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.”
Why, you are! According to you. I am convinced.
I could also add another to one of the other commenters, as a woman, your chances of being hurt or killed at work are significantly less (90+% of all work-related injuries/deaths, the males are the victims). As a woman, your educational options are enhanced, they even have scholarships specifically that women can apply for, just because they are women….as far as the “men interrupt women more than women interrupt men”, I have found studies that have corroborated that scenario and others that have backed the opposite being true. So there is not really any definitive evidence of that, Amber. In fact, on average, women will throughout the average day, speak more frequently than men do. In fact, studies have shown something of 7,000 words for women to 2,000 words for men, daily. So it’s not like men are really dominating the conversation when women are still exercising their jaws more than men are.
I of course agree that there are ways men have it worse, such as the odds of being killed at the workplace (and, even more importantly, the odds of being exposed to deadly toxins at the workplace). Far from denying that and other male problems, I’ve written about them in many other posts. Even in this post, I acknowledge that “In many cases – from a boy being bullied in school, to a soldier dying in war – the sexist society that maintains male privilege also does great harm to boys and men.”
So when someone comes in here and brings up stuff like workplace deaths, I have to wonder if they even read the post they’re responding to. Bringing up things like that in no way contradicts my argument. I am not claiming that there are no systematic harms to men. Quite the opposite.
I just cited a meta-analysis – do you know understand what a meta-analysis is? – which found that, across 43 studies, “men were significantly more likely than women to use interruptions.” A meta-analysis of studies is a much stronger piece of evidence than your anecdotal account of having seen studies going both ways.
Citation, please? That is, please cite even a single study found in a peer-reviewed scientific journal supporting what you just said.
The statistic you cite is a well-known myth – but one that keeps getting repeated by journalists and on Facebook, because it supports a sexist stereotype and so people want to believe it.
Here’s some reading about the myth:
Gender Jabber: Do Women Talk More than Men? – Scientific American
Language Log: Sex-linked lexical budgets
Language Log: Yet another sex-n-wordcount sighting
Language Log: Gabby guys: the effect size
Language Log: Regression to the mean in British journalism
Language Log: Contagious misinformation
Language Log: Femail again
Language Log: Sex differences in "communication events" per day?
Language Log » An invented statistic returns
Not to mention the excessive reductionism… » Pharyngula
Hey, Bob, in response to your direct request, I spent time researching and writing a rather lengthy response to your request. It’s sort of rude for you to not even acknowledge my response. If you could just say “okay, I guess you didn’t just make it up. Thanks,” I’d appreciate it.
“Hey, Bob, in response to your direct request, I spent time researching and writing a rather lengthy response to your request. It’s sort of rude for you to not even acknowledge my response. If you could just say “okay, I guess you didn’t just make it up. Thanks,” I’d appreciate it.”
1.Wait. Who says I have to respond?
2. I do truly see that you didn’t just make it up.
3. The reason I quit replying was that I ran out of things to discuss. Cheers.
I don’t say that you HAVE to respond. Just that it would be nice if you did. :-)
Thanks!
Unless you use a sample size that encompasses half the people in the world, your interruptions complaint is just a MYTH. Hell if I am going based on personal experience, women have interrupted me much more often than men have. And actually I was going off of an interesting thing I learned in the news a few years ago, but if you use common sense, you can understand that it is true that typically women do talk more than men. Is that supposed to be a myth too? And no, I am responding to this post. I couldn’t care less about any other article that you wrote because I saw this one and the fact that you put in effort to make a b.s. list of alleged “male privileges” that somehow females don’t have the luxury of possessing is very telling. Also one that I can’t get passed is you saying that boys are given more attention in class than girls are? Seriously? Boys are punished for the behavior that many children (boys AND girls) exhibit, while girls seldom are punished for such behavior. Hell I remember sitting in class, not saying, while 2 or 3 girls behind me would be talking and laughing and the teacher (female) would yell at me for talking when I hadn’t said anything. But of course, women seemingly can do no wrong, so they were given the benefit of the doubt. Honestly, this isn’t to say that boys and men are oppressed because really neither gender is oppressed based on gender. A person isn’t oppressed by such criteria, they are oppressed based on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and military status. And the being told to smile? I have been told that many times, because when I am around strangers, I am a very serious person, I don’t smile very often. Women are NOT paid less for doing the same work. They typically don’t do the same work or same amount of work, don’t have the same amount of experience, don’t go for the same job fields (women TYPICALLY gear towards communications, customer service, child care vs. math and science), take more time off (women are more likely than men to take sick days and maternity leave vs. paternity leave). I am just sick of hearing or seeing how women think they have it bad. If they were treated the same way as men, they wouldn’t be able to stand it. They would have to sign up for the draft, pay their half of the bill, share child custody, not get child support or alimony, be arrested if they so much as push their spouse, not have gender based educational scholarships, etc.
Joel: let me make sure I’m understanding you correctly. A study isn’t reliable unless it has half the world involved in it. However, your own personal experience (a sample size of 1 person, not 3.5 billion):
and memories of news reports:
ARE reliable. Even though the words-per-day number is a statistic and, were it real, would have come from a study of significantly less than 3.5 billion people; and even though the links Ampersand provided show that in fact it’s totally made up, with no data behind it whatsoever.
Do I have that right? If so, it seems contradictory to me. But I feel like I’m missing something (why is half the world the standard, and not all the world, or 1/3?).
Shorter version: “Research: How does that work?”
Yeah, pretty much. And whom were the people involved in the study? Honestly it is ridiculous to think that just from finding some b.s. that was written SUBJECTIVELY is going to be unbiased. How many such studies are there that have women seen in a negative light? NONE!
Just when you think comments have hit bottom a new sinkhole opens at the very bottom of the pit.
I certainly have read your post, very carefully and several times over. What has always puzzled me, and what I think is vexing your other critics, is that we cannot understand how you reach the conclusion that “it is women and not men … who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick.”
To conclude this, you would need to weigh – not merely acknowledge – the systematic harms to men vs those to women. And you’ve not done so. And neither has any other feminist to my knowledge, and I’ve been seeking such an analysis for the past eight years. Rather, your argument appears to be “here is a list of systematic harms to women. Therefore male privilege”.
So when your critics accuse you of ignoring systematic harms to men, it is to this argument they are referring, not whether your not you acknowledge or even blog about systematic male privilege. It is that, beyond the bare acknowledgement that they exist, these systematic harms are ignored in the analysis that concludes “therefore male privilege”.
Well, that theory is easy to test. I’ve temporarily removed the “it is women and not men … who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick” paragraph. Now let’s wait a few months and see if people stop posting the “but men suffer too!” responses.
I don’t agree that this will test my “theory” at all. Claiming that “it is women and not men … who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick” is just another way of saying that men are privileged, a proposition which your post continues to advance, whether or not those specific words appear in it.
I find it remarkable – though to be frank, not at all surprising – that your response focuses upon my “theory”, while ignoring the challenge to your own. Whether or not a core tenet of mainstream feminism is analytically and empirically justifiable would seem to be far more interesting and important than why people post “but men suffer too” responses.
Of course I meant to say “not whether your not you acknowledge or even blog about systematic harms to men”.
I found this article a decent read decently truthful to my own experiences. I personally do not consider the items in the list “privileges” but rather effects of the gender inequality prevalent in the society in which I live. I can understand the desire to educate people of the effects of gender inequality, however focusing solely on “male privilege” is sexist. I personally believe that gender equality will never truly be reached to the full definition as it is an impossibility for a man to truly be a woman and vice versa. I do believe that with proper education and awareness of the subject that a balance can be reached.
The above is merely my opinion.
What you find interesting and important isn’t what I find interesting and important.
Whether men or women get the short end of patriarchy’s stick is a question that cannot be answered empirically. I don’t think it can be measured or debated in any meaningful way, particularly not with anti-feminists or their fellow-travelers. So no, it’s not interesting.
* * *
When I first compiled this list – which would have been around 2001, I think – I hadn’t really thought enough about the question of “male privilege,” and what exactly that term means. With hindsight, I see that this list isn’t a list of male privileges; it’s more of a list of some of the many ways sexism harms women in modern Western society. (That’s not to say that the list isn’t relevant to male privilege. The list is relevant to male privilege, because the harms it lists result from a system of male privilege and female oppression.)
The term “oppression” is not another word for “suffering.” Nowadays, I’d probably define oppression something like this:
(This definition is modified from Caroline New’s).
I like this definition because it’s politicized, and gets away from oppression-as-suffering. I don’t like this definition because I think it doesn’t intrinsically incorporate intersectionality as well as a definition of oppression should.
By that definition men would be equally or even more oppressed then. Especially if you look at the judicial system where those without trait “xx” are treated differently than those with trait “xx” and not for the better. 92% of cases involving alimony have the woman receiving alimony. 80% of child custody cases see the mother receive full custodial rights. Men receive longer and stiffer sentences for the same crime as compared to a woman. In cases of domestic violence, regardless of the instigator and whether or not violence was mutually delivered or if the man didn’t even lay a finger on the woman, the man is the one much more likely to be arrested. Men having to legally sign up for selective service between the ages of 18 to 25 is also something that women don’t face.
Ampersand, you segued from “privilege” to “oppression” in a way that implies that you view these as opposite sides of the same coin. For clarity, could you confirm that this is you view, or alternatively explain what the difference is between systems that in your view privilege men, white people, etc., and those which oppress women, PoC, etc?
