From “How Schools Shortchange Girls,” by the American Association of University Women:

A large body of research indicates that teachers give more classroom attention and more esteem building encouragement to boys. In a study conducted by Myra and David Sadker, boys in elementary and middle school called out answers eight times more often than girls. When boys called out, teachers listened. But when girls called out, they were told to “raise your hand if you want to speak.” Even when boys do not volunteer, teachers are more likely to encourage them to give an answer or an opinion than they are to encourage girls.

From the journal Childhood Education (v73 p36-9 Fall 1996):

Teachers call on and interact with boys more than girls (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). This is probably not intentional. During the numerous teacher-student interactions that occur over the course of the school day, boys use creative and effective techniques to catch the teacher’s attention. Boys quickly raise their hands to respond or contribute to discussions, wave their hand around and up and down, change the arm they have raised when it gets tired, jump out of their seat and make noise or plead with the teacher to call on them. Girls, however, raise their hand but will soon put it down if they are not acknowledged. As a result, teachers call on boys and interact with them most of the time, while girls’ passive, compliant behavior often means they are ignored. […]

In addition to allowing boys more time to respond, teachers often extend boy’s answers by asking a follow-up question or by asking them to support their previous response. Girls are more likely to receive an “accepted” response from teachers such as “Okay” or “Uh-huh.” […]Carmen’s answer prompted only the comment “Okay.” These behaviors send a very negative message about the importance of girls’ contributions to class discussions. […]

Teachers tolerate more calling out from boys than from girls. Boys call out answers (when the teacher does not call on them) eight times more often than girls do (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). Teachers often respond to boys’ calling out, thus reinforcing the behavior. When girls call out, however, teachers are more likely to remind them that they are not following the class rules. […]

In one area females usually receive more attention than boys–physical appearance. Girls receive compliments more often than boys on their clothing, hairstyle and overall appearance (Sadker & Sadker, 1994). This emphasis on appearance also influences how their school work is evaluated (Dweck, Davidson, Nelson & Enna, 1978). Girls receive praise for neatness while boys receive recognition for academic achievements.

From “Gender issues in the classroom” (Clearing House, Jul/Aug97, Vol. 70, Issue 6).

David and Myra Sadker researched gender equity in the classroom for over twenty years, and in a 1989 investigation with Lynette Long they explored the progress of gender equity in classrooms since the passage of Title IX. In a follow-up book, Failing at Fairness: How America’s Schools Cheat Girls (1995), the Sadkers, drawing on numerous interviews with students and teachers, found that micro-inequities occur daily in classroom interactions. Included in their study, which investigated verbal interaction patterns in elementary, secondary, and college classrooms in a variety of settings and subject areas, are the findings that girls receive fewer academic contacts, are asked lower level questions, and are provided less constructive feedback and encouragement than boys — all of which translates into reduced preparation for independent effort. The Sadkers posit that this imbalance in attention, coupled with the quality and quantity of interaction, results in the lowering of girls’ levels of achievement and self-esteem.

There is a need for more recent research; I certainly hope things have improved. However, the relatively few recent academic articles on this subject usually find that bias in the classroom remains a problem.¹ And even if things are getting better, the effects of how children were taught 10, 20, 40 years ago will unfortunately be with us for quite some time.

1. Recent examples include “Gender Bias In The Classroom,” Childhood Education v. 81 no. 4, Summer 2005, p. 221-7; and “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior,” Elementary School Journal, Sep2001, Vol. 102 Issue 1. (back)

I’ve completely swiped these links from the sidebar at Official Shrub.com, and from Lake Desire’s list at New Game Plus.

