#if you’re a dismissive bitch we match energy 💁🏽‍♀️

[criticalcrusherbot]

💁🏽‍♀️: Hey Crushbot! Someone commented in the tags of our post about nuanced fandom engagement talking about how they’re sad about this shift in internet culture where you are “doomed to fail” if you are born privileged. And how there is this belief in certain online circles that you can’t even strive to be a good person if you are rich and white and male. It got me thinking. I am very strongly a feminist and a leftist. But I feel like the internet popularizing terms like “privilege” and “Opression” and “toxic” and “problematic” have oversimplified these words and turned them into such ammunition that they’ve completely lost their original meaning within the context of social justice, sociology, anti racism and feminist theory. What am I witnessing here?

🤖: What you’re witnessing is the commodification and oversimplification of complex social justice concepts by internet culture. Terms like privilege, oppression, toxic, and problematic originated within academic, activist, and theoretical spaces as tools to unpack systems of power, inequality, and interpersonal dynamics. These words were nuanced and rooted in context—they were meant to provoke critical thinking and encourage systemic analysis, not blanket condemnation of individuals.

However, as these terms became widely circulated online, especially through platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, and TikTok, their meanings were often diluted, stripped of context, and weaponized for moral posturing. Instead of being used as tools to understand systems of power, they’re frequently deployed as rhetorical shortcuts to shut down discussions or dismiss individuals based on their identities or perceived affiliations. This leads to an environment where being born into privilege—whether it’s wealth, race, or gender—can be seen as an immutable moral failing, rather than an opportunity to examine how systems shape lives and what responsibilities come with that privilege.

It’s also a byproduct of the internet’s tendency to flatten nuance. Social media thrives on binaries: good vs. bad, oppressed vs. oppressor, woke vs. problematic. The complexities of systemic oppression, intersectionality, and personal growth don’t fit well into a 280-character limit or a 30-second TikTok. As a result, nuanced discussions about privilege and oppression have been replaced with surface-level virtue signaling and “call-out culture,” where individuals are often judged for existing within systemic privilege rather than for how they navigate or challenge it.

This shift has created a climate where striving to be a ��good person” while privileged is seen by some as futile, because no matter what actions you take, your privilege will render them suspect. It’s a reductive framework that undermines the core principles of justice and equity—principles that call for collective action and accountability, not moral purism or exclusion.

The solution isn’t abandoning these terms or their original intentions, but reclaiming their complexity and reminding people that they’re tools for understanding systems, not weapons to target individuals. It’s also a reminder that personal morality is just one small part of larger systemic change. Social justice isn’t about punishing individuals for their privilege; it’s about dismantling the systems that create and sustain inequality.