Regarding #5; how is “far less” defined?
I suspect that looking at work harassment cases which has been reported to authorities is only looking at the tip of the iceberg.
A survey found that 25% of women and 10% of men reported experiencing sexual harassment at work. Does that qualify as far less?
http://www.langerresearch.com/uploads/1130a2WorkplaceHarassment.pdf
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Tamen: I don’t know exactly where the borderline between “less” and “far less” is. :-p
But it’s not as if the one (poorly designed) survey you cited is the only thing to consider. At the other extreme, for example, a 1993 survey by “the Industrial Society” in the UK found that 54 per cent of women and 9 per cent of men had been sexually harassed at work. That survey used behaviorally specific language rather than just asking “have you been sexually harassed,” so in that way was better designed than the survey you cite.
Nor are men and women always talking about the same things when they say they’ve been sexually harassed. See Gender differences in experiences of sexual harassment, a 2007 study of sexual harassment in the military, and pay particular attention to the table on page 469; 28% of men and 49% of women reported experiencing harassment via sexist and crude jokes. So you might argue that 28% isn’t “far less” than 49%; I’m not sure I’d agree, but I wouldn’t dismiss that view out of hand.
But 10% of the women reported reprisals for refusing to have sex, versus 1% of men. 20% of women reported unwanted kissing, touching, etc, compared to 3% of men; 10% of women were threatened with retaliation versus 1% of men. That seems to me to be safely on the “far less” side of the line.
So yes, overall, I’m comfortable sticking with the “far less” language.
Appreciated this post! Thank you!
Daran, I am of multiple minds when it comes to oppression and privilege. The definition I used before makes sense to me, but so do other, contrary definitions, including views that both men and women are oppressed by the gender system.
So yes, what I said before is my view that privilege and oppression are opposite sides of the same coin. But at the same time, that’s not my view, or at least it’s not my only view – I’m fuzzy on this subject.
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Why are behavioral questions better? I think there’s likely an analogy with rape here, which doesn’t quite work. I’m not sure people can be harassed without experiencing it as harassment.
No, it’s not. But it was the only one I could find within the time I had to search for any US sexual harassment surveys.
You do realize that it’s rather cruel to make me feel old by citing a 1993 survey reminding me that it’s been 21 years since then.
Since you brought up a UK study – here’s one I didn’t cite in my previous comment on account on it being from Australia. It’s pretty recent (2012) and, at least by what I’ve seen after a quick read-through, seems to be pretty well-designed: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/chapter-1-working-without-fear-results-sexual-harassment-national-telephone-survey-2012-0
I would say 16% isn’t far less than 25% when it comes to victimization rates.
But 10% of the women reported reprisals for refusing to have sex, versus 1% of men. 20% of women reported unwanted kissing, touching, etc, compared to 3% of men; 10% of women were threatened with retaliation versus 1% of men. That seems to me to be safely on the “far less” side of the line.
So yes, overall, I’m comfortable sticking with the “far less” language.
I appreciate your candour. At the same time, I can only respond to the ideas you’ve articulated, and it’s obviously easier for me to address one idea at a time, so when I talk about “oppression” and “privilege”, I’m referring to the definition you gave above, and its flipside.
Your definition of “oppression” has three components:
1. systematic mistreatment, not merely suffering.
2. “typically includ[ing] trait “X” being seen as something apart from the default trait for people”
3. Also typically including “the exclusion of people with trait “X” from fair membership in the dominating or controlling class of society.”
I understand from its grammatical construction that “typically including” was intended to distrubute over both clauses. The word “typically” here is a bit weaselly. Are these criteria essential to the definition? If not, then men are oppressed, and women privileged because there is systemic mistreatment of men in society. Men’s oppression and women’s privilege is atypical in one respect in that it doesn’t extend to the exclusion of men from the ruling class, but this has little bearing on the vast majority of people who have little to no chance of entering that class anyway.
On the other hand, if the exclusion of those with trait X from the ruling class is an essential component of oppression, then in a world in which both men and women suffer systematic gender-based mistreatment, how gender affects non-ruling men and women has no bearing on the oppression/privilege calculus. That Joe Sixpack’s life was destroyed as a result of injuries sustained as a conscript in Vietnam is of no account. The only thing that matters is how gender effected Joe Kennedy.
It is perverse to define “oppression” in such a way that only the experiences of otherwise privileged people matter.
Daran:
Point well taken. I’m not certain this is what I believe, but for the sake of the discussion, let’s reword.
Or, rewording further still:
I purposely didn’t use your phrase “merely suffering,” which seems to rank suffering as always less important than oppression, which is not something I agree with.
1. Your argument is conflating “oppression” and “suffering,” the idea being that if a man suffers greatly enough, then it is perverse to suggest he’s not oppressed as a man. But that’s only perverse if you think of being labeled “oppressed” as a medal people get to reward their suffering.
Although I can’t deny that a lot of people think of it that way, I’m not convinced that it’s a useful or clear way of thinking about oppression.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that George Clooney has chronic back pain, chronic and severe enough to make him consider suicide. Clooney is, of course, wealthy, successful, educated, respected, white, male, heterosexual, cisgendered, engaged to a civil rights lawyer who speaks 3 languages (i.e., “a catch”), has access to powerful people, and his parents (and anchorman and a beauty queen) are pretty well off, so it’s not he pulled himself up out of poverty.
But I don’t think much in this world is worse than chronic, untreatable severe pain. Let’s say for the sake of this example that Clooney has suffered sheer physical pain that’s as awful as any people suffer.
Is it then perverse to suggest that Clooney is not “oppressed”? That he might, in fact, be privileged?
2. You might respond “Clooney’s back pain isn’t because he’s male.” Okay, let’s imagine that John Kerry – born into unimaginable wealth, secretary of state, etc – had been horribly injured during his (genuinely courageous) service in Vietnam, and had chronic pain issues just as bad as Clooney’s for the rest of his life. Is it still perverse to suggest that John Kerry isn’t “oppressed”? That he might, in fact, be privileged?
Not necessarily, because those instances would be considered uncontrollable on both ends. Nobody was purposely putting him at a disadvantaged. However if John Kerry had been captured and tortured as a POW, then during his time as a POW, he would have been oppressed because he would have been treated as less than that of his captors (in this case, the Viet Cong). Or if his wife were to divorce him and be awarded 100% of all mutual possessions and monthly alimony for life, you could make a case for oppression. However, making that case with that latter scenario, would take away a little bit from the real victims of true oppression for which the word was truly created to depict. Those include: African Americans, Native Americans, Arabic Americans, Jews during WWII, and military veterans (especially those that were drafted). None of these are exclusively female oppression. Oppression doesn’t affect females more so than males. And if you want to talk about males having more power than females. There are only a few people in the top echelon of society and most of them worked their asses off to get there. And they include men and women.
I’m genuinely puzzled at this response, Amp. It seems like it sidesteps the very basic conceptual foundation of kyriarchy: namely, that there are multiple dimensions of privilege/oppression, and even though someone is privileged on one axis they could be still be oppressed on a different axis. Your response suggests that it’s an either/or kind of thing when it comes to being oppressed as males, but I’m certain you’d have no hesitation about the idea that a white lesbian might be privileged because of her race but oppressed because of her sexual orientation. Why would it not be the case with Kerry, that in your example he would be privileged because of his class but oppressed because of his gender?
It’s always seemed to me that the concept of kyriarchy was reasonable enough, with the caveat that in gender, privilege is not a one-way phenomenon. (I say “caveat” because most people I’ve seen use the concept don’t seem to agree.)
Ballgame, I’m not certain you’ve successfully followed the argument here. I’m provisionally arguing from the POV of a definition of “oppression” that excludes maleness as a axis of oppression (unless you’re arguing that women are actually the default person in our culture, and that women disproportionately dominate our ruling class). I actually don’t have much problem with the idea that both men and women are oppressed by gender, but that’s not the definition of oppression I’m arguing from at the moment.
So although I certainly agree that there are multiple dimensions of privilege/oppression, as you say, being male is not one of those dimensions (according to the definition I’m provisionally arguing from).
Not every bad thing that happens to someone is oppression. Not all suffering is oppression.
Take the Civil War. Suppose a white man fighting on the side of the Confederacy, was in an all-White battalion that wound up in a tactically poor position. As the leader of the battalion – a position he only got because of his great family wealth – he was expected to lead the charge. If he had been non-White – had he been Chinese-American, say – he wouldn’t have been in that battalion, and he wouldn’t have been injured that day. If he were from a poor family, he wouldn’t have been leading the charge, and would have had pretty good odds of not being injured. Instead, as a White man obliged by his wealth to lead the charge, he was grievously injured and lived the rest of his life in horrible agony.
Would you say that his suffering is an example of his oppression as a White? Is not being allowed into that battalion non-White privilege? Is not leading the charge poverty privilege?
I’d suspect you’d say that no, there’s no such thing as being oppressed as a White person or being oppressed as a Rich person. Yet – because men were allowed to fight in that battle, and women were not – you would say that his injuries are an example of male oppression and female privilege, right? If so, that seems inconsistent.
(Note: I wasn’t even attempting to produce a historically accurate depiction of anything about the Civil War, just trying to set up a thought experiment.)
Ampersand, I’m not ignoring the “default trait” part of your argument. I’m not addressing it here because I’m trying to keep my comments brief and focussed.
