Having exhausted the usual "inclusive," "safe," "all-bodies-welcome" jargon in her social media posts, New York City psychotherapist Judy Sherman struggled to find new woke virtues for her therapy practice to signal that were non-controversial enough to avoid ruffling the feathers of any of her target clientele.
“It’s tricky to hit the mark,” said Sherman. “You want to come off as bold, but you don’t want to actually take a stance that’s bold enough to turn anyone off. That ends up narrowing the field a great deal.”
To this point, Sherman explained, her virtue-signaling default has generally been LGBTQ-related. “You know, rainbows, love is love, celebrating identity, trans rights are human rights, that sort of thing.”
Unfortunately, however, Sherman reports, while these sorts of signals took her a long way, they have come be less impressive since so many others in the therapy space are similarly proclaiming their support for the LGBTQ community. “We weren’t standing out anymore as true social justice warriors. The question started becoming which virtues we could signal before a lot of other helpngi professionals had gotten to them.”
One virtue that immediately came to mind for Sherman, a longtime ethical vegan, was her compassion for the farmed animals who are imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered by the billions each year as standard course of business in the so-called “food” system.
“But people don’t like to hear that they’re participating in a sociopathically violent food system,” said Sherman. “Mentioning veganism, even in passing, could trigger resentment in our potential clients, which doesn’t help when we’re trying to get them in the door."
Seeing how awkward it coudl get bringing up values to be applied in real life, Sherman ruled out veganism and/or animal rights as virtue-signaling subject. Less straightforward, however, was the subject of Palestinian rights, another area in which that Sherman was tempted to her display her deep compassion and concern for suffering living beings. Utlimately, though, she ruled out that arena as well, due to concerns about alienating potential clients who happened to be aligned with either of the two major political parties.
“Very few people are pro-genocide in principle, but the concern for the Palestinian plight isn’t quire woke-accepted enough among people beyond college age to safely signal at this point,” said Sherman. “I am confident we’ll get there, however.”
Despite the virtue-signaling challenges, Sherman says that she remains committed to signaling virtues that will support and enhance her therapy brand as moral, just, and non-offensive, as with her latest, social-media-applauded post proclaiming herself “against hate.”
“To paraphrase one of my all-time heroes, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of the moral universe is long, and it's okay if it's also a little fuzzy," she said. "For purposes of social media messaging, I find that simple, elegant, and vague is the formula that fits the bill."
