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.
Men are usually considered the danger, whereas women are often the spoils.
Just the other day I heard about the coordinated nature of the conflict across Serbia. Serbian nationalist councils were formed widely, at the town level. Apparently when they finally acted against their Croat neighbors, among those who weren’t simply expelled, the men were killed and the women were kept as sex slaves and/or killed.
(This is a topic I am not well read on, and this information is gleaned from a relatively brief segment on NPR (spoken by someone much more knowledgeable than myself, but still) so please forgive/correct my vagueness/factual errors or oversights.)
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting you, but that seems to ignore outliers completely. I mean, the personal success of Oprah and Obama doesn’t mean Usonian society is no longer racist, does it?
I fail to see how coming here and displaying your utter ignorance of… just about anything is fighting discrimination.
Heck, Obama gets constant racism directed at him, even though he’s wealthy, educated and the effin’ President of the USA: the witchdoctor thing, the birthers, the “he’s a muslim terrorist” thing. I really don’t know that much about Oprah, but I’d be surprised if she hasn’t been subjected to racism.
Discrimination against people who’re proud of their ignorance – one of the great issues of our time. Why must we all persecute this poor man for being ignorant and proud of it?
The good thing about the development in Rwanda is that women are now given a chance, which they don’t have even in developed countries, with a low sex ratio, 0.9 even in the early 2000s, because of the effects of the genocide. Rwanda is also unique for it’s female majority in the parliament.
He’s being facetious.
Makes sense. I’ve been up all night and probably am not attuned to anything subtle.
extraterrestrial biological entity princess: . 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.
I don’t think ST is pro war. I’m pretty sure, actually, from talking to Heinlein that it’s not; or at least that one can’t use it to say he is.
I don’t even think, at root, it’s pro-military. It’s a gedankenexperiment about obligations being needed to get the franchise. One of the things the book makes plain is that it’s not military service which gets the franchise. The protagonist, in fact, does everything he can to avoid ending up in the military aspects of “Federal Service”.
That he adopts the mores of the MI has to be taken into account when we see the ways in which “the military” is praised in the book. The narrator is moderately reliable, but not completely so.
It only just occurred to me now that there are at least 2 Discworld books that are primarily about gender issues: Equal Rites and Monstrous Regiment. And that’s in addition to the tons of fantastic female characters throughout the books. It’s part of a larger reason I like the Discworld books; it’s one of the only fantasy worlds I’ve read in which any progress takes place. (That I actually will place some of the blame for on Tolkien’s influence; Middle Earth spends thousands of years at the social and technological level of Medieval Europe, with the only real changes being political divisions.)
On the other hand, I’ve been reading around a bit randomly, and just got around to reading Small Gods. Except for a goddess or two, I don’t think that book had a single female character at all.
I kind of did a double-take at this, because it didn’t sound right, so I checked to be sure. The Hobbit was published in 1937, and Fellowship didn’t come out until 1954, with the rest of the trilogy coming out the next year.
@PsychoDan: he Hobbit was published in 1937, and Fellowship didn’t come out until 1954, with the rest of the trilogy coming out the next year.
But the underarching mythology (which JRRT never published himself, but which has been published in multiple volumes edited by his son, THE SILMARILLION, BOOK OF LOST TALES, etc.) was being created from circa 1918-19 up until the day he died (he was rewriting Galadriel’s story/ies).
But it’s true he wrote LOTR only in response to demands for more hobbits, and it took him decades (he sent the publishers the versions he had of the SILM and was told nobody would want to read them)–and he has to retcon THE HOBBIT (original edition, Gollum not as scary, Ring not the one Ring, etc.) to make it fit the later work (the “version” of the tale Bilbo is said to have told the Dwarves is a summary of the original first edition chapter).
But it’s accurate to say the SILM which takes place in the first three ages or so of Middle-earth was published well after HOBBIT and LOTR.
However, originally the HOBBIT was not meant to be a part of the SILM mythology (for the best sources on this, I can recommend the ones I’m teaching with this year: Doug Anderson’s THE AnNOTATED HOBBIT and John Rateliff’s two volume HISTORY OF THE HOBBIT, a manuscript study).
Hmm, I knew that he had rewritten some of the Hobbit to make it fit better with LotR, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t originally part of the mythology at all. It makes sense, though, that he’d use the request for a sequel to bring it into the mythology rather than write a book he wasn’t particularly interested in writing.
