"Privilege" and the Assassination of Effective Discourse

[pErvinalia]

When you (female, black, etc) wonder why your paycheck is less than the white guy doing the same job, chalk it up to privilege. No it doesn't help to talk about it. I had the discussion with my white alpha investment banker male neighbor one day, and his reaction was that for his kids' sake he hopes it never goes away. Life isn't fair.

Sorry, but i really despise this kind of answer. Life might indeed not be "fair" at this moment, but that doesn't mean in any way at all that it must always remain unfair. If we could all answer all problems with essentially - "It's tooo hard..." - we'd live in a total shambles of a world (more so than we already do). As for that investment bwanker, of course he does. Inequality is one of the main driving forces behind capitalism. These fucks gain greatly by the availability of an exploited underclass. Anyway, that's off topic for here. I'll rant somewhere else about that.

[pErvinalia]

When you (female, black, etc) wonder why your paycheck is less than the white guy doing the same job, chalk it up to privilege. No it doesn't help to talk about it. I had the discussion with my white alpha investment banker male neighbor one day, and his reaction was that for his kids' sake he hopes it never goes away. Life isn't fair.

Life isn't fair, but it is not privilege. It might be a cultural bias, it might be that female black etc are less likely to negotiate, but it is certainly not law. In fact there are laws in most places that prevent such things. So in such a case, rather than aimlessly whining about privilege perhaps they would be better off finding out what legal routes they can take. If for example a women in the same job earns more than me, there may well be many factors. Perhaps she gets a tax rebate, perhaps sh'es been their longer, perhaps she negotiated a better salary or was wooed into that job by a better offer. The Good Lady Strange earns more than almost anyone on her floor including her own managers, including gay staff, asian staff, female staff and male staff because she negotiated a higher starting salary. Should that then be considered a matriarchal privilege, or could it be that some people are happy with what they have until they find out someone has more and refuse to accept that might actually be their own fault?

Hmm. Not sure if I can agree with the sentiments in there. Things like "cultural bias" and the like are nothing more than phenomena of social conditioning and learning (same thing). And this is kind of the thinking behind the "patriarchy" thing. So essentially "choices" made by various demographics, while appearing to be choices, are conditional on the biased system those demographics matured in. But fuck, I actually hate talking about "choice" and similar concepts as I always find myself navel gazing into issues of free will, and I really hate talking about free will as it urts me ed.

[Audley Strange]

Well I've been reading up far far too much on Patriarchy and to an extent there is some strong evidence that Patriarchy itself was heriarchical, thus while man (A) might have been the Pater Domus of his own property there were other Patriarchs (landowners Sun Kings Priests etc) to which man (a) was considered property. So we could see that such things like being press ganged or drafted to fight for wars or be executed could hurt men. However The Patriarchy is a specific term like privilege and misogyny are and the first two tend to be archaic and pertain to a code of laws that have been eroding over about 500 years. I see what they think they see but I refute both its usefulness to describe the state of the game we're in now and I'm not convinced that it was ever a potent force of oppression. Neglect of women, unwillingness to see them as equals, certainly, but my issue is that somehow it has been considered a willful construction designed for the sole purpose of keeping the ladies down.

I have a friend who looks at the entire thing in a different way and her suggestion is that it is a much much older problem that comes not from the desire to oppress women but rather Hero worship and the cultural underpinning in which men aspired to the sate of Hero God and Legend. I'm not saying it's true, but I can see how it would be plausible.

[Audley Strange]

Hmm. Not sure if I can agree with the sentiments in there. Things like "cultural bias" and the like are nothing more than phenomena of social conditioning and learning (same thing). And this is kind of the thinking behind the "patriarchy" thing. So essentially "choices" made by various demographics, while appearing to be choices, are conditional on the biased system those demographics matured in. But fuck, I actually hate talking about "choice" and similar concepts as I always find myself navel gazing into issues of free will, and I really hate talking about free will as it urts me ed.

Then drop the free.