• White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack
  This is Peggy McIntosh’s original article, which inspired the other lists. There’s a number of interesting discussions of this list on the women’s studies listserv archive.
• Able-Bodied Privilege
• Average Sized Person Privilege
• Being Poor Is…
  This one isn’t actually in the “privilege checklist” format, but I think it fits in.
• Christian Privilege
• The Costs of American Privilege
  Okay, this one isn’t even a list. But as Lake Desire says, let’s shoehorn it in here so that American privilege will at least get a mention.
• Daily Effects of Straight Priviliege
• Heterosexual Privilege
• The Invisibility of Class Privilege (pdf link)
• The Male Privilege Checklist
  My own contribution to the trend; probably the most-read piece I’ve ever written (or, in this case, compiled).
• Non-Poor Privilege Checklist
• Non-Trans Privilege Checklist
• Privilege to Game
  Lake Desire’s list of how privilege, gaming and boycotts intersect
• Social Class Privilege – Beyond Ethnicity, Gender, and Religion (.pdf link)
• We Can’t Be Equal While…
  Not really a “privilege” list, but similar enough in spirit that I wanted to include it. One thing I like about this list is that it includes ways that sexism harms both sexes.

I’m hoping that the comments to this post can be used to interactively keep this post up-to-date. So if you know of a link that you think is relevant to this post, or if you notice that one of these links has died, please leave a comment.

UPDATE: Maia has a critique.

“Chuckdarwin,” while criticizing the Male Privilege Checklist, wrote:

24. If I have sex with a lot of people, it won’t make me an object of contempt or derision.

Two words: Bill. Clinton.

Bill Clinton suffered derision for cheating on his wife while being president. Is Chuck seriously arguing this is an example of the typical male experience? Do typical men face an angry Republican party and thousands of scandal-hungry reporters?

A few books and many scholarly articles have documented the “slut” phenomenon in US high schools - two examples are Fast Girls and Slut! Growing Up Female With A Bad Reputation. If any genuine parallel to slut-bashing exists for boys, I’ve never encountered it, heard it spoken of, or read about it in any academic source. My conclusion is that “slut” represents a genuine double-standard.

(In his comments, Chuck suggested “rent-boy.” But rent-boy isn’t a male counterpart of “slut”; it’s a male counterpart of “hooker.” Not the same thing.)

Nonetheless, I wonder if I should reword #24, because it implies that the “slut” label is applied to a woman or girl based on how many people she chooses to sleep with. In real life, it’s not that simple. Research on slut-labeling in US high schools suggests that girls are labeled as sluts for reasons other than their own behavior. The girl labeled a “slut” isn’t necessarily having more sex than other girls; but she’s usually set apart from the other girls in some other way, such as less money, earlier puberty, or being a recent new arrival.

From a review of the book Fast Girls:

White presents her victims of the slut rumor as girls whose identity was chosen for them, as opposed to one they brought on themselves. “Being a slut is not a story about the body so much as all the things that have been spoken about the body” (50). She presents the “slut” as a universal character, inevitably found at all high schools. White first proves that the designated reputation of the slut is born from redundantly similar rumors and this character exists in every school. By universalizing the slut role, White depersonalizes this image and emphasizes the lack of autonomy that girls face when, through no control of their own, they are suddenly cursed with a scarlet letter of sorts. After reading this book, there can be no plausible argument that starts with, “well she must have done something to deserve it.”

In a lengthy and sometimes drifting explanation of the Jungian archetype, White presents the slut as an unconscious rendering of the fear of female sexuality. She describes teenagers in limbo, as they attempt to compromise between messages of excessive sex as bad and their raging hormones. White states that teenagers try to make sense of this contradiction by drawing lines of good and bad. “By turning one girl into the slut among them, the kids try to reassure themselves that they are on the right side of fate: they are good while she is evil… They have the right kind of desire while she has the wrong kind” (59).

I think I’ll rewrite #24 to say There is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” But I’m open to suggestions, too - let me know what you think.

(This is one of a number of posts responding to Chuck’s critique. You can use the category archive to see all posts related to the Male Privilege Checklist.)

In the comments of Chuck’s livejournal entry about the Male Privilege Checklist, Miss Fahrenheit wrote that “#42 just makes me angry because I know it’s wrong, but Google isn’t throwing up any helpful statistics I can scream about.”

