Today, blogging has been outsourced to a couple different bloggers, because finals and also depression.
1) Is This Feminist? is my new favorite Tumblr. (The answer is always no.)
2) Roger Ebert said some stupid shit about women being better than men. I agree with Jill from Feministe:
Most people have the capacity to be wonderful, non-violent, nurturing and loving. Most people also have the capacity to be competitive, driven, aggressive and ruthless. Most people are capable of great kindness; most people are capable of being total assholes… Those things are certainly influenced by gender, but our gender does not in fact hard-wire us to be nice or awful.
Please note, also, the misogynistic history of “women are so much better than men.” Protip: if your feminist opinion was used to justify women not voting (“they’re too good to sully themselves with politics!”) and not working outside the home (“a woman is an angel of the home who is too pure for the workaday world; she has to provide a place of comfort and goodness for her man”), it’s not really feminist.
3) Scalzi writes an interesting post explaining privilege through the metaphor of video game difficulties. Also check up the followup and the mockery of deleted comments.
I really like this comment from http://feministing.com/2012/05/18/new-tumblr-crush-is-this-feminist/:
“Anyone who decries a feminist participating in any activities as ‘Non-feminist’ probably isn’t very feminist themselves. From the right point of view, watching sports, reading, and studying science can be feminist just as much as attending a pro-choice rally, a take back the night rally, or commenting on feminist blogs can be ANTI-feminist. It all depends on why you do it.”
The analogy basically serves its purpose, I guess, but it’s pretty limited. Someone early on said, it’s useful until it isn’t, and that’s kind of my feeling. This is an adequate way to talk specifically to straight white men. It wouldn’t work so well if you wanted to confront another group- say, wealthy people, or gay black men, or white women, or whatever.
So no, I don’t think it’s a good all-purpose analogy for “privilege”. I think it’s a way to talk specifically to one group of people about their particular privilege.
Ozy, given the very low level of social mobility in places like the US it’s not that easy to really change your wealth characteristic either. It’s also quite difficult as most people have pointed out to actually do anything about these situations without wealth or influence – it really restricts our ability to do something if we aren’t significantly up the success hierarchy. I think a good way to actually measure privilege is to look at how people value their privileges. Taking the simplest example we have wealth vs poverty, most people would likely opt for a higher wealth stat… Read more »
John Markley: Uh, I’m pretty sure “the computer arbitrarily gives more points to buy stats to some people” still doesn’t count as being your fault or being because you suck… I believe the difference is that people can “level up” the wealth stat (even though it’s easier when you can max that out because you got 200 points when someone else got 50, and that is still incredibly fucking unfair) but it is rather more difficult to level up your “race” stat until you’re a white person.
daelyte:
Did you look at the comments, and replies to those comments? He uses the idea of privilege to shut out dissent, as do many of his commenters. His post practically invites oppression olympics, and other nastiness.
I’m not gonna lie. No I really didn’t and took it on faith that that was not what he was doing. That would be my bad I suppose.
@John Gottman Markley: Maybe, but some people’s lives are hard because they genuinely *do* suck, straight white male or otherwise. Are we supposed to pretend *that* doesn’t exist?
…Oh crap I did not just say that (tiptoes away)
Hmm, maybe you could get around it like this. If you do get everything right, it still possible that one of your teammates might knock you off a cliff accidentally. Or even on purpose. Because they suck, not you. That might work for the inflated-ego crowd.
OK, serious this time, and I apologize for doing this as a separate post: The thing I probably found most objectionable about John Scalzi’s remarks was actually his attempt to qualify his point to sound less dismissive of the problems a straight white man less successful than John Scalzi might face. Quoting Scalzi: “Likewise, it’s certainly possible someone playing at a higher difficulty setting is progressing more quickly than you are, because they had more points initially given to them by the computer and/or their highest stats are wealth, intelligence and constitution and/or simply because they play the game better… Read more »
Nice to see Mr. Scalzi joining the proud ranks of successful white men who stomp down on people less privileged than themselves to raise their own status and pat themselves on the back for how progressive and caring they are for doing so. Perhaps he and Hugo Schwyzer should start some sort of club.
He was unemployed for awhile
Welcome to Generation Y. That’s not evidence of poverty. Not having grad school at age 30 as a fallback option (because you didn’t go to college) is evidence of poverty.
@Danny: “Its one thing to use the idea of privilege as a tool to examine the status of society (how can you fix it if you don’t know what’s wrong?). Its quite another to use it as a weapon to shut people out. Not that that was happening here, just an extra thought.” Did you look at the comments, and replies to those comments? He uses the idea of privilege to shut out dissent, as do many of his commenters. His post practically invites oppression olympics, and other nastiness. If his purpose is to (in his words) “explain to straight… Read more »
“And also this reminds me of a something that I’ve seen too many times. Its one thing to use the idea of privilege as a tool to examine the status of society (how can you fix it if you don’t know what’s wrong?). Its quite another to use it as a weapon to shut people out. Not that that was happening here, just an extra thought.”