Sugar: I also actually present this rare, interesting thing known as an “argument”.
Not here you didn’t. You’ve made assertions; but there is no support, no actual defense of the positions you took.
In places you contradict yourself (the entire rant was you blaming, “the system” the “stupid liberals” say exists.
Argenti: Regarding Sam’s job as Baggins gardener, do you remember the books well enough to recall if that was paid work or something he’d volunteered for?
It’s not said, but the impression is that it’s an ongoing relationship, and that Frodo is in the role of “lord”.
Could NWO handle it? No. His life, if we take his reports as that of a moderately reliable narrator isn’t wine and roses, but’s not the life of someone who is handicapped in any significant way.
That he whines about how hard he has it, possessed of a job which values him enough (or is rare enough) that he is flown from place to place that it be done… yeah, he’s clueless as all fuck.
FTR, even if the ending makes perfect sense, it’s still going to irk me, everyone but Frodo gets a happy ever after and he fucking earned his!
Here is where I get to be bitter: We all earned it. Not all of us get it. That aspect of it is one of the places Tolkien’s status as veteran really shows. It seems perfectly understandable to me.
Sugarbloop: Also, is it too much too ask for you to remain civilized?
Why? You started with an insult in your first comment, raised to Sharculese and Rutee with the specious claims that you don’t make grammatical errors when calling people dumb, and insulted our intelligence with the pretense that you had either arguments, or legitimate facts.
You’ve not earned more polite treatment than you’ve gotten.
re Sam: I’m not sure hired help is the right thing, it’s closer; or seems to me, to the family servitor. It’s a more familiar relationship, and has more class-related aspects. It’s a fundamentally non-american model.
Yeah, he did inherit his position from his father.
Gaaaaahh you all were discussing LOTR without me! Why did I have to have an actual life yesterday!
Most of the points I wanted to answer have already been covered, but I wanted to dig into this one a little more:
Tolkien is actually really interesting (to me, at least) on the subject of class. Just sticking to the four main hobbits, we essentially have four different social classes right there – Pippin is the closest thing to royalty hobbits have, Merry is nobility, Frodo is upper-class, and Sam is decidedly working class.(I’m fudging a little, but those are decent real-world approximations.)
All four of them are heroes, but if you had to pick just one who is consistently the most brave, steadfast, and generally displays nobility of character, it’s pretty obviously Sam. (And, interestingly, both Pippin and Merry’s heroism explicitly takes the form of serving under another, and is not through anything to do with their status at home.) And all of them, regardless of their social class within hobbit society are presented as “just plain folks” in the world at large – vastly less attention is spent on the fact that Pippin is in line to be the next Thane of the Shire than on, say, the fact that he really likes smoking some pipeweed.
Most of the characters in the book aside from Sam are some form of nobility, of course – but Tolkien was explicitly trying to create not just a novel but a mythology, and mythologies tend to center around princes and kings and gods, and not so much gardeners and ordinary everyday folks. To my mind, the fact that his idea of a mythological world was one in which he fairly unambiguously glorifies the “just plain folks” as being every bit as great and heroic in their way as kings and superhuman beings is pretty notable and subversive.
(Oh, and because people were trying to remember how the hobbits are related, and I’m enough of a dork to know the answers offhand – Pippin and Merry are cousins. Merry is Frodo’s cousin once removed. (I think I’m getting the terminology right. Frodo’s mom was Merry’s grandfather’s sister, anyway, whatever you call that.) Pippin is Frodo’s cousin twice removed (I think) – Frodo’s grandmother is Pippin’s great-grandfather’s sister.)
