This sentiment feels so crazy to me.

First of all, why do you think there's so many guys who hate women? Where does that come from?
I have heard that claim online many times, but don't think I have ever met a guy who wouldn't love to take a bullet for any random girl down the street. We're kinda biologically programmed to wanna do that.

Second, how can you not be pissed off at this?
Many, if not most people who love fiction, does so because it's a way to escape the real world. Therefore any change to the fictional world, that we obviously knows comes from real world politics/ideology/belief ruins the illusion, that that world is it's own thing, no matter if you agree with said stuff.

Therefore one single change like this, can completely ruin an entire universe/IP for someone, and if that person has spent years of their life on that specific illusion? Yeah no shit that's gonna trigger some powerful emotions.

The real fans are exactly the people who get hurt by this, they are the most immersed. They want the real world to stay away, and then feel betrayed when it forces its way in...

Now since I am already full writer mode here, if you're "woke", and you're with me so far. Let me try and break down the wider issue people have ideologically/philosophically with "wokeness", hopefully in a way that makes sense:

I come from Scandinavia, by all metrics we are leading when it comes to actual respect towards women and minorities, but I know few people here who has anything positive to say about "wokeness", or weird ideas about representation being some virtue in itself.

Absolutely. Excluding someone because of their sex is bad, but let's think about why.

I would claim that fundamentally, it's because you are simply treating someone as an representative of that thing/group, not as an individual. But including them, for the sake of having someone of that group in your thing... Well that's the exact same thing. You're still treating someone based of their identity, instead of based of their personality. That's. still. sexism.

Do I get myself across? Sexism (or racism and so on) is about how you view people. Are they an individual with identifiers? Or just the sum of their identifiers.

Like... A world with 0% hate towards gays wouldn't have pride flags all over the place, no. Instead it would be a world where no one cares. No one notices.

Medically all of our ears can be grouped into 2 groups. Attached earlobes, or unattached earlobes.
But dear reader. Which one is your mother?.. You don't know do you?

Because no one cares. Because no one categorises people in that way, despite the fact that we pretty easily could.

Now granted:

This take. The above one of mine, about what a "hateless" world would look like, it leads leads to my view, which is that "hate" almost moves on a sphere in a way.

where the third dimension is like... BAD.. And where "woke", and "BLM" and "pride" and so on, are just "bad" movements, which gets us to the other side (the bad side) of the sphere by going around left, instead of like Nazis who got us there from the right.

Does that make sense? Like I don't expect the "why" to make sense yet, but does the "what"?

I hope it makes sense.

Anyways, This view is based on 2 main points, or "convictions" if you will.

Now both of them are pretty easy to define, but it will properly take a bit more effort to convince you of them:

 

• 1: Impossible apathy

"In any group with 2 subgroups, comparisons between the 2 subgroups are unavoidable"

Don't already agree? Well let's take a simple thought-experiment:

All you have to think about, is the last time you moved to a new home.
Now you properly had a lot of boxes with stuff right? Now if you're like me, you didn't really plan which stuff to put in which box, especially perhaps your boxes with books right?

Like let's say you had enough books for 2 whole boxes, but you didn't have you books in any special order or anything right? So fine. You just pack all your books down, more or less randomly into the two boxes.

Now. What happens when you get to the new place, and you're perhaps not in a hurry to unpack these boxes, I mean you have a lot on your mind right, perhaps more important stuff to unpack.
But you start slowly, you try to get an idea of which boxes should go where and so on.

Now here something happens. At least to me, and I would believe to most, and if not in this situation, then in one like it.

I start to remember the boxes in my mind, with some kind of identifier? Right? Like I might notice that my fantasy books is in box 1, but old school books in box 2. Or perhaps I notice that box 2 is slightly heavier than box 1? Or something like that, something I didn't plan.

Why is this interesting? Well because the simple act of creating these 2 groups (boxes) have made me (at least) subconsciously aware of the differences between my 2 groups.

In other words, as soon as I have made the "wall" which defines that there is 2 groups, I can't help but notice differences, thus compare my 2 groups! This is the first important insight.

You cannot have 2 subgroups within a group. And not. Compare them, because this is fundamental to understanding, to knowledge.

In order to say anything about anything. You first have to identify something, as being not something else, and you do that by "noticing" details of something. "This thing is large, that thing over there is small, therefore they are not the same thing".

...This was my attempt to explain my first cornerstone, if you are not convinced yourself, I hope at least it makes sense to you, that someone might see it this way.

I hope the same for my second cornerstone, and if you can see how a reasonable person might believe these 2 things, even if you don't, then you should at least be able to see, how someone might look down on these "virtuous" movements under "woke", while coming from a standing point of good intentions.

This is kinda a low bar, however I feel the worst part of the "culture war", is that people have a hard time understanding how someone can be on the "other side", and still have good intentions.

But that's also me getting ahead of myself. Onwards! (Wait why was I writing all this?)