Straight White Males oppressed by blog post
So straight white science fiction author dude John Scalzi has created a bit of a hubbub amongst straight white dudes on the interwebs with a blog post called Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. The post, later reposted on Kotaku, is basically an attempt to talk to fellow dudes in their own language about the concept of privilege “without invoking the dreaded word ‘privilege,’ to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon.” (And they do.)
Scalzi’s thesis:
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US – or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world – is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
Scalzi should have added “cis” to “straight white male,” but otherwise I’d say that’s fairly spot-on.
Of course, as Scalzi himself points out, life for straight white (cis) dudes is not always peaches and cream. They may have any of a number of disadvantages in life that make things difficult for them. They may have been born poor, or in a war zone; they may have been abused as children or the victim of crime or violence as an adult. Or faced any number of other problems and conditions and disadvantages.
Scalzi deals with this issue a little more obliquely than he could have, noting that some people begin the grand game of “The Real World” with more points than others, and that this can make a good deal of difference.
But do straight white cis males face disadvantages stemming from being straight white cis men? I honestly can’t think of any that have affected my life in any serious way, and these small disadvantages pale in comparison to the many advantages. Yeah, I had to register for the draft when I turned 18. Of course, when I registered there was no draft, and there still isn’t one, and the draft has virtually no chance of being resurrected in the foreseeable future, so I can’t say this requirement has affected my life in any tangible way.
As Scalzi puts it:
If you start with fewer points and fewer of them in critical stat categories, or choose poorly regarding the skills you decide to level up on, then the game will still be difficult for you. But because you’re playing on the “Straight White Male” setting, gaining points and leveling up will still by default be easier, all other things being equal, than for another player using a higher difficulty setting.
Anyway, Scalzi got a lot of responses to his post, many of them from straight white dudes outraged by his assertions. So he wrote a followup taking some of these critics to task. He was particularly amused by the criticism that by “picking on” straight white males he was being racist and sexist.
This particular comment was lobbed at me primarily from aggrieved straight white males. Leaving aside entirely that the piece was neither, let me just say that I think it’s delightful that these straight white males are now engaged on issues of racism and sexism. It would be additionally delightful if they were engaged on issues of racism and sexism even when they did not feel it was being applied to them — say, for example,when it’s regarding people who historically have most often had to deal with racism and sexism (i.e., not white males). Keep at it, straight white males! You’re on the path now!
I am sure there are many gems of obtuseosity in the comments, and in the Reddit thread on his original post. But it’s Friday night, and I have a migraine — which sucks, but it’s not because I’m a straight white cis dude — so I’m going to let you guys find them for me.
EDITED TO ADD: Thinking a bit more about Scalzi’s central metaphor here, and I don’t think it completely works: he assumes that obstacles other than racism, sexism, and homophobia can be explained as the equivalent of having started the game with fewer points. But it you have, for example, a disability, that’s something that makes you life harder every day; it’s more akin to raising the difficulty level than to starting off with fewer points. (Not to mention that you’re likely to face bigotry because of it as well.) This doesn’t erase the privileges a straight white male with disabilities gets from being straight, white, and male, of course, but it does ratchet up the difficulty.
Posted on May 18, 2012, in narcissism, oppressed white men, racism, reddit. Bookmark the permalink. 448 Comments.
darksidecat, could you talk a bit more about dwarves representing Jews? That’s not something I notcied. (Not that I notice a lot of things, I’m a bit slow.)
nanasha, I agree LOTR can be a slow slog.
“So yeah, I’ve no doubt there was more than a little internalized, though not necessarily overt or intentional, racism influencing the books.” — yeah, *that*
They aren’t exactly progressive, but they aren’t particularly terrible either, which is kind of saying something considering how often modern works do flat out “dark skin is evil” bullshit. Pretty good for something that’ll be 100 soon though. (Should LoTR get an 11d1 party? XD )
I think you’re right about the orcs too, even in the movies only the Uruk-hai are dark, and they aren’t anything like human. And that is perhaps the biggest racism issue in here — the only explicitly dark skinned race is not only evil but isn’t even human?!
Still, if I required all my entertainment be perfectly progressive, I’d get bored very quickly unfortunately. I’d be curious actually if anyone could come up with something that doesn’t fail on one axis or another. Lol, skimming my DVD rack, Gothika might be the least fail (it even takes mentally ill women seriously! main character is a woman of color!), except it isn’t very good. I bet that does pass the Bechdel test though…
@Magpie — he explicitly said in letters that the dwarves were representative of Jews, and while there’s critism that the dwarves just love their good and fuck…he also explicitly said he “regret[ed] that [he] appear[ed] to have no ancestors of that gifted people” — what he intended them to share was being cast out of their own lands, wanders with a shared language and customs, to comes off more as sympathy than antisemitism. And I think we probably are talking past each other regarding Sam, I’m too young for hired help to be something I can really conceive of as an occupation and not like, my brother shovels snow for money some storms.
And Gothika does pass the Bechdel test, hate it when the database loads 30 seconds too late to be relevant >.<
Thanks Argenti, I can see the “wanderers with their own customs” bit, now that you point it out.
The baddies in LoTR and Xena (and The Last Indian which wasn’t fantasy) are always played by Maori actors.
Just to be clear, I totally respect people’s rights to like stuff that I don’t like. And the main good that came of LOTR was the fact that “The Hobbit” (which was written last but is chronologically first) was actually quite well-written (barring a few parts that were a bit sloggy). My father is a HUGE Tolkien fan (even though otherwise he’s one of the least geeky people I know), and he’s the one who had me reading the books at maybe…10 years of age…I think..? I plowed through the Hobbit but it was hard to read LOTR and I ended up putting them down in frustration. I picked them up again when the movies actually came out (and I was an adult) but they still didn’t hold my attention. So I just added them to the other “classics” that are intrinsically “greats” but that I just personally didn’t enjoy (such as “Grapes of Wrath,” “Moby Dick,” and “Huckleberry Finn.”).
