I Guess Implied In More Than One Way - Tumblr Posts
I’ve been thinking about making a post like this for a while but it felt too personal and preachy until recent internet events made me realize I wouldn’t feel comfortable unless I put my own opinions out there.
Internet communities like Tumblr grow and thrive with very little explanations for buzzwords and memes - how many posts end in the now comedic “no one tell them.” There’s a lot of attitudes that go unexamined, as a result. We talk a lot about things like privilege without all of us realizing it’s not a space laser. It isn’t something that we as individuals rather than a whole needs to always be only a weapon - in fact the reason we seek to understand and own it personally is to ensure that we don’t use it to hurt others just because we have the power to do so.
We talk about things being problematic, as though the word always means “offensive and hurtful.” These are things that may have the capacity to hurt others. But hurt isn’t something that can be easily measured or concretely avoided. I see people say things like, “I can’t be an abuser, I’m X Y and Z!” “I can’t be an abuser, I’ve been abused in the past!” “A is the toxic hateful person, not me, go yell at that asshole!” But there’s no magic spell we can use to wash away our own ability to be a shitty person. We need to, as a community, consider our own capability to hurt others as something that can be independent of labels and traditional power spheres - and is rooted in our actions not a blanket who we are. If we assume that we are all able to be assholes, then we understand that it’s a choice we make - and have to remake, multiple times every single day of our lives.
When you don’t need anything more than a single hateful anon to make another person have a episode, it doesn’t matter if that person has 40000 followers that they can rally like flying monkeys - the anon’s actions are not excused by a lack of followers. In many ways, their capacity to hurt another is limited more by their desire to do so than it is by their own abilities. When we build up forts around ourselves to explain why and how we cannot be hurtful people, all we are doing is assuming that we are above reproach and not a single one of us are.
Just looking at all the No True Scottsman going around is pretty gross. We are not absolved of our behavior just because we are progressives. Terrible, hurtful behavior hidden behind progressive dialogue is still just shitty behavior. Terrible shitty hurtful behavior to bad people is still shitty behavior. Shitty behavior that doesn’t really hurt the person it was intended to hurt is still wrong. Excuses that mitigate the hurt that was intended only tries to reduce our agency in what we did.
To borrow from Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen’s The Wicked + the Divine (art by Tula Lotay)
