Male and Female Privilege Lists
| July 3rd, 2008Robin Hanson, who I suspect of harboring mischievous1 motives, writes:
….it is really clear male privilege is stronger overall that female privilege in our society? It might be, but as with defense spending I’d like to see some sort of calculation. A little web search finds a male privilege checklist and a female privilege checklist. The next obvious step is to assign point values to such privileges, so we can add them up and compare totals.
The discussion in Robin’s comments has interesting bits, as does the discussion of Robin’s post at Marginal Revolution. (Or course, there are also a lot of painfully obvious, cliched and/or mindless comments, but that’s par for the course, isn’t it?) It’s kind of interesting to see this discussed on blogs where the comments sections aren’t firmly dominated by either feminists or anti-feminists.
* * *
The Male Privilege Checklist is something I now have mixed feelings about. It’s probably the single most widely-read thing I’ve ever written, or in this case, compiled. I’m awfully glad that so many people have found it helpful, including many leaders of classroom and college discussions.
But I’m not sure all of the thought behind the list makes sense.
1) In particular, the implicit definition of “privilege” used by the list is muddled, because I didn’t have a coherent definition of “privilege” in mind when I compiled the list. Instead, I used the word “privilege” as a lefty-speak way of saying “advantage.” But that’s a problem, because “privilege” is a political concept.
2) I’ve also pretty much despaired of critics ever reading the introductory remarks. In particular, this bit is nearly-universally ignored by critics:
More commonly, of course, critics (usually, but not exclusively, male) have pointed out men have disadvantages too - being drafted into the army, being expected to suppress emotions, and so on. These are indeed bad things - but I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes. [...]
Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases - from a boy being bullied in school, to a soldier dying in war - the sexist society that maintains male privilege also does great harm to boys and men.
Despite this, the list is frequently taken as a statement that men don’t suffer, men don’t have legitimate complaints, etc etc.. That couldn’t be further from my view; I’ve always felt that many boys and men are severely injured by sexism, which is a major reason I was attracted to feminism in the first place.
3) It’s funny how often critics of the list assume I must be female, even though the list is clearly written from a male perspective. (In a possibly related development, men writing their counterpart “female privilege” lists virtually always write from an assumed female perspective.)
4) Why the hell did I call it a “checklist”? It really doesn’t make sense. Sigh.
5) The list is incredibly US-centric. The intro (that no one reads) acknowledges this, and I’m probably incapable of writing it any other way, but it’s still a problem with the list.
- In the sense of being playful, not in any negative sense. (back)
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I have many mischievous motives - any particular in mind? :)
This comment was written by Robin Hanson.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Oh, but you did: “invisible systems conferring dominance on my group”. One of the many problems with your checklist is that it doesn’t actually identify any such systems. Rather it is, as you go on to say, a list of purported advantages.
I say “purported” because in some cases there is obvious gerrymandering. Item 7, for example. Why is it restricted to those “who can stay out of prison”? In others, there isn’t even an advantage. Item #14, unless you are claiming that elected representatives tend to favour their own sex, in which case you should state (and defend) that proposition directly. still others cut both ways. Item #12, women are less stigmatised if they choose to care for their children instead of pursuing a career.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Not by me. Here’s what I said in one of my early critiques of the list in response to that very passage:
By “privilege as feminists define it” I meant that it met your (actually McIntosh’s) definition “invisible systems which confer dominance”. I take it as read that the living dominate the dead, the free dominate the imprisoned and the enslaved, the visible dominate those who are rendered invisible, and those whose needs are serviced dominate those whose needs go unmet.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:50 pm
Wow, it’s almost like the definition I did have was “muddled” and not “coherent.”
Maybe you should spell out why you find this an unfair distinction to make.
It’s amazing how many white men don’t see any problem at all with having the government disproportionately comprised of white men. It must be because white men are so much more objective.
I agree, it cuts both ways.
” I never claimed that life for men is all ice cream sundaes. […]
Pointing out that men are privileged in no way denies that bad things happen to men. Being privileged does not mean men are given everything in life for free; being privileged does not mean that men do not work hard, do not suffer. In many cases - from a boy being bullied in school, to a soldier dying in war - the sexist society that maintains male privilege also does great harm to boys and men.”
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:19 pm
[...] saw this in the recent comments section. Ampersand wrote a post concerning Male and Female Privilege [...]
This comment was written by More On Checklists | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
July 3rd, 2008 at 7:21 pm
It’s more like the definition you had was reasonable, then being unable to find any examples of actual male privilege, you made a list of something else instead.
It’s gerrymandering. You’re deliberately excluding the subset of men most likely to be raped in order to reach the conclusion that men are less likely to be raped.
Way to go with the ad homs circumstantial. Whether many white men do or don’t see any problem with it, or whether I do or don’t see a problem with it (your barb was surely aimed at me) has absolutely no bearing upon whether this represents a privilege for men, unless the “problem with it” is that it privileges men.
That’s your claim, and it is your burden to justify it. Specifically, in what way does the fact that the State governor is male, privilage Fred the male washroom attendant over his female counterpart Jane?
But your argument in making the list was never “It cuts both both ways”. Your argument was, and as far as I can see still is* that men are privileged over women and that women are not privileged over men, or if they are, they’re lesser, subordinate privileges, along the lines of having some “advantages”.
*If it isn’t, then you are out of line with almost all of the feminist you recognise as feminists.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 7:41 pm
You are more reasonable than I suspected; I take back any imputations I may have made against you.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 8:43 pm
Good Luck Ampersand it seems you have an MRA infestation. They like trolls refuse to acknowledge the ways in which many men refuse to see the privilege that comes with being born male. You can explain until you’re blue in the face about the different things that mitigate privilege but certain people will not allow the relations of power to be challenged in any way. It does not occur to them that owning privilege does not necessarily mean a loss of power.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Thanks, Renee, for providing a sterling example of the kind of ad hom that substitutes for rational argument in these kinds of discussion.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 8:56 pm
Daren’s not an infestation, he’s a feature.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Thanks, Renee, for providing a sterling example of the kind of ad hom that substitutes for rational argument in these kinds of discussion.
This comment was written by Renee.You are more than welcome sweetie, I am all about keeping it real. I notice that you didn’t deny the MRA label therefor you have been correctly identified and dismissed.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 pm
It’s “DarAn”, by the way. I don’t don’t want to make a fuss about it, especially since I’ve made similar mistakes with other people’s monikers, but it is my name you know.
I’ve been called much worse than “infestation”.
And in truth, I’m not as much a feature here as I used to be, precisely because of the abuse I get. When I do comment, it’s likely to be on relatively unsubstantial matters, or general (not gender) politics, where my broadly left-wing position is more in alignment with the consensus of Alas regulars.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 9:30 pm
And if I do deny it, that would divert the discussion away from the issue of male vs. female privilege and onto whether I am or am not an MRA.
Then I’d get accused of derailing the thread and making it about me.
Damned if I do. Damned if I don’t.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 10:35 pm
“It’s amazing how many white men don’t see any problem at all with having the government disproportionately comprised of white men. It must be because white men are so much more objective.”
I personally have no problem with it, I’m jaded enough with politics as it is, I doubt anyone would make issues better for my particular group (that is not white men, by the way). They’ll pander to the majority vote and to industries and the rich - cause I understand the bind they’re in. They don’t pander to industries, and the rich? They pack their bags and go elsewhere and bye bye economy. This was used to make the referendum of sovereinty of Quebec province uncertain - when many said they would go to Ontario, or the US, anywhere but staying in a sovereign Quebec. And the referendum that had almost 60% victory in surveys, went down to 49.4% on referendum night, and lost.
I also don’t see Daran as anti-feminist, and I’ve read many of his posts on FC. He goes out of his way NOT to blame feminism as a whole, and to blame instead a particular writer, a particular branch (ie radical feminism in some cases), or something else, like say, the media (bias in reporting deaths - that wasn’t blamed on feminism even remotely).
He might blame societal attitudes, generally not unique to feminism either. If feminism endorses a damaging attitude willfully, or even promotes it, then yes he’ll speak about that. But well, no movement on Earth is above criticism, or perfect.
Socialism was supposedly perfect, on paper maybe it was - but when it was field-tested, it failed miserably. Not due to the economic stand being necessarily bad either, but due to corruption for the most, and abuse of power.
No one is above making mistakes, and I’m not saying feminism is akin to socialism in it’s failures in practice either. I’m just saying even movements acclaimed to be perfect, are not.
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July 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Renee, I’m delighted that you’ve been posting on “Alas” lately, and I hope you keep it up. But on my threads on “Alas,” please don’t refer to people as “infestations.” Thanks. :-)
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July 4th, 2008 at 12:11 am
Thank goodness you’re here to tell us all what I was really thinking years before you ever encountered me. Truly, yours is the superior intellect, Khan.
Contrary to what you just claimed, I wrote the list sincerely. (Nor did I have trouble thinking of things to put on the list, since I was cribbing from Peggy McIntosh’s already existing list!) But my thinking was muddled.
Specifically, my list had the problem of talking about things from the point of view of specific, individual people’s experiences. But a lot of the reading I’ve done — particularly Allan Johnson’s book — has convinced me that it makes the most sense to think of privileges as accruing to classes of people, not individuals. But the list doesn’t make much sense from that perspective.
So the list really isn’t “examples of privilege.” It’s more like a list of “advantages that many men experience due to being on the male side of the gender class system.”
I’m still not seeing what your objection is.
“Gerrymandering” is warping the shape of a voting district in an extremely unnatural, un-intuitive manner in order to control the outcome of the election.
I don’t think my belief that the position of women in ordinary, non-prison society is a matter of interest is unnatural or un-intuitive. I think it’s actually quite ordinary to think that what’s going on in regular, non-prison society is a matter of concern.
If my overall position was “so therefore, we don’t need to give a fuck about what happens to prisoners,” then you’d have a point. But that’s not my belief at all.
Just to clarify, do you see a problem with it?
The better question is, in what way does that the overwhelming majority of governors, senators, secretaries of states, Presidents, congressmen, etc., advantage Fred and other men, or disadvantage Jane and other women?
First of all, it’s helpful to Fred and others because it provides a model of society in which men are in charge. It helps Fred’s son aspire to being in politics someday, and having that aspiration seem more plausible.
It also helps because “men’s issues” will, by and large, seem more central and important than “women’s issues.” There will have to be a special “violence against women” act for crimes that happen primarily to women; crimes that are primarily against men don’t require special legislation, because those crimes are just called “crime.” And no one talks about cutting funding to them.
It helps because Jane is much more likely to wind up with primary responsibility for childcare than Fred, and governments with large numbers of women in top positions tend to provide more help to parents, and particularly to caretakers. (Sorry, I don’t have a cite handy.)
It helps because Jane is more likely than Fred to wind up caring for aging relatives, and see above re: helping caretakers.
There are other ways it helps — but there are also, very probably, ways we don’t even see. When the AIDS crisis hit the USA, what little attention was given to it, during its early stages, only happened because there happened to be a couple of key congressional staffers who were openly gay, and who pushed the problem. But most of government was prepared, even eager, to ignore a plague in the gay community. What if there had been a bunch of openly gay people in powerful positions throughout government? History might have been different.
Of course, you might say that it would have made no difference, and that there’s no evidence that who is in government matters. But how can you know that, unless we have a government that genuinely represents groups close to proportionately?
* * *
As for “my position”: My position is that men as a class are privileged, and women as a class are oppressed, within the gender system.
This means that, as a whole, the system is generally going to push men to be in charge, and women to be dependent caretakers. It will push men to be more violent, and women to be more willing to subsume their interests to that of their spouse or family.
This doesn’t mean that sexism doesn’t screw over men in some circumstances and assist women in some circumstances, however. And, of course, the picture becomes a lot more complex once we consider how gender interacts with race, class, and other systems of oppression.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2008 at 1:52 am
And in truth, I’m not as much a feature here as I used to be, precisely because of the abuse I get.
FWIW, I read the comment as being a joke off of the old “that’s not a bug, it’s a feature” line in programming. And you are a feature, not a bug, because whatever your beliefs you are willing to think about them, think about what other people say, and make responsive arguments. Hence, you are not, IMHO, a troll or infestation. I think you’re wrong on this particular issue, but not destructive or uninterested in having a conversation.
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:41 am
And if I do deny it, that would divert the discussion away from the issue of male vs. female privilege and onto whether I am or am not an MRA.
My point is this, you are arguing from a particular perspective and so you might as well admit your biases. It is dishonest not to do so. I have yet to ever meet an MRA who will ever agree that men have any privileges. Its always the same argument over and over again. I do have a question for you…why are MRA’s so threatened that they cannot admit to any form of male privilege and yet it so obvious that we do not live in a society that is based on equality?
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July 4th, 2008 at 4:42 am
Of course, some characteristic ways that men or women are treated may be advantages in some situations and disadvantages in others. For example, women tend to be less noticible to authority figures. This is nice in some situations (I am almost never stopped at airport security screenings and rarely have to show my ID when going into supposedly secure buildings) but not so good in others (i.e. it makes it more difficult to get the credit for accomplishments.) So…is the greater visibility of men in this society a male privilege or is the presumption of trustworthiness a female privilege?
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July 4th, 2008 at 5:44 am
So…is the greater visibility of men in this society a male privilege or is the presumption of trustworthiness a female privilege?
In this case it is not as simple as visibility. To be clear you are referring to positions of power.
This comment was written by Renee.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Brief diversion, then I have to decide how to celebrate kicking King George’s butt. No, not the current King George (shrub), but the other one, 232 years ago.
It is NOT NOT NOT a crime to advocate for “Men’s Rights”. That’s actually supposed to be one of feminism’s objectives — any feminism that doesn’t liberate men from the straitjacket of gender conformity and the rigid rules the patriarchy applies to men is NOT feminist.
But, yeah, Daran is a troll.
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July 4th, 2008 at 9:15 am
I think many things factor into it. The fact that Black women were most commonly stopped in some airports by customs and security forces than women of other races means at least that whatever privilege of “trustworthyness” that gender would have provided them isn’t there at all. But then if people are being profiled as potential drug mules (which I think was the case in some cases where civil rights lawsuits were filed), then maybe women particularly women of color would be more scrutinized and stopped, due to racial and gender profiling. One reason why it’s problematic to separate out gender privilege as something separate because everything is so intertwined.
