Of course it isn’t acceptable. I never said any different.
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Satire or not, the poster has been exiled from the land of BB. And I really doubt it was satire, anyhow.
OK… I don’t disagree with you. This is probably not a ‘real’ account. But if it was, and the welcome from this new community was (right now when I’m posting this) 9 replies berating this person’s dissenting opinion, why would they stay in a community which so obviously isn’t welcoming to other opinions?
Sometimes fart noises coming out of your mouth don’t qualify as “opinions”
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Because their opinion is utter, dangerous bullshit, and so is your support of that deplorable “opinion”. Good riddance to trash. Not all opinions should be entertained, even for a moment.
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I don’t understand why the term ‘privilege’ is so offensive to people when it is used in a racial or gender bias context. If we say that people in wealthy, affluent countries are privileged compared to people in 3rd world countries, you don’t get nearly as many ruffled feathers. It is simply obvious: A person born in relative safety, development and wealth is more advantaged and luckier than someone born in abject poverty in a war zone. It’s not about guilt, it’s about circumstances.
It is no more inappropriate to refer to privilege to describe how circumstances differ for people of different race/gender. As you say yourself, everyone should have access to the same respect, rights and safety regardless of race, creed and gender, however they do not. Some people are more privileged than others. This is merely a statement of fact. A girl born in Sweden is more privileged than a girl born in Mali. No one would claim that either girl bears any personal guilt or fault in this situation. Also, one could potentially find a privileged girl in Mali and an abused, empovrished girl in Sweden, yet it wouldn’t make the initial statement untrue for all practical purposes.
The guilt response to the word privilege is a knee-jerk reaction. It doesn’t discredit the term nor its reality. People need to learn that guilt is not what is needed or expected, but they do need to accept that there are pernicious forces around them that hinder people who are not like themselves and that the fact that these forces don’t affect them (or even help them) doesn’t mean they don’t exist altogether. Simply realizing and accepting that fact without a defensive stance would be a huge step forward.
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I think you’re totally right, but what gets me is that it’s SO … textbook. It’s like the A, B, C’s of how a Sexist Asshat would respond to this sort of post. No originality or thought put into it. I suppose it still surprises me that people who are intelligent enough to use the internet, and who are aware of BoingBoing, and take the time and effort to comment, are still this fucking simple.
@Synesthesia Was your comment about self-awareness directed at me, or at the drive-by sexist? I was being sort of incredulous with that comment, in a “really? seriously?” sort of way, if that helps. UGH I am so tired of this crap. It makes me twitchy, as it should make everyone.
A lot of the stuff mentioned in that video is just plain harassment. though. It's unacceptable anywhere.
Oh, it’s not acceptable, anywhere? Is that why women get harassed so often? Because it’s unacceptable? Let me have a hearty laugh. The reason it happens so often is because so many people accept it, or dismiss it. BTW, you are dismissing it as “just plain harassment” and ignoring the fact that it happens to women a lot more than it does to men, including in this context.
Disclaimer: Not that men don’t get harassed. Of course they do. The fact that I have to add this disclaimer, however, is obnoxious.
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Hahaha, of course it’s at the driveby sexist. Don’t sweat it. I’m sorry, i thought something was off about the way I phrased that. English is not my mother tongue.
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I was almost positive due to your other comments, but I don’t like to assume! Thank you! And no problem, don’t you sweat it. It happens!
I think you and I were leaving similar comments in similar tones now that I think about it. 
Ughhhh. 
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I would disagree with you there. Men joking with other men about the relative size of their penises is an entirely different matter from men joking (or harassing, or making snide comments, etc.) with a female gamer about any particular body part. Men head up the power structure in this case–they’re not at risk of disassociation or disavowal because of a petty or shitty comment, whereas the female gamers are already starting at -1.
These issues (specifically in this case questions about body parts) shouldn’t be a big deal because we should all be a little more adult in our communications, but clearly we’re not able to do that so easily. And I’d argue it does have to do with gamers in that there is clearly a communication problem between the sexes in online games. You speak of the collective heads getting out of the collective asses–that collective is gamers, and specifically, male gamers who can’t get beyond the “Women should just get over it” viewpoint.
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So you’re finding the video to be less than useful? Do you have a better idea?
As for @scottbp’s statement that we should all be more welcoming to other opinions, you are aware that expressing an opinion of intolerance and bigotry is a rather poor way of discussing difficult topics, right?
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If you are going to quote my reply to another poster, then please take the time to read the entire conversation. My point was the video identifies behavior that constitutes harassment. If people are not already able to understand this is bad and should not be tolerated, then I am not sure the video will help them.
That’s a fair comment. However, if you look at every single BB thread about:
- Gamergate
- Gun control
- Sexism in tech
- Gamergate x 2
then in Every. Single. Thread. you’ll find spanking brand new accounts which invariably spew out the same talking points without fail. Sometimes they claim to have been lurking for years, despite being identical in every way to all the other single-serving accounts.
