An Unabashed Imitation of an article by Peggy McIntosh
In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.
As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.
Due to my own limitations, this list is unavoidably U.S. centric. I hope that writers from other cultures will create new lists, or modify this one, to reflect their own experiences.
Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted many times on internet discussion groups. Very helpfully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too – being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things – but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes.
Obviously, there are individual exceptions to most problems discussed on the list. The existence of individual exceptions does not mean that general problems are not a concern.
Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases – from a boy being bullied in school, to soldiers selecting male civilians to be executed, to male workers dying of exposure to unsafe chemicals – the sexist society that maintains male privilege also immeasurably harms boys and men.
However, although I don’t deny that men suffer, this post is focused on advantages men experience.
Several critics have also argued that the list somehow victimizes women. I disagree; pointing out problems is not the same as perpetuating them. It is not a “victimizing” position to acknowledge that injustice exists; on the contrary, without that acknowledgment it isn’t possible to fight injustice.
An internet acquaintance of mine once wrote, “The first big privilege which whites, males, people in upper economic classes, the able bodied, the straight (I think one or two of those will cover most of us) can work to alleviate is the privilege to be oblivious to privilege.” This checklist is, I hope, a step towards helping men to give up the “first big privilege.”
The Male Privilege Checklist
1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.
2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex – even though that might be true. (More).
3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.
4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.
5. I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are. (More).
6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.
7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are relatively low. (More).
8. On average, I am taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces much less than my female counterparts are.
9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.
10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.
11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent. (More).
12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.
13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.
14. My elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more this is true.
15. When I ask to see “the person in charge,” odds are I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.
16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters. (More).
17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.
18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often. (More).
19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.
20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.
21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.
22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.
23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.
24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” (More).
25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability. (More).
26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring. (More).
27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time. (More).
28. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car. (More).
29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.
30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.
31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)
32. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.
33. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.
34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.
35. The decision to hire me will not be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.
36. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is pictured as male.
37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.
38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. (More).
39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.
40. If I have children with my wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.
41. Assuming I am heterosexual, magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are rarer.
42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. (More). If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do. (More).
43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover. (More).
44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.” (More: 1 2).
45. Sexual harassment on the street virtually never happens to me. I do not need to plot my movements through public space in order to avoid being sexually harassed, or to mitigate sexual harassment. (More.)
45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men. (More.)
46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.
(Compiled by Barry Deutsch, aka “Ampersand.” Permission is granted to reproduce this list in any way, for any purpose, so long as the acknowledgment of Peggy McIntosh’s work is not removed. If possible, I’d appreciate it if folks who use it would tell me how they used it; my email is barry.deutsch@gmail.com.)
(This is an occasionally updated document; the most current version of The Male Privilege Checklist can always be found at https://amptoons.com/blog/?page_id=2402 . The views expressed here, which I started writing in 2001, unavoidably fail to precisely express my current views; that’s life, isn’t it? To see posts discussing the Male Privilege Checklist and various items on it, please visit this archive page).
Related links
For another feminist list with a different thematic approach, see Andrea Rubenstein’s “Think We’ve Already Achieved Equality? Think Again.”
The number of married women with at least one child that is not their husband’s is higher than 10%-15% because the second child is most likely to be their husbands with incident of misattributed paternity spread among other children.
I’m having trouble finding the citation, but as I remember for women having several children, the chance of someone other than the husband fathering one steadily goes up after the second child. It sounds like cultures in which women tend to have several children might have a fairly low incidence of misattributed paternity as a percentage of births, but a fairly high incidence of women with at least one child who is not their husband’s.
The sample bias in these studies is REALLY hard to get away from-communities seem to vary ENORMOUSLY on this point.
Is your argument really “Male privilege isn’t a thing because whores”?
I think the argument is actually ‘…because birds are whores’. It’s impossible to tell, because nomoreh1b has carefully taken those quotes out of any context (such as, the study Baker is referring to). In any case, I think any doubts as to whether ‘a third of married women’s children are not their husband’s’ is bullshit are pretty much laid to rest.
…and, doing a cursory review because apparently the link provided is a pirated copy of Baker’s book, it appears Baker is writing pop evo-bio and his findings have not been replicated in later studies (to say nothing of the speculation about how rape is just a way that women determine a male’s fitness to reproduce).
mythago:
“In any case, I think any doubts as to whether ‘a third of married women’s children are not their husband’s’ is bullshit are pretty much laid to rest.”
That is a clear misrepresentation of the figure I’ve been attempting to dig up.
The claim was that 30% of married women have at least one child who is not their husbands. There are _credible_ references claiming an incidence of overall misattributed paternity among children of married women in the 10-15% range-and estimates that clearly fall outside that range. As I have consistently stated: sample bias is really hard to avoid in these kinds of studies-and minor sample bias and skew results enormously. The rates of incidence among families having at least one misattributed child would be higher than overall rates if Bakers claim a woman’s second child is rarely misattributed is accurate. That is just arithmetic.
I am trying to dig up my copy of The Third Chimpanzee which may have those figures. It is also plausible I misread/misremembered Bakers claim that the overall incidence is in humans “slightly less” than the 30% we see in birds.
Another important figure here: some of these misattributed pregnancies happen _before_ marriage-so they don’t show up in the overall incidence of extramarital sex among married women. I’ve seen “traditional” communities where a woman quickly establishing a relationship with a prospective husband after getting pregnant with another man is pretty much a norm.
One important figure that is also getting lost in the noise:
just how many of the pregnant women that traditionally married men who were not the men who had impregnated them had in fact been raped? How has legalization of abortion and improved access to birth control impacted those figures?
This is all something of a moving target. When we look at these compendium’s of figures, a lot of them take place under a VERY wide range of conditions.
I grew up near an Amish community. The social norms of that community were VERY different than a lot of folks expect-it is NOTHING like the movies. From what I was told : most Amish Women were pregnant when they go married at age 16-18. The community was structured in such a way that a lot of young women had remarkably little supervision, no sex education. However, the physical access to those young women was overwhelmingly only with Amish men. An outsider so much as talking to a younger single woman could easily create a big scene.
My father was a farmer that make extensive use of Amish labor. The perception of the men my father hired was that the Amish elders had a real tendency towards sexual encounters with women not yet of legal age-and the community was structured in such a way allegations were never made.
In that case there was an alleged link between statutory rape and misattributed paternity in a highly traditional society.
I NEVER heard of a woman leaving the Amish community I grew up near. I’ve known two guys fairly well that had left-both had serious adjustment issues to the outside world. I saw an interview with a couple that left in the movie “The Devil’s Playground”-but that was about less traditional community than the one I’m familiar with.
My personal view is that all many men, including male ministers, doctors, law enforcement officials, teachers/school officials should be required by law to have DNA test results on file sufficient for paternity identification in the event of pregnancy/abortion-to make it easier for a victimized women to prove misconduct.
Even in the case of violent, stranger rapes, rape kits often are never analyzed-which I consider a travesty.
Male privilege, to the extent it exists, is something restricted to a subset of males-in some societies, a rather small subset.
If we want to assess the issue at all, we need to take a view of the entire balance sheet. That is something tricky to do-and the initial post didn’t even try look at some important issues.
Whether the incidence of cuckoldry among families is “slightly less than 30%”of something on the order of 5%, the real point here:
there is a LOT of variation in the experience of men. Rhetoric that suggests all men are somehow privileged in all respects compared to all women just doesn’t let us look at the situation accurately.
I NEVER used the word “whore”. In fact, I would suggest that in a situation in which sexual experience is relatively concentrated among a few privileged men, sex workers and women who accept a variety of partners may be doing something very altruistic.
