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Unsung Privileges

Jolly_Penguin

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In this thread I would like to talk about provileges we rarely hear about. You often hear about white privilege, male privilege, etc.

How about physical attractiveness privilege? Height privilege (short men are discriminated against research has shown), age privileges, etc

What other unsung privileges do you enjoy or notice others having and how do they effect life?
 
My privileges:

Male
Caucasian
'Western' (ie '1st World')
Height (6'0")
Straight (sexual orientation)
Financial privilege (average wealth for the UK but still way above average in world terms)
Physical health (including a lack of disabilities)


As for physical attractiveness, I wouldn't want to be the judge of that but I would say that I've been considered handsome by some, in my younger days.

Is intelligence a privilege? I suppose it might be. Not saying I'm a genius.

My 'unprivileges':

Mental health (ok now but suffered chronic depression for many decades)
Age (58 now, therefore not necessarily the worst unprivilege but I wouldn't particularly want to be looking for a job, for example).





There may be others that haven't sprung to mind.

'Male' could, I think, have been listed in both categories, since being male isn't necessarily all privileged. But imo there are more privileges than unprivileges so I put it in the first one.
 
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Grumpy Old Man Privilege (formally "You kids get off my lawn!" privilege)
The amount of stuff I'm allowed to complain about in public is directly proportional to my age. I noticed it when I was 30 when I could whinge about stuff I would have been told to shut up about just a few years prior. And the list keeps growing. Turning 40 won't happen soon enough for me.
 
Grumpy Old Man Privilege (formally "You kids get off my lawn!" privilege)
The amount of stuff I'm allowed to complain about in public is directly proportional to my age. I noticed it when I was 30 when I could whinge about stuff I would have been told to shut up about just a few years prior. And the list keeps growing. Turning 40 won't happen soon enough for me.
Depends on who you're with... It's a sliding scale. You can use age privilege only when complaining downhill.
Don't talk about turning 40 next to someone who just turned 60, for example. Or bitch about your First Gulf War experience around someone who fought in Nam. "Lemmee tell ya' about a REAL war."
 
Grumpy Old Man Privilege (formally "You kids get off my lawn!" privilege)
The amount of stuff I'm allowed to complain about in public is directly proportional to my age. I noticed it when I was 30 when I could whinge about stuff I would have been told to shut up about just a few years prior. And the list keeps growing. Turning 40 won't happen soon enough for me.

Good point. Age can have aspects of privilege as well as of unprivilege.

I suspect that at a pinch we could take several items from almost any list of privileges and put them on a list of unprivileges (or vice versa) for different reasons.

That is not to say that we should equate them. Something may have more privileges than unprivileges (ie more advantages than disadvantages). And the mix would likely vary from individual to individual and from circumstances to circumstances.
 
There's the "that's just the way s/he is" privilege. No matter what weird habits you have, people near and dear to you tend to simply accept your eccentricities and peccadilloes. "Bobby darling, would you pl..." "Yes, aunty May, I'll get the mop and bucket. Uncle George always conks out after the fourth rubber and the sixth G&T and pisses his pants. Dear unca George. What a character."
 
There's the "that's just the way s/he is" privilege. No matter what weird habits you have, people near and dear to you tend to simply accept your eccentricities and peccadilloes. "Bobby darling, would you pl..." "Yes, aunty May, I'll get the mop and bucket. Uncle George always conks out after the fourth rubber and the sixth G&T and pisses his pants. Dear unca George. What a character."
I don't think the eccentricity is a privilege, though. If you show up in a new job or a new school and you're weird, there's a good chance you'll be ostracized and criticized.

The privilege comes from something that makes it worthwhile to put up with your shit.
Family has to put up with Uncle George because of blood privilege.
People in the front office have to put up with Thomas' profanity because he's the only person who knows how the payroll program works, competence privilege.
The crew in Crimson Tide put up with the captain's dog peeing on the missile tubes because he had the 'I can put you on bread and water for NOT cleaning up the dog pee' privilege...
 
'Belonging to a dominant or established religion/worldview/culture' (in one's country).

That's by and large a privilege, I think.
 
Just to clarify, we should distinguish social biases that give unearned privileges from having traits that inherently and directly lead to better outcomes or an easier path (like intelligence, or lacking a physical disability)

IOW, confine "privilege" to the notion that violates a basic sense of merit-based fairness.

That would largely exclude rousseau's suggestion of "intelligence", which directly produces merit-based benefits. There might be some extra perks for being intelligent but I think there are also cultural biases against the intelligent, especially in cultures with strong anti-intellectual tendencies, like the US.

Attractiveness and height likely interact with gender. IOW, attractiveness benefits both genders, but probably women moreso (which also means that being unattractive is worse for females). Weight is similar to but not identical to attractiveness (one can be skinny and ugly or heavy yet otherwise seen as attractive). And again, this factor probably has more impact on women.
In contrast, being short is likely worse for males.

While a few of these impacts might be direct and merited (such as getting more romantic suitors or more modeling offers), there many effects due to indirect cultural bias where more attractive or taller people are just given benefits for which those traits have no objective relevance.
 
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Good points there, imo. My guess would be that it might not be easy to always make a clear distinction between the two (social biases on the one hand and direct or merited outcomes on the other) for any given privilege (or unprivilege) but I agree that it would still be useful to keep the broad distinction in mind.

For those who haven't already googled it, the wiki page on this is quite interesting, particularly the paragraphs under the headings, 'Overview', 'Awareness of privilege' and 'Criticism':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privilege_(sociology)
 
Another privilege I didn't notice i had: freedom from natural disasters. We have not had a serious natural disaster in Ontario in a very very long time and I don't think we have ever had a truly catastrophic one.
 
Another privilege I didn't notice i had: freedom from natural disasters. We have not had a serious natural disaster in Ontario in a very very long time and I don't think we have ever had a truly catastrophic one.

Interesting. As a native southern Californian, I can't even imagine that.
 
Weight. If you are morbidly obese, you may have a problem with people's image of what sort of person you are. Accent and grammar. having a bad accent may get you judged to be unintelligent, or possibly politically suspect. For example, having a thick Southern accent.
Being well spoken and having a pleasing voice and a good vocabulary is always an advantage in society at large.
 
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