Re: Thoughts on Shoehorning unrelated content into works of entertainment.
At this point, Dark, I feel that you are attempting to oversimplify the situation because it is more comfortable for you to do so.
There is not an ounce of "four legs good, two legs bad" present in any of my arguments thus far. I am asking you to accept that you have experienced, and probably still experience, male privilege, and other forms as well. This does not mean that you have never experienced oppression based on your gender, or on other factors. It certainly doesn't mean that the privilege you have experienced is your fault, or a bad thing that should be pinned on you at all. It is an awareness I am trying to ask you to accept, because in accepting that it is real, and does exist, and will in some cases apply to you, it may actually better enable you to understand the world in which you're living. You are where I was about six years ago.
Let me just be blunt for a sec.
If you've ever had to linger somewhere - maybe your ride was late, or you just had time to kill - and nobody harassed you, called the cops on you even though you had no good reason to be there, you may have been experiencing a very small form of privilege. As detailed in my last post, black people have had the police called on them simply for being at a Starbucks for more than twenty minutes. That black university student was napping on a couch, and woke up to a security guard asking her who she was and why she was there. Would this have even been a thing if she were white? I doubt it.
You have sometimes avoided negative consequences just by being who you are. The inverse is that there are people out there who, by dint of being who -they were, actually provoked those unwanted consequences. There is your privilege and oppression angle.
Remember, I am not asking you to internalize guilt, shame, or any other negative emotion. I'm asking you to accept that sometimes, due to things that are entirely outside of your control, you get a bit of a leg up in life compared to other people. At the end of the day though, I can't and won't demand this of you. If you want to play at agreeing to disagree, all I will tell you is that numbers, facts and sociological trends simply don't lie. Put another, sharper way, you don't have to tell me you understand and accept for me to know all the way down that the things I'm describing do exist.
Remember, also, that I am not trying to invalidate the negative experiences you do have. Some of those negative experiences may have soured you on an aspect of your person that you cannot control (being male, for instance), thus making it much, much harder for you to see clearly the advantages you still possess and probably still benefit from even if you don't know it.
There are people out there who want to bully and shame you into capitulation with a system you can't understand. There are people out there who want you to feel like slime if you're white, male, or experiencing some other form of privilege. I have demonstrated time and again that I am not one of these people. You oversimplify to your own detriment, though, not mine.
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