I _am_ concerned about stuff like concentration of wealth, political power, media access, academic authority, paternity, sexual experience in relatively among relatively few men-which in the trend I think we may be observing.
nomoreh1b: Actually, the claim, way back in @361, was:
One giant issue that needs to be addressed as part of this balance sheet is cuckoldry. about 1 in 3 married women have at least one child that is not their husbands even though the husband is on the birth certificate. Those children are fathered by a relatively small percentage of men overall.
In other words, yes, you were claiming that 33% of married women have a child who is not the biological offspring of the husband, and that this is the result of infidelity (“cuckoldry”, in your phrasing) and fraud (putting the husband’s name down as the actual father).
You keep backpedaling by promising you’ll find evidence other than Baker’s “yeah, well, BIRDS fuck around, why wouldn’t women”, and then changing your argument to ignore the fact that “woman whose children have different biological fathers” != “cuckoldry and paternity fraud”. What the studies you proudly linked to do strongly suggest is that actual paternity fraud in stable relationships is pretty low, that paternity challenges are probably most likely to be right in the kind of situation where the man has good reason to suspect he is not the biological father, and that even in those situations paternity is correct about 90% of the time.
Find another hobbyhorse to ride, please.
Tamen @367: And what happens when a portion of those mandatory paternity tests come back with false negatives, as they inevitably will? Or when the putative father refuses to take the test?
Mandatory tests are, in effect, saying that you assume all women are lying liars who lie and cheat and they have to prove their innocence. To what end?
Here is a related reproductive rights issue:
This does NOT contain the key figure I was hoping to find-but may still have some relevance to the discussion
Page 71-73
Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. , 1992
As far as I can tell, all that’s saying is “some people have affairs.” This isn’t news to anybody.
Diamond’s Third Chimpanzee came out before Sperm wars. I Think that is the origin of the 10% figure getting popularly used.
This is the 2005 paper looking at a 3.7% rate instead of a 10-15% rate of paternity discrepancy.
The thing is: this article isn’t really attempting to do a real, gobal study like Baker et all did here:
Baker, R. Robin, and Mark A. Bellis, “Human Sperm Competition: Copulation, Masturbation and Infidelity”. London: Chapman and Hall. (Robin Baker and Mark Bellis were at Manchester University)
These studies are _all_ over the map-and getting a representative sample in any country is hard-let alone an international one. In this respect, paternity is as hard to study as rape.
I don’t think that a lot of people here will disagree is that there’s a concentration of wealth, political power, and media access among a relatively small group of men. I’m also not sure that there’s much dispute about academic authority, though I don’t know if it’s the same group of men.
Could you please provide your sources for the claim that paternity and sexual experience are likewise distributed? Also, are you trying to claim that the politically powerful and rich men are the same men that control paternity and sex?
I must admit that all this dithering about precisely what percentage of children are not the spawn of their mother’s husband has driven the memory of why this was brought up in the first place somewhere far, far away from my conscious mind. Therefore, to jump off of Ruchama’s comment @411, why do we care what the percentage is? It is certainly greater than 0%. So what? What point are you trying to make? Other than the point that women commit adultery, of course?
The point is that why are we all wasting out time yapping on about trivialities such as male privilege when a man can’t even be sure that his kids are his own, dognabbit!
Why, some men don’t even have the political power or academic authority to be allowed to have sex, while women are going around having sex with *shocked gasp* multiple men.
Or something like that.
“Could you please provide your sources for the claim that paternity and sexual experience are likewise distributed? Also, are you trying to claim that the politically powerful and rich men are the same men that control paternity and sex?”
From Sperm Wars by Robin Baker
page 140-141
Note: this is complicated in humans by some economic considerations. Gary Becker in his work on economics of the family noted that well-to-do women tend to have fewer children. This seems related to another figure:
that women seem most likely to have children when married to a man that earns more money than their father did. That is one plausible reason why we see much higher rates of child bearing among recent Mexican immigrants to the US than similar women in Mexico.
One major figure-that I don’t have-is just what are the characteristics of men that divorce and remarry having children in more than one marriage. That is the closest thing to polygyny common in US society today besides the behavios of successful “bulls” that cuckold other men’s wives(or future wives).
Anyhow, there is a LOT more than just income/wealth operating here. On the economic level we need to look at affordability of children. Someone earning $100K in Silicon Valley might have a huge budget for toys, but find housing for children hard to come by.
When the wealth/income comes is also a major consideration.
That said, there are reproductive strategies besides marriage/nesting. I suspect that factors like height, fame and physical attractiveness have become relatively more important in recent decades.
I suspect many of the PD events involve women that appear highly monogamous-and if they are having reproductive sex with a man other than their primary partner, it is one many of higher social or economic status than their primary or eventually primary partner.
Why do we care how many women experience rape? Rape is often a crime of _force_- and most of those affected outside prison are women. Cuckoldry is an act of fraud that affects a subset men.
“male” privilege in the sense of having Lots of kids tends to be concentrated in a subset of men. The masculine experience of another subset of men is one of isolation, relative celibacy, childlessness. The initial discussion here focused on the most privileged of men while ignoring the rest.
Anyhow, not all non-paternity events are fraud on the part of a woman. For example in the version of Rob Roy in which Liam Neeson plays, the villain rapes and possibly impregnates Rob Roy’s wife. Rob Roy quite consciously accepts the child as his own and kills the rapist.
I’m still stuck on the part about how men with “academic authority” have sex with lots of women. This runs counter to pretty much everything I have ever observed in academia.
“I’m still stuck on the part about how men with “academic authority” have sex with lots of women. This runs counter to pretty much everything I have ever observed in academia.”
Being at the top of ANY hierarchy typically confers social reward-some more than others. I would agree that successful pro athletes are probably more reproductively and sexually successful than Nobel prize winners-but guys like
Kary Mullis are far from reproductive or sexual also rans. For that matter, when Warren Farrell was providing academic support for the National Organization of Women, the social rewards available to him were substantially greater than you might might expect of other men of his means.
I would agree, many of the rewards available to academics are concentrated among a few folks.
I think the take-away is that nomoreh1b is a huge fan of Robin Baker, but not so much a fan of actual statistics when they don’t quite back up hir assertions that women are all screwing around on their husbands with socially successful males.
Also wonder why MRAs all victims of prison rape are men.
I would really need to see some sort of evidence that being at the top of an academic hierarchy (in terms of being respected in your field, not in terms of being made head of a department or university, since that’s an entirely separate skill set) in any way makes men more attractive to women. Especially men in academia — the socially awkward professor is a stereotype, but it’s not entirely off-base. I’ve got a whole lot of Asperger’s-type tendencies, though not an official diagnosis, and the concentration of “people like me” in academia is hugely greater than the concentration in the general population.
May I just point out, nomoreh1b, that you’re the only person in this thread who thinks “male privilege” has anything directly to do with having lots of kids.
Just jumping into say that, if my memory serves me correctly, Robin Baker’s Sperm Wars was pretty roundly discredited. I don’t remember much more than that, though, and, to be fair, the fact that Baker’s book was discredited does not, as I understand it, invalidate the notion of sperm competition, in which Baker’s thesis, as I remember it, was grounded.
The big claim to having discredited Baker was his assertion that there exist “killer sperm”. Baker’s reply is here
Baker was a reproductive physiologist. I haven’t reviewed the professional work in that area. My own academic background is in Economics and Software Engineering-I also have some practical experience in agriculture. Baker’s work holds up better that most stuff I read when I put it up against my personal knowledge base. I won’t say what he does is 100% correct, but he’s at least a credible professional in this general area that writes popular books.
I’ve come to really enjoy the repeated exclamations of “cuckoldry!” It’s a term that,these days, is used almost exclusively by two groups. MRA’s & FemDom aficionados. Those comments read wonderfully, if completely differently, from either perspective.
