In Which Cracked.com Does a Follow-up On “Straight White Male”

Posted on May 27, 2013    Posted by John Scalzi

Hey, remember a year ago when I wrote a piece talking about how being a straight white male was like playing the game of life on the lowest difficulty setting? And then a bunch of straight white dudes lost their minds about it? Especially when the piece was reposted to Kotaku, the video games news and opinion site? Yes, those were good times, good times.

Well, today, over on Cracked, writer Luke McKinney (whose metaphor in a previous article about how straight male being the lowest difficulty setting in sexuality inspired me to expand the concept  bit for my own piece), combs through comments in the Kotaku repost to come up with 5 Gamer Comments That Give Straight White Guys a Bad Name. And, surprise! He’s entirely correct about that.

The piece is written in the punchy, sarcastic Cracked manner the Internets have come to love, which means that both the style and content of the article assures that the comment thread will be full of the very same people that McKinney speaks of in the main article. It’s always delightful to have the thesis of an article so immediately confirmed in the comments. Obviously, if you despair of straight white men getting a clue, you may want to give the comments a miss — although of course it’s worth noting that the commenters do not represent all straight white men, many of whom really are aware of the breaks they get in the game of life, just for being what they are, aside from anything they may have done.

Because a) today is a holiday, b) I am traveling, c) and thus will be away from the site for most of the day and d) thus don’t want this site overrun by the sort of panicked gibbering ignorant who thinks that pointing out straight white males’ difficulty setting means I am racist against straight white males, and wants to refight that argument despite having nothing new to say, I’ll be turning off the comments for this particular entry. Although do feel free to comment over at Cracked. Because, well, yeah.

I do myself mean to do a (more or less) one year follow-up to “Straight White Men,” although it will have to wait until I am off tour; the actual one year date occurred when I was doing an event in San Francisco, when it was more important to be focused on the present real world rather than the online past. So look for that once I am back home, and can swing the Mallet more effectively.