Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
This article is just brilliant, and I can't help sharing it. Of course, I like it partly for its video games metaphor, but it's still so smart, comprehensible and not agressive at the same time. I'm considering translating it and posting at feministki or somewhere. (Well, probably not there, somewhere the target audience will have a chance to drop upon it.)
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.
So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it? (More...)
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.
So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it? (More...)