Baker’s work holds up better that most stuff I read when I put it up against my personal knowledge base. I won’t say what he does is 100% correct, but he’s at least a credible professional in this general area that writes popular books
“I don’t say that he’s entirely right, but he knows more than I do about this stuff, so I’m going to cite him as hard authority for my arguments.”
Yeah, I’m back to my Evo-Bio/Psych mantra: “Cool story, bro.”
So, male privilege. Appropos of today:
“I can choose my Halloween costume without having to consider whether or not it should convey some degree of “sexiness.” No one will ever market to me costume options such as Sexy Bert/Ernie, Sexy Watermelon, or Sexy Bacon. I do not have to worry that if my costume covers my whole body without emphasizing my secondary sex characteristics, it will invalidate my worth as a member of my assigned gender.”
Get a real life, Elusis. Seriously.
You never contribute anything of substance – you are not even able to do it (possibly low IQ). You are the perpetual victim.
Oh, Ampersand, I regret to inform you that I won’t be posting on your little dog-and-pony show anymore. You simply don’t meet my needs as a poster. If you are suicidal, deal with it.
Well anticipated, PatC!
(And yes, you are banned.)
Got to love the people who shout “I’M A FLAMING DOUCHEBAG AND I’M LEAVING”!
Um… yay?
Most of the costumes last night were normal. A few were brilliant. A few were less so.
In the last category, I wonder which sets of parents thought it would be an OK idea to send their 13 year old daughters out together dressed up as–I shit you not–Playboy Bunnies. Playboy rabbit ears and all.
To quote my wife: “are you fucking kidding me?”
My wife and I went as goth Hades and hippie Persephone. She carried a bottle of POM. I scared trick-or-treaters. Good times.
I couldn’t really see too many kids’ costumes — it was pretty cold and rainy, so everyone had to wear winter jackets over their costumes. All I could really conclude was that lots of the little girls had tulle skirts.
I would be interested in any sources you have on that. Robin Baker has a list on his home page-but that obviously could be biased.
What I see in general: applying work in this area to humans is prone to extreme subject bias-and the controversy involved make meaningful scientific investigation pretty hard.
In general there is a problem with science accurately representating current consensus-and that gets really bad when dealing with controversal areas in which there is substantial public interest.
I know of one parent that did something similar. In her divorce proceedings, she accused her husband of rape-a claim denied by the woman in question. She alleged her husband was a child molester. That was thrown out by the counselor the court appointed. However, it did come out in court proceedings she was using the babysitting services of a registered sex offender and her daughter was familiar with anatomic details of a frequent male visitor to her home(that her husband has specifically requested not be allowed there). The mother in question was seriously alleged to have both alchol and prescription narcotic abuse issues.
Why are we shaming a 13 year old girl’s costume choices on a thread about male privilege again?
I didn’t know choices could be shamed, Ben, but I think we were questioning the judgment of parents in encouraging sexist standards in their 13-year-old daughters.
Er… because we aren’t?
I targeted the parents, for apparently failing to recognize or address why dressing as a pornographic model might be a teensy, weensy, bit inappropriate. 13 year olds are under the control of their parents.
I can easily imagine why the girls might want to do it. Kids want to do all sorts of things, some of which are incredibly dumb; I’m sure there are kids who want to dress in blackface, for example. We generally don’t blame the kids because they’re, well…. kids.
Obviously, there needs to be some way to discuss inappropriate costumes. If my language doesn’t work, what else to you suggest?
At age 13, I wouldn’t necessarily assume a girls clothes are those chosen by/approved by parents. I can _easily_ imagine a 13 year old secretly assembling a costume-and changing in a gas station or someplace similar.
In general though:I think sexy or revealing costumes in young men are frequently (rightfully or wrongfully) associated with homosexuality. That is a blade that cuts both ways.
On one hand guys have less pressure to appear sexy-on the other hand they have less option to play that card.
I do know some one who, around 1985, at age 8 or so, decided she wanted to dress as her favorite TV character for Halloween: Vanessa Huxtable. She’s white. Her conception of this costume included brown makeup. Her parents, for some reason, decided that explaining to the neighbors why their kid was in blackface would be easier than explaining to their kid why blackface was problematic, and so they let her wear it.
Mythago:
From http://my.clevelandclinic.org/services/paternity_test/hic_dna_paternity_test.aspx
Even higher accuracy may be achieved: http://www.dna-geneticconnections.com/dna_accuracy.html
It seems to me that the accuracy is quite a lot better than the 97%-99% “pater est” and “sign this paper” methods currently provide.
Nevertheless, I agree that false negatives are an issue and a concern.
What if one only tell those who can with be 100% accuracy be excluded as a biological father that they are not the biological father? The rest get the message that they can’t be ruled out as the father? Would that address your concern about false negatives?
Mythago:
No, it doesn’t and you should know better.
There are a lot of things that are mandatory which does not assume something about everyone being subjected to the mandatory testing/procedure. One example is the mandatory search of on-board luggage before boarding a flight. Everyone is subject to that mandatory search, yet very few people would argue that the TSA assume that ALL passengers are hijackers and suicide bombers. It’s mandatory to get tested for HIV and Hepatitis B before one can donate blood – that makes no assumptions about ALL people donating blood.
Many liquor stores has as a policy that if you’re under 25 it is mandatory to show an I.D. before being allowed to purchase hard liqour – this is not sign of an assumption that ALL customer under the age of 25 is in fact an underaged person trying to illegally purchase hard liquor. Where I live about 100 men were “asked” by the police to come in and submit to an DNA test in a rape case because their cell-phone had been registered at a certain base-station at a certain time. I said “asked” in quotes because the letter sent stated that if they declined they would be called in for a mandatory interview. Does this assume that ALL of those 100 men were rapists? Where I live it’s mandatory by law to wear a helmet while riding a motorcycle and to wear the seatbelt when driving a car – that doesn’t make an assumptions that all drivers will crash. Making it mandatory for your sexual partners to wear a condom is not making an assumption that ALL of them are riddled with STDs, but it is considered a prudent and responsible thing to do.
On the other hand, when you cross the border and you are one of the three people picked from the line of about 100 to undergo a closer search for drugs then it does feel like an accusation. If everyone had to go through such a search as routine one wouldn’t feel profiled, singled out and accused – at least not in the same manner.
Hence I would argue that making it mandatory and routine would take away the presumption and accusation part of it.
To what end? I believe there are medical and ethical reasons for children and parents to know their biological connection. I also apply the same reasoning as those who recommend that one tell adopted children that they’re adopted at some point. In fact it seems like there currently are very few (I haven’t found any with a cursory search) professionals recommending that one doesn’t tell a child at some point that they are adopted.
Waiting too long, or worse misleading/lying/witholding facts about their biological origin will cause more harm as the child the longer one waits seem to be the common advice towards adoptive children. Would you say it’s different for children who unbeknownst to them grow up believeing that their father is also their biological father? If so, why?
@Tamen: A commercial service’s advertisement of its “accuracy” is not a breakdown of the rate of true vs. false positives and negatives. That said, even with an extremely accurate test, you are going to have false positives and false negatives, and you are going to have them in situations where there is no actual reason to question paternity. It’s like stopping every driver crossing the Bay Bridge and giving a breathalyzer test in case one of them is drunk.
Also, it’s pretty astonishing that you assume because some things are mandatory, it’s OK to make anything useful mandatory. Is condom use mandatory where you live? It should be, under your reasoning. (You also don’t seem to understand that when you give blood, the blood is tested after it is donated; you, the donor, are not tested before you give blood.) The things you describe have a utility – for example, in the case of helmet and seatbelt laws, reducing the externalities of people injured badly when they don’t wear helmets or seatbelts.