“Merely” wasn’t intended to rank suffering lower than oppression, only that I agreed with you that suffering in the absence of systemic mistreatment did not constitute oppression.
I do think that the suffering caused by the mistreatment is very much the relevent measure of how bad the mistreatment is. If mistreatment does not result in suffering, then in what way is it mistreatment?
You misunderstand my argument. First I am not conflating suffering with oppression. the oppression – the systemic mistreatment – in my example is the conscription. The suffering is the consequence of the oppression. In my view, the aggregate of the suffering caused to all those systematically mistreated is the relevent measure of the severity of the mistreatment.
Second, nowhere do I argue that Joe Sixpack is oppressed as a man. My argument here is tailored to your proposed definition, which, as I understood it, addresses class, not individual oppression. Class “men” is the aggregate of all individual men. My argument points out that by your definition, the systemic mistreatment inflicted upon Joe Sixpack as an individual, and upon hundreds of thousands like him, has no bearing upon the class privilege/oppression calculus. The only thing that matters is the effect of gender on very high status individuals.
If your proposed definition was intended to be interpreted as personal privilege, then it’s even more perverse. You are arguing that nothing that Joe Sixpack has personally experienced is relevent to whether Joe Sixpack is personally privileged or oppressed, and that in fact, Joe Sixpack is personally privileged solely because of what happens to a small minority of other men.
Not “mere” suffering. Systemic mistreatment, conscription in my example. You are straw-manning me by persistently ignoring that I linked Sixpack’s suffering to his having been conscripted.
It’s not a “medal”, but an acknowledgement that they have in fact, suffered systemic mistreatment. Also the withholding of the word is a denial, whether it is a naked denial, such as arguing that Sixpack’s maleness has made his road smooth, or the more sophisticated, approach you take here, which is to define the term in such a way as to erase it. This denial, otherwise known as gaslighting is itself a form of mistreatment, systemicly applied to one sex and not the other.
The perverseness comes from your positioning the locus of oppression not in what happens to the oppressed people, or even in what decisions the ruling class make which affect the oppressed, but in the identity of those ruling classes. Let me offer another hypothetical to illustrate my point.
Imagine a world in which the Southern States never seceded and where there was no civil war. Licoln’s government is in a position to abolish slavery and is preparing to do so. Lincoln however, is opposed by a small cadre of free black men who themselves keep black slaves and who have grown wealthy off the backs of their fellows.
By your definition, the way to alleviate the oppression of the black people is not to abolish slavery. It is to throw Lincoln out of office, and install the slavers. How is that not perverse?
More relevently Clooney’s back pain is not discernibly connected to any systemic mistreatment he may have suffered. Norman Schwarzkopf’s prostate cancer certainly is because he’s male, but again, not discernibly connected to systemic mistreatment.
If I had to choose between the two, I would say “privileged” of course. So is Hillary Clinton. Does Clinton’s experience prove that women are privileged?
You could argue that it’s easier for men like Kerry than it is for women like Clinton to achieve high office. But are the experiences of men like Kerry, born as you rightly point out, into immense wealth and social status, the sole arbiters of the experiences of men as a class? For every Kerry there are a thousand Sixpacks.
A common feminist critique of society – and one that you yourself has made, is that it is “male centred”. The reality is that high status men are centred, while low status men are typically marginalised and erased. By framing the experiences of high status men as though they were the default, you are recreating the very dynamic you criticise.
So basically being conscripted isn’t oppression, because it doesn’t exclude you from the ruling class in society? What about draft dodgers – because that does come with jail/felony disenfranchisement? Aren’t they oppressed.
Not being a mind-reader, I don’t know whether ballgame is following the argument, but I thought his objection was pertinent, and indeed was one I considered making myself.
I understand that this is where you’re arguing from. However the question was addressed by you to me. You were soliciting my view as someone rejecting that definition. Limiting me to such a binary choice is puzzling in the way ballgame point out.
Of course I agree that by your definition men are privileged and not oppressed. Specifically I agree that our rulers are mostly men. I’m not sure whether our ruling class, is mostly men, which I conceive of as the pool of individuals eligible to become rulers. That’s probably true, but it’s less clear. So you will excuse me when I steel-man your definition by interpreting “ruling class” to mean “rulers”.
I do not agree that either men are the default or that women are. I think the whole issue of defaulting is much more complicated than your definition acknowledges and that consequently this clause is the weaker of the two. But I’ve not chosen to argue this in detail. Instead I’ve chosen to aim my critique at your definition’s strongest point.
I understand that. The problem here is that you’ve taken a natural and unbiased definition of oppression – “systemic mistreatment” directed at a personal “trait”, and then biased it by adding two clauses that you think will give your side a win. And I agree that your second clause probably does give your side a win, and appropriately steel-manned, definitely does. But there’s nothing particularly compelling about those two clauses. I could replace them with no-less-compelling clauses of my own which would give my side a win. How about:
I think this is a better definition in that I don’t think it leads to the kind of perverse outcomes that yours does. It’s no less compelling than yours, and of course by this definition only men are oppressed by gender.
I don’t know about the US Civil War, but it’s a pretty good description of the First World war for British soldiers at least. Overall about one in eight lost their lives, for the officer class it was one in three.
I think it is a pretty good illustration of just how smooth the road is for white people and for wealthy people, that you need to go back a century or more to find a bump in their road. Surely you’re not arguing that men’s road is similarly bump-free? If so, then it’s not the c. 2014 Ampersand I’m debating against. It’s the Ampersand of the privilege checklist who thinks that men are privileged because if you ignore all the bumps, their road is smooth.
Daran, I notice that you managed to not actually answer my question. Fair enough, I was asking Ballgame. But let me now ask you: Would you say that his suffering is an example of his oppression as a White? Is not being allowed into that battalion non-White privilege? Is not leading the charge poverty privilege?
I want to know if you think that my example civil war vet – or a similar person in the UK during WW1 – (everything I know about being in the British army during WW1 comes from the fourth season of Black Adder) was suffering from white oppression and wealthy oppression. And if not, why not.
Honestly, this entire back and forward conversation really points out that men and woman are both privileged and oppressed in various ways in various parts of life. In the end, the suffering or non-suffering or privilegedness or unprivilegedness come down to the individual and seems to be quite equal on a wider basis.
On an individual basis, some women have it easier, and some men. Lately, it seems that I, as a white male, am MORE discriminated against than other people would be in my situation.
However, my situation came about from my own choices earlier in life. It’s my own fault that I’m discriminated against these days, no because I am white or male. If I had made the right choices when younger, I would most likely not be in the situation to be discriminated against that I find myself in today.
In short, people may be discriminated against, but in most cases, they get to where they are to be discriminated against by because of their own choices previously.
For example, if I hadn’t slacked off in college, I would not have flunked and ended up homeless, leading me to where I am today, barely making ends meet and not having a job while being forced to rely on my girlfriend. I would not watch as females get hired for jobs or anyone else really because they see me, a white male, with little to no job experience, trying to take jobs away from more deserving folk.
So yea, I’ll state my points in all of this again…
1. Men and women are discriminated against.
2. Men and women suffer.
3. Men and women face oppression.
4. Men and women have plenty of opportunities.
5. Men and women have privileges.
6. Men and women make choices.
7. Men and women deal with all the above because of the choices they make.
Err, and please keep in mind this is all speculation and not backed by any statistics or anything but myself. Treat it as you will
You may be right about my having gotten lost here, Amp. If the purpose of the recent exchanges don’t revolve around whether your provisional definition is accurate or not, then I confess I’m a little fuzzy as to what their point is.
I would say these are justifiable simplifications when discussing modern Western society but strictly speaking they’re not 100% accurate. A more precise way of putting it would be that in Western society, race privilege flows overwhelmingly in one direction (in favor of whites). I would also say that class privilege also flows overwhelmingly in one direction in the modern era. (I don’t know whether the emotionally stultifying culture of the 19th century bourgeoisie would be evidence that one could theoretically be oppressed as a rich person or not, but this strikes me as an academic distraction from our current discussion.)
I don’t think ‘argument via anecdote’ is valid here. The question of oppression revolves around systematic mistreatment, not one-offs (as I believe Daran has been pointing out). A more interesting example is Daran’s point about the officer class being killed off at a significantly higher rate than the non-officer class. My suspicion is that those figures (1 out of 3 officers vs. 1 out of 8 privates) only apply to officers and privates who comprised units actually involved in the fighting, and that if you took the entire ‘officer and above’ class and compared it to the class(es) below them in that time period, they would still have sustained fewer deaths from war (and war-related causes).
Perhaps more germane to the point at hand, these examples (and your jerry-rigged one) seem to me to be more compelling evidence that even when otherwise privileged along the vectors of race and class, the oppression of being male is so great as to eclipse those protections and subject men to a heightened risk of death and maiming.
This is a much less ‘academic’ point. In modern America, for example, 18-24 year old white men are actually murdered at a slightly higher rate than similarly-aged African American women, despite the fact that as a group, those white men would have both race and class privilege compared to those African American women.
No, because as we have already agreed, oppression /= suffering
Slightly more pertinent. The answer is no for the same reason that the items on your checklist aren’t privileges. Rather they are benefits and disbenefits which arise out of broad social dynamics. It is these dynamics which are or are not privilege or oppression.
