A dozen years after John Scalzi wrote this, it continues to resonate—perhaps even more so now than then:

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

I have been sharing this concept since I first read it in 2012. It’s instantly understood and makes for great fodder for… discussion. The strongest pushback I received (and I always received pushback) was invariably some form of “Not all straight, White Males”. Which, of course, was missing the point.

The follow-ups (first, second) are also important reads, but especially Ten Years On, where Scalzi reflects on the impact of his post, and adds the very important cis identifier to his description.

This crossed my mind again because so much of America’s problems can be traced directly to Cis, Straight, White Males complaining the game has gotten harder for them, and that “DEI” makes it harder still.

This was brought into stark relief by a Mastodon post from @susankayequinn, which included this (altered) Calvin and Hobbes image:

Or, I didn’t have to compete before, now I do, and I don’t like it.

Quinn added:

Thing is, the lower-qualified white people understand this, it’s why they’re Big Mad about white dudes losing their divine right to run everything with zero consequences.

Cis, Straight, White Males want to reset the game to when they had all of the advantages. It’s a driving motivator for the Trump regime, and a significant reason why they’re in power.