Day 149: Playing the Victim and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Hi again everyone!

Today, I'm gonna do a (short?) rant on something I see a lot of on the internet.

People in arguments, rather than making and backing up claims, will often try to find shortcuts to 'win' the argument. One of the more popular ones is playing the role of a victim- it's probably self explanatory, but basically, this means constantly complaining about things in such a way that you appear to be singled out, be it by society, a specific group, or an individual. Technically, there's nothing wrong with this, but it can be very easily abused- people will act as though they're the only person or group being attacked, when this is often not the case.

The issue with this is that it's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. People who constantly play the victim, especially when they're exaggerating it for sympathy, will often be called out or mocked. They can then use these people's mocking comments as evidence that they're being singled out, which further proves their claims, while also drawing more attention from people who might mock them.

This whole process is commonly used to draw attention to issues (or, unfortunately regularly, to "issues"), including (but not limited to) racism, sexism and the like. In fact, it's a very common strategy for extremists to use- upon receiving any negative attention, they'll immediately say it's due to a factor like race or gender, which proves that their claims are valid, even if the real cause is more to do with their behaviour.

Honestly, this doesn't bother me all that much- I can generally tell when somebody is just looking for attention by doing this- but there is a big downside. Making a big deal out of what is really a superficial issue, and trying to pin it on something like sexism, really takes away from actual issues of sexism. It's not unlike the boy who cried wolf- people get so used to fake claims that they don't pay much attention to the real ones. This is one of the reasons I'm so against radical feminism- the hypocrisy of people looking for attention actually hurts people who want to help others (or at the very least, it hurts their credibility).

Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- hopefully you enjoyed this post! If you've got any thoughts on the subject, feel free to leave them in a reply- just be civil about it.