The relevant dynamic here is the expectation placed upon upper-class men that they should occupy roles of leadership, and that in these roles, they should lead from the front, even if that puts them at particular risk. So the pertinent question is whether the expectation that upper-class men lead is a privilege, an oppression, more or less neutral, or indeterminate.
Overall this expectation is a privilege, in that the benefits it brings to upper-class men outweigh the disbenefits. I do not, however, agree that it is definitionally a privilege, still less do I give it the status of an super-privilege, namely a privilege that nullifies any other oppression that upper-class men might suffer as a result of being upper-class, of being men, or of being upper-class men. Naturally I am even further away from agreeing that it is an ultra-privilege, one whose nullifying effect extend to to any other oppression that upper-class people who are not men suffer as a result of being upper-class, or men who are not upper-class suffer as a result of being men.
Note that in the above, when I refer to oppression as a result of being upper-class, I am not claiming that any such oppression exists, only that if it does, I do not think it is nullified by the expectation of leadership privilege. When I say that it is not definitionally a privilege I mean that the conclusion that it is a privilege is a result of a calculus in which the benefits and disbenefits are weighed against each other. The harm suffered by your hypothetical officer and the real officers in WW1 count. The expectation of leadership is a class privilege overall, but it is less of a privilege because of this harm, and for individuals, it may not be a privilege at all, but an oppression.
I would also argue that the expectation that upper-class men lead privileges upper-class women, who benefit more from having male family members in positions of leadership than they would if both they and their family members were competing for positions of leadership on equal terms against lower-class men and women.
I agree with ballgame, that to a first approximation this is true in Western Society.
Again, no, because oppression /= suffering.
There is, however more than one broad social dynamic at play here. In addition to leadership, which attaches to upper-class men, there is also combatancy and disposability, both of which attach to maleness whether or not upper-class, and both of which are overwhelmingly harmful, therefore oppression. I don’t believe there is an inconsistency here.
Me:
ballgame:
I’ve heard the essential claim – that officers’ casualty was far greater than of enlisted men, from several sources, most recently from one of the plethora of historical programmes the BBC has been showing to mark the centenary. I’ve not fact-checked it myself, but am prepared to trust the BBC on this one. Nor can I recall word-for-word exactly what the claim was. The one-in-eight figure might have been just for soldiers in the army, or just those who served abroad. Wiki puts the total number of UK combatants at 8,841,541, and the number of combatant deaths at between 702,917 and 888,246, which implies a overall death rate of between about one-in-ten and about one-in-thirteen. For front-line army units, a death rate of one-in-eight does not seem implausible.
Of course by “officer class”, I meant officers, most of whom will have been drawn from the middle to upper classes. Wiki also suggests a figure of 107,000 civilian deaths, mostly due to deprivation, though some towns were subject to naval and aerial bombardment resulting in direct civilian casualties.
Even if, as seems very likely, that civilian casualties disproportionately or even overwhelmingly fell on the lower classes, it’s not clear that the total casualties did.
I have some problems with some of the items on the list, but I think that’s a given for anything of this nature because frankly there just won’t be peer-reviewed studies that demonstrate all of these things, which is why privilege is so pervasive.
Overall, though, it’s a good list. And I have to give you mad credit for being a reasonable person. A lot of feminist stuff these days, and certainly the stuff that people bring to light to discredit feminism entirely, are from extremely loud, extremely stupid people. So it’s a breath of fresh air to just read something and see your responses to the comments and realize “wow, she’s actually looking at both sides of the argument and isn’t just using ad hominem attacks to get out of having to defend her position.”
And it’s nitpicky, but please change “relatively” in #29 to “comparatively.” Essentially they’re the same, but in terms of connotation, it actually makes a world of difference.
Drew,
1) I’m glad you like my writing. Thanks.
2) I’m actually a “he,” not a “she,” as I think the original post makes clear. :-)
3) I don’t think people who are “loud and stupid,” or who use ad hom attacks, are absent from feminism, but neither do I think they’re more common in feminism than any other political movement.
4)I’m not against making that change, but neither do I understand why I should make the change. What is the negative connotation of “relatively” that you see? It seems like a fairly neutral word to me, but I may be missing something.
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This list is rubbish. I won’t feel bad or apologize for being male or white. I could make a list pointing out perceived advantages of being other races or a woman, but I don’t believe in generalization.
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Of course, any number of white racists would say that by your definition, only white people are oppressed by race. Similarly, any number of homophobes would say that by your definition, only heterosexuals are oppressed by sexual preference. We’ve all gotten sick of billionaires who clearly consider rich people to be an oppressed class, comparable to Jews in Nazi Germany, by some reasoning similar to your definition. I’d call that a perverse outcome.
Nor do I agree that by your definition only men are oppressed by gender. I can easily think of instances and contexts in which either (or both) men and women could be said to be “oppressed,” by your definition. Basically, your definition is too subjective to be useful. (Unless, of course, the goal is to deny that privileged people are privileged, in which case your definition is very useful.)
I think that it makes sense to think of oppression and privilege as political terms. Although the implications of who has privilege spreads very wide, at core oppression and privilege is about who has access to power and who does not. A definition that ignores power in favor of… well, whatever it is your definition talks about… is a definition that depoliticizes the concept of oppression. No thank you.
Just as oppression =/ suffering, oppression =/ harm.
No one has asked you to.
Interesting. Source? And what about within other age groups?
Ampersand @844: But killing the messenger is always easier than listening to an uncomfortable message!
Amp, These are the figures for 18-24 year olds for 2005, based on rates per 100,000 people:
White women: 2.5
Black women: 11.3
White men: 12.2
Black men: 102.0
I originally wrote about these figures in various comments back in 2009 and got the information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It was readily available through the website then, but they’ve changed the site some and I found it harder to drill down on it today. Still, you can find roughly similar info on page 5 of Homicide in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011 (pdf) by looking at the graphs at the bottom … keeping in mind that the graph for male victims uses a scale that’s ten times larger than the one for female victims. It does have an age dimension at the bottom and the text does talk about various cohort victimization rates, but I wasn’t able to readily find a precise 18-24 year old reference. For that it would probably be necessary to drill down on the base tables. FTR, the 18-24 year old cohort is the most ‘murdered’.
With all due respect, Amp, this is ridiculous. Are there bigots who might claim that whites, heterosexuals, and rich people are the ‘real’ victims of oppression, unlike POC, gays, and the non-rich? Sure … and they’re idiots. None of those assertions flow rationally from Daran’s definition which includes the phrase “systematic mistreatment.” No rational observer could claim that whites are systematically more mistreated overall more than POC (in the US), or straights more than gays, or poor more than rich. The fact that there are ‘irrational observers’ who might nevertheless make such a claim has nothing to do with the validity of Daran’s definition, and your raising the specter of such people is little more than a transparent ploy to try to smear his point through rhetorical association.
I agree that Daran’s definition does not appear to me to exclusively define men as the oppressed, contrary to what he apparently thinks. (The fact that his definition says oppression “includes” being seen as less virtuous or less worthy of aid does not seem to restrict it to people viewed as such.) But it clearly includes them.
OTOH, your definition rests primarily on the sexist ‘men are Borg’/apex fallacy which incorrectly claims that men at the top give exclusive primacy to men’s concerns as a group over women’s. That assessment simply doesn’t hold when looking at modern Western society, and it’s debatable exactly how ‘uni-directional’ male privilege (as structured by ‘men in power’) was even in less enlightened times.
(Relevant Clash lyric.)
New datapoint/paper on this:
High Prevalence of Sexual Victimization Detected Among Men; Similar to Prevalence Found Among Women in Many Cases (paper is behind a pay-wall). Here is the press release from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
The suggestion that the “last 12 months” results from the NISVS 2010 Report for being made to penetrate were just a “blip” – an anomoly of some sort seem to be weakend by the fact that the NCVS has found a sharp increase in male victimization of rape and sexual assault in the last few years. From the press release:
This considering that the NCVS operates with a definition of rape that requires the victim to be penetrated by the perpetrator – making “made to penetrate” falling under the vaguely defined sexual assault category:
I note that the press release recommends the same changes to survey designs as I criticize the National Research Council for not doing in this blog post.
The authors of the paper is Lara Stemple – who has been the Executive Officer of Just Detention International and Ilan H. Meyer.
Ballgame, I understand that the homicide figures aren’t really very crucial to your argument. But you got me curious. So I took two graphs from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one for white men and one for black women, and overlaid them in Photoshop to turn them into a single graph.
I don’t think that the numbers support the claim that there’s any reliable pattern of white men having higher homicide rates than Black women. Murder rates for those 18-24 (and also 14-17) were higher for Black women than white men until the mid-1990s, after which the two have been pretty much identical, with year to year differences in which is higher looking (to my eye, at least) like random variation rather than a pattern. (The year you chose for comparison happened to be one of the lowest years ever for homicides of Black women). Among those age 25 and older homicide rates are always slightly higher for Black women, but they’ve been drawing close over time.
Of course, for both black women and white men, the homicide victimization rate is much smaller than that of black men. Also, there are other dimensions that the BJS graphs I used don’t cover – for instance, my impression is that the rate of homicide victimization among trans women in general, and trans women of color especially, are terrifyingly high.
Also, if you use the age category of 10-24 (from the CDC), then black women have a homicide rate twice that of white men. Admittedly, that seems hard to square with the results Amp’s chart shows, although it suggests that black girls age 10-13 have a much higher murder rate than white boys age 10-13.