As a literature fan and someone who studied it as a major in college, I have read a good number of pieces of literature that are “greats” but I didn’t find all that great. It happens. But I do think that in order to have a truly critical discussion, I’d have to spend a whole lot of energy and time citing things and making a concrete argument and that’s frankly more effort than I feel would be appreciated on this blog. Needless to say, I know what I *do* like in the realm of fantasy and fiction, which is great when my favorite authors come out with new stuff, but it does make the entry point into discovering new great authors that I would probably enjoy pretty formidable.
I think that the thing that terrifies me the most is feeling like I’m turning into those people who are totally out of touch with new and interesting stuff and instead just watch the same old 10 movies over and over again and read those horrible pulpy mainstream novels written by people with pen names like Diana Diamonds or Desmond Malcontent.
I sympathize with that, but I came to terms with it over a decade ago. My knowledge of popular music is pretty encyclopedic up to the mid-90s, and all but nonexistent thereafter. But if it really mattered to me personally (as opposed to feeling the need to do it for social reasons), I’d have kept up to date – not least because I’d have wanted to.
In fact, the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker (who I think is fortyish and who has recently had his first child) wrote about this very topic in his latest column.
Arg, Xena >.< I haven't watched that in at least a decade and still remember how obvious the white/good not-white/evil split was.
Nanasha — I know what you mean about some of the "classics" not being very compelling reads. Of Mice and Men might be one of the worst things I've ever slogged through (loved Cinderhouse Rules though). Read both of those and LoTR at ~16, I don't think I'd have really understood them at 10, and the movies do cut a great deal (like the jesus figure that really seals it as being a religious allegory) — IIRC The Hobbit is children's stories? So it makes sense why you'd have enjoyed that more.
Regarding your last paragraph, you might want to give Good Reads a go, it’s basically social media for books.
And btw, I’ll readily admit LoTR is one of my guilty pleasures, much like Kerli (you should see people when my usual steampunk and metal stuff switches to her!)
Wetherby — and for smart music (as in the algorithm is intelligent) try Last.fm — and if you want, my usual steampunk playlist should be easy to find, same SN as here. I gave up on popular music somewhere around the Backstreet Bos and N’Sync period though (omgs they’re popular again though! I feel old and I’m really not!)
The Hobbit was definitely aimed at a younger audience.
Has anyone read The Father Christmas Letters?
Nobody’s mentioned Discworld yet? ;)
@Wetherby- OH GOD, HOW DID HE WRITE MY LIFE?
Also, to be fair, I do have Things That I Like, but most of these Things are Things that People Who Know Things Know Nothing About. So I go to work and people are talking about American Idol and the Giants and I’m like……”ok…” and people talk about their diets and it really kills me not to just say, “BUT YOU ARE JUST FINE THE WAY YOU ARE!” because that’s not what they WANT to hear.
And all of my friends have moved away or are sinking into this weird “late 20’s blah” thing where they really do much of nothing and feel like they’re stagnating and since I’m married and have a kid for some reason that means that I Know Everything And Am Therefore Intimidating To Be Around.
So I’m lonely and exhausted, and my daughter is amazing but exhastING, and my husband is a zombie from working graveyard-something about working those hours just shuts your brain right off and we can’t seem to have a meaningful conversation about anything.
And I want to play new games, but I can’t seem to bring myself to figure out how to deal with the motion controls, but at the same time I’m glued to my 3DS and replaying Ocarina of Time for the bazillionth time (this time I’m playing Master Quest at least). And there’s just a point where I have to tell myself “FUCK IT” and give up on the new cool things that are out there because I’m overstimulated and temporally challenged and even when I want to think about things my brain seems to have gotten to the point where I just kind of switch off like some kind of circuit keeps blowing in my head and refuses to comprehend things.
But in some good news, this little fetus inside of me has a healthy, well-formed heart (I had to go to a children’s hospital to get a special heart scan because I have some weird hormonal issues that increase the risk of congenital malformations), and that really makes me happy. And my 2 year old, while great at giving me a heart attack by running ahead on the sidewalk when cars are zipping around nearby, has encouraged me to start jogging more often just for the fun of it (even though I jog like a lumpy, pregnant, floppy person). I guess I am just at a point in my life where I want to DO SOMETHING or CREATE SOMETHING instead of just CONSUME SOMETHING. And maybe being a parent is part of why I feel like that. Of course, maybe it’s all just some kind of cosmic joke as well. But seeing as I tend to love old movies and old music as well as the stuff from the 90’s and my own childhood, it just kinda makes me think to myself that perhaps the problem isn’t that I’m out of touch with society, it’s that what society wants to tell me is meaningful is just out of touch with *ME* and my priorities/interests.
Ok, I think it’s time to go practice my ocarina. XD
I’m getting my doctorate in early modern German history with a focus on military history. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life on “long-ass wars.” I think it’s fair to say that everyone’s mileage may vary, yes?
I think class discrimination tends to be a bit neglected in a lot of online discussions which acknowledge sexism, racism and homophobia. Having a ‘stupid’ working-class accent, no access to a decent education, parents with a lower education level etc affect how you’re perceived and how you perceive yourself and restrict your opportunities just as much.
Some poor working-class men get angry at being told they’re privileged by well-off and articulate middle-class feminists and I can kind of see their point TBH. They’re just focusing on gender when it’s their economic and social background that’s really holding them back.
“it just kinda makes me think to myself that perhaps the problem isn’t that I’m out of touch with society, it’s that what society wants to tell me is meaningful is just out of touch with *ME* and my priorities/interests.” — TRUFAX!! Seriously though, the diets/celebs/fashion/omgs can you people have a serious discussion!? is basically why I gave up on pop culture at like 17. Like, what do you people mean you need a “translation” of Shakespeare?!
Except now all my “oh we can discuss Kant?” friends are marrying and having kids and having Serious Careers while I…paint? Then again, I gave up on doing that for anyone else years ago.
