What is "woke?"
All things considered, it's a nebulous term that describes modern leftist influence on any given subject, but what are the particulars? What exactly do we see that makes us register the word in our minds?
There are, seemingly, six confirmed qualities, most of which can be seen in art.
Female "Empowerment"
This can take different forms depending on the subject. In art, it's pretty obvious. Take a role or character that is traditionally male and simply swap a woman into the role. You've seen this time and again in various ways over the last decade in Hollywood. The idea isn't just to add more "female representation" but, more importantly, to give women masculine traits.
They're supposed to be better fighters, better leaders, more stoic, more intelligent, and held at a higher value than the males around them.
And this same principle is seen outside of art as well. Women are often elevated to higher statuses in corporations and given deference in inter-office social matters, with or without merit attached to their name. While this happens in many corporate areas, you can see it best in consumer-facing companies. Think the Bud Light debacle, and "reimagining" trends in Hollywood.
Rewriting History
This, too, can take many forms. The 1619 Project, the idea that America truly began upon the arrival of the first slave on American shores, was one such attempt. In media, you can see this in making historical populations more diverse than they actually were, or introducing characters that may have been around but did not have the impact the art says they did.
Recently, Christopher Nolan's upcoming take on "The Odyssey" takes so many liberties with race swaps that people are being instantly turned off to it. Netflix attempted to paint Cleopatra as a black woman, and the BBC did the same with Anne Boleyn. The game Battlefield V attempted to make it seem like WW1 was a more diverse effort than it was. Throwing minorities into any given situation as the good guys and creating villains out of white men — usually wealthy white men — is a large part of historical rewrite.
The Uglification of Women
This primarily happens in media. It's considered a modern sin to depict a woman in any serious role as traditionally beautiful. Masculine features are often added, such as short haircuts, tattoos, muscles, or, at the very least, an uncommon stoicism. Smiling with anything more than a smirk is seen as too attractive, and so you have a lot of women doing closed-mouth smiles or smirks to lessen their attractiveness.
Clothing is also something that gets defeminized. You'll often see women in woke creations wearing baggy clothing or clothing a man would typically wear. A great example of all of this is the musical artist Billie Eilish, who tends to dye her hair unnatural colors, rarely smiles, and wears overly baggy clothing. It's a pattern seen in leftist women, in particular, including the dreaded septum piercing.
ALSO SEE: The Reason Why Woke Films Seem So Much Worse Than All the Others
Video Games May Be One of the Last Refuges of Masculinity
Immasculization
In media, masculinity is evil, according to the left, so it has to be minimized in male characters while, oddly, maximizing it in female characters. Men are usually depicted as weaker, more nervous, and reactive. Basically chihuahuas. This is usually done to make the female character seem more competent and in control.
Masculinity in woke creations is, if belonging to a man, portrayed as toxic and uncouth. It's usually displayed through insane amounts of undeserved pride or paired with childish behavior. If there absolutely has to be a masculine good guy, then they will often include a female character who is just as capable as the man, if not more so. You see this a lot in the Jurassic World films — especially the third entry.
In the real world, you see this take the form of lumping men into the group of "oppressors" and our masculinity being seen as "problematic." This is usually "remedied" through mandatory training for men via HR employees in corporations, providing more resources for women, and giving their word more weight than a man's.
Downplaying the Consequences or Promotion of Leftist Systems
"I know socialism is a charged word, but we can learn a lot from—"
That line was from Hank Pym in "Ant-Man 3," before he was interrupted by his daughter.
A lot of woke material often takes ideas championed by leftists and makes them into moral or even wisdom-based systems. Socialism is often portrayed as something the good guys support, if not in name, then in principle, but what's never discussed is socialism's effects on the economy, how it often results in sickness and death, and how it redistributes power to the few and not the many as advertised.
But it doesn't stop at governing systems.
The Black Lives Matter riots were often downplayed by politicians, artists, and interest groups as something noble and worthy of praise. You can see representations of this in popular media that depict the spirit of the marches as a positive thing, and not the brutal riots that it actually brought about.
Moral Relativism
What is and isn't evil often depends on the person committing the act. Murder, theft, or even sexism is wholly permissible if the person committing these acts has the right identity. Terrorism is fine if it's done in the name of something the left considers righteous. Is it really an atrocity if the "victims" were oppressors? Is stabbing a white woman in the neck a hate crime if the murderer is a minority?
Wokeness doesn't have any hard and fast rules about what is and isn't morally wrong. Sin isn't a real thing. Traditional morality is just a patriarchal system meant to oppress women and minorities, and therefore shouldn't be used as a metric for deciding right and wrong. Even the truth can be dismissed based on personal experience mixed with identity, in which it becomes "my truth."
And "my truth" can effectively turn any given situation into whatever you need it to be to excuse or justify any action you take.