What you’re proposing is forcing couples who have no interest in a paternity test, and in the vast majority of cases no need for one, to undergo one for a very nebulous good – not preventing drunk driving or head injuries or HIV in the blood supply, but preventing a handful of people from thinking their biological child is not their own. You don’t seem to have considered, or perhaps don’t care, about the costs of this: intruding into the privacy of couples who don’t want a paternity test, the family disruption when there are false negatives, encouraging fraud when there are false positives….oh, and who pays for these tests? What about people who don’t go to the hospital to give birth; do we force them to come in for a test anyway? What if they refuse? Do we lock them up? Do we care about people who will avoid medical care because they don’t want to be treated like criminals?
So unless you own stock in a testing company, Tamen, yes, mandatory testing is saying that we don’t trust women and their partners and we are going to make them insist they’re not sluts. Putting on the indignant ‘you should know better’ to distract from that is fooling nobody.
I’m personally a strong advocate of the expanded use of paternity testing. However, I don’t think making these mandatory for all married couples is a particularly good idea or an idea that will be politically viable any time soon.
I _do_ think that couples should be allowed to create prenup/postnup agreements that require paternity testing. I also think that men should be routinely required to submit paternity testing data upon request from a woman to prove cases of paternity for purposes of obtaining routine child support. For men assuming a position of public trust(i.e. elected/licensed folks), I think a woman-or her husband- should be able to conduct that test without the man’s knowledge or cooperation(i.e. the man in question submits a sample to a data bank so a child’s DNA can be checked against the “usual suspects”. There are allegations from responsible professionals that men in positions of authority/wealth tend to sire an unusual number of children via cuckoldry-and I don’t think those children should either be raised in conditions of poverty due to a lack of means on the part of the mother or her husband should be forced by courts to pay child support for another mans biological child. The one big exception here is if there is a written agreement on the part of a couple to impregnate a wife with another man(say due to her husband’s sterility).
I am not sure how this all shakes out. I haven’t seen any good polls on what the public thinks here-and I think the available testing technology has outstripped the legal system.
We still have situations in which married men are legally forced to pay child support for the children of other men that have the means to pay child support. We also have a situation in which men in situations of questionable paternity have no legal recourse to request a test, and can only declare paternity-which may mean they will only get child support payments with no assurance of visitation rights.
I really doubt this is the situation the public as a whole wants. I do think is a situation that certain groups of men that have a far above average chance of fathering children via cuckoldry systematically work to maintain-even if they aren’t doing that with conscious intent.
“Also wonder why MRAs all victims of prison rape are men”
sexual abuse of female prisoners certainly occurs. It happened to a friend of mine in the cook county Jail in Chicago long ago.(she was stripped searched and fondled by male Chicago Police).
That said: the ability of male police to be alone with female suspects got severely restricted after the CPD abused the wife of a judge this way-and in general I think that has been a national trend. female on female sexual abuse appears relatively rare-even in prison system-compared to male on male rape.
There are some forms of sexual abuse of women that are somewhat institutionalized. For example, in Chicago, virtually any woman working as a prostitute will need to provide either services or cash to the Chicago police(I’d guess their take is 20% or so of the gross). That doesn’t meet the conventional definition of rape-but it really doesn’t strike me as entirely voluntary either.
It is also an activity from which a pretty small minority of men benefit.
female on female sexual abuse appears relatively rare-even in prison system-compared to male on male rape
They’re about the same, actually.
Edited to clarify: by which I mean rates of sexual abuse of prisoners are about the same for male and female inmates; I don’t know off the top of my head how that’s broken down by the gender of the perpetrator.
Paternity testing is the type of thing that a church might deal with. I have never heard of a church that requires paternity testing on the part of members-or even encourages it.
On Chicago’s south side, it was kind of a community joke just how many of the children born by women participating in certain churches bore a remarkable resemblance to pastors of those churches. One reason that was alleged Farrakhan’s church tended to get a lot more male involvement: NOI tended to enforce more discipline on its ministers than other churches active in that area.
“I mean rates of sexual abuse of prisoners are about the same for male and female inmates; I don’t know off the top of my head how that’s broken down by the gender of the perpetrator.”
Sexual abuse of female _suspects_ by police is almost certainly VERY high in many jurisdictions. I suspect it varies considerably though. Jurisdictions that pair officers and/or require camera monitoring of officers would almost certainly have a lower rate of such abuse I expect. In my mind: that makes it less excusable-simply because basic protocols would assure it can be greatly lessened.
Anyhow, I would love to see figures here-I sure don’t have them handy. Chicago had a big scandal back in the 70’s around female abuse of prisoners. I remember it quite well, because I bailed out a friend who had been abused by male police. Even then, there were real limits on when/how male police could be alone with female prisoners in custody-and those got substantially tightened afterwards. I suspect there are places with many fewer safeguards in place. For example, in some parts of the south, sheriffs are not required to drug test deputies-and you have examples of sheriff departments that are are in _really_ bad shape, and stuff like drug abuse on the part of deputies and sexual abuse of suspects is pretty routine.
That said: there are two figures that are important to grasp here:
a) the number of prisoners vs. suspects that are abused
b) just how many time they are typically abused?
From every thing I’ve read/seen/heard sexual abuse of prisoners by prison guards is rare compared to sexual abuse by inmates by other inmates. Both certainly happen. The big issue is that guards sometimes systematically put prisoners in situations where repeated abuse is highly predictable and difficult to avoid.
I have NEVER seen any source claiming that inmate abuse by other inmates in female prisons was nearly as high as in male prisons. I would love to see your sources on this.
The thing about sexual abuse by police/guards/inmates, it is some of the most preventable forms of sexual abuse we have. The police force and prisons are places that we as a society manage-and they can be changed.
I think is Dostoevsky that said the measure of a civilization is found in how it treats its prisoners. One of my statistician friends claims that the expansion of the US prison system was rooted in a projection that by locking people up longer, crime rates would be reduced that was done at Rand or a similar think tank. I personally think expanded reproductive rights(via improved access to abortion and birth control) have been more important.
In general, I’d like to see a much smaller, very different penal system. Stuff like simple possession charges don’t need to be handled through the prison system at all. Even stuff like hard drug abuse and retail drug trafficking can be handled by restrictive parole(restricting just where someone can live and who they can associate with). Prostitution(male and female) can be handled similarly-and in case of female prisoners-that accounts for a huge portion of those involved in the penal system. The crimes I would like to see more harshly handled are those run overwhelmingly by white males(i.e. financial fraud). I’ve personally worked on investigations of high level financial fraud that were treated with a slap on the wrist-and followed by unpunished violations of parole a few years later. That said: the case I saw involved a LOT of female accomplices that were protected by the legal system(former Secretary of State Katherine Harris of Florida was one prominent example).
nomoreh1b:
Yes. Like all abuses of power, it will be with us always at some rate, and there is no acceptable rate higher than zero.
The reason that some officers will assault people in their custody is that officers are human, and selected by humans, from among those humans willing to do the job at the rates which are currently paid, and therefore sometimes someone becomes an officer who never should have. As Raymond Chandler put it, “Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get.” He’s wrong on two small items, but the general point he’s making is sound. (The two small items: it’s “men and women” these days, and though there’s not much to attract the best we have, there’s not nothing.)
Those basic protocols are costly, and the first is very costly. To put two people in a patrol car will require nearly halving your patrols, since most jurisdictions have gone to one-person cars. The highest cost in policework, as in most things, is payroll. So, sure, we could certainly do that. But we’d have to raise taxes or cut patrols.
Camera monitoring is imperfect, and for an intelligent adversary, mainly just makes it more difficult because he has to work around the cameras. However, it would be cheaper than doubling the size of the patrol division.
