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Consuming Problematic Media Is Harmless
During my sophomore year of college, I came down with an acute illness and ended up missing about a month of classes. While I lay under a blanket recuperating, I was bored out of my skull. I was already into radical politics, so I started filling the hours reading and commenting on social justice blogs.
I was miserable and lonely. But I didn’t want to think about that. So I got angry instead — anger is unpleasant, but at least it’s energizing. I started denouncing every popular TV show, movie, and YouTube fad as cisnormative, homophobic, patriarchal, white-supremacist garbage. As I refined my terminology, I earned the thrill of other people telling me I was right. They’d never noticed before just how much damage the media they loved was inflicting on the marginalized. They’d thank me for educating them (just as I thanked those who could claim more oppressed identities than me). This all played out in front of the backdrop of what lately goes by “cancel culture.” It layered just enough fear on top of the righteous outrage to keep things spicy. (Today, I’m calling you out — what will you pin on me tomorrow?)
The whole structure rested on the rock at the center of progressive culture’s moral universe: at all costs, avoid inflicting harm. Liberals tend to be horrified when conservatives balance avoiding harm against other moral values (loyalty to one’s…