One of the most irritating trends lately has been people pulling out these weird “gotcha” moments like, “Hey, you’re advocating for under-represented groups in science? Doesn’t that mean you’re treating people differently??? Oh-ho, who’s the racist/sexist/homophobe now!!!”
You hear it a lot from MRAs, like, “feminism is dedicated to turning women into victims,” I mean listen up buster ol’ pal, acknowledging and attempting to rectify a problem is not the equivalent of causing that problem. That’d be like saying, wow, there’s a really high percentage of people at AA meetings who have substance-abuse problems, therefore AA meetings cause alcoholism. The meeting is there in response to alcoholism, not vice-versa.
So, you know. It’s important to be aware that what you’re seeing might in fact be the response to something very different. It can go right down to everyday experiences, too: if a fandom is loud about their female characters, it’s easy to initially go, hey man, why the heck are they yelling so loud, I’m starting to feel really defensive and I’m going to start yelling even louder about the male characters. But realizing that the volume of the female-character love is a direct response to something external that has no male-character equivalent–vitriolic hate exemplifying larger trends in media and fandom–means it gets easier to realize the inappropriateness of that knee-jerk response.
That also swings into Volume Two of “Gotcha!”: the argument that if you can say something about one group, you should also be able to say it about another. This one seems to pop up a lot in not-so-good-faith discussions of race: “Yeah, well, all these student groups on campus, what would happen if there were clubs exclusively for white students?” Calm it down ya donut, you know these groups exist in response to glaringly obvious sociopoliticohistorical factors that aren’t present for white students just because they’re white. There’s a context here, a discussion you’re trampling all over to make it about you.
Just… be careful with any train of thought that goes, “How would you like it if we said X instead of Y!” because as it turns out, replacing one word with another word tends to completely change the meaning of the sentence. It’ll feel real neat and make you seem real smart until someone actually takes a second to read it and goes, “Wait, what does ‘Once upon a rutabaga’ even mean?”
Turns out words have connotations and meanings outside of their dictionary definition. Go figure.
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