Variations on a theme…
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In January, the Oxford English Dictionary added a section to the “snowflake” entry, indicating that the word once referred to a unique person with potential, but that it now denotes a more “derogatory and potentially offensive” meaning: “a person mockingly characterized as overly sensitive or easily offended, esp. one said to consider himself or herself entitled to special treatment or consideration.”
Perhaps it’s because I am myself a bit left of center, but I’ve always heard the term applied to liberals or progressives, particularly at universities, as part of what the New York Times has described as the right’s “narrative of leftist enclaves of millennial snowflakes refusing to abide ideas they disagree with.”
It’s an example, I think, of what historian Richard Hofstadter referred to as “the paranoid style” (I wrote about this in an earlier post): the outraged rhetoric of dispossession and repossession in which “they”—in this case, university professors and progressive students—are destroying America by squelching “our”—conservative (or, sometimes, stand-up comedic)—speech. And one rhetorical tool of outrage is ridicule: mocking any concern about issues involving race or gender. Ooh, the poor SJW snowflakes, triggered and huddling in their “safe spaces”….
But mockery can bite back, as happened with the word “broflake.” (The OED hasn’t added this word yet, but they’re watching it.) Broflakes are those men who mock “snowflakes” for having thin skins, and then lose their minds at any perceived slight against men.
Witness the caterwauling over the Alamo Drafthouse‘s announcement of a women-only screening of Wonder Woman last year:
More troubling, you see it in response to any critique of an area of culture these men see as “their” territory. It’s generally bad enough for women in gaming—even board games!—or in comics, or at conventions, or… the list goes on far too long.
But heaven forbid a woman speak up. That audacity elicits a brutal, toxically masculine vitriol, as when Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign to support a video series she planned to produce about problematic representations of women in video games. The response to her project was unspeakably vile—dispossession and repossession, with extreme prejudice. (The video of her TEDxWomen talk is well worth the 10+ minutes to watch, but you can get a taste of the bile she had to endure at 2:44. Trigger warning, as the snowflakes say.)
And then there’s the rhetorical poseur that my fictionary identifies as a snowfake: a person who displays spurious, hypocritical outrage at some perceived challenge to his or her (usually his) privilege.
Think of the oh-so-dignified Mike Pence walking out on a Colts football game because a handful of the visiting 49ers knelt during the anthem. If we can believe the president (though, on reflection, I don’t know why we would), Pence attended the game prepared to leave if players knelt—which was, of course, pretty much a certainty. And while I get that this is often how protests work—they’re often orchestrated—most don’t cost taxpayers nearly a quarter-million dollars.
And most aren’t snowfakes in high positions of power protesting the right of others to protest.
Or think of the response to Michelle Wolf’s descent on this year’s White House Correspondence Dinner. All of a sudden, a wave of people (including some journalists, who you’d think would have reason to be genuinely frustrated by the President’s and his Press Secretary’s gaslighting) rose up in outrage—outrage, I say!—against Wolf’s vulgar language and unconscionable, if non-existent, personal attacks on Kelly Anne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
At the crest of this wave of outrage was Sanders’s dad, Mike Huckabee, who tweeted his disapproval of the way the WHCD “celebrate[d] bullying, vulgarity, and hate.” And that’s fine; after all, his daughter was one of the targets of Wolf’s wonderfully brutal performance. (It was a roast, for crying out loud.)
Nonetheless, his reaction feels a bit hypocritical, given his snowflake-baiting tweet from the previous day:
Huckabee offers simultaneous snowfakery and broflakery. Perhaps we need yet another new word: brofake?
What do you think, OED?
For other posts in this series, see: