In reply to Duncan Bourne:
Everyone has privileges and everyone has disadvantages - it's a sense of inequality between these sets that creates an overall feeling of being victimised or not, and of course you can change your perspective.
If the people on this forum compared their lives with someone in Gaza who's had bombs and bulldozers disrupting daily life for years, watched three generations of their family wiped out by one, and now walks on crutches as they can't afford a prosthetic limb - I'd imagine most of us would feel pretty privileged in comparison.
Now on an individual level it is healthy to have a certain amount of willingness to make the best of the cards you've dealt and be happy, but being happy doesn't change the circumstances for the rest of the world, and none of this means that anyone more privileged than our Gazan has no right to complain about the disadvantages the society that they live in creates for them.
I believe in trying to create an equal society, and for that to happen I think that when someone talks about their disadvantages on a topic where we have privilege, we must shut up and listen, not try to enforce our view from our perspective of privilege. That doesn't mean we can't question their views, but they are the experts on what the disadvantages might be, so their position should be the starting point for discussion, not ours.
As an able-bodied white western heterosexual male, a lot of the cards were stacked in my favour, so when it comes to racial, sexual or sexual equality, I need to be ready to listen.
If a woman says to me "it sucks to get shouts and wolf-whistles from men all the time" I have to believe her. At first glance, the odd shout of "Oy, SEXY!" from a woman would flatter me, but I can't put myself in the position of having that as a daily part of life, sometimes threatening and intimidating, from the days of being a shy, self-conscious teenager onwards, so my instinctive feeling of "is it really that bad a thing?" is not to be trusted.
Having privileges should not prevent people from trying to right their disadvantages.