How most men, even good caring men, have no clue what women go through

[Juana]

Ugh. This is seriously the last time I'm going to engage with you on anything. Yes, class is extremely important. Yes, a woman in the upper class is way better off than lower class dude. But there are ways I have already outlined in which he has it better, although, again, they are much, much more evident within a class.

[AFK]

You haven't outlined anything that jives with reality, or at least, not the real world I live in.  I don't see any conceivable way how a lower class male can have anything over an upper class woman.  She can get pretty much anything she wants along with the adoration and aulation of society.  The poor schmuck gets spat on by pretty much everyone. 


I do agree that within classes you can see gender advantage, outside, it is a different ball game, it just is.

[Cain]

What I have learned:  Cain is right 169% of the time, and I should start paying more attention to what he says.

I do have an unfair advantage.  I have discovered the perfect conditions to enter a trancelike state conducive to prophecy.  It involves very little sleep, very long days, minimal meaningful interactions with the rest of humanity, getting strung out on poisonous levels of caffeine and eating too much junk food because you're too tired at the end of the day to stand, let alone cook.

This method has a 94% success rate, assuming you can say anything coherent at the end of the day.

[Don Coyote]

Not if it is in a context where it alienates those who do not enjoy the privilege because of those other factors like class.  Especially if you want them to be allies or to just philosophically support your cause.

All men enjoy the privleges that come with being men even if their overall situation is still worse than most peoples because of other factors.

Tell that to the poor whit guy who can't even get into the door for a job interview.  Or the intern I talked about who got passed over by many other places while his female classmates were already starting internships.  Yeah, that "privilege" is really doing wonders for him.

I think you might be over-looking something. As a male he can, provided he doesn't have terrible health issues or a shit ton of felonies, can get into the military, which is a job in which there are no jobs that he cannot do because he is a male. In other words, he has the "privilege" of being allowed to be a infantryman and get blown up, shot at etc, or anything else.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

So... I think that anyone who says "male privilege" doesn't exist or that it only exists for "some males" is ignoring reality in a serious way. There's a preponderance of evidence from statistical analysis, which although not as emotionally moving as some anecdotes, is still valid and based on the real world. For every anecdote you can produce that illustrates a lack of male privilege, there are twenty possible anecdotes that could be produced to illustrate the opposite. Even if you don't personally know anyone in any such situation (although that's extremely unlikely), it doesn't negate the millions of people who do or who are in that situation themselves. Moral of this paragraph: anecdotes prove jack shit, and they're logically equivalent to an appeal to emotion, so stop using them.

That said, I still think a militant "anti-male" position, explicit or implicit, is the wrong way to change things. I can say this despite having no personal experience of being a woman in our culture, because I do have personal experience in dealing with men and observing dismissive treatment of women. It happens all the time, and the way to get people to knock it off and evolve is not to fling insults and be dismissive in return. Not because the patriarchy is valid or because men deserve special consideration, but because when you dehumanize someone who is already dehumanizing you, it destroys any probability of them reversing course -- and even if they did, the strong rhetoric would mean you would need to reverse course and rehumanize them, which you will probably see as another affront to your independence.

But, as far as the last few pages go, I'm disappointed to see that anyone thinks it's reasonable to argue that male privilege is some kind of myth. If our society is going to change the inequality among genders, it has to begin with a recognition that inequality exists. I can completely understand the frustration and outright rage that flares up when, given a hundred years of fighting for equality, there are still people who think it isn't a problem, or that the problem has already been solved. I'm frustrated by it, I can only imagine what it must be like for someone whose personal liberty is literally on the line in many situations.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

You haven't outlined anything that jives with reality, or at least, not the real world I live in.  I don't see any conceivable way how a lower class male can have anything over an upper class woman.  She can get pretty much anything she wants along with the adoration and aulation of society.  The poor schmuck gets spat on by pretty much everyone. 


I do agree that within classes you can see gender advantage, outside, it is a different ball game, it just is.

A poor white male can physically intimidate an upper class women or assault her. After all, he's got nothing to lose and could get healthcare and food if he landed in prison.

What's more salient for you is based on what you were born into.

