A reader (thanks!) sent me a post by John Scalzi, the science fiction author of such books Old Man’s War and an upcoming book titled Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas. Scalizi’s post is entitled: “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”:
I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.
Scalzi gives some lame analogy about computers and being male in US society in which straight white men have it the easiest and minorities and women and all others are born into trouble:
So that’s “Straight White Male” for you in The Real World (and also, in the real world): The lowest difficulty setting there is. All things being equal, and even when they are not, if the computer — or life — assigns you the “Straight White Male” difficulty setting, then brother, you’ve caught a break.
I say “bullshit.” Straight white men are today’s whipping boy. Scalzi’s fawning commenters start out telling him how brilliant his little essay is while this Uncle Tim and some (but not all–some commenters fight back) of his sycophants eat it up.
In my upcoming book with Encounter Publishing entitled “Male Strike: Why Society’s War Against Men is Suicidal and What to Do About It,” I discuss these Uncle Tim types (those who put down other men) whose life is made easier by pandering to women and other men who are either Uncle Tims themselves or White Knights trying to save a damsel in distress. There is always a benefit to putting down straight white males. What’s yours, Scalzi?
My question to readers is, what is the best way to handle an Uncle Tim who puts down other men, laughs at their misfortune and even gets ahead politically with this behavior?
Update: The Red Pill Room has a good discussion of Scalzi’s lame post.
I’m told that Scalzi writes decent SF, but I am absolutely unwilling to send an iota of profit to someone as far to the left as he is. Your citations are more reinforcement.
It just demonstrates that being a writer doesn’t take any sense. Or maybe this guy hasn’t lived in the real world for the last few decades
In any event, I have read one of his books and it was good. It is also the last book of his I will read since he has it so easy and certainly doesn’t need my money.
Not so fast, my good sir! That’s why G-d gave us Andrew Carnegie. Grab more Scalzi @ your library; as the song goes, “You’ve already paid for this.” My system has Redshirts on order, and I’m #7 on the waiting list…
Nope, don’t buy it. The more successful these guys are the more influential they are, claiming to be experts do to their notoriety. I will not add to his success.
Exactly, Michael. Don’t buy it; read it for free (or for a tax of less than a nickel, technically) courtesy of your public library system! This is the way I starve Hollywood, too; haven’t paid for a tape or DVD rental in a dozen years and counting…
Nelson Muntz was indeed available for comment.
No. Never. Not one penny to someone who would trash me personally if given the chance.
If he said this kind of crap to me he would not like the reactions.
Point out that the largest segment of the homeless community is straight white men.
Except that it’s not. 49% are African American (over-represented 5x compared to 11% of general population). 35% are Caucasian (under-represented 0.46x compared to 75% of general population)[1]. Unless white privilege now extends to making up your own statistics?
[1] National Coalition for the Homeless ‘Who is homeless?’, Published by the National Coalition for the Homeless, July 2009
Anybody so fast and loose with the truth as Wikipedia is no friend of mine.
Try again.
I’d personally go with one of two situations, depending on overall context:
1) Politely disagree, keep things at a high level, give facts, talk about statistics and issues with generalizations, bring things into larger context, yield on the points on the other side that are correct to build your credibility, etc..
2) Call the guy out, say this is a lame way to get approval and ask if this is how he tried to get laid in college or if he married a radical feminist and is trying to avoid trouble.
Actually, I might even mix 1 and 2 up depending on if I were drinking.
I’m with you. I really enjoy Scalzi’s works but I read them realizing he’s a wing nut. Hey, to each his own and his self loathing doesn’t surprise me nor does it bother me. Whatever wires are disconnected in his brain bucket are giving me hours of literary entertainment. How that manifests outside of his fiction – I couldn’t care less.
Scalzi tends to be a leftist jerk on his blog from time to time, but I don’t have much interest in copying the left and boycotting his fiction, when his books don’t import his lefty nonsense. The left’s treatment of Orson Scott Card, who committed the awful sin of being a believing Mormon opposed to gay marriage (something never raised in his fiction), isn’t something we should emulate. Let Scalzi spout off to his fellow believers and ignore him.
Agreed. I used to post on his blog, but the level of antagonism got to be a drag. I sure do like his books that I have read, and frankly, I expect people in the entertainment industry to be politically naive and to over-value their non-entertainment skills. It goes with the territory.
Trey
No, Brian, you do not have to. But, some of us recognize our freedom to patronize those who we choose to patronize. You know, that freedom thing is tough sometimes.
I think Card’s real crime for the Left is he wrote a famous novel that details how much pedophiles despise gays. As for Scalzi, I’ve heard he’s a very good novelist. I just went to a Polish site and downloaded his work for free because I’m privileged like that.
I did so for this reason: I have a theory that people who are so perceptually blind as to write an article so incredibly moronic and politically correct that it literally boggles my imagination are not capable of making good science fiction that will boggle my imagination. I read that his most famous work is about reviving dead people and making them soldiers or something. Not exactly original but I’ll give it a go since it’s been donated by internet rebels like him who think all work should be free anyway.
One way to become popular as a writer is to take up every liberal cause there is. Since I am personally involved in smuggling cigarettes and child slaves from the Sudan into Egypt, I doubt I’ll ever be so popular. One can only hope Scalzi can revive his own dead brain in time for a supper of tunaless tuna salad.
Straight White Men do have an enormous advantage over the various “under privileged” groups. That advantage is that nobody “cares” about them. Straight White Men learn from an early age that they’ll succeed or fail based on their efforts. They won’t be rewarded for the color of their skin, the dangling of their genitals, or for lusting after women. No, they’ll have to work for everything in life and they’ll have to earn everything that comes their way. If they fail, they’ll dust themselves off and try again because they know that they weren’t societally predestined to fail. Straight While Men laugh at the “under privileged” who routinely take themselves out of the competition for jobs and for a better lot in life. The “under privileged” wait for somebody to hand them success while the Straight White Male grabs success by the throat.
ChrisS FTW!
Straight white men have another advantage, at least when it comes to employment: they aren’t a litigation risk. If you have two equally qualified candidates for a job, one a minority entitled to file complaints and bring lawsuits against you if they are dissatisfied, and one a white male who carries no such risk to your company, why would you hire the minority candidate?
If certain minorities and women are laboring under a disadvantage in the job market, it might be a disadvantage created by those claiming to “help” them.
“. . . why would you hire the minority candidate?”
Because they’re a litigation risk — they’ll sue you if you don’t hire them, or someone else will sue you if you don’t have the right ‘quota’ of federally-protected special interest minorities.
This is a golden rule when it comes to government jobs.
Literally one in a million Americans is a plaintiff in an EEOC discrimination case each year. If someone’s threatening to bring in the EEOC, they are almost certainly full of shit. If you’re worried about someone being an EEOC lawsuit risk, it’s far, far more likely that you just feel kind of uneasy around someone because of their race and are justifying it post-hoc. Which a more impolite person would call a genteel excuse for racism.
The odds of being killed by a lightning strike in any given year are comparable but I still don’t care for standing on a hill holding a tall metal pole during a thunderstorm.
Just because the EEOC takes only around 300 cases to trial doesn’t absolve them of directly and indirectly intimidating hundreds of thousands of other employers each year. Your betters are on to your game, grendelkhan. Some of us have even read that fun little book, How to Lie with Statistics.
Try again.
“They won’t be rewarded for the color of their skin, the dangling of their genitals, or for lusting after women.”
Wait! You mean I’ll have to give up my plans to subsidize my retirement income by becoming a gigolo?
Damn it feels good to be a Straight White Man
A real gangsta-ass Straight White Man plays his cards right
A real gangsta-ass Straight White Man never runs his fracking mouth
’cause real gangsta-ass Straight White Men don’t start fights
And Straight White Men always gotta enormous advantage
Showin’ all his boys how he shot em
But real gangsta-ass Straight White Men don’t flex nuts
’cause real gangsta-ass Straight White Men know they got em
And everythings cool in the mind of a gangsta
’cause gangsta-ass Straight White Men think deep
Up three-sixty-five a year 24/7
’cause real gangsta ass Straight White Men don’t sleep
And all I gotta say to you
Wannabe, gonnabe, success’in by the throat, steak-eatin’ prankstas
’cause when the fry dies down what the frack you gonna do
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
laugh, most definitely laugh. the cards are most definitely stacked against me, for being, white, straight and male, each with its own, sometimes overlapping reasons. if they make me angry, and I’m short of time, i refer them to go suck on some portion of some other males anatomy. If not angry, i refer to Mr Bermans strategy.
