Superb post!

One of my favorite profs summarized it as “There are privileges nobody should have and privileges everybody should have.”

This is a quite good attempt to unpack a concept that is thrown about a lot but is too-rarely defined or categorized.

I would say, though, that I think one of the biggest difficulties comes in drawing the line between 1 and 3, not 1 and 2.

For instance, yes, good looks gets one some privilege, but isn’t it a longstanding principle of feminism to try and make the culture more aware and enlightened about this in the hope that it isn’t so much of a privilege in the future? Doesn’t that make it more of a 1 than a 3?

There are true “3’s”—I would actually say that a portion of the privilege of the able-bodied falls within that. Of course we should build ramps and elevators and do all we can to ensure the full participation of the disabled, but there’s no way you can make life goals just as easy to attain for someone who has a serious disability, i.e., the privilege of simply being able to move around easier because one isn’t in a wheelchair isn’t going away, even though it isn’t fair.

The other thing I would add is that the 3’s are one reason why we need a progressive income tax and liberal social programs. You can’t take away certain privileges, but you can recognize that groups of people have benefitted from them, tax those people, and redistribute some of the proceeds to assist those who don’t have the benefit of the privilege.

Mostly agree, but there’s something contextual that’s missing here.  I’m not sure how to explain it, but if Oprah chastised you on account of your white privilege over her, would that be valid? Would the two of you have to break out score cards listing, race, class, sex, sexual orientation?

I think Oprah broke the fucking mold.

Thanks for this post. I actually weighed in on PD’s side over at Shakesville. For the folks who were getting upset, I thought it was a case of “If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.” But enough people were offended that I was forced to concude she probably didn’t express exactly what she really meant. Because I was sympathetic to the point I thought she was trying to make, this post really clarifies some of the issues involved, especially as regards to privilege.

You talk about a certain amount of economic inequality as being part of category 3, but obviously some things are going to be sort of cloudy as to whether they go into category 2 or 3. We have the right to decent shelter, but do we have the right to own a home? Probably not. I’d be hard pressed to argue for a right to own a car, but many Americans would have a hard time getting to their jobs without them and don’t consider owning one a “privilege.” If someone walked up to me and claimed ownership of my property for the collective good, I’d be pretty skeptical.  Yet I also believe that if we are ever going to make a serious dent in the problems of climate change and world economic inequality, most Americans are going to have to accept a much lower level of general consumption and reconsider some pretty fundamental things about the way our society is organized. At what exact point does it stop being “expanding a basic right to everyone” and start being “something that just isn’t equal but cannot be remedied without violating one party’s rights”? That fuzzy gray area is pretty uncomfortable, especially for progressives. We want to do the right thing and play our part, but we’re also tied up in global economic systems that we cannot really extricate ourselves from. But many of us also know, in our heart of hearts, that we could give up a lot more, do a lot more than we do.

And I still think that the really strong emotions PD elicited from a lot of commenters are due, at least in part, to how uncomfortable that gray area is.

Basic human rights that everyone deserves, but only some people have,

Uh-oh…

If you’re going to use that as a category, you’re going to need to expand on the basis on stating that someone “deserves” something, given the disagreement on precisely that topic.  It’s not something that can be slid over.

“Nothing is too good for the working class.”
  - Rudolph Rocker, anarcho-syndicalist

This is MY opinion of what rights people deserve…

Well, number 3 is interesting to me.

In a sense, the large middle-classes do a huge amount of damage, in many areas, not just the environment—it *is* the petit bouggies that are most in favor of negative rights for everyone else, for example…

On the other hand, as in what Amanda is talking about number three, there are difficulties in handling many types of privileges because they are in a nexus of rights, properties, opinions that create a structure which actively opposes reform.  This is because the system is set-up in such a fashion that being inefficient creates huge pools of people who are dependent on that inefficiency.  For example, if we want to genuinely reform health care, it almost certainly means throwing hundreds of thousands of insurance people out of work and it means that doctors will have to have their pay revised downwards—even as their student loans stays the same.

This kind of thing makes equality very difficult to grasp on an intellectual and moral level, and makes a constituency who doesn’t want to give a damn a near inevitable event.

Yes.  I think people deserve a right to a living wage, health care, life, the pursuit of happiness, etc.  The idea that rights are something people are entitled to hasn’t been really disputed for centuries now, unless your only purpose was to piddle over semantics.

No, the operative words there are “I think”.  I repeat, there are disagreements over what people “deserve” precisely because there are many “I thinks” bandied around and no objective standard given (or possibly even possible).

What’s a living wage?  Who pays for a person’s right to health care, and what are the limits? And who decides?  Do people deserve a job?  What do people deserve within their working lives as of right?

This isn’t piddling over semantics; it’s a fundamental question. What are human rights, who decides, and on what basis?

