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.”
Sigh. Are we really arguing grammar? And don’t you folks know how to Google?
Homo: same.
Phone: sound.
Homophones are words which SOUND THE SAME. However, homophones are not simply “different definitions of the same word.” The label “homophone” is reserved for DIFFERENT WORDS.
Example: Through (“I went through the door”) and Threw (“I threw the ball.”)
Another example would be Rough (“this sandpaper is rough”) and Ruff (the ruff of a wolverine is reputed to make an excellent lining for a winter hood.”) And so on.
Using a particular definition of “privilege” (or racism, or sexism, or rape, or whatever) has nothing to do with homophones.
It has quite a bit to do with semantics, of course: the person who gets to define the term usually ends up winning the argument. Obviously, you can define privilege in a way so that certain groups appear to be privileged, and you can define it in a way so that they don’t.
If you’re upset by it, the reasonable response is “sure, that group may be privileged under the definition you chose and the values that you arbitrarily assigned (or appear to have assigned) to different things. So what? Why should we use your definitions and values instead of mine?”
That’s the REAL discussion. After all, pretty much everything has a good side and a bad side: men get to be aggressive if they want (good!) but are the targets of aggression as a result (bad!) and don’t get to be emotional (bad!) but aren’t usually targets of certain types of violence (good!) but are more often targets of other types of violence (bad!) and get more respect as a result (good!) but are often “expected” to do manly things to earn that respect (bad!) and so on.
The list can go on for ages. But it’s not as simple as making the list, complex though that is. The hard part is the balancing: So, OK: if men tend to have many of those traits and if women tend not to have as many of those traits, then in the end who is better off?
In the end, I’d put the benefit on the male side; i.e., I believe that overall, men are privileged over women. But it really has a lot to do with what groups you’re talking about. The male/female difference may really be very different if you’re looking at “all US residents” versus “poor Iranians” versus “rich Russians” versus “all college and university graduates” versus “all members of all worldwide militaries” versus “people who frequently post on feminist blogs.”
This is pretty close to what a philospher named Rawls talked about in his concept of “fairness”. Essentially, if you didn’t know which side you’d be on ahead of time, how would you choose to divide the pie?
The issue here is just laying out the landscape. A lot of the men with the greatest problems are _utterly invisible_ in the mainstream culture. The women’s movement did a job of publicizing rape and sexual assault. I think as a culture, we are still dealing with rape via fraud vs rape by force. Giving an woman drugs or alcohol to get her to have sex is pretty common-maybe more common than violent rape. It is technically illegal-and even more rarely prosecuted than many forms of forcible rape. On the other hand, we have chunk of men paying to raise the children of other men-and defrauded into it. (I’m not sure how many women involved in those attempts have been raped-but that is another question). When I look at the hysteria in the GOP-with even working class males demanding lower taxes, the underlying assumption is that the social service structure uses them as cash cows-and to a degree it really may. A lot of economic transfers take place from middle to lower-not upper to lower-and the trickle up effects to the upper 1%(families with more than $5-8 million in assets) have been _huge_ in recent years. Trickle up has been huge in recent years, virtually _all_ gains in wealth have been restricted to the upper 1% according to Ed Wolff of NYU.
I personally consider the identification of white men with the GOP kind of like the helsinki syndrome-a captive identifying with abuser(i.e. some of the most very privileged of men).
My gut here: women are more likely to be objects of attention by fraud artists than men-but they also have more innate defenses(you see just like a higher verbal IQ among women which may have evolved to detect fraud artists). Men are really pretty vulnerable to fraud in relationships and from authorities they trust-in a way like women are physically vulnerable. That is part of why I brought up cuckoldry. I also think stuff like that is going on with systematic downplay of prison rape on the part of authorities(basically hysteric action towards non-conforming males-particularly non-conforming , fair, white suburban males of slight build involved in minor drug charges)-but that is another story.
I’m not really prepared to really look at the balance here until we get an idea of the lay of the land.
To me it has to do with what you value about life.
If you prefer the lonewolf-leave-me-alone lifestyle, doing it all on your own, being invisible in society (which means also being bothered less) then the male side sure looks more tempting.
If you don’t like being invisible, want more attention than zero, without being a Bart Simpson clown, the bully, or the star athlete, then the female side could look more tempting.
It all comes down to your own priorities.
All privileges have their downsides, some more pronounced than others. It comes down to what trade-offs you’d rather do. What you’d rather not do.
Ideally both sides of the equation would have the same possibilities, the same expectations, the same rewards, the same punishments. But they don’t. Heck some people, including toy marketers, balk so much at the idea of their maleness/femaleness not being some unique god-given Ultra-Significant TM quality (that is always complementary) that they pinkified everything feminine and blueified everything masculine. Just to over-highlight the maleness and femaleness of kids who don’t care about it inherently (they’re driven to it by those paranoid parents/peers who do – they do want to identify as their sex, but not above anything else in life).
nomoreh1b, just to clarify, since I can’t quite tell from the way that you’re phrasing things — are you saying that a married woman having an affair is equivalent, as an offense against her husband, to the offense against a woman who is raped?
Its not her having an affair, it’s him being liable to raise a child that’s not his own, without knowing so beforehand.
But given men get raped at about the same rate as women, given the last-12-months CDC rates, there is no need to make an unequal comparison:
A man getting raped is the equivalent of a woman getting raped. On a theoretical level (the degree of damage it can do will vary from individual to individual).
The cost of raising a child was estimated by the WSJ at around $300K. I wouldn’t say that is the equivalent of being raped-but at the same time, we have guys risking stuff prison rape for things of less financial value(though many of those guys are pretty messed up and they might risk their lives for little too).
The other thing here: we have men doing stuff to provide for families-or have a chance at having a family- that really do risk death(over 90% of workplace fatalities are male-but we also see significant fatalities among female prostitutes and wives that get infected with HIV-or just murdered- by husbands so that is a tricky figure that may be low). Anyhow, there was a paper by George Stigler that put the value of a live at something like $180K(in 1965 dollars figure $1.27 million today). Basically he looked at similar occupations and looked at how much you had to increase wages to compensate for a fatality.
We could do something similar for rape-but I don’t think anyone has(I’m thinking stuff like looking at housing prices and compare them to risk of experiencing rape). Anyhow, both rape and death are pretty severe.
Obviously cuckoldry isn’t the same death-but both are pretty substantial-and just as women will do a lot to avoid rape, men will do a lot to avoid reproductive cuckoldry. My guess -is that if we could do a good comparison, reproductive cuckoldry is less severe-but not by an order of magnitude.
Now, I didn’t specifically say affair on the part of a woman. I was talking about successful reproductive cuckoldry-getting a guy to devote his life taking care of another man’s child under false pretenses. Not all reproductive cuckoldry falls into that category. More women have affairs than reproduce with men other than their husbands. Some use birth control. Some couples have open marriages-or marriages in which the man is not expected to be a breadwinner. Some marriages involve a de facto deal in which a man supports a woman that has another mans child to get a younger or more attractive wife than he could otherwise obtain. I’m specifically talking about an act of fraud that obtains economic support for a child that wouldn’t be provided otherwise.
There is some real truth here to what Schala is saying. However, I think that actually the extremes on both sides are actually male. Most cult leaders are male. Only 3 of the top 30 grossing actors are female. I expect there are more females that at some time work as professional actors-but fewer have long or stable careers in that occupation.
I expect that both genders have different values-(both expressed and those reflected in behavior). I wonder just how life on the other side would compare using the others value system?
To me it has to do with what you value about life.
If you prefer the lonewolf-leave-me-alone lifestyle, doing it all on your own, being invisible in society (which means also being bothered less) then the male side sure looks more tempting.
If you don’t like being invisible, want more attention than zero, without being a Bart Simpson clown, the bully, or the star athlete, then the female side could look more tempting.
It all comes down to your own priorities.