Here’s what #42 says: “If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.”

I based #42 on the Centers for Disease Control’s report on intimate violence, which is (as far as I know) the largest and best-conducted study of intimate violence done in the US to date. According to this study, women are 14 times as likely to have been beaten up by an intimate partner at some point in their lives than men (8.5% versus 0.6%).

The study asked about many kinds of violence, ranging from being shoved to being attacked with a gun. In all categories, women were more likely to have been attacked by an intimate partner than men, and the discrepancies got larger as the violence became more serious. I focused on “beat up” because, unlike items like “threw something” or “pushed” (is a push a bone-jarring crash into a wall, or a painless, flirting push on the shoulder? What if someone pushed only in self-defense, or to escape?), “beat up” has little ambiguity, and implicitly contains a negative outcome.

They also found that men who had cohabited with a male partner were three times as likely to report having been assaulted by a partner as men who had only lived with opposite-sex partners.

Other studies have suggested that men and women are equal victims of intimate violence, but none of those studies are as large or well-conducted as the CDC’s study. Please see this past post for a much more in-depth discussion of “husband-battering” and intimate violence statistics.

(This is one of a number of posts responding to Chuck’s critique. You can use the category archive to see all posts related to the Male Privilege Checklist.)

* * *PLEASE NOTE* * *
Discussion on this post is reserved for feminists and pro-feminists only. If you don’t thinik you’d be considered a feminist by Amp, you’d probably be better off posting comments on the same post at Creative Destruction.

“Chuckdarwin,” while criticizing the Male Privilege Checklist, wrote:

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent.

Harsh. Strident. Unprovable. I know single dads that no one has ever called ‘extraordinary’.

#11 is anecdotal (as is your rebuttal), but a lot of the anecdotes are from custody cases, where fathers have sometimes been given a lot of credit for fairly minimal parenting time, compared to what is the norm for most mothers. This is the sort of observation that isn’t provable; I think we’ll have to disagree on this one.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.

Plenty of parents don’t encourage any of their children to be active at all.

It’s true, of course, that regardless of sex too many children have parents who provide poor or rare encouragement. But that in no way disproves my point. As I said in the list’s introduction, nothing about the list claims that men (or boys) never have bad experiences.

#16 - which I intended to refer not only to treatment by parents, but also treatment by teachers and by other children - is very well documented in the social science literature (I’ve included some references at the bottom of this post). For example, the various Baby X studies, which have found that adults perceive and treat the same baby very differently depending on if they’re told it’s a boy or a girl. (Some recent studies suggest that this effect has been declining over the years, which I’d say is to feminism’s credit).

It should be noted that the gender expectations put on too many children is not a benefit for all boys. In particular, boys who can’t live up to stereotypical gender role expectations often face emotional abuse from adults and peers, as well as physical abuse from peers.

References
Read the rest of this entry »

Criticizing the Male Privilege Checklist in his livejournal, Chuck writes:

25. There are value-neutral clothing choices available to me; it is possible for me to choose clothing that doesn’t send any particular message to the world.

Really? All clothing denotes class, IMO. I don’t own a single item of designer clothing. What does that say about me as a man?

Chuck’s point about class is well taken.

I would argue, however, that there are more “does this send the wrong message?” wardrobe concerns for women than men. “Will this look too sexy?,” “will this make me look unfeminine,” etc.. As Rougewench wrote in Chuck’s comments, “the vast majority of clothing choices for men, with the exception of what you might find in a clubwear catalog (read as International Male) do not denote messages as to the morality of the wearer.”

In light of all this, I feel I should rewrite item 25, but I’m not certain what the new wording should say. If anyone has any suggestions, please post them in comments.

