Why is Wu continually broadcasting her insecurity online? Like, does she actually expect people are going to go like "Oh, sorry, I guess I'll only use your latest selfies when I'm mocking you from now on"?
She belongs to an older school of shithead online activist that was way more common around 2012-2013.
It was most commonly seen on Tumblr (which is apt, as Bribri got the start of her modern presence there), and was hallmarked by its glorification of weakness. It's not enough to simply be part of a protected class, you had to constantly jockey for position against other protected classes. If you never saw Tumblr at its absolute lowest, I scarcely know how to describe it to you; it was the origin point of the Oppression Olympics meme where two shithead activists would whip out how mentally and physically disabled they were in an effort to outdo one another.
This is why you had cows from this era (
Vade most visibly) seemingly collecting mental illnesses like a six-year old in the 90s collected pogs.
Brianna is slightly more classy than this; with age comes experience, after all. Wu was never big on using her trans status as a weapon like other online activists - something I will give her props over, since she was mostly content to focus on her feminist and woman-in-tech vibes than anything else (and good god, can you make fun of Wu's incapacity in those particular areas for fucking ages). The only time her trans status got much play in her earlier days on Twitter was when idiots, trying to rile her up, would post the Wu/Flynt pic and get banned immediately like this website hadn't covered for years that Wu had IRL contacts to Twitter support and was every bit the petty vindictive little shit she looks like online.
So at first glance, there doesn't look like much tie-over with that era of activist, but where you did see it is in her tactics - baiting harassment until she got ridicule, then immediately retreating to the proverbial fainting couch, immediately publicizing her harassment when she got it (against FBI advice), and constantly getting caught out when she tried to make herself out to be the biggest victim.
The thing is, this particular tactic fell out of favor a while ago. For one, it's a hallmark of insufficiently socialized teens and tweens, not fucking 40-year olds who by all accounts should fucking know better at this phase of their lives. Second, because it relies on an embrace of your own vulnerability, it functionally comes with its own inherent achilles heel if no one bites or if you fuck up. Worse for Wu, newer, sexier professional victims have long since come up and none of her original harassment claims matter anymore.
There's nothing more sad than an aging hipster, except an aging hipster who happens to be named Brianna Wu.