Excellent. I’ve always been slightly uncomfortable with the word privilege the way it’s sometimes used, “You men have the privilege to walk down the street without fear of being harrassed, threatened, objectified etc.” as if it sucks that men have that privilege. Er, no it doesn’t, it sucks that women *don’t*. But I like the way you divided those categories.

Amanda, I agree we aren’t going to banish good looks, and I am not arguing about their effects in areas such as sexual attractiveness (we can’t and shouldn’t force or persuade people to screw folks they aren’t attracted to!), but in the more public realms, such as job applicants, classrooms, politics, etc., I would argue that good looks should be treated as a category 1 and not a category 3, at least in the sense that we should be raising consciousness to make them matter less. Indeed, I always thought that was a rather central claim of feminism.  (Of course, I was in college when “The Beauty Myth” came out, so it probably had a disproportionate impact on my beliefs.)

I feel bad about the post I wrote earlier today, in that I might have been unduly harsh, though I’m still thinking that everything I said was right. 

There’s nothing to feel bad about.

Not only PD’s post, but the general vibe of Shakesville, has earned your criticism and more.

For months now, Shakesville has been going the way of No Quarter—turning into what is functionally a Republican site, under cover of “radical feminism!!!1!!1!”

Between PD’s rant about “just be gateful for what you have before demanding some measley scraps from the Wall Street bailout, you plebs” on the one hand, and Melissa McEwan’s devolution into a PUMA in all but name, what’s left to like over there?

If “Feminism” can be used to rationalize and accomodate all the bullshit you see at Shakesville, then “feminism” doesn’t have any use as an analytical tool or a political category any more.

I think the core difference here is between the positive and negative. People react badly to negative portrayals of privilege (I.E. Men have to be harassed threatened, objectified while walking down the street, or we have to give up our houses and our cars and live in poverty), but not to positive portrayals. That we have to extend things to the unprivileged is easy.

There is a problem when it comes to ways where that just can’t happen. The economics privilege we’re talking about here is a good example. I think that it can be done, just not under current 1st world standards. And I’m not talking about lowering standards, per se. Just changing them.

that was a very lovely and helpful post. i was irritated and upset by PD’s post this morning, but didn’t have time to give it much afterthought. seeing the different meanings the word ‘privilege’ has to carry clarifies the issue a great deal, and i will try to keep that in mind when people are discussing rights and privileges. on another note, i think PD had a point in reminding us to be grateful… but that doesn’t mean i should stop working for what’s right because otherwise i’m not being thankful enough for what i have. though she didn’t say it like that, i think it very much came across that way. just because i’m angry about x doesn’t mean i can’t also be thankful for y. i’m glad i have a home, and i want to make sure every other person does as well. one can be full of gratitude and yet still desire to work for change; i think people are capable of more than one emotion/motivation at a time. We shouldn’t depreciate one in order to draw attention to the other; or, more in tune with PD’s post, to remind those who are working for good things that they should remember what we have. obviously we do, cos we want everyone to share in those benefits. i’m not working to end poverty for me, i want to end it for the everyone. i don’t want reproductive rights for just myself, but for all women, and while i’m thankful for what i have, i don’t intend to give up until everyone has the same privileges.
anyway, thanks amanda, those were two great responses.

Wow, great posts today
But ”It’s not fair that some people can walk and others can’t, but the last thing we should do is try to create equality by cutting some people off at the knees.”

I don’t know, I can think of a few we could shorten

This isn’t piddling over semantics; it’s a fundamental question. What are human rights, who decides, and on what basis?

Amanda already answered that. She said the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good starting point on what are basis human rights. It’s not definitive, but it’s the best we’ve come up with so far.

For months now, Shakesville has been going the way of No Quarter—turning into what is functionally a Republican site, under cover of “radical feminism!!!1!!1!”

That would explain the DOZENS of anti-McCain posts there.

I’d be hard pressed to argue for a right to own a car, but many Americans would have a hard time getting to their jobs without them and don’t consider owning one a “privilege.”

On the other hand, in places where most people can get around without a car, owning one very much is a privilege.  Sometimes, and this is where it gets interesting, it’s a #1, and sometimes it’s a #3.  Many New Yorkers (for instance) who own cars do so because they have the disposable income to maintain a (nice, new) car in the city despite the prohibitive costs of insurance, parking, gas, etc.  Others have cars because of circumstance—usually, they used to live somewhere else that required them to own a car, and when they moved here they found a way to bring the car with them.  Often these cars are older and not in great condition, and the owner manages to afford the car by parking on the street and driving as minimally as possible so as to be able to afford some gas, sometimes.  Usually such folks also have a certain degree of car maintenance skills, and often these cars happened to be fully or mostly paid for when they were brought to New York. 