Imperfections in video systems: some areas aren’t covered, limited storage capacity causes erasure of the loop before you can get to it or even know that you need to get to it, limited storage capacity prompts people to select a level of resolution which won’t show what you want, limited storage capacity causes people to opt for cycling between cameras thus producing intermittent gaps in recording, the camera is mounted too high so you can’t get height or a good shot of the face, the camera is pointed in the wrong direction, the camera lens is low quality so the resolution is low, the auto-focus makes everything blurry, insects or birds build something in front of the camera, snow or rain wet the lens, the lights go out and the camera does not have a light source, or something malfunctions and it simply doesn’t work.
Speaking as someone who routinely tries to gather video evidence at crime scenes, these problems are frustratingly common. Easily over half the time, a business which supposedly has a video system does not actually have a video recording when you need it.
Yes, all of that can be improved-upon and done better. That takes staff and equipment. Like most problems, this is 99% soluble with a sufficient infusion of money and some intelligent problem-solving. How high do you want those taxes to go?
Of course there are. As of a few years ago, around 90% of police departments in the United States had FIVE OFFICERS OR FEWER. That means your entire agency has one person on duty at any given time, even supplementing to some extent with part-timers. One agency in my region has over thirty officers, but only two of them are women. Even if you doubled that to four, you couldn’t guarantee that a woman was on duty at all times.
For an agency with three officers, who all work the road full-time and rotate the on-call time? Forget it; 95% of what they do will involve one, and only one, officer. And forget about two-person cars or any meaningful video surveillance, either; they’re lucky as hell if they have in-car video, let alone video surveillance of all the places a bad officer could take someone to assault her or him.
Grace
and in general I think that has been a national trend. female on female sexual abuse appears relatively rare-even in prison system-compared to male on male rape.
I have NEVER seen any source claiming that inmate abuse by other inmates in female prisons was nearly as high as in male prisons. I would love to see your sources on this.
Oh, no, after you, my dear Alphonse. If you have sources showing that sexual abuse of female inmates is “relatively rare”, by all means share.
Mythago is right according to BJS. Female prisoners are just as much at risk of sexual abuse and sexual violence in prisons as male prisoners are. There are differences when it comes to the perpetrator though.
nomoreh1b:
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics that’s not true for the vast majority of victims of sexual abuse and sexual violence while they are incarcerated: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/svpjri0809.pdf
Female prisoners are more likely to be abused/violated by other inmates (all but four female facilities in the BJS report were not co-ed which means that the perpetrator in the majority of cases were a woman) while male prisoners are more likely to be abused by prison staff. About 64-69% of the male prisoners reporting sexual abuse and sexual violence from staff reported that the perpetrator were a female staff member.
I break down the numbers from that BJS report a bit more in this comment: https://www.amptoons.com/blog/2006/05/30/men-are-much-less-likely-to-be-victims-of-rape/comment-page-1/#comment-224861
Aren’t male prison rapes primarily committed by other inmates?
Or am I misreading: Are you saying that the rate of staff-inmate abuse is higher for males than females, without it being higher than the rate of inmate-inmate abuse?
The BJS report is at odds with several other studies on this issues. From the wikipedia article:
I’m not sure what is going on here entirely. One isssue, the BJS figures appear to be looking at the number of prisoners making a formal report. In male prisons, that is pretty likely to have severe ramifications for the prisoner making the report. I think other surveys may have been done with more potential confidentiality for the inmate in question.
Also, we need to look at how many rape victims in prison are repeatedly assaulted. None of the studies really covered the case in which an inmate was acting “voluntarily” to get protection from other prisoners.
That said I was rather surprised the ratio of reported inmate abuse of females was as high relative to staff abuse of females as it was in the study.
I think the overall phenomena of prisoner abuse is pretty hard to study for a variety of reasons. I also think the government authorities involved have pretty consistently swept it all under the carpet.
I’m trying to find some data on how “rape kits” are analyzed that involve prison inmates. There is an appalling low level of analysis of those kits in the outside world. The controlled nature of a prison environment means DNA analysis of those kits could be much higher return. All penetrative sex acts involving prison staff and inmates are illegal-so simply proving unprotected sexual contact makes the case here pretty soundly.
The BJS report is at odds with several other studies on this issues. From the wikipedia article:
I’m not sure what is going on here entirely. One isssue, the BJS figures appear to be looking at the number of prisoners making a formal report. In male prisons, that is pretty likely to have severe ramifications for the prisoner making the report. I think other surveys may have been done with more potential confidentiality for the inmate in question.
Also, we need to look at how many rape victims in prison are repeatedly assaulted. None of the studies really covered the case in which an inmate was acting “voluntarily” to get protection from other prisoners.
That said I was rather surprised the ratio of reported inmate abuse of females was as high relative to staff abuse of females as it was in the study.
I think the overall phenomena of prisoner abuse is pretty hard to study for a variety of reasons. I also think the government authorities involved have pretty consistently swept it all under the carpet.
In 2003, congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act-in part under pressure from groups like Human Rights Watch and Just Detention.
Here is a quote from one of the government funded studies.
“Prison rape worldview doesn’t interpret sexual pressure as coercion,” ……
“Rather, sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening.
Given that we have seen public officials doing stuff like threatening suspects with prison rape on live radio-and keeping their jobs, I’m rather suspect of official government sources on these issues. The adopted brother(biological cousin) of an old friend of mine committed suicide after a California police officer threaten him with prison rape during an interrogation relating to a misdemeanour offence.
I grew up in a part of the country where Sheriff departments often have pretty low levels of oversight on the state level-and allegations of drug use and sexua abuse of suspects/inmates by deputies were pretty substantial. I know they had stuff like convicted a felon working in the Sheriff office as a dispatcher(in a country where jobs were pretty hard to come by so lots of candidates were available).
gin-and-whiskey:
You are not misreading me. I’ll repeat the pertinent part from the comment I linked to as well:
Those were the numbers I extracted from the tables and text in the report.
Here are some verbatim quotes from the “Highlights”-section of that report – these quotes are aggregate for both male and female:
Notice how they emphasized the “willingly” ones while leaving it up to the reader to calculate the percentage of inmates who had “unwilling” sex with the staff. The report categorize both as “staff sexual misconduct”. Human Rights Watch have a problem with that term: http://www.hrw.org/news/2007/12/15/us-federal-statistics-show-widespread-prison-rape
Two more verbatim quotes:
When I was in high school, there were a bunch of guys claiming they had willingly had sex with an attractive female teacher. I honestly think they were making false claims in an attempt to brag-and cause her trouble(i.e. if enough folks made the claim _somebody_ would believe it). I really wonder if something similar isn’t happening with female prison guards in male prisons.
Do we need to add to the Male Privilege Checklist that “Other men are much more concerned about rapes occurring to my gender, which take place largely in prison, than they are about rapes occurring to women, which take place largely in the un-incarerated world”?
I am having pretty strong feelings about what feels like a tremendous de-rail even though this thread is an old and long one at this point. There are plenty of places on Alas to talk about prison rape, and this feels like just another example of how men always, always wind up centered in the conversation about damn near anything (rape, pregnancy, abortion, contraception FGM) if a vigilant effort isn’t made to keep the focus on women. A classic definition of male privilege if ever there were one.
I don’t think so – I think this is a case of the more of what you say in the second paragraph; the fact that these particular two men have a bee in their bonnet about this is incidental. Note that nomoreh1b came up with this topic only shortly after realizing that his previous derail – about paternity rights – was petering off (and I am somewhat ashamed of my participation in that derail).
And to pre-empt any responses by Tamen and nomoreh1b – I am not dismissing rape of male prisoners as a problem, which it obviously is. I’m just wondering why, of all the places in the internet you chose to have this discussion, you chose to have it in this particular thread.