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July 4th, 2008 at 9:50 am
Male privilege does exist, but so does female privilege. And I may be biased there, but I wouldn’t want male privileges even if I was guaranteed all 46 of them, not worth it to me - and I did have a chance to get them (at least some of them). From my perspective, I’d rather be female, even if I was oppressed, than male, even if I was privileged - because it’s who I am.
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July 4th, 2008 at 10:04 am
“The fact that Black women were most commonly stopped in some airports by customs and security forces than women of other races means at least that whatever privilege of “trustworthyness” that gender would have provided them isn’t there at all.”
It means black women were treated as badly as white men. That which supposedly means gender is not a privilege, or that race makes the intersection worse? Black men are even more profiled than black women, as far as I know.
Really, the privileges of men and women are in different spheres, different areas. Wether one values them more or less is a question of perspective.
I see little to no value in male privilege in my case, and a lot of value in female ones, if not all of them. And I’m speaking as someone who is seen, understood, and treated as female - and who has had the experience of being treated as somewhat male, before.
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July 4th, 2008 at 11:13 am
It is NOT NOT NOT a crime to advocate for “Men’s Rights”. That’s actually supposed to be one of feminism’s objectives — any feminism that doesn’t liberate men from the straitjacket of gender conformity and the rigid rules the patriarchy applies to men is NOT feminist.
The problem is not advocating that men face certain disadvantages in society. That simply cannot be denied, whether it is teaching boys not to cry and have a stiff upper lip or the assault of a boy by a female teacher not being taken seriously, none of these factors eliminate male privilege. To fully examine gender both privilege and factors that mitigate privilege must be acknowledged.
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July 4th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Disclaimer at head: for what it’s worth (and as I’ll go on to state, I think that’s not as much as some people think) my moniker’s not a good indicator of my gender; I’m a woman. But this
I agree with absolutely. And I’d like to add that in many cases it’s men who are the authors of men’s suffering under patriarchy, and in many cases it’s women who are the authors of other women’s suffering. Any feminism that doesn’t mean all feminists, male and female, beginning and continuing by taking a good hard look at the ways in which they are actively contributing to the problem is NOT feminist either. MRAs could be a force for great good if they were actively engaging in how to develop conceptions of being male that didn’t lead to the harms they talked about, and where violence and emotional detatchment and endless status tussling weren’t sine qua nons for masculinity.
I also think that this may be a problem with talking about matters in terms of class man and class woman. The fact is that there’s a strong chance that although the successful businessman or male politician is in a better position than the struggling single mother, he’s still living an impoverished life because of the limits gender imposes even on what we expect for ourselves, on our capacity to imagine goods. The good lives we could build for people in this society wouldn’t necessarily look like either of those things.
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July 4th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
I’m curious. Is it more racist to target the black women at the airports, or to ignore the intel on the drug smuggling operations and let the drugs into the country that will then devastate the black community?
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July 4th, 2008 at 6:09 pm
Well, I think Prohibition tends to do more harm then good, and that putting those women in jail tends to do more harm than whatever small amount of drugs it
This comment was written by hf.delayskeeps out. But I also do not believe the implied assertion about intel. See “Driving While Non-White in Missouri: Actual Measured Facts” and the kicker at the end.Report this comment to the moderators
July 4th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
What do the two have to do with one another? How does racially profiling Black women at airports keep drug smuggling from devastating the Black community?
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July 5th, 2008 at 6:34 am
The presumption is that women of color are the ones hauling said drugs.
If that’s a statistically valid factoid, I have no problem with it and it should reduce that channel. However, racial profiling on such a thing is subject to changing which group is engaging in transport, so it’s generally pointless.
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July 5th, 2008 at 10:15 am
If that’s a statistically valid factoid, I have no problem with it and it should reduce that channel. However, racial profiling on such a thing is subject to changing which group is engaging in transport, so it’s generally pointless.
Has anyone bothered to think that imprisoning these drug mules actually does nothing to stop drug trafficking in the first place. Women that are drug mules either have been tricked into it, or are in an economically vulnerable place to begin with. Want to stop the drug trade, stop imprisoning people and start treating the sickness.
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July 5th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Oh, now you’ve gone and done it, being all reasonable and rational.
So, which sickness are you talking about? Excessive Puritanicalism? Escapism? Overworked Americans? Sinfulness? Government expansionism?
Get back to me on that one and we’ll start working on it tomorrow ;)
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July 5th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Interesting discussion with alot of important points being raised, albeit with some sharp exchanges ocurring.
I think the fundamental underlying reality is that you cannot partially construct or deconstruct a gender system. Such systems are, by definition, closed. The roles they ordain and maintain are synergistic and interdependent. You cannot successfully introduce change to a part without transforming the whole.
Feminist theory recognizes this as a general principle but has achieved neither consensus nor synthesis on how to apply this insight. This shouldn’t be surprizing since Feminism historically has been defined as the advocacy of the rights and interests of women. It could hardly be otherwise since Feminism emerged at a time when women were disenfranchised and had little to no legal status separate from their fathers or husbands. It would be a fantastic presumption to expect that women engaged in a struggle for full personhood should divide their energies equally between the advocacy of their own rights and the liberation of men from the warrior/drone paradigm, particularly when so few men seemed interested in such liberation.
Never the less, it’s impossible to envision a society in which women are freed from the strictures of sexism while the condition of men remains essentially unchanged. I think the experience of three decades since the re-emergence of Feminism as a major socio-political force amply illustrates that, by itself, Feminist advocacy will not necessarily lead to a general re-ordering of gender roles rather than to a limited re-ordering of privilege.
I have no simple solution for this paradox. I am of the opinion though, that the uncritical application of paradigms of class exploitation, borrowed from radical political economic theories, has hampered the developement of any possible solution. What has been often overlooked in the enthusiatic embrace of these tropes for their apparent analytical clarity and organizational utility is that the theoretical systems which they are drawn from base themselves on the concept of class war leading to an apocalyptic show down. If the logic of these tropes is pursued consistently, the result isn’t a deconstruction of existing gender roles but their reification into hostile camps along the paradigm of warfare.
It comes down to whether or not you believe men as well as women have something to gain from the advance of Feminist ideas. If you don’t believe so, then the concerns I raised above won’t matter. If you take the affirmative view, we have a lot of work to do and no has yet drawn up a blueprint.
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July 6th, 2008 at 1:26 am
I don’t agree. The history of the development of Western society since the dark ages has been one of incremental change. Revolutions rarely come out well.
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July 6th, 2008 at 2:10 am
Renee:
You are misunderstanding the argument.
Feminists assert the existence of a social phenomenon called “privilege”, with certain properties. One of the claimed properties is that it is one-sided: Men are privileged over women; women are not privileged over men. It is therefore the feminist’s burden, first to explain exactly what they mean by privilege, and second to show that it has the properties they claim it does.
Thus you might start by offering incidents - essentially anecdotes purporting to show a man’s privilege over a women. This invites the skeptic to respond with counter-incidents, such as your boy-abused-by-his-teacher. The counter-incident is not posited as “eliminating male privilege”. The counter-incident is offered to demonstrate the insufficiency of the feminist’s incidents to show one-sided privilege.
You could raise your game, by asserting advantages enjoyed by men over women. That, essentially was what Ampersand’s checklist was about. But that invites the same kind of response. If I can show a similar list of advantages that women get, then your list doesn’t show the kind of one-sided privilege you claim it does.
Now suppose you set the bar even higher, by arguing systems which favour men, such as the system of gender norms which tend to exclude women from positions of institutional power. I can point out other systems which favour women, such as the system of gender norms which tends to send men to their graves.
At this point, you’ve run out of rational arguments, and really have no response but to insult me or call me a troll.
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July 6th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Dianne:
O RLY?
So how come the murdered women of Cuidad Juárez get so much attention, while the overwhelming majority of those killed in the wave of violence that has swept that town are completely ignored. (See footnotes 8 and 9 of this report.)
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July 6th, 2008 at 3:10 am
This is Bulverism.
It’s also a false dichotomy. “male privilege” and “a society that is based on equality” are not the only possibilities here. I would say that we live in a society which advantages men over women in some ways and circumstances, and which advantages women over men in other ways and circumstances.
I don’t see any reason why I should explain the behaviour of MRA’s solely on the basis of a label you pinned on me. Do you feel obliged to explain why feminists are so threatened that they cannot admit to any form of female privilege?
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July 6th, 2008 at 5:58 am
[...] Ampersand: Just to clarify, do you see a problem with [having the government disproportionately comprised of white men]? [...]
This comment was written by Male Privilege, Victim Invisibility, and the Predominance of Men in Government. | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
July 6th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Ampersand:
Then
Well you did ask. But rather than speculate on your motives, I’ll stick to what calling it a “checklist” does, what it’s rhetorical effect is.
It personalise it. It invites the reader to examine each item to see if it applies to them.
OK, I will speculate on your motives: Presumably your intent was that male readers would see how many of the privileges did in fact apply to them, and would thus be convinced of their gender-privilege.
Unfortunately it backfired, because many of your readers can see that many of the privileges don’t apply to them. Where’s the privilege in being able to negotiate a better deal on a car purchase, if you can’t afford to buy a car at any price?
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July 6th, 2008 at 10:07 am
No, it’s not. Bulverism has a specific form, in which one goes from “you have a motive for believing X” to “therefore X is wrong.” I don’t think she has claimed that you are wrong because you have a motive for your beliefs; therefore what she said was not Bulverism.
1. I note, with no surprise, that you are objecting to anyone paying attention to women who have been victimized. Typical.
2. Dianne did say “tend to be,” a phrasing which implies that her claim is true much of the time, but not all of the time. Exceptions do not disprove general patterns.
3. The report you linked to gives several reasons for the difference in attention:
In other words, the high murder rate of men in Ciudad Juárez is caused by the high murder rate of men all along Mexico’s northern border, whereas the high murder rate of women in Ciudad Juárez is something particular to the situation in Ciudad Juárez.
I’m not sure if I agree with all of that — I don’t really know enough about the situation — but it’s certainly something that a reasonable person could believe.
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July 6th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I don’t agree. The history of the development of Western society since the dark ages has been one of incremental change. Revolutions rarely come out well.
Not exactly sure why you think what I said implies revolution. It can be interpreted that way of course but not necessarily. The principle is fairly straight forward. If you increase the freedom of action of a group or individual you naturally decrease the power of other groups or individuals to limit that freedom of action . When women became fully recognized in law as autonomous individuals, the liquidation of the role of men as their legal guardians and masters was a natural and necessary consequence.
It may be that you and I attach differing meanings to the term “revolution”. Some limit it strictly to a relatively brief period of revolt leading to an abrupt overthrow of the existing political order. Others take a more expansive view wherein such upheavals simply punctuate a more generalized social process that can span generations.
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July 6th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Yes it is.
That’s not what Bulverism is. According to Lewis, “The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.”
In the words of Bulver himself (surely a greater authority, even than Lewis) “[R]efutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error… [Do not a]ttempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right”
Nothing there about motive. The elements are 1. Assume without discussion that he is wrong. 2. Redirect attention from this, the only real issue, onto whatever might explain why he is wrong, (my alleged bias, for example arising from my alleged status as an MRA). That is exactly what Renee did.
It’s true that in many of Lewis’ examples, the purported explanation was the person’s alleged motive, but it’s not part of his definition.
No I’m not. This is a strawman as well as an ad hom. I’m objecting to the erasure of male victimisation. There is a huge difference.
I don’t agree that her phrasing implies merely that her claim was true “much of the time”. A tossed coin will come up heads much of the time, that doesn’t imply a tendency towards heads. Rather, she was asserting a generality.
And it’s a generality I dispute. In turn I offer a counter-generality, that adult male victims tend to be overlooked in favour of women and children. My references were intended to be examples of my counter-generality, not merely counter-examples to her generality.
I contend that the existence of a counter-generality occupying a significant portion of the space over which the alleged generality operates does undermine the generality in a way that mere counter-examples do not.
Um, no it isn’t. The murder of men in Juárez is a part of the wider problem of the murder of men all along the border, but it is not caused by it.
Well that’s probably true. On the other hand the explosion of murder of women in Juárez is unlikely to be unconnected to the explosion of murder of men there. The murder of women is also a part of the wider problem of murder in Juárez and along the Mexican border.
Look, Amp, I would have no problem with reports or essays or discussions focusing on the murder of women in Juárez, if those murders were contextualised, internally and externally, by being framed against the backdrop of the wider problem of murder. By ‘internally’ I mean that a few paragraphs near the beginning be spent summarising the wider problem. ‘Externally’ meaning that I would expect the document to be part of a corpus of work dealing with the wider issues.
So for example, I would expect an essay on, say, the extermination of homosexuals in the Holocaust to spend a paragraph or two summarising the broader background, including the fact that 6 million (or whatever the accepted figure is) Jews were murdered. I would not expect a search on the word holocaust to turn up page after page after page after page of texts about the murder of homosexuals, with only the scantest references to the six million Jews, if that. If this was what I discovered, then I would find it very problematic, wouldn’t you?
Assuming, of course, that I even knew about crime perpetrated against the Jews. And with that in mind, I will give the inestimable Dr. Jones his well deserved hat tip.
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July 6th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Renee writes:
Excellent point, thank you.
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July 6th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Daran, the Wiki link you provided gave the form of Bulverism as I described. But I’m not familiar with Bulverism, so perhaps you’re right and wikipedia is mistaken.
It’s not an “ad hom,” because I didn’t say “and therefore your argument is wrong” or the equivalent. That’s an essential part of ad hominem. Nor it is a strawman; it’s a straightforward example of you objecting to people talking about female victims, because you object to female victims being talked about unless male victims are given primacy.
You don’t act as if there’s any difference between objecting to female victims being talked about, and objecting to “erasure of male victims”; as far as I can tell from observation, you consider it “erasing male victims” whenever female victims are focused on.
It’s hardly just this one example, either. Earlier this thread you objected to me talking about the problem of men raping women, even though I “contextualised, internally and externally,” by referring to the prison rape problem within the list (internally) and in other posts on “Alas” (externally). So your claim that you wouldn’t object if it’s “contextualized internally and externally” isn’t true; you object to people focusing on harms to women, regardless of contextualization.
