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

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Amanda Marcotte addressing last week's Women in Secularism conference.



By Amanda Marcotte
Thursday, May 23, 2013 9:34 EDT

In the comments of this post and on Twitter two days ago, I laid down a gauntlet: Since so many anti-feminist “skeptics” (I refuse to acknowledge the skepticism of someone who won’t apply it to gender roles and patriarchy, when these are major societal issues) were having multi-year meltdowns of tone policing feminists, I just wanted to know why. Over and over, I kept seeing the phrase: “You shouldn’t be able to call me privileged/misogynist/asshole/bigot just because I disagree with you!” This phrase is meant to force the conversation into more tone policing and rules-lawyering about how one is allowed to express disagreement, a debate that is set up so that progressives just give up and go home since any expression of displeasure at reactionary sentiments is considered “intolerant”, no matter how mild, as I noted yesterday.

So, I had one question. Okay, you “disagree”. About what, exactly?

After all, the answer to that question determines the validity of the whine. They know this, which is why they reference their disagreements ellipitcally. If you come right and say what your real problems with feminism are, you out yourself not as a reasonable person who has reasonable disagreements with those hysterical bitches, but someone who openly holds anti-woman positions that just so happen to conflict with what a rigorous examination of scientific fact and skepticism about appeals to tradition would lead one to believe. My belief was that the feminist detractors would not be, despite calling themselves “brave heroes”, brave enough to articulate the actual meat of their objections, but would fall back on the not-talking-about-the-thing-we’re-talking-about strategy of tone policing. I was correct. Almost no one produced a substantive complaint about the actual ideas feminism brings to the table.

I tried! I gave them a list of things that feminists support, so they could argue against them. Things like the right to choose, the right to live free of violence, equal pay, or hell, even the expansion of the social safety net. I pointed out that there were many feminists who spoke and brought actual arguments and evidence to the table at Women in Secularism, and they could argue with any of them! I got crickets. Just kidding! I got more tone policing, but no substantive arguments. It’s definitely not because of previous rounds of bans of people for harassing me and commenters drained the numbers, either, because this time around another dozen people got banned for inability to follow this most basic rule.

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