It's an odd thing when a cishet white man is called out on his various sexist/racist/LGBT-phobic sins after basing his entire public persona on "getting it." It's like a surgeon lancing a large, deep abscess; everyone gets hit in the face with all the pus and poison that's managed to stay hidden so far.
Currently, that abscess is on the ass of one Louis CK as he moons his audience. After #MeToo collected him back in 2017, he had a pretty good opportunity to put his money where his mouth is, eat that bag of dicks, and take responsibility for himself and his actions like he'd been urging his male audience members to do for his entire career. Instead, he decided the real victim in all of this was himself (rather than the women he choked his chicken in front of), and shat his pants accordingly.
Because cishet white men start life on the lowest difficulty setting and get infinite lives, he could even have taken the light dragging he received that second time around and learned something from it (namely, how to tell better jokes). Instead, he decided his Woke White Guy Costume had outlived its usefulness, and went Full Fedora this past week.
He's not the first, unfortunately. Nor is he going to be the last. Cishet white men pretending to get it and then losing their shit when people (most often women, POC, and the LGBT community) point out they don't quite practice what they preach is a tale that's been reenacted for literal centuries, and doesn't look to be going out of fashion anytime soon. We can just see that shit in real-time now thanks to the internet.
Because the thing that cishet white men loudly proclaiming how "woke" they are keep overlooking is that if they got it even half as well as they purport to, they wouldn't have to keep telling us. It would be inherent in their everyday speech and actions, and would not require a spectacle. But like Mommy Fortuna's Midnight Carnival, spectacle is all they've got because the reality is disappointingly mundane, and the truth melts their magic. Always.
These types wear progressiveness like anime fans wear costumes at conventions. They do it to get noticed. They do it to get attention and praise for their efforts. And they do it to enter and win contests. It's a fucking hobby for them, and when the act is over, they can take off the suit and makeup and wig and go back to being their privileged asshole selves.
Louis CK's latest antics are what happens when someone points out their Evangelion plug suit is made of old garbage bags instead of PVC.
It's no accident that these are the same guys who love smart, confident, successful women until they have to interact with them.
Men like Louis CK love the ideal of equality. They love the talk and the MLK quotes and the rainbow flags. But when marginalized people gain real power -- when women, for example, are able to end his career by telling the world he's a creepy piece of shit -- the game changes. Going back to an earlier post of mine, they're fine with equality until it means there are consequences and they have to actually change their behavior in order to avoid them.
Then, the costume comes off. The jig is up, and since equality won't get them the prizes they're after, the act is worthless. Might as well go back to being a chauvinist asshole.
Oddly enough, anime itself predicted this kind of pseudo-woke douchebag two decades before it was cool. If you were anywhere near a television tuned to Cartoon Network around 2001, you probably caught at least one episode of Gundam Wing. And if you were one of the geeks that I knew in college, you caught a whole lot of episodes. But in case you didn't or you're too young to have heard of it, let me introduce you to one Quatre Raberba Winner.
The short version is he's a richer-than-God teenage boy with Daddy Issues (sound familiar?) who has grown up in relative comfort most of his life. Like with servants and shit. And his father controls the resource satellites for a particular colony. The members of that colony voted him off the island because even benevolent tyranny is still fucking tyranny, and in response, Quatre's father tried to make off with the aforementioned satellite. The colonists, not keen on letting him engineer a massive food and water shortage due to a temper tantrum, fired on the satellite just long enough to kill him so they could recover it. Quatre decided everyone was insane except him and blew up a colony or two himself because hey, if he has to live with Dead Daddy Issues, everyone in space should die.
All Quatre's missing is the man-bun and Bernie campaign bumper sticker. His family's power and privilege -- literally controlling the food and water supply for that colony -- were called out and questioned, and his father absolutely lost his shit over it. And rather than see that the people had the right to defend themselves, Quatre even more thoroughly lost his shit and decided the facade of being decent wasn't worth it if people don't automatically bend the knee.
So he fucking killed them.
It's a chillingly prescient storyline when seen through the lens of angry white men today who explode into violence at the notion that the behavior they feel entitled to engage in is no longer acceptable, and it illustrates the thing at the very heart of the Performance Progressive mentality: they're more concerned about not looking like bigots than not being bigots. Their "wokeness", like the Winner family's "generosity", is not born out of true passion for human rights or the desire to actually make the world better; the Winner family just wants to maintain control of the colony, and these guys just want to bang some feminists.
And when both are denied the thing they want?
The jig is up. The mask comes off. And people fucking die.
