So I’m a cultural muckraker, and consider it my station in life to slaughter sacred cows, shatter illusions, bring illumination to our dark world, and correct common misconceptions. My popularity in this regard varies depending on the target. I can savage organized religion, Wall Street, Republicans, Nickelback, whatever is the acceptable target, and then you all love me. Because you are the choir I preach to.
I could publish a recipe for BBQ Jeff Bezos right now and probably get a ticker-tape parade for it. But then, if all I did was knock down straw men all day, I’d be fat ‘n’ lazy. Instead, I choose a more difficult topic, which will make me a lot less popular.
Today, I am going to tell YOU, yes YOU READING THIS, why YOU do a bad, damaging thing on social media, and why YOU need to stop it. In fact, I am going to beat this lesson into your backside with a belt and squat you in the corner afterwards to think about what you’ve done. I do it because I love you.
I’m not very popular when I do this. There will be no ticker tape parade for me for this post, but I am OK with that. Because doing things means more to me than validation.
What is this “Gatekeeping”?
Not to single out this particular person or account or even instance, but the lesson demands a random example:
This gem is a perfect example of the “gatekeeping” delusion. It hits all the woke buzzwords. And it shows a nasty mental virus that infests the “writing” community.
The irony here is that I can go up to these people and introduce myself as a writer OF BLOGS, and get tarred and feathered instantly. The #WritingCommunity makes no room for bloggers. That’s a sell-out! Somebody serving the corporate overlords! A greedy capitalist swine! A pay-for-play! He’s working for THE MAN!
The #WritingCommunity, with a hashtag, very strictly defines writers in a tiny little box, in fact:
- Must not do it for a living
- Must be dirt poor
- Must not do anything non-fiction
- Writing on keyboards is “ew,” you have to use pencil and crumpled notebook paper
- Must do this at a cafe, at a table by yourself
- Poetry preferred, prose allowed, fan fiction encouraged
- Scribbled doodles in the margins count as “writing”
- Must spend all day crying about “gatekeeping”
- Must constantly talk about depression and suicide
- Spelling, grammar, and literacy are just other people trying to hold you back!
“Writer” is actually more of a lifestyle or fashion choice with these people. With the exception of slash-smut posted on DeviantArt or Tumblr, you need never fear encountering much of the output of these people. They cringe like a vampire encountering garlic when you use the verb, “writ-ing.” A writer is something you ARE, always, never something you actually do.
What little typing you actually do should be devoted to dramatically angsting on Twitter so everybody knows how HARD YOU ARE SUFFERING for your sacred art.
No, honestly, nobody knows the turmoil and angst and drama and sacrifice you make to breath life into these dumb little puppet shows that nobody will care about:
Now that we have introduced the social media #WritingCommunity, we can translate their very tribal language:
- Gatekeeping – denying somebody a title
- Imposter syndrome – what you suffer when you’re a victim of gatekeeping
- Elitist – anybody who has accomplished anything in life at all
- Condescending – how people who have learned anything talk
- Ableist – anybody who does anything that you would rather have an excuse not to be expected to do
Quite a mouthful!
So let’s diagram the “gatekeeping” part:
I say I am a writer. That is because I press keys on my keyboard in patterns that cause checks to arrive in the mail. It has been my sole income for 20 years; in fact, I have supported an entire family this way.
You say you are a writer. But you have not earned a nickel writing, have never written anything, don’t even believe in writing, have not even a threadbare website that carries your content, have no fans, have no ideas, have no thoughts of your own in your noggin. You’re just saying this because it feels cool to say “I’m a writer.”
I say you’re full of shit.
You accuse me of “gatekeeping.”
No really, that’s how it works!
Where is this alleged “Gate”?
The concept of “gatekeeping” sprang to life right at the turn of the century mark and has since dwindled in popularity except for a certain age group that hangs onto it like Gollum clutching the One Ring. Briefly, the “gate” is enclosing this select, exclusive group of elites, and when you try to join them, somebody slams the gate in your face.
The part where this is a delusion is the part where the #WritingCommunity attaches false value to this label. The label, “writer.” This is all you need to know about the trophy generation. This is more expressible if we switch metaphors for a moment.
