[Signal Boost] Tithenai: Linkspam: Scalzi, SWM, and the Necessity of Metaphor

Originally posted by tithenai at Linkspam: Scalzi, SWM, and the Necessity of MetaphorA few days weeks ago, John Scalzi wrote a post called Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. In it, he sought to explain the concept of privilege to men "without invoking the dreaded word 'privilege,' to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon." He did this by likening life to a video game, with Straight White Male as the easiest setting. He later wrote a follow-up to it and later some final notes.

Megan McCarron responded to the initial essay with a thoughtful, nuanced exploration of the metaphor's virtues and limitations; Chris Barzak took in both the original post and Megan's reply in order to critique Scalzi's positioning of class with reflections on his own experience; Erin Hoffman critiqued the gaming metaphor from a game designer's perspective; and Jim C. Hines, responding to commenters on Scalzi's article (which garnered 800 replies) who seemed to find multiple ways of missing its point, has a comprehensive round-up of statistics which support Scalzi's main thesis.

What I want to talk about is metaphor, and why metaphor is crucial to social justice.

Scalzi posted his essay a couple of days after I spent the better part of an early morning attempting to do some Racism 101 work with a straight white dude on Facebook. While so doing, I kept thinking that it was really, really important to me to find The Best Metaphor, because simple logic just wasn't having an effect. If I could just find The Best Metaphor, surely a world of understanding would open up for this dude, and he would Get It. I wanted One Metaphor to Rule Them All, One Metaphor to Find Them and Bring Them All and in the Searing Light of Privileged Insouciance Bind Them.

What I came up with is none of those things, but I'll share it further down anyway. It's the need that I'm thinking of right now.

Because privilege is, by its nature, invisible, and because we are resistant to being made aware of it, metaphor allows us to perceive its operations outside of ourselves while simultaneously encouraging us to understand how those operations relate to us. To get all, er, meta, metaphor is a mirror in which we can see the invisible knapsack before we begin to unpack it. Or it's a two-way street built between us and a new concept, allowing us to reach it and then return to our initial position enriched. It's in the etymology, this notion of carrying something in between.

But the strength of metaphor is also what makes it vulnerable: that removal from immediate reality in order to explain to someone benefiting from reality that they are so doing is often used as grounds for dismissal. Dozens of comments on Scalzi's blog say things like "this is a complex issue and you're making it too simple with your gaming metaphor, ergo you're wrong," when really the whole point is to attempt to lay the foundations for an understanding of the complexity.

And of course Scalzi's metaphor has limitations, and people like Meghan and Chris and Erin are right to point them out -- but the limitations do not invalidate his main point, nor do they change the fact that Scalzi's post is now a fantastic jumping-off point for these discussions. For instance, the day I started writing this post I saw that ann_leckie had written up a useful metaphor of her own which addresses the idea of privilege with a cafeteria full of bugs. I was especially struck by it because it was very similar to the way I'd tried to explain privilege and the responsibilities attendant on it to the guy on Facebook, locating its problems in environment, systems and food rather than individuals.

So this is what we do: we reach for metaphors. We struggle to make them encompass every possible aspect of our problems. We fail to do so because it is impossible, because the nature of the activity is to find valid similarities, not precise copies. And we swap them, and sometimes in so doing we improve them -- like, I don't know, evolving certain species of Pokémon.

Okay that was a simile.

Anyway, here's what I came up with.


Unfortunately, much of the world's water is poisoned for the vast majority of people, in a vast number of ways. There's a pollutant to which women are vulnerable, and a pollutant to which black people are vulnerable, and a pollutant to which trans* people are vulnerable, and a vast number of others -- almost as many pollutants out there as there are ways to be. Much of the world's water is a swampy soup of pollutants for most of the people. And because each pollutant is unique, many people suffer from multiple pollutants: a disabled woman of colour will suffer from at least three, and likely more, because the pollutants do not function discretely, but combine and mix in a person in order to make her sick in shiny new ways.

But people have to drink water to survive. So for most people, every day, there are choices to be made between whether they will be thirsty or whether they will be ill. Since being thirsty for long enough will make them ill anyway, though, most people end up drinking the polluted water.

Mysteriously, there are a few people who can drink the water without any trouble. Without examining too closely why this is -- where have these pollutants come from, anyway? Who is responsible for them? -- these people who can drink the water without getting sick end up strong, well-hydrated, unlikely to lose time to illness or thirst or the misery attendant on having to choose between illness and thirst. These people, though relatively few in the grand scheme of things, end up dominating the world because they can drink the water -- although you might ask whether they can drink the water because they're the ones dominating the world, certainly.

These people who can drink the water without suffering? They could, by virtue of their strength and their wellness, labour to make the water potable for more people. They could work at figuring out how to get the pollutants out. Some do.

But it takes effort. And there are a lot of people who can drink the water without suffering who might also say, "you know what, I LIKE the way the anti-woman pollutant makes the water taste. It's nice and tart (ahaha). I like the way the anti-class pollutant makes the water taste. Sure it means that some people can't drink the water, but can't they go find some of their own that's not polluted and leave me alone to sip my nice oppression-flavoured water in peace since it does no harm to me whatsoever?"

The trouble is, there is no other water. By virtue of no one being bothered to do anything about it, and the people who can drink the water being so powerful and catering only to themselves, the pollutants fall with the rain and spread and it takes finding underground springs and squeezing water out of plants and WORKING to find clean water. And since the people who need clean water the most are also the ones who are most likely to be already sick and hurting from the shitty readily available water, it's that much harder to get at.

But it's up to them to do the work because no one else can be bothered to.

And what makes that even worse is that sometimes, groups of sick people band together to remove a pollutant. Enough sick women get together and say ENOUGH, WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS POLLUTANT, AND WE ARE GOING TO WORK HARD AND FIGHT TO GET THIS ANTI-WOMAN POLLUTANT REMOVED. And they make such progress! All these suffering women get together and say ENOUGH and while some of the people who can drink the water grumble at how OPPRESSED they are by these sick women's demands, the anti-woman pollutant gets some treatment. And there is rejoicing over a victory, especially from the women who didn't suffer from any other pollutants!

But the women who still do say, "hooray, this is wonderful, one pollutant down! Shall we work on getting rid of the anti-race pollutant now?" And the women who no longer suffer from pollution say "what do you mean? Women don't suffer anymore." And the women who are still sick say "We are women, and we are still suffering."

And the tragedy of it is that so many of the women made strong will shrug and say "we fixed things for women, these other problems you're having aren't women's problems."

And it goes on, and on, and on.
It's a long-winded and overwrought way of saying "my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit," but there it is. It's how I find myself thinking of things lately. And it's another reason metaphor's important -- to help clarify things for ourselves as much as for others.

I welcome your thoughts.