For the first time in my life I’ve started to really examine privilege. Up until this point (as a straight white male) it has been easy to ignore the issue of privilege. Not just easy, effortless, I know I’ve heard it mentioned before, but it was usually in sort of a “count your blessings” sort of way that never got my attention. Part of this is that I’ve been inoculated against the very idea of privilege since childhood. I honestly I don’t think I’d be examining it now if I hadn’t noticed that a lot of my straight privilege went up in smoke when I began to identify as kinky.
I guess I benefit from a great deal of privilege, an interesting article describes being a straight white male as being the Lowest difficulty setting for life, though I find describing privilege as “an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks” is a more helpful analogy to explain how one benefits from privilege even if you don’t realize it.
Even as I’m trying to read about this and examine it part of me rails against it, and I feel defensive. In almost everything I read privilege is something experienced and perpetuated by men, by white people and by straight people. Especially when it comes to male privilege I have trouble making my brain accept that it is a thing.
I begin to feel like posts about sexism are in some way attacking me as a man for the actions of other men. In fact I can remember feeling like I was being attacked for being male since I was a boy, there just seems to be this belief that starts with “girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice and boys are made of Snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails” and never stops until women are, in the public’s mind, blameless paragons of virtue and men a violent slavering beasts of uncontrollable lust.
Having heard for so long that my gender was the shameful progenitor of all of the woes of the modern world, that men were bullies, heart-breakers, cheaters, beaters, abusers, abandon-ers, rapists, murders, thieves, embezzlers, fraudsters, dictators, warlords, and worse, I think it is quite reasonable that I should have a mental category for “Other men.”
On one hand I don’t feel like I’m anything like “other men” and on the other hand when reading anecdotes about men behaving badly towards women, I put myself in the man’s shoes much of the time, and find myself trying to defend actions I would never do, or words that I would never say. There is a point somewhere in the topic of sexism, where a man goes from being a guy like me to being an other man. Guys like me are never being sexist, they were just misunderstood. Other men are just assholes and you can’t judge a guy like me based on the words or actions of some other man.
“Men are from Mars” become so much more offensive when you realize that the planet was named after an asshole.
I think that this part of what makes it hard to have a conversation about privilege, Guys like me aren’t sexist/racist/homophobic, Other men are, but when privilege is tied to our culture being inherently unfair in a sexist/racist/homophobic manner then it makes Guys like me feel like they’re being lumped in with those Other men.
Another thing is that it is a difficult thing to accept that the world is unfair in my favor, my life kinda sucks, or at the very least I’m not terribly happy with it right now. It just doesn’t seem like the odds are really stacked in my favor. Maybe I’m just contradictory but as I’ve gone down privilege checklists while putting this post together I see a lot of little things that I don’t feel like I’m getting any benefit from or flat out are not part of my experience.
More or less how I would react to being sexually harassed,
Which is not to say that I’m not privileged, just that it’s damn near impossible to recognize. What sticks out to me are the privilege that I’m “supposed” to get that I don’t, or the privileges that not only do I not want, represent the opposite of my desires.
As I said much of straight privilege is tied to vanilla privilege, if I think of my submissiveness as an orientation (which may be messy, but for me it works) I don’t qualify for a lot of straight privilege, especially in my community where to out myself as submissive would be on par with coming out as gay.
White privilege I guess is what it easiest for me to ignore. I grew up in a majorly white region and so racism wasn’t just something I didn’t have to deal with, but nobody I ever knew had to deal with it either. I realize that I sort of have some thoughts that might be racism-apologist, that I got from working in the service industry.
Hypothetically: if you sling java long enough you notice that customers with handlebar mustaches tend to tip less/be rude/complain more than customers that don’t have handlebar mustaches, eventually you realize that you brace yourself for this behavior whenever you see a customer with a handlebar mustache , even if it’s their first time visiting your store. Now, you’re not usually prejudice, but when you hear other employees complain about handlebar mustachioed people you start to think that perhaps since these ideas about people with handlebar mustaches are true, well maybe there is a reason people complain about people with neck-beards, or soul-patches as well…
He would not get good service from me
You see where I’m going with this? I’m trying to be a better person than I would be if I weren’t thinking about this all the time. Right now this is the only place I have to hash this out. My roommates are not interested in intellectual discussion of any sort, I’m currently unemployed, but even on the job conversation like this doesn’t happen, my social life is non-existant, and my family, well I’d tried mother’s day weekend to discuss a bit of this.
I had already seen the avengers but I went again with my Mom and on the way discussed a blog post I had read about it, which decried Joss Whedon’s failure to include more female characters in the film. Basically she didn’t get what all the fuss was about since the film was packed from beginning to end and you couldn’t fit anyone else in it, which is true. But when I suggested that the fact there are so few female heroes to begin with was problematic she didn’t really accept that either.
So what I’m getting at here is that if I seem painfully unaware of my privilege, I’m working on it, by myself, and when I try to discuss these issues in real life I by comparison to my peers come off as I don’t know, not just feminist or liberal but radically so in the stirring up trouble where there wasn’t any before.
So, please have patience.
Privilege is like that – you never know its there until you see what it’s like without it.
On one level, it is impossible to be unaware of your privilege and not be one of those “other guys.” At the very least, blissful ignorance allows the cycle to self-perpetuate. Just the fact that you’ve become aware enough to find a group of “other guys,” however, is evidence that you are evolving away from supporting that system.
On one level, it is impossible to be unaware of your privilege and not be one of those “other guys.”
I’m not sure I agree entirely. Even without being aware of privilege I had (and I think most people have) a mental category for unforgivably bad men, rapists, abusers ect. that didn’t overlap with guys like everybody else.
The more strongly I identify with a given man, the harder it becomes for me to accept that they could somehow be in the an “other man.” I think this is the basis for a lot of why guys will rush to defend appalling behavior because they don’t want to admit that a guy like them could be capable of such action, their must be a misunderstanding, or her was provoked or lead on…
Anyway my point is even without ever giving privilege any thought you can still be a good and decent man, and not stray into the behavior of “other men.”
I think I failed to express what I wanted to say.
You are right – you can be a good and decent man without ever giving a thought about privilege.
However, there is a system in place that stimatizes people and limits their ability to simply be their selves, and that is the same system that privileges some people above others. If you benefit from that system without a second thought about the other people who are not privileged; then you are not quite as good as it would seem at first blush. You are passively accepting the degradation of people, simply because you have not looked beyond the cover of your own book.
Actually, I think I would leave behind the “good” and “better” designations, as they imply too much judgment. Perhaps “more enlightened” or even “more socially aware.”
Indeed, more socially aware works better, I know some very kind, selfless giving people that aren’t aware of their privilege.
What’s tricky about this topic is introducing the concept to privileged people without making them feel as if they’re under attack.
I’ll just leave this:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2008/06/08/female-privilege/
I’ll also add that privilege is often used as a silencing tactic and also probably the only justifiable instance in some political circles in which you can use stereotypes.
The whole concept needs to be expanded, rather than used as an instrument of blame. The term “kyriarchy” was supposed to be about this larger system of intertwinned areas of dominance and oppression but people seem to have forgotten the origin of the term and are using it, in some cases, merely to substitute for “patriarchy”.
I’m familiar with this idea. I’ve considered writing about feeling that my opinions and ideas on certain topics will be rejected because of this.
“Kyriarchy” is an idea that I like since it fits in with my theory that everybody pretty much sucks.
For the most part that’s not really what my blog is about, but I needed to have this post as background when I write some other posts.