Scandalous Illustrations

"Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive." G. K. Chesterton

I'd never heard of Amanda Marcotte before, but I caught the sound of general hilarity, schadenfreude, and innocent delight in poetic justice.

I gather that said Marcotte wrote a feminist tract designed to "empower" women titled It's a Jungle Out There. Turns out that the illustrations she picked involve a busty female Tarzan demolishing attacking African tribesmen. You can guess what happened next. Her apologies don't seem to be good enough to calm the storm.

The blogger linked to above has some of the offending pictures and an extended quotation from one "Twisty Faster," another "feminist" writer. The illustrations do suggest that Marcotte is a little slow on the draw. The explanation from Twisty turned a little light on for me, though.

That's right! White privilege! It's just like male privilege, except in this context it's just for white chicks. Where dude bloggers may exercise control over women according to their status, white feminist bloggers may exercise control over women of color according to their status.

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In the example cited above, the one where I allude to having posted a pro-Marcotte book dealio, the "control" aspect was expressed in my failure to address the current controversy. In so failing, I effectively endorsed white privilege in feminist bloggery, and closed down a potential avenue of discussion. That this was unintentional is of no consequence; it was perceived by many, and rightly so, as an example of what has been popularly referred to as "circling the wagons."

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The sad irony is that I never cut dudes the tiniest bit of slack in the male privilege department. They write in and say, "But Twisty, I never rape my girlfriend, aren't you being just a little shrill?" And I always reply, "You might," I used to tell them, "be the nicest male dude on 9 planets, but the fact remains that you're a dude, so you automatically benefit from male privilege whether you actively choose to or not, and unfortunately this privilege, though it may be invisible to you, is experienced by women as misogyny, again, whether you like it or not."

It's the same exact thing with white privilege. So, if you're a white feminist blogger: you may not choose it, you may hate it, you may ignore it, or you may not even see it, but you do exercise your white privilege daily, and it is absurd to expect that this exercise would be perceived by women of color as anything but racism. Because it is racism, dum-dum.

Got it. A's "privilege" is "experienced by" B as "misogny." Or "racism."

And if I, with two (so far) working legs climb on my roof to fix a shingle that is "experienced by" my neighbor in a wheelchair as "ableism."

There's another word for the experience of unhappiness with someone else's privilege. Envy. Used to be one of the seven deadly sins, but these days I guess you get to blame the other person for it.