http://cheyennecheyenne.tumblr.com/post/151127246428/ive-been-reading-this-thread-on-reddit
I… wish I could agree, but I’m honestly not sure I can. Because yes, you can “criticize something” without saying “there oughta be a law.”
But what does criticizing mean? What ends is it designed to achieve? Very often, no one knows. And if they do know, they tend to parse to getting someone disgraced or making it difficult for someone to make money, which… well, a lot of people don’t have issues with those things, but I kinda do, because I don’t think people are one thing they did.
If there oughta be a law, then it’s clear what your end goal is, and you know whether you’re achieving it or not. You also know how far along you are, because even if your law has not been passed yet, you have things happen along the way like legislators sponsoring it. You know what challenges are occurring and whether they’re minor wording – everyone agrees this is a good idea but they don’t agree on how it should look – or whether you’re facing a serious uphill battle.
With “you can criticize a thing,” okay. You wrote a blog post. Now what do you want to happen? Are you looking for your post to go viral? Are you looking for a formal apology from a content creator? (Are there particular formulaic elements you require in the apology, such that if they are not included the apology is a “fauxpology?” Does the person you want the apology from know this?) Are you looking for a firing? Are you looking for an especially intelligent hatedom that impresses people with its incisiveness?
Etc. “Liberal feminism” gets lambasted all the time, but at least “liberal feminism” is clear about what it is looking for.
This kind of thing is actually the stuff I think looks reasonable at first and is actually a tumblrism (or better said a neo-Marxist impossible project regardless of platform), not the other way around.
The “main point” is usually cultural influence, isn’t it? When you start talking, especially through a medium like tumblr, the hope is that other people will become infected with your preferred memetic viruses and start to think along lines that you find valuable. Hearts and minds. You know, the thing that authors in most contexts usually say that they want to do.
“Concrete” “practical” results (apologies, firings, policy changes) are very secondary.
Which doesn’t render the project frivolous. Cultural change drives pretty much everything else, at the root level. Once hearts and minds have been altered, everything else falls fast and easily. We’ve seen a whole lot of that in the last couple of decades.
(…which I guess all translates to things like “looking for your post to go viral” and “an especially intelligent hatedom that impresses people.” But both of those formulations seem unfair. Even more than politics, idea-building is the long slow boring of hard boards. The grunt work of writing essays and sharing thoughts is endless. It’s a good thing that so many of us seem to find it intrinsically rewarding.)
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To be clear: this is all a meta-point about the nature of conversation. Not an attempt to speak up for feminist media criticism specifically, which, well, at the very least it’s definitely not my project.
But it’s not like there’s no point to discourse contributions unless you can walk away with a trophy.