1883: Social Justice, Public Shaming and Why I Want My Friends Back

I’m probably going to upset a few people with this post, but this is something that has been festering inside me for quite some time; something that I need to release by talking about it. I hope doing so will help me feel a little better, as well as make the people who care about me aware of the way certain increasingly prevalent attitudes in popular culture make me — and, I’m sure, others like me — feel.

I’ll kick off with an immediately contentious statement: I completely understand why the term “social justice warrior” is used as a pejorative.

I will immediately qualify this by saying that I do not think the concept of social justice is unimportant, nor that it is something that should be swept under the carpet and ignored. There are still problems with attitudes towards marginalised groups in society. There are still groups out there whose sole reason for existence is an irrational, burning hatred of certain people. There are subsets of passionate fans in all interest groups — be it video games, sports, movies, books, anything — who do not have a positive influence on the community as a whole.

However, I believe that for the most part, human beings are fundamentally decent people. I’ve met my share of assholes, sure, and seen evidence of people being mistreated, insulted and even threatened online — although, on that note, I will also say that we’re collectively a little hasty to jump to the descriptor “death threat” when it isn’t always particularly accurate. But I’ve also met enough decent people in my time in this world and on the Internet to find it difficult to believe that the world is the seething morass of hatred and prejudice that the most passionate advocates of social justice — the aforementioned “social justice warriors” — believe it is.

Let me clarify my earlier statement. The term “social justice warrior”, as I see it — and as many others see it, too — does not simply apply to anyone who believes in social justice, otherwise there would be no need for it; it would simply be a means of describing pretty much everyone who isn’t an asshole. Rather, it describes, as noted above, a particularly passionate and outspoken advocate for social justice — and someone who is not above using particularly unpleasant tactics to try and get their point across. Tactics like public shaming; insulting; “othering”; discrimination; ignoring opinions based on socioeconomic, ethnic, gender or sexuality groups; dogpiling… the list goes on, and, you’ll notice, these are all things that anyone who truly stands for social justice should really be against the use of, regardless of who they’re aimed at. A “social justice warrior” would discount my opinion on all this, for example, because I’m a white, straight, heterosexual, cissexual male: the very definition of the concept of “male privilege” that many of them cling to so very desperately.

Why is this a problem, though? It’s easy enough to ignore and filter out other bile-spewing groups based on hatred — when was the last time you accidentally stumbled across neo-Nazi ravings without deliberately going looking for them, for example? — so why not just tune out these people? Well, the answer to that is simple: unlike other hate-spewing groups, these loudmouths are increasingly infiltrating mainstream popular culture having positioned their approach as being “correct” from a moral perspective. My experience of them has largely been in the video games sector, but from what I understand, they’ve had a fair crack at numerous other communities over the last few years, too.

Let me explain why they bother me so much, and hopefully, my dislike of their tactics will become a little clearer.

A few years back, a games journo friend of mine — Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat — wrote a news story. I forget the exact details of the story (and can’t seem to find the original since GamesBeat’s numerous refreshes over the last few years), but it involved, as I recall, Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe making some contentious statements that involved the hypothetical punching of a woman in the face. Jaffe wasn’t advocating for violence against women, of course; doing something like that directly would be tantamount to career suicide; if I remember correctly, the context was something to do with playing multiplayer games and reactions to winning and losing. The details of the story itself are somewhat unimportant, anyway; what I’m really concerned with here is the reaction to it.

Jeff wrote the piece on Jaffe’s statements from a factual perspective — as a reporter, without editorialising. Different publications approach this sort of thing in different ways: more blog-style sites like Kotaku have no problem with their authors saying exactly what they think about a particular issue, whereas GamesBeat’s parent site VentureBeat is more of a business-centric publication that is less concerned with drama and more with simply reporting what has been going on.

Because Jeff didn’t condemn Jaffe’s statements in the article, however, he attracted the ire of an early incarnation of the “social justice warriors”. The situation became worse as he attempted to defend himself on Twitter; as time passed, more and more people, including high-profile games journalists with large followings, started attacking him — rather than Jaffe, who arguably should have been the subject of their ire, though even that’s debatable, given what I recall of the context surrounding his comments — and publicly shaming him, denouncing him as an “example of white male privilege” and effectively setting hordes of followers on him. I became seriously worried for his safety and wellbeing while this was going on.

