Not so long ago somebody linked me to this article as a primer on the concept of privilege:
http://qz.com/257474/what-riding-my-bike-has-taught-me-about-white-privilege/
I read the article and I agree that it's not bad at all, but I think that the author doesn't fully understand privilege himself. Actually, I was somewhat disappointed that someone would think that I was so uninformed as to find anything in it new or revealing. I'm well read on the topic and I am professionally used to working with data with a high degree of dimensionality and dealing with the intersections that arise. I actually think that that makes me more capable of properly understanding Kyriarchal privilege than most people.
The author of the article reduces white privilege to an analogy. That's fine for explaining a complex topic to a lay person, I use it a lot myself, but it does miss some important details.
The most serious thing that I feel feminists frequently miss out is that male privilege is not a straight line. Looking at privilege as a whole is far too complex (you would need at least an 8 dimensional canvas to begin to graph a very rough approximation of societal privilege) so some simplification is needed, but reduction to a single dimension is far too limited to be of use. Instead take a cube. The centre of the cube is "no privilege" and you become more privileged or more oppressed the farther from centre you are. The x-axis is gender privilege. The y-axis is racial privilege. The z-axis is wealth privilege. We will ignore others for simplicity.
There is no doubt in my mind that white privilege is very real and black oppression equally so, at least in the US. There is ample evidence of black people being unfairly treated and very, very little apparent positive effect. The guy with his bike analogy was quite right about that. White is at the very top of the cube, black at the bottom. The middle could be people of Asian descent, but that is far too simplistic. While white-black is nearly a straight line, Asian is more heavily influenced by the other two dimensions. It's a curve in three dimensional space.
Now take gender. That is even more heavily affected by the other two predictors than any of the other measures. The reason is mostly because the strength of male privilege is relatively small, so it is more distorted by other effects. A wealthy, white male is absolutely at the top, but a poor, black male is at the bottom. A poor white female is far, far better off than a homeless black man, or a homeless white man.
This is an important point that deserves stressing, in a Kyriarchal / intersectional model there will be positions where, with all other variables being equal, a man will be less privileged than his female counterpart. To put it concisely: male privilege is not universal.
This is often missed when talking about how we need more women CEOs and politicians and millionaires because men hold all of the power. Yes, but then you are forgetting about all the homeless men too. The top 1% are unfairly male, but so are the bottom 1%. Towards the middle things become a lot less unfair. Given that this is where the vast majority of us actually live it seems prudent to focus the debate mostly on areas that affect this middle ground too.
Now think again about "male privilege". It exists, but it exists for certain strata. There are many, many social groupings where you would genuinely find that women hold all the privilege. Telling a man who may well be on the oppressed end of the spectrum within his clique that he should check his privilege is highly offensive, but feminists accidentally fall into the trap time and time again. It's a complex topic, when you simplify it and make it dogma that is bound to happen.
Quite simply: privilege cannot be applied to an individual, especially in isolation of other variables. As a concept it is only useful to apply against populations.
Back to the axis. Even isolated from all other variables the idea of a straight line from "women = oppressed" to "men = privileged" is absurd. The weighting of the social importance of male / female issues needs to be very skewed before that can happen. A few of those issues on either side:
Men are:
Massively more likely to be imprisoned.
Massively more likely to commit suicide.
Massively more likely to be homeless.
Massively more likely to lose a custody battle.
A lot more likely to die of a cancer with insufficient research funding.
Massively more likely to be the victim of criminal violence.
Massively more likely to die on the job.
Slightly more likely to be the victims of domestic child abuse / rape.
Less likely to attend / graduate university.
Make less money when young.
Women are:
Slightly more likely to be victims of domestic violence.
Massively more likely to be killed by domestic violence.
Massively more likely to be the victims of rape outside of a domestic setting.
More socially pressured to conform to unrealistic physical ideals.
Make significantly less money at and after common child-bearing age
(seems to be about 25 at the moment).
Arguably taken less seriously in a number of industries.
Massively less likely to make it to the top of the corporate / political ladder.
Women have the social pressure of a history of oppression.
(note: stats can vary on these topics - there is wiggle room here)
There are more, but I don't need to hammer the point home any more. Both genders are unfairly discriminated against in significant facets of their lives. I personally feel that men might even come out slightly the worse since most of the complaints on the male spectrum are more common and actually deal with life and death issues, but there is certainly room to make judgement the other way. Really it doesn't matter who is the most oppressed, what matters is that male privilege is not this simple linear factor that people claim it is. I, as an individual man, might be privileged or I might be oppressed based on the narrow view of gender. It is hard to say because I am middle class and white - my significant privilege in other areas will drown it in the noise.
It is here that I agree with feminist goals of equality, but disagree with their methods.
When we are told that:
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/
and also
http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/faq-female-privilege/
(I raise these as examples mostly because they were probably my earliest exposure to the concept, in 2008) then we have a problem. This can only be explained by an absurd cyclical argument:
Men are privileged. Don't women also have privilege in different areas? No, because men have privilege!
The answer that feminists tend to provide for this is that males and females are both suffering because of the existence of patriarchy. A patriarchy which hurts men too. So how is this patriarchy proven to actually exist? Because of male privilege:
Male privilege! Why? Patriarchy! Why? Male privilege!
Apart from being really, really hard to justify, this also minimises the influence that generations of women have successfully had from outside positions of leadership. "Behind every great man stands a great woman", but feminism does not believe that these great women could have in any way shaped our society, nor that the great men might have been acting in the interests of women at all.
This is all highly dismissive of the genuine gender-based challenges of many males outside of the top 1%. This is why I cannot call myself a feminist, and nor do I want to be associated with the MRAs. Both look to further equality by focusing entirely on a single side of the coin, while minimising the very real issues that exist on the other. More than anything, I hate people being dismissive of opposing viewpoints. We will never learn anything if people are not prepared to listen to other opinions.
So, if you got this far, thanks for listening! I'm quite open to returning the favour and will definitely adjust my views based on evidence and facts that tell a different story.