The fact that the #1 privilege car owners exist doesn’t make the #3 privilege car owners a bunch of capitalist running dog traitors, and very few people begrudge #2 privilege car owners their right to transport themselves in a way that is workable outside New York, where they tend to live.

but in the more public realms, such as job applicants, classrooms, politics, etc., I would argue that good looks should be treated as a category 1 and not a category 3

I think this is pretty ludicrous.  Mainly because how are you going to solve that?  Burn the pretty people with acid to create a society where everyone is “equally” attractive?  Not to mention that attractive is an incredibly subjective concept. 

A friend and I were giggling this weekend while watching the (campily hilarious but pretty much misogynist) movie What’s New Pussycat?—he thinks Peter O’Toole is one of the most handsome men of all time, while I think he’s so ugly I can hardly bear to watch movies he’s in (this is back-in-the-day classic O’Toole we’re talking about, to clarify).  On the other hand, I find both Peter Sellers and Woody Allen rather sexy, and both of them are considered generally unattractive or at least not sexualized in any way by the larger society.  So then who wins?  Do we burn Peter O’Toole’s face off because he’s tall and Aryan and a known sex symbol?  Or do we elect Sellers and Allen for that honor?  Do we burn the face of anyone who can, in any way, be considered attractive, even in an unconventional way?  Who decides the difference between ‘conventionally’ and ‘unconventionally’ attractive?  Do we have a vote?

Not to mention, of course, that for “attractiveness” to be a #1 rather than a #3, there’d have to exist some sort of oppressed underclass of ugly people.  Which is definitely not true—looking around, I don’t notice at all that conventionally attractive people are more successful than “unattractive” people.  Some of the most powerful people in my workplace (for instance) are also the least attractive, and most of the traditionally pretty young women have basically zero power (and can even be mocked for bothering about their appearances). 

I have issues even typing those words without a lot of equivocation and irony-quotes, because it just doesn’t seem to me that you can even separate out the pretty from the non-pretty in a meaningful way.

Opoponax you are so right when you say that motor vehicle ownership can be either -
#1. a totally unfair advantage that will be taken away from all fat cats when the revolution comes, #2. a basic human right like water, or #3. an undistributable blessing like good hand-eye co-ordination (in Amanda’s example) - depending on the context.

”This involves something entirely different.  When you refer to “having 3 squares a day,” you move into the area of being able to require others to do something for you if you are unable to provide for yourself. “

Yeah?
So what?

”I would separate these concepts into human rights and social privileges: if getting 3 squares a day happens to require the compelled effort of others, this privilege can only exist with both the active participation of others, who may or may not feel like helping you”

Look, we are social animals. Its our species’ survival strategy, even if Ayn Rand said different

You’re right, Piator, that those issues are complicated.  That puts them outside of the scope of this post or anything that could ever be resolved in blog comments.  But the notion that there’s something fine and dandy with people living in shit is something I’ll never agree to.

Indeed.  But there’s a distinct difference between the sort of things you’re sorting into your categories, and the problem of whether condemning people to live in rubbish piles outside Mexico city is wrong.

Amanda already answered that. She said the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good starting point on what are basis human rights. It’s not definitive, but it’s the best we’ve come up with so far.

Very good.  Now, to what level should Article 25 be implemented, based on who’s decision, and how much of your income should be taxed to do so?

There’s a very valid conservative critique that draws a distinction between claims to rights based on forbidding certain actions (such as killing people) and claims to rights based on requiring certain actions (such as funding health care or unemployment insurance).  Amanda gives examples of privileges that should be abolished as like being able to talk out of turn and get respected, being able to do less housework because you’re a man, being treated as if you’re smarter than you are because you’re white - getting rid of those requires that people act in certain ways.  If education isn’t enough, do you intend to enforce these actions?

Of course, some jobs, like acting or modeling, have good looks as a requirement.

Except that a) good looks keep getting redefined and b) not so much, especially if you go back a few decades. In general, the quality of a film or tv show these days seems to be inverse to the percentage of people on screen who are conventionally attractive…

Why does that matter in this context? Because once you get beyond the rights not to have your life curtailed by starvation, exposure, violence or easily-preventable disease, a lot of privileges are considered privileges precisely because of their rarity. And that’s going to take some more fundamental changes to address.

Awesome post. Now if only someone could effectively explain Category 3 Privilege to the Fat Acceptance Movement.

”in general, taller men earn more than shorter men (a quantifiable measure), “

Actually, it doesn’t matter how tall you are as an adult directly, but if you were tall as a child/teenager
The difference goes away for tall people who were average height children and is still there if you were tall as a kid and ended up average height

If you’re the biggest kid in 7th grade you assume you are the leader and carry that confidence the rest of your life

MikeEss:

I read the Vonnegut book too, and never forgot it. The question to ask people is, “Do you think we need a Cabinet Position like Diana Moon held?” The answer tells you what people think about Category 3 privilege.

Tools of analysis can provide insight but do not generally reveal truth. 

A lit theory professor taught me that (it was about deconstructionism) and it has served me well.

Which leads me to ask: can a social privilege be a right? Can you, by the simple virtue of being a living human being, require someone else to provide for you what you cannot provide for yourself?