Also, you’re creating a new human — that definitely counts as creating something. Enjoy your ocarina, I loved that game (and then moved on to Kingdom Hearts); and I’m glad your newest little one is growing healthy.
Hey. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m tipsy, but it’s OK. You’re going to be OK. I’m glad the child you’re carrying is ok, that’s great.
I’m 30 and I worry all the time about whether or not my life has passed me by. The point is doing what you need to do at the time you need to do it, not measuring up to anyone else. That’s what I tell myself every time and it holds the fear at bay for a while.
Anyway, to move to the point that lies above the real point you’re making, the thing about consuming things the way I and the fans I know do is that it is an active process. “Star Trek would have been so much better if this had happened in the Original Series…” “Oh yeah? Then what happens to this timeline?” and before we know it we have spun off a story on our own. It’s not just passive.
@VoIP: “I’m 30 and I worry all the time about whether or not my life has passed me by. The point is doing what you need to do at the time you need to do it, not measuring up to anyone else.
Is it OK if I print this out and hang it on my wall? XD
I’m not!!
And you know the hilarious thing? there are some women my age at church and they all have kids. When we’re talking over coffee, I’ll mention, sometimes, how much I envy them for starting their real lives while I’m in grad school, rotating softly, over and over, in this liminal realm.
But every single one of them envies me even as I envied them–they all want to go back to school and do what I do. Argenti Aertheri, as fucked up as it may seem, the rest of our cohort envies us.
Go hog wild.
My point is that it involves a narrowing, a deliberate decision to narrow what you look at at the beginning of any given day, and that’s a decision that won’t just come to you, you have to force yourself to make it each time.
Anna — you’re back on topic not discussing LoTR right? LoTR’s classes seem to be royalty and not-royalty. Yeah, you must be back on topic.
In which case I don’t think it’s just online discussion, though the desire of many Americans to act like we rule the world probably means it permeates everything online (at least everything in English anyways) — considering what time it is on the east coast here, I’m guessing you aren’t American? We have this goddamned blinder to class here, where people seriously act like it just doesn’t exist because social mobility — even if they’re receiving gov’n benefits of some sort or struggling to get by, and certainly if they aren’t, our upper class basically has to maintain the allusion anyone could “make it big” or, well, look at OWS.
This is also how NWO manages to go on about new world orders while thinking himself sane btw — we do have a ruling class and most people stubbornly refuse to admit that because admitting it would mean admitting they can’t just work hard enough and manage to end up there too. (note that this has basically nothing to do with feminism besides intersectionality though, NWO has it fucking backwards)
You might be right, the FWB and I basically never discuss each other’s art because it quickly turns into a “you’re a better artist” “no you are!”…and he’s applying at Disney I think, because it’ll look good on his resume and he wants to work in Hollywood (he does lighting design, theatre/film work) — the grass is always greener on the other side I guess?
Oh, and another thing about age: nobody ever stops struggling or freaking out, you just get more experienced at whatever it is you’re doing while you’re freaking out.
Heh, yeah, I commented on the post without reading the comments
I’m English and I have definitely wondered this about America. Your social class doesn’t seem to be a whole lot different from ours, except that your elite don’t have 28 surnames and a title. But acknowledging that the playing field isn’t level is communism? Over here, even though there’s a lot more social mobility than there used to be, we’re hyper-aware of where we fit in to the system.
Bear in mind I’m getting my impressions of this from a) Ayn Rand fanboys ranting on the internet and b) Gilmore Girls, so correct me if I’m wrong. :D I’m genuinely interested
Anyway, my first encounter with feminism was through some aggressively articulate rich girls who were completely blind to their class privilege and lived up to a few of the humourless, victim mentality stereotypes. Let’s just say that it’s taken me a while and a lot of reading to shake off the associations and start to identify as feminist.
Actually, our elite are more likely to be new money–the really old families, like my boyfriends’, don’t have very much anymore. It’s all money and, within those constraints, influence–family is one means to influence, but not the only one.
Yes. Our Founding Myth is that the field is level. If someone has succeeded more than others, he (it’s always a “he”) must deserve it more, by definition.
oops: he’s only old money on one side: his dad grew up sharecropping. So one family.
“But acknowledging that the playing field isn’t level is communism?” — it’s worse than that, any request to remotely level it is communism, that’s why it’s “universal healthcare” and not socialized medicine. That’s the only chance we stand at getting the republicans to approve it (and they’re so far right as to be laughable, but with a two party system laughing isn’t helpful either)
The Ayn Rand fanboys are mostly Ron Paul supporters in my experience — they think they like the sound of a free market, but either don’t care about social justice issues, or are privileged enough to be blind to them. Ron Paul is unelectable in our two party system though, our right needs the religious vote, and Paul’s too much of an atheist for them, our “left” is really central but has enough sense of social justice not to be willing to hand social security (our only real safety net) to capitalism and corporations…not that the right isn’t trying to privatize our retirement fund.
That’s more a rant about having to vote centralist to keep abortion legal than on topic >.< (I just cannot believe we're debating birth control in 2012, that's truly mind boggling) — I know what you mean about feminism's class issues too, but I think it's partly that we want to act like everything is equal, which means higher ed is often needed to see what's really going on behind all the stick figure models in ads, breast implants, etc — those things are fairly obvious to most people, but to the Rand/Paul supporters, it's just how capitalism works, sex sells after all. And the idea of regulating things like ads gets people up in arms about communistic censorship (we can’t even issue a legal gag order that has any actual standing, and many, many people see this as one of the best parts of the first amendment).
I haven’t seen the Gilmore Girls though, sorry.
VoIP — just to be pedantic, boyfriends’ would be more than one boyfriend, one boyfriend and referring to both sides of the family would still be boyfriend’s (of the singular boyfriend) — too many years of Latin!
I appear to have gone into mod while ranting about our political system >.<
VoIP basically nailed the question with this though:
"Yes. Our Founding Myth is that the field is level. If someone has succeeded more than others, he (it’s always a “he”) must deserve it more, by definition."