Here’s another beaut.
Male privilege means being able to say
“The only exception I have … to have on abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God. And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”
and then being able to say
“When I walked off the stage, I expected, walking to my green room, to get high-fives because I had no idea that the statement that I made would possibly go a direction that it went…. I didn’t think that anyone could possibly begin to take those words and construe a meaning from them that was never intended and certainly never meant.”
Male privilege means being able to be totally unaware of how your comments about rape and women’s bodies might sound to actual women, and to think you deserved congratulations for your tin-eared remarkes.
Martin:
I have never seen a man “thrown out” of anywhere for talking to a woman at a bus stop (absent actual criminal behavior), even when the woman clearly did not want the contact and the man persisted. And professionally, I sometimes get CALLED to situations like that. Unless there has been a crime, the worst thing that happens is that an officer, sometimes me, says, “Sir, she does not want to talk to you. Leave her alone, before your pattern of behavior starts to fit the definition of Stalking. And now that it’s gone this far, you might want consider taking a different bus, so that you don’t give the wrong impression, even though you mean no harm.”
Also, see this about your desire to speak to women who interest you.
Grace
Speaking as a male rape survivor, no, other men mostly do not give a shit about me / refuse to acknowledge my existence. (Women, generally, do the same, although at lesser proportion.) The experiences of shaming, “but you must have liked it,” and flat-out denial seem, to me, pretty much the same for all rape survivors.
Obviously this is just personal experience and not anything like an actual study.
yrs–
–Ben
Also see this.
Elusis:
I’ll just correct you and say that “Other men are much more concerned about rapes occurring to my gender, which take place largely in prison,” is according to the BJS report and the NISVS 2010 report not correct. BJS found that almost 89,000 inmates were sexually abused in a year. Page 19 of the NISVS 2010 report states that 1.1% of men (that amounts to an estimated 1,267,000 men) were being made to penetrate someone else in the last 12 months. It seems you either were unaware of the statistics from the CDC or that you don’t believe that particular statistics.
The original post contains this sentence:
So it’s not as if the topic of male rape victims outside and inside prisons are completely unrelated to the original post. I brought it up this time on this thread to refute the claim made on this thread that “female on female sexual abuse appears relatively rare-even in prison system-compared to male on male rape.”. Mythago also refuted that claim while saying that she couldn’t recall the characteristics of the gender of the perpetrators. The BJS report provide some insights on that so I included that. Gin-and-whiskey then asked me to clarify what I wrote in this thread.
I apparently don’t find it as unnatural as you do that the comments on a post titled “The Male Privilege Checklist” tend to be about men.
Nomoreh1b:
Of course you do.
If you care to look at the methodology used by the ‘Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09’ by BJS you’d see that 81,566 inmates were interviewed. The interviews were divided in two – one part was Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing which lasted about 2 minutes where the interviewer obtained background information and time of admission. The remaining 23 minutes (on average) were done by Audio Computer-Assisted Self-Interviewing in private – that is the interviewer were either leaving the room or moved away from the computer. Before the interview the inmates were told that any information would be held in confidence. I can’t see how a large number of inmates would think there was something to gain from bragging to a computer.
Eytan Zweig:
Gee, thanks for that dismissive choice of words – I found them insulting and hurtful. It probably wasn’t your intention for them to be so, and I hope you would’ve chosen other words had you asked/remembered/read further up in the thread/guessed why the subject matter of male victims of rape is of importance to me.
See my answer to that above.
I hadn’t read the methodology before you post. I’m still troubled by the differences between the results in the BJS study and the earlier studies cited in the wikipedia article.
“Speaking as a male rape survivor, no, other men mostly do not give a shit about me / refuse to acknowledge my existence.”
As a child, I witnessed a molestation of student by teacher-and could not talk about it until years later. I hate to think how this has been for you.
A difference I suspect is due to two things:
1) The majority of earlier studies doesn’t seem to examine staff-on-inmate sexual violence/abuse at all.
b) When a study finally did it chose to label staff-on-inmate sexual violence/abuse as “staff sexual misconduct”.
Reminiscent of how most earlier studies on rape doesn’t seem to examine male victims of rape at all – and certainly not male victims of female perpetrators. When a study (NISVS 2010) finally did they chose to label a large part of it “being made to penetrate someone else” rather than rape.
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Ben, I’m sorry you have to deal with that nonsense. I don’t think that Elusis was trying to claim that men are usually enlightened about rape when it happens to other men (and as you know, women are also perfectly capable of being victim-blaming assholes to other women); but that they are more likely to be outraged about situations where the victim is male. I’d modify that to say ‘and when the perpetrator is male’; there’s not a lot of appropriate outrage, sadly, about sexual abuse when the perpetrator is female and the victim is male.
Less nebulously, there’s a huge amount of outrage in the MRA community about prison rape, which they assume never happens to women and is “real” rape in a way that sexual assaults on women can never be.
Tamen, actually some of the studies _did_ look at sexual abuse by prison staff
-and the ratio is way different than the BJS study.
from the wikipedia article.
The results in the BJS study were reported by prison-which may have meant that the prison officials had a strong reason to encourage low reporting rates. The rate of inmate abuse seems substantially lower in male prisons that earlier studies might suggest.
Tamen – I apologise for any hurt I may have caused with my choice of words. That was not intentional. Or, more accurately – I had, and still have, no intention of diminishing either your personal experiences, feelings or the overall importance of the issue of male victims of rape.
However, I still do not accept that just because male rape (in prison and otherwise) is of importance to the culture, then it is important enough to allow it to drown out the conversation on issues that are relevant to women. At the moment this thread is almost entirely dominated with men talking to other men about issues that have to do with men (and I’m well aware of the irony that in making this post, I am just adding to that trend).
So, I do apologise for being hurtful as I did not intend that. But I did intend to be critical of your behaviour in this thread, and while I probably should have expressed it differently, that still holds.
Anyway, in order to reduce my own hypocrisy in this matter, I will no longer post in this thread.
Thanks, mythago, for clarifying my point effectively. Your summary is right on.
Privilege is hearing that women shape and curtail their lives on a daily basis in reaction to the messages they’ve gotten about the threat of rape, and turning the conversation to rape that occurs in a setting most men will never experience.
Privilege is hearing that most rapes of women and men are committed by men and turning the conversation to men as victims.
I’m not terribly worried about keeping threads on topic when they’re over 400 comments long! The fact that the thread is alive at all after all this time pleases me.
Also, although there are definitely threads where I step down hard on this sort of MRA domination of discussion, I don’t want to do that blogwide.
The reason is, I sometimes worry that I’ll get stuck in a “feminist bubble.” For instance, sometimes I hear a feminist claim that women and children are the primary victims of war, I wince a little – it’s not true, and it ignores some important stories. Having occasional MRAs and anti-feminists posting on “Alas” forces me to be aware of contrary facts and stories, which is good for me, even if I end up rejecting 95% of what the MRA visitors have to say.
@mythago —
I understand Elusis’s point. But it’s wrong.
Outside of MRAs (a tiny, non-representative fraction of men) in conversation with feminists about rape (a tiny, non-representative fraction of conversations), the majority of men do not give a flying fuck about prison rape except to make jokes about it or threaten non-conformists with it. Which often amount to the same thing.
Outside of those conversations? MRAs sure as hell don’t give a flying fuck either.
This is mirrored with rape of women. Outside of very specific conversations, or very specific women (a girlfriend, wife, or relative), the majority of men do not give a fling fuck about the rape of women, except to make jokes about it or threaten non-conformists with it. Which often amount to the same thing.
