You say potato
Douglas Murray does an OJ-tease:
Does male privilege really exist? I did not used to think so. But in recent years, I’ve come to realise that not only might it exist, but that, at least in one respect, I may also benefit from it. That is, I have the privilege of being able to write about certain contentious issues without being singled out and demonised for doing so.
Quite.
On gender, for instance, as he goes on to say. He can be critical, women not so much.
After all, countless female authors have written articles expressing scepticism towards the transgender movement — many of them more moderate than my own. Yet almost every time, I have watched in horror as online and offline mobs are stirred up against them and not me. Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stock, Selina Todd, JK Rowling, Abigail Shrier, Helen Joyce — some of these women have been subjected to physical assault; the rest threatened with it.
Some women get hauled off to jail, some get summoned by the police, some lose their jobs, some get bullied by major institutions, and all who speak up get shunned and ostracized.
Another of the things that all these attempted witch-hunts have in common is that they are orchestrated by a small number of highly motivated activists who behave as they do precisely because they are so deliriously certain that they are on the right side. And no one is more certain in this regard than the YouTuber Owen Jones.
There is much laughter at “the YouTuber” because of course that’s not how OJ would describe himself.
[S]o high on certainty is Jones that he consistently uses his considerable social media platform to denounce “transphobes”, who invariably end up being women.
He doesn’t actually mean “invariably,” because in the next paragraph he admits that OJ does also go after the occasional man, including Murray himself.
But none of this bothers me. What does bother me is that he was one of the people — along with the very weird gays at a pseudo-publication Pink News — who has repeatedly tried to destroy JK Rowling’s reputation after the country’s most successful author had the temerity to say that women exist. Jones, Pink News and others consistently suggested that Rowling had said things she had not said, deploying one of the nastiest tactics of this inquisition. They pretended that rather than expressing a view they disagreed with — and that Rowling had every right to hold — she was, in fact, attacking trans people.
It’s what they do. They translate “men can’t become women” to “transphobia.” Period, end of discussion. Simple well-understood facts become a form of hatred, and everything proceeds from there. It’s not a useful or intelligent way to navigate disagreement.
Jones did it to Suzanne Moore last year, and now…
There is now a pattern. This week, Jones targeted another exceptionally talented female writer, Sarah Ditum, for the same reason: she disagreed with him about trans issues.
But this time, people started to notice the trend. As the Left-wing journalist Helen Lewis — formerly of the New Statesman — observed, it is becoming increasingly clear that Jones only seems to go for female journalists. She pointed out that a male journalist recently wrote something similar to Ditum, and did so in the low-circulation New Statesman to boot, yet Jones did not organise a pile-on against him.
There’s just not the same frisson in doing it to a man.
According to Helen Lewis, a number of her mutual friends with Jones no longer speak to him because they believe he has become a bully. She also observed that Jones has spoken publicly about feeling like an outsider, and about the times he’s been the victim of abuse in the past.
If that’s true, one might expect Jones to act with more compassion. But self-reflection has never been his forte — as countless women are starting to discover.
Jones’s supply of compassion is reserved for trans women – who have the massive advantage of not actually being women, which women don’t have and thus are not deserving of Jones’s limited compassion.
Anyway don’t worry, OJ is working on his reply as we speak.
I just know that I’ve been guilty of saying “So-and-so once said THIS horrible thing so I don’t have to care about what they say about anything else for all time” only to be able to find the reasonableness and open-mindedness to say “So-and-so once said something horrible but they’re right about THIS particular issue” when it’s convenient for me.
I suppose OJ won’t shirk from engaging with the evidence-backed accusation that he only attacks GC women in his eventual response.
And, of course, Jones immediately condemns as hard-right-by-association those feminists who dare to point out that Murray is stopped-clock mode, being right on this issue even as he (like most neo-cons) gets pretty much everything else wrong on gender. (Of course, like the metaphorical clock, we need to remember that even on this issue, Murray is probably right for the wrong reason–conservatives believe gender (ie, masculinity/femininity) should be shackled to sex, just as TRAs believe sex should be shacked to gender. Neither wants to actually burn the idea of gender (that is, a defined social role for women from which they cannot be permitted to break without critique) to the ground.
Quite British, that. Had me laughing rowdily in the British way. (A brief and almost imperceptible twitch at the corners of my mouth.)
Privilege, though. I’ve always found privilege an odd choice of terminology. The noun connotes, at least to my ears, something extra and special, something beyond an actual or theoretical norm. If something is a privilege, then it exceeds the norm and is thus not a norm. If something is a norm, then it is not a privilege, for every privilege exceeds it.
For instance, I would find it odd to call it a privilege to not be punched by someone whenever I walk into a grocery store. Likewise, it rubs me the wrong way to name as privilege the ability to write or speak on issues, contentious or not, “without being singled out and demonised for doing so.” Is it a privilege to not have one’s genitals mutilated? To call it such suggests that the moral problem is that some are not done evil, but not being done evil seems (or ought) to be the moral baseline, not a privilege. The moral problem isn’t that some are not done evil but rather that most are.
Again, not saying my feelings on this are correct. This is just how the word works in my own fallible brain.
Yes, I know what you mean, and I think this is what the word is meant to convey when used politically. Everybody should expect not to be punched on walking into a grocery store – or enslaved, or raped, or singled out for bad treatment in some way. Or at least I think that was originally what it was meant to convey; it’s somewhat battered from overuse now.