Privilege + Brief Update

I’m opting for a brief update as I’m in the middle of writing a new scene for the revised Star Horizons. As noted before, the editor for book2 strongly recommended I re-edit book1, and that’s in process. I’m about 80% done with the edits. But I’m at a place where I did a high-level “tell” to skip over a side quest that at the time I could not justify. The editor felt cheated so I’m in process writing out the scene. It’s possible I will not use it in the novel—it could be website material. But I’m working through it and since I’m in the middle of it, I prefer to not get sidetracked this week with the blog :).

So Privilege—a you tuber that I follow talked about in the last week from the perspective of gay men in the queer community. Because the queer community is heavily stratified by identity and oppression currency, it has come about that biological men who are gay have been deemed as the most privileged and therefore the group that can be 1) targeted with virtue signaling points gained 2) ignored/silenced. Gay men serve as the “straight white male” of the greater culture within the community. Gay men are generally targeted but white gay men are particularly targeted as representatives of the evil capitalist patriarchy.

And some people have trouble understanding why many gay men have distanced themselves from the queer community. It pretends that my pain must be worse that yours and that makes me superior/better/fill in the blank. Gay men get to have boundaries (boundaries are not limited to anyone). Deal with it.

And given this desire by what seems to be majority (or at least, the loudest cheering section) to convert the community into a stratified hierarchy of oppression, well then, there is no community. That is not a brotherhood or sisterhood. So in effect, the community has already expelled gay men in this way.

Here is my gut, brutally honest reaction:

Privilege is a dehumanizing word usually used by losers wanting to project shame on to others in order to validate themselves or to silence another or both so that they may quiet/push away the voices in their head that cry out their failures in life.

Why do I carry a charge around this? On June 9, 2025, further reflection can be found on my blog was “The Shame We Live.”

I grew up with total self-rejection. I have spent most of my life working to shed the shame that I have carried like Marley’s balls and chains. Somewhere along the way, when I was still young, I developed strong boundaries against shame-pushers. I did so out of survival. I could carry no more. And the boundaries have remained stout as I have recovered bits of myself from the cesspool of shame. At the end of the day, privilege is a word loaded with judgment, and I get to choose whether I want to participate in that or not. And since the use of the word has become connected to shame-pushing, my walls go up when it’s used or implied.

Being a victim does not make you better, special or more virtuous though it can open doors into the soul through a lot of personal work, reflection, and honesty to one's self and to others. In other words, a person who has lived a life of pain has the possibility of understanding deep things about who they are, the world, others, but that takes self-awareness, intention and work. People who engage in this kind of work generally (because perhaps there are exceptions) do not go around trying to validate themselves by tearing down others.

They don’t need to.

There is such a thing as "privilege" and it comes in many forms and the vast majority of people in the US have it to some degree; in terms of behavior, my judgment is that liberal women act/perform in ways that are most "privileged". People who walk around with blue or pink hair, never have to worry about getting enough to eat, who allocate endless hours to fantasy sports, spend their adulthood at Disneyland, and raise money for mothers who kill their children are privileged. The examples would probably take weeks to chart out. And it quickly becomes a toxic game to devote attention to these kinds of judgments especially since in this game there is no mirror—we see the privileges of others while ignoring our own.

Because a social hierarchy built around the oppression Olympics is toxic both to the victim-hooder and their target. Any sense of value derived from shaming another merely feeds the shame carried within. You may indeed succeed in pushing the shame on to another (so many people walk around with white guilt, male guilt, ect...) but that doesn't relieve the beliefs you carry about your self. It is a hollow game with the end goal of trying to make the world as miserable as you are.

Having privileges does not make one bad, or morally inferior, or less of a person. Though it may allow space for the expression of darker impulses. People are complicated. It’s okay to give grace to others (and to one’s self).

My want around this:

Go love yourself and find joy in who you are.

That's a much better game.