My dad experienced discrimination based on his ethnicity. He changed his surname, and the discrimination ended. A black man who experienced discrimination based on his race would not be able to make any change that would “hide” his race the way my dad could hide his ethnicity. White privilege.
My H and I graduated from the same college, and we worked in manufacturing for the same company. Another company reached out to my H about a job, and he explained that it would only work if I was able to get a job in that area, as well (a move was involved). They asked about my background and said that they had some jobs I would be perfect for. We went for our interviews. The jobs they wanted me to consider were secretarial. I was a manufacturing manager! Had I been a male, there is no way that company would have thought that I would be a good fit for, much less interested in, a secretarial job. This is male privilege … guys don’t seem to be undervalued in quite the same way women are.
I don’t think that is male privilege. I think it’s a horrendous company, one to be avoided.
I work with a fabulous female that can best me in many ways. She has been rewarded for her talents. I look up to her as a role model. Someone to be emulated.
I have been blessed with American privilege. Some aspects in my life have been made infinitely easier-purely because I was born in the USA-for me than they would have been if I had been born in Yemen for example. I did nothing to earn being an American.
If I was having a conversation with a Yemini woman who said “You are privileged to have been born an American”, it would never cross my mind to give her a litany of all the ways being an American can be a PITA OR all of the ways I’ve worked hard in my life. It is just a fact that, compared to her, I enjoyed unearned access to better safety, education and free speech, purely as a benefit of being an American, than she has.
Plenty of people can be said to have been born with more “privilege” than I. I remember eating government cheese growing up. Getting free lunch at school. I personally don’t care about someone else’s “privilege”. I made my own way and am happy with the result.
none of that has anything to do with the privilege we are talking about here. I have some advantages in life because I am an American, because I am a woman, because I am white and because I am tall. All those advantages were conferred on me because of my DNA or the society I was born into. None of them have a thing to do with how hard I worked.
I’m thinking about rape and homicide. Homicide is worse in most cases, though I’m sure in some, a quick clean shot involves less suffering than the lifelong pain of violent rape. I don’t have statistics, but I have a feeling that there’s a lot more rape than homicide out there. Men are raped too, but women more. And there’s more unreported rape than murder, as people have reasons to not report, and it’s kind of hard to hide the fact of a missing or dead body. And while there are some random homicides where a guy is just going about his business and killed in crossfire or a robbery, I think, for the most part, it’s easier for anybody …at least middle-class people in safe neighborhoods to avoid homicides than rape if they’re not involved in drugs or sketchy people and take reasonable precautions. But women are subject to rape or other forms of sexual assault in all kinds of situations, day or night. Not just on a lonely trail in a national park, or a dark street at night, but maybe in a woodsy quarter-mile walking path in her neighborhood, in an office in the workplace.
Once when I was young and working as a waitress (had no car) I was ordered by a male supervisor to close up that night. I was alone, I had to walk a creepy half-mile through a deserted area of warehouses before getting to a nicer residential area where you could get help. No cell phones at that time. A guy came behind me and started pinching me, wordlessly. I was able to get away safely after a couple of blocks but, man, that was scary. I had been so socialized to pitch in, do what was asked, to accept authority, it didn’t occur to me that I could legitimately refuse to close the restaurant that night for my own safety, and the supervisor (who knew I didn’t have a car) sure didn’t care. I have others stories, but I won’t belabor he point, Just about all women I know, most of them middle class women, have stories, if not rapes then close calls or some incident of forceful intimidation to let a man have his way, I doubt so many white, professional-class men have had brushes with rape, homide or muggings at the rate women of any race (but of course, more women of color) do. Maybe more men actually die, but I think, overall, women may have more overall forms of violent intimidation done to them, by strangers and colleagues and intimate partners.
When my husband and I meet new people, about 99.9% of the time, they ask HIM what he does, but don’t ask me. Uh, we do the same job!! It drives me nuts. Until I told him it bothered me, DH would just answer the question and not refer to me. I finally trained him to say, “We’re structural engineers and work together.” Geez, it’s not rocket science.
Why do you ascribe “privilege” to differences between men and women that benefit men? For each of the items I listed above, the counter is a benefit to women. Are those areas in which women are “privileged”? Are you denying “woman privilege”? See how easy that is to claim. Maybe I will start another thread. “Female privilege denialism” There are benefits to being a man just as there are benefits to being a woman. We are not the same and that’s totally fine. Also, “thousands of years of history”…I think you are conveniently ignoring some incredible accomplishments from your “sisters”. That statement is just not truthful.
Plenty of people can be said to have been born with more “privilege” than I. I remember eating government cheese growing up. Getting free lunch at school. I personally don’t care about someone else’s “privilege”. I made my own way and am happy with e result.
@MarylandJOE, I think it’s truly honorable that you didn’t compare your situation to others with more privelege and kept your nose to the grindstone without resentment and created a life you are happy with. But you probably didn’t have to have very much to do with the people who had it easier than you, growing up.
It’s hard to have an equal or close relationship with a person who has a lot more privilege, especially if that person won’t even acknowledge it or try to compensate on your behalf at all for it. Even if you don’t resent it, and they’re a nice person overall, it’s hard to be with someone who just won’t understand.