The sci-fi/fantasy/comic book world is currently dominated by feminists, gay activists, and leftists of various degrees of militancy. Scalzi may simply be trying to fit in.
“Dominated” might be a shade too strong. Certainly those communities are represented in SF and fantasy, but there are a substantial number of writers, particularly in SF, on the Right side of the spectrum. Quite a bit of the Baen Books catalog is conservative or libertarian, including PJ Media’s own Sarah Hoyt.
(Of course, there are a few genuine oddballs, too but with a little practice, you can learn to cross the street quickly when you see them approaching.)
Actual if a book has a conservative message or even poo poos liberal holy cows only Baen Books is likely to ever publish it. Smart science fiction is on the outs, but at lest is does still exist.
Heinlin must be turning over in his grave.
The reason Baen appears so heavily non-left is that no one else will publish those authors.
I disagree Baen’s author’s are conservative or libertarian. Baen is to SF what a Zane Grey site would be to Westerns. If you like a certain thing and want to see it repeated over and over again, Baen’s the place for you. They have a smart business model there and appeal to a very specific fan base. The work is detail oriented enough to make obsessive compulsive’s look blithe.
Remember Niven and Pournelle are still actively publishing.
Word. Finding out they didn’t turn out to be (or remain) leftists is some of the best news I ever got. Even in my youth, I did judge intelligence accurately.
The recent “… Of Worlds” series by Niven and Edward Lerner have been awesome. I think it’s at 4 books at the moment, not sure if more are coming.
They aren’t the only Conservative/libertarians in sci-fi. Dont forget Orson Scott Card, or John Ringo (The Last Centurian).
Yes, the s/f world was colonized by leftist/feminists a good twenty years ago, starting with womyn like Ursula K. Le Guin, who set about trying to dismantle the values that dominated golden age science fiction, of competent men, achieving great things. And as female acquisition editors have taken to favoring women writers, and feminist storylines, we’ve gotten to the point that only a handful of s/f writers can be counted upon to have decent, male-positive characters: Larry Niven, Jim Butcher, Mike Resnick, David Sherman & Dan Craig, and a few others. I stick to military sci-fi at this point, and just avoid all female authors wherever possible.
As a Southern White woman who raised to value masculinity, I tell people that I love and respect my straight white male.
His work ethic and respect for me keep it that way. I didn’t much respect my straight white male alcoholic dad…but that word alcoholic explains a lot.
I know how to change my own flat tires and my own oil, but I value that my husband doesn’t let me do those things for myself unless I’m stranded without him. He knows how to do my dishes and laundry, but I don’t ask him to often, because he does the cars and yard. Yes, it’s traditional. Things that work become traditions – marriages that work last 20 years. We both work outside the home and we both work at home raising our kids – together. Because it’s easier with 2. Just sayin’…
All I can say is that someone who can write something that absurd will never get a dime of my money.
The analogy is valid as long as you add that along with higher difficulty levels comes extra abilities (more and better weapons, more extra lives, etc.).
In victimtown everybody wants to be a victim. I’m sure glad I grew up somewhere else.
The funny part is that Scalzi (and others that write these screeds) are basically writing this century’s White Man’s Burden. White men have it so much easier why? Because they stride the earth like gods, other mortals must tremble in fear of the mighty White Man. We must create institutions that punish us just to give the other poor saps a fair chance – for they are way to inferior to do it themselves.
This meme is also present it pop culture. Take “Dances with Wolves” which one person joked should be renamed: “White Man, the Superior Indian”. It’s replayed in “The Last Samurai”, “Avatar”, etc. In each movie, it’s the White Man who adopts a foreign culture and actually does better than the natives.
Oops. That should be “…way too inferior…” Should proof-read more.
Then again, I am a white guy, so my it’s my privilege to re-invent grammer?
Work on your spelling first. It’s g-r-a-m-m-a-r.
Aww, you’re just upset that he’s exercising his white male privilege.
Grammer, it’s grammar redefined.
There is a “white male privilege” – it’s called ownership of one’s actions.
When something goes wrong, we don’t waste time navel-gazing or looking for “racists” or “sexists” or “structural issues” to blame. We accept our failings, get back up, learn from the experience and try to do better the next time.
And by focusing on our own actions and really doing the best we can, we find our way to our better outcomes.
Stripping agency from their preferred victim classes is how the Left ensures a permanent captive underclass.
Amen! Well put.
Remind him that ‘shameless. flamboyant homosexual’ is the lowest difficulty setting for getting fawned on by such poor and inconsequential gatekeepers of popularity and public access like Hollywood and the universities. Also remind him how white most gay neighborhoods and social circles are. Or for that matter, how white most popular sci-fi and fantasy settings are. Tell him to do a google search for the term “why beta males are homophiles” and read the first linked page. Ask him why a man who’s so confident in the strength of his arguments feels the need to close popular and ‘controversial’ comment threads (Answer: he fears truth, like all who made their living peddling easy lies.)
Or just extend his metaphor: Affirmative action is basically a government-endorsed cheat code that makes ‘difficulty selection’ meaningless for his hypothetical ‘gay minority female’. Not only is the person using a hack like this not actually playing on the proper difficulty setting, they’re not even playing the same game. No one wants to take their advice, honor their play records, or look at their achievements-they just want to get on a server as far away from the phonies as possible.
Let’s give it up for Dystopia Max, master of the extended metaphor! This is the best I’ve seen in too long, and I don’t even play computer games.
Too bad that Elizabeth Warren got Straight White Male’s job at Harvard law because she’s 1/32 not Native American.
What a shame, I’ve read 3 of his books, starting with Old Man’s War and they were really good. There’s no trace of Leftist idiotology in the books.
That’s what’s amazing about his books. They’re really, really, really good and if there’s a trace of lefty ideas anywhere in them I haven’t noticed. His Old Man’s War “series” even read as libertarian-ish in the tradition of RAH (perhaps because he was consciously trying to write that sort of book). His politics on his blog are moronic but he really can write and he really does manage to leave that stuff out of his writing.
Well, let’s see if being a moron will allow a trace of art in his books.
I am an old white lady and no longer have many inhibitions when I talk to men. When I encounter an Uncle Tim, I tell him that because of my age and experience, I understand why he thinks the way he does and I offer to pay for a prescription of Viagra for him.
Isn’t this the same Scalzi whose wife thought she was entitled to threaten a man in a bar with a baseball bat because he didn’t “respect women” enough?
Jim,
Yes it is and here is my reply to that incident:
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2006/09/bit-of-over-reaction.html
Law of the Jungle.
Whip (yes whip) it out and piss on the Timmy, without comment.
To the non-whimpering Tims. You know yourselves.
From The Red Pill Room: “He did manage to pull back on the throttle of disdain towards the end of the piece…”
And then closed with a warning to be civil. That Scalzi, what a card.
To use Scalzi’s analogy, if you play as Straight White Male, you get extra mobs and side-quests. You don’t get any loot or XP for them, though.
Perhaps the most offensive thing said here is that Scalzi is a good writer of SF or anything else. He is not. The guy couldn’t write a decent grocery list. He’s also always been a leftist tool, and his books are saturated with it.
Don’t get his books from the library. This is how libraries decide to purchase books– by how many times they get checked out. Just move along to another writer. There are plenty, plenty better than Scalzi. Just about anyone else.
Don’t be absurd. Scalzi is a skilled writer. Please try harder to separate your assessment of his politics (arrogantly liberal BS) from his fiction-writing skills.
I’m not the only person who thinks Scalzi is a bad writer. If you can’t see it, perhaps you need to read more widely.
This has nothing to do with his politics, which are their own brand of bad. There are many progressive writers who are very good, but Scalzi is not one of them.
If you want to say that it’s not about his politics, okay, although the over-the-top intensity of your dislike suggests otherwise. But if it is so then your problem is an inability to separate your personal tastes from any objective assessment. For instance, I can enjoy Frank Herbert’s novels for their merits while simultaneously recognizing that he was, stylistically speaking, a bit limited, just as I respect Charles Dickens while admitting that I usually find his novels padded and over-long and too episodic (presumably due to the medium for which they were first written.) Roger Zelazny was one of the best stylists the field has produced, but some are annoyed by the dubious science in some of his stories while remaining unmoved by his poetic qualities. Gene Wolfe is a brilliantly complex and sophisticated writer, but many find him bewildering. Each of these writers is good but not to everybody’s taste.
I don’t think it’s a matter of taste. It’s a matter of execution. Scalzi makes amateurish writing mistakes, stuff that any decent editor should pick up, like putting dialog tags at the end over very long sentences. Like rampant infolog. Like chunks of description. Like overuse of adverbs. Like charachters that are all the same character, more or less, all versions of himself. He even named his protag “John” in Old Man’s War in case the point isn’t clear enough. His science in wonky and often ancient, his plots are lame at best with characters spending tons of time sitting around bullshitting, and all Scalzi has done is to rip off Heinlein, who is in every way his superior. Why read a watered-down Heinlein when you have the real thing available? Everything Scalzi does is a knockoff. Hell, even the metaphor he uses for his little privilege rant was lifted off another writer.
While it’s true most writers have their weaknesses, Scalzi’s are legion and really he’s not improving at all. If possible, he’s gotten worse if his reviews are any indication. I wouldn’t know. I stopped reading him years ago, books and blog. There are many thousands of great writers in the world. I’m not wasting my time on a bad scribe like this guy. If you want to, that’s your business, but I cannot help but think less of you for it.
Sorry about the typos. Shouldn’t type so early in the morning.
“Why read a watered-down Heinlein when you have the real thing available?”
Because I read everything Heinlein wrote multiple times before I was 20 and want a little variety?
Okay. So you’ve read everything in the entire SF catagory so that now you have to stoop to that dreck?
Really, I don’t believe you guys are as well-read as you claim. If you were, you would know how bad Scalzi compares to just about anyone. The emperor has no clothes. He has a lot of fans, a lot of defenders, a lot of blog sychophants, and yet nobody can deny my critique of his writing. It’s littered with amateurish writing that any first year Clarion East or West student would blush about.
But this is tiresome. Some people cannot be objective about the writers they read. They like anything, just about, and the more cocksure the author is the more turned on they get. But as for me, I’d rather read Haldeman or Heinlein for the 8000th time than read a book by someone who has a hard enough time locating the verb in sentence and has the prose style of a gang of drunk monkeys.
I pulled this from an Amazon review of Old Man’s War, an excerpt:
“Sorry about that,” Thomas said. “I didn’t mean to hold everyone up. The fettuccine was excellent, but my lower intestine would apparently beg to differ.”
“Please feel free not to share such information in the future, Thomas,” Susan said. “We don’t know you that well yet.”
“Well how else will you /get/ to know me that well?” Thomas said.
**
That’s awful. That’s about as bad as dialog gets. Seriously, even if this weren’t “on the nose” dialogue, which it is and always is with Scalzi, and even if it were funny, which is isn’t, you still have the problem of a dialog tag at the end of a long line and the fact that Scalzi constantly uses people’s names in dialog even though people almost *never* do that in real speech. And again, every character sounds the same, male, female, young, old, whatever. Everyone is identical.
Sorry, but for years this guy’s popularity has just baffled me. And as yet nobody has given me one good reason why I should start reading him again, other than to call me stupid and my opinion absurd, backed up by nothing whatsoever.
Those writer’s are all to my taste. Good is what’s important.
Politics is one thing, residing in an Orwellian perceptual trap of political correctness another. The latter precludes real art since such people are perceptually blind. I’m eager to test my theory out by reading his books.
My biggest complaint is that his stuff is very derivative; packed full of the worse cliche’s of science fiction. “Old Man’s War” started out okay, but I knew where it was going and was annoyed that I was right.
“My question to readers is, what is the best way to handle an Uncle Tim who puts down other men, laughs at their misfortune and even gets ahead politically with this behavior?”
“Prove it for today, not as it once was. What institutional advantage does being a white male bring today?”
And then excommunicate the sob.
Refining it further–I say that against any other type of person, as far as the establishment is concerned, the heterosexual white male no longer has any offensive weapons–which is as it should be–but also no longer has defensive ones either–which is as it should not. He is quite simply now the overlooked child no one has any great care or concern for, and who will be automatically ruled against, initially, due to the beliefs of idiots like Scalzi, who believe he, the white male, must have some kind of advantage he does not (though the other person does), and that thus the “other” needs the benefit of the doubt. Even though the “other” may be the party on the wrong.
The appropriate phrase, I believe, is “red-headed step child”, or perhaps the child who is clothed but knows he is not loved, and the inflection point between “privilege” and “benign contempt (occasionally not benign)” was reached a few years back. There will be a backlash.
Alas, today men earn more than women. Robert Palmer was right.
From Slate in September 2010: The news last week was that if you’re a young woman without children, you have a shot at making more money than your boyfriend. “Young, single, childless women out-earn male counterparts,”
Two years later, the female wage premium holds. These young women are earning their money the old fashioned way–they’re acquiring skills and behaving well at work. But that was mostly how men earned more before–better education and more workplace experience. Scalzi’s hypothesis that straight white males play on “Easy” is not testable without sophisticated statistics, though those studies have been done and do not find great disparities due to sex or race.
But, today, the raw statistics show that, as a group, women excel.
http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/09/are_young_women_earning_more_than_their_boyfriends.html
Best way to handle an Uncle Tim? I probably shouldn’t say this out loud, but I’d ignore him, or put him on, and leave him to his nonsense. He’s taken himself out of the game and that will be its own punishment.
It’s not so much what he said, it’s that he said it and how he said it. It’s self-congratulatory, as if his consciousness is raised.
He also ignores one big thing:
Life gets everybody. I don’t care who you are, you suffered. Something, and probably a lot of things, totally sucked for you.
The article was so moronic, I thought he was being sarcastic. I had to read the update to learn that in fact John Scalzi is that stupid. If men like this are writing SF, it’s a sure sign the field is falling back into itself, becoming a caricature, recycling old ideas with lame prose that sits there, as deep as water on glass.
ADDENDUM: From someone else:
“John Scalzi lives in Bradford, Ohio, which is 98.82% White.”
Also Scalzi deleted another post of his:
“For people who aren’t straight white males, life is the easiest when they are in a society run by straight white males.”
In other words, if you’re a leftist sci-fi writer, you couldn’t ask for a lower difficulty setting for selling your books and meeting other authors.
As a straight white male I was continually turned down for college scholarships, even ones that were supposed to based solely on merit.
That’s OK, I worked my own way through college.
While there I watched women and minorities get accolades and awards for doing half as well as I did.
That’s OK. I got an education.
In graduate school I witnessed two sets of standards: One for men and a much lower one for women. It was explained thusly: It’s hard for a woman in the sciences.
At my first job I was laid off during a downturn. A female coworker who was on maternity leave was untouchable and not laid off even though she should have been.
The next job featured a woman manager who held special meetings for female employees to help them advance in their careers. The men had to make it on their own.
I have seen good men passed over for a management position and a lesser qualified woman or minority hired simply because management decided “It would be better to have a woman or minority in this position.”
I have yet to see any benefit to being a straight white male other than the aforementioned knowledge that I am judged solely on my abilities.
Apparently that is enough.
My wife is a recently retired nurse. Last night, she attended an orientation for volunteering in a charity women’s clinic. I asked her where the free men’s clinic is located. There isn’t one. How many times have you seen a “Women’s and Children’s Hospital”? I guess men can just die.
Dave P – I was applying for a position where the Manager knew me, my work and wanted me to fill the position. We had worked together before, me as a vendor to his organization and I had been away from it long enough to not violate non-compete issues. He was told that he had to hire minority. I got another position with another vendor and served his org again. The minority hire? He became my contact to the org. He was an idiot who was totally incompetent and only got by because I helped him.
Infuriating.
So no one can say that being a SWM is anything but a handicap in the modern world and be taken seriously.
The implication that the minority ‘needs’ the hand up, the leg up is fundamentally racist in itself. It implies the minority does not have the chops to make it without help like us SWMs. It is just pathetic.
So who are the real bigots?
27: Dave P
Sir, my experience and observations totally agree with yours. AA is an abcess. In my area, all of the machine shops claiming to be “small business” are owned and operated by women.
Another Uncle Tim scam:
I’ve dealt with several male vendors in small business who have signed their company over to their wife so that they can claim a ‘minority business’ advantage in government contracts.
I worked for a guy who had the company incorporated under his wife so he could get access to minority lending money.
“I’ve dealt with several male vendors in small business who have signed their company over to their wife so that they can claim a ‘minority business’ advantage in government contracts.”
—-
I’ve seen that manipulation quite a bit. I understand it, though, because there are lots of set-asides, loans, grants etc. for female-owned businesses. It distorts the Guurrrl-Power statistics, though.
The most blatant one I saw was: 40-year-old son who had spent 20 years moving up in precision-tooling companies was the employee, coincidently, at a precision-tooling company run and owned by mom, who had worked at WalMart and Target as a cashier and had no clue as to what “precision-tooling” even meant. The GubMent doesn’t seem to care about reality, though, just put a woman’s name on there and start lining up the set-aside projects.
“If you want to, that’s your business, but I cannot help but think less of you for it.”
My, my, such pique. You have remind me of why I limit my contact with science fiction fans–too many of them are intellectually narrow and socially stunted.
Typical. You addressed not a single thing I said and merely went for the insult. No wonder you like Scalzi. He’s right up your ally.
I rest my case.
You had a case?
And proved his point, to boot! Win-win!
Okay. So you’ve read everything in the entire SF catagory so that now you have to stoop to that dreck?
Really, I don’t believe you guys are as well-read as you claim. If you were, you would know how bad Scalzi compares to just about anyone. The emperor has no clothes. He has a lot of fans, a lot of defenders,a lot of blog sychophants, and yet nobody can deny my critique of his writing. It’s littered with amateurish writing that any first year Clarion East or West student would blush about.
But this is tiresome. Some people cannot be objective about the writers they read. They like anything, just about, and the more cocksure the author is the more turned on they get. But as for me, I’d rather read Haldeman or Heinlein for the 8000th time than read a book by someone who has a hard enough time locating the verb in sentence and has the prose style of a gang of drunk monkeys.
I pulled this from an Amazon review of Old Man’s War, an excerpt:
“Sorry about that,” Thomas said. “I didn’t mean to hold everyone up. The fettuccine was excellent, but my lower intestine would apparently beg to differ.”
“Please feel free not to share such information in the future, Thomas,” Susan said. “We don’t know you that well yet.”
“Well how else will you /get/ to know me that well?” Thomas said.
**
That’s awful. That’s about as bad as dialog gets. Seriously, even if this weren’t “on the nose” dialogue, which it is and always is with Scalzi, and even if it were funny, which is isn’t, you still have the problem of a dialog tag at the end of a long line and the fact that Scalzi constantly uses people’s names in dialog even though people almost *never* do that in real speech. And again, every character sounds the same, male, female, young, old, whatever. Everyone is identical.
Sorry, but for years this guy’s popularity has just baffled me. And as yet nobody has given me one good reason why I should start reading him again, other than to call me stupid and my opinion absurd, backed up by nothing whatsoever.
I agree SF reader. Many readers lack discrimination today. This not being fought by this new Human Wave nonsense by a small cabal but enabled. This is a link to an almost unbelievably moronic article recommended by an adherent of this Human Wave that thinks that SF fans should forget SF’s legacy and writer’s start repeating themselves because reading SF’s seminal novels is too hard and they’re old. It’s like saying Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre should be picked over when they become forgotten.
The woman’s name is Kristine Rausch and she also unbelievably states writers should base their work on Star Wars. She writes “to what extent is current sf writing influenced by Star Wars? The answer is simple: Not enough.” To me this is a perfect liberal argument: of course just forget about the past, it makes it easier to succeed because you can’t be original – it’s the argument of a failure, and as for the Star Wars comment, it’s bafflingly stupid.
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0612/thoughtexperiments.shtml
In SF, when you start talking about gatekeeper and protecting the integrity of SF, keeping the quality high and being keenly aware of it’s history, you get hostile and sneering replies that only YOU know what’s good and you’re arrogant for even bringing up good and bad – it’s all up for grabs, everyone’s opinion’s are equal, being well informed is to be cocky, and no one knows anything. The Human Wave is a completely liberal argument and one that follows the exact doctrines that destroyed fine art photography in America. It is the argument of failures.
Although SF&F fans usually look down on mainstream literature, mainstream literature respects it’s past and keeps it alive, and teaches people the difference between hackery and art. Usually when I say this, SF’s new fans say I’m trying to tell them what to read and that anything fun is what’s good. Well, the former is not true and the latter is true. But what’s good has another dimension as well: it is what advances and respects the evolution of the genre. If you’re not up to it as a writer, don’t go the way of fine art photography by pulling it down to your level and telling me Star Wars tie-ins and what amount to Civil War re-enactments are either prominent art or literature. They’re fun, enjoy them – don’t make more of them than they are just because you like it.
Either men’s privilege consists of institutionalized discrimination against women or informal discrimination.
I can’t really think of any kind of government policy or law or regulation that discriminates against women (I can only think of things that discriminate against me – selective service, affirmative action, set-asides, judicial chivalry in both family and criminal court etc.). That also applies to military jobs, other government jobs and, for the most part, jobs in large companies.
So it seems that when people say “men’s privilege”, it means that men still discriminate informally against women. That’s what they’re really saying. Otherwise, they would men that outcomes are different based on the choices of women themselves, which means that women are getting some kind of advantage for making those decisions.
So discrimination by men it is. Why don’t thy just say it up front.
As an example, Heather Mills and Ivanna Trump would probably not be able to get jobs as garbage collectors or miners because the men wouldn’t think they could cut it. So they should feel justified in shaming garbage collectors and miners with regard to their huge male privilege.
“So it seems that when people say “men’s privilege”, it means that men still discriminate informally against women. ”
Yep. Pursue them, try to win their affections, then watch them walk away with our kids and a substantial share of our wealth and income.
Maybe part of men’s privilege is also based on something that seems negative for men at first.
When I was in my 20s, I couldn’t stand working. After I got my first job out of college, I really hated it. Occasionally going to class, partying (read: drinking lots) and having no responsibility was a better match for me. LOL
And I see women who feel the same way. The difference is that a lot of them take the easy way out: They become housewives. They find a sucker to finance their lives. And they are also protected by the family law system.
Men can’t really do that – not without a lot of humiliation that women don’t get and that I wasn’t interested in getting.
So I had to muddle through. Lo and behold, decades later, I take pride in my profession and don’t hate to work any more. I also make good money – maybe even more (!) than a housewife can get from her similarly situated husband in a divorce.
So that’s my male privilege. I HAD TO develop my skills, because it was either that, jail, or being humiliated by society for marrying a fat bitch who works and sitting home myself.
Around 8-10 years ago, Ms Magazine used to have feminist message boards that could be way over the top. They were all serious, though. If any of you remember it, there was Fluffy Rich and Lynne (the gigantic male-to-female transsexual who caused a lot of battles among the essentialists).
Anyway, I once posted something about women having three options (work, part time or sitting at home) and men having there options (work, work or work). I assumed that they would attack me for insinuating that sitting at home was easier than working (huh), but no, one woman started by saying that it was a further way in which women were oppressed and victimized: the choices they had to make. Men just had their tasks in life, so they had it easy. Women constantly had to *choose* whether they stayed home or worked or whatever, so women had the more difficult path in life.
I just gave up at that point. Women like that win the victimhood Olympics. All you can do is open the wallet or checkbook and say, “how much do I owe you in compensation for my privilege?”. And then give it to them. And give it to them again the next year. But they’ll still lay into you.
No surprise here, people – this is the same Scalzi who said the character of John Galt is a “genocidal prick”, and, if I recall correctly, said his torture was justified….
The guy can piss off – haven’t sent a dime his way since, and never will again.
I suppose refusing to work so lazy grasping mooches have nothing to steal, and thus causing the mooches to face a slow death from starvation, exposure, and general inability to lift a finger to provide for themselves is pretty prickish if you look at things from the perspective of the mooch. I’m not certain, however, because it hurts my brain too much to try to duplicate the low mental state required to attain such a viewpoint.
And to convince the producers of the world to coldly do likewise and spread the denial of self-slavery would be absolutely genocidal against the race(?) of mooches. Galt did seem to want to be rid of them- we should be suspicious.
Perhaps this is also the source of Whittaker Chamber’s sock-puppetry into Ayn Rand’s mouth(or pen, if you will) of the statement “To a gas chamber — go!”. She really did want the poor, hapless mooches to die, die, die!
Alternately, I wouldn’t put it beyond the standards of Scalzi’s scholarship that he believes Galt actually said this. Even though we *know* he read every page of Atlas Shrugged carefully before forming his criticism, right?
I tell the Uncle Tims they are acting like cuckolds. They are pissed off because the “straight white guys” are in, what they perceive to be, the positions of power and influence and money and they are not. They wish they were but don’t have the guts to do something about it. They talk, they whine, they write articles and books and have radio programs (say “Pacifica Radio”)but not too much else. They can’t stand the fact that these guys actually worked and created their own success. And for the record, and I have worked in the organic foods industry for the last decade, I have never met a more greedy bunch of men AND WOMEN in my entire life.
Since the founding of the republic the graveyards are filled with straight white men who made sure that the same republic has existed till today. Proportional representation doesn’t count on the field from Lexington to Kabul. It’s raw numbers. When the dirty end of the stick is extended, it’s been the group that has paid the price in blood. From the first acts of Congress as the Militia Act of 1792 to Title X USC today, it’s been all males 17 to 45 who are member of the unorganized militia [the source of selective service] whether they want to or not, in accordance with Congress’ Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 8 to regulate the militia. Some privilege. The day the straight white males shrug and step aside, is the day everyone’s world will alter beyond redemption.
BTW, when that first militia act was passed, all free white males were so identified which was also the basic population that enjoyed the franchise. The Act was modified in 1862 to include males of African ancestry, soon followed by the 15 Amendment constitutionally extending the franchise. Where the disconnect occurs between obligation and franchise is the 19th Amendment. Privilege without obligation.
Every infantryman has a mother, who nourished him with her blood. That service is also valuable.
Poetic, DonM, but not analogous.
Write again when females are drafted into motherhood and rape is not a crime but government policy.
Well that’s the interwebs for you. I really liked the Old Man’s War trilogy, but I def caught a whiff of JS’s senses of humor, morals and plot development that make me take Helen’s critique with a grain of salt and interest. The main character skated because of a connection with the DI in Old Mans War that smacked of straight white successful ad copy writer. I will probably hold out for the audio book that Will Wheaton did, and then I can transfer any backlash and anger onto him…he does make a great nemesis: just ask Sheldon.
Helen, as much as I love you, Johm is correct. You are confusing the fact that because straight white males have so much vitriol aimed at them by various victim groups that they must themselves be a victim group. In fact, SWMs are the default power group in western societies. Their problem is that they too often fail to man up and act like the men they pretend to be. The notion that there is some sepcific privilege alloted to each white straight male is nonsense but there are a large number of negative characterizations from which he is exempt. To not understand this and to not chide the SWMs for their lack of SWM-liness neither advances their relative position in the world nor instructs them on how to retain the advantages they have nor how they can can have a good impact on the world so that others can labor without their particular negative characterizations.
The fact is that straight white males have it easier than any other group in this society. It is also a fact that mostly they don’t deserve it. As a SWM myself, this is very much like denigrating my own “kind”, but the truth is that all these lables are rubbish. In the end, there are only individuals and each individual should have an opportunity and and does have the responsibility to make him- (and her-) self better than they need to be.
Please don;t misunderstand me. There is indeed a cooncentrated effort by some clearly identifiable goups to denigrate men in general and SWMs specifically. The only defense against that is to demonstrate that they are wrong where they are wrong. By definition, that doesn’t come from playing the victim card.
You “love” Dr. Helen – and are mistaken.
It’s not a median approach being sought here. It’s how to deal with Uncle Tim’s (fantastic name), you, and how to deal with others who demand to define an individual’s “manhood.” Women spouting “grow a pair” is disrespectful since they don’t understand the burden by far (they may be brave in a moment and equally unhelpful with such a cutting insult), yet the same comment or “man up” from men is said is by small-minded men who play tough when building something does not require a big-mouth, and then men are fluff behind closed doors as well.
Even the phrase “man-up” is frequently said by a sweater around the neck gent who has never demonstrated an activity involving visible perspiration.
Dr. Helen asked how to deal with such men. Men with no standards and shame in their own sex (which is shameful). These are men who’ll demean themselves by playing along with self-sacrificial, sexually destructive roles. The answer is we men, first and foremost, must call it out when it happens – consistently. We must also let women know we need their voice of support, by helping them understand, and demonstrating, such support gets back to them.
Johnny Depp entered Uncle Tim territory and entrenched there. He and many other males actors play along with Hollywood’s desire to make groin cutting/harm jokes (Depp in the Pirate movies sequels when he’s been captured). Because this plays out daily in the lives of men and boys in the U.S., to no apparent, outspoken compassion from women or censure from cruel comments, the end result is a bad society and no laughing matter.
Uncle Tim’s and the “rapist” minded women (those women who excuse sexual assaults upon men) are always to be called out and guarded against. They do nothing for society that is beneficial, and there is no balancing “good” such as being outgoing, smiling a lot, or advocating for the protection of pets. The “second hand smoke” of such silent or actively misandrist men and women is cancerous to human and gender relations.
SWM created Western societies, of course they’re at the top. They know how to fix the engine of the car they built, everyone else is just driving it and doesn’t know what’s under the hood and can’t make it for themselves, unless every history book about the last 300 years is a lie. They certainly are to a liberal, who’s theory is that white men oppressed, exploited and enslaved their way to the top. It’s a child’s fantasy to soothe bruised egos. If there was an asteroid strike tomorrow I guarantee you you’d see the value of white privilege, as everyone would come running to us asking us what the hell to do, much like the entirety of the Third World does now anyway.
Even a cartoonist can spot the flaw in your claim.
Maybe, Ripley, you’re one of the people comedianne Wanda Sykes warned us about when she said a lot of people are going to be really confused because now The Man is black!
I’ve run into the problem of in an argument of Uncle Tims changing definitions or never admitting anything, It is so because I feel it is. The only way I see getting one to admit their illogic is to get him to argue my side accidentally. I could see this happening by falsely attack the white part of it. Get him to defend the African American side. Write doen his arguments and have him agree that definately means A is oppressed. Things like it’s obvious that African Americans are oppressed, look at conviction rates and sentencing in prisons. Fake fight it, throw out the arguments he would use if you were arguing about men. Then concede the point but write it down as ‘The oppressed one is the one who is sent to prison for the longer time for the same crime/disproportionate numbers in prison’ get him to agree to that statement. In media they are portraid as criminals idiots evil. Fight it but concede and write down, ‘the oppressed ones are the ones portraid in media as criminals, evil or idiots.’ Keep going, the parallels are everywhere, children are taught to fear/hate the oppressed,one gets backbreaking work in the elements the other cushy AC jobs. Life expectancy, medical funding, disproportional insurance rates.
Get him to agree that these statements are proof of privaledge, and all the proof that is needed. Then flip the argument on him, that each of the stated proofs appy to me in America today.
The prison argument as a sure sign of racism is a fool’s con. It posits that a first place sports team conspires to keep the last place team down and that people with no names and faces are responsible for what criminals do. If being poor made people criminals, Mayan highland Indians in Guatemala and Egyptians would be killing and robbing tourists wholesale. In fact, they’re nothing like that – downtown Cairo, a city of 20 million people, is perfectly safe at 3 am and people don’t have dimes to rub together.