I think part of the Usonian discomfort with class is that it feels limiting to acknowledge (But we can all be billionaires if we work hard enough!), but another part is inherited disdain for awareness of “one’s place.” We don’t like boot-licking based on class, the idea that we have “betters,” or the idea that we can’t become one of our betters and receive the boot-licking based on class because we worked hard and damnit this wealth better come with privileges.
(ps societies have contradictions)
RE: LOTR
I actually read The Hobbit first without even knowing of the existence of The Lord of the Rings. I will always remember this as being an awesome thing, and I really hope that the movies haven’t spoiled the possibility of that kind of thing happening. Hell, you probably couldn’t even buy a recently printed copy of The Hobbit without getting some mention of LOTR and THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURES BY PETER JACKSON PLEASE GIVE US MONEY NAO on it. There may have been a mention somewhere in my school library’s copy, but it wasn’t obvious if there was, so when I found LOTR the surprise was really gratifying.
“I appear to have gone into mod while ranting about our political system >.<"
No worries, I’ll check back when I can. Have to get ready for work now
“Yes. Our Founding Myth is that the field is level. If someone has succeeded more than others, he (it’s always a “he”) must deserve it more, by definition.”
This makes me sad, really. I think the American Dream and similar ideals are a very worthy thing to found a country on, opportunity for all. That the same old system reasserted itself isn’t a failing, it just means that maybe there have to be certain social safeguards – universal health and education and a safety net – for true social mobility to be possible. IDK, I don’t feel I understand the US well enough to be discussing this
Re: American class, Tulgey’s got the basics of it right, and my comment is a longer ranting version along the same lines — because I get called a fucking commie for thinking healthcare is a goddamned right, not something one earns by making enough money >.<
Note that I don't use the internet USAian wording because I want to gag everything someone gets all "go USA!!" about things, things which are usually either privilege of some sort, or racist/other-ism-ist (eg "go USA [fight those Muslims]" *gag*) — maybe I'll adopt it eventually, but within the USA really the only times you hear it called that, and not America, is when it's a nauseating display of "patriotism" (which really means "love everything your country does or you're a terrorist", see Bush's "you're either with us, or against us")
Re: LoTR, idk Tugley — I only heard of the books when the movies came out, and then insisted on reading them before I'd watch the movies because no one ever does the movie adaptation all that well. It is one of the better adaptations I've seen though, if anything, I think the movies would make people more likely to read the book to see wtf got cut from the 9+ hours of screen time.
@Tulgey
another part is inherited disdain for awareness of “one’s place.” We don’t like boot-licking based on class, the idea that we have “betters,”
Well from a working-class Brit perspective, we don’t like the idea either, but the old constructs are hard to break. While people reject the idea of boot-licking and those of a higher class being their ‘betters’, the idea of ‘knowing your place’ tends to manifest itself as inverted snobbery. People are proud of their working-class identity, and someone who tries to move upwards is seen as stuck-up, getting above themselves.
“…maybe there have to be certain social safeguards – universal health and education and a safety net – for true social mobility to be possible. IDK, I don’t feel I understand the US well enough to be discussing this”
You’re right though, the only one of those we really have is education, and while that’s technically guaranteed, I grew up one town over from a major city, and we had students who were “illegally” attending because they lived in the city, not our town. Except the city system was so much worse, if they wanted to know enough to get into college they basically had to get out of the city (and this isn’t Detroit or anything but a fairly well off city) — and then there’s the whole racist “black youth are criminals” problem, which is tied into the “school to prison pipeline” (that’s in quotes because googling it will help you more than my ranting will)
Our education system not directly teaching that the American Dream!! is possible via The Great Gatsby would also be kind of nice.
Ok, now to watch Arwen out run some wraiths!
@Nanasha
“So I’m lonely and exhausted, and my daughter is amazing but exhastING, and my husband is a zombie from working graveyard-something about working those hours just shuts your brain right off and we can’t seem to have a meaningful conversation about anything.”
Poor thing, not knowing wether to jog, paint, blog or play oncaria to fill your day while hubby works graveyard shift must be exhausting. A woman of quality would be outraged that an article on the ease of being a white man was published as her hubby slaves away to support her plus their children, yet here you are joining in the mockery.
———————-
@Argenti Aertheri
“Also, you’re creating a new human — that definitely counts as creating something.”
A new life is being created within her, she is creating nothing. It’s a biologicial function she has no control over other than to not kill the child. A pregnant woman could go into a coma and still give birth. Cudo’s to me, I’ve created a poop this morning.
I notice you seem to be able to blog and play online games 24/7. It must be so oppressive to post hatred of men while indulging in hobbies all day.
Well off to work I go, seven days a week. I’m so privileged, as is every white man I know.
“and someone who tries to move upwards is seen as stuck-up, getting above themselves.”
Oh we certainly have that too, I got told not too long ago my psych (undergrad) degree should mean I can just use my fancy theories to fix myself (because getting a degree is stuck up, and psychology BS and oh is the intersection of those two FUN!)
I can admit that I was resistant to the idea of white privilege at first because I was like, “But I go through xyz and it has made my life really really difficult,” until I understood intersectionality and that, what they were really saying, was that I have the privilege of not, say, being racially profiled by police, and I’ll never understand what that’s like. Privilege is a very tough word to swallow when it’s a new concept for someone who hasn’t lived a life of total luxury. But once you take a moment, put your pride aside, and understand what is actually meant by it, it absolutely makes sense.
But I’ve seen MRAs also flip a shit about words like “cisgendered” and they treat that like it’s an insult too. They just read the tone that they want to read and get pissed off. It’s just, this complete lack of desire to understand new concepts, and the privilege to be able to ignore them.
