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.
They literally cannot hear where he says “all other things being equal.”
The only explanation for that is that they think all other things can’t be equal, because SW(cis)Ms are smarter and better. A woman or a minority applicant for a job just can’t be as good or better and must have a shittier attitude as well.
“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.”
Isn’t the draft on r/mr’s list of ten men’s rights issues on their front page? If I recall, that’s the one with all those false rape allegations that totally happen every day don’t believe it and you’re misandrist. It’s interesting how far afield we straight white cis males have to go to find something that oppresses us.
I love your blog! Endlessly interesting and amusing.
even if there was still a draft, it’s not like that wouldn’t be affected by privilege. my dad had a super low draft number, but he got to defer by going to vet school. did having shit tons of privilege make that option more available to him? of course it fucking did.
I’m not sure where this trend of calling someone racist or sexist when that person is pointing out racism or sexism came from, but it needs to die. If I call the fire department to report a fire, I’m not an arsonist (yes, for the cheap stupid seats, I know that sometimes happens, but work with me here).
People who do this may as well yell, “NO U.”
@hellkell
It’s more like they still think that he who smelt it must have dealt it
The comments on the Kotaku reposting of that article are a perfect illustration of why I avoid male-dominated geekspaces like they were infested with ebola, sharks, and really bad tempered wasps. The level of outrage generated by a really rather gently worded post pointing out that privilege exists is ridiculous.
Kotaku is generally like that. One time there was an article about how a game designer had secretly labeled a character “Feminist Whore” in the program files and someone had found out. The Kotaku-ites were bending over backwards trying to justify that one rather than condemn it.
John gets it.
His post on what it means to be poor… pretty damned good.
There was one guy who stated that in his opinion that most privileged people in the world are hot Asian girls. These dumbasses really do think that ability to get laid is the single most important factor in determining who has most privilege. They think that sex appeal is the One Ring of privileges.
Idiots.
Because obviously if you were an enlightened post-racial color-blind prodigy you wouldn’t ever notice anything regarding race whatsoever. So people who call out racists are racist because
1. *gasp* they are calling attention to the fact that somebody is not white
2. they are causing “racial disharmony” by daring to mention that racial tensions already exist
Those are the most charitable interpretations of things you’ll hear people say, it’s from a fundamental misunderstanding about what racism and sexism etc. are. That being non-racist is really about politeness and not about stopping the harms an oppressive institutionalized system causes. “Racism” is these discrete acts that happen sometimes which are bad because they are disruptive and offensive, like swearing loudly in public or something; they aren’t a moral issue but an issue of etiquette. Talking about race is like talking about politics or religion or whatever. It’s ok to call out racists so long as you tell them they’re being mean or something, but if you mention race (i.e. that the person is being racist) you’ve broken the etiquette norm of Don’t Mention Race and now any problem that breaks out is not due to the original person’s racism but due to your causing discord by mentioning it. It’s sort of like how you’ll hear calls for “civility” in politics (which is not in itself the worst of goals, but) ignoring the fact that sometimes people in government have repulsive, reprehensible views that need to be strongly condemned and that the problem is their disturbing views and what they’ve done about them, not the way people are discussing the issue.
The less charitable view of what people are doing when they complain that people are being racist for pointing out racism is that they’re mad that the racism-pointer-outer is dismantling white privilege. Which is not incompatible with the first thing; despite individual intent, people who yell racism at calling out racism basically function in favor of white privilege anyway even if they think that colorblindness is legitimately the best way to avoid racism. It’s an attempt to shut down the conversation and refocus it on white people, i.e. how calling people racists affects white people and their role in society. You are now a reverse racist if you talk about racism because that implies that it’s white people’s fault or an individual white person’s fault and that they need to do something about it, which would require seeing white people as not totally A W E S O M E all of the time. Hence the ethnic studies bill in Arizona where studying Chicano history/rights movements etc. implies “inciting racial hatred” against white people.
So I guess it depends on whether the person who is yelling “NO U” means that you are being racist about PoC or being “reverse racist” when they call out “racism”, but as I said, both things functionally amount to tone-trolling in favor of the white-at-the-top status quo.