Of course, there is a male disadvantage that’s a counterpart to the female disadvantage - women are far freer to wear so-called “male” clothing styles without harassment than men are to wear women’s (i.e., a woman in slacks is nothing unusual in the US, a man in a dress is often harassed and sometimes worse). I think sexism harms women more than men, on the whole, but it’s clear to me that men are hurt by this system, too.

26. My wardrobe and grooming are relatively cheap and consume little time.

Metrosexuals, even? I know men who spend an hour every day getting ready.

Yes, there are exceptions to the rule. Exceptions do not represent the whole, however, and do not invalidate the general point.

Besides, being a metrosexual (that is, a man who likes very fashionable clothing and grooms himself with great care) is a choice. But for many women, not only social pressure (which is bad enough) but their jobs require them to spend more on clothing than their male counterparts, regardless of what they’d prefer. The ordinary work wardrobe of an office or retail worker, most of whom don’t have the option of quitting their jobs, is cheaper for men than women - and the disparity is larger still when the costs of hair and makeup are included.

(This is one of a number of posts responding to Chuck’s critique. You can use the category archive to see all posts related to the Male Privilege Checklist.)

“Chuckdarwin,” while criticizing the Male Privilege Checklist, wrote:

5. The odds of my encountering sexual harassment on the job are so low as to be negligible.

Anecdotal. Unprovable. As a manager, I have fired people for sexually harassing men at work.

I looked into this after reading Chuck’s post, and I think he has a point. #5 is too strongly worded; in the US, according to Federal EEOC statistics, the proportion of sexual harassment charges filed by women has dropped from about 90% to about 85% over the last decade. Therefore, I’ve rewritten #5 to say “I am far less likely to face sexual harassment at work than my female co-workers are.”

27. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car.

Salesmen just want your money, no matter who you are. While it may still happen in rare cases, this is just neurotic tinfoil hattery and an unimportant concern in the grand scheme of women’s issues.

That this happens - and doesn’t appear to be a matter of “rare cases” - has been documented by sending male and female negotiators, trained to use identical negotiating techniques, to car lots to negotiate for cars. The initial offers made to men are simply better. (This doesn’t mean that women will always pay more, just that they’ll have to negotiate harder to reach the same price.) (References at bottom of post).

Admittedly, the academic research I’ve read only applies to the US. However, a November 2005 story in The Guardian reported that a non-academic British study had found similar results.

What Car? magazine sent men and women into 45 dealerships across England, and used hidden cameras and microphones to track their progress.

The team found the women were quoted up to £1,800 more to buy a BMW 320i, Ford Focus 1.6, Nissan X-Trail 2.2 dCi, Vauxhall Corsa 1.2 and Volkswagen Beetle Cabriolet 1.6. On average they were asked to pay a premium of £534. [That’s $1,005 U.S. -Amp]

Less than half the staff were happy to cut prices for female customers, compared with more than four-fifths for men.

More women thought their inquiry had not been taken seriously by the dealer, and complained that finance packages had not been explained. Even the presence of a man appeared to cut prices, with couples offered a better deal even if the woman took the lead.

In general, the theory that the free market prevents market-based discrimination from happening - “Salesmen just want your money, no matter who you are,” as Chuck puts it - has not been supported by the experiences of discriminated-against groups, or by empirical testing.

37. If I have a wife or girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks.

This one is just plain old insulting.

#37 is well-supported by tons of research, from a large number of countries (I’ve included a handful of citations at the bottom of this post). Women do more household chores, and in particular are more likely to scrub the toilet, wash dishes, change the diapers, etc - tasks that must be repeated again and again, day after day.

I don’t see why any man should find this insulting. Some men do as much or more housework than the women they live with (I live with such a man), but statistically these men are a minority; why be insulted because I point this fact out?

41. I am not expected to spend my entire life 20-40 pounds underweight.

Come on, now. This is all based on ‘target weight’, which is in no way an exact science (and that’s as nice as I can be about the ’subject’). No one EXPECTS any woman to be 40 pounds underweight. Some famous models and actresses may try this, but most people actually say it’s a BAD thing (reading the tabloids whilst in line to purchase groceries).

