Facts are Cool

[jimhines]

After reading John Scalzi’s post on SWM being the lowest difficulty setting in the game of life, and then reading the 800+ comments, I figured I’d join the crowd who decided to write a response. So I’ve dug up some information for those commenters who seemed to completely lose their minds…

I’ve done my best to find reliable, objective sources for

Comments

[misslynx]

I think you could use the same basic model that he used and switch the specific forms of privilege around, and it would still work. He's got it framed as gender, sexuality and race being part of the difficulty setting, with things like wealth and ability being variable stats in addition to that, but if you changed it to wealth, ability and geographical location being part of the difficulty setting and the other traits being variable stats, it would still essentially work, in that affluent, able-bodied Westerners in any given category would tend to have an easier time of it than others in that category who were poor, disabled, or living in a Third World country.

Being straight, white, male, affluent, able-bodied and living in a comfortable Western democracy are all forms of privilege. They all make people's lives easier than those of others without those traits, all other things being equal. And that last is an important qualifier - I don't think the idea is that race, gender and sexuality automatically trump all other forms of privilege and therefore all straight while males have an easier time than all people who are not straight white males. In fact, Scalzi stated pretty emphatically that that was not what he meant. The idea was to illustrate how privilege itself works, with the difficulty setting model. I think he chose the specific forms of privilege he did as an example, not on the assumption that they're the only forms there are.

[serialbabbler]

Then he should have chosen a different title for the post because the way he framed it doesn't work for a lot of people other than me. :)