BDBoop
Platinum Member
- Banned
- #1
It's the easiest game setting there is. Congratz to all who attained it by virtue of being born.
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
Or as I once told my night foreman. Of COURSE you think the world is fine as it is. That's because nobody's ever come gunning for WASP, brown-eyed, brown-haired, short balding men wearing glasses.
And they never will.
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
Ive 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. Its not that the word privilege is incorrect, its that its 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?
Being a white guy who likes women, heres how I would do it:
Dudes. Imagine life here in the US or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Lets call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, Straight White Male is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default its easier to get.
Or as I once told my night foreman. Of COURSE you think the world is fine as it is. That's because nobody's ever come gunning for WASP, brown-eyed, brown-haired, short balding men wearing glasses.
And they never will.