Not because they want to dress too provocatively or do "girly" things that put them right back in traditional roles of subservience (though in the Pagan community, I still have to question the frequency with which females -- much more than males -- describe their relationships with gods in terms of bondage, slavery or servitude, and I'd really like to see an intelligent discussion of why this is, instead of a knee-jerk defensiveness that says, "If it's okay in BDSM among humans, it must therefore be completely healthy in a relationship with deity".... but I'm getting off my point, if only just).
I'm annoyed with them because they are so completely clueless about how to do effective social justice work. Nobody's educating them on the difference between heuristics that work in the context of a university classroom, and what works in the real world when you're actually having to engage with people who don't already agree with you and who might be very invested in and maybe even reliant on the current system that you're trying to challenge. On top of that, we have all these new tools now, through social networking and online media. As a culture, we're pretty terrible at using these tools for effective, respectful communication even on a normal basis to talk to friends, and we've been abysmal failures at using it for the more difficult work of social justice.
That's what had me going last night, talking to Jeff after dinner. The result when you take people who have no education or experience in what makes effective social justice work, and who haven't bothered to study or take seriously the successes of the people who came before them and figure out what works and what doesn't... and then those folks run wild on social media, where all of our vices get compounded and miscommunication is even harder to avoid and everybody is much more prone to projections and assumptions about others.... and it's no wonder that what you end up with is not social justice work at all, but LIBERAL BULLIES AND TROLLS.
Maybe I'm old-school. I obsessively studied the writings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, both of whom sustained successful social justice campaigns in a large population for years and made substantial, lasting change for the better in their communities. Their techniques and insights are still being applied worldwide, and in other countries social media is even helping to enhance those techniques by effectively connecting people and helping them coordinate protests and sit-ins and other forms of nonviolent civil disobedience. You can see why these approaches are effective, and a recent survey of violent versus nonviolent revolutions showed that nonviolent ones were twice as likely to "stick" and make real, lasting change. Because violence provokes further violence.
And this is true online as well, where trolling and bullying behavior tends to escalate. This is basic social justice stuff, here. It quite literally doesn't matter what side you're on or what ideology you're trying to promote. If you do it through bullying and using physically or emotionally aggressive or abusive techniques, you will succeed in provoking further violence. And provoking further violence will almost always lead people to hunker down and invest further in the current system. Again, this is regardless of what your ideology is or what system you're trying to change. When people feel threatened, they cling to the familiar. Shouting at them won't change their minds, it only serves to polarize people, causing them to cling more deeply to whatever beliefs they already hold. And even if you are successful in overthrowing a system temporarily by force, the use of force on your part only serves to justify, in the minds of the people you have deposed, that you are a dangerous element who needs to be put down quickly and the previous order restored.
This is why people like Gandhi and King had two basic techniques that they always used, no matter what:
(a) In-person gatherings of nonviolent citizens participating in acts of civil disobedience by passively resisting unjust laws (which meant, very often, allowing themselves to be jailed for breaking those laws -- but not fighting back, resisting arrest or responding with violence, physical, verbal or emotional).
(b) Mutual respect. Gandhi was so well known for his adherence to the spiritual principle of mutual respect that he often ended up being friends with the police officers and prison guards who were supposed to be his oppressors. He refused to respond to their attempts to demean and dehumanize him by doing the same to them, and it worked. People who complain that of course Gandhi was able to work with the British to secure India's independence, because the British liked him so much, are totally missing the point that this was exactly the goal of the techniques Gandhi used -- a way of ensuring that nobody was the "enemy" and nobody "lost," but that a peaceful resolution could be reached that satisfied everyone.
I've used this technique myself, many times, during protests in college and afterwards. Even during times that had nothing to do with social justice but just involved people getting into fights and nearly coming to blows. More than once, I stepped between two people who were bigger and stronger than me, who had their fists clenched and were ready to starting punching, and I was able to de-escalate the situation using techniques of nonviolence and satyagraha.
But what nonviolent social justice work does not involve is mob-mentality harassment and bullying of individuals because we don't like something they did or said. And that's where I think younger feminists and social justice advocates online are really fucking up. Too often, what happens online is not mutual respect, it's not even "speaking truth to power." It's bitching about the powerful amongst ourselves, and then ganging up and harassing those whom we see as powerful out of some warped belief that people in power are not individuals (especially when they're online) but representatives of the systems that we disagree with.