(Yes, I’m a huge nerd. In my defense, I pretty much had to become a giant LOTR fan, seeing as my actual name is in Elvish. No, seriously. And my brother is named after a hobbit. I come from a weird family. :-p )
“That he whines about how hard he has it, possessed of a job which values him enough (or is rare enough) that he is flown from place to place that it be done… yeah, he’s clueless as all fuck.” — yeah, that’s pretty fucking clueless (I have my interview 5/30 btw, there’s a combination of w00t for that and *terror!*)
“Here is where I get to be bitter: We all earned it. Not all of us get it. That aspect of it is one of the places Tolkien’s status as veteran really shows. It seems perfectly understandable to me.” — someone pointed out that Sam does join him eventually, which was the closest to a happy ending I figured possible…I wasn’t just irked he doesn’t get some perfect shiny life, I too realize that’s just not always possible, but how he lost nearly all the friends who’d literally kept him alive really irked me — you’re right about that being Tolkien’s status as a veteran showing though, highly doubtful he didn’t see friends die (this is why I love doctor who, in his world many things are solved with peaceful methods, too bad our world can’t work that way…)
“It’s a fundamentally non-american model.” — which is probably why I’m not really getting it >.<
and re: super bloop, I am probably going to be fuming for days over that idiotic comment saying that the poor sometimes don't eat for days and that’s more dangerous than being killed — that hit my nerves ala remind me never to present as not-bio-gender around him, and not to let anyone I care about do so either
His cluelessness rivaled NWO’s…except NWO I think is actually clueless, whereas super bloop was pulling too much from a gaslighting 101 handbook for me to give him the benefit of the doubt. (NWO is also consistently clueless, which would be harder to fake)
“‘Also, is it too much too ask for you to remain civilized?’
Why?”
Because gaslighting 101 was his game — he knew damned well he didn’t earn respect, but since we were swearing and he wasn’t, we must be “the bad guys”
“All four of them are heroes, but if you had to pick just one who is consistently the most brave, steadfast, and generally displays nobility of character, it’s pretty obviously Sam.”
And while the other humans do treat the Rohan people as lower class and lesser, it’s the Riders of Rohan who are always there to answer the call — Gondor has a small fit about not requesting their aid, they were debating why they should answer the call, but when that call came? Hello Riders of Rohan, you’re just in time to turn the battle. Sam is so the hero of that story, even Frodo says so when Sam jokes about telling future hobbits about Frodo and the ring — Frodo says something, pretending to be the kids, about tell me the one about Sam, he was so brave; “I was being serious” “so was I” — their relationship is more complex than just hired help.
Polliwog do you know the mythology after the end of the trilogy? Are the humans less classist under Aragorn? He’s written as a king by both blood and actual leadership/loyalty/etc, even as Strider the ranger he seems more fair than any of the kings. And iirc, all the kings die in the final battle, he’s literally the only blood heir to any of the thrones.
Thing is, there’s not much to tell us what Frodo’s life in Valinor was like. He did basically get permission to retire to the land of the gods* with his beloved uncle Bilbo and his good friend Gandalf.
*Okay, not exactly gods, but you get my drift.
Yeah, and I assume if all the elves went that includes Legolas, it really could be the best possible life. I’m not saying I was irked in some highly rational way or anything, just annoyed he had to leave Sam behind when they seemed somewhere between good friends and lovers (he tries to leave Sam behind at the end of the fellowship, and then dismisses him just before the giant spider, and Sam will not leave — whatever duty bound them initially wore into at least friendship)
Pecunium — you were right they aren’t anything like the modern use of “lover” — I was thinking more like a “Boston marriage” without the modern assumption that included sex — but it could be just the sense that the families would always be interacting in a master-hired help sense and them being actual friends as well.
My annoyance really is the not rational annoyance that them seem to have a sense of a shared future together and then Frodo leaves without Sam. That Sam joins him eventually does make me feel somewhat better about it. I’m also kind of annoyed that Legolas and Gimli probably never speak again, as they also definitely became friends by the end of the trilogy, but it can be assumed Legolas left with the elves. But Tolkien could’ve never foreseen an audience used to talking to people across the globe in real time, I can’t fault him for not inventing the internet a half century early!
Legolas didn’t leave for a long time. In fact, he and Gimli sailed to the Undying Lands together.
Yup. Tolkien didn’t write a whole lot about what happened after the events of LOTR, but it’s clear that the friction between Gondor and Rohan pretty much ends for a long time after the War of the Ring, and it’s definitely very strongly implied that Aragorn’s awesomeness as a king is very much based on his general awesomeness as a person and his respect and decency towards everyone.
Not quite – Eomer’s alive, and as Theoden’s nephew, he inherits the throne of Rohan. He goes on to marry a woman from Gondor, and Eomer and Aragorn are pretty much best buds (Aragorn has a line in the book about them being brothers) for all of their respective very long, very successful reigns. 🙂