This wasn’t an isolated incident, either. Numerous times over the last few years we’ve seen outspoken members of the industry with social justice leanings adopt the tactic of publicly shaming and bullying, even going so far as to threaten people with ending their career. Most recently, we’ve seen Polygon’s Ben Kuchera attacking a member of EA’s customer engagement team over the latter’s concern over community-made Twitter “blacklists”; in previous months we’ve seen the widely celebrated writer Leigh Alexander threatening to end people’s careers, feminist critic Mattie Brice throwing a hissy fit when someone called her out on a sexist joke and all manner of other atrocious behaviour. It simply isn’t acceptable.

All this isn’t to say that these people can’t voice their concerns. What I do find myself violently disliking about this culture of public shaming that has been growing over the last few years, however, is that there’s little to no “right of reply” in most cases. Once someone is branded as a misogynist, sexist, transphobe, racist or whatever by these self-appointed crusaders of morality, there’s no recovery from it. They have no opportunity to say “well, hang on a minute, here’s why you’re not quite right there…” and no opportunity to criticise the arguments being levelled against them. More often than not, critics of Kuchera, Alexander et al are swiftly blocked, silenced and/or mocked, simply because the “social justice warrior” position has been successfully positioned as the “correct” attitude. The same thing happens when anyone attempts to start a conversation surrounding feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women video series; while she does attract plenty of hate-filled bile — and that, let’s be clear, is always unacceptable — she and her team appear unwilling to engage with or discuss legitimate criticisms of her work, and often post deliberately provocative statements seemingly with the sole intention of drawing the trolls out to point and laugh at them.

Now, I’ve been standing on the sidelines throughout all of this. I have, thankfully, never been attacked by these people, even when I was working in the mainstream games press on GamePro and USgamer, even when I was writing about notoriously provocative and controversial games such as Senran Kagura and other titles from Japan. Perhaps I was just too small fry for industry “megaphones” (as Alexander calls herself) to bother with, and I’m not complaining; the fact I made a point of remaining positive while acknowledging these titles weren’t for everyone helped me build up a decent audience who appreciated the work I did, particularly as it was in stark contrast to the majority of other sites out there.

So why does all this bother me so much? Well, because it’s deeply, deeply frustrating, and because the culture of fear that these people are perpetuating online makes me very nervous about speaking on certain topics for fear of being ostracised. More important than that, however, is the feeling that it’s driven a wedge between me and a number of friends whom I no longer feel particularly comfortable talking to because I know they’ve drifted more towards the social justice side of the fence — or, in some cases, become outright zealots. I miss those friends greatly, and it makes me extremely sad that I can’t talk to them any more simply because I don’t share their ideological viewpoint — or, rather, I do, but I fundamentally disagree with the methods through which they go about expressing that viewpoint.

What should people do instead? Simple. Champion the things that you’re fond of and believe in, without putting down other people for what they enjoy. Diversity isn’t just about creating experiences that “everyone” can enjoy, though that’s part of it. Diversity is also about creating experiences that appeal to specific audiences. There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, it makes for more interesting, more focused pieces of entertainment that feel personal and relatable. Cater to men, women, heterosexual people, homosexual people, cissexual people, transgender or transsexual people, white people, black people, Asian people, anyone you like. Accept that some things are not “for” you — though that doesn’t need to stop you from finding enjoyment in them, as the number of otome games I’ve enjoyed over the last few years will attest — and celebrate the things that are. If you believe that there aren’t enough works catering to the groups you consider yourself to fall into, throw your support behind those that do or even make your own. Just, for God’s sake, don’t ever position yourself as The One Correct Attitude and point the finger of shame at anyone who doesn’t fall within your own specific worldview, because that’s where the majority of this nonsense is coming from.

I’m not a misogynist. I’m not a sexist. I’m not a racist. I’m not a transphobe. I’m not even an anti-feminist or a men’s rights advocate. I just want these “social justice warriors” to understand that what they are doing is not, in fact, championing diversity; it’s stifling conversation and creating a culture of mistrust between developers, players and press — and between friends.

I hate it. And I wish it would go away. And I want my friends back.