I’m sure some of them are very stupid people, but there are also some very smart bigots who have used their intellects to fool themselves. (As an analogy, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely s/he is to be a climate change denialist. Being smart is not effective protection from pulling the wool over your own eyes.)
The one example Daran’s definition gave of “systematic mistreatment” was being seen as “less worthy of social concern and welfare.” I don’t think it’s any more ridiculous to say “men are seen as being less worthy of social concern and welfare” than it is to say (for example) “heterosexuals are seen as being less worthy of social concern and welfare.” I see both statements as equally ridiculous, and coming from an equally blinkered view of reality.
*shrug* I’m not interested in what your magical mind-reading powers tell you my secret hidden agenda is, Ballgame. My point was exactly what I said it was.
To expand a bit, the problem with using “being seen as less virtuous or less worthy of aid” as a a measuring stick is that it’s so subjective it doesn’t really mean anything. In particular, there are always those who see the dominant groups as “the real victims,” and who interpret criticism of (male/white/wealthy/cis/etc) entitlement and privilege, and concern for the problems of marginalized groups, as meaning their own group is “being seen as less virtuous or less worthy of aid.” I think this particular error is especially (but not exclusively) likely to be made by people who spend too much time in online political discussions.
So yes, I think that this is something that you and Daran have in common with (for example) Maggie Gallagher. I’m not saying that as a “ploy” or to “smear” you; I’m saying it because I believe it is true, and that both you guys and Maggie have made the same common error.
Genuine question: Does that mean that if only those who are “seen as less virtuous or less worthy of aid” are oppressed, you believe that would restrict being oppressed along gender lines to men?
No, it doesn’t. It’s clear you don’t understand my argument even slightly, if this is what you’re getting out of it.
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I know I have asked this before of both Daran and ballgame, but I don’t remember if either has ever answered. Have either of you read Manhood in The Making, by David Gilmore? It is a cross-cultural, anthropological survey of manhood and masculinity that I think you would find interesting and that might raise some interesting questions regarding your thinking about the privileges, benefits and disbenefits that attach to being a man in a culture that values—to whatever degree—manhood. I am not suggesting this because I think the book will change your mind; but I do think Gilmore’s analysis and argument would add another, deeper layer to discussions like this, which, frankly, have not changed very much over the years that they have been going on.
I think you may want to reconsider.
There are a variety of social services (by which I am not limiting it to government provided things) which are strongly biased against gays. There are also a lot of people in the “social concern and welfare” contingent who are there due to some religious/conservative drive and they, too, can be biased against gays.
There are, conversely, some social services which are specifically aimed at women; comparatively few which are biased against women; and a lot of people in the “social concern and welfare” group whose religious/conservative beliefs tend to make them be more interested in helping women than men. Overall, I’m still on the “women have it worse” side, but I’m not sure that your assessment is right.
Enough already. Both men and women have privileges. And more than half this nonsense list has been disproven, but here’s some food for thought.
47) irregardless of my parents’ culture or religion or any small beneficial side-effects, I am protected by the law from any genital cutting until I am an adult and request it for myself. If I have been cut, my peers will universally agree that I have been a victim of a heinous crime.
48) I can openly state a sexual preference for members of the opposite gender who had significant portions of their genitals removed at birth, and not immediately be called out as crazy by most of society. I can request a sexual partner who has not been cut to become cut for me, and that partner would most likely not immediately leave me.
49) I can cite my own sexual preference for members of the opposite gender who had significant portions of their genitals removed at birth as the sole reason for requesting the same done to my newborn child, and my child’s doctor will comply without arguing with me or reporting me to the police. My health insurance will even pay for it.
50) It would be career suicide for a doctor or politician to recommend cutting off significant portions of my genitals to reduce the chance of catching STDs or having other medical problems with my genitals.
51) There’s little debate as to whether or not cutting my gender’s genitals is bad.
I think that #11 is flat out wrong. My husband is the stay at home dad, and for every 1 comment he receives suggesting he is a good parent for doing it, he easily receives 20 that are negative. People assume he is “unemployed”, “couldn’t find work”, or just lazy because he is not working outside of the home. He has people ask him all the time why his wife “has to” work, and when will he go back so that I can quit. Absolutely no one, even people who know us well, has ever verbally recognized the fact that he is the better choice for stay-at-home parent than I am. Even when he gets praised, it is with an undertone of insult or derision. We are just one couple, to be sure, but our daily interactions are with a wide swath of people from extremely varying socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, so I find it extremely difficult to believe that the majority of men who stay home with their children during the day are “praised” as being exceptional parents; my husband is lambasted, instead, with insinuations and accusations of being a poor provider.
Speaking for myself, the answer is no. Nor am I likely to, unless it is freely downloadable on the net somewhere.
There are lots of things which might add deeper layers to my discussions, but as a member of the long-term unemployed, I am reluctant to prioritise such things over the many other things I might spend my limited resources on.
Serious question, not intended as snark: Does the place you live in not have a public library? (I don’t know much about the UK. In the US, only the smallest of towns has no library, in my experience.)
Aly:
This interests me, because I have on many occasions seen #11 in action. I don’t know why your husband has had a different experience. I suspect that it may be a difference in location, class, or other subculture division.
I have a fair amount of contact with people around here who have very little money and pretty lousy life management skills, most of them at the bottom of the working class, and I don’t recall ever hearing a man lambasted for being a lousy provider unless he also did none of the housework and childcare (which is a pattern I see a fair amount of).
But thank you for providing a contrasting experience with some substance to it. It improves the discussion.
Grace
My experience is also very different from Aly’s; like Grace, I suspect this may be a function of geography and community. Likely the people lambasting Aly’s husband assume that he is lazing around all day eating bon-bons and watching TV while Aly not only is the breadwinner, but does all the housework.
Even though I live in an extremely liberal area, it has been very difficult to get schools, medical providers, etc. to grasp the concept that they should be calling Dad, not Mom, for things like ‘your kid got sick in class, please come get him’ or ‘you have an appointment coming up’.
It seems like Aly’s experience and your two experiences are … basically the same?
I mean “people calling Mom and not Dad when the kid is sick” and “Dad stays at home with the kids and does housework and thus is a lazy bum” are exactly the same prejudice.
I’m not sure if there’s been any widespread study of cultural opinions about stay at home dads, but it would surprise me that:
1) Men get complimented for childcare — as long as they are the household’s primary income or can assumed to be the household’s primary income.
and
2) Men get denigrated and called lazy bums for making childcare and home-making their primary occupation.
yrs–
–Ben
I am not sure what you mean by widespread, but here goes:
http://cola.unh.edu/sites/cola.unh.edu/files/student-journals/TanyaRouleau.pdf
The three referenced papers (only abstracts are available for free):
http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/29/4/436.abstract
http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/9/2/258.abstract
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3090148?uid=3738744&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104125937553
Other studies:
http://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2376/2853/Scott_wsu_0251E_10078.pdf?sequence=1 (from page 100 – fairly technical)
http://goodmenproject.com/families/survey-says-women-are-less-likely-to-support-stay-at-home-dads/
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/29/breadwinner-moms/1/
More than half of the Pew survey respondents say children are better off if a mom is home and jobless, just eight percent say the same thing about dads.
My previous comment apparently had too many links and were spam-trapped or something, I’ll try again with just one.
Perhaps this Pew Research survey is indicative: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/29/breadwinner-moms/1/
The spamtrapped(?) comment had links to several more (albeit with much smaller samples) studies looking into cultural opinion on SAHDs.
[Previous comment dug out of the spam folder, thanks. Not sure why it was in there – the number of links wasn’t the problem. –Amp]
Thanks!
Not read as snark.
I live in a city, population > 200,000. The central library is within walking distance. I doubt if they have that specific book, but they could probably order it.
Either it is a characteristic of my mental health condition that I struggle to motivate myself to do even simple mundane tasks. Or I’m just catastrophically lazy, take your pick. Either way, my motivational resources are as limited as my financial. Ordering books from libraries isn’t going to be high on my list, when I’m struggling to motivate myself to prepare a meal for myself. Additionally, borrowing books is just storing up future problems for myself should I fail to return it on time.
That makes sense. Thanks for responding.
Ampersand:
Whether the bigots are stupid or smart is a complete irrelevance. That bigots might irrationally use my definition to claim absurd things is no reason to reject it. Nor do I see any obstacle preventing bigots from irrationally using your definition to do the same.
On the other hand, if a genuinely sound argument could be made (whether by a bigot or someone else, it makes no difference) that, based upon my definition, heterosexuals and rich people were oppressed and not privileged, then I should be forced either to accept that conclusion, or reject or modify my definition. So let’s focus upon making rational arguments ourselves, and not concern ourselves with what bigots will make of them.
Whether or not it is a “ploy” is of no import. This kind of rhetoric does smear us by association, whether it’s intended to or not. Your intentions don’t matter.
It’s interesting that you should claim this, given that one of your critieria is that trait X be regarded as the default state. How subjective is that?
This is Bulverism, and a particularly ironic instance, given that the charge of spending too much time in online political discussion can be laid at your door just as much as ours.
There you go again, smearing us by association whether you intend to or not. I don’t recall having heard of Gallagher until I read your comment, but if this summary of her views is accurate, then her views and mine are 180 degrees apart in every respect. the suggestion that there is something in common in our thinking is both ridiculous and offensive.