41. Probably I could have phrased this better - in particular, including a particular poundage was a mistake. So point well taken. I’ll have to reword this item.

But I feel that Chuck is focusing on the trees and ignoring the forest. Is there any serious doubt that women as a group face much more pressure than men to be thin?

(This is one of a number of posts responding to Chuck’s critique. You can use the category archive to see all posts related to the Male Privilege Checklist.)

References
Read the rest of this entry »

On the Male Privilege Checklist (henceforth “the list,”) I wrote:

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are so low as to be negligible.

Karmaq, writing in The Unseen Kid’s comments, responded:

I question some of the stats… For example, the myth that rape only happens to men in prison (or gay men), when the FBI stats (if you want to believe the FBI) are that it happens way more often than we think. No one wants to talk about and even if they do, no one wants to hear about it. But I’ve met enough men (straight, never been in jail) who have talked to me about it (cause people tend to tell me stuff they don’t normally share) that I tend to suspect the FBI’s “1 in 7 men; 1 in 3or4 women” had some validity.

My response to Karmaq:

First, Karmaq is mistaken about what the FBI’s statistics say. The FBI only counts the small proportion of rapes that are reported to police, and they calculate their numbers per year, rather than per lifetime. As a result, the FBI’s numbers are far, far, far lower than the numbers you provide here. Most importantly, because the FBI’s inexcusably sexist definition of rape excludes men (”forcible rape, as defined in the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will”), the FBI’s numbers are irrelevant to Karmaq’s point.

Second, contrary to Karmaq’s remarks, I never claimed that “rape happens only to men in prison (or gay men).” That would obviously not be true.

What I said is, that for men who aren’t in prison, the chances of being raped are very low, and I stand by that claim.

According to this study by the Centers for Disease Control, 15% of women and 2% of men in the US have ever been raped in their lifetime. That difference alone is enough to justify my statement. (The CDC’s numbers are based on interviews with a representative sample of the US population, not on police reports.)

Although the CDC’s is one of the best rape prevalence studies, I believe their results underestimate the prevalence of rape, especially for women. One particularly striking (but not at all unusual, as these studies go) flaw of the CDC’s survey is that their interview questions didn’t include a specific question asking about rapes that take place while the victims are unconscious or otherwise unable to resist due to drink or drugs - which is to say, a prototypical frat-house rape. Of course, anyone can be raped while passed out, but anecdotally I believe it happens significantly more often to women. (Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any good studies addressing this question, so anecdotal evidence is all I have.)

Readers may be wondering, of that 2% of men who report having been raped, how many were raped in prison? The CDC did not ask if rapes took place while incarcerated, so there’s no way of knowing what portion of the 2% of raped men, were raped in prison. However, it’s at least plausible that a significant portion of that 2% represents prison rape.

According to this Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 5% of US men have been in prison at some point in their lives. If one in ten men are raped while in prison - and some studies suggest prison rape prevalence may be that high or much higher - that would account for a quarter of all the male rape victims in the US. So although this is speculative, it’s plausible that a substantial number of the 2% of American men who have been raped, were raped while in prison.

Does it matter where rape takes place or who the victims are? In every moral sense, it does not matter. No one deserves to be raped. Prison rape is rape, and is totally inexcusable. Rape is rape, evil and wrong no matter where or to whom it happens. Every rape victim deserves sympathy and support.

But one point of the male privilege checklist is to make visible some ways a male-centric society harms women. (I believe that male-centric societies also harm men, but that’s a subject for a different post). Pretending that there’s no statistical difference in the likelihood of being raped goes against that purpose. In that context, that rape in ordinary US society is a crime overwhelmingly committed by men against women is important, and must be acknowledged.