Actually, that’s exactly what was happening, IMHO. I forget who said it first, but to criticize people without offering an alternative is simply cruel.
MRAL: Here he’s basically targeting a specific group of people and saying YOUR LIVES ARE EASY (no, not literally, but come on, that’s how people will read it). I got an air of “If you’re born into this group your lives will be easy.” Sure one could go back and say that he meant “If you’re born into this group your lives will be easier.” but considering that he used video game difficulty as his analogy I can’t totally blame people for reading it as the former. And also this reminds me of a something that I’ve seen too many… Read more »
…well, I never would’ve expected MRAL to be the most reasonable person in a comment thread. Congrats.
MRAL is basically correct: It was clear from the start that his post wasn’t going to have the effect he intended because he’s actually being a good bit MORE confrontational than the word itself, not less. That said, he was still entirely correct, as far as he went.
@Men’s RIghts Activist Lieutenant:
“Scalzi’s article was ok, but there are a lot of disadvantages you can be born with besides the three he mentions.”
You mean like poverty, disability, gender identity, etc?
http://aspergersquare8.blogspot.ca/2009/07/ever-expanding-list-of-neurotypical.html
Scalzi’s article was ok, but there are a lot of disadvantages you can be born with besides the three he mentions.
Also, he gets all pissy in the follow-up post but I don’t know wtf he was expecting. His post was WAY more confrontational than the word “privilege”, which at least has some nuance, you can say things like “everyone has privilege”. Here he’s basically targeting a specific group of people and saying YOUR LIVES ARE EASY (no, not literally, but come on, that’s how people will read it).
Ozy: I’ve looked at the essay closely and I don’t think he’s writing from his own experience: he wrote “Being poor is believing a GED actually makes a goddamned difference.” however, he’s a college graduate who went to a private school, according to his wiki entry http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scalzi#section_5
He was unemployed for awhile, but that’s not the level of poverty I mean. There are white Americans who are still quite poor, and deal with multigenerational poverty.
Ozy: in that case I find his dismissal of poverty even more troubling. Poverty can be an inherited trait.
@TokenGreyGuy:
“Consider a woman living 100 years ago and assume for the sake of argument that somehow all men were more powerful than she was.”
Off with their heads.
@Eagle34, I was also annoyed by that comment on Feministe. People’s behaviour depends both on their stable long-term psychological characteristics and the specifics of any given situation (e.g. what they think they will be able to get away with). Most people have some power in some situations and less or none in others, so it is rarely the case that you can determine whether or not someone is an a**hole (across the board) solely from their gender, race, social class etc. (witness the high levels of violent crime in many ghettos for example, something that should not exist if the… Read more »
Monkey: Scalzi has been fairly poor. I also think that while it is not a fair assumption that all men play video games it is certainly a fair assumption that all Whatever readers do.
Remember, Ozy: Tomorrow is also day!
Thanks for explaining, Gaius. What you say makes a lot of sense. Also, yeah, I don’t like the type of “feminists” that perpetuate the “man-hating” stereotype or condemn other women for not living up to their standards of “feminism”. Like, for example, with the name changing after marriage. I definitely support the right of women to keep their own names after getting married – but, at the same time, I’m not against women who do choose to change their names. There are just as many valid reasons to change one’s name (not aesthetically appealing, doesn’t get along with family, etc)… Read more »
@Bttf4444: “Is this feminist” is, in part, about rote problematicization: the ease with which you can say, “Such-and-such isn’t feminist BECAUSE of some fundamentalist reason.” Here, I mean fundamentalist in the denominational sense, because if you think about it, there are as many “denominations” of feminism as there are people, and some of these people are rather fundamentalist about their particular denomination. That said, I should note that some of these people who identify as feminists aren’t feminists by my definition, because some people who call themselves feminists also demonstrate misandric behavior, and I don’t believe that feminism should be… Read more »
Oh, I think I get what the tumblr blog is about. It’s a blog that pokes fun at the type of feminists that say “you’re not a feminist if you do X or don’t do Y”, right? The type of people that are the primary cause of why other people say “I’m not a feminist, but…” – because they think feminism is about following a bunch of rules, rather than simply supporting gender equality.
Monkey, look at this sentence right here: ““The truth of the matter is, those with less power have no choice but to be “nicer”, more “cooperative”, etc. Very convenient… for the master class. ” Those with less power have “No Choice to be nicer, more cooperative, etc”. As in, no free will, no independant thoughts or feelings of their own. They are slaves. Then there’s “Very convenient….for the master class”. Master class. What in the fuck does that imply? Men? Like I said, it’s the old “Women have no agency, the ‘master class’ made them do it”. I’m tired of… Read more »