Here’s of the kind of thing that leads me to believe men are viewed as less virtuous than women. We agree that Obama’s view sucks. We were both bitterly disappointed that a Democratic President – and one we both supported – should take such a view. But were you honestly surprised? I wasn’t. What would have been surprising is if his view had been “if you’re female and near a terrorist, that makes you guilty”. It’s inconceivable that any president would decide the issue that way round, because in our culture women are presumptively innocent, and men aren’t. There’s your “men are seen as less virtuous”. Right there.
Do you disagree? Do you think Obama calling these men “terrorists” just him criticising male privilege or entitlement, or showing concern for the problems of marginalized groups?
Or consider the marked lack of media attention and international concern given to the plight of the schoolboys Boko Haram was burning alive back in February, which prompted this author to ask why? All the jigsaw pieces are present in his article, even though he didn’t fit them together at the time. It wasn’t until Boko Haram started targetting girls, with the resultant upsurge in media and political interest that he joined the dots.
Note that I’m not criticizing the high levels of attention that the kidnapped girls are getting. It’s the lack of attention given to the murdered boys that I object to. I say that this indicates that males are seen as less worthy of social concern and welfare than girls.
Do you disagree? Do you think that silence and inaction are the media’s and politicians’ way of criticising the partriarchy? Or perhaps it’s how they show concern for marginalised groups?
I have blogged about the phenomenon of male victim erasure dozens of times over the years, and seen many more examples than I’ve blogged about. In the humanitarian discource, females are centred, males are erased. I think male victims are a big enough and important (to me) enough subclass to falsify the claim that “men are centred, women are marginalised” as a generality, and it is false to the point of perversity to claim that female victims are a “marginalised group” relative to male victims.
That’s the fundamental difference between us. You think (or at least, it’s the core of your argument) that the experiences of a very small number of men at the top of the social heap define the situation for “men” as a generality, while the experiences of men at the bottom don’t matter. I’m not claiming that they don’t matter to you personally. I’m not claiming that you don’t care about male victims. I’m saying that they don’t matter analytically. Their experiences are trumped in your analysis by those of a small minority at the top.
I do not know what observable social dynamics inform Gallagher’s views, but I would be very surprised if they include targeted massacres of heterosexual people in which homosexual people were spared, being described in news reports as “massacres of homosexuals and bisexuals“. If I saw the same dynamics play out in media and politics between homosexual and heterosexual people as I do between men and women, then my views would be different. But I don’t.
Directed at ballgame, but I’ll answer it. I agree that in certain circumstances women are judged more harshly than men. For example who are (percieved to be) sexually active outside social norms. However as a generality (i.e., not tied to particularly circumstances) I think it overwhelmingly applies to men and not women.
I agree that your argument does not rest on the fallacy that men at the top give exclusive (or predominant) primacy to men’s concerns (which in any case, is the Front Man Fallacy, not the Apex Fallacy). It does, however rest on the idea that the situation of men at the top define the experience of men generally, which is one form of the Apex Fallacy.
ballgame:
My understanding of the earlier exchanges between Ampersand and myself about the word “typically” is that the “including” wording in his revised definintion was intended to indicate that the conditions stated in the clause were essential, and it is on this basis that I have been responding to his arguments. My own is intended to be interpreted the same way.
To the extent that his and my definitions can be construed otherwise, then it is a failure of the wording to express exactly what he and I meant. Given that we understand what each other meant (assuming of course that we do), I’m not particularly interested in discussing the wording.
Let’s look at whether my definition really does lead to those outcomes and not concern ourselves about what racists and homophobes would say about it.
Both black and white people can be seen as less virtuous than the other. There is a lengthy list of stereotypes associated with black people – that they’re lazy, criminal, etc. – that amount to them being seen as less virtuous. On the other hand white people are more likely to be viewed as racist and some argue that black people by definition cannot be. I think the case is much stronger for this criterion to apply to black people than to white. I’m not aware of any particular virtue attached to homosexuality. The most vociferous advocates for homosexuality acceptance don’t claim that its better to be gay, just that gay is what they are. On the other hand, many religious people think that homosexuality is an abomination before God. There is a much stronger case that the poor are seen as more virtuous than the rich, though that too is a two-way street. The rich are seen as exploiters, or just insufficiently charitable. The poor are often seen as criminal, or lazy.
In so far as black, poor, and homosexual people are viewed as more worthy of social concern and welfare, it is because they are worthy, on account of being socially disadvantaged relative to white, heterosexual, and wealthy people generally. I should perhaps have said “unjustifiably worthy” in the definition.
Regardless of how we judge these threshold issues, by the “systematic mistreatment” part of the definition, it is black, homosexual, and poor people who are overwhelmingly oppressed by race, sexuality and wealth. That racists, homophobes, and wealthy people might claim otherwise is irrelevant. They’re just wrong.
But even if my definition did have the perverse outcomes that you suggest. It’s no worse that yours, which also has perverse outcomes.
Perhaps you could, but if so, than it only indicates that I have failed to gerrymander the definition sufficiently to achieve the desired goal. I could say the same about yours. For example, those excluded from power by reason of a felony conviction are overwhelmingly men.
I find it ironic that you make this suggestion about my alleged “goal” given your response to ballgame’s comment about your alleged “ploy”. Yeah I realise that you said “unless”, but I don’t think that really helps. There is no foundation to this suggestion.
The goal was to demonstrate the arbitrariness of your definition. Nothing more and nothing less. The systematic mistreatment suffered by men and by women is asymmetric. That’s not to say that its worse for one or worse for the other, only that its different. Consequently its possible, potentially, to choose one or more points of asymmetry, and incorporate them into your definition to make it onesided.
My real definition of oppression is, more or less, systematic mistreatment which is 1. significant, 2. widespread, and 3. non-artificial. The latter criterion is intended to exclude positive discrimination per se from the definition’s ambit.
I don’t agree that my definition does depoliticise oppression. I think access to power, or its denial, is right there in “systematic mistreatment”. But access to power, for the overwhelming majority of people, men and women alike, doesn’t mean becoming powerful oneself, it means being heard by those in power. When the World Health Organisation in 2004 embarked upon a survey specifically intended to identify the needs of victims war-related sexual violence in Liberia, it only consulted women. What access to power did the other 50% of victims have? Power doesn’t even know they exist. Similarly what access to power do the overwhelming male population of America’s gulag system have?
You’re still Apex oriented. You’re still only looking at those at the top of the social heap.
And it’s not as though feminists have consistently used “privilege” to refer to access to power. Far more consistently, feminists have used it to deny that those they claim to be privileged suffer any systematic mistreatment at all along their axis of purported privilege. That’s what this post argues. It’s what this post argues. Privilege is the smooth street you don’t know your driving on. Privilege is “About how society accommodates you.” the privileged person. Except when we want to talk about female privilege, when suddenly privilege magically becomes about something else entirely. It’s about the people the top, about those who perpetrate violence, about the the people who maintain the road, about anything at all, so long as it isn’t about how society accommodates women or how smooth their driving experience is compared to men’s.
I’ve not argued otherwise. Oppression is systematic mistreatment. The harm and suffering caused are the relevent metrics by which we judge how bad the systematic mistreatment is, but they are not the oppression itself.
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Hi Daran,
I want to respond to a few of your points here, but I thought I’d start out with this overall caveat:
I agree, more or less, with your definition there, and also that there is (in various venues) harm to both men and women based on the way we view and treat men and women differently. However, I do disagree strongly with the notion that the amount of mistreatment of men and women is equal or is greater for men (I don’t know which one you believe, but it appears to be one of those two). When I list examples below, I’m listing only the most obvious cases from what I perceive as a complicated system that makes the most sense under certain unifying principles, such as women being seen as–and treated as–less than men in most ways. I understand that you probably see this system differently.
I’m also going to limit myself mostly to the US here: I know too little of the social systems & gender politics of other countries.
So, first:
I wanted to address the social concern and welfare part of this definition, because it’s not a standalone concept. It’s not “Women deserve our help!”; it’s “Women deserve our help, because they can’t take care of this problem themselves.” It’s the flip side of the coin that says women are less competent and/or capable than men. In limited situations this is a benefit to women; as you’ve mentioned, when women are victims of a crime, we’re more likely to find and/or punish the perpetrators, and when women commit a crime, we’re more apt to think they didn’t really mean it, and to punish them less. But most people spend most of their lives as neither the offender nor the victim of a crime, so the other part of the definition–the one that says women aren’t as competent as men–has a far larger impact for most people, affecting everything from how students are treated when they fail at a task, through which jobs women are steered toward vs men, through promotions even at very low levels of employment, through which medical procedures women are allowed to receive (the “partial birth abortion” Supreme Court decision has a little paragraph in it about how we shouldn’t allow it because women might regret it later, since apparently women are unable to fully comprehend their own medical decisions), through how likely an employee’s ideas are to be adopted (and to be credited to that employee), and up to one’s chances to be elected to high political office or selected for high-compensation jobs or board positions. You know, in addition to all the everyday interactions it colors and all the other areas it impacts. (I focus on employment because it’s one of the clearest-cut areas of demonstrable harm, even though there are lots of other ways this shows up. For example, I’ll sometimes add an extra dollar or two to cash I’m handing over at a store so I get an even $5 or $10 back. The salespeople don’t always realize why I’ve done this. The women who don’t figure it out will usually just hand me back the extra cash with a puzzled expression, but the men often need to make a comment about it in a way that implies I can’t do basic arithmetic. But that’s not a harm, per se, except when it happens often enough to raise my blood pressure…)
I’m not saying that what happens to victims and criminals isn’t important: I agree with you that we should help male victims more, and punish female criminals and male criminals the same way (my preference would be to punish male criminals less, given the state of our prison system, rather than punishing women more). But I don’t think those situations outweigh the negative impact that this nexus of ideas has on many women in many diverse situations.