On men being “made to penetrate”. I’ve never met a man that felt he was psychologically damages by that kind of activity. I’ve known some men that got severely harassed by women. I once had a roommate who looked like he stepped out of GQ(I’m completely serious). He really had to be careful how he structured his life due to issues around stalkers-but it was never a safety issue(more an annoyance we’d joke about).
The thing that was an issue: he had some women that really treated him cruelly. His looks brought him a lot of options-but he had to learn to choose more carefully than most guys-because he had options. I think from his perspective, the emotional abuse he got was a much bigger deal than the stalkers or women that physically accosted him.
I have. A lot of men have reported being hurt and traumatized by rape, including by being raped by women.
I don’t think it’s really up for debate that some men are hurt by rape – including cross-sex rape – even if you have never personally met anyone who has told you about that.
I’m not trying to make light of the issue. It just hasn’t come up on my radar in terms of communication with other men. I’ve known men that have had serious emotional abuse. I’ve seen men falsely accused of serious crimes in a divorce trial. In one case that involved a severe beating by a hired thug that left a guy permanent disabled.
Prison rape I’m painfully aware of. That is something that can involve prolonged torture rare in other situations. I’ve known men that were homosexually raped.
Overall the guys I’ve known that had unwanted sexual attention from women seemed to have a lighter attitude towards it that women with similar experiences. The extent to which that is really typically-I don’t know-and whether it is cultural or biological-I don’t know.
Some men make light of it because they need to talk about it, but have been trained by the men and women around them that they can’t make it a serious complaint or they’ll be mocked and/or shunned. So they make light of it.
I was sexually harassed in the 7th grade by a same-age girl who was aggressive to an extreme. I have little doubt that had we had slightly more private school grounds she would have escalated beyond the verbal harassment that became a routine, and torturous, part of my day. And I imagine I would have yielded – in part, because everything in my culture told me that I should WANT what she was apparently insisting on having happen.
I don’t bear her any ill will today; I imagine she was acting out from some trauma in her own life. But the idea that I would have told someone what was happening would have seemed like a cruel joke. I know what the response would have been – an expression of how lucky I was and an explicitly-framed expectation that NATURALLY I fucked her, and was bragging, not complaining about harassment. I didn’t even think about telling someone; I just pretended to be deaf and wished desperately that she would go lust after some other boy.
I will admit, though, that there is a spectrum here. If my high school French teacher had behaved similarly, I would not have felt oppressed or harassed; I would have felt lucky beyond belief and I would have banged her brains out. You can’t sexually harass the intently interested. But you can harass to the point of rape the non-interested very, very easily, and if the culture tells the victims that they should “feel lucky”, it’s no surprise that you might know very many victims who are willing to talk openly about it. I would have been lucky if my French teacher had made the overture (at a time when I was physically mature and able to meaningfully consent), I was not lucky that a peer made it (at a time when I was not and was in fact terrified at the thought).
@nomoreh1b: we’re not talking about ‘unwanted sexual attention’ but rape. The fact that you, personally, have never had a man tell you he felt harmed by a particular type of rape is not only beside the point, it smacks of a really nasty form of minimizing.
@Robert, you might have felt lucky but you really wouldn’t have been lucky to have a teacher who had such poor boundaries and judgment.
>@nomoreh1b: we’re not talking about ‘unwanted sexual attention’ but rape.
All rape is unwanted sexual attention, but not all unwanted sexual attention involves rape. I was trying to use a more inclusive term. I _have_ known men that had unwanted sexual attention. However, what I’ve seen a lot more of is men that felt utterly invisible to the point they had very poor self-image.
That said: some of the folks I’ve known that got the most attention also had poor self image.
@Mythago – I’ll make the same underlying point again: you don’t get to decide that for me. (You (collective you) do get to make that decision in terms of policy, in terms of where we set boundaries, because the legal system cannot be based on an exhaustive examination of every participant in every act’s psyche and circumstance. We gotta have heuristics. “Adult teachers, hands off your late-teenage students” is a fair heuristic, and I don’t quibble with it.)
But as it happened, I was old enough and mature enough that it would have been OK. And I get to decide that, retroactively as a middle-aged guy thinking about his own life; there’s a (mostly right) social consensus that condemns the teacher who does that, along with (mostly wrong) social consensus that tells the 7th grader he should be eagerly enthusiastic about his age-appropriate peer’s advances.
I reject the superiority of the social consensus’ view, when it comes to my own situation over which I am final arbiter. My same-age peer was an abuser, and my older teacher would not have been. I get to decide.
There are people who – though they may feel just as strongly – are of an age where as a society we’ve decided not to extend the right of decision. That’s OK with me. I was 17, an age at which we think (in most states) that the person is able to consent. I was able to consent. I had the forms filled out and notarized and everything.
I think Robert’s sexual fantasies about his high school teacher and his counter-factuals about a desired but non-existent sexual relationship are entirely irrelevant to this thread. I think we should stop discussing them.
Speaking as a moderator, I am very uncomfortable with where this discussion has gone recently. I’m too tired right now to be articulate, but nomoreh1b, you need to tread lightly. Anything which could possibly be construed to be minimizing the actuality of men who have been sexually assaulted by women – that should probably be left unsaid, and might get you banned. Likewise with anything which sounds like blaming such men for what happened to them (see comment #513).
Robert, you’re also on thin ice.
This is supposed to be a reasonably safe space for survivors. Consider all of the people who are reading before you post.
Grace
I’m a survivor myself; the point of bringing up my teacher was to illustrate at least one source for the “lucky” meme – the data point that sometimes it is perceived that way. What is problematic is privileging third party opinions over the experience (good or bad) of the recipient of attention.
But I see how it could veer off into the weeds or make people uncomfortable, neither of which are my desire, and I am quite content to drop it. I apologize to anyone who I did make uncomfortable.
[Edited to own my statements a little better.]
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Some thoughts on privilege and problematical dynamics in discussing it.
Grace
gin-and-whiskey:
Better, perhaps, than what followed.
Anyway, I used the term outside of its strictest sense, in a mild hyperbole to emphasize stylistically that the meaning everyone else was using was very different from the meaning nomoreh1b was using — in effect, that they were different words.
Schala, however, objected on strict grounds. She then asserted a homophone which isn’t a homophone in American speech, where “depend” and “deep end” are emphasized on different syllables – the only dialects of English I have any feel for which might construct that pair as homophonous would be from the British Isles.
Ah, poetry, thou art dead, and rhetoric too, and gin-and-whiskey hath driven the final nail in your coffins.
For the actual on-topic portion of your reply, well, see my latest post, linked a wee bit upthread.
Grace
Certain verbs in French are homophonones of each other when using past, vs future vs another form.
Peinturer (to paint)
Peinturé (painted)
Peinturez (paint at the 2nd person plural future tense)
They sound the exact same. You have to guess through context.
Schala,
Cool! I am not a francophone, and I did not know that.
There are a number of words in English which are the same singular and plural- elk, deer, moose (for some reason, the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are large herbivores…)
I can’t think of any verbs in English with this characteristic phonetically, but there are some which are homographs but not homophones, for instance read (present tense) and read (past tense).
Grace
That would be a homonym from how I understand the term. Written and sounding the same, but with a different meaning, and being a different word (ie regarding context and such) not just a different interpretation.
As I understand “homonym”, it requires both homography (written the same) and homophony (sounding the same). And, of course, read (present) rhymes with reed (grassy growth) while read (past) rhymes with red (color).
However, in a looser or rhetorical sense, I’d try to roll with it. ;)
Grace
People are teaching our children about “homophones” and “homonyms” in the public schools right now. When will Americans learn? Stop the madness. Stop the out-of-control gay agenda. Heterophones and heteronyms were good enough in our grandparents’ time, and they’re good enough today, thank you Barney Frank.
(Someday I want to have a job where I write political campaign radio spots that people are almost, but not completely, sure are jokes.) Every rage-filled letter I get from people will be like a little paper orgasm.
