About Social Justice Warriors

…and why they’re not bad as a such. Honestly, whenever I see someone who uses the expression ‘Social Justice Warrior’ (SJW for short) as a slight or to insult someone, I wonder why they would do that. I mean, being a warrior is cool. Justice is cool. Social things often are cool, too. What is bad, then, about being a Social Justice Warrior?

Of course, it’s only a very small group of people overall who have it for SJWs. People for whom social justice as a concept is the root of all evil and thus whoever protects it must be evil, too. And those are the people I don’t get. Really, I don’t. Like … not at all.

I understand that promoting social justice means that people will gain more equality. People who are today seen as the privileged majority (which is not really a majority world-wide in some aspects) will no longer hold a privilege, but, and that’s the important part here, they won’t stand to lose anything, either.

That is the point which they seem not to understand. When slavery was abolished in the US, slavers really stood to lose something - because you can’t do that without taking the right to own slaves from people. So the slavers actually lost a right when slavery was abolished. But when stories are diversified and not every action hero is a straight white man or when women are paid equally to men or when “Battlefield V” introduces female and POC character models for use, nobody’s rights are taken away. Because there was never a right that every hero would be a straight white man who looked interchangeable (as the picture below this paragraph shows). Because there was never a right that a man has to earn more money simply for having a penis or a Y chromosome (see this post on another of my blogs about sex and gender). Because nobody is going to force them to play a female character in “Battlefield V” - they will be an option, not the only choice.

Pictured above: the amazing variety of heroes in video games

There was a certain privilege granted to those who complain about the changes, but the point about the privilege is that it is granted, it’s not set in stone. It’s not a law.

In my experience, those who complain about SJWs are usually people who aren’t very comfortable in their own life. They hold on tightly to what little comfort their unearned privileges grant them and complain loudly about someone else getting that privilege as well. Privileges such as being overrepresented in media or earning more than the woman in the next cubicle who does the same job.

Those who don’t complain about SJWs are either people who know they don’t have anything to fear from the changes or who actually stand to win something. Like more money or movie heroes who look more like them. Or playable characters who don’t look like they swallow a bottle of steroids first thing in the morning. But everyone as they like. And that’s the actual point behind social justice.

A lot of demands made by SJWs are actually demands about diversity in general and diversifying certain things. About granting rights to people who didn’t have them already. In most cases (although not all, see slavery above), that doesn’t mean taking rights from someone else. Men don’t lose the right to vote when women are given it. They lose the privilege of being the only ones to control politics. Whites don’t lose the right to be free when blacks are given it. They lose cheap labour.

I imagine that if you happen to be on the side which has privileges, you might not even understand that there are people who don’t have them - or that you have privileges. If you always see straight white men as heroes, you might simply think that this is the order of things. Heroes need to be straight, white, and male. You will not even wonder what a movie would look like with a hero who’s not straight, not white, not male, or a combination of those ‘not’ things. But the women in the audience will at some point wonder why there’s no female hero doing awesome stuff who’s not dressed to please the male gaze. The POC in the audience will wonder why there’s no hero who looks more like them, even though there are many villains. LGBTQ+ people will wonder why the hero always has to be straight.

But when, at one long overdue point, the industry reacts and makes a woman or a POC or an LGBTQ+ person the lead, some of those who were happy with the regular hero get all worked up over it and start blaming SJWs for the loss of her usual hero. Instead of just leaning back and taking a look at the new one - or seeing another movie. Because, despite the occasional stab at more diversity, most heroes still are the same old - straight white men.

This is where it also becomes a topic for writers, though. Because writers are part of media and media has a chance to change things. There are many good reasons for more diversity in your cast, social justice is only one of them. You can tell more interesting stories with different heroes, because they’ll have different skills, different backgrounds, different ways of seeing things.

But you need to realize that sooner or later someone is probably going to accuse you of just doing it for social justice. Then you should make it clear that it’s great to be a SJW. Of course, you don’t have to be a warrior. You can also be a rogue, a mage, a priest, a paladin, or a member of many other classes.