Gradually throughout the 2000s this transitioned to "echo culture", where people hung out in ideologically sorted communities and discussed things from a shared perspective. At its worst, this was straight outrage culture; some blogger on DailyKos would write about the latest awful thing Dubya said, and hundreds of commenters would compete to demonstrate just how much they hate him. But at its best, it was about building communities of likeminded people, having a space where you felt safe expressing yourself, refining shared views, and letting off steam. Echo culture isn't necessarily evil - basically every subreddit is its own echo culture hangout (so is ACX!) and many of them are great. But it took a lot of culture shock to make it work.
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The transition to echo culture wasn't a uniquely feminist phenomenon, but it lined up with the rise of the feminist movement pretty closely, and so the two are intertwined in a lot of people's minds. It's interesting to look at some of the most controversial parts of early feminism as conflicts between argument-culture and echo-culture norms. For example, everyone who was around in 2010 has the phrase "it's not my job to educate you" seared into their consciousness (also its equivalent, "this is not a 101 space"). A lot of early feminist culture centered around various terms and concepts and witty in-jokes that basically boiled down to "annoying people sometimes come into our spaces and argue with us, and we hate it". So for example, "sea lioning" was based on a comic where people wanted to vent about how much they hated sea lions, but every time they did, sea lions would show up and insist they weren't so bad. "JAQ-ing off" stands for Just Asking Questions, based on a complaint about how sometimes outsiders would show up and ask whether feminists had considered that they were wrong about X, Y, and Z, and if anyone asked them to go away they would insist they were "just asking questions". With a little more work, you can trace the same complaint in a lot of the other feminist jargon of the era, from "mansplaining" to "safe spaces" to a lot of the way people used the term "privilege".
Many early feminists ignored racial issues because they were talking about their own experiences. Blogs have always had a weird tension between newspaper, manifesto, and personal diary, and this encouraged a political movement centered around its members' personal problems, like creepy guys asking them out at comic conventions. Most early feminists were white, and so not likely to personally encounter racial issues. The "white feminism" cudgel probably hastened the collapse of the feminist blogosphere in favor of safe corporate properties that talked about universally-compelling issues like pay gaps.
I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016. Consider: Hillary Clinton, a historic first woman candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by "at least 23 women since the 1980s", and who was caught on tape saying he liked to "grab [women] by the pussy". While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.
The first milestone on that path was Milo Yiannopoulos. As outrageous and offensive as he was, he was actually a step above everyone who had come before him in terms of visibility and respectability - at least nobody expected him to shoot up a school or anything. The second milestone was Jordan Peterson, who was an obvious step up in respectability beyond Milo. There was a really interesting period in 2016 when the media was trying to decide whether to unite in character-assassinating Peterson the same way it had character-assassinated all previous people in this space, or treat him as some sort of interesting and potentially sympathetic phenomenon, and it decided on the interesting phenomenon angle. After that, being anti-SJW lost about 90% of its stigma, to the point where people would roll their eyes instead of freaking out. This New York Times article on the Intellectual Dark Web essentially turned the semi-respectability of anti-SJWism into common knowledge, and makes a fascinating contrast with the TIME article on MRAs linked above.
When was the last time you heard people argue about \"creeps\", \"nice guys\", or \"friendzoning\"? Mansplaining? #NotAllMen? MRAs and PUAs? If you're in your early 20s, you might not even know what half these terms mean; if you're older than that, you\u2019ll remember them with a sort of cold dread. But they're gone now - you'd have more luck looking for recent discourse about Osama bin Laden. Nor has some some other gender discourse arisen to replace them. Everyone just stopped caring and moved on to race.
Gradually throughout the 2000s this transitioned to \"echo culture\", where people hung out in ideologically sorted communities and discussed things from a shared perspective. At its worst, this was straight outrage culture; some blogger on DailyKos would write about the latest awful thing Dubya said, and hundreds of commenters would compete to demonstrate just how much they hate him. But at its best, it was about building communities of likeminded people, having a space where you felt safe expressing yourself, refining shared views, and letting off steam. Echo culture isn't necessarily evil - basically every subreddit is its own echo culture hangout (so is ACX!) and many of them are great. But it took a lot of culture shock to make it work.
The transition to echo culture wasn't a uniquely feminist phenomenon, but it lined up with the rise of the feminist movement pretty closely, and so the two are intertwined in a lot of people's minds. It's interesting to look at some of the most controversial parts of early feminism as conflicts between argument-culture and echo-culture norms. For example, everyone who was around in 2010 has the phrase \"it's not my job to educate you\" seared into their consciousness (also its equivalent, \"this is not a 101 space\"). A lot of early feminist culture centered around various terms and concepts and witty in-jokes that basically boiled down to \"annoying people sometimes come into our spaces and argue with us, and we hate it\". So for example, \"sea lioning\" was based on a comic where people wanted to vent about how much they hated sea lions, but every time they did, sea lions would show up and insist they weren't so bad. \"JAQ-ing off\" stands for Just Asking Questions, based on a complaint about how sometimes outsiders would show up and ask whether feminists had considered that they were wrong about X, Y, and Z, and if anyone asked them to go away they would insist they were \"just asking questions\". With a little more work, you can trace the same complaint in a lot of the other feminist jargon of the era, from \"mansplaining\" to \"safe spaces\" to a lot of the way people used the term \"privilege\".
Many early feminists ignored racial issues because they were talking about their own experiences. Blogs have always had a weird tension between newspaper, manifesto, and personal diary, and this encouraged a political movement centered around its members' personal problems, like creepy guys asking them out at comic conventions. Most early feminists were white, and so not likely to personally encounter racial issues. The \"white feminism\" cudgel probably hastened the collapse of the feminist blogosphere in favor of safe corporate properties that talked about universally-compelling issues like pay gaps.
I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016. Consider: Hillary Clinton, a historic first woman candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by \"at least 23 women since the 1980s\", and who was caught on tape saying he liked to \"grab [women] by the pussy\". While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.
The whole process was a very clear example of a respectability cascade. There\u2019s some position which is relatively commonly held, but considered beyond the pale for respectable people. In the beginning, the only people who will say it openly are extremely non-respectable people who don't mind getting cast out of normal society for their sin. Everyone attacks them, but afterwards they are still basically standing, and their openness encourages slightly more respectable people to say the same thing. This creates a growing nucleus of ever-more-respectable people speaking openly, until eventually it's no longer really that taboo and anyone who wants can talk about it with only minor stigma. It's the same story as atheism, gay rights, and a hundred other things that were once taboo but eventually became mainstream. Except in this case it was kind of cannibalistic, because the main complaint the anti-SJWs had was that they couldn't talk about how much they hated SJWs. Once they could, their case kind of lost relevance, which is probably one reason the search term is trending down these days and nobody talks about the IDW anymore. 2ff7e9595c
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