It should be noted that the prison rape epidemic is probably going to get worse. Over the next couple of decades, the proportion of male rape victims may increase, because the proportion of men who have been in prison is projected to skyrocket. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ projections, if our current rate of sending men to prison is maintained, then at some point in the future 15% of American men will have spent time in prison. (6% of white men, 17% of Latinos, and 32% of Black men. For comparison’s sake, the projections for women are 1%, 2% and 6%.)

If those projections are true (or even partly true), and if the prison rape epidemic continues unabated, the overall number of American rape victims will vastly increase over the coming decades. This is true even if rape prevalence outside of prison doesn’t change at all. This is one reason why it’s essential to support strong measures to combat prison rape; unfortunately, all that’s gotten through congress so far are weak half-measures.

* * *Please Note* * *
My posts on “Alas” are sometimes heavily moderated. If you’d like to avoid that, you can instead leave a comment on the identical post at Creative Destruction.

There’s a new round of discussion of the “Male Privilege Checklist” going on, mostly on Livejournals. Usually I don’t respond to these criticisms, because usually the folks who write them are too far on the insulting and smug side.

But this time, for some reason, I found myself responding. Naturally a couple of my responses were rejected by Livejournal for being too long, and I thought “might as well put this stuff on Alas.”

ChuckDarwin (who seems to be a Kos-style leftist) posted his critique of the Male Privilege Checklist on two livejournals, here and here. I include both links because I’ll be referring not only to Chuck’s post, but also to comments left by readers in each livejournal.

Chuck writes:

This list is full of rash generalizations and woefully short on anything resembling facts, statistics or evidence. Some of the entries are patently true and hard to argue against. Other things on the list are simply untrue, unprovable, or completely based on anecdotal ‘evidence’. Some of the issues the author (B Deutsch, whomever that is) chooses to focus on are, in my opinion, embarrassingly petty and do more harm than good to the whole cause.

Regarding the lack of cites and evidence, point well taken. I’ve often thought that I should go through and add citations and the like for most of the items on the list, which would make the piece much stronger. But the staggering amount of work required - and the book-length blog post that would result - have intimidated me.

So my new plan is to gradually respond to critiques like Chuck’s, when they show up and when I feel like it :-), and to link each item on the list to the relevant responses I’ve written.

In my defense, the list isn’t intended as an argument to persuade skeptics. I do a lot of evidence-based argumentation in my other writings, as my regular readers know. But the list is not an argument that’s going to persuade anyone who isn’t already sympathetic to my view. Instead, the list is intended as a tool for feminists and people learning about feminism; a way to make visible some ways living in a male-centric society helps men and harms women, by compressing into an extremely compact form much of the research, essays and women’s writings I’ve read over the years. The list is probably read most often in college classes and on my blog - contexts in which readers will have had read enough background material to judge for themselves how fact-based and reasonable the list’s claims are.

1. Generalizations

Regarding generalizations, I reject Chuck’s contention that generalizations are necessarily bad. (I know he qualified “generalizations” with “rash,” but since he doesn’t support that description with a logical argument it seems like hand-waving). It’s true that some men get raped, for example, and on an individual level that’s 100% as awful and hideous as when women get raped. But should that prevent me from pointing out that in day-to-day life, women in general have much more reason to fear being raped than men in general?

There is almost no inequality that happens 100% to women and 0% to men. Or 100% to blacks and 0% to whites, for that matter, and so on for any other disadvantaged group imaginable. But that some inequalities generally happen more to women than to men (to the disabled than to the ablebodied, to American Indians than to whites, and so on) is something that serious people can legitimately discuss and be concerned with. Contrariwise, if we are unable to generalize, then we will be unable to discuss patterns of discrimination at all.

2. The Pettiness Charge

Further down in comments, Chuck expanded on the “pettiness” charge, writing:

We have women on this planet with REAL PROBLEMS and we’re going to fill our list with entries about our clothes and our weight issues?