I agree that there is a lot of social conditioning, however I don't see it as a plot. I see it as an arbitrary societal trajectory. Like languages, you don't have a choice in what language you speak and it's pretty fucking arrogant to suddenly start saying "oh I don't like this... change it now!" and expect society to conform to your demands without resistance. Yes a lot of that resistance comes from cultural lag but not all of it and this is where I think a lot of Feminist thought fall flat on it's face. Many of them utterly refuse to accept that there are probably biological reasons why our cultures developed the way they did.

[pErvinalia]

Well I've been reading up far far too much on Patriarchy and to an extent there is some strong evidence that Patriarchy itself was heriarchical, thus while man (A) might have been the Pater Domus of his own property there were other Patriarchs (landowners Sun Kings Priests etc) to which man (a) was considered property. So we could see that such things like being press ganged or drafted to fight for wars or be executed could hurt men. However The Patriarchy is a specific term like privilege and misogyny are and the first two tend to be archaic and pertain to a code of laws that have been eroding over about 500 years. I see what they think they see but I refute both its usefulness to describe the state of the game we're in now and I'm not convinced that it was ever a potent force of oppression. Neglect of women, unwillingness to see them as equals, certainly, but my issue is that somehow it has been considered a willful construction designed for the sole purpose of keeping the ladies down.

I'm not much of a feminist, but I think to "regular" feminists it doesn't imply wilfulness. It just describes a state of society. Is that close to the mark, or am I way off? Even the zealots at A+ claim that "intent" doesn't matter, all that matters is behaviours. Not that they follow that proscription one bit, but if even the loonies are saying that, then is it safe to say the vanilla fems say and follow it?

But just a quick rejoinder on the "wilful" thing - I think in terms of religious doctrine it has very much been a wilful program. I've got no doubt there is a doctrinal (or is that dogmatic?) patriarchy in at least Catholicism, Judaism and Islam. And this sort of thing (among other dogmatic issues, like gays and abortion etc) are reasons why I quite despise religion. Individual religionists might more or less be wonderful people and totally benign, but the doctrinal influence of religion on our societies sees these patriarchies slipping into social practice and systems. So, I guess for me is, does that doctrinal/dogmatic influence amount to enough to say that our societies are patriarchial? I'm not really sure of the answer as I haven't researched this enough, but one thing that is clear is that over time that religious patriarchial influence on society is decreasing. I wonder if the rad fems accept this?

I have a friend who looks at the entire thing in a different way and her suggestion is that it is a much much older problem that comes not from the desire to oppress women but rather Hero worship and the cultural underpinning in which men aspired to the sate of Hero God and Legend. I'm not saying it's true, but I can see how it would be plausible.

There's definitely going to be a biological underpinning of the social systems we have evolved. We can't look past that. But we also need to be careful not to be falling for the 'naturalistic fallacy'.

[hiyymer]

When you (female, black, etc) wonder why your paycheck is less than the white guy doing the same job, chalk it up to privilege. No it doesn't help to talk about it. I had the discussion with my white alpha investment banker male neighbor one day, and his reaction was that for his kids' sake he hopes it never goes away. Life isn't fair.

Life isn't fair, but it is not privilege. It might be a cultural bias, it might be that female black etc are less likely to negotiate, but it is certainly not law. In fact there are laws in most places that prevent such things. So in such a case, rather than aimlessly whining about privilege perhaps they would be better off finding out what legal routes they can take. If for example a women in the same job earns more than me, there may well be many factors. Perhaps she gets a tax rebate, perhaps sh'es been their longer, perhaps she negotiated a better salary or was wooed into that job by a better offer. The Good Lady Strange earns more than almost anyone on her floor including her own managers, including gay staff, asian staff, female staff and male staff because she negotiated a higher starting salary. Should that then be considered a matriarchal privilege, or could it be that some people are happy with what they have until they find out someone has more and refuse to accept that might actually be their own fault?

And since there are some successful black professionals now, racism is totally dead in America. Right? I always remember that documentary that one of the networks did some years ago, after the civil rights legislation was passed. They set up two equally attractive well dressed young men and put them in various situations like walking into a high end store, buying a car, renting an apartment, etc. The results were rather mind boggling. The unprivileged make it to the top despite white privilege. Not because it doesn't exist.

[Thinking Aloud]

There was an interesting post by Nicko on RatSkep about 'patriarchy' earlier, which echoes some of what's being said here:

Subject: Atheism+ hits the MSM

Trigger Warning!!!1! :

What would it take to falsify the concept of the patriarchy?