Similarly, on your own blog today, you explain that you don’t care about equality in government (and you don’t even bother responding to my examples of how representation in government matters, not just to the ruling class, but to people at many levels of society) because people in other countries are suffering so much worse. Here, you do cite a problem that happens to women (and men) as important — but only because you can use it to dismiss women’s problems.
Amanda Marcotte refers to this “logic” as “I’ll show you what real suffering is, bitch!,” and I think that’s apt. But let me also point out that when the subject is (say) options for love-shy men, I don’t see you dismissing men’s problems as too petty to be concerned about in a world in which people are being murdered in Mexico. Again, you demonstrate a double standard: talking about men’s problems is permissible, even admirable, whereas talking about women’s problems is objectionable.
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July 6th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Wow, Amp, I’m impressed. A two-page comment almost entirely about me. Perhaps you just wanted to get it out of the way so that you could then post a reply addressing my substantive points without being sidetracked. (That incidentally, is the reason I made the post you mentioned. I was drafting a reply to your comment #16 above, and I decided to spin off what was otherwise going to be a major side-track into a separate post. I still haven’t finished the original reply.)
But on the basis of the record so far, it looks like you’re more interested in talking about me, than you are about the substantive points I raise:
1. Do you agree that the coverage of the murders in Ciudad Juárez is problematic in the way I say it is?
2. Do you agree that this coverage is illustrative of a broader gender-dynamic that operates to erase male victimisation?
3. Do you agree that this dynamic operates systematically?
4. Do you agree that this dynamic operates within feminist and feminist-influenced discourse?
5. Do you agree that this is not only a feature of feminist and feminist-influenced discourse, but is, in fact, a characteristic of the system that you call “Patriarchy”?
If you do not agree with these things, then please state your disagreement.
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July 6th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Renee:
I don’t know about MRAs, but I think that most serious Male Privilege skeptics will agree that male privileges exist. What we question is the existence of Male Privilege—a systematic and unambiguous privileging of men over women. We acknowledge male privileges—that is, specific privileges men have that women do not—but we also acknowledge the existence of female privileges.
Hanson is on to something: To determine whether men or women have more privilege, you’d have to assign a value to each specific privilege and then add them all up. The problem, of course, is that the value depends on your preferences, so there’s no one answer. Some people may do the math* and find that they prefer the package of male privileges, while others may find that they prefer the package of female privileges. Others may say it’s too close to call.
If you’re about to say that that’s ridiculous and that no one could ever prefer female privileges to male privileges, that’s why you’re a feminist. Women who are happy with the status quo don’t become feminists, or at least not hardcore smash-the-patriarchy feminists. This isn’t to say that you’re wrong—just that your preferences aren’t universal.
*Well, in theory. It’s probably not actually feasible to enumerate all male and female privileges.
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July 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
Brandon, I think we can test your argument more easily; that some people prefer the societal advantages of being men and other’s prefer the societal advantages of being women.
How many organizations can you think of that are focused on allowing men have the same advantages that women now have?
How many organizations can you think of that are focused on allowing women to have the same advantages of men?
How widespread is the support for their ideas? How large are their memberships? Feminist Critics does not equal NOW for instance.
I wish I could remember which one of the other commentors at Alas came up with that idea so that I could give them credit.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the only large organizations focused on allowing men more of the women’s advantages focus on situations involving divorce.
I also wish that someone with more time and interest in this (Amp, Mandolin, Robert or Daren) would do some actual research for a blog post so I can see if I’m right.
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July 6th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
“Brandon, I think we can test your argument more easily; that some people prefer the societal advantages of being men and other’s prefer the societal advantages of being women.”
If any masculine man says he prefers the advantage of females, he’ll not only not be listened to (by both men and women), he’ll be shunned for it, be told to ‘man up’, and basically taken for someone who is a loser.
Personally I’m female, and yes I do prefer the societal advantages of females over males. Pretty sure I’m not alone there.
Not that I see women having no problems left to be resolved, especially outside the US and Canada.
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July 6th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
How many organizations can you think of that are focused on allowing men have the same advantages that women now have? How many organizations can you think of that are focused on allowing women to have the same advantages of men? …I also wish that someone with more time and interest in this (Amp, Mandolin, Robert or Daren) would do some actual research for a blog post so I can see if I’m right.
Research takes work. Pass. However, I’ll bloviate and guess for nothing, while my dinner digests.
Although I generally like tests like this, my offhand answer to both questions is “none”. NOW doesn’t try and get women to have the same privileges as men; NOW tries (broadly) to reorient society away from privilege being associated with gender.
That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, NOW ends up trying to improve women’s position in society, and men’s groups end up trying to do the same thing for men. Men’s groups, as you noted, seem primarily focused on divorce and child custody issues - which is the one area of social life where women seem to have a pretty strong advantage.
Of course, a feminist would point out that the government, business, labor unions, social clubs, etc. all buttress the power of men. NOW seems pretty feeble next to that amassed social firepower. By the criteria of your test, we could conclude that women must have lots more power, since there are all these social organizations formed to ‘fight’ it and build up the position of men.
Now, although by the lights of most self-identified feminists I certainly am not one, that doesn’t jibe with my perception of reality. Even misogynistic sexist old me can see that the feminist description of reality is largely accurate: men seem to have the upper hand - not society-wide, not in everything, but in most things. Why? Feminists say “patriarchy” or oppression; meh. Evil empires have this way of falling apart. If patriarchy were a conspiracy to keep the chicks in their place, it would have failed by now. It’s structural, not contingent on a social order.
My horseback diagnosis: men have a significant edge in being able to cooperate with one another. Women’s organizations seem to fall into a state of perpetual war, internal or external - Ovarian Suicide Squad, attack! Men are way better at getting along. Oh sure, sometimes we decide we have to kill millions of our fellows, but that’s usually because one gigantic male-dominated outfit wants something that another gigantic male-dominated outfit has. In the meantime, we go around building the gigantic MDOs willy-nilly, while the women work on trying to get a fourth person in the group without someone killing someone else. So men end up running most things because our organizations can get bigger and more efficient with less conflict. Not NO conflict - just less. (The reason for the differential is probably the greater bell curve in men’s performance on most measures of same, which in turn is probably related to having only one chromosome with lots of important genes, instead of two copies. Big differentials make hierarchies important. Important hierarchies mean that men have no choice but to learn the skills of hierarchy among almost-but-not-peers - how to be a dominant, how to be a submissive. Women tend to see everyone as a exact peer, and as a result fight all the time because they don’t see why they should just knuckle under and let that bitch Gladys run the group, she’s no better than I am! While next door, Frank sees that dang, Bill really is good at this, OK, I’ll shut up and let him run it.)
So how come women have the power edge when it comes to these marriage and family issues? We don’t see women shelling out $20,000 for a ring so some guy will say ‘yes’. We don’t see divorce courts routinely handing the kids to the men almost without regard for differential parental ability. I think the answer is cooperation, again. Men can’t cooperate to get a woman pregnant. We can cooperate to hunt a mammoth, build a wall, form an army, dig a well, have a parliament - but putting babies in the belly, that’s a one-man job. Our organizational skills fail, and in fact we end up fighting one another (metaphorically or literally) for the permission of a woman to reproduce. Women are no better at cooperating here, but they don’t need to be - they each have a unitary monopoly on their reproductive resource. So they end up with a built-in advantage in this one area of social life.
There, that ought to offend everybody.
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July 6th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Oh this is ridiculous. I’ve never heard anyone suggest that a particular form of words be used before something is deemed to be a fallacy of a particular kind. None of the examples in this postare of that form.
Here’s how wikipedia defines the term:
And that is exactly what you have done.
Even if it were true, (which it isn’t) that I object to people talking about female victims, or I object to them talking about female victims unless male victims are given primacy, then it is still a strawman and an ad hom.
1. It’s a strawman because my argument is actually that these discourses in aggregate erase male victims because a. There are no (or very few) discourses which externally contextualise the discussion about female victims, and b, the discourses which focus upon female victimisation fail to adequately (or at all) contextualise them internally.
That, on its face, is not me objecting per se to people talking about female victims. It’s not about me at all. It’s a factual claim about a corpus of discourse.
2. It’s an ad hom, because whether I do or do not object to people talking about female victims has no bearing upon the question of whether these discourses erase men in the way that I’ve said that they do (By failing to contextualise, etc.)
Whether or not I act as if there’s any difference between objecting to female victims being talked about, and objecting to “erasure of male victims” has no bearing upon whether the discourses I cited erase male victims in the way that I said they do.
Stop! Addressing! Me! Address! My! Arguments! Instead!!
I have absolutely no idea which of my comments in this thread you are talking about here, but in so far as you reference my criticism of your list, it is clearly on its face a different kind of discourse, and therefore has no bearing upon whether the discourses I was refering to do or do not erase men in the way that I say they do.
Wrong.
I haven’t yet responded to your examples of how representation in government matter. I have a half-drafted response to that comment, which, admittededly hasn’t reached that part. I span off that particular sentence because it took me off on too great a tangent, because I thought it would make a good post in itself, and because I was aware that you had raised the matter before:
There’s a reason why I remembered that comment from more than two years ago. I filed it away in the back of my mind as something important which I never got round to addressing back then, nor properly since. So when you asked essentially the same question again, I decided to reply to it in much more detail, that the one-word answer it might otherwise have merited: “yes”.
So no. It’s not through lack of bothering that I haven’t yet replied to some of your points. Why won’t you reply to mine?
I cite as important a problem that happens to women and men. How dare you re-erase those I made visible, when describing my post. How dare you!
And no, I did not dismiss those women’s problems. I made it very clear that I thought Amnesty’s focus upon those individual cases absolutely appropriate. Nor did I dismiss the problem of rape in Brazilian prisons in so far as it happens to women. Unlike Amnesty, I would call for the Brazilian authorities to protect all prisoners from sexual violence. To do that, I entirely endorse Amnesty’s demand that women are never housed with men, and children never with adult prisoners. But I wouldn’t stop there. I’d also call for particularly vulnerable men and women to be identified and protected within, and if necessary segregated from other prisoners, and for such additional steps as appropriate to be taken to protect the general prison populations of both men and women from abuse by other inmates and guards.
If you think that I’m “dismissing women’s problems” by making men visible in this way, then I can only conclude that your views are so distorted that there’s little point in us continuing the discussion.
I’ve got more to say on this topic, but that’s enough for now. Maybe in another two years you’ll ask again, and elicit another lengthy post.
Again, you are in error.
First you are ignoring the difference between “It matters” and “I don’t particularly care”. The first statement was about “It”, i.e., women’s underrepresentation in government. The second was about me, i.e., what I care about. In no way does my statement about what I care about, which explains the focuses of my own blogging, dismiss other people’s concerns as being too petty.
Second you ignore the external context of my post, which context included your working definitions of oppression and privilege, before you withdrew criterion 3. Criterion 3 says, basically, that no amount of oppression on the male side could ever outweigh the oppressive effect of women’s underrepresention in government upon women in general. That was an invitation to show you some oppression, bitch.
Thirdly you are correct that another of my focuses is Love-shyness and similar problems in forming intimate and sexual relationships and that this is a problem with, to the best of my knowledge predominanly affects men. Since it has never been my position that “talking about women’s problems is impermissible” there is no hypocracy in talking about men’s. What would be hypocritical, would be if I were to erase or marginalise women who have related problem (perhaps by saying “we’re talking about the men here” or by creating a ghetto thread as if that were some sort of favour (see your own privilege criterion 2), or if I were to allow their erasure by others to go unchallenged.
But look: I do try to include women’s experiences and I do challenge their erasure. And I do try to welcome women in the discussion, and if I move the discussion to another thread, it’s to one of the mainstream threads on the topic, rather than a special ghetto just for them.
Also hypocritical, would be if I were to offer the following putative “female privilege” for any other purpose than to refute yours:
“If I’m not horrendously unattractive physically, then the likelihood that I will not be able to attract a sufficient number of men to have a reasonable dating life is negligible”*.
*Notwithstanding that I don’t actually know that the premiss is correct.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 6th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Damn right it does: you’re stealing my shirk-the-work-and-bloviate shtick!
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July 6th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
It was an homage. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Homage.
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July 7th, 2008 at 12:09 am
If I might infest for a little while, too…
About #7:
I do see value in discussing rape rates in the non-incarcerated population, and I’m not sure I agree with Daran that doing so is “gerrymandering.” Yes, the list does obscure rape rates in the most vulnerable male populations. Yet this problem isn’t with that particular item: the problem is with the whole enterprise of the list, which in general obscures the links and parallels between male and female oppressions.
Ampersand said to Daran:
I disagree with this interpretation (though I’ll admit to bias, as Daran’s co-blogger).
At most, I think you could conclude from his discussion of Juarez that he objects to anyone paying attention to women’s victimization in contexts where men are unacknowledged as the majority of victims. Even then, there are no grounds to say that he objects to paying attention to female victims. He objects to the obscuring of male victims.
Knowing that Mexican men are victimized in an even larger area, and that this victimization is also being obscured, really makes me feel better about the erasure of male victimization in Ciudad Juárez.
If the rise in violence towards women is due to some particular factor, than I have no problem focusing on that; however, like Daran, I doubt that general factors relating to violence between men in the region are nothing to do with violence towards women in Ciudad Juarez. Furthermore, I would object to a “boys will be boys” attitude normalizing intra-male violence in that area.
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July 7th, 2008 at 1:23 am
1) You haven’t heard me suggest anything about “particular form of words,” either. What matters isn’t the “particular words” but the sentiment. If I say “George Bush is a dick,” that’s not an ad hom — not even if it creates a distraction from Bush’s argument. (To be an ad hom, I need to say something like “because George Bush is a jerk, his FISA claims are wrong.”)
2) From the article you linked to, with bold added by me: “In the so-called abusive ad hominem, someone argues that because a person has a bad character, we should not accept that person’s claims.”
And again: “Another illegitimate form of the ad hominem is the tu quoque, or “you, too” version, which is an attempt to discredit a person’s claims because the person has failed to follow his or her own advice.”
See? An ad hom isn’t just calling the person a jerk. It’s making a logically mistaken claim that because a person is a jerk, their claims are wrong. If those two elements — the “because” and the “claims” — aren’t present in some form, then it’s not an ad hom.