Isn’t that what anti-abortion people argue?  You want women to be required to provide to the fetus what it cannot provide for itself.

Piator, you’re threadjacking.  I fail to see how delineating categories means we have to solve the world’s problems in one night.

Your categories depend on an assumption that there is an objective definition of what is and isn’t a human right, that people can agree that some things are deserved by all. 

The 40 hour week is a social norm, not a human right (cf France). You can construct an argument against access to abortion based on human rights, whether or not you and I might agree with it. I would make a comment about desegregation, but I’m not sure I grasp the full context in which you’re using the word.

I’m not asking you to solve the world’s problems.  I’m asking you to acknowledge that you do not speak for everyone, and an attempt to drawn lines between “advantages that one person has that they don’t deserve”, advantages that people may have but are acceptable in a just society, and “basic human rights that everyone deserves” necessarily requires a subjective judgement.

Yeah, fundies write off lots of #1 and 2 as “blessings.” Which tends to collapse them into #3, because it presumes that they’re received on account of some divine justice. But a blessing, because it’s made up, is neither a privilege nor a right, even if it’s congruent to one of those. If it’s part of a social system that can be reformed, it’s kind of not magical. That takes away the allure, but it also helps distinguish between 1 and 2.

Great post—there ought to be more thinking along these lines.

Here’s my post about how MRAs fail to see their own privilege and why they attack feminists for what they see as taking too much of a position of power.

Piator, I suggest picking up one of George Lakoff’s books on framing (Whose Freedom, Don’t Think of an Elephant!) for an explanation of how tools like this can be useful without arriving at an objective set of definitions.

Thanks.  I’ll pick up the “Elephant” book at the library tonight.

I have way too much to read at the moment 8-(

The issue of rights vs. priveleges is one thing, and the issue of rights vs. responsibility is another.  The question of whether positive rights (the right to a minimally decent standard of living, a job, health care, etc.) incur positive responsibilities on society at large is obvious.  Of course it does.

Society has a responsibility to ensure those rights: members of society have a responsibility to pay for that ensurance.

Example: our children have a right to a decent education.  We all have a responsibility to pay for that through taxes, whether we have kids or not.  It isn’t about just our own kids; it’s about making our society a decent one.  Free education works toward that.

You don’t live alone in this world.  Even if you go to the expense and trouble of paying for your own health insurance, for example, or paying out of pocket for your own preventive care, you and everyone else is put at risk by having a large number of people who don’t ever go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.

It isn’t just altruism, you see.  You may well end up being the one who needs the assistance of society to meet your basic needs like food, shelter, or health care, no matter how skilled, competent, responsible, or independent you think you are today.  Even if you never do, if you’re one of the fortunate ones, you still benefit hugely from living in a society where people aren’t dying all around you from lack of health care, people aren’t desparate to feed their kids, people aren’t sleeping on the streets. 

Such a Dickensian world is dangerous for everybody in it including the wealthy.  It is inherently unstable.  It leads to otherwise peaceful people like me seriously contemplating violent revolution and not much giving a shit about the rights of anyone in a society that’s perfectly willing to let me starve and my mother die penniless because OMG TAXES.

Somewhat off-topic: The best interpretation of “Harrison Bergeron” that I’ve ever encountered was that it was intended as a satire, not of egalitarianism, but of anti-egalitarianism in the vein of Ayn Rand - by illustrating their fears of a society in which nobody is allowed to excel as requiring the kind of absurdity nobody would ever want to set up, and their “heroes” as the kind of ridiculous wish-fulfillment that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world either.

In other words, it’s essentially a parody of Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem.

Paul—Thank you!
Being good looking wasn’t a requirement for acting in the past, still isn’t in some venues, and the Hollywood tendency to cast only pretty people in shows (I liked Smallville, but no one in the entire town wasn’t airbrush perfectly beautiful) drags down the believability. AND encourages weird expectations in real life. The notion that every woman has to wear a size 2 or smaller dress or be mocked as a fattie? Modern Hollywood.

I’ve watched plenty of old movies where the fat, funny-looking secondary couple were not only truly funny looking (these days they do the secondary couple still perfect, just unconventionally perfect, like one has an odd haircut and the other isn’t white) but they were also more interesting, better-written, and better-acted than the main couple. And I can name off the top of my head two series from the 60s-70s that were remade in the 90s and 00s with prettier actors and not a trace of the idiosyncratic charm of the originals (Dark Shadows and Kolchak: the Night Stalker).

I realized only about a year ago that the obsession with prettiness is one reason I don’t watch much TV anymore. Not that everyone doesn’t love eye-candy, it’s just the modern tastes aren’t the flavor that suits me.

Thanks, MikeEss.  That story was the first thing I thought of, but I couldn’t remember the title of it.

Seems to me that Amanda’s sorting does a brilliant job of what she intended it for.

