About male privilege...

The President of the United States today said that it is a "scary time for young men in America."

Men have been shaken by the wave of hostility coming at them from women all over the United States. And by men I mean mostly white men, but in gender issues the relationships become more complicated. Let's focus on the white dudes for right now, since they are the most egregious offenders.

You don't have to want to be a domineering asshole to find yourself the beneficiary of generations of domineering assholes. In fact, as a member of a privileged class it is basically impossible to separate yourself from your advantages.

Witness the rage of privileged white males in government who face a challenge to their anointed candidate for the Supreme Court. Witness the quivering indignation of the man himself. They know that they face the biggest challenge ever presented to their ability to rule with impunity over women and minorities. This is life or death for their way of life. Maybe the patriarchy won't fall immediately if Brett Kavanaugh doesn't get a seat on the Supreme Court, but the battle has solidified opposition to it. Losing it will weaken them further. Winning it, on the other hand, will fortify their defenses for an indefinite period. One can only hope that in either case the movement to end their hegemony will lead to a better world, not just another hegemony.

All I can say to white men -- as a white man -- is that this would have hurt a lot less if y'all had accepted it well back in the last century. Maybe your fear even then was fully justified, and the paybacks would have been hell. We'll never know now, will we? And the paybacks really will be hell now. They will continue to ramp up steeply as long as you drag your feet.

I will admit that I never gave it much thought when I was growing up. I worried about how I would earn a living. I wondered if I would be able to get a job that would keep me in the lifestyle to which my parents were accustomed, because I knew nothing else. As far as I knew, we weren't rolling in dough. My father did okay, but he and my mother had both been children during the Great Depression. They grew up with competing urges of compulsive thrift battling against the desire to live large. Everyone in America looked up to the wealthy. At that time, that automatically meant white people.

Add religion to this and you can write off a lot as God's responsibility. "God has a plan." "God will care for them." May God help them, because I won't do more than toss an occasional charitable donation at the problem."

No one that I knew of ever said anything about massive lifestyle changes to balance out the prosperity.

See how any discussion of white male privilege veers into economics? Daddy gives the allowance, see? Daddy gives Mommy the housekeeping money, and she'd better not blow it. The lucky wife gets a bigger allowance. Maybe she exerts her power by henpecking her man into bringing home more money and letting her get away with whatever she wants.

You heard almost nothing about the accomplishments of women.

Mostly white men did the hiring and firing, and engaged in the dirty business of politics and government. Rooms full of cigar smoke and self congratulatory flatulence were no place for a lady. The women who broke into those citadels had to be able to deal with that, and were changed by it to become something similar to their opponents. We are only now finally seeing women present their point of view without justifying it to masculine values. They may have gotten the vote in 1920, but they were still subject to the coercion of the male establishment.

Be afraid, white men. You're very close to finding out what it's really like to be a disadvantaged minority. I'm afraid, because I look like you. As much as I wanted things to be different, I was already in the minority of the privileged majority. I alone could not have stopped this. I had enough to do, weeding out the programming I had absorbed, as I learned to recognize each piece of it. Because you cherished dominance so much, and feared equality, you will soon be distinctly unequal for a while. The first effect will be the loss of credibility of a white male speaker or writer. It will be automatic suspicion and dismissal of ideas put forward by a white man. It will be a higher bar of proof, and greater scrutiny of sources and reasoning. The shoe will be on the other foot. You'll have to face prejudice just because, at long last, enough people are tired of your shit.

You want to know why there's black pride, gay pride, feminism? Y'all made that. Then you try to answer it with white pride, and white identity, and hetero male dominance. You made the whole situation happen.

We cannot know whether some other subgroup in human evolution would have appointed itself the Asshole Emperors of the World if white people hadn't done it. We live in this world, and in this world the gang that's on top right now got there by being the best at not playing nicely with others. You accepted life as a competition. When you were at the top of the game you could have changed how the prizes were distributed. Instead you just tried to be the biggest winners in the history of the world. Winning streaks end, boys. They always do.