Newcomers who consider themselves morally enlightened

Dave Hewitt is brilliant.

There is a phenomenon I’ve noticed in political discourse many times in recent years, which goes like this:

• An existing term is colonised and its meaning subverted to new political ends
• Previous users of the term are forced to try to come up with a new term to replace the old one
• The new occupants demonise the old, and deny political legitimacy to any new terminology

The best description I can think of for this process is semantic gentrification, in which users of a word’s original meaning are forced out by newcomers who consider themselves morally enlightened in comparison to the older population, who completely change the character of the term in service of their own, narrow interests, and who regard the now-homeless former inhabitants with contempt.

It’s not so much a description as a metaphor, and it’s a brilliant metaphor. Let’s use it a lot.

Inherent in this is a sense in which the new meaning is superior to the old, representing a progressive, moral inevitability, and that attempts to reassert old meanings are denied legitimacy as regressive, backwards, and “on the wrong side of history”. Why would you want to hold on to a run down, backwards old semantic neighbourhood, when the shiny new hipster takeover is such a clear improvement?

It has huge windows! Wifi for cats! Luxury lightbulbs! Espresso machines in the showers!

…the female-centric analysis of feminism was colonised and redefined into a gender-centric one promising “equality for everyone”, women’s studies supplanted by gender studies, and so on. Rather than a movement to redress historic in[e]quity for women, and bring women’s needs to the fore, this shift reinforces women’s stereotypical role as primary caregiver, sacrificing their own needs – their own words – to right all of the world’s wrongs.

It reinforces it and it abuses all women who resist. Win-win.

Of course, in this inverted analysis, the most wrongs are perpetrated against the most “marginalised genders”, and the most marginalised of all are the men who wish to be seen as women, whose concerns have become so central that any women’s issues that exclude them are deemed hateful.

Deemed hateful and punished accordingly. Cops arrest us, friends berate us in public, judges tell us to call our male assailants “she” in court. It’s 1960 all over again.

Shared understanding cannot be assumed because the entitled new occupants have appropriated the old semantic structures, and supplanted them with their new, fashionable concerns. Every attempt to speak with precision about the pre-gentrification meaning of these words, to talk only about women’s rights and needs, to talk specifically about LGB issues, to make a feminist stand on a newsworthy event or a matter of policy – all becomes a trans issue. The conflict is inescapable, and a huge amount of time is expended trying to restate entirely reasonable feminist points from first principles. All the while the new inhabitants of these well-respected old semantic neighbourhoods have free rein to use their stolen goodwill to reshape society in the way they see fit.

The neighborhoods now have no grocery stores or parks or libraries but there’s a Starbucks on every corner. Enjoy.