Misslizard wrote:
http://www.policymic.com/articles/87485/an-open-letter-to-the-sexists-who-think-female-privilege-is-a-thing
1. Female privilege is being able to walk down the street at night without people crossing the street because they’re automatically afraid of you.
The site that you linked to gave this retort, which isn't quite a rebuttal: "Male privilege is being able to walk in public without being sexually harassed on a regular basis." I'll give a counter-example from my own life: I had several friends who worked at a cafe near my apartment where all of the staff were young women. I only knew one of them at first, and once asked another if my friend were getting enough hours. She made some snide comment about sexual harassment to another gal working there. I explained that another good friend of mine was an experienced barista and was looking for work. I asked because I wouldn't have bothered to pick up an application for him if hours were already tight there. It's fine to be bothered by harrassment, but make sure that that's really what it is.
2. Female privilege is being able to approach someone and ask them out without being labeled “creepy.”
His retort: "Male privilege is the ability to occupy any space and not be inundated with attempted flirting." Again, not every 'Hello' is attempted flirting. And on the topic of unwanted intrusion, I'm often asked questions by women whose aim is to find out how much I make. I grew up in a wealthy family, have no interest in gold-diggers, and find it irritating.
3. Female privilege is being able to get drunk and have sex without being considered a rapist. Female privilege is being able to engage in the same action as another person but be considered the innocent party by default.
His retort: "Male privilege is claiming that men are oppressed because they can't have sex with drunk women — even if men are drunk — without being labeled rapists, despite the fact that we know consent is not a difficult concept and that male predators — even drunk ones — know what they're doing." Consent actually can be difficult. The safe option is to not date girls who aren't clear about it, but that narrows the field a lot. It's not just men who have a weakness: Plenty of women choose to cohabitate with predictable abusers because they don't want to be alone.
I read this account of a rape: The two college students were making out. The girl wasn't sure how much farther she wanted to go when the guy pressed her down onto her knees and said "I think that's fair." She performed oral sex on him, and only realized later that she'd been raped.
When I mentioned a similar, gender-reversed case to an outspoken feminist who I knew to be particularly sensitive about rape, she focused on the fact that the man had been "passive", rather than the fact that the woman had been the aggressor, and that he would have needed to use some physical force to stop her.
5. Female privilege is the idea that women and children should be the first rescued from any sort of emergency situation. Female privilege is saving yourself before you save others and not being viewed as a monster.
His retort: "Male privilege is looking at other men put women on a pedestal and getting angry … at the women. Here's a protip, Mark: If you're going to rant about the myth of "women and children first" policies, do your homework first so you don't look like an uninformed jackass."
I had a female friend who grew up in a family with similar patterns to my own: She had an overbearing father who didn't give her any space, and a mother who gave in to him. My family was a gender-inversion of that. When she wanted to break away, she was able to openly call her dad a narcissist, expect people in her social circle to back her up, and find a lot of support in the community and at college. No such luck for me when I wanted to do the same. Everybody thought that my duty to family should come before looking out for myself.
6. Female privilege is being able to decide not to have a child.
His retort: "Male privilege is believing you have a right to decide what a woman does with her body." Mine: Female privilege is believing that you have the right to decide what a man does with his body, his mind and anything else that might be milked for profit during the following 18 years. The idea that child support in the case of a half-wanted pregnancy is "for the child" is right out of the 1950s. May I open that door for you?
He continued: "It's also having the ability to skip town and abandon a woman you impregnated because of lax laws on paternity and child support." I will cover that below. More: "It's also ranting how you feel women aren't attracted to you even though you're a "nice guy" but curiously can't make a connection between that and how you generally treat women like objects with no personal autonomy." That's unrelated, backed by stereotypes, and designed to needle men on topics that the culture conditions us to feel insecure about. Classy.
7. Female privilege is not having to support a child financially for 18 years when you didn’t want to have it in the first place.
