Tag Archives: male privilege

8½ Rules of Privilege

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As many beautifully-snarky people have pointed out in recent years, it’s getting harder and harder to be White, male, heterosexual, and/or cisgender in this country these days without having to occasionally think about one or more of these identities in ways that might make us uncomfortable. (Full disclosure: I am all of those things listed in the previous sentence.) I have the utmost faith that we can handle it, though, and that we will emerge better for it.

I only recently (i.e. in the past 4-5 years) came to understand the extent to which I do not have to consider how my race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. affect my daily life. Other people do not have that luxury.

I’m not talking about any great epiphany that I had. Really, the most important thing that I have come to understand and accept is this: with respect to people whose lives are not like mine, I don’t understand their daily reality, and I will never fully understand. To put it another way, I get that I don’t get it.

I’ve had numerous discussions on social media and in real life (yes, IRL conversations do still happen, even with people who live glued to a computer like me) recently about how to recognize and understand our various forms of privilege, and how it can be difficult because of the way our society tends to view most of my attributes (White, male, etc.) as the “default” setting.

As a sort of confession, I used to be of the mindset that racism, sexism, etc. were not my fault, because I never owned slaves, I hadn’t even been born when Mad Men took place, and so on. It’s a seductive view for someone who wants to be on the right side of history while keeping a perfectly clear conscience, but it’s not true. Continue reading →

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Kill All Men

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The more time you spend thinking about the patriarchy, the more you’re genuinely like UGH DUDES AMIRITE. Because the thing is, patriarchal culture actively trains men to be awful. They’re not born thinking that they’re in charge of women’s bodies, or that their opinions hold more weight and should get more credit, or that orgasms are their birthright! They have to get poisoned with those ideas by steeping in a culture that uses individual men as a tool to advance male supremacy.

Part of the reason misandry jokes take off, and part of the reason men who see the patriarchy matrix are some of the most enthusiastic misandry jokers, is that men are encouraged and rewarded for behavior that is, on the face of it, downright awful. Once you see through that horrible joke that patriarchy is playing on you, individual men start hating men-as-a-group in the same way that feminists hate them — not a way that encourages automatic hostility towards members of the group, but a way where you want to see the group disbanded and its charter destroyed and cast to the winds and forgotten.

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To my male friends who have complained — gently! Respectfully! But still infuriatingly — about the “misandry thing”: I do not really want to send you to an island. I do not want to light you on fire, or send you into space, or put you in a box and put the box in the ocean. I do not need to drink your tears to live.

But I do think the concept of “manliness” needs to be taken out and shot. And when (not if, but when, because this is how privilege works) you slip up and do something sexist, when you shout down a woman who knows more than you or act like her body and clothes are designed for your pleasure or just ignore the inequities around you because you can, because you were told all your life that this was okay and only learned recently that it isn’t and you have to fight to remember that and it’s hard, that’s the guy I want to banish. I want to banish That Guy so you can be the generous, just, compassionate human being you are, and one day when all of Those Guys are banished we can be human beings together.

– Jess Zimmerman, “Men, Get On Board With Misandry,” Medium, August 8, 2014 (see also)

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“Your Low Self-Esteem Is Sexy to Me”

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A social experiment involving online compliments from men to women yielded interesting, if disappointing and unsurprising, results (h/t Ragen):

The next time someone sends you a “you’re so hot” opening line on a dating app, try simply saying “Yeah I am.” That’s exactly what one college student started doing, and she got some… interesting reactions.

Claire Boniface, a 20-year-old student, began conducting a social experiment she called “agreeing with boys when they compliment you.” Rather than profess thanks and gratitude to suitors offering compliments via online dating sites, Boniface politely agreed with them.”I was curious to see how the people that messaged me would respond,” Boniface told The Huffington Post. “Often when I get messages on that site simply complimenting me I just ignore them because the compliments are never sincere and I see no reason to respond, so I thought I would try out a simple response of ‘yes’ and see what would happen” She quickly found out that most dudes did not like this.

This is not the first such experiment  but the results do not seem to have changed at all.

Now, you might be saying that these are “just compliments,” and/or that she shouldn’t be so egotistical as to agree with the people sending her these messages.