If you look at crime rates, suicide rates, homelessness, mental illness rates, life expectancy, etc, I think it would be hard to argue that men overall have happier lives than women overall. So you can say, ok, “patriarchy hurts men too, but feminists are fighting patriarchy.” So the question is, does feminism reduce the ways gender roles harm men? I think the answer is no.
Take traditional ideas like, “only men commit rape”, “domestic violence by women is rare and doesn’t matter since women are weak,” “women are better at caring for children,” and “men should man up and not complain.”
The first idea is reinforced when feminists say things like “only men can stop rape because only men rape.” When they do mention the possibility that women commit rape, it is in the form of “99% of rapists are men,” which is false.
The second idea is reinforced when feminists say that domestic violence is caused by “male privilege”, 95% of victims are women (not true), women can’t hut men because men are generally bigger, men can take care of themselves because they are “privileged”, etc.
The third idea is reinforced when child abusers are portrayed as mostly male, which is not accurate. This creates the impression that men are a danger to children and women are not.
The fourth idea is reinforced when feminists say stuff like “oh noez, what about teh menz” and “check your privilege”, as replacements for the traditional “man up” and “stop whining.”
So, what’s going on here? The traditional “patriarchal” reasoning for male gender roles is, “women are weak, and men are strong”, but the feminist replacement is very similar, “women are oppressed, and men are privileged.” In fact, “oppressed” could be considered a form of being “weak” and “privileged” could be considered a form of being “strong.” As a result, feminism does not reduce the impact of male gender roles, but instead reinforces them.
Seems to me it’s Kate Beaton time.
Hiiiissssssssssssssss… *slither, slither*
Grace
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If I have correctly deciphered code words by Elusis and Grace Annam, they are saying that Egalitarian is setting up a straw-woman version of feminism. It would be more polite and less dismissive if they gave a concrete analysis proving their point.
David, people get dismissive because we hear the same strawmen over and over, and actually addressing the arguments 1) is exhausting and 2) never seems to make a difference.
Buuuuut … since I’m such a great guy … I’ll respond.
The best evidence I’ve seen is that the vast majority of rapes are committed by men. Men aren’t the only ones who commit rape, but it’s certainly not an equal sort of thing.
Whether it’s 99%, 90%, 80%, or whichever, it’s certainly not 50%.
Some of this is owing to biology, some of it is owing to our culture, and some is owing to male privilege. Regardless, the quotes ‘Equality’ invented for his strawfeminists to spout do not back up his central claim.
Equality is mashing up a lot of statements here, many of which are quite simply not something feminists generally say.
I’m not sure what universe ‘Equality’ is living in where Feminists have such control of the media and dominant cultural narratives that we’re able to control that child abusers are “portrayed as mostly male.”
Equating ‘check your privilege’ with ‘men should man up and not complain’ is unreasonable. They have very different meanings. Totally different.
“Oh noez, what about teh menz,” is used to criticize the routine centering of male experience in discussions of feminism and female oppression.
The fact that ‘Equality’ either 1) doesn’t know this or 2) doesn’t care, is part of why his post was so roundly dismissed by Elusis and Grace Annam, both really smart, informed people.
Feminists (most feminists, anyway. Feminism isn’t a monolith, which is another problem … but I digress) don’t have a problem with male discussion of the way the patriarchy oppresses and hurts men. In fact, the gentleman who runs this site, Ampersand, has recently written a lovely comic on that very topic, “How To Make A Man out of Tinfoil,” available as part of “The Big Feminist But” comics anthology, currently being kickstarted.
What what what what what?! A comic about how the patriarchy hurts men too?! Included in a book with ‘Feminist’ in the title?! It’s true!
Wow, it’s almost as if ‘Equality’ just made up a bunch of shit without regard for whether any of it was true or not. It’s almost like that. Yeah.
I hope that this post has been informative for you, and I suggest you have it bookmarked to link to for the next time someone posts this kind of bullshit. It should be pretty soon now.
—Myca
The thing is: feminism and religious fundamentalism have common roots in the US-dating to working together for women’s suffrage. Prohibition came right after suffrage-and banded not only alcohol, but cannabis and other drugs-and prostitution-and that was driven largely-but not solely-by fundamentalist women. However, the result has been putting a LOT of men in prison(a huge share of male prisoners are drug war casualties and a big share of women prisoners are there on prostitution charges). The label feminism strikes me as intellectually dishonest:
A huge share of women identify with other ideologies more than feminism. For example even though most fundamentalist figureheads are male, a lot of churches are mostly female. Acting like those are all robotic idiots is really insular.
If some people want “equal” gender roles, calling themselves something like
“gender role egalitarians” would have a whole different connotations. There is a similar issue with tying stuff like black nationalism into stuff like international socialism-it is an alliance bound to crumble when it gets real power. In this case we have folks that really want matriarchy mixed in with folks that really want a radical change in gender roles towards more uniformity.
David, see what I mean about a point-by-point response to a silly strawman argument never making a difference?
There’s more straw out there, always.
—Myca
Fascinating historically, but irrelevant.
So what? How does that make it intellectually dishonest? It’s the name of a political and social movement.
Stop strawmanning.
Nobody’s doing that. That’s not the topic. Thanks for the non-sequitur. Stop strawmanning.
This isn’t even mockery-worthy. Black nationalism? International socialism?
You know what the real problem is? How the Freemasons got tied into the Esoteric Order of Occulists. That shit totally fucked up the Illuminati.
No we don’t. Quote those people. Quote them right here and now. Find me the people who want a matriarchy. Are they any kind of significant presence, either politically in the world or within feminism?
Also, stop strawmanning.
—Myca
“No we don’t. Quote those people. Quote them right here and now. Find me the people who want a matriarchy. Are they any kind of significant presence, either politically in the world or within feminism?”
here is an up front quote-from a pretty minor figure:
http://www.womanthouartgod.com/femdivine.php
“That special bond with Mother coincides with our love of God – they both represent the Source of our life. Humanity must return to that Sacred image and Matriarchy is coming. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy
One of the more important folks here is Maria Gimbutus-who has been pretty influential on a lot of feminist thinkers. I don’t have a good quote here-but I will look later.
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Here is a quote from Gloria Steinem
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/e/eller-myth.html
The first link you provide is essentially pornography.
The second link you provide is to the wikipedia page on matriarchy. Like maybe I didn’t agree with you because I didn’t know what a matriarchy was? I don’t even have words.
Marija Gimbutus was an archaeologist who believed in a period of historic matriarchies. I think she was wrong, certainly (as does … reality), but that’s a far cry from feminism being about “really wanting matriarchy.”
The third is a link to Gloria Steinem, forty years ago, talking about the (since well discredited) theory about historic matriarchies.
You’ve utterly failed to provide any evidence that ‘folks that really want matriarchy’ are any kind of significant group worth discussing.
You’ve got three options.
1) Acknowledge that you made up some shit, and apologize.
2) Provide actual evidence that this group (“folks that really want matriarchy”) are anything we should take seriously at all. (Note: Your high school’s pagan club mission statement doesn’t count)
3) Get banned.
Pick in your next comment, please.
—Myca
The Prohibition was enacted before women’s suffrage. The 18th Amendment, remember? Women’s suffrage was the 19th.
45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.
nonsense. women interrupt all the time.
NahYoChill:
Which is actually not the opposite of #45. #45 says nothing about whether women interrupt. It talks about the fact that men interrupt women more than vice versa. Sure, both men generally and women generally sometimes interrupt. #45 compares the rate, not the existence.
In my personal experience, #45 is true. Are you asserting that, in fact, women interrupt men as often or more than men interrupt women?
Grace
Am I the only one who finds something incredibly sexist on both side in this kind of battle-of-the-sexes, who-is-worse dispute?
1. I feel responsible for what I do , not for what other members of my gender do.
2. In the case of many though not all gender differences, the similarity is much greater than the difference. In particular, you can make a one-one match between male and female with identical characteristics, with a relatively small number of unmatched males in one extreme and unmatched females in the other. Why would you want to characterize a gender by its extremes rather than its central tendencies?