Sorry to go on about this, but the common misunderstanding of what “ad hom” means is a pet peeve of mine.
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July 7th, 2008 at 2:28 am
Daran, judging from your behavior here, you seem to think that if you get even ruder and yell at me, that will allow you to dictate the bounds of our discussion. But that’s not the case. Quite the contrary; the ruder you become, the less I feel compelled to give any credence to your preferences. You may want to revise your strategy accordingly.
I understand that you don’t want your views criticized. But going all caps won’t make me stop criticizing you. If you dislike having your arguments criticized by me, then the solution is for you to stop posting comments on “Alas.”
The truth is, you do have a habit of responding to feminist concerns about harms to women by objecting “what about the men.”
For example, when objecting to discussions of female victimization in Ciudad Juárez, you claim that you don’t actually object to people focusing on male victims; you just object to it being done without a context in the first few paragraphs establishing that the problem of male victims is bigger.
But when I say that most female rape victims outside of prison are raped, suddenly it’s no longer about context; it’s “gerrymandering” for me to focus on female victims, even though I provided the context. When I point out the inconsistency to you, you said, essentially, “a list is different.”
So now your rule is that it’s okay to focus on harms to women only if context is provided on the first page, unless it’s a list in which case it’s not okay even if context is provided. Why it being a list makes your previous rule no longer applicable, you don’t explain.
Now, let’s look at unequal representation in government. Here you use two strategies to explain why what happens to women is unimportant, both about claiming that concerns about representation are petty. First of all, you imply that’s it’s something that could only concern elite, upper-class women: “I think it sucks that mega-privileged women don’t have the same opportunity as mega-privileged men to lord it over the rest of us.” You make similar sarcastic comments about women getting promoted in their jobs.
Then you switch the subject to murder and rape, in the very next paragraph:
Note that the sarcastic, trivializing tone you used to sneer at issues like employment discrimination and unequal representation, has been replaced by a serious tone. Your message is loud and clear: You don’t have to care about unequal representation, which you discuss only in mocking tones, because that stuff is trivial next to murder and prison rape.
Of course, murder and prison rape are important; but it’s not an either-or choice. Using murder and rape to dismiss the importance of issues like job discrimination and unequal representation doesn’t prevent a single murder, or a single rape. The only thing your rhetoric does is provide yet another rationalization for sneering at feminists for being concerned about what happens to women.
I’ll discuss Ciudad Juárez in my response to Hugh. But regarding rape in Brazil’s prisons, here we see yet another strategy you use to object to anyone discussing harms to women:
In this case, “erased” means that they published an article focusing on women in Brazilian prisons. But for you, to talk about harms to women without focusing on men is the same as “erasing” men - even when the article is in response to a particular news story.
(And, contrary to your claim, the Amnesty article didn’t claim that addressing this particular problem would be the same as solving the entire problem of prison rape.)
You write:
But of course, you didn’t say any of this stuff in response to Amnesty. This is material you’ve adding after-the-fact, after I’ve called you on your behavior.
What you actually did was object to a case of Amnesty talking about rape of women.
I have no doubt that you can make excuses for all these cases and many more. Your ability to create rationalizations is not in doubt here. (Paraprhased Daran minimizing harms to women: “Being denied the vote was inconvenient for women, but it wasn’t real oppression, because being drafted is so much worse than being disenfranchised.”)
And your excuses might wash if it were just one case, or just two. But it’s something you do all the time. It’s a pattern.
You brought up Jews in the Holocaust as an example. Let’s say that someone objected once to a discussion of resistance in the Jewish ghetto: “There were also some gentile gays who resisted.” Okay, fair enough. Then, in another discussion, that same person is the one saying “yes, Jews were nearly wiped out, but the Roma got it even worse and any discussion of Jews in the Holocaust must be contextualized that way.” And then the next day, this same person objects to a discussion of Jewish teachers in the camps to suggest that we should be talking about communist teachers in the camps as well.
Let’s also suppose that this person even objects to Jewish-focused groups, like the Holocaust Museum, focusing on Jews. (In fact, he seems to be more passionate about objecting to what Jewish-focused groups do, than he is about anything else.)
Even if this person has a rationalization each and every time; and even if this person swears up and down a stack of Bibles (or Torahs) that he cares deeply about Jews in the Holocaust; after a while the pattern becomes too clear to rationalize away.
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:03 am
I am a ridiculous jerk who has been banned on multiple occasions.
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:10 am
Again, I don’t agree. A comment is ad hom if it introduces a person’s irrelevent personal characteristics in such a way that it tends to discredit their arguments. It is not necessary to use words like “therefore” or “because”. From the checklist:
This is a classic ad hom. The fact that critics are usually male has no bearing on the merit or otherwise of the argument that men have disadvantages too (assuming that this is a fair characterisation of their critique). So what does that remark do, to an audience of feminists? It operates to discredit the critic.
Your definition of ad hom is so narrow that hardly anything that is said in practical debate would count. But even if you were right, it only means that the phrase ad hom is inapposite. It doesn’t alter the fact that you have repeatedly introduced irrelevent negative purported information about me, my motives, etc., in such a way as to derail the discussion on the substantive issues.
I am no longer trying to discuss those issues with you. It’s plain as plain can be that you are not interested in addressing my arguments. My only role here now is to defend myself from your slurs, and to combat their distractive effects. That is to say, to point out to a hypthetical reasonable but distractable reader that my arguments stand unrebutted by your antics.
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July 7th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Daran,
The basic problem is that you are posting counter examples without assigning them weights.
Do men get subjected to conscription? Yup. But the negative VALUE of that (or positive value, if you want to define a female privilege of ‘don’t get drafted’ instead) is not so obvious.
I’m eligible for conscription and in a war I would probably be killed before my wife. But I have not, in fact, been drafted or killed (nor will I be, I hope) while she has had a variety of sex-specific issues which, while minor as compared to death, have happened to her and will happen again. Who is more privileged? And so on.
So in addition to explaining, for example, “men get killed in war” (true), in order to use that as a compelling counterexample you need the followup “…and that is a BIGGER/more important problem than ________(a problem or group of problems), therefore _______ cannot be a claim of privilege.”
But in order to prove, say, that women were actually privileged over men, you would need to do that for every issue.
I, like some other folks here, think it is obvious that men are not universally privileged in all respects and situations; it is equally obvious that women are not universally underprivileged in all respects and situations. There will always be some true statements like the one above. But overall, men seem to have the upper hand.
And it’s “overall” that is being discussed here. Amp does not adhere to the perspective of “female privilege does not exist, ever,” nor does he, AFAIK, believe that men are always privileged. So arguing against that doesn’t make as much sense.
(though Amp, I have to agree, that was an ad hom; Daran wasn’t arguing in favor of silencing female victim reports)
This comment was written by sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 5:36 am
As long as we’re on conscription, if theoretical conscription (i.e. being eligible for conscription if it is ever reinstated) is oppression then I am one of the oppressed, as much as any man in the US and more than many. The idea of drafting health care workers is very much on the table. So until age 54, I’m actually more at risk of being drafted than the average man. Daran, may I have your permission to consider myself as oppressed as a teenaged American boy*?
*Hint: In all honesty, I must admit that the actual answer to my sarcastic question is “no, at least not on this issue.” I have access to far more resources than your average 18 year old and could run away much more easily. Plus I’m pretty sure I could convince a draft board that I was far too crazy to draft. Ironically, if I was subject to the “inconvenience” of being unable to vote, I probably wouldn’t have the resources to evade a draft, if necessary but would probably also not be in a position such that I was at particular risk for being drafted. Oppression is rarely simple or unidimensional.
This comment was written by Dianne.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 6:09 am
I could convince a draft board that I was far too crazy to draft.
Ever read Catch-22?
If you’re in a situation like that there’s only one thing you can do — and that’s walk into the shrink, wherever you are, just walk in say “Shrink … You can get anything you want, at Alice’s Restaurant.” And walk out.
This comment was written by nobody.really.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 6:36 am
Ever read Catch-22?
Yeah, but I’ve also read Feynman’s biography. If he can do it…
This comment was written by Dianne.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am
Ooo, does the draft mean that heterosexuals are oppressed in comparison to those nasty over-privileged gays, too?
This is a fun game.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Hi Renee and Dianne and FurryCatHerder, etc.
So in order to discuss trollage, I’m going to do two trolly things. I’m going to go off-topic and I’m going to quote the dictionary. A troll:
The issue here is intent, yes? Daran and some of the other anti-feminists who appear here do not appear to have malignant intent — in that, I don’t think they’re posting here solely to fuck with other posters.
Those who insist that Daran and others are not trolls seems to be responding to intent, which I have to say is fair enough.
Then there’s the issue of results. The result of the presence of many, mostly male, anti-feminist posters who post long, angry comments, often many times in a row, that effectively dominate the comment thread — is that we see a place which is A) hostile to feminists in general, female feminists in particular (and in this case Ampersand as well, IMO) and B) the anti-feminist agenda and its credence of lack thereof replaces and “generally disrupt[s] normal on-topic discussion.”
So, if you define a troll by intent - no, I don’t think he is one. I don’t think it’s his purpose to see if he can make people on this site agitated, though I do think we have a regular commenter whose purpose that is. If you define a troll by result, then yes, the result of having a large and dominant contingent of anti-feminists is and has always been the derailment of the feminist conversation which could otherwise happen here.
This relates to privilege lists… well, not directly, but here we do see the normal patterns of power making it normal and possible for people to seem polite while choking spaces so that their (often heard) voices on sex roles are heard more than the voices of people whose opinions are systemically less powerful.
The definition of “troll” is not very useful sometimes. I think it might be better to say that no one likes to talk to someone who is arguing in bad faith, and while I think Daran’s arguments are bad, I don’t think he’s making them in bad faith.
BASTA!, however, is a damn troll.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Ampersand said:
On the contrary, he is asking you very explicitly to criticize his views. That’s exactly what he put in bold (”Stop! Addressing! Me! Address! My! Arguments! Instead!!“). Saying that he “doesn’t want his view criticized,” in addition to being simply untrue, shows exactly the kind of focus on him, rather than on his arguments, that he is objecting to.
Personally, I’m more interested in hearing about what you think of male privilege, female privilege, Ciudad Juarez, and the visibility of victims of either sex, than what patterns you perceive in Daran’s posting history.
Perhaps we wouldn’t expect context from a privilege list, because they are inherently one-sided. Whereas we should expect reports on human rights abuses to be held to a higher standard of providing context? Makes sense to me.
I think his comments only look that way if we disregard the very point of his post, which is about “male privilege”:
Daran isn’t dismissing employment discrimination and unequal representation as unimportant, he is dismissing those phenomena as being sufficient to show that men are privileged in some generalized way over women, given certain disadvantages of low-status men relative to low-status women. When he says that feminism provides a “fair description of how gender operates for those at the top of the social heap,” it contradicts your claim that he views women’s concerns as important and petty.
Amp, in your view, how would you address the erasure of males from discourse on victimization without committing the error of trivializing female victims that you perceive in Daran’s analysis? Do you even think there is a problem with typical discourse on Ciudad Juarez, per Daran’s questions, which I would also be curious to know your answers to?
This comment was written by HughRistik.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
This may be a bit of a sidetrack from this lovely argument you guys are having, but this bit in particular caught my eye:
So here’s my question, both to Amp and to everyone else here who has gained some insight on the subject: How would you define privilege?
I am perfectly capable of discussing white privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc. but struggle to explain the concept to friends who don’t already have a clear idea of what I’m talking about. Perhaps we can all put together a ‘coherent definition of privilege’, or at least share the definitions that we each have in mind.
This comment was written by becca b.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
<blockquote
Of course, a feminist would point out that the government, business, labor unions, social clubs, etc. all buttress the power of men. NOW seems pretty feeble next to that amassed social firepower. By the criteria of your test, we could conclude that women must have lots more power, since there are all these social organizations formed to ‘fight’ it and build up the position of men.
This wouldn’t be part of the test. None of these function to help men get access to female advantages/privileges.
Can you think of any organization, created by men and for men, that helps men have lives more like a ‘traditional’ females? For instance SWE (society of women engineers) does a number of things focused on making it easier for women to be engineers. How many counterparts can you think of for men?
Also, the ovaries suicide squad was sort of funny, (i thought) but rude. More so considering where you made the joke. Did make it clear who Mandolin meant when she said there was a regular poster that said things to upset people. Maybe I’m giving you too much credit, but I think you’re way too on the ball to make a joke like that here without knowing how it’s going to come across.
Anyway, thanks for responding.
As far as the Daran thing goes…I’m sorry but I usually just skim over his comments on gender stuff. I do agree that he’s not saying things in bad faith, he just disagrees, a lot.
This comment was written by Joe.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I would like to echo becca’s question about how people define the term “privilege” here.
One of the things that has never been entirely clear to me in these discussions is whether participants believe that “privilege” = “the opposite of disprivilege”, or if they see an important distinction between the two. For example, let’s assume that Group A and Group B are equally qualified and desirous of work, but Group A has ready access to jobs (say, 98% employment) while Group B does not (say, 55% employment).
As someone who believes that everyone qualified and desirous of employment should have ready access to jobs, it does not appear to me that Group A is privileged (i.e. that they have something they shouldn’t have). It appears that Group B is disprivileged (they lack something they should have).
Focusing on the “privileged” side of the equation (when dealing with “identity” and not class) seems to have two related effects. On the potentially positive side of the ledger, it challenges the complacent. (”Sure I care about the underprivileged, wev.” “No, YOU’RE privileged! YOU’RE the problem!” said with angry tone and wagging finger.) But from another perspective, it antagonizes people who could/should be allies. (The phrase “divisive and counter-revolutionary” springs to mind.) The latter effect fuels an often unremarked but significant right-wing dynamic to much of identity politics.
This comment was written by ballgame.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
This reminded me of one of the criticisms of how black women are treated by white feminists:
It’s also how male critics, especially white ones are silenced. There’s a distinct pecking order within feminsm. The lower down the hierarchy you are, based upon your sex, the colour of your skin, and your posture (for/against), the higher the standard of behaviour demanded of you, the worse (other) feminists treat you, and and the less seriously you are taken, no matter how well you behave. White female feminists are at the top of the pecking order, white male opponants at the bottom. Black female feminsts are somewhere in the middle. This social stratification on the basis of race and sex is everything feminism purports to be against.