Of course that whole registering for the draft thing applies to all cis-male citizens as well so if the draft was actually going on it would disadvantage more than just SWMs. In fact since SWMs are more likely to be in college or have other circumstances that would get them an exemption from the draft they still have benefits over other cis-males in this respect.
Those straight white males are so sensitive. I think they’re just looking for something to get offended by. Jeez, talk about a victim complex. Why don’t they have a sense of humor?
These guys also seem to think if they lose their privilege that things will necessarily be worse for them. They fail to comprehend that one solution to privilege is to allow others to rise up, rather than simply bringing the straight cis white males down. Some people can’t feel as though they’ve won unless someone else has lost.
It’s weird that they think “your life is easier than a POC/woman/queer person’s would be in the same position” is some kind of mortal insult.
I think they’re hearing it as “your life is so super easy you’ve never suffered or worked at all,” which I could totally sympathize with if there weren’t hundreds of people constantly trying to explain that’s not what anyone said.
Leaving aside what kladle said, which are all good points, I think some of the folks who go “NO U!” are doing it because they think that on lefty blogs the first person to call racism, sexism, disappearing the victims of abuse, or what have you, wins.
Either that or they’re irritated because all of their good, strong, rational arguments* don’t make a dent in lefties’ you’re-a-racist-idiot,-shut-up fields. These guys come to sites like this, or over on pandagon, or to slacktivist, and they think they’re making great arguments when they go ARGLEBARGLE and then conclude, when we go dude, you’re being a dick, that we’re just being willfully obtuse.
Because it makes so much sense that men are working themselves into coronary disease while women marry them only to take half their assets or more in the divorce, and why can’t we see it?*
(Incidentally, some awful whim of mine made me click on the Archive link over to the left and scroll all the way down to the bottom and start reading forward from the first post, and by Vecna’s right hand the comments are like, three trolls versus Darksidecat and David and Christine. And the trolls’ arguments are just appropriated feminist arguments about oppression and equality and Dworkin this and Steinem that. Urg.)
*OH SO MUCH SARCASM
Yep. Given a lot of their defenses basically sum up to “yeah? Well you’re FAT” or “you’re wrong because you’re a big meanie poo poo head and it’s just cause you hate me” it’s unsurprising that they’ve still got the “you detected it, so you ejected it” grade school mentality when it comes to pointing out privilege.
LOL. I wonder if then by that comparison, feminists are the Nazgul.
SHIIIIIIRE! BAGGGINSSS!
Dworkin is clearly the Balrog. Sexist dudes keep calling her out from the depths (or, you know, death) purely so they can make a big dramatic last stand against her.
“LOL. I wonder if then by that comparison, feminists are the Nazgul.”
Impossible! They’re the idiots who needed a spell editor not to leave open the “no man can kill me” loophole (Eowyn: I am no man) — they’re more like our MRA trolls….
“Dworkin is clearly the Balrog.” — quite possibly
Anyone else notice that there’s a perfect correlation between skin tone and good/evil in those movies though? Dark = from the south = evil, 100% of the time >.<
Back on topic, do the complaining (straight white cis) men realize that life isn't a zero sum game?
Also, +1 internet to Noadi for this:
Though, it’s kind of moot, if the draft were reinstated MRAs and feminists would finally agree on exactly one thing — protesting the draft. Granted, the reasons would be different, but we could probably manage that whole “the enemy of my enemy is [a temporary ally]” (friend is way too much credit for people merely fighting for a common cause)
I agree with the analogy. White straight males would most definitely be the easiest setting.
Ah yes, of course. That makes much more sense.
Yeah. I love LOTR, but yeah, there really do seem to be racist undertones. Though IMHO not as bad as with C.S. Lewis.
If only straight white males would quit starting wars than they wouldn’t have to sign up for the draft. They can thank Dick Chaney and his kind the world over.
I think that his point is solid but does need to encompass class, transness, and ability… otoh, I can see why “straight white man” is stronger for rhetorical purposes than “straight white middle-class* cis abled man.” Still, he could have put in a paragraph mentioning ability and transness…
Look, I am Queen Gender Roles Suck For Everyone, but they suck extra-hard for women. That is not controversial.
*because no one in America believes they’re rich
Lewis is ahead of Tolkien, because he did write a non-white non-western protagonist (Aravis).
cue pompous, self-righteous and bloviating “rebuttal” from JtO in 3…2….