planesandtrains

okay whoa just for the record i totally did not mean THAT.

it's just so the sort of thing that makes our field seem like a parody of itself. it's so hyper-specific and so aimed at a very specific set of very contemporary concerns. i mean i'm sure there are papers to be written about various body types in literature. but is it really worthy of its own subfield?

fair 'nuff. though the above 25/below 25 category changed about 14 percentage points from one survey to the next, so even if was all due to birthdays, it's interesting that there were that many people on the upper limit in the under 25 category that made it in. can't do math, though, so...

well because grad school is the first step on a career track, which most people do in their 20s regardless of career, but a few decide to switch directions and start a whole new career track later on. why would that be surprising? more interesting is that there are a greater percentage of 26-30 year olds accepted than applying, and a lower percentage of 21-25 year olds accepted than applying.

No! They'll appreciate it, and so will the people on their waitlist! I turned down several within a few days of acceptance.

I mean to be fair, the "Post-Acceptance Stress and Misc Banter" thread was started by the same person as this one was, and the justification was: Have a little bit of empathy and understanding for people in a worse position than you. It's tough, and their feelings are legitimate. No one's even been rude - they're just asking for you to let them have their own space, and not to rub it in their faces.

To end the male privilege thing, what bluecheese said. I just meant that declaring trans men not really male and thus exempt from male privilege is problematic, as is the idea that male privilege is based on biology - I mean, I know trans men (that means FtM) with beards, big muscles, and low voices! It ain't that simple. (I know that's not what you meant, girl with glasses, and the language is slippery, but I'm just clarifying what I'm responding to.) My original analogy was just meant to say "people with privilege can and should critique privilege," not dictate which groups do and do not have "privilege" and in what contexts or imply that it's simple. DontHate, no one here is pointing fingers at "the privileged." Just the privilege-denying. And the fact that we in the US aren't raised to believe class is not fixed is exactly the point, and why it's more of a problem in the US than most other developed countries - it allows us to deny its existence and makes it invisible, which gives it even more power. Nor is it just a self-designation one can capriciously change. It exerts real influence on people's lives, and is not nearly as fluid as we are all brought up to believe. You keep talking about other people being unreflective and pointing fingers, but from where I'm standing, you're doing the most finger-pointing and the least self-examination. And the stage I mean there's a reason we say socioeconomic class and not just economic class. It's not just determined by the number on your paycheck. Again, it ain't that simple! Okay I gotta be done with this conversation. Back to lurking.

Okay but trans men are men. And many of them will be the first to tell you that they do, in fact, have male privilege - just not cis privilege.

No, there aren't. My point was to counter the DontHate's bizarre idea that if you have class privilege, you can't acknowledge class privilege and call out others when they deny its existence.

So basically, all this says is, "I have no idea what privilege is." It's not a bad thing to have, since you can't control it, but it is a bad thing to deny as a force active in your own life and in the lives of others. The original post on this thread was naive, sure, but that doesn't excuse the arrogance of your reply to it, which implies that class (and privilege blindness!) is not an incredibly salient aspect of life at any elite institution, that there is no incredibly oppressive class system in America because we don't have a royal family (!), that because your grandparents were not wealthy, that somehow transfers to you as an upper-middle-class kid and also demonstrates that anyone who wants to can ascend the socioeconomic ladder, and that non-rich people who have anxieties about dealing with the sort of disproportionate privilege that exists on elite campuses should just shut up about it because it doesn't matter and it's not a big deal. It's like those men who tell women that sexism isn't such a big deal because they don't experience or notice it and that women should just quit whining about it. Just because I am also a man and have male privilege doesn't mean I can't call that bullshit. That sort of arrogant privilege-blindness is exactly what the OP was asking about, and it was what bugged me most about my own elite undergrad institution (where I certainly needed a lot of financial aid to get through!).

DAE find the brazen lack of awareness of class privilege displayed in this post hilarious? Yeah, it totally doesn't matter that the US has some of the most extreme income inequality and one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the developed world (a fact which is displayed starkly at our elite institutions, where 74% of students come from families in the richest quarter of the population and 3% from the bottom quarter) - because bootstraps! BTW, if you don't qualify for financial aid at a private institution, you're decidedly well up in that privileged quarter. I'm not suggesting this is a problem unique to Ivies, and being rich does not equal being a snob. You know what does correlate with being a snob, though? Refusal to acknowledge one's own class privilege.