But just because two different issues fall into the same category doesn’t mean that their solutions, or even the approach to them will be the same. Why would they? And using that to try to invalidate the concept is wrong.

If someone’s right not to get slaughtered in the street is being violated or is at risk, that requires government intervention. Certainly regulation and enforcement. Jail, etc for the violators. And so on.

The fact that it is a “everyone should have this and it needs to be changed if they don’t” doesn’t mean that all such issues have similar solutions. Everyone also has the right to be an equal partner in their relationship and not have social stereotypes or childhood training force them into second class status in their own homes. But nobody here is proposing SWAT teams enforcing equal housework regulations.

If Amanda had in any way implied otherwise, you might have a point in poking at her sorting method. But she didn’t.

What if you use category 3 privilege to overcome the lack of category 1 and 2 privilege?

That’s something the right wing wants to prevent as well: smart female trailer trash (blacks, etc.) shouldn’t be allowed to bump rich kids out of universities if “it” can’t pay it’s own way?

I realized only about a year ago that the obsession with prettiness is one reason I don’t watch much TV anymore.

If you have BBC America, a good local PBS affiliate, or a Netflix subscription, you might want to look into British TV.  They don’t seem to have the issues with Prettiness (tm) that American TV does, especially for dramas.

I’d tend to agree, though I’m not sure I’d put privilege from good looks as we understand them into category 3 (advantages that can’t be distributed fairly or taken away without more injustice) and not category 1 (advantages that one person has over another that they don’t deserve).  It’s obvious to me that most (if not all) of the advantages of whiteness fall into category 1; why wouldn’t privilege from good looks fall into this category as well?  (We’re supposed to just shrug our shoulders and say “oh well, it’s not fair that conventionally good-looking people get hired/promoted more often, seen as more virtuous, etc., but what can we do?”

I see now that Dilan beat me to the punch on this one.  Though I’m not sure it’s as easily dismissed as “some people are just more attractive than others” - perhaps, but even if that’s true (in a sense we can’t do anything about), so what? 

But at the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to get around the fact that some people are considered better looking than others.

At the end of the day, I don’t think we’re going to get around the fact that some people are considered more white than others.  But we sure as hell can decide what we’re going to let that mean.  And right now, it means much more than a few BFOQs and a different dating experience (not that those are beyond questioning too).

I think this is pretty ludicrous.  Mainly because how are you going to solve that?  Burn the pretty people with acid to create a society where everyone is “equally” attractive?  Not to mention that attractive is an incredibly subjective concept.

Nope, any more than we solve sexism by giving people involuntary gender reassignment.  No need for Uglies or Harrison Bergeron, though, to point out privilege where it exists and fight against it.  And while it’s subjective to some extent, there tends to be correlation among people.  I’m not talking “Hollywood ugly” here, or liking muscular guys vs. skinny guys.

Not to mention, of course, that for “attractiveness” to be a #1 rather than a #3, there’d have to exist some sort of oppressed underclass of ugly people.  Which is definitely not true—looking around, I don’t notice at all that conventionally attractive people are more successful than “unattractive” people.

Seriously?  It’s always seemed really obvious to me.  (Then again, I’m not going to be considered conventionally attractive, so it’s a little more noticeable.)  I certainly saw that back in law school when everyone was applying for jobs - none of the people who had trouble finding employment were conventionally attractive.

Some of the most powerful people in my workplace (for instance) are also the least attractive, and most of the traditionally pretty young women have basically zero power (and can even be mocked for bothering about their appearances).

Well, yeah, looks privilege there probably gets overwhelmed by male privilege and white privilege, and among some groups may correlate inversely due to age.  But what about within those groups?  How do the “traditionally pretty young women” people compare in privilege with the young women who aren’t “traditionally pretty”?  (Don’t forget in that comparison to include the women who aren’t in your workplace at all because they got passed over for the job.)  How does it work among young men?  Among older women?  Older men?  My understanding is that there’s a correlation within each group, though it may be less strong among some groups than others.

Now if only someone could effectively explain Category 3 Privilege to the Fat Acceptance Movement.

Oh, fuck off.

“I think people deserve a right to a living wage, health care, life, the pursuit of happiness, etc. “

Are they owed these things or do they deserve a fair chance to obtain them?  What if individuals choose to not work, for instance, or do a really crappy job while others work their butts off doing a great job.  Are they provided a living wage anyway because it is deserved?  And then would that not be providing them with a category 1 advantage over those that actually work to receieve the same living wage?

why wouldn’t privilege from good looks fall into this category as well?

The difference between racial privilege and “looksism” privilege is pretty obvious to me.  Look around you at who has the power in our society and who is powerless.  You’ll notice that almost everyone in a position of real power (as opposed to relatively powerless tokens and mascots) is white, and most of the poorest of the poor are non-white. 