Au contraire. I’d like you to stop misrepresenting my views. I’d also like you to address my remarks about how certain discourses about female victims fail to contextualise them, so that male victims are erased. But given that you won’t do that, I’d like to remind the hypothetical reasonable but distractible reader, that my arguments continue to stand unrebutted by you or anyone else.
Your entire approach to this discussion has descended into Bulverism. Instead of proving that my criticisms of feminism are wrong, or worse, looking to see whether they are right or wrong, which is the only issue that matters, you assume that I’m wrong and seek to account for my silliness in terms of some alleged objection on my part to focussing on, or even talking about female victims.
That is because two characteristic modes of feminist discourse are objectionable. First: the discussion of an issue which effect both sexes in such as way as to imply that it only effects women. In other words erasure. Second: baselessly to assert that women are affected much worse than men. In other words, the Odious Comparison.
It’s how you discuss these issues that it objectionable, not that you discuss them. It’s the denial, the dismissal, the minimisation, the ignoring, the erasure, and the anomalisation.
Without sufficient internal contextualisation, yes. If I was going to write an essay about the extermination of homosexual people in the Holocaust, probably a one paragraph contextualisation would do, because I could assume that the basic story was known to my readers. If instead I were to write for a general audience about the role of women in the Jacobite Rebellion, I’d need to give a lot more historical background.
Moreover, an essay on the role of women in the Jacobite Rebellion would be justified by the comparative lack of attention paid to women’s roles in standard treatments of the subject, which in turn may (or may not; I don’t know the history) be justified by the fact that women didn’t actually play much of a role. Similar remarks could be made about homosexuals in the Holocaust
By contrast, texts focusing on the murder of women in Juárez aren’t filling a gap in the coverage. They are the coverage.
In my opinion the two footnotes in the report I cited were subminimal context. I think one could defensibly argue that, had the external contextualisation been adequate, those footnotes would have been minimally sufficient. However, most of the other treatments on the subject focus upon women while providing no context at all.
It’s not different because it’s a list. It’s different because it clearly wasn’t about female rape victims per se. Rather, it was intended to support a claim originally about male privilege and subsequently defended as a male advantage. My complaint in this instance was not about contextualisation but about gerrymandering.
How does the following sound, as a putative female privilege/advantage: “If I can avoid entering into an intimate relationship with an abuser, my odds of being violently assaulted are relatively low.” (When did you edit that? It used to say “negligable”.)
I would object to that on the same gerrymandering grounds. How about you?
And you know, even the word ‘object’ has a different meaning in the two contexts. Erasure is wrongful, i.e., socially harmful. Unsound elements on your list are just logically flawed - puirported advantages which are not really advantages. I also object to your list on the grounds that it doesn’t actually list any privileges in the systemic sense, which objection you now appear to have conceded.
Not only do you misrepresent my views, but you misrepresent the nature of your own list.
I’ll respond to that in a separate post. Snipped.
No I didn’t. Not at all.
I didn’t make any comment about “women”, nor did I say anything about ‘jobs’. The word I used was ‘career’ - not all women with jobs have careers. I named two individuals who share other “distinctive traits”, and I did so specifically with those other traits in mind. They are not representative of women. They are representative of a subset (B) of women.
Also, what do you think is sarcastic in the sentence “I think it sucks that Dianne’s and Mythago’s career may not be as high flying or well-paid as they might have been, had they been born male”?
Contrast with “I think it sucks that mega-privileged women don’t have the same opportunity as mega-privileged men to lord it over the rest of us”, which is obviously sarcastic. The change in tone is obvious to me. I’m surprised you don’t see it.
Again you generalise when I was actually being very particular. I did not say employment discrimination. I was quite specific - career status and pay. I didn’t say anything about workplace harassment, which also falls under unemployment discrimination.
What kind of “you” did you mean by the one I emboldened? If you mean me as an individual, then you’re right. I don’t have to care. I don’t take orders from you about what I should or shouldn’t care about. If you mean “one” as a pronoun, then it’s not for me to say what other people should care about. But let me remind you of the question I was answering:
Do I see a problem. The question is about what I see.
And I answered it. I don’t much care at all, to be that honest, if Clinton’s, or Pelosi’s, or E. Dole’s political careers are limited by sexism. Rationally, I can see that it matters, but at an emotional level, it just doesn’t stir my passion.
I’m a bit more concerned about the careers of middle-class professional women, especially if I have a personal connection with them - enough concern to look them over to see how their doing. Dianne looks to be doing fine, do you not agree? More to the point, does she not agree? Because my concern would rapidly escalate if she gave any indication that she wasn’t.
I wasn’t doing either/or. I was ranking them in order. Clinton and Pelosi: not much concern. Dianne and Mythago? Some consern, and ready to become more concerned if the situation warranted. The unnamed girl who got raped in Brazil: Whole heap of concern. The multitude of victims who were the wrong sex to attract Amnesty’s attention: maximum concern.
My concern is inversely proportional to the level of privilege I attribute to these people, and I submit that this is exactly what feminists do, except that because men as men are always privileged in the eyes of the feminist, men as men are subject to a diminished level of concern, even if they are, by any reasonable (i.e., non-feminist) definition, disprivileged.
What would have been the cost of saying “urgently review the whole of the detention system to ensure prisoners are not exposed to human rights abuses”? What would have been the cost to women?
And by the way, Amnesty never calls for “men” to be protected, even when the article is in response to a particular news story involving individual men. Women are never excluded from Amnesty’s demands for protection.
Why do you defend Amnesty’s treating the rape of men or women as an either either/or choice, while condemning me for purportedly doing the same? Amnesty has influence. I don’t. Amnesty matters. I don’t.
Contrary to your claim, I never claimed that Amnesty claimed this. I say that they “think” this, inferring the corporate “thoughts” from its stated goals and actions.
Of course. What I wrote then was intended to point out the problem with amnesty’s coverage, this was back when I thought you might actually care about what organisations like Amnesty do, instead of regard me as the important issue. But let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that you’re right, and I’m eeeevviiiil. That I would never actually write like that, just as I would never ever contextualise a discussion about the rape of males in the Balkan wars with a 155 word quote from the Bassiouni report describing how females were raped and tortured. How does that void my criticism of Amnesty?
Specifically, I claim that Amnesty could and should have said the things in the quote above, and that this would be a much better way to treat the issue. Your reply is “Daran is evil”? How is that a rebuttal? What does my allegedly evil status matter?
I have no doubt that you can create excuses for ignoring that last link and many more I could show you to demonstrate that I do not treat the victimisation of women the way you say I do. Your ability to avoid talking about things that matter (such as how a movement with worldwide influence treats these issues) is not in doubt here
As for your paraphrase, well I find it quite astonishing that you hold it up as something which supposedly discredits me. Yes, I do think being conscripted and sent to your death on a battlefield is worse than being disenfranchised. I think a lot of people would agree with me, and even more, who might not actually agree, would agree that it’s a defensible moral position.
Let’s compare this with your stated position, before you withdrew the third criterion. Paraphrasing Amp minimizing harms to men: “Being drafted wasn’t all ice cream sundaes for men, but it wasn’t real oppression, because having less than 50% of your legislators with the same shaped genitals as you, even though you all got the vote, is so much worse than being sent against your will to your death on a battlefield, bitch.”
By the way, in my country, it was precisely the sacrifice made by so many disenfranchised AND conscripted men during the first-world war, that lead to full male suffrage.
As an initial matter, I note that once again, you fail to address the question I raised when I offered this hypothetical. Rather you offer a different hypothetical. I draw the reasonable but distracteble reader’s attention to your continued evasion of my substantive points.
Then I’ll address yours: Did the Roma have it worse? If they did, then a body of discourse which focussed almost exclusively on the Jews would be problematic, and someone complaining about the erasure of the Roma would be justified. But I’m not aware in general that individual Roma were treated differently from individual Jews, or that the number of Roma victimised was greater than the number of Jews, and I know nothing at all about how the proportion of Roma victimised out of the entire Roma population compares with the proportion of Jews victimised out of theirs. So I’m not aware of any metric by which the statement “the Roma got it even worse” could be held to be valid, while there is at least one metric (absolute numbers) by which the statement “the Jews got it even worse” is valid.
But you raise an interesting point. Perhaps the Roma, homosexuals, the disabled and various other groups are marginalised and erased by the discourses around the Holocaust. It’s a remarkable coincidence, given that we’re having this discussion, that the top result on a Google search on “Holocaust” is this wikipedia snippet:
So it does indeed look like there is some marginalisation going on there.
Here are the first two paragraphs in the article itself:
I must admit I didn’t know the number of non-Jewish victims was so large.
But notice what this article does. It puts the majority victims first. It then reports the others. In the later development it gives each class of victim its own section. Without vouching for it’s factual accuracy, it’s not a bad treatment of the subject. The minority victims are not the centrepiece of the article. Neither are they rendered more marginal than is appropriate for their minority status, still less erased outright.
Contrast with the Wikipedia treatment of Juárez. First the city generally which briefly mentions the problem of murder, and references only female victims by gender. Even if every ungendered victim was assumed to be male, the reader who didn’t follow the link to the Main article on the murdered women, would be left with the impression that the overwhelming majority of victims were female. If they did follow the link, they would read an article that provided no contextualisation at all in terms of a wider problem of murder in Juárez or along the Mexican border. They would be oblivious to it.
If that isn’t erasure, then what would be?
So will you now answer my questions about whether you find this body of discourse problematic, or will you continue to evade the points I raise, while demanding that I answer yours?
I’ll address that separately too. This comment is already far too long.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I think I just got the world record for the longest comment ever.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
I do not agree differential participation rates imply differential access, even if the unstated hypothesis is accepted, that men and women have the same capabilities and aspirations.
For example, imagine a hypothetical world in which women who want custody of their children are favoured, while the non-custodial parent is force to support the child. In such a world, the same capabilities and aspirations could lead to a vastly different outcome.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Daran, I was very specifically focusing on a theoretical, non-real hypothesis (Group A vs. Group B) in order to better understand the specific meaning people were ascribing to the word “privilege” here.
This comment was written by ballgame.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
Hello Mandolin
To be honest, I posted one angry comment, before returning to my usual calm self. See Emily’s quote from Hugo’s at the top of comment #68.
What happened here is that Dianne made a general statement way back in #19, in which she claimed a male advantage, and in support of which she offered nothing but anecdotal evidence.
I responded with a countergenerality and some illustrative examples.
From that point on, everything played out exactly as I predicted in comment #13. The discussion was derailed by feminists so that instead of talking about Dianne’s claimed male advantage the discussion was deflected onto me, my biases, motives, and what have you. I responded in self-defense; of course I did. I was being accused of all kinds of nasty things.
And now the final element of the prophesy has come true: you are now blaming me for doing nothing more than attempt to discuss something that was said in the thread, that was on-topic, and defending myself from the off-topic derailment that was instigated by feminists. It’s a very nice blaming. Very civil. I don’t think I’ve ever been blamed so politely before.
If this is a hint that it’s time to leave this topic or this thread, then I’m sorry, I’m an Aspie, and I don’t do hints. As soon as you tell us we’re not welcome, then we’re gone.
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July 7th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Daran,
Actually, I’ve lost your position in the muck.
Generally, there seem to be five options, two of which are extreme. Which is yours?
1) Men are privileged over women, always, at all times (and the reverse is never true). 100% of the time, or pretty close to it, it’s better to be male.
2) Men are privileged over women in general. Which is to say, there are times where the privilege flips. But if you were to weigh things, and count numbers, and compare advantages, you’d find that at least 51% of the time, men were more privileged.
3) Sex privilege is exactly, miraculously, equal.
4) Women are privileged over men in general. Which is to say, there are times where the privilege flips. But if you were to weigh things, and count numbers, and compare advantages, you’d find that at least 51% of the time, women were more privileged.
5) Women are privileged over men, always, at all times (and the reverse is never true). 100% of the time, or pretty close to it, it’s better to be female.
Which are you? I’m a #2. Which includes a wide range, from 51! advantage to 98% advantage. And there’s lots of variation and yes, arguments between those who think it’s 65% and those who think it’s 95% and so on. But basically, I think most feminists are #2; a few are probably #1.
This comment was written by sailorman.Report this comment to the moderators
July 7th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
None of the above.
I think a better model would be the following
M > W >> w > m
where
M, W = High status men and women
This comment was written by Daran.m, w = low status men and women
> = general privilege of type 2 or 4.
>> = strong privilege (pretty close to 1 or 5).
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I’m a #2.5. I don’t believe #3 is possible in our world. It would be #2 or #4 in a matter of minutes if #3 was ever reached.
I also think it’s a matter of perspective. In short, which privileges you give value to imports, and different people will give different value to different things. I don’t think that having the choice to be stay-at-home, or work outside the home (or work by contract inside the home), with pretty much equally valued consequences and acceptance (always depends on the partner, and personal expectations in the present, and future - for example, if I choose to be stay-at-home, I don’t see myself working in 20 years, and I accept the risks that it might happen) is a disadvantage, I think it’s an advantage.
The thing is, men rarely have the choice. They got it on paper, in theory. In practice, most women wouldn’t date a stay-at-home man, wether he had kids or not. Many men would be willing to date a stay-at-home woman, and many men would be willing to date a career woman.
Since I’m not a career person, and don’t intend on working my whole life for meager pay in work I can barely endure just to make ends meet - and that some men don’t mind that I want to be stay-at-home - advantages me. Doesn’t mean I won’t work or get some useful skills (like accounting), but it means it’s more acceptable to make the choice I do as female, than were I male. I can also choose to work part time, or get a few contracts in my free time, rather than burden myself with a 40 hours (or more) schedule, simply because anything less wouldn’t pay the bills.
As it stands, it’s working-class men, more than middle-class men, who get the very short end of the stick. They don’t have a choice to work, often in difficult conditions, if not outright horrendous ones sometimes, and even then, barely get enough money home to make ends meet. Even with credit, few can save for a house, especially with how the market exploded in recent years.
Single mothers who work also get the short end of the stick, sometimes having to pick between staying at home with their child, or dropping them at daycare and, unless they have significant income (was it above 30k a year before taxes?), almost being poorer than they were before. And most unskilled jobs don’t pay 30k a year as far as I know. What we got here in Canada is subsidized daycare, 7$ a day (used to be 5$) per child, and it’s sort of affordable.