This prison conspiracy thing says there is agreement the legal bureaucracy from coast to coast is so stupid they put innocent people in prison because of their unwitting racism. How can a law be imbalanced or racist just because black people violate it more. Does that mean white serial killers should get lower sentences? If anything, if one knows a drug law is particularly harsh do what a white privileged man with brains would do – don’t break that law. No one forces people to do crack and cocaine. And if such people are so easily whipped about by social forces, then they’re not equal are they?
You are mis characterizing the prison problem, it is not a crack vs cocane thing, or claiming that society or poverty made anyone do anything. It is a sentencing difference. That white convicted criminals recive 15-20% lighter sentensses on average than Blacks. Female convicted criminals however, recieve 200-400% lighter sentences. Take 1000 white men who with no prior record,commit armed robbery, they would get on average 12 months in jail each. 1000 black men with no prior record commit armed robbery they recieve 14 months in jail. On an individual case by case look, one can be tough to show any bias, because the particulars of that case could dominate.
The corrilary in the male female spectrum is that 1000 white women who committed armed robbery would recieve 3 months in jail as sentence. Meanwhile black females would get abot 4 months as sentences on average.
Who in this world commits armed robbery with no prior record let alone 1,000? The idea there’s an unconscious racism that goes from coast to coast is nonsense. You can’t read minds by cherry-picking stats. Michelle Alexander is a known racist.
I can only give you my own experience. One data point, and in an Australian context too, so YMMV.
It’s almost a classic thought-experiment though: what happens if a straight white male is put into the situation of another group. Ideally you’d run several hundred experiments – Straight White Male to Straight Black Male, Straight White Male to Gay White Male, Straight White Male to Straight White Female, with multiple samples of each, controlling for education, wealth etc.
I’m Intersex. I looked mostly male, completely so unless you looked real closely (and I made sure no-one did, avoiding locker rooms etc). My “gender identity” was female, but like all gals with CAH, something of a tomboy, so faking being male was possible, and not too great a burden, usually.
OK, it was Hellish, but I didn’t think I had much choice. I was asexual, so being situationally lesbian made sense too, I certainly wasn’t attracted to guys. Rather afraid of them, actually, other women at least thought like me, even if there was no “chemistry”.
In 2005 things changed, I had an anomalous partial female puberty. Most such (partial, apparent, not-really but close-enough) “Natural Sex Changes” go from Female to Male, going the other way is unusual, but happens. Anyway, I looked about as female as I looked male before. Enough so faking male was no longer an option (and I tried, for a while, failed miserably).
In the process, like most (or all?) people who go through puberty, I acquired a sexual orientation. Suddenly guys starting looking… and smelling… really, really yummy. All sorts of involuntary responses I wasn’t prepared for. “Chemistry” all right.
Anyway, I went from (apparently) Straight White Male to (apparently) Trans White Female. So I have some basis for comparison.
Bottom line, cutting to chase: Scalzi’s right.
SWMs have all sorts of disadvantages others don’t have of course; routinely screwed over in divorce cases for one thing, expected to put “Women and Children First” because that’s what Men do. Viewed as potential predator.
But Scalzi’s right, very obviously right, from my own experience. It’s made me aware of just how privileged I still am compared to many too.
In the USA, Trans Black Females have 1 chance in 8 of being homicide victims. Chance for SWM’s – 1 in 18,000. Odds for me, about 1 in 1000 near as I can determine. Not the only measure for whether you’re in “Expert” mode or not, but one you can’t honestly ignore.
Zoe Brain,
Thank you for your detailed and quite fascinating portrayal of your early years. Since there is little in western culture that describes your experience your comment was mind opening for me. Not that I wasn’t of an open mind prior to reading it, just that you contributed to my understanding of CAH from your personal perspective.
However, I must take exception as to your having argued the point in question. Other than to say something on the order of “trust me” or “take my word for it” you didn’t really go into any detail as to HOW a males life is privelaged. You say that you believe that, in your personage as a male, life was easier for you but you lack any of the detail that you laid out regarding your early experiences as an individual born as intersexed.
I’m not denying that you are right about male privelage. Frankly, I don’t know if you are or not. All I can say is that, in reference to your comment, you did not provide adequate evidence to bolster your point of view. If you have it, lay it out. You laid out your early intersex esperience well. Now document your underlying statement that men are privelaged. If you can’t, then that’s another matter.
OK, fair enough, I’ll try to.
1) Being talked over in meetings, having opinions discounted because I’m female. This in what I’d always considered as near as equal environment as possible.
2) Different expectations in job interviews. The questioning was a LOT harder. It reminded me of the old joke about the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew being asked questions about the Bible:
To the Protestant: “Samson slew 10,000 with what implement?”
A: The Jawbone of an Ass.
To the Catholic: “What group of people did the 10,000 belong to?”
A: The Phillistines
To the Jew: “What were their names?”
3) Salary. A 30% cut in initial offer, no bargaining, take it or leave it, compared to life before.
4) “Assertive, Self-Confident” -> “Pushy B*tch”
Nothing major, just a constant accumulation of infantilisation, assumptions of technical incompetence, “don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, dear”, the financial hit of course. The double-standards. The Job applications returned unread. All the hoary old cliches that turn out to be maddeningly, frustratingly true.
Very Clausewitzian: “War is the province of Friction. In War, everything is simple, but the simplest things become extraordinarily difficult”.
Leading a highly technical conference with an outside firm – and being told by members of said firm to go make the coffee, when I was the convenor. (I shouldn’t have laughed, and I did it, the look on their faces was priceless when they realised).
I didn’t mention the hours spent putting on ridiculous warpaint and wearing heels to give a “professional image”. When I presented as male, I thought wearing ties was silly, so you can imagine that this is a bit against the grain. (Dammit, a bit of makeup and heels do make me look better though… grrr…)
Learning to be afraid. Being careful to keep to lighted areas at night, when coming home alone from the workplace. Trying not to go home alone, at least as far as my car. That’s a biggy, but becomes second nature, you don’t have to think about it, it’s just what you do.
Making sure that your drink, even if soda, never leaves your sight. I forgot that one once. They used LSD-25 rather than rohypnol, I’m told.
Argue all you want. I’d say stop thinking so much and remember that sand is dry, water wet and fire hot. I don’t like people telling me I’m privileged when I’ve sweated blood and risked my life just to do things I wanted to do. I don’t remember any Rainbow Coalition types around. If saving a few thousand bucks and running around the world having adventures is so beyond these non-SWM groups then they just aren’t all they think they are. It’s not like building the Great Wall of China and acting like it is is the true cause of failure, not some dumb ass cheap psychology.
I understand the theory behind straight white male ‘syndrome’, but the problem comes in the execution. Here are actual examples from my life. “We will offer you a job assuming the black female we interviewed doesn’t want it” Yes, a quote, this was in 1979, before you couldn’t say things like this without a lawsuit. “There were several qualified candidates Mr. Jimminator, and while your achievements are admirable, we’re looking for someone who can provide a more diverse view.” (Not too many years after the first interview.) “Due to Government requirements, we can’t keep you on this program” (Black female with sketchy history took over the program, failed miserably!)
Despite all that crap, I am now a successful businessman. I defy anyone to prove that I succeeded due to
‘white priviledge’ or any other PC excuse. I worked my ass off. As did anyone, white or otherwise, who is successful (and I know many of them.) If you are a minority and want to succeed I would suggest you learn a lesson from George Washington Carver or Jubril Agoro and get off your ass and do something. (That applies equally to white enterpreneurs.) If you are a minority and feel that everyone is giving you the finger, WELCOME TO THE CLUB! When you reach this stage, you’re almost there. Keep fighting (and smiling.!) You are one step away from WINNING!!!!!
I’ve run into several ‘Uncle Tims’ in my life. The best approach is to smile in their face, and when they inevitably give you advice, produce your bird finger and move on.
If Mr. Scalzi’s (et.al.) position was so self-evident, then why the need to endlessly point it out? Nobody needs to constantly point out that murdering people or owning another human being is objectionable behavior.
