Paul Elam, head ranter at A Voice for Men, has a new video out called “You want privilege? You got it!” The thesis: if women really did have the so-called privileges that men have, they’d hate it and want men to take them all back. Because all of these so-called privileges are really giant burdens. Or, as Elam puts it, somewhat more melodramatically, these privileges have “begun to more resemble an anchor around your neck than the helm of a great ship that everyone tells you that you are captaining.”
Here’s the video.
Well, all right, that’s not really Paul Elam. But that little clip does capture pretty well the tone of his latest post, which is indeed about how male privilege is really a terrible burden.
I mean, this is his opener:
I swear by everything holy that the next time I hear some fembot caterwaul about “male privilege,” I am going to find something to break, turn it into shards, and drag the broken pieces across my chest just to distract me from the pain of their increasing stupidity. Just picture me like Martin Sheen, collapsed in a heap of bloody, tearful insanity on the floor of a cheap hotel in Saigon.
Heck, compared to that, Mr. McDuck’s reaction to the news about his “ice cream” was, if anything, rather restrained.
The rest of Elam’s post is, as is typical for him, a rather trite recitation of a number of standard Men’s Rights talking points about male “disposability” written in some of the most ridiculously overblown prose ever seen outside of an Ayn Rand novel.
Elam complains that he hasn’t seen much benefit from his privileges:
Mind you I still don’t know what that privilege is. One time when I was young and very poor I was late on my light bill. I showed the electric company my balls, but they cut my power off anyway. …
Yeah, as someone who’s also had his power cut off, I’m pretty sure they do that with everyone. I’m also pretty sure that no feminist has ever or will ever argue that male privilege means you won’t get your power cut off for nonpayment.
Here’s Elam addressing women as if they’ve traded place with men:
With your privilege comes the right to work on crab boats, drive trucks, work on electric lines, walk into burning buildings and sink into the bowels of the earth digging out coal and other things people find useful.
Apparently having greater occupational choices is scary and bad.
When a ship goes down, or any other life threatening disaster strikes, you have two choices. Be a real woman and die, or treat your life like it has value and have the world shit on you as a coward who refused to perish on cue. There is also the possibility of third option, either die from the disaster so that men can live, or have another woman blow a fucking hole in your face with a pistol because you tried to save yourself.
Yeah, I believe we may have addressed this earlier. Oh, but there’s more:
Like noticing the emperor has no clothes, it may hit you one day when you decide not to offer your seat to a man; when the stares at you from all around seem to come down people’s noses. …
You must learn not to say a word. Not to anyone else, not even to yourself. You must learn to see flames, coal dust, icy saltwater, death and sacrifice for the trappings of power that the world around you thinks them to be.
Says a dude typing out his manifestos on an expensive laptop he conned nagged his followers into buying for him.
And you must be willing to hang your head in shame over that power, even as the world chews you up, spits you out, and gets ready to take its turn with your daughter.
Elam’s rousing conclusion:
So, that is it, ladies. You want my privilege, it is yours. I will gladly hand it over to you this very minute. I am just waiting for you to meet the pre-requisites of disposibilty and an utter lack of self-value. I am waiting for you to woman up to the job, take off your fucking make up and be ready to bleed, blah blah blah look at me I’m mad!
I paraphrased a little at the end there. But, yes, the world champion at seeing male “disposability” everywhere did in fact misspell the word “disposability.” That was all him. And so, believe it or not, is the following:
I, like a Jew gone weary of being called a chosen one, am completely ready for anyone else, and in particular, you, to be chosen.
Personally, I have had about all the privilege I can stand.
Yep. He went there.
Also, I don’t know if you all knew this, but when women serve in the military these days it’s “like a day care camp for them.”
Also, not to pat myself on the back or anything, but my headline is much better than his. Maybe he should get me to write all the headlines on A Voice for Angry Duck Plutocrats Men.
Discuss.
Yeah, if you show up at someone else’s blog and they talk about something you don’t want to talk about, you can hardly accuse them of wasting your time.
Vindicare, we’re not sure you have half a brain at this point.
Actually Vindicar, I will respond. Hey, I’m waiting for my muffins to bake.
Your two points do not contradict each other in any way shape or form. ““If you really want to excel as a Privileged Person® you need to learn to value data, statistics, research studies and empirical evidence above all things, but especially above Lived Experience©.”. Data sets and statistics tell you about the general prevalance of variable x in a given population. When you are an oppressed group, people often choose not to see just how often x happens to you. Or what factors make x a likely outcome. So when women talk about “hey babies” there aren’t many studies showing how often this happens to us. The lived experience part? It refers to YOUR lived experience, the part where you say you’ve never done that and don’t know anyone who would. ” You won’t take us seriously unless we canshow in statistics a very high prevalance of hey babies happening happening damn near all the time and because you’ve never noticed it, obviously it doesn’t happen.