His retort: "Male privilege is being the only parent purely capable of escaping legal ties to a child because you're not the one birthing the child." That makes no sense. How can I escape legal ties to the child? Even skipping the country isn't enough, since the US has treaties with many others governing child support. Any job that posts your contact info online makes it easy for child support case-workers to find you. If he were pro-life and his argument were about physical privilege rather than legal privilege, it might make sense.
8. Female privilege is never being told to “take it like a man” or “man up.”
His retort: "Male privilege is overlooking the fact that when a man is told to "man up," what it really means is "don't be like a woman" because if society has taught us anything, it's that being a woman is a lesser state of being." This fits his thesis that every element of male culture is an attack on women. It's wrong. When I worked in R&D, the distinction was between men and boys, not men and women.
13. Female privilege is not having to take your career seriously because you can depend on marrying someone who makes more money than you do. Female privilege is being able to be a “stay at home mom” and not seem like a loser.
His retort: "Male privilege is not having to navigate life while being forced by cultural pressure to choose between a rewarding career and a rewarding family life." I'm not sure how men or the culture are guilty here, or how men are free to have it both ways while women can't. The men in my family struggled with that
a lot.
He continues: "It's also watching the men you love being called a "loser" by other men because they support the women they love by being a homemaker." For someone who doesn't think that I should have ownership of my own body, he's sure eager to set the world straight on men's issues here.
15. Female privilege is being favored by teachers in elementary, middle and high school. Female privilege is graduating high school more often, being accepted to more colleges, and generally being encouraged and supported along the way.
His retort: "Male privilege is believing that a higher rate of women graduating high school and college leads to success when in reality, women make up only 4.6% of Fortune 500 CEOs, 18.2% of the U.S. House of Representatives, 20% of the Senate, 27.4% of college presidents, 19.5% of law partners and 30.4% of active physicians. And need I mention again the gender wage gap?"
When I last heard, we had more female medical graduates than male graduates, and women who ran for office won at a slightly higher rate.
16. Female privilege being able to have an opinion without someone tell you you’re just “a butthurt fedora-wearing neckbeard who can’t get any.”
Retort: "Male privilege is believing that any opinion you give, no matter how ridiculous, childish, or lacking in education or nuance, deserves to be held up above others, particularly those who aren’t male or white." I'll respond to this and the next one together.
17. Female privilege is being able to talk about sexism without appearing self-serving.
His retort: "Male privilege is the ability to look at the mountain of data that clearly demonstrate how women are discriminated against across the board and still taking the time to write a half-assed blog for Thought Catalog that utterly fails to counter this data." Cherry picked data? WRAs have a poor record of intellectual rigor:
They used obvious selection bias and premature closure to build this argument: 'Excesses of "fighting-age" men have coincided with outbreaks of war over the centuries;
therefore young, testosterone-soaked men cause wars.'
As I pointed out elsewhere, "fighting age" men lacked the resources to wage a war at any point in the last millennium or two. They didn't even get to vote in the US until the 1970s. (The draft age was 18, voting age was 21.) Canning of food didn't come in until the Napoleonic Wars. How would they eat? Cheap, strong steel is a 20th Century invention. Before then, weapons quality steel was smelted near the tip of Sri Lanka in the monsoon season, then taken by small wooden sailing ships to an unloading point. From there, a trader with a mule cart would walk it to Europe.
Even a history professor at a Bible college would know better. The notion of war as a population control measure has been in classical literature as far back to the 1500s, and has fewer contradictions. They either didn't ask for review, or it wasn't an honest mistake.
David Reuben wrote in 'Everything you always wanted to now about sex, but were afraid to ask': "Every sick penis is attached to a sick man. Cure the man and the penis gets well by itself." He went on to describe men who climax "too slowly" or "too quickly" as defective and woman-hating.
Last edited by NobodyKnows on 13 Apr 2014, 10:58 pm, edited 10 times in total.
13 Apr 2014, 1:25 pm