3. Even if it were the case that one gender was vastly worse than another on one morally judged characteristic, what then? Do we count up winners and losers across characteristics? Do you really expect to find agreement on who won? Even if you did find agreement, would that lead to positive social change?
This all seems like an Eric Berne-style game of self-justification for holding a grudge.
Granted there are subcultural differences between genders, and granted that some of them are dysfunctional for one or both genders. Guilt-tripping can probably achieve a small amount of social change, but my sense is that those possibilities have been mostly used up. I think the way forward has to consist in showing how both genders can be made better off if both genders make some changes in their own subculture.
The idea that the intent behind this list is either to say that one sex is morally superior to another, or that the goal is “guilt-tripping,” is not something that you’ve supported in any way with quotes from the list, David.
I think it’s something you’re projecting onto what I wrote, which isn’t actually there.
I agree that people of different sexes have a lot more in common than not – but don’t find that to be at all contrary to anything claimed in this list.
In short, it seems to me that you’re bringing some pre-existing opinions you have over to this thread and using this as an opportunity to rehash those opinions, rather than actually engaging with what I wrote in any way whatsoever.
In short, it seems to me that you’re bringing some pre-existing opinions you have over to this thread and using this as an opportunity to rehash those opinions, rather than actually engaging with what I wrote in any way whatsoever.
I believe that you have just defined the Internet. Well done, sirrah.
Grace @ 538:
In my experience, yes – I would assert exactly that.
I’m in a STEM field. A female with any kind of reasonable qualifications is definitely going to be favored over a man,.
Based on my experience in doing both my and my wife’s laundry I’d have to agree with at least the “better-constructed” part of this. I have no idea on what my wife spends on a blouse or pants, so I can’t answer for the first part. Women’s clothing seems to be very poorly constructed. Why is that?
If I turn on the TV and watch either a situation comedy, a romantic comedy or a commercial I can generally expect to see people of my own sex widely represented as a fool unable to manage their own lives, a relationship or even a computer or DVD player. Women, OTOH, are able to master all of these, except possibly the computer or DVD player, in which case a 10-year-old is more capable than either one of us.
Do you have studies that back that up, or specific experiences where you saw a woman who was less qualified hired over a man? Because that’s a pretty broad and sweeping assertion to just generalize about, particularly when STEM is such a broad category.
Also, I’d really, truly appreciate it if you would not use “female” as a noun to refer to women, particularly when you’re not using “male” to refer to men.
A recent article by Deborah Tannen on interruption.
Interesting article, Elusis. Thanks. From that article:
and
Grace
David Burress:
Nope. A lot of people misunderstand privilege as a complexified version of “Who has it better the Battle of the Sexes?” So you have plenty of company.
But that’s not what the concept of privilege is trying to get at. Privilege seeks, as Peggy McIntosh put it,
It isn’t merely “Who has it worse”. It’s “Who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth, and in what ways does that manifest, and how can we work to reduce unfairness which results?” Americans, and perhaps Westerners, treasure the notion that our society can be characterized as a meritocracy. Privilege is a way of examining the ways in which that’s not true. It’s very natural that examining your own privilege is an uncomfortable process. At least, it has been for me, and it certainly seems to be for many other people.
Me, too. Also, I acknowledge that what I do is interpreted through a context over which I have very little control. Things I say with the best of intentions can be understood completely differently, and as an adult, functional member of my society it’s my job to know that terrain.
Example: I, as a white woman, should not address a black man, even a young black teenager, as “boy”, even if I would/could address a young white teenager that way. Why? Because that form of address has a history and a context which freights it with meaning I do not want.
With all due respect, that’s because you haven’t understood it. Further, that assertion is pretty insulting to many thoughtful, caring, non-grudge-holding people who are trying to use the notion of privilege to better understand our culture and how it works.
Grace
RonF:
Interesting. I’ve talked with a lot of transsexuals who would disagree with you. I have NEVER heard a trans woman report that she gets interrupted LESS, post-transition. Nor have I ever heard a trans man report that he gets interrupted MORE, post-transition.
It is the Law of the Internet that now a lone voice will cry out to contradict me, and that’s fine; trans people are nothing if not diverse. But ask a large group of trans people and I’ll bet money on the answer, because I’ve heard this question answered before.
I, personally, have insufficient personal experience to speak to the question. Ask me in a few years.
In the meantime, this is one area where transitioned transsexual people are uniquely qualified to speak from personal experience.
Grace
Elusis:
I’m glad someone mentioned Deborah Tannen.
It’s occasionally, but not normally, true.
My experience is that STEM hiring falls into two pretty distinctive categories:
1) Traditional “who you know, who you coded with in college” kinds of hiring, which tends to functionally focus on white and Asian men without explicitly being defined as such; and
2) Hiring that involves some sort of lawyer, initiative, diversity committee, or the like, which tends to to avoid white and Asian men and seek out women and/or non-Asian POC.
#2 is more obvious because it is open. You’ll see ads specifically seeking “diverse” faculty members (in STEM this is often code for non-white, non-Asian, non-male), but you won’t see any ads for “traditional” faculty members.
#1 is much more prevalent. For every “diverse” ad, there are more than one unspecified position which is functionally unlikely to end up with a “diverse” candidate, and in which a “diverse” candidate may well be discriminated against.
In the end, the cost/benefit of a set of traits (sex, race, etc.) depends on the preferences of who is doing the hiring.
BTW, I put “diverse” in quotes because obviously people aren’t individually diverse, it’s a group quality. But it’s how the ads often are written.
Since I don’t know (and can’t tell) when’s my time to speak, I tend to interrupt a lot. I did this pre-transition. I do this now. No change there.
My experience says that it’s about equal men and women interrupt. And the people who are hard to “speak over” (interrupt them or even place a word edgeways) include only women I’ve known. And me if I’m with someone with a lower threshold (ie my mom I can’t speak over, but my boyfriend can’t speak over me, a sort of hierarchy of interruption – and the speak over thingy is determined by how likely they are to leave pauses in their talking).
I can easily interrupt my boyfriend because he rarely speaks for a long period of time without leaving plenty of pauses, while he’s not done yet (so I interrupt him incredibly frequently without meaning to). While my mother leaves pretty much no pause in her talking. If she phones me she can talk continuously for over 30 minutes, without me saying a single word. If I even want to place a word, I have to interrupt her. I eventually do so to end the conversation (which ends 10 minutes later).
I’ve never experienced being unable to place a word at all with a boy or man. You eventually get a pause long enough to place a truck in, and before 30 minutes passed.
Me and one of my brother have a way of communicating that is apparently interesting to outsiders: we talk past each other. We half-listen to the other, and talk at the same time. Making it seem as if we were not even listening at all to the other, while we are. Apparently only works with two like-minded people (we have similar interests and are rather close).
Grace-
Thanks for a responsive reply. It makes sense, but…
The problem I have with your reply is the apparent assumption that there is no such thing as female privilege. Is that your belief? If not , how can we really understand male privilege without considering the offsetting male disadvantages?
Grace-
While it’s not related to the main topic, I have a further comment. You said in effect that my question and statement were naive, which may be true. Then you said it was insulting to smart people who had a better understanding. Isn’t it just a tad high face to feel insulted by someone else’s ignorance in your presence?
David Burress:
No, not when that person is presumably an adult capable of self-education and clearly has access to the Internet.
Some people believe that trans women are in fact men, and are pretending to be women because they are mentally ill, and are sexual deviants who are dangerous to children. This is a bigotry founded in ignorance and fear. The people who believe this push this meme in order to prevent trans people from securing for themselves legal protections which give them access to bathrooms, among other things, which creates concrete hardships for trans people, just as bathroom segregation in the south led to concrete hardships for black people. When these people express this notion that trans women are sexual predators in places where trans women can hear them, or in places where trans people will be impacted by the consequences of that speech, should trans people not feel insulted? Should they let it ride, simply agree to disagree?
