Using My Outdoor Voice

feigningnormalcy:

outdoorvoice replied to your post: You are always talking about “privilege.” Do you know what’s privileged? Having time to read for pleasure.

priveleges: -having a college degree -literacy in any language, especially academic literacy (the ability to undestand and interpret…

I’m so obsessed with this ask, and it wasn’t even mine! What gives! As someone who has a lot of privilege and tries to check/recognize it as much as possible, I like agreeing with people who call out privilege I haven’t recognized before. That being said, I think that calling out reading as a privileged act not only denies the history of printing and the written word as a great intellectual equalizer, but also denies agency/choice to those who are un/under privileged.

Based on the assumption that anon is making about “time” being the privilege, the assertion is untrue on it’s face. Everyone has time. Everyone chooses to spend that time in a different way. Equating privilege and time suggests that anon believes that time=money. Fine, a lot of people believe this. Equating time and money this way is all well and good, but also assumes that humans are rational economic actors and that every time based decision is a decision to spend that time either in an economically productive way (the assumption of the ask is that some people need to spend time working and have no time for something that is a non-economic activity), or to spend that time in an economically unproductive way.

This is by and large true, but a)people do not spend 24 hours per day working, b)denies the very hard to swallow pill that most people are un/under employed and could not spend their extra hours working for pay and c)ignores the fact that those who are not as privileged per se do spend non working hours doing something. 

That something that people spend those extra 5 minutes or however long we/they have doing is a choice. Not a privilege. 

As a multi-job (4 job) holder who worked to put herself through college, I had very little free time. Yes I had the privilege of attending a 4 year university that is one of the premier schools in the nation (we won’t get into how crap the public funding for education is in this post). But if you consider the “school” part of my life as time that I could not spend reading for pleasure (although I also had the privilege of being able to study something that I loved rather than studying something for the $$ it would make me in the future), I STILL FOUND TIME TO DEDICATE TO READING FUN BOOKS OTHER THAN SCHOOL BOOKS. And I worked 60 hours a week on top of my schooling. Nights, weekends, school days. 

All I am saying is that it takes some real academic gymnastics to equate the economic pressures on someone’s time with the inability to read for pleasure. Lazy assumptions anon, just plain lazy.

outdoorvoice:

So thefuckingquibbler and I were having this conversation about Daenerys hate in the fandom, based on the Dany/Palin comparison in my previous tumble/reblog. Somehow I am not very active (or even a passive observer) in the Game of Thrones fandom and had not even recognized…

So I spend a legit hour writing a post and then fucked up the read more link and lost it all. This is a mere fraction of it!!!! whyyyyy is my read more brokennnn!!!

(via feigningnormalcy)