As Amp has said before, this is not true. Privilege is easiest to see for people at the top, because being at the top requires a confluence of personal work, luck, and situational/community help that is very rare, so missing even one of those components can prevent you from reaching the top. That doesn’t mean the same privilege doesn’t apply to men further down the social ladder, merely that it’s harder to disentangle from all the other effects that can contribute to a person’s success or failure. As an example, here’s an article stating that (as of Oct 2011) 18 women were soon to be heading up Fortune 500 companies, a new record; that means 482 men were doing the same. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are quite rare, though, so you might say this doesn’t apply to men at the bottom of the social ladder, what you’re calling the apex fallacy. But if we look, for example, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics 2013 detailed statistics by gender, age, race, and occupation category, we find that women make up 47% of the labor force, 38% of all management positions, and 27% of chief executives. (From other sources, you can find that women make up ~15% of executive positions at Fortune 500 companies, and <5% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies as I cited above. And the CEO numbers, at least, have hardly budged in a decade or more, so this isn't a case of not enough women with sufficient workforce experience to have reached the highest levels yet.) Men have an advantage at all levels, but it's easiest to see at the most rarefied levels, so that's where we often point.
(You might look at that table and say, "But it says management, professional, and related occupations are 51.4% female, so that shows an advantage to women." If you look in detail at the professional occupations that make up the difference from management, the women are largely concentrated among the less prestigious and less well-paid occupations–a dominant percentage of nurses and paralegals, for example, while still being underrepresented as doctors and lawyers–with psychologists being a notable outlier. Left as an exercise for the reader: whether women are steered to these occupations because they're lower-status and lower-paid, or whether they're lower-status and lower-paid because women primarily do them.)
As another data point: the poverty rate in America is 13.6% for men and 16.3% for women. For working-age adults (18-64), the numbers are 11.9% men, 15.4% women. This is definitely not apex-fallacy territory, and yet men have a clear advantage.
Well, again, there are some ways men are harmed by our current gender politics, but women suffer much more under the same system. Would it be more true for feminists not to acknowledge that it’s terrible that men are much more likely to die on the job than women are? That’s just acknowledging the system sucks for almost everybody, while not pretending that the amount of mistreatment is equal, or that men have as credible a claim to oppression as women.
And, again: Amp’s argument (and mine) does not rest solely on access to power, though it includes it as one of several important areas of impact.
Finally, a side note:
I think, in modern-day America, it would be more accurate to say that the middle class is seen as more virtuous than either the poor or the rich, and that while some (often religious) rhetorical themes hold poverty to be a noble state, when faced with an actual living person in poverty, the reaction is often to see them as least virtuous of all. Cf. drug testing for food stamps and cultural memes about the homeless.
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@Harlequin, so does this imaginary “male privilege” apply to men of color as well? Is a man of color somehow treated with more respect and kept in higher regard than a woman of color or even a white a woman? Hell I am tan-skinned and have yet to understand this “male privilege” that I often hear from bitter feminists. And to say that women aren’t treated in the U.S. at least, as good or even better than men is laughable actually. I always point to the Vietnam veterans ( most of them male, in fact the only ones that were drafted were male) and how horribly and inhumane they were treated by Americans (men and women). And they had no control over being drafted but yet received harsh backlash for having served their country and deployed with their respective units. Women certainly can’t claim to be treated unfairly in the courtroom. It is also acceptable for a woman to complain about a man’s inability to provide for her but yet ridiculed if a man makes the same complaint of a woman. So all in all, I would say that YES there is equality, it just comes on different levels and in the end it levels out for the most part (it is a little swayed in favor of women at times, but we generally let that slide).
I understand the concept of white male privilege (I’m not agreeing it exists) but just want to comment on some of the beliefs held by the author. As far as facts and surveys go (on both sides of the gender argument) I do not know who to believe anymore. From perusing the internet the last decade I conclude any one can provide a study to support their beliefs: you show me your stats, I’ll show you mine; you show me your research, I’ll show you mine. I was a journalist for 35 years and at the start stats were wonderful … near the end I no longer trusted them. A bit of a shame.
I thought this was a great read and post.
The men who read this, get mad, and post their snarky and unintelligible comments on here are the ones who have truly benefited from our patriarchal society and feel as if they are being demeaned by the original post.
To have privilege is ok. No one is attacking you for having a penis. As I read it, this post was simply serving as a way to point out the times in a white man’s life where they did not have to worry about their clothes, whether they were talking too much, etc. It is a way for white men to realize where they stand in the world and be able to make change in the work place, education, and government so it IS equal for all genders, races, ethnicities, queer-identified people, etc.
This post wasn’t an attack on anyone. It is a tool for you to wake up and realize you have it good and to start to make changes to make life good for others.
McIntosh has been interviewed about this recently, and seems to very strongly disagree with Ampersand on the oppressed/opressor interpretation.
http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/05/the-woman-who-coined-the-term-white-privilege.html
It’s also interesting how privilege has changed from introspective group work aimed at reducing tension “this what I have that was unearned” to an outwardly focused “here are 46 reasons you are part of the oppressor class” aimed at cowing people.
Abbe Faria, I very much deny that my aim in writing this piece was to cow people. *rolleyes*
And yet, I agree with everything you just quoted.
24) I know it’s not as common, but I definitely heard of quite a few guys in high school that were called “man-whores” because they tried to get around. (I realize this implies that typical whores are women, and that’s not good, but my point is that there is a word for guys like slut.)
30) I might be misinterpreting this, but I thought loud guys were just called obnoxious, and aggressive males were assholes or dicks.
Of course you agree with her. The statement that everyone has some unearned advantage and unearned disadvantage is so gentle and obvious I’d be amazed if you could find anyone to disagree. That’s the point. Maybe she’s gotten mild in her old age or is toning things down for the masses, but the concept is decoupled from patriarchy, dominance and all the other stuff you are throwing around. That’s what I was hoping you’d notice and reflect on.
It wasn’t meant as a gotcha, though if you need me to quote a flat out disagreement.
As a black male, I fail to see the benefit of the reinforced contextual thinking blogs like this perpetrate. I’ve been relatively successful through a combination of opportunity, drive and intellectual curiosity. Gender, race as well as a host of other labels don’t outweigh the shear privilege of being born in an opportunity rich country. Perhaps your readers are more sophisticated than me but I can’t disconnect the negative consequences tied to assuming life is unfair and its problems are insurmountable because of ethnicity or gender. I’d rather be born a poor woman in the US than an Indian male in a lower caste without the opportunity for advancement. One of the most powerful concepts common to accomplished people is a belief in self determination. I acknowledge there are historically more white men in high positions than black but I also decided to have some of the fun and change xenophobic stereotypes in my colleagues.
Blogger wrote: “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 respond: ‘Heroes’ intended for little boys, like ‘action-figures’ or movie heroes, are stereotyped–impossibly muscular and perpetually invulnerable.
It’s true that heroes intended for boys include some stereotyped in the sense of being “impossibly muscular and perpetually invulnerable.” But that’s hardly true of all male heroes in children’s media. For instance, you mentioned “movie heroes.” Here’s a list of the top-grossing animated films so far:
1 Frozen film currently playing $1,219,285,529 2013 [# 1]
Female hero. Male sidekick/romantic interest is not invulnerable or impossibly buff.
2 Toy Story 3 $1,063,171,911 2010 [# 2
Main character is a male cowboy toy, not invulnerable or especially buff.
3 The Lion King $987,483,777 1994 [# 3]
Main character is a boy for most of the movie, eventually grows into a strong adult man.
4 Despicable Me 2 $970,761,885 2013 [# 4]
Main character is a portly older man.
5 Finding Nemo $936,743,261 2003 [# 5]
Main character is a not-especially-powerful-seeming male fish.
6 Shrek 2 $919,838,758 2004 [# 6]
Main character is a big ugly ogre, but he is pretty strong and invulnerable.
7 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs $886,686,817 2009 [# 7]
8 Ice Age: Continental Drift $877,244,782 2012 [# 8]
I never saw the Ice Age films.
9 Shrek the Third $798,958,162 2007 [# 9]
10 Shrek Forever After $752,600,867 2010 [# 10]
11 Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted $746,921,274 2012 [# 11]
Haven’t seen these films, either.
12 Monsters University $743,559,607 2013 [# 12]
Main characters are two monsters, very varied in physical size and abilities – both very round in shape, one quite large and strong.
13 Up $731,342,744 2009 [# 13]
Main characters are a fat young boy and a short old man.
14 Kung Fu Panda 2 $665,692,281 2011 [# 14]
Main character is a fat panda bear.
15 Ice Age: The Meltdown $655,388,158 2006 [# 15]
16 Kung Fu Panda $631,744,560 2008 [# 16]
17 The Incredibles $631,442,092 2004 [# 17]
Main character starts out fat but becomes, as you said, impossibly muscular and perpetually invulnerable.