Amp’s post, which generated this discussion and to which, presumably, you were referring with “this all”, was a public self-exploration of ways in which he, as a man, has been granted cultural advantages by an accident of birth. It was an attempt, on his part, to understand and own that accidental advantage. You characterized his post and the discussion which followed by referencing such things as being self-serving, looking for reasons to harbor ill feelings, and as seeking the advantage in a zero-sum game. These are not neutral phrases. Did you expect the recipients to regard them positively? Can you explain how that would work?
Grace
David Burress:
Scrolling back, I don’t see that in what I wrote. I have, in the past, used the phrase “female privilege”, but I suspect strongly that I was stretching the underlying concept beyond recognition, or abusing its meaning.
I’m still chewing on the notion of female privilege. To reference Peggy McIntosh’s essay again,
Note the definition McIntosh uses of privilege: “unearned power conferred systematically”. (Personally, I would say “systemically”, intending to say that it is conferred as a result of the system, rather than in a systematic manner.)
Critics of privilege checklists, it seems to me, tend to view such checklists as lists of ways in which the advantaged group has it better. It’s natural, from that understanding, to tot up the score, and then search for ways in which the other group has it better, and tot up that score, and see who “wins”.
Proponents of privilege checklists, it seems to me, are coming at them from a different understanding. They acknowledge that privilege exists, as an aspect of a self-reinforcing system which underlies much or all of the terrain we tread, perhaps a bit like bedrock. We can see examples of it when it pokes through the topsoil, but we understand that those are evidence of the thing, not the thing itself.
Critics can point to a free-standing stone and say, “Aha! See, there’s a stone which is not connected to the bedrock, so your whole ‘bedrock’ construct is false!” And the proponents say, “Um… okay, yeah, that’s a rock not connected to bedrock, but that doesn’t mean that the bedrock is not there, and that doesn’t mean that this mountain over here isn’t an upthrust part of that bedrock…”
If “female privilege” exists, where is its “unearned power conferred systemically”? We can point to instances where women have it better, certainly, but the only attempts which I have seen to articulate an underlying structure of which these instances are visible examples have been laughable MRA screeds. We can find loose stones, some of them pretty huge, but the bedrock is still the bedrock.
I think I am coming to the conclusion that, if I understand the concept of privilege correctly, the relatively disadvantaged group doesn’t have it.
Grace
I respectfully disagree.
I see female privilege on the same footing as male privilege, as unearned systematic privileges conferred by society.
It’s not conferred by the 1%., by congress, or by a “majority-male-congregation-of-people caring more about males”, it’s conferred, by a 51% female 49% male society, which views femaleness as inherently valuable (and fragile, and worth protecting), and maleness as inherently useful and powerful (or its broken and deserves death anyways). This means different advantages and privileges (depending on sex and ambition and path of life), not a powerful and a powerless class.
For sure, such a society would value powerfulness amongst male-assigned at birth people, while valuing outright value (beauty and other signs that get you noticed) in female-assigned people – if those people are even ever-so-slightly-biased the way society is, Don’t show the signs for your assigned-sex? Welcome to pariah land. I’ve been there, it’s very interesting.
I prefer Pariah Land to Conformist Land anyday. I’ll be myself over being fashionable. In the US, Pariah Land would mean death, unless you start off rich. In Canada, Pariah Land is doable without being rich or even middle class. Having to wear make-up, or a tie, or short hair for work = conformist land. I won’t tolerate such a personal compromise on apperance, but it seems to be the 2nd criteria of hiring besides experience (they won’t hire a long haired man, a visually masculine woman, a known trans woman, because capitalism). I’d rather be unemployed than contort myself in enough positions to satisfy their cravings about who “holds their image best”.
I’m a hard worker, but I’ll never even get to demonstrate it, because they only care about productivity once you’re hired.
In this world, I won’t get hired as a trans woman by most companies (they’re very likely to know, my papers won’t match), would be financial suicide for them, who would blame them in a no-blame profit-is-everything society anyways?
In summary, I think Grace is saying there is no such thing as female privilege, only male privilege.
Would it be fair to say that that opinion is held, by and large, by most women who describe themselves as feminists? Or do any other feminist voices on this list, for example, take the opposite view?
I don’t know if this will be useful to your question, David, but when I was newer to this site and to feminism, I was confused because of an ambiguity in the way the word “privilege” was used. People, here and elsewhere, use the term “male privilege” interchangably in two senses –
1. Specific advantages that society confers onto men by virtue of them being male.
2. The systematic power imbalance in society between men and women.
The thing is, even though people (myself included, probably), keep talking about specific advantages as “privileges”, that’s a misnomer. Specific advantages are privileges *only* when in the context of an overall power imbalance. Otherwise, they’re just advantages.
That’s one flaw of the checklist approach – it puts emphasis on the advantages themselves rather than on the system that causes them.
I don’t think anyone here – male or female, feminist or not – that would dispute that there are *specific advantages* accorded to women in our society. And that may be what your question is getting at. However, a power imbalance cannot exist in two directions at once. So it must be true that *either* there is male privilege, or female privilege, but not both. The feminist view is that society, as a whole, is imbalanced so that men have considerably more power, even though there are circumstances in which women may have an advantage. (I personally think that this is entirely correct, but I’m not a woman so my opinion doesn’t actually matter to your question).
It can exist in both directions at once, just not in the same domain of life.
There is a power imbalance favoring ambition in men in the business, discovering, inventing side. There is a power imbalance favoring empathy towards women and favoring ambition in women in the caring trades.
If you want to go to Wall Street, think “everyone” should aspire to this, and that caring trades are bad stuff. Sure you’ll think it’s one-sided.
But not everyone aspires to material wealth and working themselves to death as an end in itself. Some people think society caring about them and them being able to do work they actually like, and having a quality of life, is a much better deal. They want to enjoy life during their working years, not at 70+.
I’m not sure the power imbalance favors women in those careers except for the fact that those careers are viewed as more “appropriate” for women. It might be that male nurses or male elementary school teachers have trouble getting hired because of that, but I wouldn’t want to assume that they do without something to back it up. But once you have the job, they often pay less. As women enter a field, the pay tends to drop. So I don’t think women’s ambition is favored in those career paths.
Not to mention, the path for promotion in any career is generally away from *doing* the work and into managing or supervising it. So someone who really wants to work with kids (e.g., teacher, daycare worker) isn’t going to make as much money as someone who supervises other people’s work with kids and does less directly with the kids themselves (e.g., principal, superintendent, daycare manager). So the ambition comes at the expense of the actual nurturing.
Work-life balance I think depends a lot on the specific career more than whether it’s a “nurturing” profession or not. (From personal experience, I have a lot more flexibility now, as a technical writer, than I ever did as a teacher. But even as a teacher, I had a better shot at work-life balance than my mom, a nurse, because I wasn’t working holidays and 2nd/3rd shifts.)
“Actually doing a job you like” is also not really specific to women. It sounds like you’re assuming that the caring professions are inherently better, more enjoyable jobs, while the more “ambitious” jobs are inherently miserable, which isn’t really the case.
According to Eytan’s theory, there is only one significant domain of life and one unified gender-related power balance. According to Schala’s theory there are multiple more or less separate domains of life with differing gender-related power balances. This seems to me to be a critically important theoretical question. Would anyone hazard an opinion on which theory is more commonly accepted among feminists?
Schala – in addition to everything KellyK said above, I’d like to point out that dividing life into arbitrary domains is specifically the kind of thinking that I understand feminism to be arguing against here. Sure, I don’t dispute that the women who want to be in caring professions may find society rewards them for that, in a way that men in the same professions are not. But there’s more to those women’s life then their jobs. They have families, they have friends, they may or may not be in relationships. They have to buy and eat food, they have to buy and eat clothes, they also have medical problems. They consume media, they seek entertainment, they have hobbies. In all of these domains, the women have to interact with the society they live in.