I find that feminist groups sometimes want rape survivors (particularly male ones or those raped by women) to shut up and go away. And they often conflate cultural lies about rape with on-the-ground facts about rape. But they are usually a damn sight better than the culture at large, which means several damn sights better than MRA circles [1]. Which is one of the reasons why I hang out mostly with feminists.
yrs–
–Ben
[1] And I sure as hell don’t appreciate being used as “rhetorical point of the moment” by them either.
Well, I’ll bow out as it seems clear that I am seen as an unwelcome intruder here – although it puzzles me that my 9 comments since August in the last 175 comments amounts to dominating this thread.
Tamen – I appreciated your comments, actually.
Ben – I wish everyone treated your experiences with respect. :(
Amp – obviously it’s your blog, your rules.
I just feel like
– there are multiple places on this blog that the discussion of prison rape and male sexual victimization in general is on topic (as well there should be, because both are a serious and under-acknowledged problem)
– the fact that a discussion of institutional sexism, kyriarchy, and male privilege gets turned to “but what about the men” is an illustration of that same system, and the way that it drowns out discussion of male privilege/female oppression is isomorphic to the culture at large
And both of those frustrate the hell out of me.
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So, I noticed that a) a lot of this conversation has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with male privilege, and b) quite a few people on here seem to think that women are completely incapable of sexual abuse. You’re wrong.
Is there even one person here who has said that women are incapable of sexual assault?
My own posts here have been in an attempt to look at male privilege as part of a balance sheet-and a spectrum.
Are there privileged men? Yes. However, not all men are privileged by virtue of being men. Even some of the men you think of as privileged, if you really knew what their life was like as a package, you wouldn’t want any part of it.
There are also women that are privileged and abusive. The idea that sexual abuse on the part was rare came up because other than one, BJS study prepared under duress, that was my read of previous studies. It isn’t that women are saints. However I’d look to other areas for the stuff they do that is the equivalent of forcible rape of the other gender. Involuntary cuckoldry-which is an action of fraud not force is one example. I’ve also seen pretty extreme examples of child abuse/neglect in which women were the key factor.
Yes, I think some women are highly privileged-but I honestly think that is rare compared to the number of women that avoid stuff like the equivalent of being a young male punk in a prison.
A lot of it depends ultimately though on what you as a person value. how you weight different factors will determine how you view the balance sheet.
IMHO the majority of men cannot think about/talk about the issue _either_ way. The men that intimidate others this way are really a pretty small, distinctive minority.
That said, as a “nonconfomist” that has spent time in jails,
(I got arrested once briefly for charges that were dropped, and bailed a friend out of jail after she was sexually abused by police), the issue has been forced on me a bit.
I think a lot of men really are intimidated by the threat of prison rape even if they don’t admit it-and it is the backbone of a lot of traditional conformity among men-and the tendency of non-conformists to identify with gangs for protection.
nomoreh1b:
That’s not what privilege is.
Grace
Grace:
According to wikipedia:
“A privilege is a special entitlement to immunity granted by the state or another authority to a restricted group, either by birth or on a conditional basis.”
Do you have another definition you would choose to use?
nomoreh1b:
Why, yes. Rather than using a using “privilege” in the legal sense, which would be absurd, because Amp was never talking about legal immunities, we could use “privilege” in the sense which Amp, the author of the post, clearly intended: male privilege. “Privilege” in the same sense that Peggy McIntosh intended when she wrote about white privilege in Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, which Amp referenced in the first line of his post.
I think it would be a good idea to use that sense of the word “privilege”, and not a homophone which, while using the same spelling and sound, has a very different meaning and context.
And frankly, it’s ridiculous that I even have to explain this. Did you really not get it, from the post and the link in the first line of the post? Because in the 483rd comment on a post, I should not have to qualify my definition by saying, “Oh, I mean privilege as we’re using it in this context where the title of the article contains the phrase ‘male privilege’ and the first line of the article contains the phrase ‘white privilege’, because I can see how if I didn’t explain that in detail, it would be totally confusing.”
Grace
“most rapes of women and men are committed by men . . .”
Nope. If you properly define rape to include being “made to penetrate,” most rapes of men are committed by women. According to the latest CDC (US government) survey, 4.8% of all men have been “made to penetrate” and 79.2% of the perpetrators were women. Examples of “made to penetrate” are: a woman who has sex with a man who is passed-out drunk, or a woman who forces a man to have sex with her through violence or threats of violence. There is some confusion due to the fact that their definition of rape excluded “made to penetrate” and only included men who had been penetrated. That was far less common (1.4% of men) and was mostly perpetrated by men. However, if you include “made to penetrate” as rape, which you should, since it is forced sex, women are a significant percentage of rapists, and the majority of male rape victims were raped by women. Here are direct quotes from the report:
“Approximately 1 in 21 men (4.8%) reported that they were made to penetrate someone else during their lifetime”
“For three of the other forms of sexual violence, a majority of male victims reported only female perpetrators: being made to penetrate (79.2%), sexual coercion (83.6%), and unwanted sexual contact (53.1%).”
The above, lifetime stats do show a lower percentage of male victims (up to 6.2% of all men) than female victims (18.3% of all women) although this is far more than commonly believed. However, if you look at the report’s stats for the past 12 months, just as many number of men have been “forced to penetrate” as women were raped, meaning that if you properly define “made to penetrate” as rape, men were raped as often as women.
A homophone is a word that sounds the same but isn’t written the same, and isn’t the same word.
“In linguistics, a homonym is, in the strict sense, one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings.”
and @Grace in post 485:
White privilege in the US, Europe and NA and most white-dominant places, can be said to be unidirectional (it won’t get you far in Japan, but there you’re the minority). Whatever privilege being a minority ethnicity or skin color provides, it’s not on the same degree of comparison as being the dominant (in number and influence) ethnicity.
Sex doesn’t work so unidirectionally. It all depends on what priority you put to the benefits of being presumed having more agency, vs the benefits of being presumed having less agency.
More agency means you can be credited for stuff you do, because nothing about what you do is inherent, the flip side is crimes you do are considered to have been chosen willfully (and as thus, punishment is harsher, presumed to be capable of evil). Less agency means you’re unlikely to be found competent (people can underestimate your capacity to do stuff)…or guilty, for stuff you do (punished less for same crimes, presumed unable to be evil).
If you have agency, you can possibly (but are unlikely to) accomplish great things. But no one will care if you fall down, get hurt, need any help. “You brought it on yourself.”
I prefer having the safety net of being presumed not responsible for being poor (thus more sympathy towards me) and other things outside my control (being trans, aspie), and being a bland member who doesn’t do anything specially great.
But that’s me. Not everyone prefers being safe, some people like risks, regardless of the costs.
The situation there is also complex. If you value procreation, whites in the US are at a real disadvantage-except for a few groups like Mormons and Amish. That is arguably the root of the hysteria we see around evangelical christians-their old formula just isn’t producing babies the way it used to.
Just in the interest of disclosure:
I’m largely of indigenous descent. In terms of appearance, I’d get classed as “white”-but I don’t fall into any of the ethnic groups common in US cities, and some of my relatives have pretty strong Native American features-and a patterns of health issues more typical to what you see on a reservation to what you see in the general American public-and family cultural traditions that just aren’t in the mainstream at all.
One time I saw an interview with a civil rights worker who can easily “pass” for white-but culturally was clearly african american-when you looked at the rest of his family photos and how it talked about his home life it was pretty clear.
The way I see it:
Europeans before migration were a collection of warring tribes. The abundance of natural resources in North America, physical isolation and serious technological advances lifted that tendency for a least a while-at the expense of stuff like African slavery and genocide of native americans. Big chunks of white America never had their hearts in either of those practices.
Stuff like economic privilege of is really confined in huge part to specific groups of whites-that are pretty distinct from the rest of the white population. One of the big tendencies in recent years has been to move limited numbers of people from specific minority groups into the upper class-but that has meant _less_ perception of potential for upward mobility among many working class whites.
