My privileged life
I have just read the article Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Level , and the comments, and the follow-up and its comments. The author claims that straight white males (SWM, for short) don't like being told they are "privileged," so he is going to try to explain their advantages in terms they understand. He then very condescendingly compares their lives to playing a game on the easiest difficulty level, whereas people in other categories have it harder, and black lesbians are playing on the hardest level of all. I understand that this is a metaphor, or an analogy. I understand that it is not supposed to be a perfect model of reality. There are, however, several reasons why I think it is a very poor and misleading metaphor. First of all, using the gaming-difficulty metaphor implies that SWMs have an easy life. No one plays at the easiest level unless he is a total noob, and only college students with lots of time on their hands play at the hardest levels