When evaluating whether there is a power imbalance in society, it makes no sense to point to one aspect of someone’s life and say “look, here societal expectation corresponds to your own desires and you are rewarded”. As I said above, I don’t think anyone – and definitely not anyone in these forums – disputes that women have advantages in all sorts of domains. But when evaluating power structures, we must evaluate them in the entire experience of someone living in that society.
David – your comment at @561 came in while I was writing mine, but I think mine helps explain my viewpoint on your question. But since you seem to be more interested in asking questions about feminist beliefs as a way of trying to generalize over feminists as a group rather than as a way to engage with these beliefs, I’m not sure whether you’ll be able to get any useful answers in what I write.
My guess is that the majority of feminists don’t have any particular opinion on the matter, since they’re not here in this conversation.
Schala:
Actually, men in female-dominated jobs tend to be promoted faster and higher than their female peers.
There are some genuinely crappy jobs out there, and most of the very worst jobs are majority men (although not all of them). However, just because most of the very worst jobs are held by men, it doesn’t follow that most men are in those jobs.
This is anecdotal, but among my real-life male friends (who range from middle class to poor), I can’t think of one who has a job that makes him miserable. The worst off among them has a supervisor job in an office which requires a too-long commute and which doesn’t really use enough of his considerable intellect and talent. The others work in “meh” jobs, like retail; they wouldn’t do it if they weren’t being paid for it, but they don’t find it terrible. A lucky few of us (me included) work in jobs they love. One is a househusband. One is highly-paid (at least, by the standards of my circles) and has an interesting job in the sciences, but hates the office culture where he works. One is highly-paid (by the standards…) and seems to really enjoy his work, but he’d still quit if he won the lottery.
The idea that none of them have “a quality of life” at all – that a decent, enjoyable life is universally unavailable to men in our society – is ludicrous. (Ditto for any claims that a decent, enjoyable life is universally unavailable to women – but no one here has made a claim that extreme about women’s lives.)
And I could have said the exact same thing about my female friends. One is in a retail job she’s told me she hates, most are in “meh” jobs they do because they need the income, a lucky few are paid for work they love. None of my close female friends earn high incomes, but I can think of one female acquaintance who is very successful in her field and probably does earn a lot.
The idea that the typical man is working 14 hour shifts breaking his back in a coal mine, while a typical woman is working five hours a day being paid to taste test bon-bons, doesn’t describe the reality for most Americans of either sex.
Ambition not meaning wanting to raise to the top, but specifically a desire to do that kind of job.
If I have the ambition to be a programmer, I don’t want Bill Gates’s managing-a-company-job, I want to work for him, or have an independant small group of 5 people (which has different priorities than a giant company employing thousands). Promoting me to a “hire-and-fire people” position is counter to my ambition, unless my ambition is being richer.
Men’s role is being pushed in a “provider and protector” role, which often means being the sole or higher earner. And high-paying jobs require sacrificing your other life area’s time and enjoyment for it. Meaning you better love your job, or the money it gives you, because you’ll be doing that most of your waking time for decades. Without flex time and 4-day weeks, because those jobs pay less.
How are they pushed in those higher paying and possibly less enjoyable jobs (given less free time outside the job too)? Well, carrot (the average woman will find it more attractive if you earn more or are in a higher-status job), and stick (no income, no one will pay for you, low income, no one will pay for you – some satisfy themselves with low income, but given the level of debts of people, it’s sure not the majority).
If you go in a job with the intent of doing something you like, and not caring about the pay as much. Because it doesn’t make you more attractive to the other sex on average, and it’s not expected of you – well you have more options as for jobs. You can go in the extremely low-paid (min wage) weird-scheduled (overtime summer, empty schedule winter) videogame testing if your income doesn’t matter. If it does matter, you’ll find some people consider you immature for having such a job “and being selfish”.
And in these domains, society has more empathy for women. Considers them first and foremost when seeing if they need subsidized money, housing, etc. Sees to ending “violence against women (by men)”, and tells men not to rape.
Male victims of DV and rape need not apply.
And as for income disparity. Well, when a couple lives together, there is pressure to pool resources together. And despite lower average income, all women I know have 3 times the amount of clothing than men I know. (Same for me, my clothing just happens to have been very cheaply acquired on average). So men aren’t shacking up with women and keeping their superior income from the wage gap away from their girlfriends and wives. Women can consume media and medical stuff and food and clothing and hobbies with that pooled money.
Single women have higher income than those with children, so they don’t have those issues. And single mothers can count on welfare and other government help to even the odds.
Those who are forgotten are mentally ill men, poor men, abused men and single fathers. Because since men’s role says they must be strong, those who are not (temporary weakness like depression/being poor to permanent one like disability) are not considered worthy of any help.
Not that they won’t be helped at all ever, but society considers it more wasteful to help “loser” men than it does to help “loser” women.
If you had to pick between having a more likely shot at the top positions (but it’s a lottery you’re likely to lose, since most people are not in top positions), or having a safety net to not rot in the pit of despair if bad stuff happens – which would you want?
It’s too bad that people at the top being “like you” doesn’t incite them to care about you. Obama didn’t start laws protecting against violence against men, open men’s DV shelters and rape crisis shelters. Bush didn’t. Clinton didn’t, Bush Sr didn’t. They’re all men. They won’t sympathize with homeless or abused men, especially not just because they’re also men.
But women still have to eat and pay rent. Their income doesn’t just not matter because they don’t have the stereotypical “provider” role. For a woman to make career decisions without regard to money, she has to a) already have a partner who can support both of them (and is willing to) and b) be willing to have her financial security hinge on the relationship. And b) is actually a pretty major risk.
And women do certainly face criticism for staying home (and also for working–yay for double standards).
Seriously? As far as I know, the only difference in government help between women and men is WIC, which provides supplemental nutrition for *pregnant or breastfeeding women* as well as for infants and children. The only way a woman qualifies for this aid where a man would not is if she’s actually carrying or breastfeeding a child. So the food is, indirectly, going to the child.
Can you cite any actual government regulations where qualification for food stamps or welfare is different based on gender? I mean, I know I’m in the US and you’re, if I recall correctly, in Canada, so things might be different.
David Burress:
Why would you put any stock in what a random self-identified feminist says here? If you want to know what feminists in general think, you have to read a lot of feminist writing and talk to a lot of feminists. We don’t march in lockstep.
In this conversation, you are giving the impression that you have arrogated to yourself the role of wise moderator. You have also demonstrated that you don’t know much about feminist thought, so that’s probably the wrong impression to convey.
I suggest that you Google “Feminism 101” and read the results for awhile. I found that useful, and I think you would, too. That way you get a lot of potentially embarrassing misconceptions and mistakes taken care of in private.
Unless, of course, your objective is not to learn but to stir the pot.
Grace
Oh, I keep meaning to say: Myca, thank you for your efforts starting at #529.
Grace
Grace-
I was not trying to make trouble, I was trying to get informed opinion about feminism as a general tendency. If I were pretending to expertise on feminism, I wouldn’t have asked those questions. I very much doubt I could get answers to the kind of questions I asked by reading feminism 101. I didn’t intend to be annoying as such, but sometimes I do try to get information by posing provocative questions, so apologies for my manner. Perhaps I also seemed arrogant because I do think of myself as having professional expertise in some areas of (non-feminist) social science. Also, as a quadriparetic old white male heterosexual civil libertarian with an interest in discrimination against blacks I have to say that the male privilege checklist struck me as bit myopic.
Myopic in what way, specifically? (If you don’t mind the question.)
Come on, isn’t that fairly obvious? Leftists love to talk intersectionality, except when acknowledging that intersectionality would make a specific claim of systemic oppression more complicated or harder to justify, or so it seems.
