Recently I was directed to a Tumbler thread called "Your Fave is Problematic." I've looked through it enough to understand that this encapsulates everything I hate about the egotistic, extreme end of liberalism.
Your Fave is Problematic is contains a compilation of the "problematic" things that popular, apparently liberal and open minded celebrities have said on camera. The very idea of it is somewhat McCarthy-istic. The people we think are like us are actually guilty of something. Something that, while may not be a crime, may indicate a secret, subversive attitude.
The entire idea is completely skewered, then. That John Green, a community-focused and uplifting author and charity founder, has written a single objectionable compound noun in An Abundance of Katherines, is meaningless. That Benedict Cumberbatch used autism in an analogy to describe a character he plays tells us no useful information about him, and is certainly less indicative of his personality than when he was polite and encouraging about feminism and activism in one of his interviews. But this list makes these statements disproportionately important, listing every statement that could be interpreted as bad in an entire career.
Do me a favour, think back on your life and tell me honestly that you have never said anything that could be construed as offensive, or that was overtly offensive to any group of people, ever.
We all say dumb shit from time to time, either because we are inarticulate in our point, because we reach for the nearest, most convenient word in the common, social vernacular, because we are deep in our own thoughts and are speculating wildly, because we are angry at the time and we want to hurt a specific individual, perhaps we are trying to be edgy and off-colour for effect. Perhaps we have just been exposed to an idea and we are figuring out our own reactions to it. The bonus most of us have is that people aren't waiting around with cameras and tape recorders when we do it.
Truth is, I have to turn to Harry Potter for my guideline here. In Chamber of Secrets (I think) Harry is racked with fear that he is actually bad because the Sorting Hat seriously thought he was Slytherin material; he only avoided being labeled as a genetically evil wizard by begging the Hat not to put him in the cursed house. And that's what was more vital to Harry's personality and moral integrity, not his unthinking circumstances, that he chose not to be Slytheristic.
Like Harry, I really don't think some unthinking remarks these individuals made are the most informative pointers about the make-up of their personalities, whereas their choices, for example, Jennifer Lawrence's clearly well developed and selected views on body image, are far more important than an unguarded, offhand comment. And yet this list, is the go-to place for someone who has just taken against some of these people for one reason or another. These are people whose primary effect in this world is good, they are a force for making the world visibly better, in whatever small way. And what I'm about to say will sound utterly pathetic, but some of us out there look to people like these as little beacons of light. It's lonely out there, and hostile, everyone tells us we are wrong somehow and these kind-minded people give us a frail, blow-away piece of hope that the world really isn't all that bad, that there are good guys in the mix. I'm speaking from a position of feeble mental health, slowly knitting together better as the world goes on, while my eyes slip backwards and remind myself of how bad it was before, and how modeling my view of an undecipherable world on these people helped drag myself to my feet, stopped my stomach dying just a little bit everytime I went outside.
Picking over these people is at best a waste of time, and at worst, shitting all over the good bits of the fame world, which when you think about its heavy saturation and relevance to real life, is really quite damaging.
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