The Real Problem With “Check Your Privilege”: It’s Too Generous

[phantom power]

This topic is also similar to the experience of watching Democrats talk about "reaching across the aisle," as if the problem with GOP politics is that nobody ever tried to respect them or meet them half way. The problem is they're authoritarian assholes who want all the power in the world to replace our secular democracy with theocratic corporatism.

one middle-aged gentleman on Twitter, a man who at his age should really know better, finally came up with something that he believes feminists are wrong about: sexual harassment. Of course, in the grand tradition of creepy dudes everywhere, he was still arguing in bad faith, and pretended that sexually harassing women is sincere, if clueless flirting. He stood up for the male….wait for it….privilege to say whatever you want to any woman and have it interpreted, no matter how obviously it was creepy, as generously as possible. The right to corner women in elevators to creep them out, which is apparently the most sacred right ever concocted by a non-existent god to show how much he loved men more than women, is and always will be about what this multi-year meltdown of misogynists in the skeptic movement will be about. That, and really nothing else.

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As astute commenter YamaraTheGod noted, people tend to say “privilege” as a shorthand for “unexamined privilege”. It’s a useful concept in social justice, this notion that sometimes people behave in unjust ways because they don’t actually know how the other half lives. For instance, we all share the privilege of being able to buy cheap clothes because of unjust labor standards in overseas factories, but only some of us are aware of that fact. Those of us who are, however, don’t really benefit from being told to “check our privilege”, even if we’re saying things that support the system. For instance, if you shrugged off the Bangladesh factory collapse with “thems the breaks”, you’re just being a jerk right now, and you really ought to know better. In what case, being told to check your privilege is meaningless. You know you have unfair privileges. You just don’t give a fuck. In other words, I find the concept of examining your privilege to be limited, because it assumes that the only problem that those fighting for social justice face is one of education.

That’s what bothers me in the end the most. The feminist freethinkers who use the word “privilege” a lot aren’t being bullying or silencing. The opposite. They are being generous. They see a bunch of dudes screaming about elevators and say, “Clearly, you are a well-meaning person who is simply being blinded by unexamined privilege. Why not take the time to check that and listen to another person’s point of view?”

Unfortunately, what we’ve learned is you don’t get brownie points from reactionaries with this kind of good faith interpretation of their behavior. There’s another possibility besides unexamined privilege, usually just shortened to “privilege”. It could be that they have looked at their privileges, find them appealing, and would like to preserve them at the expense of basic decency and keeping the peace. Or, to be more blunt, it’s possible that when you tell people not to sexually harass other people, people who like harassing others—or those who haven’t tried it yet but like to keep their options open—will throw a fit and try to preserve their social license to harass without facing pushback. The people who threw a fit over sexual harassment policies did so by employing every bullying, harassing, and abusive social manipulation under the sun, after all. That evidence suggests, in fact, that simply just being into harassment is their thing, and they don’t like people threatening to take that from them.

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If it seems baffling to you that people are “into” harassment, I don’t know what to tell you. Why else would people harass? (Don’t say autism, for the love of god. People on the spectrum struggle to interpret social signals. Harassers, on the other hand, are masters at manipulating social rules and actual physical space to creep people out as much as they can get away with. It requires careful study of social signaling, not the opposite.) I got harassed on the sidewalk the other day, because that’s just part of the atmosphere of being female. I didn’t catch exactly what the guy said, because he muttered it, but what he wanted out of the situation couldn’t have been clearer. He had that sly smile, that glint in his eye that harassers get when they manage to capture their target’s attention and make them uncomfortable. It’s the feeling of power they have over you, the little jolt they get from putting a bitch in her place. Why people harass is not a mystery. It makes them feel good to exert power. This motivation is all over the Twitter rampage from the pro-harassment forces. They love drowning out useful tweets about real information with their anti-feminist garbage and ranting. It makes them feel good, like they have power. They can harass you and get under your skin and make you write blog posts about them, and then they feel powerful. It’s all of one cloth, and it’s not about unexamined privilege. It’s about being an asshole. We’re asking them to give up this jolt of feeling powerful they get from making other people sad or angry. No wonder they resent us.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/23/the-real-problem-with-check-your-privilege-its-too-generous/

[msongs]

1. the problem is democrats, not republicans. we all know what republicans are like, so why are some

democrats refusing to acknowledge the truth and continuing to act is if republicans will be reasonable? It is not correct to blame republicans as obstructionists when democrats appease republicans repeatedly in the name of "reaching out" and bipartisanship. By doing this "some" democrats betray their own values and constituents.