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.
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.