One of the issues with the “work hard enough and you will make it to the upper class” mentality is that our society has basically set most of us up to fail. With the minimum wage being well below the poverty level for those who work full time, with the laws that give break after break to the people who are already rich and powerful, and give them loopholes to use and abuse the poor and powerless, and no incentive to keep the higher paying jobs in the country, it basically takes a miracle to scrape your way up to the top. Oftentimes you have to either be naturally gifted or just have pure, dumb luck. Even a bachelor’s degree is practically meaningless at this point. Most people will spend their lives running on a hamster wheel.
And what really pisses me off is the notion that the poor are not working hard. This completely false idea that the worst paying jobs are the easiest. Someone who is running themselves ragged all day at a customer service job is lazy yet someone who sits around in an office bossing people around is a hard worker who deserves a six figure salary. It’s such a distortion of reality.
And on the subject of universal health and education, the USA mentality is just completely missing the boat in that these things would only further the country in keeping it a global competitor. Intelligent, healthy people can create, invent, produce, and do so quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, it seems as though the powers that be are dead set on keeping us sick and stupid, so that we keep buying and don’t question anything. Here is a product for your sickness that won’t cure it, just make it tolerable. Here is a product to distract you from the unhappiness you feel because you have no sense of purpose. We are dumbing ourselves down as a whole, and it’s really only a matter of time before we have little to no pull left in the world. The only thing we’ll have is out weapons of mass destruction.
Re Tolkien, it’s been long enough since I read the books that I am not competent to comment on some of the things discussed. I do agree very much that sometimes people forget that fiction written many years ago by people who’s experiences were different than what is the norm today, in times when accepted attitudes and practices were different, may not be in line with 2012 standards. Not because the writers were bad people, but because there were things we notice today that were not on their radar, like the comment earlier about Tolkien not knowing how women talk to each other. It may be part of people not realizing that the world has not always been the way it is today. I am not saying sexism or racism were ever right, just that sometimes it’s necessary to remember that Oxford in 1935 was not Los Angeles in 2012.
This is a bit OT, but I’ve also seen people use well known books, movies, et c., as bad examples of patriarchy, glorifying war, and so on, when the work in question is not a strong example of that. One I remember is saying the Star Wars movies advocated militarism and war. There are other works, like Starship Troopers, that are far more pro-war, but are less used as bad examples because they’re not as well known.
@Anna:
“Some poor working-class men get angry at being told they’re privileged by well-off and articulate middle-class feminists and I can kind of see their point TBH. They’re just focusing on gender when it’s their economic and social background that’s really holding them back.”
Yeah, but gender doesn’t disappear. Poor working-class women will have to deal with an extra level of kyriarchal bullshit in comparison with poor working-class men. I thought that was the whole point of intersecting privilege.
Yeah, the myth of “meritocracy” is quite insidious. If I hear one more smug asshole say, “Half of Americans don’t even pay an income tax!” I swear I’m going to scream. Yes, a large portion of Americans are so dirt poor they don’t even make enough income to be taxed, but that’s not an illustration of how fucked up the income inequality is in this country. No, it’s an illustration of laziness, clearly.
I also often dare people to go work in a field for a day for twenty bucks and tell me again that poor people are lazy.
Yeah, I really like the people who are like, “Oh, just pick up a second job if you can’t make enough money with one.” This idea that it’s totally ok that people have to work 60-80 or even more hours per week just to make ends meet. They basically live to work shitty job after shitty job and have no time for any sort of quality of life. They think it is justifiable that these companies could pay a living wage but choose to take home sums of money which they will just hoard and not actually use.
Just, so many ridiculous mentalities that the average person holds, I just can’t.
QFT.
Anna:
Indeed – and it’s not that hard to move upwards if you genuinely want to. My wife proudly refers to herself as “council house scum”, but she didn’t let that stop her when it came to either educational or professional achievement.
In fact, she relishes the fact that she’s so obviously as clever as (and in many cases markedly cleverer than) the more straightforwardly privileged people that she mixes with now, and this is where her roots and accent are a positive virtue. The latter alone sends off all kinds of signals to pretty much anyone British, so she doesn’t even need to spell any of this out.
Tolkien possible derail: let me know if I’m falling too much into lectureproflecture mode, and I’ll shut up.
I first read LOTR when I was 10, in 1965: there weren’t a lot of works by women available then, let alone feminist works.
Compared to the stuff published at the times, it’s possible to argue, as Edith Crowe does (let me know if you want her article) that Tolkien’s work shares some values with feminism (not that he’s a feminist).
And at that time, girls weren’t supposed to like boy stuff like sf or fantasy I’m currently working on a project on audience reception and Tolkien–here’s my first results from pilot survey, just to get reasons why women might like Tolkien (despite issues many have raised here):
http://women-and-tolkien.dreamwidth.org/564.html
From age ten on, I have totally queered Eowyn as well (and have a paper on that, not yet in print, so let’s not forget the possibility of resistant readings).
In terms of some of the other issues:
People who don’t realize the depth of Tolkien’s knowledge of the early medieval Germanic cultures (Norse, German, Anglo Saxon), don’t realize the way that knowledge affected his world–which is not to say there aren’t racist elements in the work–BUT as the SILMARILLION makes clear, the ‘good’ guys (white elves) can go pretty damn bad (and Numenoreans, the ‘best’ men can turn to worshipping Morgoth and then Sauron as well–the Hand of Sauron in LOTR is rumored to be a black Numenorean, i.e. evil).
So while a reader responding to racism in the work is perfectly valid response; it’s also perfectly valid to read more and make other arguments. Somebody’s cited Tolkien’s letter above re the question asked by german published (remember he sent two to his publisher; they apparently sent the one that just answered the question and kept the other one). Let me throw in as well that when Oxford admitted women students after WWI, the dons (professors) did not have to work with them. Tolkien chose to do so; he worked with a number of women students who have written movingly about their professional relationship with them, and their scholarship. It’s possible to argue that while he saw men and women as essentially different, he did not see women as essentially inferior (all the major women are in the SILM). So, to say he was/was not sexist/racist, or more useful in some ways, his text is/is not sexist/racist doesn’t get discussion too far–though, again, I won’t challenge anybody response to a text (as long as it’s understood as their response and not some objective value judgement–i.e. I don’t like X, therefore it’s bad).