Look around you again at who has power and who does not.  Does it seem to you that the people with real power are uniformly ‘attractive’, while the oppressed are uniformly plain?  I guess I can’t speak for the whole world, but things just don’t look that ay to me.  In fact, looking at the world under a metric of “who has power?”, it seems that people who are rather plain tend to have most of it.

Last week Michael Bloomberg was on Meet The Press.  He’s the mayor of the most populous city in the US, the one of the most important cities in the world.  He’s a billionaire.  He’s one of the biggest financial fatcats on the planet.  Not a good looking man.  And short, to boot.  Not to mention middle aged, balding, and paunchy.  Probably not anybody’s idea of a sex symbol.  Compare him to someone like Sarah Palin, who we could probably all agree has benefited from her Middle American wholesome good looks.  She’s the governor of a state that barely registers on the national level, the vice presidential candidate on a ticket that has about a snowball’s chance in hell of winning this election.  And even if her ticket won, she’ll still only be the vice president, a role that is usually little more than a figurehead.  Even if the unthinkable were to happen and she became president, she would probably be, at best, a puppet controlled by people who look a lot more like Mike Bloomberg.

In a world where looksism was a #1 privilege, the above paragraph would make no sense.

I was once vying for a promotion with several other people of similar rank and skill set .  One of my competitors was a very attractive young man who everyone knew the manager in charge of the promotion had a crush on.  Guess who got the promotion?  In that situation, yeah, I felt like this was a horribly unjust privilege that he had,  or maybe a terribly unethical action on the manager’s part.  Bottom line, though?  We were a bunch of service industry shlubs vying for a chance to become a management trainee.  Most of us left within a year to start more fulfilling careers.  I think that guy might still be stuck as the Assistant Manager Of Stupid Bullshit, making less money than I do, working on his feet all day, generally miserable because what he really wanted to do was be a graphic designer, not make work schedules for the next generation of college kid service industry shlubs.  So woohoo.  The pretty boy got to be assistant manager and the plain girl got to pursue her actual goals and dreams.  Looksism in action.

How do the “traditionally pretty young women” people compare in privilege with the young women who aren’t “traditionally pretty”?

The ‘traditionally pretty’ ones last 3-6 months and then decide they can’t hack it and go to grad school or something.  The ordinary ones stick around and end up being promoted, and ultimately do what they wanted to do for a living rather than having to fall back on a second or third choice because they were more worried about this season’s heel height than the best way to paint a set, gaffe lighting, or operate a camera.

Unless you’re a costumer.  The pretty girls tend to do OK there.

And here is Dr. T. Why is there always this huge belief that large groups of people just don’t want to work? I know that is what Republicans want to scare everyone with. There are going to be a few people of every background that are lazy, sure. But wouldn’t those people be easier to find if everyone were guaranteed certain rights, like housing.

We can’t even talk about how to make these things work if we don’t stop framing it in the broken ideas we currently have. And is that the argument against by the way? We can’t make sure the playing field is even because someone might work harder at a job? I would say that if these “privileges” were treated like the rights they are, that the job market would be even more competitive because there would be even more people with skills available. I meet people all the time who are interested in what I do, but don’t know how to get involved. What if lots of young people didn’t have to worry about a place to live and tuition, they would be freed up to do more internships and more exploration.

I gotta get to work.

“If we don’t ensure these people can live decent lives (and I’m not talking about a McMansion and a Lexus in the driveway), where do you think those people you look down on will go and what do you think they will do?”

I’m not sure what this has to do with my question to Amanda.  My question highlights that any system, even one supposedly built around equality, creates advantage for one individual over another.  It might be equal that hard workers and slackers get the same wage - but it isn’t fair.

And to answer your question, I think all able bodied people (and any non-abled bodied person who can) should work and pay taxes and we should have a net of social benefits to provide for those who can not paid for through a progressive tax system that collects more income from those that earn more (within reason).  We should not subsidize sloth or corporate mistakes, but we should adequately (not barely or poorly) provide for those in society that simply are unable to provide for themselves.  If, however, you choose to not work or screw around in school - good luck, you’re on your own.

Thank you for making this distinction.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal”, he meant that everyone has the native right to category 2.  But he’s often taken as being a nincompoop who is trying to deny the existence of category 3.

Look, I’m not saying that looks privilege is not going to be trumped by white privilege or male privilege or other forms of privilege or power.  But it’s simply not the case that, because women and young people are seen as more beautiful, and men and older people have other forms of privilege and power, that there’s no such thing as looks privilege.  It’s just that it’s much more relevant *within* those groups than *between* them.

You keep making this points that powerful older men who aren’t particularly attractive mean there’s no beauty privilege.  To me that’s like the MRA who says that because Hillary Clinton is wealthier and more powerful than he is, that there’s no such thing as male privilege, or that Barack Obama’s candidacy means that racism has ended.

MikeEss:  I read “Harrison Bergeron” in 1974, too!  And it stuck with me, as well.  I love Kurt Vonnegut.