Put yourself in the shoes of a 60-year old black man from a poor family who had to drop out of school in the sixth grade to go to work and who has never had a job better than head custodian at the local school despite being the hardest-working person in the community, who prays every morning that his sons and daughters who are forced to endure a gangland social milieu will make it home alive. Then come read a list like this, where he hears how great he has it compared to the crushing burden suffered by white women with PhDs who live in the suburbs and whose main worry vis a vis their offspring is whether Dylan will get into Brown or not, because he has a penis and that makes society his footstool.
That doesn’t make the list myopic, that’s a myopic use of the list. The list doesn’t deny that there are many other types of privilege (indeed, the very top of the post acknowledges that the list is based on a similar list for white privilege). And talking about intersectionality means that you need to compare yourself to someone with similar demographics except for the relevant property. So the 60-year old black man from a poor family shouldn’t be comparing his life to an affluent white woman in order to decide whether he benefited from male privilege; he should be comparing his life to a 60-year old black woman from a poor family.
I can’t see how anyone can reasonably read this list and think that by arguing that there is a systemic power imbalance between men and women then Amp is denying that there are other systemic power imbalances in society, some of which are more overt, and all of which interact.
Robert, of course I suspected where David was going. But I wanted him to make his argument more specific, because I think that making and responding to specific claims makes for better discussions than trying to respond to arguments that are implied but not actually stated. I don’t think that requesting that someone make a more specific argument, when what they’ve actually said is only implying an argument, is unreasonable.
There’s something notably missing from your description of the 60 year old man’s life in your example. Where did the children come from? You make it sound like they were delivered by stork.
Maybe they were – it’s your example. What’s more typical, however, is that he has a girlfriend or wife who is the mother of his children. Is that female partner a “white wom[a]n with PhDs who live in the suburbs”? Probably not. (If so, he and the kids should move in with her). Most likely, she is, like him, sixtyish, Black, without a higher education, and in a working class job.
My point, of course, is that when talking about male privilege, it makes sense to hold other factors constant. Yes, Barack Obama has more privilege in his life than a white homeless guy downtown. Does that prove that racism doesn’t exist? Is it myopic to ever focus on racism in any discussion or blog post, since in the real world intersectionalities exist? I’d answer, no and no.
I’m happy to acknowledge that intersectionatity exists. But the argument we both inferred from David’s comment (but David didn’t actually say) suggests that it is myopic to ever talk about sexism’s effects in a focused way. I don’t agree, and I don’t think either David or you have made any sensible argument to support that claim.
Finally, from the original post:
To summarize the view of my post as ‘because he has a penis and that makes society his footstool” is
both dishonest andunfair.Hi, David. Regarding getting an informed opinion about feminism:
You’re welcome to keep posting comments here on “Alas,” but do keep in mind that our goal here (at least, in my conception) is more conversation than interrogation, and I’m likely to push back against comment-writers who (in my view) aren’t really participating in a two-way discussion. Like Clarice in “Silence of the Lambs,” you have to be willing to give in order to get. :-)
I wonder if the “Ask Feminists” forum on reddit might better suit your needs? You may want to check it out.
(Of course, it’s not an either/or choice, unless you have time constraints forcing you to choose just one forum.)
In Canada, qualification for welfare is being a citizen, with lower than a certain income (or no income at all), not eligible for unemployment (used it all up possibly). De facto couples or married couples who are both on welfare get a “joint check”, and a parent with a dependant child gets slightly more, a couple with a child gets the most (but probably not enough). Disability factors into welfare checks too (temporary, permanent).
Joint checks amount to less than two separate checks (which is why I consider it stupid, given both being on welfare – it’s no different than having a housemate – it should only matter when one of the two’s income is high enough to put the other as a tax deduction).
Food help I’m not certain how it works. It seems to be on a case by case basis, by the org itself (you don’t apply for it with forms and the likes, which you do for welfare). It’s rather cheap brands, but it saves you a lot of money if your budget is that tight (I’m on welfare but don’t get food stamps, even if I possibly could be eligible for it – as my income is enough to eat).
Sympathy capital about your situation will be higher if you’re a girl or woman, because it’s seen as “bad circumstances that happened to you, outside your control”, while for a man or boy it’s seen as “your own damn fault for not pulling yourself by your bootstraps”, regardless of the true circumstances in each case.
And as for single women vs single men, the wage gap for childless adults is null. This is what I was getting to. Mothers get a penalty to their income because they’ll be considered primary or only caregiver (and take time off, or have a more flexible job), taking advantage of programs or job opportunities (like parental leave) that are often unavailable to men at all. Fathers who take what’s called “the mommy track” would get the same penalty on their income probably.
Unfortunately, more caregiving men get selected against by the majority, who think men are too incompetent, or unmasculine for doing it (and thus as unattractive to most women as a gay man). It’s very slowly changing.
Maybe in 50 years we’ll have parity and don’t assume inherent innate competence and incompetence (or sexual interest in children) based on bits between the legs in caregiving and technical fields both. Until then, we’ll have a wage gap based on what choices people actually make in caregiving arrangements.
Personally, my favorite arrangement is being childless. No problem there. And it’s not like my being childless is going to kill the human race.
“Does that prove that racism doesn’t exist?”
No, naturally not. But it (it = the existence of a black POTUS) presents a prima facie case that racism isn’t black and white (sorry); it’s a strong check on the ability to make the absolute statements that so many are fond of making. (I almost said “everybody” there; only Sith deal in absolutes, and I’m not quite ready to reveal myself as the head of the order.)
Your points are all valid, for the most part, and I have little quarrel or quibble with them. That said, I think that the myopic potentiality of an entity like this list doesn’t come from the list or that model per se, but rather from the natural human tendency to turn “focus” on a particular subtopic into a complete centralization of that subtopic to the exclusion of other narratives. The list isn’t the enemy of reason, but it gives those enemies aid and comfort, even unintentionally.
Only true within the same defined space. Start defining different spaces and things change. Those can range in size from “country ___” (can anyone dispute that male/female privilege differences vary greatly from Canada to Iran to China to Sweden?) to “local geographical area” to “the place where you are and the group surrounding you at this very moment.”
The problem, I think, is that the broader truths (women have it worse off, generally speaking, when evaluating them as a group) aren’t really applicable to individuals with any sort of reliability. They simply don’t take account of the granularity of spaces.
They’re a bit like BMI and obesity. Sure, BMI correlates to obesity across large groups; sure, male privilege has a definite effect across large groups. But you can’t randomly select two people and conclude, with any reasonable accuracy, that the one with the higher BMI is actually more obese. Similarly, you can’t randomly select a man and a woman and conclude, with any reasonable accuracy, that the man has experienced an overall better life as a result of his sex.
That’s less of an issue if you’re only using the lists to make broad group-based changes. But it makes them very difficult to apply to individual situations.
So, women *don’t* get more government assistance than men, which is what you were arguing earlier.
Not necessarily the case. For example, nobody says anything about “welfare kings.”
On the wage gap for childless adults being null, please cite some studies to back that up. My understanding was that motherhood accounted for part, not all, of that gap. Additionally, the idea that women get paid less by virtue of working less and taking advantage of offered flexibility is an assumption. You would have to control for hours and type of work for that to be provable. Mothers get that penalty regardless of whether they actually take more time off or require more flexibility or not. There’s also no guarantee that an employer who pays a female employee less is actually offering flexibility–they may simply be paying less on the assumption that she’ll be less available for last-minute overtime.
Also, why probably? There are men who are primary caregivers. We should be able to find stats on how their responsibilities for their children affect their income. (In cases where they have a flexible schedule, that is. Obviously if they stay home, kids affect their income by making it go away completely. But the same is true for women.)
I’ve seen stats showing a decrease in earning for mothers who take time off or put less focus on their career post-birth. I’ve not seen stats for fathers, so I say probably because I don’t know for certain.
There are stats showing that for same-education single childless adults, the wage gap is anywhere from 7% to negative 5%, or in those waters.