Also: while he’s seen as massively popular today (and yes, originated the whole publishing category of genre fantasy), at the time his work was controversial to many (including all the Oxford dudes–and the university still doesn’t really admit his fiction was of any value). The high modernists (Joyce, Pound, Eliot) etc. were big at the time Tolkien was publishing–and academic valuation still elevates them way above him–means that his work is still what I would call marginalized (my specialization is marginalized literatures).
Additionally: Catholics did not have equal rights in Britain –were definitely as a minority–and he was not from a wealthy family. His father died when he was five or six; his mother died when he was 12 (and since her family had cut her off when she converted to Catholicism, he saw her as a martyr); the guardian who raised him and his brother was a priest, and Tolkien not only was in the army, but was in all-male educational environments his whole life–until Oxford began admitting women students and even then there weren’t that many women faculty (see Dorothy Sayers GAUDY NIGHT to read about it).
Toklien was no saint (he disliked Sayers’ work). He was not feminist (though a lot depends on how you define ‘feminist.’).
I am also uneasy with the Dwarves=Jews, given that the Dwarves are taken more or less lock stock and barrel (all the names in the Hobbit) from Old Norse fragments that have existed. They have their own creation myth in SILM.
Now, if you say that in the cultural construct of the fictional work, they held a social position that was analagous to Jews in the middle Ages in Europe, that might be a supportable statement.
But if you say Dwarves=Jews in some allegorical sense (my partner and I team teach Tolkien, we have a whole lecture on why LOTR and his other works are NOT allegories–basically, there is no simple one-one system that works throughout), then I’d say that ignores a whole lot of contradictory evidence. Ditto for “Dwarves are based on Jews” in some sense of character building. So I’d have to know more about what was said (and even if it’s in one of his letters–first off, the letters are edited–we don’t have all of every letter he ever kept copies of; second, if you read the whole collection which I have, several times, he contradicts himself a lot over time; he also makes jokes, and he’s not above saying intentionally misleading things because he had a ‘thing’ about academics analyzing his works).
So, um, complicated and fascinating to think about. But really, if you’re interested in women and Tolkien, read the survey responses–they’re incredibly rich and fascinating.
Ostara:
I read Lewis as a kid and loved them until the end of The Last Battle and got really pissed, as ten year old, about the way Aslan treated Susan. I threw the book into my father’s lap and told him that he could keep his allegory and if God was like that he could keep his Christianity as well! To his credit he re-read it and agreed with me and we sat down and had a discussion about theology, which I thought at the time was pretty cool of him, because I was very rude indeed! He also apologized for not reading it closely enough to pick up the reallyreally offensive passage. Usually he and Mum read everything they gave us and made a point of sitting down and talking about them with us. It wasn’t so much a question of vetting our reading (the house was full of books and nothing was out of bounds) they wanted to know what we thought about them and how we interpreted them.
I read Neil Gaiman’s, “TheTrouble With Susan” a couple of years ago and it seemed I was not the only one annoyed with Lewis over that passage.
I was gonna read your blog post, dude, but you used the P-word in the first paragraph so I skipped down here to comment without reading. Quit oppressing me.
To the actual post: I followed the whole discussion in Scalzi’s blog (I have it on my DW feed), with great bemusement and not having energy/desire to engage–I almost sent the link to David because of the presence of a few MRA dudes in the thread, blathering on about the constant “women can have sex whenever they want, and I can’t, therefore as a SWM I am oppressed.” And yeah, my favorite part in Scalzi’s follow up is #6.
In terms of the analogy not being exact–of course, no analogy can be. (I am not a fan of argument by analogy, but I thought Scalzi’s was a very good 101). And as a teacher type, if anybody takes time to think through the analogy and try to modify it, I’d say that’s one of the more useful results of the process. It’s not about whether his analogy is right/perfect, but how useful it is for thinking through things that people might not have thought about before.
And his snark in the follow up is priceless (I tried to read his fiction, but bounced off hard–however, I adore his blog, and have his book on YOUR HATE MAIL WILL BE GRADED).
Okay, Gaudy Night is about the harassment, intimidation and attempted murder of women students and faculty in the classical English university. I think perhaps there is at least one murder, as well, but I can’t remember.
It’s also about Lord Peter Wimsey pestering Harriet Vane to marry him. Endlessly.
One can argue that it’s a game between them, that Harriet is only teasing Lord Peter, etc. etc. but I don’t want to get into that.
What I want to do is warn people who don’t know the Wimsey books: Lord Peter spends three or four novels proposing to Harriet at least a couple of times a novel, and she keeps saying no. On the surface, it can read very much like harassment, and so I feel obliged to speak up and say TRIGGER WARNING while also saying it’s more complicated than that.
@Nanasha: Have you read Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy novels? She’s got the Chalion series, which is a loosely-related trilogy; and she’s got the Sharing Knife series, which is a more tightly-knit quadrology.
The eurocentric focus of a lot of genre fantasy could, I guess, be laid at Tolkien’s doorstep (though publishers are also responsible)–but there are a growing number of writers who reject that. So spreading the news about three whose work I enjoy:
One of the best I know of is Saladin Ahmed.
The ruler/king is elite.The powerful institutions are bankrupt.
And it’s up to Abdoulla and Raseed (and Zamia, a shapeshifter whose family/tribe were murdered) to stop the deaths.
Instead of being centered in European mythology/geography, Ahmed’s novel is firmly located in an Arabic world.
There’s also N.K. Jemison’s fantasies. Pretty much all I can do is squee because I love her work so much.
In the sf genre, Tobias Buckell transforms hard core space opera by centering Afro-Caribbean culture (and a lot more non-European cultures in a far future). (I haven’t gotten his latest yet, but am tracking down and enjoying the Ragamuffin series).
