Outside Looking In

Thoughts, ideas, perceptions. Everyone one has unique versions of these concepts, but we all see them through society’s lense of what may be seen as “normal.” In lecture this week, we discussed many metaphors dealing with how we are perceived in society. The first metaphor was the idea that society operates under an intangible operating system which connects us, the users, to the rest of the world. The metaphor of the operating system is of course flawed (no model is perfect, but they do get the message across), but it is one way to conceptualize that our cultural operating system affects how we view the world around us based on perceptions of the system. These are ideas like race, religion, class, occupations (basically all the things that lead to stereotypes). By learning about the operating systems, one has the chance to reflect on how they might view others from the cultural operating system of their society.

The second metaphor (well more of a model really) we discussed came from John Scalzi’s blog post “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” The focus of Scalzi’s article is the comparison to people in society being like players in a quest oriented videogame. This comparison allows many readers, not just his target audience of straight white males, to understand the concept of privilege in life that places no blame on them individually. He basically removes the reader from the situation to become an observer looking in. He then compares being a straight white male to having the game’s difficulty settings at the lowest levels; so they have more “points” to begin with so they have an easier time in the game completing goals than say a “gay minority female” who would start at the bottom and have a harder time getting to the same goals. Scalzi’s point is that straight white males are not at fault for the privilege they have, but people should recognize that they are more privileged than other individuals. It is very interesting to learn that even though the article was written for the benefit of straight white males it was taken very hostility by many of such individuals.

Afterwards, we read the blog post “Queer Woman of Color: The Highest Difficulty Setting There Is?” by Lisa Nakamura, which is her response to Scalzi’s post. In her post she nit-picks at some of the issues of Scalzi’s model of all of us just being characters in a game (again models are not perfect), but the bigger concern she brings up is the idea of how an article like this would have been received had a queer minority woman have written it. She discusses Aisha Tyler, a gamer, who had to prove herself to other gamers, even though she had been openly playing games for longer than many of the people doubting her abilities. We see similar cases in other masculine dominated spheres such as sports; when girls say they like sports they must “prove it” with some bit of obscure knowledge, rather than they take her word for it. One thing that’s certain is that though Scalzi’s model is flawed it is a good step towards people learning more about how privilege invisibly affects the world we live in.