> If you're western/male/white/straight you're playing life on 'very easy' mode.
When I read this, my interpretation is "Your achievements don't count because you are a white man."
Is that what you were trying to express?
When I read this, my interpretation is "Your achievements don't count because you are a white man."
Is that what you were trying to express?
It's not about denigrating anyone's achievements. It's about understanding that some things make your life easier. Being born straight, white, and male, in the United States (or other first world countries) provides a tremendous amount of benefit to you. To deny that benefit is to deny reality.
It doesn't mean when you do something good it doesn't count...it just means that you probably would have had a harder time had you been born non-white, non-male, non-straight. No one is saying you're bad for being white, male, or straight, or that what you accomplish does not count.
Denying you receive privileges for being a straight white male can be offensive or upsetting to those who don't experience life with those privileges. It's a complicated issue, of course, and there are plenty of straight white males who have to overcome significant hurdles; but given the same circumstances, the straight white male has an easier time getting ahead in business (especially tech and science), being treated with respect, not being treated like a child (women are frequently treated like children by well-meaning men), and not being treated like an outsider.
You're not being blamed for being born lucky. You're just being asked to acknowledge it.
Imagine all the men born in German and Great Britain eighteen years before WWI. Just as they were graduating secondary school they would have been drafted and forced to kill each other in some of the most horrible battle conditions in recorded history. Does lying in a waterlogged trench, dying slowly over three days of a gut wound sound like a privilege?
Men currently account for 92% of occupational deaths in the US. Imagine what it was like a century ago, before occupational safety standards. A coal miner in 1910 had the privilege of being able to vote and to wear pants but his wife had the privilege of not being crushed to death in a poorly supported tunnel or dying of black lung.
Men have far higher rates of mental illness and drug addiction. Men are more likely to attempt suicide and more likely to succeed. Men who are victims of rape or domestic abuse are often ridiculed. At least one study showed 40% of domestic abuse victims are men. The majority of US rape victims are men. Unemployment rates are currently higher among men.
Imagine you're a woman and you really like small children and want to work in a career with them. That's perfectly acceptable.
A man doing the same thing is constantly viewed with suspicion and often faces false accusations.
You say men have the advantage of being treated with respect but I think that is highly dependent on the circumstances.
I will readily admit that the greatest factors that have affected my life are random. We all play the birth lottery but I don't see your ranking of various characteristics as justified or useful.
To me it just seems like a way to dismiss people and their achievements because of things beyond their control.
But I still can't believe that it's useful to apply this concept to everyone on a society wide basis. It just seems like too wide a net. The world is more complicated than that.
For example, a side effect of men being grownups, and women being child-like, is that men suffer consequences in court at a much higher rate than women. Women are viewed as both weak and incapable of making rational choices, and so when they commit crimes, including violence against men, they receive child-like treatment. Where an abusive man might spend time in jail, an abusive woman gets a slap on the wrist and the man gets snickered at for being too weak to stand up to the woman. Woman==Weak and Victim, Man==Strong and In Control.
Similarly, women are seen as safe to be around children because they effectively are children according to this worldview. Men should be ambitious and driven, and shouldn't be wasting time playing with kids, and should be viewed with suspicion if that's how they want to spend their time...there must be something wrong with them, some ulterior motive. This is insulting to both men and women; and it just falls out naturally from the way men and women are currently viewed by our institutions and our society. We could go on for days talking about ways women and men get treated differently, and it's not really about who gets treated worse (though, again, most of the time, us white guys get a hell of a lot of advantages over just about everyone else as long as our goals align with what we're expected to want out of life).
So, I think it's unfortunate that so much time gets spent trying to pick apart the idea of privilege without realizing that it's dangerous for everyone for these kinds of inequalities to exist, but it's generally more oppressive for non-white, non-male, non-straight folks.
I absolutely concede that it's complicated. I doubt anyone, even the most militant old school feminist, would argue that it's simple. It's just a matter of checking your privilege now and then; it's all most folks are asking for when they talk about privilege, and I think that's entirely fair.
I'll give an example: I'm involved in activism in my local community, and have found myself talking to media a lot lately. One of my friends noted that all the people in our activist community who were talking to media with regularity are white, middle class, able-bodied, straight-looking men, even though plenty of women, black and brown folks, disabled folks, obviously LGBTQ, etc. people exist within this community. Media were simply walking into the room, looking around, and picking the person who looked most like they were in charge...wouldn't you know, they'd pick the middle class straight white guy to talk to? It's the way the world is. Changing it means checking that privilege on a conscious level. The next time I was asked for an interview I redirected him to a woman in a wheelchair who is probably a much better speaker for our cause than I am; in a world without this pre-existing bias, she's the person he would have talked to, because she was heading up the meeting. But, due to that bias, he came to me. When you start looking for this bias (and you can call it whatever you like, but this is what people mean when they say "privilege"), you'll start to see it everywhere.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that we can recognize that it's complicated and that everyone is dealing with shit, while also recognizing trends and societal bias and favoritism.
Who the hell says this? Where are you getting it from?
You make tons of assertions but what are they based on?
As far as I can tell you made an absolute statement "White men have privileges that nullify their achievements. Women are not privileged so their achievements count.". I pointed out several cases where men were disadvantaged as compared to women and you start throwing up a bunch of bullshit.
That is not a quote from anything I have written, and is not what I've said or implied. You're taking this in a far more argumentative direction than I had any desire to go in. Perhaps I've struck a nerve?
Arguments are fun. No harm done.
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Your achievements do count, but they happen in a context. To ignore that context is foolish.
Achievements are only relative.