What is a descriptive noun to the rest of us is a Title to them. It is more like a king’s crown. In the gatekeeping delusion, the world is filled with regal kings and queens who sweep by with their noses in the air, while paper Burger King crowns on their heads proclaim their Important Titles: “Writer,” “Mother,” “Inventor,” “CEO,” “Doctor,” “Lawyer,” “Coach,” “Peanut Allergy Sufferer.”
Meanwhile, the gatekeeper delusion makes you feel like a little child with no crown. You hop up and down and reach for the crowns but they won’t give you one. You want a crown! You want a crown so bad that it becomes your obsession. Eventually, you dig a few used paper crowns out of the trash and wear them proudly, only to have somebody tell you that they are not yours.
What! You just finally got a crown, just put it on, and these bastards knock it right off your head! Well you’re going to show them. You’re going to spend the rest of your life railing against this crown system. You’re going to band together with other crownless people and all make crowns for each other in a circle of caring and support. You will forever preach hate against every person in every business, government, or religion. They are all the Crown Controllers!
I like my metaphor much better, but we have to use the standard one. it’s the same deal: Society, when you have the gatekeeper delusion, is this exclusive garden party and you can’t get in without a Title. There’s a guy at the gate checking for these, behold yonder keeping of the gate. Then you spend the rest of your life with picket signs in front of the “gate.”
Here is the big secret that #WritingCommunity doesn’t want you to know:
THERE ARE NO GATES. THERE ARE NO CROWNS.
These things are illusions that exist in your mind when you have gatekeeper delusion. Society is not running around with their noses in the air keeping these prestigious treasures to themselves.
When I call myself a writer, there is, in fact, never a ticker-tape parade. I have no throne, no prestige, no scepter, no advantage, no power. To the rest of us, most especially me, the title “writer” doesn’t mean anything more special than “plumber,” “stockbroker,” “security guard,” “well digger,” or “bum.”
In fact, as I outline in “How I Accidentally Became A Writer,” I never aimed at doing this. I tried it out as an embarrassing juvenile, decided it wasn’t for me, went on to other career attempts, and only accidentally circled back when blogging became the backbone of eCommerce.
That part where I started out submitting short stories to magazines out of the Writer’s Market, believing that New York publishing desks was my only path, is the part where I was playing by popular culture’s rules. You’ll notice, importantly, that I gave up and walked away and instead discovered other talents that would make me useful to the world. I didn’t stay there for the rest of my life crying about the unfair system that was gatekeeping me. Then I came back to it later in life, only to discover that either I had improved (no), or a market existed for me where none had existed before (yes).
It is the #WritingCommunity people of the world, the online clique, who formulates this “gate.” To them, denying them any title at all is gatekeeping, no matter how outlandish. To us sane people who don’t live in a Humpty Dumpty world where words means whatever we want, these titles are just descriptive words.
You can always tell when a gatekeepist obsesses over the social value of a title. They agonize over its definition.
When they stop asking questions like this one. https://t.co/H1kXfztYnz
— Penguin Pete 🐧🍂 ☕🍁 (@Penguin_Pete) September 5, 2021
When you point to a dog and say “that is a fish” and I correct you, am I gatekeeping for fishdom? To the person with the gatekeeper delusion, yes, that is exactly the point. I have denied the dog its inalienable right to identify as a fish.
So… What do I care?
Well, I don’t, really. But I did mention at the top that this gatekeeper delusion does damage to society, and it does. It establishes a cargo cult mentality in the public’s mind, that just the appearance of something and the something are the same thing. It stops people from actually achieving something in life, for fear of gatekeeping. It makes people unhappy, creating scarcity of this imaginary commodity. It makes people worry about being an “impostor”; another symptom of raising children with participation trophies regardless of whether they earned anything or not.
In the populist world of the Internet, we have very few actual commodities to trade without resorting to postage. But one commodity we can all distribute is neurotransmitters! Your brain pays you in little rewards of dopamine whenever you get recognized in a social sense. So if we all hop around upvoting each other’s tweets, bam, we all created dopamine for each other. The definition of a circlejerk.
