Feminism and leftism are orthogonal.
See, that demonstrates the problem; I guarantee you plenty of “left wing” people would disagree with that.
And plenty of feminists who are not “left wing” (whatever that means - I suspect not at all what I would mean) would disagree with that.
Marzipan? That’s just nuts.
It’s interesting to note the things not listed as woke, including:
- Allowing same-sex couples access to marriage, adoption, and other family structures.
- Ensuring access to reproductive freedoms such as abortion and contraceptives.
- Eliminating workplace sexual harrassment
- Replacing prison with treatment as a response to addiction diseases
- Ensuring children have access to health care, regardless of parent income
and so on.
These are all positions that people on the left take, and that are commonly opposed by people on the right. What differentiates them from the things @DemonTree wants to categorize together, other than her possible agreement with these positions?
I imagine she’s OK with women voting, having credit cards in their own name, interracial marriage, as well as the stuff above, all of which would have been/is considered woke.
I’d say they’re not woke, due to the Victor’s Virtue. Paraphrasing myself from six years ago:
You can approve of Parks and King, and of suffragettes and Loving v. Virginia, because they won. Their civil rights struggle is safely in the past, and society has agreed that what they did was great and that they were heroes. Today if you blame Parks or King, you experience some serious social pushback. So if you adopt the Victor’s Virtue, you approve of what they did, and feel virtuous about it.
Black Lives Matter? They haven’t won yet. Trans rights activists? They’re in the middle of their struggle, and you can condemn them without universal social pushback. So the Victor’s Virtue doesn’t require you to approve of them: you can criticize them all you like without losing that warm happy virtuous feeling inside.
It’s convenient and consistent. Fifty years ago, those who adopted the Victor’s Virtue could approve of Harriet Tubman while disapproving of MLK, pointing out how he stirred up trouble in otherwise peaceful communities. A hundred and fifty years ago, those who adopted the Victor’s Virtue could approve of the Boston Tea Party while condemning Harriet Tubman for violating property rights–I mean, sure, maybe slavery should end some day, but stealing people from plantations wasn’t helping the cause at all. And in 1773 I’m certain there were people who approved of Pilgrims who left the land they were bonded to, but wagged their fingers at the hooligans throwing perfectly good tea into the Boston Harbor.
Maybe “Woke” is the flip side of the Victor’s Virtue. It refers to struggles that, fifty years from now, people will mostly accept as obviously just, but that are now fair game for criticism. Sixty years ago, MLK and Rosa Parks were Woke, and a hundred and ten years ago, so were the suffragettes.
Why do you need one word to refer to all these concepts? Why not just address them individually, on their merits?
Love that term.
So, @DemonTree, do you think interracial marriage is OK? Women having credit in their own names? Gay marriage? Women being allowed to vote? Those were 100% considered woke, or woke’s equivalent, in the past. Where do you stand on those?
Let’s focus on gay marriage for a minute. It wasn’t that long ago that it was illegal in many places. Were people who supported it “woke” in your eyes?
My bad, I totally forgot another option: Marxist.
I see no substantive difference between using “Woke” the way @Demontree proposes, and “Marxist” the way Hegseth uses it.
For sure we need now someone as “woke” as him nowadays to defend his show and PBS from the current forces of ignorance, just as he did back then.
I guess I’m too woke. I’m not a huge fan of marzipan, but some of the others are great. 
Not to be confused with Cultural Marxist.
Ah, right, the ones who control the banks and space lasers.
[Aside] Discourse there thought that the confused emoji is the same as saying “sigh” for some reason, so I meant to say “Sigh” there.
How about “white privilege”, “intersectionality”, and “systemic racism”?
Why do you want one overarching word to describe all “ideas like” those three (and, considering the “like”, presumably a batch of others as well)?
And, while we’re at it, in what post did you make that request before?
Nope.
They may be new to you. Some of them may be using relatively new terminology. There’s nothing new about the ideas.
Considering that what’s now calling itself “conservatism” doesn’t seem to believe in any of those things, perhaps a different term is needed.