In the real world, this kind of behavior has failed over and over again to accomplish any real, lasting change towards social justice. It's about as effective as a group of people drinking beer and riling each other up in the local pub before grabbing pitchforks and torches and marching off to mob the gates of the local rich man's castle. That is pretty much the definition of violent rebellion, rather than nonviolent revolution, and it violates both of the fundamental techniques that made Gandhi and King so successful.
The internet affords us so many opportunities to speak out and have our voices heard. Yes, there are still gatekeepers and large-scale aggregators who determine what gets promoted and what doesn't -- the irony is that most of those choices are being made behind-the-scenes by computer algorithms now, which tend to favor what is already popular, helping to reinforce the disparity between celebrity and non-celebrity and leaving some people feeling ignored or oppressed without really even being able to pinpoint why or who is doing the oppressing. Everybody is struggling to figure out how to effectively use this technology to both promote communication and community involvement and carve out safe, personal spaces online for themselves.
We have to stop thinking of online space as just one big empty public square where we have the right to go up to anyone in any medium and knock them around because we're angry at them for what they represent. I am not comfortable with online campaigns of harassment and bullying -- even in the name of liberal causes -- because we already know those techniques don't work. I am really against them when they're directed at individuals, but I think they can be problematic even when directed against corporations. Why? Because even a corporation's Facebook page or Twitter feed is maintained by somebody, an individual, and I will bet you any amount of money that the individual on the receiving end of harassing messages and emails is not directly responsible for the injustice that their company is perpetrating. Now, they might be a jerk anyway, they might really believe in what their company is doing and justify it.... but one thing's for sure: you don't know who they are, but you do know that their livelihood is dependent upon the company that you're attacking and barraging with hate-mail. Which means they are much more likely to respond by hunkering down and defending the company all the more resolutely in the face of violence. Which means you just lost a potential ally.
Gandhi and King understood that every place of interface between the oppressive system and the people being oppressed was an opportunity to make an ally. The police officers who beat you and imprisoned you could be won over through mutual respect even in the face of brutality -- and now you have an ally and you're making headway. The individual waitresses who serve the coffee at the whites-only café might not have a horse in the segregation race -- so you sit there breaking the law by not being white, but you treat them with respect and understanding, and now you have an ally. Now the people who have feet on the ground, who are actually the people most directly involved in enacting and enforcing the injustices, can see that you're actually not the enemy, you're a good person trying to do the right thing, just like they are. Winning over the people on the frontlines of an oppressive system is the first step to dismantling that system. This works, and we know it works.
What doesn't work is sending anonymous or pseudonymous hate-mail to figureheads. What doesn't work is showing up at someone's house to throw rocks through their windows -- even if those rocks have "social justice" and "peace" written on them. And when you organize an online campaign to bombard an individual with hate-mail or spam their Facebook walls or Twitter feeds with trollish rants... you are effectively throwing rocks through that person's window. And they have every right to make their profile private and/or block you. Just like they would have the right to call the police because you're throwing rocks at their house, even if you were doing it "for a good cause."
Civil disobedience is about breaking the laws that matter, not breaking whatever laws you feel like because your anger has overruled your better judgement. Don't break laws -- or basic guidelines of respectful engagement -- just because you're angry and want to hurt someone, break them because the laws themselves are unjust. And respect the consequences of breaking laws or violating civil rules of social engagement when you do it. Don't turn around and whine about how unfair it is that everyone doesn't have the right to go around throwing rocks at whomever they want. Do you really want to live in a world where everybody feels justified throwing rocks at each other whenever they get angry? Is that the precedent you want to set, knowing full well that there are people out there with way bigger rocks than you?
I'm not the only one who feels this way. Maybe we can start having a conversation about how to engage in effective social justice work online at some point. I'm trying to be patient.
ETA: I think maybe one of the key insights here is that, as feminists have long pointed out, "the personal is the political." And so, as a corollary, you can't expect to make the world a better place unless you yourself become a better person. If you allow your desire to remake the world to become an end that justifies harmful or violent means... you're no better than the people you're trying to fight. ("And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?")