Doug S:  So you think “Harrison Bergeron” is a parody of “Anthem”?  “Anthem” is the only thing of Ayn Rand’s I liked (maybe because it’s short - “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” are the cures for insomnia, if you can get past the need to rant and rave over the incredibly stupid people in those novels).  It has been many years since I’ve read “Anthem”, and I was 16 (I think) when I did read it, so I’m willing to admit that maybe I missed the point.  But it seems to me that both stories are really about the stupidity of eliminating individuality (up to eradicating singular pronouns to ensure individuals didn’t have the words to describe their dissatisfaction in “Anthem” [similar to “1984” and the concept of “plasticspeak”] and eradicating inequality by enforcing an arbitrary set of standards in “Harrison Bergeron” [similar to “Brave New World” where the populace was literally programmed to love their status in order to prevent revolution]).

I’d be interested in your reasoning regarding “Anthem” parodying “Harrison Bergeron.”

...oops… 

Did I just reveal my geeky, English Major, hopelessly-in-love-with-literature-nobody-reads-unless-they’re-required-to-by-their-professor side?

To me that’s like the MRA who says that because Hillary Clinton is wealthier and more powerful than he is, that there’s no such thing as male privilege, or that Barack Obama’s candidacy means that racism has ended.

No, it’s not.  Using someone like Clinton or Obama to say that racism and sexism don’t exist is ridiculous because it’s obvious that they’re exceptions to the rule.  The vast majority of people who hold power in our society, regardless of gender or race or age, are not especially good looking.  There is no noticeable ‘ugly’ underclass of unemployable social rejects.  Go up to your average person-on-the-street and ask them if most people who hold power in the US are white.  They will agree with you.  Ask the same person if most people who hold power in the US are pretty/attractive/good-looking/whatever term you prefer.  They will probably say no, because that’s just not fricking true (any more than there’s an oppressive over-class of people with good hand eye coordination, or who are especially articulate, or good at math or whatever) .

While plenty of people will try to argue that “racism doesn’t really exist”, very few people will try to pretend that that the majority of our past presidents have been black.

Okay, it only wins a bronze at the Oppression Olympics.  Happy?

But when you look at the construction industry around Philadelphia, you see that we have basically imported workers, many of whom are here illegally, to work in concrete, landscaping, frame carpentry, siding, roofing, drywall and painting, people who speak little or no English, and who are making decent wages; they aren’t being paid minimum wage here.

That’s because contractors want to hire people who are willing to work in dangerous conditions, accept bad terms of employment, and who won’t decide to unionize.  They also prefer to hire people who don’t know their rights and won’t have anywhere to turn if they have a problem.  They can’t sue you.  They can’t apply for unemployment insurance or worker’s comp.  You pay them under the table.  In some circumstances you can even feed, clothe, and house them (in horrible conditions) and “take it out of their check”.  Or, heck, if you’ve got ties to the old country yourself, you can work in tandem with a smuggler and get what amounts to slave labor.

Also, if you think these people get good money, you are even stupider than I originally thought you were.

Dana, you’re conflating (perhaps intentionally) the definition of privilege as something granted conditionally and the definition of privilege as something that advantages one person over another. Amanda is talking about the latter.

it only wins a bronze at the Oppression Olympics.

Hey, you’re the one who claims that not being a supermodel is a form of oppression, not me.

Beauty can be a DISADVANTAGE for women, jfpbookworm. It can lead people to assume that a woman is stupid or incompetent. Or slutty. Pretty women get assumed to be sluts or bimbos more than plain ones do.

To some extent this applies to men too, though not nearly as much. For instance see the reaction to John Edwards, who got dismissed as a pretty-boy. Or even Obama himself: the Paris Hilton ad implied that he was just popular because of fluff characteristics like charisma and LOOKS.

Dana, I don’t think you were really the intended audience of this post. You’re using rights and privileges the way they might get used in a law or philosophy class. Amanda is trying to suss out different types of “privilege” as the word gets used by people on the left to talk about oppression and consciousness around those issues.

She’s not conflating rights and privileges. She is saying that when progressives talk about “male privilege” or “white privilege,” sometimes they are talking about actual privilege that should be taken away (like the privilege of believing that women should be sexually available to you at all times). Other times, they are talking about how some members of society are in a better position than others because they are in posssession of their full human rights. She’s not saying a right and a privilege are the same thing. She’s actually making a distinction - that what we describe as “male privilege” is not always actual privilege, but sometimes is men exercising their full human rights, and what we want in those circumstances is not for men to lose their rights but for women to gain them. Then men would cease to be “privileged,” not because a right and a privilege are the same thing but because they would no longer be in a “better” position than women.

No, you’re insisting that there can’t be any privilege there because other forms are worse.