It was really ages since I read the Narnia books. All I remember was that Susan was shut out because she didn’t believe in Narnia any longer.
On the topic of Neil Gaiman, I didn’t think about this when I first read the Sandman books, but on re-reading them a short while ago, I became pretty annoyed with the way he portrays gender.
– It’s the role of men to be brooding and mysterious.
– It’s the role of women to be down-to-Earth and keep the men from brooding too much (even DELIRIUM gets assigned this role!). The only exception really is Barbie.
– It happens like three times throughout the series that somebody gets pregnant completely by accident (in one case despite using condoms!), and then decides to keep the baby after all. It never happens that a woman gets pregnant by accident and have an abortion, or have a baby after actively trying to concieve, or simply have an active sex life without getting pregnant.
– Dream puts a girl in HELL for THOUSANDS OF YEARS just because he’s pissed that she rejected him. But we’re not supposed to blame him for this since he’s a cool goth guy. And besides, it was probably her fault that she spend all that time in Hell anyway, perhaps she could have gotten out of there if she had really tried.
– One ought to behave decently towards trans women, despite the fact that they’re not real women after all (in the eyes of the gods, a trans woman will forever be a man).
Re: Narnia: I loved the books until I hit Tolkien at ten, and learned what allegory was, and realized DUH! Then I got mad.
My memory is that Peter and the others tell the Narnians that Susan is grown up, no longer believes in Narnia, and likes nylons and lipstick and by implication, I guess, boys, so not allowed into Heaven.
Lewis had some srs issues with women (way beyond Tolkien’s), and, apparently (according to Norman Cantor’s book on the medievalists of Lewis and Tolkien’s generation, a longstanding BDSM sort of thing going on with his housekeeper–and thought Tolkien needed a good spanking–all this is out of context, but srs, some issues). Norman Cantor. The book I’m referring to is INVENTING THE MIDDLE AGES which is really cool (basically, one point he makes is that Tolkien and Lewis’ fictional works had a widespread influence on how people today ‘view’ the Middle Ages, much more than their scholarly work–or the scholarship of medival historians during their time).
I can still like some parts of Narnia (I’m a sucker for talking animals), if I try to ignore the ALLEGORY stuff, and some of the later ones. VOYAGE OF THE DAWN TREADER is probably my favorite, as well WARDROBE.
But the series seems so thin compared to Tolkien’s work. (Any Dr. Doolittle fans here–or Oz? Because, I am all about the talking animals. Ditto Andre Norton’s books with telepathic bonds between human adolescents and sentient cat like aliens!)
@Falconer: Seconding the love for Bujold (sf and fantasy), though I’m curious–since you made a point of warning about the harassment in Sayers (which Wimsey himself realizes was completely wrong later in the arc), and don’t warn about the attempted and implied rapes in Chalion and Sharing Knife (and in the HALLOWED HUNT which is sort of set in the Chalion storyverse, what’s the difference?
And even when they are born in a war zone, they are privileged. When Srebrenica happened, the world went wild. Why? Because white (probably straight & cis) men were killed, but nobody cared about the black men and women in Rwanda and nobody cares about them now in Darfur. I have to admit that I was in denial, too, and feel guilty for it, I was an activist for equal pay back then in the 90s.
The thing about light=good and dark=evil is that, while people are quick to point out the racist connotations, they always seem to forget the intraracial classist connotations. This shit’s been embedded in our values a lot longer than people realise or acknowledge.
From a European perspective, I think the biggest shock about Srebrenica was that it happened in Europe at a time when such things were supposed to be decades behind us. Whereas with Rwanda and Darfur there was a general assumption (whether conscious or otherwise) that it’s the kind of thing that just happens in Africa and there’s nothing we can do about it.
@Anna
“…maybe there have to be certain social safeguards – universal health and education and a safety net – for true social mobility to be possible.”
Supposedly Canada has all these things (I say supposedly because while we don’t have to pay for health care, access is not always possible; while we do have access to education, it is prohibitively expensive for some people; and while we do have a “safety net” it is not actually possible to survive on what income assistance (welfare) pays you) and yet the lack of social mobility is the same if not worse than in the US. I guess that I’m saying is that the social mobility problem is a lot more complex…
@Argenti Aertheri
re: USA vs America
I understand the point you are making about patriotism, but the US is only one of the Americas. I lack the skill to this properly, but as a Canadian it is really annoying how the US as “America” is seen as the only America while the rest of us are made invisible. An example of this is that when traveling it is always assumed that I am an American from the US because Canada is all but invisible.
Re Fantasy
As a child I read a lot of SF and Fantasy, but as an adult I find that I’ve moved away from fantasy and I think a lot of it is because of what Nanasha is saying about how a lot of it is the same old tropes, medieval Europe, war, and women not really having a place. Not all fantasy is like that, and I did enjoy Tolkien as a child. As a women it is sometimes hard to find Speculative fiction that I can identify with because so much of it is written with the assumption that it is for men, As a child reading a lot of speculative fiction I had no idea it was supposedly a male genre until around my late teens when people were surprised that I liked it. (I’ve read more golden age SF than any guys that I know…). It is interesting how as women we are supposed to be able to identify with the protagonist when it is a SWM, but it would be considered socially unacceptable for a man to identify with a female protagonist, because SWM is the default.
>She’s got the Chalion series, which is a loosely-related trilogy;
My feeling was that the third book could just as well be set in a competely different universe. I did not like it a single bit. But The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls are amongst my favourite fantasy books. Other books I’ve enjoyed greatly were Clouds End and The Chronicles of Sirkara.
Argenti: Not to be flip, but to be in a war, in the combat zone, is to survive by pure chance. In a line unit in something like the Penninsular War (Wellington in Spain and Portugal), or WW1, or WW2, or Korea, or… the sense of fatalism: of being the walking dead, was really high. It was a defense mechanism of the first order.
Tolkien’s luck was that in the most stark of the actions of chance his unit was in, he was spared having to roll the dice.