In close quarters, women have to live with and work with and love (if they are straight ) the people who have this unequal privilege or unearned advantage, or whatever we should call it). That’s a very different situation than not caring about some random individual who happens to have it easier in life than you ever had. I think you’d find it different if you had had to eat that bad government cheese every day growing up, but had a sibling sitting next to you who got to eat everything they wanted under your nose, every day, especially if that sibling insisted there was no difference in your lunches and theirs. Harder not to resent them. Harder to feel a camaraderie.
Does some of the reaction have to do with age? Are older males less inclined to admit or recognize their privilege? While I expect my son to acknowledge his male privilege, as he does, that my husband also acknowledges it somehow feels unusual. I don’t mean for H as a person but given that he’s nearing 70 it doesn’t seem to fit in with most of the men our age we’ve known.
H grew up in a large family with mostly sisters, both older and younger, and perhaps that experience shaped his attitudes. We met in college 50 years ago, and from the start he’s been the least sexist man I’ve ever known. Over the years, he was often the sole senior exec at his employers to mentor female jr. execs and offer them promotion opportunities.
Maybe another reason H does not deny his male privilege is that he’s long agreed with a comment by King Charlemagne in Pippen that “it’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.” H is well aware of his IQ, hard work, and achievements, but he has always expressed gratitude for the luck he’s had, too. Part of that luck was being born male at a time when men were favored in so many ways.
H is well aware of the sexism I encountered in a male dominated profession back in the 1970s and 1980s. H was never asked about his family planning or whether he’d leave a job as soon as he had children. He was never told that clients/customers wouldn’t take him seriously because he was “just a little girl” (actual remark by one of my potential employers.) He also knows the issues and concerns I dealt with when traveling for work which he didn’t face when he traveled. He knows that I was mugged twice, something he never worried about as he’s about a foot taller than I am. H has never been assaulted, molested or raped; I have. It isn’t that bad things never happen to men, or have never happened to him, but he’s seen what his sisters, his women friends and I have had to deal with for decades, often on a daily basis, and that has informed his attitudes about male privilege. Acknowledging it has in no way diminished him.
I guess I don’t really understand, and I’m trying to understand. Yes, I’ m actually very glad I never had to go to war and I know that often men are forced to go to war to defend against aggressive men who start wars. But in the end, it not generally women who start wars. Men start the wars and women send off sons they spent their lives raising and mopping up the blood as nurses and replace the population with more babies for the next war. From where I’m looking it’s men who have glorified and perpetuated war. Not the poor soldiers at the bottom, but that is not what this discussion about. Women listen to men’s experience of war and are horrified. We don’t brush it under the rug and tell men it’s not so bad. More women want to do anything to figure how to end the madness. I’m not a pacifist, as I see that’s unrealistic, but if I had any power over the situation I’d give my life if that could stop wars from ever happening. I had a good friend, who became like an older brother, who had been a Marine in Special Missions in Vietnam, and learned a great deal from him as I listened to his stories. I even watched Apocalypse Now for the first and only time with him. We were both in Peace Corps together at the time. He joined up a few years after the war because adjusting to the US was too hard yet he wanted to fill his mind with new memories. I wanted to learn what that war was like for him. As is, I did spend seven years with Peace Corps and UNICEF, four years of it in small villages with no running water or electricity, trying to understand what it’s like in other people’s shoes and trying to find at least small ways to make things work better and build some human bridges. Talk about imbalanced privilege. I was never and AM never unaware of that privilege (especially when we get into political discussion here involving desperate refuges at the border and having a degree of compassion). Later I became a social worker in the foster care system, in the juvenile court system, in locked-down residential treatment centers with children abused and neglected and susceptible to committing violence themselves. One of my most memorable and satisfying cases is the eight months I worked with a seventeen-year-old boy previously living in juvenile detention and got to go to court to confidently tell the judge I thought he was safe to get off of probation. So I have not shied away from trying to understand hard realities in the world that people, often boys and men go through, even though I didn’t go to war and I didn’t get incarcerated myself and I am, at 67 years old privileged beyond belief in many ways. That doesn’t mean that white middle class men in the US aren’t oblivious to a lot of things women go through , often things that happen to them because men did it to them and I feel I can speak to that. It doesn’t mean I don’t think men ever have it hard. It’s that men tend to want to brush off women’s concerns as trivial.
I bet those striving, successful “sisters” of mine you refer to have some stories too,. Just because they are successful doesn’t mean that men made their journey any easier.
It can depend on how common such horrendous companies (or managers in companies) are in the labor market that you participate in, and whether the labor market favors employees or employers. If such companies or managers are common, especially if the labor market favors employers, then it can effectively create an unfair disadvantage for female employees.
I am also pretty sure it would never cross your mind for you to, upon meeting a poor US male who cannot afford college and has lost brothers or friends to gun violence, to tell them how privileged they are to be male.
That is the problem with the title of this thread. It suggests that male privilege as is universal, when most of us know it isn’t at all.
Everyone has burdens to bear, everyone has privileges of varying levels, everyone has demons and differences, we all have our own challenges and advantages. But it is clear that a universal privilege is still being a man. And being white is most certainly a privilege. I don’t see why it is so difficult to admit it. Personally, I have the privilege of being an upper middle class middle aged (or am I old?) female. Nobody is threatened by me, not police officers or young women running alone in the woods. Everybody believes me, and nobody thinks I’m trying to steal from them.