My Guess Is It's the "Prime Directive"

Heat Street asks a question: why don't Social Justice Warriors try to ruin Hip-Hop?
Just look at this 2012 2 Chainz video, “Birthday Song,” with the chorus “All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe.” The video has enough problematic elements to make a purple-haired Tumblrina’s head explode....

There could be a few reasons for this. First of all, gamers and geek culture in general are seen as easy targets. They are perceived as indoorsy nerds who were bullied in high school. Perfect subjects to put up little resistance to those seeking to browbeat their hobby into submission (of course, the events of Gamergate proved that not to be the case). But compared to the hyper-masculine hip hop culture, geeks are certainly the easier victim.

Another aspect is race. Hip hop is inextricably black, born out of a resistance to authority, namely the police. Many prominent rappers today are staunch advocates of Black Lives Matter and their songs contain lyrics protesting police brutality. So does that give the entire genre a pass? For every “To Pimp a Butterfly” there are still dozens of songs about big booty women.
So, my theory about this is that the young women who make up the feminist arm of the SJW community all grew up in the 1990s. Every one I have ever met is a Sci-Fi fan -- especially Dr. Who -- which means that they cut their teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Now if you remember, TNG was an insufferable departure from the original Star Trek in its constant fulminating about the Prime Directive and the importance of not interfering in another culture's development. The Prime Directive in the original series was just a plot device: Kirk violated it at will, really, and it never caused bad results to do so. TNG took this idea very seriously, though, and I'd wager that growing up listening to important-sounding lectures from Captain Picard made way more impression on these young women than they are prepared to admit to themselves.

So what does that mean? It means that hip-hop comes from another culture, implicitly a lesser culture, and non-interference is the right response to it. The same is true, I think, of their view of Islam. The reason they view it as racist and xenophobic to criticize Islam's treatment of women is that, in so doing, we're trying to force a (again, implicitly in this view lesser) culture to adapt to our preferences.

White male geeks, however, are very much from these feminists' culture. They like Star Trek and comic books just as much as you do! Of course they have every right to tell you what to think and how to behave.

There's an implicit racism, maybe, in deciding which cultures merit protection from the Prime Directive. In the show, it's something like non-spacefaring cultures if I remember correctly. In this application of the concept to the real world, deciding to "respect" these cultures' right to non-interference is in fact a form of disrespect. I don't think these young women would admit to themselves that they think this, or that they are doing this. The last thing they would want to do, consciously, is 'colonize' these cultures or set up a hierarchy in which some cultures were superior. The mental pose is that they're respecting these cultures by leaving them to develop independently.

I think they probably really believe that "respecting you" is what they are doing, rather than "babying you" or "isolating you" or "looking down on you." They would probably be highly insulted at the suggestion that they had any such intentions.

7 comments:

raven said...

You may be over thinking this.....

They may be a collection of spoiled princesses who never had a thing in the world of any consequence to worry about.

Grim said...

"You may be over thinking this....."

Philosophy is always subject to that charge, but I think I'm probably in the clear this time. I just came up with this theory like 15 minutes ago. :)

Tom said...

I have thought about countering SJW rhetoric with a claim that I come from a very different culture and that their criticisms are simply xenophobic. Part of me believes that, but part of me just wants to see what happens.

raven said...

tom,
That could be a useful tool- "don't try to impose your culture on me!"

Eric Blair said...

That is exactly the path to take, and of course all those lily-white SJWs are not going to go disrupt a rap concert.





Tom said...

I think we have a good argument that we really are a different culture. You could get technical and talk about subcultures, but that works for everything. African American culture is a subculture. Immigrant cultures are subcultures.

Not only are there religious, political, and social differences, I think we could make a reasonable case for linguistic differences. We speak "conservative" (or whatever we are) and they speak "social justice." Very different world views.

Ymar Sakar said...

Perfect subjects to put up little resistance to those seeking to browbeat their hobby into submission (of course, the events of Gamergate proved that not to be the case).

A lot of that comes from Leftists terrorizing geeks and lower social orders in high school and college. That hasn't really stopped all that much from the experience of Asperger likes in academic circles. Leftists, by definition, prefer someone to be beneath them, so they can put their foot on the throat of the lessers. That makes them feel masterful and powerful. Politically, it was white Southerners before, and now it's blacks on the city plantations. Maybe Mexicans and Muslims will become the next thing they put their foot on as Masters.

Also the Leftist academic SJW born squads, have experience reducing intellectual non Leftists to tears. Just look at that NASA guy with his rocket to somewhere. Did he make great bucket full of tears for that shirt he was wearing? People do what is successful. They don't over think things or try harder to improve what already works. Besides half of the corporates and journalists in Game culture already belong to the Left's culture, so they were already occupying much of the battle space. Accelerating their plans to hijack another institution, was merely standard Gramsci gameplay. Quite literally gameplay there.

The Left's stereotype of gamers is a little bit wrong though. For a person to be in the internet gaming culture, there is quite a lot of verbal or rather written abuse out there. People, including women, either get used to it and grow an armored skin, or they quit. Humans can tolerate that because gaming is an objective numbers record. Skill/scores cannot be faked, unless somebody pays for it to be faked that is. Also, a lot of the time the community doesn't know what gender/sex/race a person is. That doesn't matter nearly as much as other things. In a sense, it is a meritocracy, which high school culture sometimes is the opposite of. Now that the Left has taken over universities, high schools are next. Including the one which made two girls kiss each other on a stage, to make a point.