Social media is a wonderful tool for anyone with a cause to preach; no longer is someone striving for social justice relegated to an underground forum, doing their best to raise awareness through demonstrations, marches, or whatever else people did in the fifties. The world is instantly accessible, and the Internet has become one of the best tools for any advocate or social justice warrior.
There is, however, a big obstacle that advocacy soldiers need to overcome: anger.
Their own, to be precise.
I was lightly involved in advocacy work back in my more youthful days, mostly as just a volunteer. Most of my work centered around feminist campaigns, and overall it was a very eye-opening experience that I'm glad I was a part of. That's not to say it was all smiles and sunshine, however, and to say there were clashes with some of the people I was involved with would be a massive understatement (which is why I tend not to be very involved these days).
Those "clashes" tended to crop up around the more elitist of advocates that I encountered, the sort of people who would condemn me for having a private discussion with friends in which an off-color joke was uttered. Frankly, it became too off-putting to deal with. I was all for helping a cause, but when the people I was involved with started playing Thought Police to my personal Facebook page, that's when it transformed from passionate cause to stressful burden. I was fully supportive of the ideals and notions these people were advocating, but it was the people themselves that grew too difficult to deal with. And since most of the work I was involved with revolved around feminism (which is becoming quite the buzzword these days) we might as well start there.
Feminism is such a basic and primordial idea that it's even bizarre to think we live in a world where we still have to campaign for it. Feminism is simply the idea that women should be treated as equally as men in all matters of life. That's it. Ask almost anyone if they believe in this and they'll agree, but ask if they're a feminist, and good luck keeping track of the responses you get. "Feminism" is still a bit of a dirty word, and is full of negative associations (like "angry feminist" or "femi-Nazis"). But why did these associates crop up in the first place?
Well, the first thing I think we need to understand is that feminists are people too, and the thing about people is that they can be very angry and egocentric. And on the other side of the fence, people often correlate unrelated things and make unwarranted associations, which is why encountering one angry advocate could turn you off their cause, even if their cause is still a valid and worthy one.
Let me explain it better with a story . . .
Many, many months ago, I was pursuing online dating. During that time I began speaking with someone whom we'll call "Girl-X" for the sake of this article. Girl-X was a very outspoken feminist, and she was excited when I told her that I had dabbled in a bit of advocacy work in years past. We talked for a little while, and it became obvious that she was very emboldened and passionate, which I respected. Then she shared something which threw up many red flags.
You see, Girl-X was also very angry (which anyone who's dealt with misogyny has every right to be) and she'd also encountered a guy online who self-identified as a "women-hater." Girl-X concocted a plan to create a fake online profile, get close to this man, learn his identity and his secrets, then expose him. She shared this information with me because she wanted to be honest with me, and then asked if I thought she was crazy. This is when I had to have a very real talk with her . . .
I told her that because of my experience with advocacy, I understood that she was just angry. Unequal pay, cat calls, sexual objectification - these are things women have to deal with regularly, and so her anger was justified. She wanted someone to pay, and this guy seemed like a ripe target. She thought she would be doing the world a favour by outing him. That's perfectly understandable . . . to someone like me who has experience with her cause. But to anyone else who isn't familiar, like say, the general population, it would come across as certifiably bat-shit insane. I convinced her to stop with her elaborate plan based on one irrefutable fact:
Anger solves nothing. And in the case of advocacy, it hurts it.
To me, she was just an angry girl. To someone else, she might be a "crazy feminist" and therefore justification to ignore the entire cause. There's a very important rule when it comes to advocacy that I think some advocates ignore: advocacy supports an idea, usually in an attempt to fix a problem . . . but the average person doesn't realize there's even a problem in the first place (or in the worst cases, don't want to admit there's a problem). Feminism is particularly hard fought because unless you've dealt with misogyny first hand, you're probably not going to believe it's an issue worth fighting over, and because most men never have to deal with it, that means that female feminists have to convince the very people responsible for the problem that there is one. This certainly explains why there's such opposition to feminist crusaders (take a look at what happened to poor Anita Sarkeesian) because no one wants to believe that they're secretly responsible for having done something bad.
It thus becomes a heavy burden for advocates because they have to not only attempt to fix a problem, but they need to justify and explain why there's a need to fix it in the first place. The only way you can do this is through education, but when you're so angry at having suffered under a problem (patriarchy, misogyny . . . take your pick) then patience and understanding can go out the window, and suddenly you're just this person that to the general population is attempting to fix a problem no one knew existed.
A perfect analogy is bullying. If you go to a high school and ask someone from a popular crowd if bullying is a problem at their school, they'll probably say no because they've never experienced it personally; it's not a part of their life and therefore they have no reason to believe it's an issue. But if you ask someone who gets the shit beaten out of them daily, the answer will be much different. If you show evidence to the popular person that there's indeed someone getting bullied and thus it is in fact a problem, then you've properly educated them. If, however, you simply run up to them and start saying they need to fix a problem that they don't know exists, you're going to get a lukewarm response. And if you get angry when they fail to accept your campaign because of their ignorance, you've effectively scared them away forever.
You could also say the same about racism. A white person isn't going to have much experience dealing with that sort of prejudice, so if an advocate starts condemning them and preaching about white privilege, then nothing gets solved, and all that's been accomplished is you've deterred a potential supporter away from your cause.
It can be difficult to accept that change is a slow process and that people are often resistant to it. We're a culture obsessed with quick fixes, so our instinct is to push and pull and scream until we accomplish something or get our way; we did it when we were kids, and it's a go-to tactic when we're angry and frustrated. In the grand scheme, however, this only sets us back as a society. It's easy to make associations where they shouldn't be, so if the most vocal member of a cause or movement comes across as angry or furious, then the bridge to the average person just got a whole lot scarier for them to cross.
It's a shitty situation, make no doubt about it. It puts all the pressure for change on the shoulders of victims and people that have suffered enough; you're telling someone seeking justice that they need to be patient and understanding with people who are ignorant and blissfully unaware of the injustices they've faced.
So to all those passionate advocates out there, I implore you to keep your hearts open and accept that fear and ignorance don't equal opposition. And to everyone else, I encourage you to keep your ears and minds open to the experiences of those who have lived a life outside of your own.
No comments:
Post a Comment