Like evolution, it's a broad framework that covers a lot of facts and theories and all parts of falsifiable, but probably the easiest way to disprove it would be to find that men aren't awarded advantages on the arbitrary basis of their sex. For example, that they don't get paid more, they get more job opportunities, don't dominate positions of power in governments and businesses, etc etc.

First of all, I would like to second Precambrian Rabbi's disdain for your attempt to link scepticism of feminist ideology with opposition to evolutionary theory. Please stop that shit. You are well-informed enough to know that there is nothing like the empirical support enjoyed by evolutionary theory for any psychological or sociological theory.

But let's look at the bolded for a bit. You are asserting a causative role between maleness and power/employment/pay. I of course concede that there is a correlation. I do not concede that it has been shown to be causal. I cannot show up for a job interview and list "I have a penis." on my CV.

Let's look at the pay gap. It does exist. But of course the question we need to ask is whether it is due to gender or the choices that different genders tend to make. Seriously, if an employer could get a woman to do a job for $8.00 that he would have to pay a man $10.00 to do, no man would be employed ever. Once factors like seniority, interruptions to one's career, training, choice of field, choice of subfield etc. are taken into account, the pay gap either disappears or reverses in favour of women. Look, for example at Dr. Laurie A. Morgan's, “Glass-Ceiling Effect or Cohort Effect? A Longitudinal Study of the Gender Earnings Gap for Engineers, 1982 to 1989,” (American Sociological Review No. 63; August, 1998; pp. 479–493) where it is shown that - when we allow for these factors - there is no wage gap:

Analyses of the overall gender earnings effects for U.S. engineers and how these effects vary with experience yield two major findings. First, the effects on earnings of being female - or earnings penalties to women - are relatively flat for each of the cohorts over the seven-year period of the SSE (1982-1989). This suggests that gender earnings penalties are the result of cohort rather than glass-ceiling effects - that the earnings penalty to women engineers is more a matter of when they started careers than of how long they have worked. Second, in absolute terms, earnings penalties for younger cohorts of women (those having started their careers after 1971) are essentially zero as of 1989. This finding is also supported by the finding of no overall gender earnings penalty in the SWE data, in which more than two thirds of the women surveyed entered the engineering profession after 1981. These results suggest that not only has there been an improvement for women starting careers more recently, but also that this improvement may be complete.

Or we can look at Dr. Lawrence C. Baker's, “Differences in Earnings Between Male and Female Physicians,” (The
New England Journal of Medicine Vol. 334, No. 15; April 11, 1996; pp. 960–964):

The difference in annual earnings between young male and young female physicians in 1990 can be fully attributed to differences in hours worked, specialty, practice setting, and other characteristics. Although earlier studies found that men earned more than women, even after adjustment for such differences, I found no evidence that young male and young female physicians with the same characteristics earned different amounts in 1990.

Job opportunities? Male employment took a harder hit than female employment in the GFC.

Business power? Women tend to cluster in fields that dead-end at upper managerial positions. CEOs just do not get drawn from the ranks of the HR department. They get promoted from operations and sales, both areas that women choose to go into with less frequency.

Political power? Women make up more than half the electorate. They get elected just fine. They run less often. Again, one can hardly claim discrimination for under-representation resulting from under-participation. I would also note that the personality characteristics required to gain overt power in our societies are ones that women - to their credit - tend not to commonly possess. Put bluntly, there are proportionally more men who are power/money hungry bastards than there are women who are power/money hungry bitches.

Men are over-represented at the "top" of society. They are also over-represented at the "bottom". Men are more likely to be unemployed, homeless, addicted, imprisoned or die early deaths. If you won't accept the latter as evidence of a matriarchy - and you shouldn't - why should I accept the former as evidence of a patriarchy?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

It appears that we have uncovered a new logical fallacy - argumentum ad privilegum - in which the speakers degree of privilege is addressed rather than their viewpoint.