18 Ratatouille $623,722,818 2007 [# 18]
Main characters are a male rat and a male boy, both on the reedy side of thin.
19 Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa $603,900,354 2008 [# 19]
20 Tangled $591,794,936 2010 [# 20]
Main character is female. Male sidekick/romantic interest has an athletic but fairly realistic physique.
21 The Croods $587,204,668 2013 [# 21]
Haven’t seen.
22 Monsters, Inc. $562,816,256 2001 [# 22]
23 Cars 2 $559,852,396 2011 [# 23]
Haven’t seen.
24 Puss in Boots $554,709,226 2011 [# 24]
Haven’t seen.
25 Despicable Me $543,113,985 2010 [# 25]
26 Brave $538,788,207 2012 [# 26]
Main character is female.
27 Madagascar $532,680,671 2005 [# 27]
Haven’t seen.
28 The Simpsons Movie $527,071,022 2007 [# 28]
Main characters are Homer, fat, and Bart, an ordinary looking boy. Neither one invulnerable.
29 WALL-E $521,311,860 2008 [# 29]
Main character is a small, not especially powerful robot, who is for some reason male-identified.
30 Aladdin
Main character is an athletic but not impossibly muscular teenager.
I don’t see how you can look at that list and deny that there are, in fact, a big variety of male heroes (physically, at least) offered to kids, most of whom aren’t “impossibly muscular and perpetually invulnerable.” Also, note that of the 25 or so films I’ve seen, all but three had male lead characters. (And unlike the male-lead character movies, Brave, Tangled, and Frozen all feature female leads with virtually identical physiques, although the lead in “Brave” is a teeny, tiny bit less thin.)
It’s amazing to me that four of the movies feature fat male leads, and three of them are very positive depictions. Can you think of even one children’s movie that features a fat girl in a positive leading role?
Of course, animated movies aren’t all of children’s media – but they’re probably the children’s media with the largest audience. And superheroes aren’t all of children’s media, either.
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Now, I know there is a really interesting debate in the comments section, but I will like to add that I have to disagree with number 17.
The reasons might be influenced by the fact that I am a part of the Z Generation, and I have lived as a kid during a major change of the representation on the media. But I have seen many female heroes, or just characters, with a great level of diversity; at least on the internet (since television is obviously not a good source). Marvel is a great example, although I must admit, the quantity is vastly different-and like I said, it is very recent- but it at least exist.
But now taking in consideration how recent and therefore less popular diverse female characters are, we also have the counter argument, there isn’t that much diversity in media over all, especially for children (obviously young girls are greatly affected, but young boys to, to a lesser extend). Yes, you go to the girl’s aisle in a toy store and everything in sight is a bright color of pink, a pink kitchen set, a pink doll house, but what about the boy’s section of the toy store: violence (swords or guns), cars or a bulky giant white man. Going back to marvel, yes, through the history of Marvel males have been the average, but the only fat male character I have seen as a kid was a white otaku with serious OCD and before being a super hero he used to eat fast food and slacker in his couch, and he was also villain (that’s also an interesting topic since representation doesn’t mean it is productive. I recommend this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdmJXHJLZ6M (please ignore everything until 5:30 since the first part are ”funny” jokes about boobs and an explanation about drag queens)the short version is , being represented is one thing, being represented as a villain is another) and going to a show dedicated to a younger demographic, we have skinny white boys with blue spray painted all over their character.
In Discovery Kids there is always the same recurring trope of the tomboyish blue-wearing skateboarding soccer player always-the-leader white blond boy.
So how does this ”representation” equates to a privilege when all you get is either a super strong or skinny white violent men who MUST show no weakens, with blue all over their body an intense sense of responsibility over ”the fate of humanity”. I mean certainly, it is better than the omnipresent standard of sidekick white skinny girl, but how much does it counts as ”a privilege”?
Carlos, you’re putting your thumb heavily on the scale by looking only at superhero characters, who almost by definition have an extremely narrow range of physical types (at least in the heroes). If you look at children’s media in general (including but not limited to superheroes), there’s a much bigger variety of body types among male than female heroes. (See my comment immediately before yours).
In fact, there’s still a lot of sexism in superhero comics – although both men and women are drawn in an idealized fashion in average mainstream superhero comics, men are drawn as idealized power-fantasy men for boys, while women are drawn as idealized pin-ups for boys. That’s not equal treatment, that’s sexism. Furthermore, women are extremely underrepresented as protagonists in superhero comics and movies – in The Avengers movie, for example, of six superhero characters, five are male.
Totally agree with you about the boys and girls sections of toy stores.
Totally agree with you about the lack of positive fat characters in Marvel (or in DC, for that matter). There’s Volstagg, who is likable and brave even though he also has a lot of fat stereotypes. And there’s Franklyn Nelson. And Ganke in the new Ultimate Spider-Man. That’s really all I can think of offhand. And all of them are sidekicks, not leads, of course.
The main audience for comic books in the 40s and 50s when these tropes were codified (back when comics had a mass audience) were women, the main genre was romance comic books. You can get a sense of what they wanted by looking at male physiques on modern romance novel covers, which are just as if not more ridiculous than superhero comics. These aren’t male fantasies, they’re female fantasies which just got fosilised in the style of the genre and persist long after it has become a niche market which women have abandoned.
If you look at big-name characters created for boys after women abandoned the genre who do you have? spider-man (gangly scrawny kid), ironman (middle aged industrialist wearing plate metal), wolverine (short, hairy), the hulk (a monster), you don’t get the superman physiques.
Was it somebody here who linked me to this article on the Comics Code and the demographics of readers of comics? Anyway, perhaps relevant to the discussion.
In any case, Abbe Faria, I think your point is incomplete. You say that women were the main readers of comics, mostly romance comics, and therefore superhero comics were obviously the physiques appealing to women. Well, the majority of moviegoers nowadays are women; does it follow that every movie in every genre caters to straight women’s desires with respect to male actors? If superhero comics were mostly read by men–and I don’t know enough to know one way or another–then the overall readership of comics didn’t necessarily control what superhero comics in particular looked like. (That’s assuming the creators were even aiming at women when they were the dominant consumers; see Jennifer Kesler on why people discriminate when it doesn’t profit).
Wait, what?
I thought the main movie-ticket-buying demographic was young men.* It was at one point (i.e. the late 1990s, apparently). It would be good to know if that changed. Can you provide a citation, Harlequin?
* Which conceivably could be different than the ‘movie-going‘ demographic if the latter doesn’t count repeat sales or something.
An avid comic fan since the 70s, I have no perspective on the 40s or 50s romance comics but I do know that the current the ideal male body for women is closer to Brad Pitt in Fight Club then Arnold Schwarzenegger. Men’s fitness magazines are marketed to us in a similar fashion as cosmetic products are to women with ideal image closely tied to the sex sells adage. Comic books as the name implies are surreal fantasies meant to entertain. Incidentally if you ever want to know what great female comic characters are out there; here is a top 10 list worth checking out.
Wonder Woman
Batgirl
Black Canary
Ms. Marvel
Natasha Irons / Starlight
The runaway girls
Kate Bishop / Hawkeye – after being attacked and raped in Central Park she becomes driven to train and spends a significant amount of time dealing with feeling safe or unsafe as a woman
Electra
Cat woman
Here’s a link to hundreds more:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superheroines
@ballgame: Hmm. I had heard a 55% statistic (ah, from Hathor Legacy, quoting the MPAA–that’s 55% of movie ticket buyers in 2010), but that was for just one year.
Here’s the statistics report from the MPAA for 2012. According to them, women made up 52% of moviegoers and 50% of ticket buyers. Nielsen finds the same percentage of female moviegoers, but says 55% of theatrical audiences are male–which I guess we can square with the MPAA statistic either by saying that there’s a total 5% uncertainty or that women are buying tickets for men, who are then more likely to see slightly more movies per moviegoer than women. (Also note–wtf, some of the worst chart types I’ve ever seen; aren’t they supposed to specialize in statistics or something?) Both reports show the past 3 or 4 years and it’s pretty stable at women moviegoers >= men moviegoers. The MPAA gives their statistical error on men and women as +/- 1.7 percentage points, so it is possible that they have reversed their numbers, though that’s less likely since it’s stable through time; that uncertainty would require 4.7% uncertainty on the Nielsen numbers to make them consistent (or 1.8% for a slightly looser definition of “consisent”–1- and 2-sigma error bars, respectively, for those who care). Not out of the realm of possibility.
Both agree, however, that teenagers and young adults–as you mention–make up a disproportionate share of moviegoers and audiences.
Interesting info, Harlequin.
The latter interpretation seems consistent with what Nielsen seemed to be trying to say when they talked about the same issue with Hispanic moviegoers. It would actually be interesting to know for sure what the numbers are saying. A 55/45 male/female skew in (net) movie attendance isn’t trivial: it means males are 20% more likely to attend a movie than females.
You wouldn’t actually have to posit that women were buying tickets for men. I can’t help but wonder if in fact the 50/50 breakdown of movie ticket purchasers is using the same basis as the moviegoer breakdown … i.e., of all people who bought tickets to one or more movies in that year, 50% were male and 50% female (thus obscuring the fact that males bought more tickets overall because they went to more movies).
That would be the interpretation I would wager on, but it definitely isn’t clear from the way the documents are presented, and your take on it could in fact be the correct one.
Agreed! I especially ‘liked’ the little counterintuitive details … like putting the most recent year on the left instead of on the right.