I believe there’s a line about herding cats?
They sure as hell are. Says a woman who has tried being a woman in the room with some particular leftists.
A lot – not all – of feminists are leftists. (The ones who aren’t, at least in the USA, often don’t want to use the word “feminist” even when they are.) But a lot of leftists aren’t feminists; though some of those lend it a bit of lip service.
Hadn’t heard that phrasing, but I know exactly what you mean.
Oh yes, and again: where is your answer to my questions way back in post #50?
I am still waiting for answers and cites as well.
I had to wait quite a while for a definition of “woke”. I asked, repeated my request many times, and then got an answer in another thread in another forum.
Going back to your definition – I think it’s an example of a category mistake. You are noticing some ideas which are parts of modern discourse, grouping them together without really understanding the way they connect to each other (or things you’ve left out), and assigning an underlying motivation that is incomplete and based on faulty implicit assumptions.
Here are some of the implicit assumptions I see in your definition:
- That there is a single Social Justice movement.
- That it is a modern thing and distinct from the Civil Rights movement.
- That the Civil Rights movement is over, and has been for at least 50 years.
- That there have been three waves of feminism.
- That your alleged Social Justice movement is mostly American, as it has arisen as a response from American social structures and issues.
That’s only from the first couple of paragraphs, but it’s already a lot, so let’s stick with those for now. I don’t agree with any of those assumptions (except possibly the last one – but I see it as a problem). It seems to me like there are currently several overlapping social justice movements, one of which is the civil rights movement, which never ended, but just evolved over time. I see several groups with some shared interests that sometimes ally with one another, and sometimes conflict. If you wish to convince me of your assumptions, it would help if you could answer the following questions:
- When did this Social Justice movement start?
- Who started it?
- When did the Civil Rights movement end?
Regarding the waves of feminism, my understanding is that we are in a 4th wave of feminism, and doing a google search of “how many waves of feminism are there” seems to confirm that. I would argue that 4th wave feminism is one of the many social justice movements out there, so how does that square with your single movement?
In addition, here are some of the more subtly misleading things I see in those couple of paragraphs. You identify the following problems that you think are motivating people in “the Social Justice movement”:
- Black Americans are poorer than White Americans
- Black Americans are more likely to be in jail (than White Americans, I assume)
- Black Americans are in general doing worse (whatever that means)
- Women earn less than men on average
- Women do more housework and childcare (than men, I assume)
- Other minority groups still suffer discrimination and lack full rights
- Gay and trans people are examples of said groups
None of this is wrong, exactly. But here are some example of things you left out that are kind of a big deal to lots of people who care about social justice (I will stick to an America heavy focus because that’s what I know best, but it’s an admitted bias):
- Black people are more likely to die from police violence than White people
- Black women are more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth than White women
- Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women
- LGBTQ+ young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers
- Indigenous women experience an extremely high rate of violence, abduction, and murder
- Trans people experience an extremely high rate of violent crime
Do you see the theme here? While economic disparities and whatnot are certainly genuine problems, most people cross into “woke” (as Lead Belly used it) because they notice the ongoing violence and death that keeps happening to some folks.
I think the way you have told the story hides that in vague terms like “in general doing worse” and “suffered discrimination”. I wasn’t convinced the civil rights movement wasn’t over yet by economic disparities – it was the way Black people kept getting killed by cops, over and over, in my lifetime. I didn’t decide to fight for the rights of gay people because people didn’t believe in same-sex marriage, but because gay people kept getting beaten and stabbed in my town. I became involved in trans rights because a trans woman in my conservative home town was murdered and the cops wanted to ignore it – we had to be activists in order to keep it in the news and hold them to accountability.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s lots of important and interesting debate about the things you mentioned, and they are part of the social justice discourse. But it’s very interesting how you leave out the murder and violence. Why is that?
I love this post and everything about it.
Depends on how relative - 1967 (“institutional racism”) or 1988 (“white privilege”) are hardly what I’d call new.