[Thinking Aloud]

It appears that we have uncovered a new logical fallacy - argumentum ad privilegum - in which the speakers degree of privilege is addressed rather than their viewpoint.

whining.jpg (12.44 KiB) Viewed 2199 times

[hiyymer]

It appears that we have uncovered a new logical fallacy - argumentum ad privilegum - in which the speakers degree of privilege is addressed rather than their viewpoint.

"every man's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; the viewpoint of Thomas Jefferson. So did the slave-owner take a stand for equal opportunity or was he just the biggest hypocrite in American history? Did it make a difference 200 years later, the possibility on which MKLJr could call us to count? So maybe it's a matter of whose viewpoint is doing the addressing. The white colonial elite, chaffing at the divinely protected privilege of the king, could maybe care less. But, for his slaves toiling in his fields. what Thomas Jefferson was doing might have seemed more relevant than his viewpoint about it.

[DaveD]

It appears that we have uncovered a new logical fallacy - argumentum ad privilegum - in which the speakers degree of privilege is addressed rather than their viewpoint.

[Tero]

That only happens at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

LOL

My son likes that stand up guy that says: who doesn't like watermelon and chicken?

[Robert_S]

"Patriarchy" the word is often no more than trolling. Seriously.

It is trolling of the most anti-human kind.

You can speak of patriarchal values and assumptions that tend to press men and women into roles that might not fit the person and it makes perfect sense. Old roles that probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but like our appendix and coccyx are sometimes innocuous, sometimes a pain in the ass and life threatening on occasion.

But when people use the phrase "the patriarchy", knowing that the first reaction is to think of a grand conspiracy to keep wimmins in their place, and keep using it and complain about how people are so resistant to their ideas, I can only conclude that the people are actually going for the reaction that they have been reliably getting for some time now. Why? Because helping people feel their being accused of being complicit in such a conspiracy is a sure fire way to get a negative reaction. That reaction is then used against the person making it, gaining the femitroll both a victim status as ze has been hated on and also a sense of superiority to those that just don't get it.

That's what they are over there. Femitrolls. That's what the academics who formed the language were. They weren't smart enough to go into engineering or science, but they weren't dumb enough to work a real job. So they invented forms of trolling and a special trolling language that the people involved in actually getting shit done could not wrap their heads around long enough to refute. That's my take on the whole of post-modernism: College level trolling.

[Azathoth]

It appears that we have uncovered a new logical fallacy - argumentum ad privilegum - in which the speakers degree of privilege is addressed rather than their viewpoint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

I think I might make some bingo cards when I have some time. They use all of them

[Audley Strange]

And since there are some successful black professionals now, racism is totally dead in America. Right?

That is a preposterous inference from what I stated. However it provides a good example. No racism is not dead in America however as far as I know there is no private law in place that allows people to discriminate on race therefore IT IS NOT PRIVILEGE. You could not have, literally could not have Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton in power if such were true.
I accept there may be traditional cultural biases, but it is not evidence of a specific group dedicated to designing a culture of oppression.

I always remember that documentary that one of the networks did some years ago, after the civil rights legislation was passed. They set up two equally attractive well dressed young men and put them in various situations like walking into a high end store, buying a car, renting an apartment, etc. The results were rather mind boggling. The unprivileged make it to the top despite white privilege. Not because it doesn't exist.

It does not exist and I will continue to say that until someone provides me with legislation that proves discrimination on race or gender. Also that documentary you talk about was "some years ago". Well that was some years ago and while I accept that Americans, like the rest of us, do not live in an egalitarian paradise, to blame everything on privilege is erroneous. (I am well aware this is a semantic argument, but semantics are important). The culture is changing, people say "the N word" as a polite way of saying nigger, because when anyone in the public eye says "nigger" there is rightly or wrongly (dependent on context) an outcry. I would suggest that such a thing would not have happened even 20 years ago. Racism does not just work in one direction, it is not codified in law, the cultural zeitgeist tolerates it less and less.

Also I would suggest that racism is not equivalent to sexism and sexism is not equivalent to misogyny, that the cultural biases that are endured by women are not part of a plot by some moustache twirling rapists any more that the cultural biases against black people are a plot by the KKK. If they wish to address cultural problems, people would take them more seriously if they provided actual evidence, the reason they do not, the reason that these are generally anecdotal whines is because if they had actual evidence they would have the law on their side.