To use a non-appearance or gender based example to address the “ego” question, I present the following hypothetical exchange between two men:

Continue reading →

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What I’m Reading, January 5, 2015

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On Nerd Entitlement, Laurie Penny, New Statesman, December 29, 2014

These are curious times. Gender and privilege and power and technology are changing and changing each other. We’ve also had a major and specific reversal of social fortunes in the past 30 years. Two generations of boys who grew up at the lower end of the violent hierarchy of toxic masculinity – the losers, the nerds, the ones who were afraid of being creeps – have reached adulthood and found the polarity reversed. Suddenly they’re the ones with the power and the social status. Science is a way that shy, nerdy men pull themselves out of the horror of their teenage years. That is true. That is so. But shy, nerdy women have to try to pull themselves out of that same horror into a world that hates, fears and resents them because they are women, and to a certain otherwise very intelligent sub-set of nerdy men, the category “woman” is defined primarily as “person who might or might not deny me sex, love and affection”.

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Heterosexuality is fucked up right now because whilst we’ve taken steps towards respecting women as autonomous agents, we can’t quite let the old rules go. We have an expectation for, a craving for of a sexual freedom that our rhetoric, our rituals and our sexual socialisation have not prepared us for. And unfortunately for men, they have largely been socialised – yes, even the feminist-identified ones – to see women as less than fully human. Men, particularly nerdy men, are socialised to blame women – usually their peers and/or the women they find sexually desirable for the trauma and shame they experienced growing up. If only women had given them a chance, if only women had taken pity, if only done the one thing they had spent their own formative years been shamed and harassed and tormented into not doing. If only they had said yes, or made an approach.

This, incidentally, is why we’re not living in a sexual utopia of freedom and enthusiastic consent yet despite having had the technological capacity to create such a utopia for at least 60 years. Men are shamed for not having sex; women are shamed for having it. Men are punished and made to feel bad for their desires, made to resent and fear women for having denied them the sex they crave and the intimacy they’re not allowed to get elsewhere. Meanwhile, women are punished and made to feel bad for their perfectly normal desires and taught to resist all advances, even Eventually, a significant minority of men learn that they can ‘get’ what they want by means of violence and manipulation, and a significant minority of women give in, because violence and manipulation can be rather effective. (Note: accepting the advances of an awful man does not make these people bad women who are conspiring to ‘make life hell for shy nerds’. I’ve heard that sort of thing come out of the mouths of my feminist-identified male nerd friends far too often.)

And so we arrive at an impasse: men must demand sex and women must refuse, except not too much because then we’re evil friendzoning bitches. The impasse continues until one or both parties grows up enough or plumps up the courage to state their desires honestly and openly, without pressure or resentment, respecting the consent and agency of one another.

Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond, Phil Nobile Jr., Badass Digest, December 29, 2014 Continue reading →

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How the Loss of Male Privilege Affects Men Who Don’t Care About Male Privilege (Short Title: Suck It Up, Dude)

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(Originally posted in a Facebook comment thread.)

I used to bristle at being “lumped in with rapists, chauvinists and domineering punks” too. The problem is that, as a society, we are trying to have it both ways, and the only means of achieving equality that I can see is for men to endure a tiny bit of stereotyping (and honestly, who among us men has actually suffered real harm solely by being “lumped in with rapists, chauvinists and domineering punks”? I’m guessing none. Any harm that might seem to result from that is more likely to be based on individual circumstances.)

Back to my original point about having it both ways, just to give one example, a common trope with regard (trigger warning) to sexual assault is that women need to be more watchful and mindful, while at the same time men get offended when a woman acts as though he might be a potential rapist. Those two ideas cannot coexist. I hope that we can one day live in a world where avoiding sexual assault is 100% the purview of the potential assailant, but we are not there yet by a long shot. Until that time, so long as any men in our society continue to act as though their loss of male privilege somehow constitutes actual oppression, the rest of us have to live with that tiny bit of stigma.

Two conclusions I draw from this: (1) let’s focus our efforts on rooting out the male behavior at the core, rather than criticizing the largely-female-held opinions that are merely the result; and (2) we’re men, so according to our own folklore, we can handle a bit of criticism, right? (BTW, the opinions I am referencing are by no means limited exclusively to men, women, or any gender in between or elsewhere.)

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