Being on social media is so infuriating sometimes because so many people just refuse to acknowledge any nuance in situations where it's absolutely necessary. But if anyone even tries to suggest that the situation has more nuance it gets treated like a complete disagreement.
The other day I saw a post that was something about how people who say they hate snow because it's hard to drive in have essentially been disconnected from the natural world in such a way that it prevents them from seeing the joy in something as simple as snow. Then a couple days later I see a different post complaining about (what I assume to be) the first post I saw, where the poster said that they saw a post saying that EVERYONE who doesn't like snow is an evil driver without any joy in their life. And I was like... What?
Either there were two posts with the same premise going around at the same time and one of them happened to be very accusatory while the other was much more lighthearted. Or this person saw a post that (in my opinion) was pretty clearly only talking about people who specifically dislike snow because of the effect it has on driving and was worded in a way that really seemed like it was being overdramatic about it for the sake of comedy and decided that was the same as a sweeping condemnation of everyone who dislikes snow for any reason. And that second post was complaining about how contradictory Tumblr is because they also saw a post saying that anyone who did like snow was bad because they had no idea how horrible snow is for anyone experiencing homelessness. I didn't see the post about homelessness, so I don't know if their description of the post was even accurate... But like, yeah? If you ignore all nuance in any statement then a lot of things seem contridictory? It's the "you like pancakes so you must hate waffles" bullshit all over again.
I've been seeing a lot of posts talking about how it's not fair to ask cis men to push back against sexist jokes because the people making those jokes aren't going to be receptive to any challenges to their misogynistic beliefs... But they always seem to assume that the people making those kinds of misogynistic jokes are full on alt-right proud misogynists, which I just find to be such a bizarre assumption. There are a LOT of people who are centrists or liberals who just haven't actually unlearned their bigotry. Yeah, if you're hanging out with a bunch of Andrew Ta/te fans then you're not going to have much luck with a "hey man that's not funny" but I've seen that kind of thing work on less extreme situations. It's not a matter of changing someone's mind with a single sentence, it's about trying to make it less socially acceptable to make casually bigoted comments.
The same thing honestly should be applied to all privileged groups. There's a real issue of privileged people bonding over mutual bigotry. (One of the big ones is white people bonding over racism.) And I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that people push back against this kind of thing wherever they can.
It's so weird to me that a significant amount of people seem upset at the idea that maybe people with privilege should try to do something small within their social groups to push back against the normalization of these sorts of bigotry. No one is actually forcing you to do any of this, it would just be a good thing to do if you can. And yeah, it would probably be uncomfortable sometimes and you might lose friends, but if you're serious about feminism or any other form of social justice then it's a small but concrete form of action you can actually take. It's so weird that people are vehemently defending inaction on the premise that there might be some consequences. Any form of meaningful activism has the potential for consequences. But even beyond that, it seems that some people are angry at even the suggestion of something that could be done. It's still an individual choice and it's weird to act like it's just such a big deal that it's unfair to even suggest it.
Idk I'm just so frustrated with tumblr in general lately.