There’s many male privileges I also wouldn’t ever see myself taking advantage of, were they offered, much like I don’t buy Pretzels. Even if you’d put 300 stands of Pretzels around my block, it wouldn’t make me any happier.
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
sailorman said:
Surely these are not the only possible positions.
6) “Privilege” is a meaningless concept
7) There is a greater variance in male privilege than female privilege (i.e. more men at the top and more men at the bottom) (EDIT: this is what Daran is getting at above)
8) The privileges of men and women cannot be compared, because they are qualitatively different. The privileges of men and women cannot simply be tallied up and compared on a single dimension.
9) Even if the privileges of men and women could be compared in principle, no convincing argument has been put forward so far about who has more of it.
10) Both men and women deal with so much shit that asking which pile is bigger is really a stupid question.
If the options you list are actually the only positions that feminists can typically think of on privilege, then it’s no wonder that so many people don’t “get” the feminist concept of male privilege.
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July 7th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
[...] on Alas, Ampersand continues to decline to address the relatively trivial matters I raised about media framing of male victimisation, and [...]
This comment was written by How Concerned are Women about Women’s Underrepresentation in Governement? | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
July 8th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Possible position, but red herring. Unless you are arguig it, that is–are you?
And…?
Just because there’s more variance (if there is; I’m not sure I agree) is not necessarily relevant to the idea that one sex can, generally speaking, be more privileged.
The M>W>>w>m thing may be relevant, but it’s missing the numbers to make it so.
You could, for example, claim that poor men are less privileged than poor women, that there are enough poor men to balance out the privilege of all the rich men, and that as a result men are less privileged than are women, and then you could defend your position. Or whatever. But simply saying “Poor men! Underprivileged!” doesn’t cut it.
Ya know, for folks who were complaining about people ducking arguments instead of engaging in them, you seem to be ducking a bit more than expected.
As with #1, this is a red herring, unless someone wants to put this out there and defend it. DO you?
Hell, you don’t seem to have put forth an argument at all–by which I mean a defined, defensible position which can be compared to competing arguments. I don’t really care if you find the other arguments convincing or not; they are surely more convincing than a non-statement.
See #1 et al.
I can think of all sorts of things, but in the context of this discussion those seemed most relevant. But given the snarky tone, that’s all the conversation I choose to have with you.
DARAN:
You said
M>W>>w>m
I note the “M>W” part. Does that mean that you are conceding that, overall (i.e. “in general,” “on average,” etc) men are more privileged than women?
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July 8th, 2008 at 5:44 am
What happened here is that Dianne made a general statement way back in #19, in which she claimed a male advantage, and in support of which she offered nothing but anecdotal evidence.
This is the problem with being out of time zone sync with most of the rest of the people in the conversation: I don’t follow up properly. I should clarify that the purpose of the original post was to ask the question, “Can a certain characteristic way in which group X is treated be both an advantage and a disadvantage depending on the circumstance?” The example was really only to give a concrete example of what I was talking aobut. It may be that I’m altogether wrong about whether men or women are noticed more readily. It may be that I in particular am unnoticible to authority figures for whatever reason. Maybe I look innately harmless. Maybe I look like the sort of person who would go insane, sue, and post it all over the internet if I were challenged at customs. Whatever. Sorry about leading people into an argument and not being there to help deal with the consequences.
But I do think that the question is still a potentially interesting one: Are some stereotypes or social norms examples of both male privilege and female privilege? Consider the “men should protect women” meme: It’s bad for men in some ways–they get drafted, are expected to fight to prove their “manliness”, are made to feel like they’ve failed if they ask for help, etc. Women have the advantage of not being drafted (except in Israel and we’ll see what the US draft is if and when it happens) and being able to gracefully duck out of barfights without being called a wimp. But they are also told, overtly and subtly, that they can not protect themselves and must rely on a man to protect them (and that therefore having a man–any man–around is better than not, even if he’s abusive or obnoxious). And are not allowed to fight as equals with men should they wish to (i.e women are not allowed in combat), which both blocks some ways in which they might acheive success in life and is obnoxiously patronizing. So, the idea that men must protect women can be damaging to both men and women. Wouldn’t it be better abandoned and replaced with the idea that the stronger person or the better defender in a given circumstance, should protect the weaker or less able person? Or that society as a whole and those within it with specific skills as may be needed in a given circumstance are responsible for protecting people in circumstances in which they can not protect themselves (from stopping invasions to making sure the water and food are clean to keeping the climate from altering to the point where human life is no longer possible.)
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July 8th, 2008 at 6:17 am
Conversely, I would also claim that the same outcome can result from privilege in one case, oppression in another. One could use the draft as an example. In the US Civil War, upper and middle class white men often legally “dodged” the draft by paying someone to take their place. (I don’t quite understand how this worked since it seems like the person being paid to take the original draftees place would be eligible for the draft themselves, but it did occur.) So their not being drafted was an expression of privilege. Blacks in the south weren’t drafted either. No one would argue that their not being drafted proves that it was actually the slaves that had higher privilege in the pre-Civil War southern US, would they?
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July 8th, 2008 at 7:06 am
It’s a pattern, Daran, not a single instance. Nor is it you alone. I wasn’t really referring only to this thread, but to the progression of things on Alas over the years. I would have been more explicit about that, but since you’ve been party to the eternal discussions about moderation and the space on Alas as it pertains to supporting systems of power, I figured you would understand what I was referencing.
The blame is polite because I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong, per se. Your characterization of the situation is true. It is, simultaneously, true that the way this thread progresses chokes off other avenues of conversation and sends a signal to some watching female feminists that this is a hostile space — but no more than is true of a very large number of other Alas threads. That’s one of the ultimate dilemmas of moderation in general and Alas moderation in particular; there is not room for all voices to exist simultaneously, and lack of moderation does result in the recapitulation of pre-existing power systems. Barry and I handle that differently, and generally - though not always - respect each other’s tactics. Certainly, we respect each other’s intents.
It’s not a hint to leave the thread. I was just responding to the people who were bringing up concerns about moderation. Frankly, I’m the one who’s off-topic.
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July 8th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Sailorman (et al),
“Just because there’s more variance (if there is; I’m not sure I agree) is not necessarily relevant to the idea that one sex can, generally speaking, be more privileged.”
well, it does make the point that sex/gender is not a relevant category.
If you take the suggestion M > W > w > m and assume it’s true for a minute it will become clear that it’s logically impossible to come up with a statement like “men are more privileged than women” unless you also believe in cardinal utility theory (to come up with “the numbers”).
Whether men generally privileged over women is a cultural article of faith, not something that can be proven. Adherents of that list note as much by saying “men have the privilege to be ignorant of their privileges”, which essentially amounts to claiming an epistemic privilege for feminists.
But this is where the argument logically ends: Trying to explain truth by using standpoint epistemology is an oxymoron. It’s logically impossible, and amounts to a simple, “really trust me, you are better off than I am, and you should do something about it” - as someone said above “”really, I don’t see why men can’t accept they are so much better off.” Well, there’s no way they can using the same approach most feminists use to come up with their conclusion.
Personally, I think men do still have some advantages over women in the environment most people who discuss this care about: The professional and public spheres of advanced Western Economies/Polities. That said, if feminism came up with concepts and definitions that led to testable theories instead of merely preaching its articles of faith, that would be great. It would actually be possible to discuss the assumptions, conclusions and data used. They would actually have a falsifiable theory. Alas, I’ve never seen one to date…
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July 8th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Proven? Perhaps not, in a scientific sense.
But one can certainly evaluate and judge. One can debate, or come to an agreement.
So if Daran thinks that being drafted is a serious risk, then he can put forth why “conscription as a very remote possibility” is more/as/less worthy of consideration as, say, “being discriminated against in the workplace” as a comparatively likely possibility.
Or if he thinks prison rape is an issue, he could, for example, talk about the people who end up in prison (generally a combination of society and individual action), and distinguish, perhaps, between the various classes of prisoners; he could compare that to the issues of women getting raped outside (and inside) prison.
Of course, you can take the position that it is impossible to compare the harm of potentially being raped in prison with the harm of potentially being raped outside it, or that is it impossible to compare any of these thing.
In which case, pardon the question, but what the freak are you posting in this thread for?
1) the thread started about privilege.
2) various “anti” folks posted things against privilege, and there have been many posts complaining about lack of response;
3) then I try to post a response, and now
4) note that the “anti” folks have yet to post their own cognizable position, just attack the other position (this is often referred to as “sniping”, which is why I’m calling them “antis.” I’d love it if they would post pro-something so it could be compared) and now
5) supposedly/suddenly it can’t be talked about at all
Goalposts seem to be moving here, or perhaps it’s just me.
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July 8th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Dianne: So, the idea that men must protect women can be damaging to both men and women. Wouldn’t it be better abandoned and replaced with the idea that the stronger person or the better defender in a given circumstance, should protect the weaker or less able person?
Should a strong woman protect a weak man? Maybe, if the only relevant factor is who’s strongest. Perhaps in a bar fight. Historically, women have had almost no participation (compared to men) in war. It’s really negligible and I’ve wondered quite alot about the why of it. We say things like “women and children first” and it’s taken as an assumption that women, like children, are incapable of defending themselves but is that really what it’s about? That’s always seemed too weak a position to account for such a trivially small role in war in history.
But then, from a historical perspective a woman can be viewed not just as an individual but as the root of a family tree. The number of people descended from my maternal grandmother, at this moment numbers more than a hundred and fifty people. In a sense, one bullet can kill one man, or hundreds if it hits a woman, one seat on a lifeboat can save one man, or save hundreds, if it’s given to a woman. Looking at it that way, I feel compelled to admit that putting men between women and things that kill, even when between the two of them, the woman might handle it better, makes a kind of Darwinist sense.
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July 8th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
Sailorman,
goalposts move in every discussion, don’t they? Hopefully, that also indicated increasing common knowledge. The problem is that “privilege” and “oppression” aren’t testable concepts but ideological framing devices for discussions, whether inter-gender or intra-gender (there’s recently been a big intra-feminist debate about women of color and intersectionalism if I’m not mistaken).There’s a non-testable thing called privilege that is considered unfair so no one wants any of it so he/she doesn’t have their arguments and experiences devalued by having too much privilege. And there’s a non-testable thing called oppression that is some sort of currency in this kind of debate.
“Of course, you can take the position that it is impossible to compare the harm of potentially being raped in prison with the harm of potentially being raped outside it, or that is it impossible to compare any of these thing.”
You can’t compare any of this according to feminist standpoint epistemology. The epistemological basis for the argument is the reason why it’s impossible to discuss it. You can talk about it, but since everyone is talking about something else and the very requirement for the existence of “privilege” and “oppression” is the definition of an “epistemic privilege” (which is a real concept and very different from the other ‘privilege’ and essentially supposes that only women can understand oppression, that it is not something accessible by anyone outside the group in question) that logically is the opposite of truth, there’s not much sense in doing it.
“In which case, pardon the question, but what the freak are you posting in this thread for?”
Valid Question. There probably is some element of defensiveness in my reply. There was a time when I was really ticked off by radfem flatmates who were telling me about my privileges. They were intelligent girls and eventually stopped making this particular argument because they saw the flaws in standpoint epistemology… maybe they will eventually get that they can just as well talk about unfairness without claiming universal gender based “privileges” and “oppressions”.
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Daran, you confuse me. Sometimes I’m reading you and thinking yes, yes, there are so many ways in which the gender system fucks men over too and there should indeed be organisations promoting men’s capability in caring roles and feminism is incomplete when it doesn’t focus on men - and then you come out with all this stuff about ‘low status’ women being privileged over high status men and I wonder what the hell parallel universe you just stepped in from. You know that globally, poverty is massively feminised, right? You know that even in the UK, women are still slightly more likely to be living in low-income households and much more likely to be low-paid? And that this last figure means that many women are out of poverty only by virtue of being in relationships, and thus are under extreme economic pressure to remain in those relationships even if they’re abusive?
Or how about this thing I just found: it would be difficult to find a more ‘low status’ group in our society than poor old people. Low income elderly women aremore than three times as likely as low-income elderly men to feel ‘very unsafe out at night’.
This is just what about five minutes of google-fu turned up. It’s not sophisticated. But the fact is that being female is still a serious disadvantage at the ‘low status’ end of society - and that probably means that in real terms, it’s more of a disadvantage, since you’re talking about the margins here. That pay gap means a whole lot more when you’re struggling to even get by.
The first page I linked to alludes to Amartya Sen’s estimate of 100 million ‘missing’ women throughout the world - basically, if you judge by birthrates and optimal patterns of life expectancy, there should be 100 million more women on the planet today than there are. Many died in infancy or early childhood because they weren’t fed as well or taken to the doctor as carefully as male babies.
So I suspect Amp would prefer it for general civility’s sake if I didn’t give you explicit guidance as to where to stick your w>m.
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July 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
I think the comparison was low status men and low status women. I might be off, but the other one doesn’t seem right to me.
And we’re talking about North America aren’t we? Cause for sure, if we’re talking worldwide I totally agree with you Acheman, except I sure wasn’t talking about worldwide, cause I don’t live everywhere, I live here, and I can only know in practical, lived experience, about here (that is, Canada for me).
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
They were intelligent girls and eventually stopped making this particular argument because they saw the flaws in standpoint epistemology…
Or maybe they stopped making that argument to you because you continually referred to them as, “girls.” Just pointing out another possibility to you.
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July 8th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
JakeSquid,
“Or maybe they stopped making that argument to you because you continually referred to them as, “girls.” Just pointing out another possibility to you.”
Sorry, are we on the linguistic playground here? Did you want to know their names? Is “girl” no longer considered appropriate as a reference to more than one human female in their 20s???
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
“Sorry, are we on the linguistic playground here? Did you want to know their names? Is “girl” no longer considered appropriate as a reference to more than one human female in their 20s???”
You hit the nail on the head. Yeah that’s probably the issue. I don’t personally have one (issue), but I’ve seen many feminists have an issue with being called girls if over 18/21 (depending on majority age cut-off), since it’s considered on the same level as boy(s). I can see the logic there, even if I don’t apply it in my personal life (and call myself a girl often, despite being almost 26).