As straight white males we have a bias to notice class as that's the main form of oppression we are subjected to on a day to day basis. This same class oppression also gets dumped on 99% of women seems to pale in comparison to the gender oppression that they get subjected to on a day to day basis, and hence gender is the most noticeable.

Edit: clunky sentence

[Verbal Mike]

I read what you just wrote where you said privilege isn't about enjoying anything, it's about being treated better.  If someone is being treated better, they are enjoying being treated better.  That is enjoying something.

Okay, we're just talking past each other here. I meant "enjoy" in the sense of "having joy in"; you're reading it in the other sense, "have something that is positive". But ECH's dentist example illustrates this perfectly.

But the thing is, yes, many WASPy men do get treated better, but many down at the bottom of the social ladder get treated like dirt.  I'm "waiting" for some acknowledgement of that fact and that, therefore, the blanket generalization all men enjoy privilege, all men enjoy being treated better, is bullshit. 


Some do, all don't. Period.

Well, if you're still waiting for that it's gonna be a while, since so many of us have conceded that point so many times by now. (Even before this last round about this bush.)

I have nothing else to add, since other posts, especially the last three (Guru, Vex, Net) have said what needed saying.

[Juana]

"Anti-male"? What does that mean? I can agree with most of your post, but that's kind of...hm, not something I'm sure I'm reading right.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

"Anti-male"? What does that mean? I can agree with most of your post, but that's kind of...hm, not something I'm sure I'm reading right.

Something I probably didn't phrase right is more likely. I mean dismissive of males in general, or behaving like all males are rapists-in-waiting who are deserving of suspicion and distrust solely for their status as penis owners even when all signs point to "may not be a douchebag." That isn't to say you owe men your trust by default, or that caution is unnecessary, but to see all men as suspects before any crime has been committed isn't part of the solution, even if it isn't part of the problem.

[Juana]

Ah. Well, then I can agree with you all the way there.

[Placid Dingo]

Not if it is in a context where it alienates those who do not enjoy the privilege because of those other factors like class.  Especially if you want them to be allies or to just philosophically support your cause.

All men enjoy the privleges that come with being men even if their overall situation is still worse than most peoples because of other factors.

Tell that to the poor whit guy who can't even get into the door for a job interview.  Or the intern I talked about who got passed over by many other places while his female classmates were already starting internships.  Yeah, that "privilege" is really doing wonders for him.

I think you might be over-looking something. As a male he can, provided he doesn't have terrible health issues or a shit ton of felonies, can get into the military, which is a job in which there are no jobs that he cannot do because he is a male. In other words, he has the "privilege" of being allowed to be a infantryman and get blown up, shot at etc, or anything else.

Yes. RWHN, even if your life sucks you still have the privleges of your race, class and gender. Even if those privleges are pretty shit.

In this context a privilege is anything that works in your favour just for being who you are. Even if you're the dirt poor uneducated white guy in your argument you can still go into the local pub without having your arse pinched. Thats a make privilege. It's not ' not ' a privilege just because it doesn't make everything better and put them on top of other people.

Privilege is being misunderstood as being something that one group has. Thats not the case. So m maybe your guys class disadvantage means he can't get ahead despite male privleges. Thats not the same as ' no such thing as male privilege.'

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Dingo, a better way to say it is that the playing field isn't level.  It is still possible to succeed or fail regardless of where you start, but to say that the starting points aren't different is demonstratably false.

[Placid Dingo]

Dingo, a better way to say it is that the playing field isn't level.  It is still possible to succeed or fail regardless of where you start, but to say that the starting points aren't different is demonstratably false.

While true I think this is whats causing confusion.

Male privilege doesn't mean all men have the  advantage over all women at all times. I think thats where some if the confusion is coming from.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Dingo, a better way to say it is that the playing field isn't level.  It is still possible to succeed or fail regardless of where you start, but to say that the starting points aren't different is demonstratably false.

While true I think this is whats causing confusion.

Male privilege doesn't mean all men have the  advantage over all women at all times. I think thats where some if the confusion is coming from.

Which is pretty much what I just said.  The playing field isn't level.  The predisposition is for the male to have the advantage, but that advantage can sometimes be overcome or squandered.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I think the predisposition in the US might always have been for the wealthy white male protestant landowner to have the advantage, with the advantage lessening according to how much a person deviated from that.