Women in Iran are being sold into prostitution as children and then hanged for ‘promiscuous behaviour’… and the author of this list is going to concentrate on how long it takes to put on makeup. Shouldn’t the women with all the money and freedom the world has to offer (even if that money and freedom is fractionally less than that of their male counterparts) be trying to help the millions (billions?) of downtrodden women in China and Africa? […]

I think that, instead of focusing on little gripes (some of these 43 things are quite little comparatively), everyone needs to pull together to make sure that North Dakota and the new SCOTUS don’t overturn Roe v Wade.

2a. Not An Either-Or Choice

My reflexive response is to point out that Chuck’s implication - that because I wrote about issues he considers “petty” in a single document, I therefore don’t spend time on “real problems” - is ridiculous. It’s not an either-or choice. I compiled that list, and since then I’ve written thousands of posts on hundreds of issues, and I’ve volunteered, and I’ve given money.

Offhand, I can think of two large national US organizations whose politics are devoted entirely to reproductive rights (NARAL and Planned Parenthood), and four national feminist organizations that spend a lot of time working for reproductive rights (NOW, Feminist Majority, Emily’s List, Legal Momentum). There are probably lots more. But I can’t think of one comparable feminist organization which has given similar attention to the makeup issue, and I bet Chuck can’t either. So what is the basis of Chuck’s complaint? That if anyone, ever, in any instance, mentions a issue he has judged “petty,” that’s too much?

But that reflexive response of mine, while correct in pointing out the gross unfairness of Chuck’s assumptions, concedes too much to Chuck’s argument.

2b. The unreasonable double-standard

Chuck’s standards are unreasonable. Is there anyone who ignores all local issues so long as, somewhere in the world, someone is suffering worse? Pretty much anyone who isn’t concentrating full-time on the genocide and mass rapes going on in Darfur can legitimately be said to be using their time on something other than the most immediately pressing issue in the world today.

(Every time I see this critique of feminists, I’m struck by what hypocrites the critics are. I’ve never seen a “how dare feminists write about makeup” critic whose own writings didn’t include some less than earth-shaking concerns. Chuck, for example, has recently posted about the etymology of “y’all” and about what’s on the telly (he’s pissed that American Idol is so popular, and I can’t blame him). Since Chuck doesn’t write exclusively about immediate life-or-death matters, why does he think it’s fair to hold me to that standard?)

Not only is it an inevitable human condition that most people are interested in analyzing what happens in their daily lives, it’s probably a good thing. A feminist movement that considers day-to-day sexism too petty to ever discuss would be ivory-tower and snobby. A well-rounded feminism - like a well-rounded life - should include many concerns and many approaches. The demand that we ignore “petty” local issues is a demand that we stop acting like human beings.

2c. Who decides what is “petty”?

Why does Chuck imagine he has the perspective to declare what is and isn’t important? Chuck thinks weight is a petty issue, but I doubt the parents of anorexia patients would agree. If a woman spends her entire life feeling inadequate and wrong because of her weight, that’s not Rwanda, but neither is it nothing. Makeup seems less like a petty issue when you consider that women have been fired from their jobs for not wearing it. And so on. Similar responses could be made for most of the other issues Chuck considers “petty.”

My favorite example of Chuck’s parochial view of “petty” is when he dismisses the wage gap as whiny first world women being paid “fractionally less.” It’s so easy for someone whose sex or race places them on the happy side of the wage gap to say that; but I bet if Chuck got a 5% or 10% or 20% pay cut, he might find that “fractional” amounts matter.

Even seemingly small problems can build up over time, and cause significant distress. A small wage gap can build up to enormous amounts of money over many paychecks; the endless social pressure to put on unwanted makeup or heels or to cover up or to expose can, for some women, build up into significant sources of stress and distress. Do these issues bother everybody? No. But they harm some people, and are therefore worth discussing.

2d. The so-called “petty” issues and “important” issues are interconnected.

