Thiiiiiis. Thisthisthis. THIS PRECISELY.
It’s a funny self-eating cycle of paradoxes, isn’t it? By its very nature, hardship–including the kinds of hardship that fundie-SJ puritanism uses as criteria for social standing–forces people to adapt creatively, ad hoc, in whatever ways they can, often without the benefit of a script or an existing, known set of best practices. Lack of resources begets a huge variety of approaches as people reinvent the wheel a zillion different ways just to get by. And part of the nature of hardship is also that a lot of those strategies will suck, have less-than-ideal side effects, be effective at solving a problem but wreak havoc in some other area that’s off your radar screen, take a complex and ambivalent stance towards whatever’s causing the problem, and generally be messy as fuck.
In other words, whatever life experience makes you qualify to check off an SJ tickybox also multiplies your chances of being highly inconvenient to whoever’s treating it as a single, unified tickybox with PROTECT AT ALL COSTS within the lines and PROBLEMATIC GARBAGE outside them.
(Well, unless you’re able/willing to exploit the fuck out of online-SJ’s inversion of stigma into the only legitimate source of authority, leverage your tickybox status, and shout down your detractors with “I think you will find that it is you who are problematic!” Which is itself an adaptive coping strategy–sometimes an appropriate one, often the only effective one to avoid being eaten alive in a subculture gone viciously dysfunctional, but always one that risks taking on the shape of the problems that created it. Messy as fuck.)
Anyway, I suspect that thinking of diversity in terms of how many different boxes you can tick off is directly, causally linked to the fundie-SJ suppression–even hatred–of diversity of experiences within those tickyboxes. Because the tickybox approach to representation is tokenism, and if you only get one token representing a group–one person, one experience, standing in for the whole thing–it leads straight into the construction of a “textbook” narrative which has to be perfect. A perfect distillation of The [X] Experience, which of course can’t exist. But once the textbook version is out there, other experiences tend to be viewed as imperfect–as problematic–and their messiness is tantamount to a slanderous claim about the entire group.
Or in terms of stereotypes: anything, anything, no matter how true it is to many people’s lives, no matter whether it’s insulting or complimentary, can become a noxious stereotype. It’s not about whether it’s true for some people, it’s about whether it’s treated as The Truth and generalized onto a whole category of people, crowding out or invalidating other narratives. This is why fandom’s approach to Problematic Tropes drives me nuts: most of the time, the trend is what’s ‘problematic’–the omnipresence, the way it’s used or not used, what that implies in the aggregate–and the individual instances are a far more mixed bag. Some of them exist out of laziness and failure to consider other possibilities, some of them are trying to generalize onto a whole group and say “this is what [x] is like,” a lot of them are merely saying “this is a thing that happens and what [x] can sometimes be like.” (And the really fun ones are going “but if [wildly creative and improbable intersection of circumstances], I bet [x] could play out in [weird and unexpected but totally plausible way].”) If some woman happens to fit a sexist stereotype, it doesn’t mean her existence or stereotypical behavior is sexist–hell, if enough women do something, it will become a sexist stereotype sooner or later.
I am talking in vague terms like [x] here because there are SO MANY TICKYBOXES that are subject to puritan-SJ bullshit–which ones I have personal cause to be pissed off about is kind of beside the point. But oh, man, can I just say? There is a special place in hell for fandom morality police who make a big show of decrying the culture of shame and silence surrounding sexual violence, then turn around and spew jaw-droppingly caustic bile at women who create noncon fanfiction/fanart–categorically, regardless of approach, any inclusion of the subject matter whatsoever, with occasional magnanimous exceptions for didactic textbook treatments of recovery–calling them enablers, apologists, propagandists, pinning responsibility for getting other people assaulted on them through the enormity of their contribution to rape culture. (Via… marginal and deeply non-normative depictions of rape that pay far more attention to the victim’s POV and hold a funhouse mirror up to the anxieties of living under rape culture? Okay, that sounds fake but… okay.) And then they go on to demand that those implausible, inconvenient noncon fans who’ve been raped themselves parade their trauma in front of a bloodthirsty audience for judgement on whether it’s “enough” to write off their unacceptable behavior as the maladjusted coping mechanism of someone who’s too damaged to know better, or whether they’re articulate and unrepentant enough need a stern lecture on how they’re monsters whose abuse has turned them into their abusers. Or whether they’re just lying about being raped to keep Good People from objecting to their sick fantasies.
….but oh, what a tragic injustice that the amorphous beast called rape culture has made the entire subject so taboo that survivors are ashamed and afraid to talk about their experiences. Dear followers, please join me in working ourselves up into a lather of righteous fury about what the devil the unenlightened heathens the BAD PEOPLE WHO ARE BAD UNLIKE US have wrought, or you’re probably one of Them and should unfollow me and go sit in the corner and think on your sins.
That’s the version of SJ fundamentalism I find the most unspeakably revolting–the reductio ad absurdum of puritan hypocrisy–but it’s pretty widespread for the blowback against “diverse” creators of “problematic” works to be orders of magnitude more intense than against clueless majorities. Sure, we’re easier to push around–we care, deeply, and there are usually well-oiled mechanisms in place to silence us–but I think it’s more than that. We’re traitors; we should know better. It’s betrayal. That stereotype-threat anxiety, the fear that we’re using our privileged (ha!) position of credibility to peddle a less-than-ideal take on the subject, that someone whose experience is messy and imperfect will win the game of trump cards and become the token representative of the group and there’ll be no room for anyone else’s stories.
Gosh. How the fuck do you think that would feel?
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