Invariably, there’ll be a tiny fraction who do hold that position, have been reading BB for years and aren’t trolls. However, they’ve basically had their position buried by the 99% of single issue drive-by trolls.
You can blame ethics in games journalism for that.
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Yeah, make a video that’s not cheesy and lame. I think that should be obvious from the tone of my post.
Edit: Big misunderstanding. Most of post removed.
Sorry, that’s from the American constitution. I’m not American. My own rights are (non-exhaustively) enumerated in the International Declaration of Human Rights and in the European Convention of Human Rights. Also, I thought the American Constitution explicitly mentioned other “rights” as such, without referring to them as privileges.
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But you did that by essentially shitting all over the lived experience of a bunch of people. Not cool.
See? You have no clue about the issue. So why poke fun at it?
Oh, yeah. You totally showed us!
You need these kinds of videos, dry and–yeah–even cheesy, as much as you need humorous, entertaining presentations of the same subject. You need angry people calling others out for their bullshit as much as you need welcoming voices, dry academic voices, to educate.
People come to understand this stuff from different angles. I was always a damn tree-hugging flowers-in-my-hair liberal so I just kinda dismissed this stuff as, yeah, sure, I love everyone, whatever, I don’t need to do anything, these videos aren’t for me. It’s only when an utterly furious feminist was yelling about privilege (I forget who it was) that it kinda shocked me, made me get defensive, then made me read up on it. Then I read some essays and articles, watched some videos like this, and I realised, hey, this is something I always kinda knew, but never really acknowledged.
So yeah, it’s not cool (it doesn’t even have a rap by a B-list celeb, like you pointed out) but it’s still useful. Others will take the material and present it in different ways, comics, humour, games, whatever.
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Man… don’t do that. Maybe he’s commenting in good faith, maybe not, but give him the benefit of the doubt. If you want to make snarky comments at trolls, there’s bound to be a entertainingly stupid one along any minute. This is a feminism-in-gaming thread, after all.
It’s a valid critique. I wonder all the time, is any of this going to change anyone’s mind?
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It’s a bigger problem than that, I believe. Deliberate, coordinated efforts to deflect or disrupt online conversations have been a problem for years. There are professionals acting directly, such as PR firms employing astroturfing; there are professionals acting indirectly, as with the 50 Cent Party. And there are advocates of various causes who coordinate their actions on the same model, with varying degrees of formal organization and success. Gamergate is just a recent, prominent example of this. It’s been an issue for years.
I worry sometimes that we may have come down too hard on a sincere newcomer, but given how common it is to see new accounts spewing the same talking points when certain issues come up, I think we’re erring in the right direction.
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I’ve presented one theory why this is the case; do you actually not understand my reasoning, or do you just not agree? You might argue that my reasoning is flawed and at the same time understand that there will be a significant number of people who think that way. It’s often not really a matter of whether people “should” feel offended by something; the fact is, people are, and the question is, what are the costs/disadvantages of refraining to use the allegedly offensive term?
I do think the word “privilege” has strong negative connotations in general. These negative connotations are two-fold:
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Privileges are “granted” and may be taken away again. Relabeling someone’s rights as privileges is offensive because there is the implied threat of taking them away.
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Privileges are what the French Revolution set out to abolish. Privilege is the opposite of Equality. Equality is seen as desirable. Excessive privilege used to get you beheaded.
Of course the word can be used non-offensively. I can politely say, “It’s my privilege”; and when I say that, I am actually saying, “I do not deserve this, thank you for treating me better than I deserve. See, I’m going out of my way to be humble”.
Privilege is a term I’d use for “more than the expected norm”, not as a purely relative term. People in wealthy countries enjoy the privilege of being able to use more than their fair share of our planet’s resources. The problem is not only that others get less than they deserve, it’s that we actually take more than we deserve. A part of our wealth is actually built on the exploitation of poorer countries. I also tend to think of large material disparities in wealth as an injustice per se (in American terms, that might make me a socialist; but I’m European, so it’s normal for me ;-)).
So, in the case of global wealth disparities I actually agree with the use of the word “privilege”; we should not only be aware that others have it worse, we should not only try to help them, we should feel bad about using more than our share of limited resources.
if I end up in a job where I get paid more than an equally-qualified woman, I will consider myself privileged. But that’s because in that case I’d actually think it proper for some of my income to be given
to my female colleague instead. As in, I have something that can and should be taken away in order to create equality.
By contrast, a white male gamer who is not actively a jerk does not profit from the fact that there are other white male gamers who are.
When does the speaker get to define how a term is to be understood, and when do the people offended by what you are saying get to decide that a term is offensive? It’s a hard question.
True. However, using terms that can be understood as offensive can put people into a defensive stance. It does not really matter whether you have a cogent argument that shows that the term should not be understood as offensive.
And, never attack people for being defensive. It’s counter-productive when you’re trying to convince them. And if you’re just trying to “win” an argument, I’d consider it a flawed argument and a dirty rhetorical trick - you’re trying to ensnare your opponent in a trap of either agreeing with your argument, or confirming it by trying to deny it. You will try to contradict me now, won’t you? 
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