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July 8th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Schala,
thanks for enlightening me. It is definitely a privilege to not care if someone refers to me as a boy (despite being a little older than you are)…
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I agree it’s a pattern. That’s why I was able to predict it. The pattern is as follows:
1. A feminst makes a statement, which may or may not be connected to the matter at hand, which accords with feminist doctrine, but which is, in fact contentious.
2. A dissenter disputes the statement, possibly supporting their position with facts and/or argument*.
(Optional step 2a: Feminists make a half-hearted attempt to defend the original proposition, alternatively, to defend a more moderate and reasonable version of the original proposition. The dissenter rejoins with further facts and/or argument. Rinse and repeat.)
3. Feminists attack the dissenter, with reference to their motivations and, purported affiliations. Sometimes these attacks are verbally-abusive, “infestation”, etc.
4. The dissenter tries to argue the original proposition, while (optionally) defending themself from the attacks, and (also optional) responding in kind with attacks on the motives of feminists and/or outright abuse. (In this particular case, I did defend myself, but did not respond with abuse.)
(Optional step 4a. The dissenter may be prohibited from using certain modes of argumentation. For example, the dissenter may be prohibited from questioning the integrity of feminists. No such prohibition will be enforced upon upon feminsts.)
5. The dissenter is blamed. In particular, any departure from perfectly calm ratiocination by the dissenter is seized upon for criticism, while the provocation by feminists that lead to the departure is generally give a pass.
(Optional step 5a. If the dissenter is unsophisticated in their argument, or if the dissenter resorts to abuse in step 4, then the dissenter is site-banned. Alternatively a dissenter may be thread-banned).
*”an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition” — Monty Python
Note that this applies to internal dissent as well as external. The same process is used to suppress WOC feminist criticism of white feminism.
Please explain what you mean by “supporting systems of power”.
I’m glad that we are in agreement on this.
But what is it that is hostile, and what is it that is choked off?
I contend that the hostility arises in step 2. Any kind of response to feminist orthodoxy other than unquestioning acceptance is regarded by feminists as hostile. What is choked off, is a discussion consisting of a unchallenged series of statements of feminist orthodoxy.
Some of these statements are obviously true, and uncontroversial. Some of them are true, but for reasons which aren’t obvious. Some of them are true, but are framed and contextualised in ways which are prejudicial. Some of them are kinda, sorta true, with many ifs, and buts. Some of them might be true, but lack empirical foundation. Some of them are ambiguous. Some involve terminology which has never been adequately defined, or whose meaning is in flux, or which feminists use in ways different from their purported definitions or for which different feminists have different and incongruent definitions. Some of them are outright meaningless. Some of them are generally false, but may be true in particular instances. Some of them contain a grain of truth. Some of them are lies. Some of them are 180 degree reversals of the truth.
None of them have been subject to the kind of critical examination that would allow feminists to sort the wheat from the chaff. But they get stated, and restated, and re-restated, over and over again, until they seem to be established unchallengeable truth.
But they are neither established nor are they unchallengeable in the normal sense of the word. They are unchallengeable because feminists do not allow anyone to challenge them.
And these discussions are not choked off; they continue to happen elsewhere, on feminist-only threads on Alas. Or on other feminist blogs. (It’s not like there’s a shortage.) Rather, it’s the kind of discussion that I want to have, that gets choked off. The kind in which ideas are tested logically for cohesiveness and coherency, and empirically against the reality they purport to describe, and in which those which are found wanting are discarded in favour of sounder ideas.
I find it very curious that so few feminists are interested in having that kind of discussion. I believe that feminism would be a better movement if they did.
Oh I appreciate that there are dilemmas in moderation. We have ours, and the headaches seem to grow exponentially in proportion to the number and activity of the guests participating. Alas is much busier than FCB, so you have my sympathy in that respect.
Our version of the “not all voices can exist together” problem is that antifeminists and MRA/antifeminist voices tend to substitute themselves for ours.
Again, please expand on “pre-existing power systems” and how they are “recapitulated”.
That’s why I don’t do hints. I so often get them wrong.
Actually I think this is very on topic.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Daran, there’s a lot of discussion about how these dynamics unfold in the various threads about moderation… Rather than reinvent the wheel, I’ll hunt down some of the links.
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July 9th, 2008 at 12:35 am
No, it means that I “concede” that the statement “High status men in general are more privileged that high status women” is a part of a better model of gender privilege than the statement that “men are more privileged than women”.
The phrase “better model” does not imply that either model is any good.
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July 9th, 2008 at 1:15 am
What’s the evidence for the w>m part of Daran’s hypothesis? Or against it, for that matter? It seems like a claim that can be tested anyway. (I’m ignoring the M>W component because, as far as I can tell, we are all more or less in agreeement on that.)
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July 9th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Maco: I see your point concerning the relative reproductive risks of losing too many women versus too many men, but I’m not sure it’s relevant in the modern world. We’re really at virtually no risk of running out of H sapiens any time soon. Certainly, in the “west”, the risk of losing enough military personnel to make a dent in the population or reproductive success of any given country is negligible. Still, if that’s the concern, why not draft only post-menopausal women? Many positions in the military require little physical strength and having women filling these roles could free up the men for the more physically demanding roles.
One point at issue here is that while very few people want to be drafted, being eligible for the draft is a sign of being considered a full adult in this society. Being able to get out of the draft–or able to chose consiously to allow oneself to be drafted– is a sign of privilege (see G Bush and A Gore in the Vietnam era). But not being eligible for the draft is, in some senses, a statement that society considers you “lesser” in some way (i.e. the ban on gays in the military.) One might consider draft registration as analagous to jury duty. Few people enjoy jury duty. Most would rather not have to do it. But if a law were passed saying that group X is no longer eligible for jury duty, would you consider group X to be privileged or oppressed by that law?
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July 9th, 2008 at 1:45 am This comment was written by Desipis.
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July 9th, 2008 at 1:53 am
sailorman,
I can see why you found my comment snarky. My intent was not to be snarky, but to point out certain limitations I perceive in the feminist conceptualization of privilege. I prefer your version of feminism to most, so I don’t have a motivation to pick on you in particular; your post just helped clarify some of those limitations which I perceive. I hope that if you observe any limitations in theorizing of mine, you will have the grace to notify me.
I’ve noticed that feminists are often mystified by opposition to their concept of privilege; in contrast, I am mystified by their mystification. It’s possible that there are really just a few possibilities about how privilege is distributed (such as the ones you suggest), and skeptics are failing to acknowledge which of these possibilities are correct. Alternatively, it is possible that more plausible positions on privilege exist than feminists typically acknowledge, in which case disagreement with feminist theories of privileges should seem less surprising.
To attempt to demonstrate this point, I suggested several other positions on privilege that people might find plausible, and which might sway them away from feminist conceptions of privilege. You said:
I showed that, actually, there are more options, regardless of which I would defend. You point out, correctly, that I don’t actually state my own position. That’s not because I’m trying to be evasive; it’s because I’m not sure exactly what my own position is.
On the contrary, sometimes a non-statement can better than a hasty statement. It’s not like we have to decide, right now, whether men or women are more privileged in order to begin remedying harms to either men or women. The only reason that question comes up is that feminists consider it so important, and because they think they somehow have the answer. I don’t think I have the answer. Is that bad?
The burden of proof is not on me; it’s on feminists to justify their claims about privilege. I don’t yet have a clear answer on that question, partly because I want to avoid making the errors I accuse feminists of: being myopic towards the suffering of one’s own group, and presenting my own value judgments as objective.
I am still thinking through the issues of privilege, and I’ll attempt a brief explanation of why I’m so skeptical of easy answers on the subject:
I am not sure that privilege and lack of privilege can be quantified in a way that it can be added and compared, when we are talking about many different types of privilege in many different contexts. How exactly do we reduce privilege down to one dimension that can be added up and compared? As you acknowledge, it’s not true that men are more privileged on all dimensions. So, given that men are more privileged in some dimensions, and women on others, how do we decide that the dimensions on which men are privileged are more important than the dimensions on which women are privileged? That requires value-judgments.
Well, we could try to look at as many dimensions as possible, figure out whether men and women are more privileged in each area, and see if some obvious “big picture” answer emerges. I’ve tried this, and, well, I can’t really tell what the big picture is. It’s just too damn big. Furthermore, I’m not confident in my knowledge of both male and female privileges, which would shed doubt on any big picture I thought I could see. I’m not confident in feminist knowledge of female privileges, either, which is why I’m even less confident in their intuitions about what the “big picture” is.
In saying that men are more privileged in general, a feminist is packing in a ridiculous amount of empirical assumptions (about who has more privilege in each sub-area) and value judgments (about in which sub-areas privilege weighs more). Some of those empirical assumptions I know are true; some I know are false. Value judgments about what types of privilege weigh more than others can be justified, but need to be made explicit, which I haven’t seen feminists do.
At this time, the most honest answer I can make to the question of which sex is privileged more is that it depends on how you measure privilege, and it depends on which context we are talking about.
Now, this is a long post, so if there other points you would like me to address, you are welcome to bring them up specifically and I will get to them in a future post.
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July 9th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Daren, No other blog that I am aware of is this friendly to conflicting ideology. I think it’s a good thing brought on by Amps dislike for angry discourse. But imo there’s really very very little room to argue that Alas is hostile to people that disagree with feminists.
As far as choking off discourse…well I can’t speak for others but i usually don’t check in on threads where there are multiple comments by some of the regulars. Especially if I’m already pretty sure what they’re going to say. Sometimes I’ll skim but usually that about it. Thing is, they (feminists) seem to like arguring with you most of the time. So if there are 4 comments by you, one by amp, one by sailorman, 3 more by you, one by mandolin and one by someone else I’m pretty sure what you’re talking about and that it will be the focus of the conversation.
I’m fine with that. And it doesn’t bother me because I don’t have an emotional response to the argument. but i know there are a lot of people (you included) that take gender politics more personally than I do. It’s probably frustrating or angering to try and follow along and participate or raise a different point. So I’ll bet they don’t bother. I think some people have already said they’re not going to comment here because this frustrates them and makes them angry. I’ll bet that’s why they call you a troll, because you frustrate them and make them angry. Not because they think you’re arguing in bad faith.
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July 9th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Sorry I’m not participating in this thread — I have a cartooning deadline to work on, and engaging in threads like these isn’t good for my creative process. (One reason I’ve cut back on “Alas” stuff in general as I’ve gotten more into cartooning.)
I’m sure I’ll come back to the ideas here again, but for now, apologies to folks who find my departure frustrating.
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July 9th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Acheman:
Good.
Specifically It’s good that you are reading me and thinking. It’s also good that I confuse you.
The reason that it’s good that I confuse you, is because that’s a very positive indicator that you really are reading me and thinking, and not just pinning labels on me and attributing views to me that I don’t actually hold.
I have a problem with the word “too”, in the above, which is prejudicial because it frames men’s injuries as adjoint and subordinate to women’s - hense begs the very question at issue. It’s a minor point, a quibble really, but the incremental effect of many instances of the same kind of framing is to prejudice the discussion quite significantly.
On the other hand if I challenge the usage, then the risk is that a discussion about language ensues, which derails the substantive discussion. So I’m damned if I make an issue of it, and damned if I don’t.
No, I don’t know that. I know that it is claimed that globally, poverty is massively feminised.
What I don’t know, is where it is on the scale between “true, for reasons which aren’t obvious” and “180 degree reversal of the truth”. All I can say for certain is that it is not obviously true. Neither of us can see the extent of male and female poverty. We depend upon a body of discourse to inform us. But what if that body of discourse were tainted? What if it lacked empirical foundation? What if it simply isn’t true, or if it misrepresents the truth in some significant way.
It’s claimed (including by none other than the UNHCR itself*) that Eighty percent of casualties by small arms are women and children, who far outnumber military casualties. But that’s a 180 degree reversal of the truth. It’s claimed that just two percent of rape accusations are false, but that claim lacks empirical foundation. It’s claimed that there is a major problem with women being murdered in Ciudad Juárez, but that, while literally true, is a gross misrepresentation of what is happening out there.
(*Actually by a non-peer reviewed activist magazine published under the auspices of the UNHCR, but that suffices for citation in scholarly literature)
All these claims are supported by bodies of scholarly discourse. So why should I believe that this claim is any closer to the truth than those others?
I agree it’s not sophisticated. But five minutes is not enough. Have you checked any of the citations in Mayra Buvinic paper? Choose one single claim - any one you like - and try to trace it back to its source. What is the empirical basis for the claim?
See this post for an example of where I did precisely that, in respect of just one paragraph of a paper by Patricia Hynes, which Ampersand had cited in one of his posts. Here’s what I concluded:
If you follow up just one of the links in this comment, let it be that one. It is an object lesson in how badly the argument from authority can fail.
I will reply separately to your remarks on the 100M missing women.
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July 9th, 2008 at 8:58 am
As your own cite shows, single childfree women are not the slightest bit worse off than their male counterparts. In fact they are probably better off on average, since they will be doing less dangerous jobs, on average, for the same pay on average. That single mothers are financially worse of than single fathers is probably down to the fact that women tend get custody by default, while men only get custody if they are well-motivated. But well-motivated men in one respect are likely to be well-motivated in others, such as in providing for their families.
Note that I am not saying that there is a difference between men and women in terms of their motivation. I’m saying that there is a selection effect. Custody arrangements select for motivation more in the case of men than women.
In other words, I conjecture that the difference between single parents of the one and the other sex is an artifact of the privilege enjoyed by women in terms of custody. (Of course, it’s only a privilege if you want it. It’s a disprivilege that women who might prefer otherwise tend to get lumbered with custody. My understanding is that most women want custody, so this is more of a privilege than a disprivilege)
There are other selection effects. Poor men are more likely than poor women to end up in prison, resulting in their exclusion from statistics like this. But a poor man in prison is still a poor man, so if you attribute to each prisoner the income that he would need to give him the standard of living that he actually gets, (pretty low), and factor that into your statistics, the average income for single men would be lower.