“I am a member of -privileged group- and it didn’t seem to me that I benefitted from that” this is a derail that centers the discussion back on you, the privileged group. When an oppressed group wants to talk about a situation, they are talking about THEIR lived experieces, something you’ve never been forced to encounter and has never crossed your mind, even for a moment. Privilege is a group impact and maintained by society at large. Yes, certain individuals may experience less than the full privilege in a particular circumstance periodically. Privilege does not gaurentee that bad things will never happen to you, but it does garentee that the odds are definately tipped in your favor.
Thank you pillowinhell, that’s a much better explanation of privilege than my attempt (and mmm, muffins!)
Is it sexist to suggest that pillowinhell’s muffins might be yummy?
Lol! As long as you like cornmeal muffins. Do you only think muffins made by women are yummy? No? Then you’re safe.
And the explanation of privilege was garned from lots of blogs about racism and a 101 blog on feminism that made it clear that no derailing would be tolerated.
But pillowinhell, I just want to put your muffins in my mouth. Especially if they’re hot from the oven.
Am I sexually harassing you?
About your sexy-sounding muffins?
I think I can smell them from here.
. . . Please let it be known that yes, asexuals are allowed to make pervy jokes. It’s one of the caveats on the membership card.
That reminds me, I should make banana muffins soon, I have some rapidly aging bananas.
Swankivy my muffins are always hot and awesome. Here, I’ll shake them in front of an open widow for you…
Nice typo, go ahead and expose yourself to that open widow.
That was a typo? Hey you started it!
I am an unrepentant instigator. But I didn’t go bringing widows into it!
Unless they have hot muffins. Then all bets are off.
/pads off to get her third cup of coffee for the day
Annd..on another thread slaveyboy gets asexuality for the fail!
*carefully polishes a rather dented halo*
Hey, I just wanted to make sure you got a good sniff of my hot delicious muffins!
*okay, you know next time I need this thing imma gonna have to pound it out on an anvil*
Cecilia: I’m pretty sure my childhood friend who’s in the process of becoming a green beret could cure him of this belief. As my father said: “She’s beautiful, smart, and she can kill you with her little finger.” That last bit doesn’t come from day care.
Pardon my doubts, but this statement is contrary to fact. It is against the law for women to be part of the Special Forces, as SF is a combat arms MOS, and so women are forbidden from even taking the training.
@indifferentsky
Okay, my ADHD makes it impossible for me to ignore the bolded bit of misinformation in an otherwise totally awesome post. In fact, being able to pay attention to video games but not, for example, to doing one’s homework, is a typical symptom of ADHD. Fortunately, in my own case, I was able to parlay that focus on computers into a career writing software for smartphones, but that’s only with the benefit of a lot of hard work compensating for my wandering attention span n all sorts of ways that are invisible to most people, and of course, thanks to Ritalin (or should I say “ridalin”) and other prescription meds.
If I hadn’t dragged myself to a psychiatrist to get on the drugs that helped me salvage my life and career, I would no doubt be seen as having personal failings rather than neurological problems, so I’m hyper-sensitive to people trying to erase ADHD by acting as gatekeepers for who “really” has it and who’s just “lazy”, even (especially) when they’re well meaning about it. It’s the sort of thing that one can’t just diagnose over the Internet, and it really irks me for people to use it as some kind of joke.
Actually that’s something I wrote. I apologize that my wording suggested I’m writing off ADHD as something you can’t have “really” if you can play video games. I know that many video games are in fact engaging in the interactive sort of way that provides the necessary stimulation for an ADHD or ADD person to retain attention. I didn’t mean for that to sound like a blanket statement, but rambling further in a parenthetical aside would have pulled me away from the main point. I’ll try to find a less specific way of referencing mis-diagnosed ADHD in the future . . . in this case, I meant that some kids who do not have ADHD (yep, mostly kids) are suggested to have it if they sometimes don’t pay attention when they’re supposed to, but can pay attention fine if they’re doing something they want to do. There is a trend toward medicalizing normal but inconvenient functioning, which ultimately actually hurts real ADHD folks because their issues are underestimated and their situations are mocked.
ADHD is absolutely over-diagnosed, partly because some parents have really high expectations of what their kids’ attention spans should be when they’re very young. I was exposed to this unfortunate issue as a student teacher in college, with children who were medicated for ADHD when they clearly didn’t need to be. I had one kid who had divorced parents and one of his parents would give him his meds and the other wouldn’t because his dad didn’t “believe in it.” (Very dangerous! But anyway.) On the days he came to school medicated, he would nearly fall asleep in his chair and zone out and no one seemed to care. On the days he came to school not-medicated, you could completely tell. But he was just a rambunctious kid; he could pay attention if you expected him to and put some effort into it.
But yes, it would absolutely be a travesty for anyone to make up hard and fast black-and-white rules for what constitutes having ADHD (especially since there is a huge spectrum of functionality and different ways to approach managing it). I hope that you understand what I was really trying to say, and that you accept my apology for the misleading language I chose. I understand that people who mock and dismiss ADHD say things that sound similar, and I don’t want to be taken for one of them.
Wait…women don’t do this? I’m pretty sure a close friend of mine told me about her grandmother who worked in a coal mine and had to have open heart surgery (one of the first, in fact) because of it.