You can argue that through the 70’s white male privilege was a huge factor-but wages of men have been pretty stagnant after inflation since the mid 60’s. By world standards, they are still quite high-but in certain cases the delta is what is important in terms of the individual values of the people in question. The only way to have a discussion is equals is to at least try to look at those individual value/priorities.
You can argue things _must_ be the way they are going -but that isn’t necessarily a universal opinion by any means either-and is far from reflecting consensus.
From the wikipedia article on male privilege:
It all depends on what priority you put to the benefits of being presumed having more agency, vs the benefits of being presumed having less agency.
Why is that analysis supposed to be limited to gender? Whether it “can be said” (by whom? you?) to be “unidirectional” you could use the exact argument as to, say, race.
Also, protip: uncritically quoting Phyllis Schafly on male privilege just makes you look badly informed.
@Egalitarian, I doubt anybody here would exclude envelopment from the definition of rape, but could you kindly link to the CDC report?
Schala:
Not sure what you’re quoting, but your own definition, above, does not accord with the definition I thought I knew, the difference being the ultimate clause “…and isn’t the same word”.
So I checked the dictionary which comes with my computer, because it’s handy: “each of two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, e.g., new and knew.”
Also, since we appear to be quoting Wikipedia in this thread now, “A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning.”
Even using your definition, I am prepared to go off into the swamp over what a “word” is, and when one is different from another even if they sound the same and are written the same. But I’ll hold off, since it that would be completely beside my point.
For the rest of your response, I confess that I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Are you disagreeing with me, or simply riffing off of my post to make points which are interesting to you? If you’re saying that privilege is complex, multilayered, situational and intersectional, I agree.
Grace
nomoreh1b,
So, that’s a long excerpt from a wikipedia article with no comment from you. I don’t propose to argue in absentia with such paragons of feminist authority as Phyllis Schlafly, Anne Coulter, etc.
If I must infer YOUR point from a long passage which you did not write, it seems to me that it boils down to “but it’s not all soft cushions and bon-bons for men, who have it hard in a variety of ways in our culture”.
You’ll get no argument from me on that point, presuming that it was your point – I don’t want to put words in your mouth, even though there do seem to be a lot of other people’s words in there just now. But that does not negate male privilege, nor the concept of privilege generally or other specific types of privilege.
Grace
The way I would phrase it:
the concept of male privilege is far from one around which there is a consensus.
I am critical of Phyllis Schafly on a variety of angles. However, she and Ann Coulter represent a VERY real constituency that isn’t going away any time. soon.
My own favorite of the sources quoted would be Warren Farrell-but there are big issues that he simply DID NOT want to touch(I am actually an acknowledged reviewer for one of his books).
My own position, is that male privilege-to the extent it exists, is a minority experience, except when accompanied by strong institutions that regulate/restrain the most powerful/privileged of men or environmental conditions that inherently tend to support a high degree of equality of outcome.
In addition to what Grace said, there’s also the introduction to the list:
However, she and Ann Coulter represent a VERY real constituency that isn’t going away any time. soon.
So what? Did you quote them for a reason other than you had nothing important to say, so were again throwing out chaff?
nomoreh1b:
Okay, but until recently you could argue the same thing about global warming. People near Schlafly’s and Coulter’s stances can and do argue that there’s no consensus around evolution. “But there are people who disagree” is pretty weak tea.
I’m not sure what you mean, here. Are you willing and able to elaborate, and perhaps provide examples?
Grace
This is a homophone.
I didn’t quote this person (I have no idea who this person is, personally).
It’s even more than that. Male privilege, like female privilege, are not unidirectional class A oppress class B deals.
At least not since 1960s where it was considered appropriate to diss a woman’s leadership on the “obvious” grounds that “men are THE leaders” (see Lost in Space episode where Will Robinson says to his sister that “He’s a man, he should lead”, and her only rebuttal is that he’s “not yet really a man” because he only tried to shave that morning, he doesn’t have a real beard or any facial hair (ie not rebutting the concept, only saying he doesn’t qualify yet)). Reference courtesy of my geeky boyfriend who likes old sci-fi series that aired before I was born.
Male privilege is nice if you like taking risks, going in a “winner takes all” match, having to fight just to survive, let alone get on top. You’ll be less underestimated. If you’re on the wrong side of the law, of class, of sexual orientation, or just randomly targeted by thugs, however, it’s the worse side. No one is going to risk their lives to protect you, or help you. They’ll diss any plea of help and deem them signs you’re “not a real man”, and thus, circularly, unworthy of their respect or help. With our paranoid society of today, any action you take towards people will be seen as sexual, potentially violent, your altruism and desire to better society questioned at every turn, your desire to raise/better/babysit children seen as a desire to have sex with them and nothing more. Your competency in matters of childcare, and care matters at all deemed null and void, even negative. You also apparently don’t care one bit about your health, would rather die than go to a doctor, and eat food like you want to buy diabetes and a stroke at 40 years old, if you don’t, you’re such a sissy – so will many mainstream (rather stupid I agree) people, of both sexes, will say.
Because masculinity is rewarded on risk-taking, even stupidly imbecile risk-taking (impressing mates) you’ll have more people doing it than biologically would. Some people inherently love taking more risks than average, but if you’re told it makes you more ‘you’ (and attractive) to do so, you’ll have way more incentive to stupidly risk your body integrity.
Female privilege is nice if you want to be more protected, have people want to protect and value you, have people value the beauty of people of your sex (in that femaleness is considered inherently beautiful, more than maleness). If you want to be considered more empathetic, more moral, more caring, it’s the Nirvana. If you want to be considered competent in the outside-home sphere, however, you start a bit handicapped. You have to prove your worth maybe more than others (this is mostly true for politics). This is the flip-side of being considered unable to do evil. You are also considered unable to do good. Whatever you do isn’t (considered to be) something you chose to do, so you’re punished less, and rewarded less, for the same efforts in the good and the bad ways. You’ll be helped more if you fall into poverty, disability or any other status that requires society’s help to go through. Get more sympathy, you’re never said to be responsible for your condition (ie lack of agency) so people are more sympathetic to stuff that “happens to you”. Regardless of your role in it (it also applies to 1st degree murderers).
Because feminity (and yes I don’t add the extra ni, it sounds redundant to me, it doesn’t exist in French) is rewarded on a certain degree of vanity, even extreme I’m-25-but-need-wrinkle-cream and can’t-go-out-without-make-up-I’d-be-naked people, you’ll have more people doing it than biologically would. Some people inherently love taking a ton of time to improve their appearance (real or perceived), but if you’re told it makes you more ‘you’ (and attractive) to do so, you’ll have way more incentive to spend a tons more on your “beauty routine”.
I’ll end this with the cost of my own beauty routine, as a rather lucky trans woman (I “pass” without really trying, don’t really care about being seen as feminine enough). Less than 50$ a year. This includes razors (can’t say price) and shampoo and conditioner (likely 10-15$). I shave legs, what little facial hair I do have, and pubic hair. I have no armpit hair to shave ever. I was lucky for that. It takes me 5 minutes a day max. My make-up lasts me 2 years, or more (over its expiration date). Because I hardly use any of it. I feel I didn’t need to be indoctrinated into “make-up = pretty” and am lucky to have avoided it. To me make-up = clownish.
I brush my hair 2 minutes.
I shave facial hair 1 minute.
I take a bath daily 5-10 minutes tops (including time to draw the water) unless I want to relax.
I shave legs hair once a week (1 minute). I shave pubic hair once every 2 weeks (1 minute).
I wash hair once every 2 weeks, takes 5 minutes.
I apply make-up once every 3 months, maybe, if I feel like it, takes 5 minutes.