What Lady Vetinari said is a pretty good gloss of my coments about the “pretty girls” in my workplace.  A lot of the time, regardless of how competent they are, they’re just not taken seriously.  Even if they are pulling their weight just fine, they’ll be seen as coasting on their looks, not working hard enough, not as deserving, or driven, or ambitious, etc.  Hell, I fell for that trope in writing about them.  Plain women tend to be taken more seriously in my industry, especially women who dress down, don’t appear to spend a lot of time on their looks, or don’t broadcast HI IM A PRETTY GIRL WHEE BUTTERFLIES AND DAISIES!!!1!1!11!! 

Which is why claiming that, actually, they have it made while I, the plain jane tomboy, am being horribly oppressed by our evil looksist system, seems really stupid to me.

The contractors around the area have hired these immigrants because, with a city full of people who didn’t finish high school and with an excellent public transportatin system, contractors couldn’t get them to take jobs which did not require a high school diploma, and in which the basic skills can be learned fairly rapidly.

This is one of the most ignorant things I have ever read. Obviously, you’re far removed from the realities of competition for blue collar jobs. My father works in construction and has been out on his ass for the past six months, having to take a job as a trucker where he’s constantly on the road. The reason isn’t that he’s a lazy fucko who doesn’t want to do construction work—the reason is that the crooked construction companies would rather save money by hiring illegal immigrants who are not deemed to be deserving of a living wage. And my dad doesn’t have a high school diploma—a lot of construction workers don’t, in fact. That’s rarely an impediment when going into the construction trade. The real impediment is the reality that the Mexican economy has been gutted and the desperate workers will do dangerous work here for less than they’re entitled to. There are lots of people who want those damn jobs, who had those jobs for years, and made good money, too, but have effectively been outsourced in their own country.

Or what Opoponax said.

...Better than me.

No, you’re insisting that there can’t be any privilege there because other forms are worse.

I’m insisting that , since there don’t seem to be any real victims of looksism, in the way that there are victims of racism and sexism, it’s more of a type 3 sort of ‘privilege’.   

And I say this as somebody who is not usually considered particularly good looking.  I’m lucky, I guess, that I don’t weigh 300 lbs and I didn’t have my face burnt off in a horrible childhood accident, or anything like tha But even people who weigh 300 lbs fall in love and get married and start families.  .  Even people with burnt-off faces have jobs.  While driving around the outskirts of town, you don’t ever happen upon a little ghetto of corrugated metal shacks inhabited by the particularly ill-favored folks, which everybody you know smirkingly refers to as “uglytown”. 

That’s the sort of thing I expect from a Type 1 privilege.  I want actual evidence that the people in question are really being oppressed.  It doesn’t have to be genocide or shtetls or Jim Crow laws or mass rape, but there’s got to be something.  My life is every bit as good as the lives of the prettier people I know.  I have everything they have, and sometimes more, because good looks are hardly the only lucky fluke of genetics you can end up with.  There’s no 70 cents on the dollar, no special law that makes me less in control of my body. I’m not more likely to be the victim of violent crime or imprisoned unfairly.    I can marry the partner of my choice, and I have the right to start a family with said partner, even if it means adopting a child.  I have every freedom and entitlement that a prettier person has.  I am thus not oppressed on account of my looks.

Whenever the talk turns to how pretty/attractive people get all the breaks, I can’t help but think of Diana Vreeland, a woman who was, to be kind, quite homely, and yet she was a style icon who ran Vogue magazine for years.

Of course, she had the compensating factors of money and blue blood behind her, but she certainly wasn’t shut out of her chosen field of fashion just because she wasn’t pretty.

What contractors are looking for are people who will come to work every day and do the job.

And that doesn’t, in your view, describe Americans? Who are, to a man, lazy, shiftless bums?

Why do conservatives hate the American people so much?

Do you have a right to a living wage if you don’t work?  Do you have a right to health care if you cannot or will not pay for it?

Yes, yes.

These things are social privileges, which require the actions of others.

Yep, living in a SOCIETY has many advantages to just living in the forest all by your lonesome. health care, jobs, financial assistance are all just examples of this.  this also means those of us in society have responsibility towards others. this really isn’t that complicated…

unless you are living in a house you built yourself or that you paid for yourself (without loans!) and you grow all your own food and pay for your own healthcare (not your employer paying for it, or insurance paying for it), YOU are using societies advantages.

As to “what if lazy ppl don’t work?” well, a “living wage” is not what most ppl want. even if i got a “living wage” for not working, i would STILL work so i could afford a car, a house, etc. i really don’t have a problem not keeping homeless folks on the street just cuz they “don’t want to work”. the homeless around here get a living wage through begging, so the public is paying to help them out no matter what.

what about if you get laid off? when i was on unemployment after i got laid off, i got the $200 a week, which in seattle is NOT a living wage in the slightest. it took me 2 months to get another job. if i didn’t have friends and relatives in higher places than myself, i would’ve been homeless. does someone with poorer friends than i deserve homelessness more than me for some reason??

how is it we can have ppl living on the street when the richest people in the WORLD live here and have more money than they know what to do with?