Your reply is a strange (mis)interpretation of what monstro wrote.
She precisely says that, if you have privilege, you should be subject to have your ideas questioned, and you should be open to criticism and challenge. She also admits to have privilege in some areas. Almost everyone has some privilege.
So would that be a yes or a no? Are these factors a significant axis of privilege or not?
Sure, its significant in that shows that men, as a group, are so privileged that they can do the most victimizing of all groups combined, not only heaping more abuse on the non-privileged (women, and children) than those groups do each other and amongst themselves but of weaker members of the privileged group as well.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I think society broadly classifies things as follows:
**“Privileged”: ** White, men, Christians, thin, wealthy, tall, attractive, straight
**
“Un-Privileged”: ** Non-white, women, LGBT, short, fat, impoverished, Muslim or non-Christian religions
Of course, it gets complicated in real life since there’s often overlap.
Thank you. His post is so over-the-top wrong that I can’t be bothered with it.
Another way of looking at privilege:
There are a lot of issues out there that I really do find stupid. Like, I don’t know why women feel so much pressure to look a certain way. So what if magazine advertisements don’t feature bodies that look like yours? Stop looking for validation from external sources, people!
I mean, I get it on an intellectual level. But I still think it’s stupid.
Now why do I think it’s stupid? Is it because I’m just fundamentally better than those “silly” women who do worry about their looks? No. I’m not “above the fray” because I have angel wings. It’s because I enjoy a degree of privilege.
No one’s ever called me ugly before or put me down because I look a certain way.
Even if I did have a history of abuse, I have a lot going for me besides my looks.
I don’t care what men think, because I’m not emotionally invested in men’s opinions.
Personality-wise, I don’t give a fuck about lots of stuff. That doesn’t make me awesome. It just means I tune extraneous information out really well.
Does being privileged in this way mean that I can’t have an opinion about beauty standards? No, of course not.
But it does mean that when I encounter a discussion about lookism and unreality beauty standards, maybe–just maybe–I shouldn’t be the first person grabbing the microphone. If someone asks for my opinion, maybe–just maybe–I should admit that while I “don’t get it”, that doesn’t mean those other folks are talking out of their asses. Because they may be seeing things that my privilege keeps me from seeing. Maybe if I were them, I’d feel the same way they feel.
I swear. People act like this is so hard to understand, but it really isn’t.
Thank you for taking time to write out a thoughtful response. I always appreciate reading what you write, whether or not I agree with it.
As I said in my first post, there are many kinds of privilege. There’s material privilege, family privilege, social privilege, etc… Each of those could then be broken down into countless specific instances. Deciding who’s privileged in part depends on which are considered most important. To me it’s self-evident that material privilege is the most important kind. Having adequate food, safe drinking water, a good home, clothing, medicine, and the like, when millions past and present lacked such things, is a massive privilege. This in no ways denies that social privilege issues exist, but it does help keep them in perspective.
Things like “It means always having your opinions, your feelings, your beliefs validated by others” don’t seem correct to me. Does anyone always have their opinions, feelings, and beliefs validated by others? If so, they must have a very sheltered existence. Having people disagree with oneself is part of being human. To say that anyone is unprivileged because they don’t have everyone in agreement with them is to create an unreasonable expectation.
To me, there’s a difference between being disagreed with and being invalidated.
To me, being disagreed with means that someone has listened to my opinion or argument, taken it into consideration and evaluated it, and responded to it based on the merits of the opinion or argument. Being invalidated means that the person dismissed and tuned out my words out of hand before they ever got to the content.
Good to know that African-Americans and the poor are not significantly disprivelaged, then. On account of all the violence.
Or perhaps you’d like to walk back the claim that privileged people do violence a little?
robertliguori, you never responded to this – do you agree that it’s reasonable to believe that black people are mistreated above a “base rate”?
So if someone listens to your opinion or argument and responds on the merits after evaluating the statement itself, that’s mere disagreement – but if someone tunes you out with a dismissive “you can’t know what it’s like” or a brief “check your privilege” instead of considering the content of your statement, that’s invalidation?
Maybe? I don’t know. Almost certainly, in many areas, almost certainly not in others.
Hmm. Actually, let me clarify. Yes. It is reasonable to believe that. There are many examples of it happening, there is a clear aveneue for it to happen systematically, and formal studies show a resounding “It’s complicated.”, so I think this is an entirely reasonable belief to hold, even if I personally am holding out for more analysis. What happens if we factor in that criminals who shoot at police officers are overwhelmingly black? If police officers are colorblind, but mistreat poor and violent criminals more often, then you would see mistreatment of black people above the base rate, but you wouldn’t see any evidence of privilege.
Now, I don’t think that police officers are colorblind, but I don’t know how not-colorblind, on average, they are.
Again, it’s complicated.
You might want to check into that job before you do accept. Chances you were asked because nobody else wants to do it.
Given the recent headlines about Women’s Health Services, I was curious if I could find out if there was a difference between government spending on women’s vs. men’s health. I wasn’t able to find a good answer. (Perhaps because there’s no such thing as Men’s Health Services.) I did find this old study though: (from the abstract) “in 2004 per capita health care spending for females was 32 percent more than for males.”
Have you considered the possibility that women may require more health care then men, on average, due to legitimate medical needs? I’d be surprised if that wasn’t true, considering reproductive health care.
Hmm. Women are less healthy than men, by a spending factor of 34%?
Well, that many extra sick days would explain the 5% wage gap several times over.
But hey, I think we can resolve this. We can see if there are any ailments which disproportionately affect women, and see if they’re given funding and attention disproportionate with the harm they cause relative to more gender-neutral ailments. Any takers for suggestions?
And then they live longer!
I’ve got a very tricky math problem for you.
My wife and I have two daughters.
During each of her pregnancies, there were at least eight medical visits, including 2 nights in a hospital.
The question is two-part:
There’s a challenge question, too:
3) In general, when a child is born, does the father or the mother incur thousands of dollars of medical expenses?
My main issue with it is entirely syntactical; it’s not an either/or situation of privileged or under/non privileged. It’s entirely possible for there to be a group that’s neither privileged nor underprivileged.
When 70% of the population has something, and 30% does not, by the very definition of the word that ITR Champion posted, the 70% is not “privileged”. They’re the status quo- the baseline. Neither here nor there. They don’t have anything that most other people don’t have, and nor do they lack anything either.
That’s my problem- the implication that white people are privileged is absurd- by sheer numbers, we define the baseline. Some people are privileged relative to that baseline, and some are underprivileged. And trying to make it an either/or situation implies that if you’re not some kind of minority or other put-upon group, then you’re “privileged” is somewhat offensive.
To use the John Scalzi metaphor, white male is really the “Normal” difficulty, and there are easier and harder difficulty levels in the game, as there are richer, more influential people, families, locations, etc… and there are ones that are less so.
If white male is the “normal” difficulty, what’s “easy”? I’m not convinced majority = baseline.
Who said less healthy? Requiring more health care doesn’t necessarily mean “less healthy” – a pregnant woman requires more health care than a non-pregnant woman, all else equal, but she’s not “less healthy”.