Second-Handed

An acquaintance of mine directed my attention to an online comic about the links between "Pickup Artists," the "Involuntarily Celibate" community and the Alternative Right. It was interesting, if fairly predictable.

It hit the expected progressive notes and all that, and included nothing that you wouldn't have known if you'd paid halfhearted attention to the evening news. And in that, it seemed like a missed opportunity; but one that you may have expected to be missed. The author was a biracial woman seeking to explain a mindset that she attributed mainly to young White men. Which is fair enough. We're often called upon to explain the viewpoints of people unlike ourselves. But about midway through the piece, I found myself with a question that I wanted to ask: "Have you actually spoken to any of these people?" When the stories that people tell themselves, and one another, about third parties are deficient, it's often because they haven't.

And that tends to leave out part of the story, because "what I would think if I were you," and "what you would think," are not the same as often as we like to think that they would be.