No metaphor required there nor is there any need for one. Reminds me of someone trying to sell a car that nobody wants.
Zoe Brain opines:
“In the USA, Trans Black Females have 1 chance in 8 of being homicide victims. Chance for SWM’s – 1 in 18,000.”
—-
I saw the same types of arguments in the comments for John Scalzi.
I do know that men are much more likely to be assaulted and murdered than women.
But here’s the bigger issue: Is that an inherent privilege that white men have if they live in safer areas? I have lived in nasty “inner city” areas, and I quickly learned to … get … the … f*%& … out. If this is the kind of thing that is being claimed as a privilege, I start thinking that “privilege” may simply come down to making better choices in life. Granted, you may start with moronic parents, but at some point there is an element of free will.
Same with going to college, staying out of trouble under criminal law and all the rest.
I also think the focus is on areas where men seem to have the advantage, like work and business success (although they HAVE TO move up in life, otherwise they are “losers” – what a “privilege”), but there is no focus at all on women’s privilege. I know Heather Mills is an anomaly, but the rich old bitchy women in my neighborhood who never had a day of hard stress trying to move up in business in the real world are not. The billions and billions and billions of dollars that are transferred from men to women in the way of taxes (men pay more, women get more from them), alimony (7 billion a year), higher child support that is “mommy support” in reality (Linda Evangelista may be getting something like $40,000 per MONTH for one child), dating, informal prostitution, inter-family money transfers, divorce settlements based on fictions and all the rest of the ways that women get unearned money.
A thought experiment would be interesting.
Give women all the prime real estate in America. They get Harvard and New York City and all the industry and machines and everything else. Send the privileged men out to the areas in the west with NOTHING except brown dirt and some scrubby brush. So now all the women start with “privilege”. They’ve got all the stuff.
I truly think that in a 100 years, all of the former stuff would be run-down junk, and the former desert areas would be built up into shiny new cities (Tel Aviv was built very quickly out of a desert right after Israel became a state).
And the woman would be whining on that day far in the future that it’s UNFAIR that the men get all the good stuff.
This is the history of the world: those that do and those that don’t. All else is fluff, excuses and blame.
It’s a common conceit among the SF crowd that their fiction if prescient and insightful, when it’s actually not. They’re really just retreading a lot of conventional wisdom from prior fashionable thinkers that hasn’t yet made the mainstream. SF is mostly a layman’s guide to the bien pensant knowledge of their ‘betters’.
It’s well-known that the bell curve of intelligence of men is a lot flatter than that of women. Women are bunched in the middle with regard to intelligence, men are more likely to be at the extremes. So you’ve got lots more really intelligent men and lots more really dopey men. Lots of traits of men are like that, because nature apparently wanted to use men as experiments.
It’s not that hard to imagine that this flatter curve may also apply to business ability (whatever that is) or a “slimy politician gene”.
But the problem is that people see Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Steve Jobs and see “male privilege”. It is really “far-end of the curve privilege, which men are much more likely to fall into”. They DON’T ever seem to see the other end of the curve, where men are much, much more likely to be homeless. Stupid men are also found in jail, because they do stupid things. It’s hard to make a case that they have any “privilege”.
So maybe Scalzi and his ilk should quit calling it “male privilege”. If you want to beat up on the really rich guys and really high placed male politicians – be my guest. I’ll never be that rich. If you don’t think they earned it, take their money away from them and give it to me. If you do think those outliers-on-the-curve earned it, then you’ve got a REAL problem – because most of the male names on the Fortune 500 list got their money from some kind of work or business, as opposed to most of the women on the list (aside from Oprah Winfrey) who got their money by having the skill to marry the right guy or to have the even greater skill of being born into the right family. That would show that WOMEN have privilege, not men.
In any case, John Scalzi and your ilk, please quit extending your crap to normal men.
A man who is under high stress in his job, a bit behind on his mortgage payment for a small house, and paying alimony to an ex-wife who is now living with a new rich boyfriend, not working and driving a Mercedes … doesn’t feel particularly privileged. And he is not. And he has nothing to do with how much money Bill Gates has.
Even more ridiculous, Heather Mills pointing her bony finger at a homeless man and telling him to admit to his privilege and feel guilt … is simply a bizarre notion.
So in summary, John Scalzi, f&%k off. You and the pony you rode in on.
The privileged white elite has designed a new game. They get to exercise and keep power in exchange for a “victim card”. This victim card provides access to some of the benefits of the elite and even allows them (the non white minorities and women) to believe in their self evident moral superiority. There is no downside to this new game, for the elite because their children are not penalized for it. Only the lower class single white males suffer the penalties, while the elite gets to deny that a non privileged white class even exists, all the while, exploiting the members of the white non privileged class to the nth degree.
Huh. And here I had thought Scalzi trended toward Libertarianism. Boy was I wrong. Because with this “easiest setting” crap he has revealed himself to be a doctrinaire postmodern liberal; because if ever there was a streaming pile of self-loathing liberal doctrine it is the “privilege” canard.
Two things are certain now: 1 )the media will decide he’s a genius, producing true literature in the guise of science fiction; and 2) I’ll never give him another cent of the money which I earned with the blood-sweat of my “privileged” brow.
I stopped reading his blog strictly over politics, as I was tired of my views being openly insulted. At various times, he’s posted that anyone who still thinks Obama might be a Socialist is a “tool”, and that Republicans are power-hungry hedonists. But in the meantime, he admonishes his blog commenters to keep it civil.
He’s only libertarian in the sense that Bill Maher imagines himself to be one. Anyone who considers Obama to be a “pragmatic centrist” at this point has proven they’re listing hard to port.
I saw a Tweet from him this morning that he’d been busy removing racist comments from his blog. Have no idea if they were truly racist or just straight white guys defending themselves. Either is equally likely.
I hate saying any of this because I’ve met him before and he was a genuinely nice and funny guy. Then again, we didn’t talk politics…
Here’s my problem: in the history of SF, especially in it’s Golden Age, 1940-60, we’re talking about people who were experts at perception. George Orwell wrote a whole goddam book about it, though he was not a hard genre member of that Golden Age.
Now, we have a man like Scalzi, today’s legacy of SF, and he cannot exert the classic theme of SF: see the forest for the trees.
Anyone, and I mean anyone, who truly opens their eyes and dispassionately puts the dots of facts together can see that, not only is Obama a socialist, he is a welcome racialist in a party that has gone insane, and one I used to love. A classic way of divorcing a reader from his personal bias would be for an SF writer to blindside you by taking the same facts and putting them at a distance on an alien world and suddenly, wham!
Here’s the alien world: one where morality and a sense of innate judgment is doled out according to how blue your hair is, how dimpled your elbows are, and what sex you are. Do I really have to say more for a person to see how the Dem Party has adopted the vile color codes of Apartheid, but in reverse? For Scalzi, to have such positions as he does is death for a writer of SF.
Some people are fools, and feed on attention – Scalzi seems to be one, irrespective of how “intelligent” he pretends to be. The worst that can happen to him is to be ignored.
“Never approach a bull from the front, a horse from the rear, or a fool from any direction.”
I get up every day, go to work, and fulfill old-fashioned straight white male obligations to my wife, kids, family, nation, and God. Sue me. I was born white, male, and straight. I was taught duty, honor, faith, and sacrifice.
If it wasn’t for these and other “straight white male lowest difficulty setting” values that built this country, Scalzi would not have the liberty to speak such drivel and (presumably) get paid for it.
This crap is just more race-baiting bondage out of which President Barack promised to lead us. Instead, Barack is false prophet who keeps pulling us back to Egypt where we like “Julia” can live a life of ease on the public dole.
Talk about life at the “lowest difficulty setting” – that’s the socialist’s dream, isn’t it?
I see a big drop in his book sales in the future as Straight White Males – no doubt 99% of his readers – exercise their privilege to read someone else.
He just lost four readers (my three sons and I) in my household alone.
If you’re gonna make it as the white guy today, you have to be the best white guy. Average, or even above average, won’t cut it. All you have to do if you’re black is apply. The rest is taken care of for you. Just take a close look around in any medical school.