This applies to women as a group (not just mothers), but women tend to work less hours a week outside the home, and more inside the home (being about at parity with men in overall work). The effect motherhood has on this is not something I know for sure.
The societal encouragement men get for focusing on career, vs the societal encouragement women get for taking care of their kids more – end up encouraging the status quo, or punishing those who deviate from it (by giving them less popularity, and thus opportunity).
If you don’t mind being an outlier (like me, I don’t mind at all), it’s fine for you. But this society seems to focus on being normal to outrageous levels, whereas even having (positive) super powers gets pleas of “but I just wanna be normal!”. Apparently most people want “to be normal”, even if the ostracism for being an outlier isn’t that bad, possibly because normal requires little thought (just copy everyone else, and you’ll do fine).
So this will result even in some men who want to do caregiving steering away from it, some women who want to focus on career steering away from it, and people who are on the fence will obviously stop considering the other option (because its more of an hassle, and they have no preference).
The status quo deal is why some people only identify as their sex because “it happened to them (ie, they got told it, and didn’t think to question it)” rather than because they really identify that way and would have chosen it given the choice outright.
Transitioning is much more socially (and financially) costly than not-transitioning, especially if your stance is basically “no opinion”. Bringing this back to my point: following the norm about provider/caretaker role is easier because you don’t make waves. You don’t have to take a big 30 minutes discussion with every serious date you have about how you’re not like other men/women and would prefer the non-normative role.
And we humans are lazy peoples. We’ll only do something when we’re motivated to do it (by whatever, a ton of factors there).
Are single men eligible for welfare in the states?
Welfare king/queen is not an expression being used for Canada. The contempt people have for people on welfare here is gender neutral, and mostly takes them as defrauders of the system, purposely living at society’s expense without ever contributing a dime. The right-wing manage to generate more contempt for people on welfare than tax-evading 7-digit people and 9-digit companies (like banks).
Like I said, the only mention of sex as a determinant of benefits I can find anywhere is for WIC for pregnant and breastfeeding women. A single person is eligible for TANF if they make less than 577 a month.
Yes, single people are eligible for welfare in the U.S.
Most countries are more socialized and therefore have a higher level of “dole” than we do, so I believe “living on the dole” is less pleasant here. Not that it’s less-than-shitty anywhere else, mind you, other than possibly Sweden. but it certainly stinks in the U.S. I know plenty of people who ARE living on welfare, but I don’t know a single person (on or off) who WANTS to live on welfare.
The public concept of a “welfare queen” (which has been skewered elsewhere on this blog; they don’t really exist) was based on the increases*, under limited circumstances**, in welfare allocations when people had more children***.
*though not much of an increase anyway, compared to the cost of kids.
**and not always available. Many people who need welfare can’t get it. Lots of things can disqualify you.
*** until you hit the “child cap.” Because, ya know, kids cost nothing to raise when you have enough of them.
There are stats showing that for same-education single childless adults, the wage gap is anywhere from 7% to negative 5%, or in those waters.
Really? I’ve seen the +5%-for-men wage gap studies when looking at men and women at the start of their careers and controlling for education, but the only study I’ve heard of where women have better pay is this one, where it’s looking at urban, childless women and men under 30, but NOT controlling for education.
I don’t know what controlling for education would change to those stats,
Though this being for childless urban people under 30 does mean that tendencies go that way (it didn’t hit the 50+ cohort yet, who grew under different regimes).
For it to affect with-child couples in an egalitarian way would mean attitudes of those couples AND of society would have changed enough to become at-parity or close enough that it doesn’t matter in practice. (a 60/40 ratio would have less prejudice against the minority one than a 90/10 ratio like in nursing).
Controlling for education means you’re comparing like to like when looking at wages, because level of education influences pay.
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I don’t know what controlling for education would change to those stats,
Controlling for education means you’re comparing like to like when looking at wages, because level of education influences pay.
Yes. The author of the study attributes the higher pay for women to their higher college graduation rate (from the Time article I linked in my last comment):
The figures come from James Chung of Reach Advisors, who has spent more than a year analyzing data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. This is almost the exact opposite of the graduation ratio that existed when the baby boomers entered college. Studies have consistently shown that a college degree pays off in much higher wages over a lifetime, and even in many cases for entry-level positions.
Most likely, the pay gap would be in men’s favor if you controlled for education. That’s because A) that’s what most studies that control for education have shown–all the ones I’ve seen–and B) Even a small wage gap in women’s favor while controlling for education would be big news, so the study author would be talking about it, and C) for women outside the urban, childless subset–even those who were also under 30–the pay gap was in men’s favor. These women were less likely to be educated (also from the Time article):
As for the somewhat depressing caveat that the findings held true only for women who were childless and single: it’s not their marital status that puts the squeeze on their income. Rather, highly educated women tend to marry and have children later. Thus the women who earn the most in their 20s are usually single and childless.
What this means is that a study that doesn’t control for education (or occupation) does not show that women get equal pay for equal work; it shows that education level has a bigger impact on pay than gender among single urban women under 30. (Among women NOT part of that group, education is less common anyway, so this may indicate that education is more important overall than gender in influencing pay.)
How you control for education also makes a difference. If you only control for amount of education, the pay gap is bigger. If you control for major, occupation, and hours worked, the pay gap is smaller (but still in men’s favor).
10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question. — false
12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home. — false, lots of men get shit for spending too much time at work and not at home
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. — false. men are bombarded with superman and rambo and etc as role models.
18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often. — false in my experience, but i was mostly in honors classes (of which the majority of students in my honors classes were female)
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. — no but he could (and many times he might be right, people are sexist against men too)
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. — false. i’ve heard lots of men get called “manwhores”
25. I do not have to worry about the message my wardrobe sends about my sexual availability. — false. been told many times by men and women that i looked trashy because they thought i was trying to show off my bulge. (usually wasn’t)
29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore. — false, ugly guys get a lot of shit too
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. — loud men get a lot of flak too, though instead of “shrew” its “spaz” and instead of “bitch” its “asshole”
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. — in the way they are worded domestic violence laws affect both genders equally. however, if both partners go to jail for a fight, typically only the male gets charges pressed against him (regardless of what the police reports say about mutual fault)
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. — such images of men are not that rare at all. i see shirtless men with bristling six pack abs all the damn time.
43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover. — statistics in this situation are skewed, see the comment i already made about #31.
44. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.” — i have people tell me to smile all the time
46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege. — false. didn’t he just write about 45 things he’s aware of? lol
there definitely are lots of ways that women are treated unfairly though. i’m not anti-feminism by any means. i’m just pro-humanitarianism. there’s issues on both sides that need to be discussed, but many of the ways that men are treated unfairly are largely not talked about.
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I am so glad when the “smile on the street” gets included in any discussion or list of this kind. It happens dozens of times a shift to service industry workers — even when they’re being friendly and attentive. There seems to be no good way to explain how condescending and belittling it is no matter how the line is delivered. Being expected by employers not to react — except by smiling — is nearly as exhausting as having to hear it repeatedly
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There is a stunning number of insults from positions of priviledge. Gendered slurs almost always target women, not men. Race terms target minorities.
So many slurs are for women only (slut, feminazi, fishwife), while insult terms for men are far fewer, and are more complex. Anti-male slurs use back-handed anti-female actions or body parts (sissy, pussy) or acting like a woman (fag) or have a bit of admiration/envy in them (loverboy, dan juan). Insults to women are usually just mean, and the list is long, long, long. Very few insults can only be applied only to men. In fact, if you try to make a list, you can be writing the anti-women slur list all day. The pure anti-men list is pretty short (dick, prick). Usually, insults to men are just generic insults (asshole, jerk), but insults to women are gendered.
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“41. Assuming I am heterosexual…”
Actually, nearly the entire checklist assumes one is heterosexual. Just saying. Things like this list would be on my list if I were to make a heterosexual privilege checklist.
Heteronormativity for the win!