The magic word is “validation“! So there must be something to the way a brain is constructed, where it gets addicted to dopamine, to the point where it seeks out constant peer validation, even if it’s meaningless.
By the way, we have real problems in society, like science denial, social media propaganda, and hate groups, which are fires upon which the gatekeeping delusion throws gasoline. The whole protest against vaccine cards right now is just “gatekeeping logic” in action. People are fucking dying by the hundreds of thousands right now, but we don’t dare make people get a vaccine against a deadly virus. Because we wouldn’t want to “gatekeep” now would we?
The Incel hate group movement is another example of the gatekeeping delusion in real life. Women to Incels are the “gatekeepers,” with the literal gate between their legs, and in order to have sex with one, you have to convince her that you’re a decent human being. Incels don’t want that, they think women should be property. Having standards is just another word for “gatekeeping.”
When Incels get even crazier, they invent “tulpas,” which are imaginary girlfriends. And, well, at that point they have driven themselves to voluntary schizophrenia – but they’re getting their dopamine!!! You see how addicting it is?
As you can see, the word “gatekeeping” becomes your one-word explanation for all of life’s setbacks. Whenever you are turned down for anything, because you lack good credit, qualifications, degree, whatever, now you can blame the teacher and the test instead of admitting that you failed the grade.
This is why I call it a nasty mental virus.
Is there more of this “gatekeeping” business?
it’s practically a cottage industry. The subreddit /r/gatekeeping is a good establishing anchor and guide to this delusional worldview. The accusation of “gatekeeping” is applied to any and all situation whenever somebody tries to make words stick to their definitions.
Urban dictionary has it:
A dissection of this faulty logic: That a person “elevates themselves above others” – this is a delusion, there is no status involved, just a definition. “A sense of being superior” – that is in the mind of the “victim,” nobody else is assigning a lofty position of prestige to this label. “Self-inflation” – there is nothing to “inflate” to!
When you’re hearing “I am this thing and you are not,” the gatekeeper delusion makes you suppose that this thing is valuable for peer validation. It isn’t. Nobody else gives a crap except the person who’s crying about “gatekeeping.”
The gatekeeping delusion is so ingrained in the #WritingCommunity that there’s even parodies of it.
In our social media cancel culture, an accusation of “gatekeeping” is one of the best ways to burn a witch. You get “dumped for gatekeeping Marvel fandom.” Gamers rail against gatekeeping in games. There’s an Esports team criticized for gatekeeping. Gatekeeping is a target yet again in music fandom.
Even there with that last one: SO WHAT if somebody “unnecessarily shames me for enjoying music”? If I’m listening to music, who else even needs to know that? I don’t need to burst into a forum and demand people validate me for my fandom. Anybody who does that deserves to be shamed. What is wrong with actually “enjoying music”? If you’re in it for the social media validation, then you never gave two shits in a sandbox about the music in the first place, now didn’t you?
If you claim to love a thing and you want validation for it, and are upset when you are denied that, then you never loved that thing in the first place. You loved the dopamine hit which your brain secretes when people cheer for you. The other thing was just a means to that end.
Seriously, “gatekeeping Marvel fandom”? What, do you get 37 virgins in the afterlife when you get designated a “true Marvel fan”? Where’s the payoff? Where are these people bragging about what a swag Marvel fan they are?
Bottom Line: If you care about “gatekeeping” then you ARE that impostor!
Writers write. I still go on writing regardless of whether anybody tells me I’m a writer or not. I don’t get validation and I don’t need it, because I get money instead. That, to me, provides plenty of dopamine.
Now I realize that monetary compensation is no proof of artistic merit. God knows, the media world has driven that lesson down our spines. You will notice, I am careful not to label myself as an “author.” I also made no claims as to my brilliant prose.
I’m a hack, and I’m pretty damned proud to be a hack, because a lot of good writers in the past were proud to share that title.
You watch and see, the delusionals will come for the word “hack” too. In fact, they already did with the word “hacker” in the 1990s and “geek” in the 2000s. They will come for all of the paper Burger King crowns, and we will not be free one day to utter a single word. We will all be gagged and chained in Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, where nobody can gatekeep anybody else ever again.