Scalzi may have a point if he’s talking about journalism or Hollywood, two areas that seem curiously dominated by white males. But if you’re a regular guy doing ordinary things like trying to get a job in an organization with diversity “goals”, or going through a divorce with children involved, it’s a different story. Scalzi must know this, but for some reason needs to toe the feminist line.
Let’s suppose for a moment that we can convince our Uncle Tim into accepting reality as we see it.
What will happen next?
1) Re-organisation of the basic premises in his married life, especially if his wife is a feminist (who in turn would have to come round our way too, or the divorce is pre-programmed)
2) instant loss of most of the social circle he has and the resulting social difficulties(I’m not going to your party if you invite that bigot(tm) etc)
3) loss of a vast number of assumptions and premises that much of his other opinions in life are built on, probably kicking off a major re-evaluation of his thinking. That kind of upheaval doesn’t always do people favors, growth is a possibility here, but so is shrinkage
So, I’d say, use him and his views to make your points to his audience, not to him.
And if you look at history, opinions once held to that depth and breadth never change, but, they eventually die out along with their believers, depending on who can win over the audience of the young people who are still undecided as to what their way in life is going to be.
Very true. It is the next generation which needs to hear these arguments. The problems of this are that, the main education system in America has been long held by the extreme left, purveyors of this ideology. Groups that give alternate viewpoints, i.e. Boy Scouts, Churches, home schools, traditional marriage etc. are the targets of the Democratic party.
Maybe Scalzi meant to say that those with lesser talents and abilities need help, but he isn’t enough of a thinker or writer to say it in an inoffensive way. Maybe he’s just another sycophantic wuss. Maybe he’s decided to market his writing to the self-loathing.
His opinions aren’t worth my time.
As someone who is “Uncle Tim” to about 20 people, I take offense at this coinage.
As someone who has actually read Uncle Tom’s Cabin (unlike virtually every single person who uses “Uncle Tom” as an insult), I take exception to this coinage.
I’m glad you said it, Mr. Maguire.
The phrase “ugly American” is similarly misused by people who likewise never read the book.
Scalzi’s SF is low on testosterone. Not a Black Jack Geary or a Retief, or a Stainless Steel Rat in the bunch. He comes across as a girlie man in his stories. Lots of good writers do. c’est la vie
Scalzi uses a prefect metaphor for privilege. So let’s say I’m playing on the white, straight male (WSM) setting and I’m getting my butt kicked. I feel sorry that others are forced to play on a higher difficulty level and having difficulty too. The anger comes when policymakers and society start trying to artificially up my difficulty level as opposed to lowering the difficulty level of others. Don’t call me a bigot just because I get mad when you start upping the stats of the NPCs I’m fighting against when I’m already having a hard time dealing with them as it is.
Yeah, but members of Certified Victim Groups get to play with cheat codes on.
I stopped buying and reading Scalzi’s work after I watched his misandry at work in the Old Man’s War series, which starts out with reasonably positive male characters, but then diminishes them in competence, while steadily afflicting them with more and more put downs from increasingly “spunky” women – women who are spunky to the point of female supremacy. Scalzi seems to be a bit like Joss Whedon – he’s a female-worshipper, and probably a self-loathing one at that. My guess would be, he’s a sexual submissive, and this is one way that he satisfies and hamsterwheels his fetishistic need to exalt women.
I’m glad I’m not the only one that found Scalzi’s post lame.
As for his fiction, I won’t be reading any more. Not because I’m boycotting him because of his post. For me, Scalzi committed the ultimate writing sin, and that is making science fiction boring.
I’m not going to comment on Scalzi’s blog (with his follow-up: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-setting-follow-up/ ) – because he is apparently actively censoring people with good arguments against his thesis. Lots of people are complaining on another blog I follow that he is deleting people en masse. He IS leaving in some people with weak arguments against him. Too funny.
He is arguing on the level of groups (and I guess the white males without anything in society are just “collateral damage”), but I would be confident in saying that he will not apply anything “bad” to other groups. Only to white males.
White males are bad as a class – he seems to indicate – but he will never bring up the crime statistics and say that black people AS A CLASS cause far more crime in the US. And rightfully so, because it puts an unfair burden and guilt-trip on black people who follow the law. Scalzi doesn’t see that he is doing the same thing by blaming the class of “white males” – and not even for something bad, like crime, but something good, like building up an economy.
If he’s doing that he’s a typical liberal: they hate facts and find them threatening and mere disagreement itself an insult.
Scalzi also seems to be a very abrasive person. He is absolutely *sure* that he is right, and he seems to delight in taunting other people.
I had vaguely heard of him before, although I have not read anything by him. Maybe he is a good writer, but I just can’t believe it based on the personality he shows on his blog. He is downright childish.
Here’s an important point:
If this jackass (Scalzi) thinks that he owes other groups above and beyond the taxes he pays because of his “privilege” (and he was bragging about how much money he makes in his new thread), why isn’t he paying them himself or making retributions?
Instead, he wants to be the hero by laying a guilt trip on other men with money AND on men who have no money at all. They are all included under “white males”.
If I felt I owed a debt, I would pay it. Scalzi doesn’t even think that way. He wants to blame a whole group in society (“white males”) and then sit back and reap the benefits of his “heroism”.
Pay up, Scumbag Scalzi. I’m not the one touting your group dynamics, and I have no money. You, on the other hand, are doing both, so pay up.
Scalzi writes highly enjoyable novels, and so does Charles Stross, but I’ve noticed their blogs suffer the same problems. They are Gods there and do not hesitate to censor anyone that doesn’t toe the line they’ve taken. That’s their right. but it’s not very… um… open minded?
And they tend to be pretty high handed with the line they take.
It’s okay though, I’ve found I tend to enjoy authors works much more when I don’t know their personal stances on things, because some bleed-through inevitably occurs for me.
I have a funny story to tell you about a blogger which I can’t say too much about because it’s a claim. But he got high-handed, went to the wrong place, and ended up literally eating a dried cat poop sandwich, which is how revenge is best served as apparently. They were laying in wait for the guy. Lesson: don’t make fun of entire countries and then announce you’re going there.
Words to live by in any event.
To paraphase P. J. O’Rourke, Scalzi has done something unforgiveable. He has told the truth. And, until he is willing to stand up and lie like a white man*, he will not be forgiven.
*I say this as a white man myself.
Hey Robert, see the old disabled person in a wheelchair? Go over and make fun of him, BECAUSE HE’S A WHITE MALE! All of a sudden, he’s a piece of shit who gets handed everything.
Your group politics are just as moronic as bigots attacking other groups. But while you’re at it, what’s your opinion of Negroes?
Congratulations, you’ve just rediscovered the concept of “kyriarchy”, a word coined by a feminist no less. Perhaps you missed your calling in life?
Maybe Ms. Fiorenza missed her calling in life by sitting on her fat butt, trying to think up ever more subtle victimhood scenarios, instead of producing something good for the world (like the awful, awful white men who have brought us computers and cars and cell phones and airplanes and bridges and buildings and … other stuff).
Yes, Robert, it takes a really courageous man to say something bad about white males. Really courageous. I don’t know if that’s ever been done before.
And the fact that men kill themselves at something like 3 times the rate of women shows just how easy they have the pressures of life.
… and …
“Lie like a white man” is about as offensive as it gets. Do you think that white men lie far more than any other group in society? Really?
“And the fact that men kill themselves at something like 3 times the rate of women shows just how easy they have the pressures of life.”
You, sir or madam, win the thread. Over to you, Robert.
I’m still waiting for all my status checks for being a white male to arrive.
Haven’t gotten any of that stolen slavery labor money from my ancestors that supposedly kept the black man down either.
Or a thanks for my ancestors dying to fight the evil of slavery.
no, I’ve gotten jumped, assaulted, denigrated and treated like a second class citizen. Because of my color.
Yet I can’t somehow relate to the black man’s rage and history.
Humbug.
Who knew that having a work ethic and being self-reliant was “privilege”?
I also didn’t realize that when I failed out of High School and was jobless and homeless for about 3 months that I was “privileged” as well. Who knew?