The economic dependancy of homemakers on breadwinners is an issue, I don’t deny, but there are also advantages to the homemaker to this arrangement. They get the benefits of the breadwinners income without paying the price that the breadwinner does. For example, my mother enjoyed the income of a soldier without ever setting foot in a war zone. All the risk was borne by my father. My father became a soldier because the only other career option open to him was an apprentice welder in a shipyard. That’s what he did for three years after leaving school at fourteen. In those three years he had the tips of his thumbs torn off in a grinder, his foot smashed by some item of dropped metalwork, and he was temporarily blinded several time by the flashover of an arc welder. At seventeen he decided that life as a solider would be safer.
None of this invalidates your point about dependency. My point is that dependency isn’t the only factor that should be considered when considering the position of the homemaker as compared with the breadwinner. Like men, women can choose to remain single and just win bread for themselves. Your statistics show that this is a viable option for them. Or they can choose to enter into a homemaker arrangement, and many of them do. Men are less likely to have that option.
But are they more or less likely to be attacked?
I haven’t looked at the intersect of age and gender in respect of street violence, but I do know that women generally are much less likely to be attacked than men, yet they are more fearful. Instead of terrifying women with tales of “epidemics” and “tides of violence”, the organisers of “Take back the Night” marches should do so under the slogan “Take back the night, because there really isn’t anything to worry about”.
Until they do that, I will not blame the patriarchy for women’s fear.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 9:33 am
[...] On the other hand it would appear that none of the feminists there can explain exactly what “privilege” is, how it works, why it works, who is affected most and how one would make such a determination. Initially I assumed this occurred as a matter of unwillingness. However, given the number reasonably capable feminists commenting there who still cannot seem to address the questions raised, perhaps they literally cannot explain the concept beyond what Sammy refers to as “standpoint epistemology.” [...]
This comment was written by Yet Even More On Checklists | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 10:09 am
Joe,
I don’t think the regulars “enjoy” arguing the same arguments over and over again. There is simply a dislike for letting the anti-feminist bullshit stand — the blog is (or at least was) often read by feminists new to the blogosphere, and they don’t necessarily have the benefit of having seen this argument play over 50 times.
I, however, have vanishingly little interest in it. Which is more or less why I’m not going to argue the like 900,000,000 points of illogic Daran has brought up here. I came in to try to manage social dynamics, not try to argue reason with someone who has a great deal of time to squander on the discussion and also thinks disenfranchisement is no biggie.
I still read a number of feminist blogs where stuff that’s actually interesitng happens. But mostly Alas just makes me tired.
Update: The comments threads, that is.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Threads that touch on the recapitulation of existing power systems in mod-free spaces. Note that I’m not endorsing everything anyone ever said on them ever.
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2005/12/28/why-alas-needs-radical-feminist-woman-only-threads/
http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2007/04/17/the-moderation-policy/
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Setting aside the skewed arguments about custody cases, this sounds an awful like conservative arguments about poverty. If you’re poor, it must be because you’re too stupid or lack motivation. If you’re better-off, then by golly you must have earned it through all of your hard work. This statement makes it sound like single mothers just aren’t as “motivated” to provide for their families, and that’s why there is a gap in household earning. (It couldn’t be the de facto segregation of men and women into certain jobs, and the associated pay scale.) You need to prove that men who have custody are somehow more “motivated” before making any of these inferences. Not to mention the implication that there is a definite correlation between “motivation” and earnings among single parents.
Men sometimes get custody for a lot of the same reasons that women sometimes get custody–the other partner is unwilling and/or unavailable. You do know that in contested custody cases, men are awarded custody about as often as women, right?
As for gender and global poverty, you have suggested that the statistics are wrong without providing any reason why this is so, except for an irrelevant claim about war victims. If you have the backing to disprove the claim that women and children do not make up the majority of impoverished people on a global scale, then show us why this fairly well-established claim is false. Don’t just talk about something else trying to “prove” the argument. That’s not an argument.
This comment was written by Sarah.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Incoming POV from a serial lurker.
Re: the Mandolin/Daran thing. I don’t know about everyone else, but even if I (sometimes) agree with Daran, I stop reading the two page long diatribes after awhile. Nothing else is being said that wasn’t said earlier. We got your point long before, and you aren’t really adding anything new. Daran, you said something awhile back about how you have to be told to leave, you don’t take hints. IMHO, those shouldn’t be the two possibilities (leaving or continuing to doggedly argue). There’s also the “I think I got my point across. They don’t agree with me, and that’s OK” point.
This comment was written by plunky.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Hi, Plunky, thanks for your delurk and you POV.
I realise there is a problem with my two-page long (and longer) diatribes not being read, or being skimmed. That’s a matter of presentation. What I don’t know is what to do about it, given my goal, which is to support the contention that w > m is a better model of reality than m > w.
I don’t know whether “we” got my point, whoever “we” is supposed to be. My guess is that if each of “we” individually posted a comment stating my point, a small number of you will have got it, a much larger number will have kinda, sorta, partly got it, and some won’t have got it at all.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Daran, it might help your readability if you let all the petty shit go and just focused on whatever your main point is.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Sarah:
Any similarity between my arguments and those of conservatives are 1. Superficial and 2. Coincidental.
I suspect that oversimplifies conservatives’ arguments, but I’m not, um, motivated at this point to analyse their positions. I’m having enough difficulty expressing my own.
I’m would certainly not agree that stupidity and demotivation are the reasons for poverty. Poverty is multicausal. On the other hand, I would have thought it self-evident that stupidity and demotivation are two causal factors among many, which contribute to poverty.
Furthermore, I would argue that there are social forces beyond the control of the poor, which operate to demotivate and stupify them. Thus I would argue that “stupid” is the wrong word here. “Punch-drunk” would be better. I speak as someone who is demotivated, stupified, punchdrunk, and consequently poor.
To summarise:
1. I attribute poverty to many social forces, not solely or primarily the personal characteristics of the poor.
2. The personal characteristics of the poor are themselves the products of social forces.
I believe these views put me firmly in the liberal/progressive camp.
I’m sorry that my argument sounds that way. It really isn’t. Do you understand the concept of a selection effect?
I haven’t focussed on custody. (My main research specialisation is war attrocity). There is lot about custody that I don’t know.
Again, selection effects are important.
You claim that this statistic is well-established. What do you mean by that? That it is accepted by many scholars? So what? I gave you examples of facts accepted by many scholars which are demonstrably false, emprirically unfounded, or literally true but misleading.
Show me (and, more importantly, show yourself) that these statistics are empirically well-founded, which is the only kind of “well-established” that matters. Track them back to their sources. If you can show that this statistic has a better foundation than somebody’s best guess, then I will happily donate $100 or its Sterling equivalent to the charity of your choice.
(And both of us will be the better for the deal. You will have learned something, and through you, so will I.)
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
As I said, I’m damned if I do and I’m damned if I don’t. But not all damnations are equal, so your point is taken.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
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This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 9th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I agree. This is only place where I still come to discuss politics regularly. Very bullshit-free.
It’s been hard to keep out of this discussion, because I find it so interesting, but I too generally shy away from discussions dominated by the regulars. They tend to be heated, in-depth discussions about gender issues, which I usually don’t have super-strong opinions about, and jumping in and playing food-for-thought, I’m-just-a-fence-sitter guy being a very obnoxious thing to do and all. (And if anyone feels I’ve done just that with this post, I’d like to apologize pre-emptively.)
Hmm. I don’t know… the draft has been used as legitimizing full citizenship: students’ conscription into Vietnam lowered the voting age to 18, Black men’s conscription into WWII provided part of the impetus for the civil rights movement. So I do think you have a point.
But I also think there are some major differences between jury duty and the draft. People want women off the draft lists because they believe women are incapable of violence and would be a hindrance to the army, and use this absence in a roundabout way to argue against their equality in other areas. People want women off the jury lists because they believe women are incapable of impartial reason. Big difference, in my view.
Ultimately, I don’t buy the feminist argument that the gender-specific demands of violence placed on men always carry with it a “but”, as in “but this just demeans women even more when you think about it”. For instance, the gender-specific physical violence of male bullies, which scars both the bullied and those forced to bully, is a specific male disadvantage, period, in my opinion. But the draft, with its political history, is more of a double-edged sword. I suspect most women would rather be drafted than to hear the draft used to justify the glass ceiling and occupational segregation and the like.
(EDIT: Note to Daran: I’m not implicating you in the last paragraph, I know you don’t support either the glass ceiling or occupational segregation. However, it’s plain fact that the draft has been used in this way by other people.)
This comment was written by sylphhead.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Mandolin, thank you for your links.
In respect of the first, I must decline, as far as the comments thread is concerned. At the very least, you will need to point out more specifically what it is that explains what you meant by “power dynamic”. It’s not reasonable for you to expect me to wade through 441 comments, none of them by you, in the hope of gleaning what you meant in your comment above.
I did, however, read both posts, and your own comments from the second thread. The latter in particular was most instructive. I guess by “power dynamic” you mean this:
I am still at a loss as to what it was that I did “again” in that thread, unless it was “Yet again, Daran responded to some of the unkind remarks feminists made about him”. To that I plead guilty. A careful review of my comments on that thread will show that I did nothing else.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Oh, and another thing:
Mandolin:
Are you endorsing everything any feminist ever said on them, ever?
If you do not wish to be presumed to endorse the view of every member of a group to which you voluntarily affiliate, might I also plea to be freed from the presumed association with various “buddies” that I have no philosophical or political connection to whatsoever?
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 2:07 am
Daran, I don’t blame you or think you’ve broken any specific blog rules or anything. But I also don’t like the way you’ve completely dominated this thread.
So with all due respect, please don’t post in this thread again.
(I’m sure your readers will be hearing about this on your blog…)
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 2:08 am
Oh, why thank you! Without your assistance, how would I ever have divined what was reasonable?
I have no desire to debate this with you, Daran. You asked what I was referring to; I gave you the links. If I asked you to define all the social effects of the impairment in facial expression recognition associated with Asperger’s syndrome, would I get to complain when you sent me to go off and read the studies on “Reading Emotion in the Eye” and etc. by Baron Cohen?
If you were actually interested in learning about what I’m saying, then you wouldn’t demand I respond to you with my personal attention. You’d actually go do the reading, do the learning, absorb things, inform yourself! It is not my role to play teacher.
You’re being really condescending to me and others (it’s *good* that I confuse you! paternalistic, much?), as well as chocking this thread with noise while failing to supply signal. Since you don’t “do hints”, I won’t hint; I think you’re being unreasonable and silly and unthoughtful toward others on this thread.
You’re usually not like this, and certainly not to this extent. I look forward to chatting with you again on another subject, in another place.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 10:17 am
Dianne: Maco: I see your point concerning the relative reproductive risks of losing too many women versus too many men, but I’m not sure it’s relevant in the modern world. We’re really at virtually no risk of running out of H sapiens any time soon.
We’ve never been at risk of running out of H sapiens. Throughout our history, though, smaller racial and cultural subsets of H sapiens have been absorbed, displaced, oppressed and destroyed by larger racial and cultural subsets of H sapiens.
Dianne: Few people enjoy jury duty. Most would rather not have to do it. But if a law were passed saying that group X is no longer eligible for jury duty, would you consider group X to be privileged or oppressed by that law?
Oppressed. Exemption from juries means X has no influence in matters of justice.
Still, if that’s the concern, why not draft only post-menopausal women?
What about pre-menopausal women who declare they don’t want children? It’s conceptually possible for a society to separate women from war, but I don’t think a society can split the hair much finer.
The even-handed nature of life seems to guarantee that most of the time, to gain something we want we have to give up something else we want. So we make a decision: do we value the social equality that would have come from five million women lying dead alongside the men at the Somme, Verdun, Ypres and other battlegrounds more than we value the preservation of their lives and the lives of all of their progeny?
I ponder the consequences of both options quite a lot, Dianne, because the implications of both vex me. I don’t know in God’s eyes which is the morally superior path, but a great many Americans and French and English and Italian and Russian et al are alive today who wouldn’t be if their mothers and grandmothers had met their end serving in war, and there are a great many Jews and Gypsies and Roma and of course people of many other nations that would be alive today if their mothers and grandmothers, killed as civilians, had been saved, and that means something to me. I accept it as an axiom that the future is inherited by survivors.
This comment was written by Maco.Report this comment to the moderators
July 10th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Just because we don’t send women to war doesn’t mean that plenty of women (and children, elderly, disabled, etc.) aren’t casualties of war. I’m sure there are plenty of Italian, French, British, German, Polish, Korean, Vietnamese, and Iraqi women who can testify to that, just as a starting point. One could argue that the continual denial of the civilian casualties of wars that we fight overseas is just one more example of privilege. We don’t want our women fighting in a war, but we also don’t want to hear about everyone else’s women getting shot, raped, stabbed, beaten or blown up.
The fact is that the military industrial complex of the US is intimately tied to an enormous power structure that has been largely held out of the reach of women. Women are separated from the military structure to protect us and in the process we just happen to be separated from a powerful clique that runs a good chunk of our government and money. And it’s that power structure that negates women’s participation from within the US and ignores the horrific effects it’s wars have on women overseas.
Sorry for the slight rant…i’m really bothered by the idea that women are too precious to risk in a war, mostly because i think that is a convenient myth. Women may be too precious to be given a gun and armor and training, but they certainly aren’t too precious to be on the recieving end of a bomb.
This comment was written by bradana.Report this comment to the moderators
July 11th, 2008 at 4:28 am
[...] Ampersand: Daran, I don’t blame you or think you’ve broken any specific blog rules or anything. But I also don’t like the way you’ve completely dominated this thread. [...]
This comment was written by The Irony | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators
July 11th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Seeing how passionately people argue the merits of these lists inspired me to create a list that illustrates why people take these privilege lists so seriously: the Victim Privilege List
This comment was written by Sweating Through Fog.Report this comment to the moderators
September 21st, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Hmm, I get people demanding that I smile or upgrade my feelings so that I am “having a nice day” and have for some time.
But generally, it is good for people to read lists like this, and to see them in context (since the contents of a list like this change over time).
This comment was written by Stephen M (Ethesis).Report this comment to the moderators
March 22nd, 2009 at 3:55 am
[...] She doesn’t use the “D” word, and the thread doesn’t descend into attacks. The topic of how the dynamics discussed affect boys is even allowed to continue - in it’s orthodox feminist framing. But the original criticism of that framing was suppressed. See also this critique.[↩] [...]
This comment was written by In a fair (little) light (Part 1) | Feminist Critics.Report this comment to the moderators