One of the things I took away from the books (I couldn’t abide the films) wasn’t that the bad guys were dark, but they were twisted. The spark of the humane had left them. Yes, the Nazgul were creatures of the night, and so the blended into it, but it wasn’t that they were dark of skin, rather they were dark of soul.
“And I think there is something to it because of how everyone liked to make fun of the hobbits for being gay (honestly gay hobbits just makes it better imo).” — yes! Though I sometimes get a “huh whut?” when I say Frodo and Samwise are basically lovers until the ending.
I don’t think I see this. Not lovers in the sense we would think of it now. For the same reasons that Tolkien didn’t have a strong sense of what women were like, we don’t have quite the same sense of the homosocial bonding of the period (and there was also a lot of situational bonding too… again, The War was a powerful creator of bonds which were strong, durable, intimate and affectionate. I can see Frodo and Sam having that. It’s interesting that I see less of people saying they see that in Merry and Pippin). Late Edwardian mores were different.
The Hobbits are “Good Olde England” the land of Church Ales and Sturdy Yeoman and Peasant Farmers before Enclosure. It’s Arcadia, and while it was never real, in the flesh, it still informs a lot of the English sense of the past.
Magpie: He couldn’t imagine how women would interact with each other? But he could imagine how hobbits would interact with elves. Much easier than women, apparently ?!?!
Yes. Women were real. He was ignorant of them. Elves, Hobbits, etc, were false. He couldn’t get them wrong.
Argenti: Magpie — so far the only maybe-classism I’ve seen is the description of the hobbits as “simple people” — but given they’re the heroes,
There is a lot of class in the relationship between Frodo and Sam. Between Gandalf and everyone, the Elves and the Hobbits, the Elves and the Rohannim, the Dwarves and….
It’s all a huge pile of class; some of which we lose because we see them as the treatement of different groups of people, as opposed to ways of showing who fits where (it was some of both, and there was probably some aspects of the ways in which different parts of the Empire were seen to have different qualities).
“the hobbits as “simple people” — but given they’re the heroes, I’m not sure what to make of that” —
“The Sturdy Englishman”, plain spoken, bluff and honest,” and so the paragon of all the world.
Much as I love the Sandman comics, Dream is actually one of my least favorite characters. This is just my interpretation, but I think we are supposed to blame him.
I mean, he’s basically portrayed as a rigid, uptight, pompous asshole. To my mind he borders on being the villain of the story.
… I forgot about them? Sorry! I’ve only read the Bujold books once each, and I’ve read the Wimsey books within the past year.
@Falconer: That makes sense!
I reread both authors fairly constantly, though it’s been a while since I read Sayer (I found her work in 8th grade and read constantly for many years)! Bujold’s work–most everything, all the time, loving it like crazy.
Sorry if I came across as hostile–but the stark difference astounded me.
No worries, Ithiliana.
I just dashed off a quick recommendation before I headed out to rehearsal, and didn’t remember all the details.
Chalion’s a heavy read and it takes me a while to get through one. The Sharing Knife reads a lot more like a Vorkosigan novel to me — light and fast, with hidden depths. I re-read Miles every year or two, but oh boy is there a problematic scene in Mirror Dance. That I remember.
I guess the Wimsey stood out to me because the creeper was the hero, and the problems with that stuck in my mind.
Someone, I think Magpie, asked about the Discworld dwarfs — if Tolkien meant his dwarves to share some background elements with Jewish folk, Pratchett kind of stumbled into a similar situation without realizing it. As in, Jewish fans of his started remarking at cons how admirably Jewish his dwarfs seemed to be: thrifty, hard working, living away from their homelands, sending money home, etc., which was something of a surprise for Pratchett.
Gotta be off in a minute — I’ve got a concert to perform this afternoon. Wish me luck!
Regarding The Sandman, I also thought the readers were meant to see Dream as a stubborn asshole. Also, to some extent, I’m not sure if he and his family can really be judged by human standards, because they seem to be operating under a different morality (that I’m still trying to work out). Though with that said, Dream still pisses me off.
Speaking of fantasy, has anyone else read The Circle of Magic series? I really enjoyed the way those books mixed magic in with every day activities, and the number of female characters.
guys, varpole weighed in and its predictably hilarious. apparently privilege exists, and yes, people act like spoiled babies when you point out their privilege, but what’s really illegitimate is not objecting to people reacting poorly to having their privilege called out.
http://antimanboobz.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/john-scalzi-challenges-ebert-for-the-douchebag-awards/
If a woman woke up one day as a “cis” straight white male she would be horrified by her experience. It’s not a pleasant experience. Straight white females are more privileged than men.
Hey guys, NWO dropped some idiocy upthread. Turns out we can add “bitter that he cannot carry life” to the list of “Reasons NWO is a pathetic misogynistic asshat.”
@nwoslave- Er, no. I work full time during the day. I spend the evenings keeping my daughter out of my husband’s hair so he can sleep and be as healthy as he can. I’ve also been taking time off of work and driving him to job faires, double checking his resumes and doing whatever I can to make sure he gets all the support he needs to help him get out of his current job and into one that is better for his mental health.
You see, I actually LOVE my husband and think that he’s awesome. And just because heterosexual white males tend to have less problems in life, it’s not that they have NO problems in life- and there are levels of status and privilege that my husband does not have access to as well- my husband is a large guy- overweight people are heavily stigmatized in our society. His job is retail-based/low class, which is hardly ever respected either. And then you have the fact that he is a very giving/caring person, which a lot of people attempt to abuse (not on my watch as much as I can manage it, but his job abuses the hell out of him by forcing him to come in when he feels like shit).
So stop talking out of your ass. It just makes everything you say sound like shit.
i feel like ‘carrying a child for nine months is the same as taking a shit’ is already in the book of larnin’, but i can’t remember
i dunno man, being swcm has been pretty fucking awesome in my experience. but then again, i can pay full price for a drink without bleating about how i’ve walked into cafe buchenwald, so ymmv.