(Funny! Agree!)
I never got to see the original Privilege Denying Dude tumblr page as I became aware of its existence after the tumblr pages shut down due to copyright infringement of the iStock photo the meme employed. So my exposure to meme involved flipping through 20 pages or so of everyone’s take on the theme on memegenerator.net. Strewn between the really awesome ones were captioned images that did not really resonate with me for the following reasons and more: obvious trolls, non-English captions, meta-PDD jokes, non sequiturs, bad arguments.
I was excited to find this morning that the PDD tumblr is back with a new, fully consenting male model. Now that I’m introduced, I’m disappointed to see that the tumblr and it’s however inspired and admirable creator doesn’t seem to do much to restrict false claims and bad arguments from making it onto the tumblr page. Some images are great and speak to a truth about privilege denying dudes, but others, I found unrelated and wrongheaded.
(Huh?!)
I found that this contributor is one of a group who seems to equate Islamophobia with a perceived “Atheist Privilege” and have compiled an atheist privilege checklist. This is a weird argument to me for a couple of reasons.
First, a hypothetical: could a man in a woman-suit get male privilege? Privilege in the sense that I’m aware of, refers to unfair benefits systematically gotten by groups of people because of their perceived identity. You could say a man has white privilege in an instance like this. He is pulled over for speeding and when he reaches into the glove compartment, the cop assumes that he’s reaching for his registration and not reaching for a gun. We identify this as white privilege and not brunette privilege or red car driving privilege when we identify that non-criminal is an association broadly made with white people, not just some brunettes or red car drivers and that the association is denied to non-white people throughout society–when the unjust belief is systemic. This is the first problem. The group: atheists, like Republicans, vegetarians, cat people, or dog people is a grouping based on personal beliefs or preferences. Being an atheist generally isn’t apparent to others the way that race, age, weight, or sometimes, religious belief is. So, before we talk about whether atheists have privilege, we should investigate how they could get it. I’m doubtful that they could.
Secondly, because atheists don’t suffer some of the injustices towards Muslims doesn’t mean that atheists benefit from “atheist privilege.” The comparison is one of apples to spaceships in the contest for “most derided fruit”, or alternatively, “least likely to be launched into space.” Some of the completely justified grievances of Muslim oppression that are given on the “atheist privilege checklist” are not really things that atheists evade, but all non-Muslim-appearing-people are not subject to. Like: “religious persecution on the street never happens to me” or “I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my likeliness to blow something up.” Yes, this is something that atheists are not victim to, but not in virtue of their perceived atheism. This is something that Catholics and Jews also aren’t subjected to by equally not being perceived as Muslims in certain places.
The writer makes some points under another PDD about people who identify as both Muslim and feminist being denied inclusion in some mainstream feminist groups.
“Why of course there’s no such thing as atheist privilege! That’s why Muslim feminists who try to be part of the mainstream feminist community are never told they can’t be REAL feminists by atheists, never have their religion mocked by atheists, never have their clothing demonized by atheists, are never expected to provide an education on hijab, niqab, or Islam in general to atheists, are never dismissed as being too “uneducated” or “ill-informed” to speak about their own religious beliefs by atheists, are never accused of being “socially irresponsible” for observing hijab or niqab by atheists, and are most certainly never regarded as invisible by atheists.”
The argument is that because most feminists disagree with the Muslim feminist (though I assume that they can be atheist feminists, feminists of non-Muslim faith, or a combination of both), atheists have atheist privilege. This doesn’t follow.
Like beliefs about which is the best football team, religious beliefs can be supported and verified with evidence. If one party’s argument doesn’t hold out after critical inquiry, it may mean that it’s not a valid candidate for being true. Feminists who believes in alchemy may be in the minority but it doesn’t need to be because society systematically gives unjust privilege to alchemy-deniers. It’s not right to say that both are equally verifiable views about the natural world and should deserve equal respect as truth when they do not.
Maybe more to the point, “mainstream” feminism, at least the iteration I’m familiar with, is a strain of humanism that contains some ideas that contradict ideas I understand to be contained in Islam (and Christianity and Judaism.) “Women and men are equal” vs. “The sexes are unequal” can only be bridged by a heaping spoonful of cognitive dissonance or abandonment of one or the other belief. I’m sure there is a way to create an internally coherent set of beliefs by the cafeteria method (picking up some beliefs and refusing others) but the result may not immediately look like a synthesis of feminism and Islam. Like how picking up a side of rice from the Chinese food line and a side of rice from the Mexican food line doesn’t make your lunch look like fusion cuisine. I won’t object if you claim it is but neither will I congratulate you for your innovation.
Related: There (edit: used to be) a Privilege Denying Feminist meme which characterizes the feminist not by her privilege actually, but by her sometimes bad arguments (or argument stoppers.) Even better, there is a Critical Feminist Corgi meme that is absolutely brilliant.
gender, humanism, something on the internet is WRONG!!, talking too much
atheist, atheist privilege, feminism, feminism definitions, humanism, Muslim feminist, Opression Olympics, privilege, privilege denying dude, privilege denying feminist
One of the points is that “offensive” is meaningless; it’s an entirely subjective judgment; there is no way to verify whether something is objectively offensive or not; nothing is demonstrably offensive. We should say that we are offended, not that something is offensive.