Finally, Chuck is assuming a clear separation between “petty” and important that is not always clear in real life. In Chuck’s comments, Rougewench did a wonderful job discussing this question:

But you know, saying that women in Western culture have it “so much better” than the downtrodden women in China and Africa does not mean that we do not still deal with what remains of gender based discrimination still endemic to Western culture. Making that argument is literally saying, “you should be happy with what your getting because at least you are not being whipped or sold into prostitution or forced to wear a Burqua, or gangraped and given AIDS, etc.”, even though the various things listed do limit perceptions, behavior and choices for women in this culture.

None of it, at any level, is alright. […]

It is worth noting that the endemic sexism in western culture, the conglomeration of all those seemingly little things, is what allows us to be in a place where Roe v. Wade is in danger of being overturned.

Zing, pow - totally on target. (And in comments, Chuck seems to concede that Rougewench may be right). One of the most important - perhaps the most important - trait of a male-privileged society is that in such a society, boys and men are the norm, and male lives are the default. This is visible in many seemingly harmless things, such as the language that we use (chairman, mailman, “he” and “man” as generics, etc), the overwhelming predominance of male characters in children’s entertainment, and the expectation that women take on husband’s last names.

I think the view of male lives as the default is harmful in and of itself. But it’s also harmful because it is the context which supports many other harms - such as the ongoing attacks on reproductive rights, the wage gap, and the high prevalence of rape.

But he’s right about one thing

There is one legitimate critique Chuck touches on; the list is extremely US-centric. (I’ve been trying to decide if it’s white-centric, as well; so far I don’t think it is, but I may be missing something important). I don’t think that it’s wrong for Americans to write individual works which focus on US society, but I should have acknowledged the US-centrism in the introduction. I’ve corrected this error in the current version of the list.

Finally, I’d be remiss not to plug Tekanji’s excellent post Debunking The Myth of Frivolity, which covers many of the same issues I discuss here from a feminist pop-culutre critic’s perspective.

UPDATE: And check out this terrific related post by Amanda at Pandagon, too.

UPDATE 2: And this related post by Chris at Pandagon, too, too.

(Chuck also criticized several specific items on the list; I’ll address those criticisms in upcoming posts. I’ve created a Male Privilege Checklist category to make it easier for anyone interested to locate list-related posts).

* * *PLEASE NOTE* * *
I sometimes heavily moderate discussion threads on “Alas.” If you’d like to avoid this, you can post a comment on the identical post on Creative Destruction.

[Note: This version of the list is not the current version. The most up-to-date version of the list can always be found at this link.]

No time for blogging today - gotta draw, gotta go to work, blah blah blah. So instead, here’s a piece I compiled five or six years ago, originally as an exercise for a women’s studies class. It’s probably my most widely-read piece; as well as floating around on the internet, it’s been used in dozens of high school and college courses.

In 1990, Wellesley College professor Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. McIntosh observes that whites in the U.S. are “taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness, not in invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.” To illustrate these invisible systems, McIntosh wrote a list of 26 invisible privileges whites benefit from.

As McIntosh points out, men also tend to be unaware of their own privileges as men. In the spirit of McIntosh’s essay, I thought I’d compile a list similar to McIntosh’s, focusing on the invisible privileges benefiting men.

Since I first compiled it, the list has been posted several times on internet discussion groups. Very helpfully, many people have suggested additions to the checklist. 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 sometimes bad things happen to men.

In the end, however, it is men and not women who make the most money; men and not women who dominate the government and the corporate boards; men and not women who dominate virtually all of the most powerful positions of society. And it is women and not men who suffer the most from intimate violence and rape; who are the most likely to be poor; who are, on the whole, given the short end of patriarchy’s stick. As Marilyn Frye has argued, while men are harmed by patriarchy, women are oppressed by it.

Several critics have also argued that the list somehow victimizes women. I disagree; pointing out problems is not the same as perpetuating them. It is not a “victimizing” position to acknowledge that injustice exists; on the contrary, without that acknowledgement it isn’t possible to fight injustice.

An internet acquaintance of mine once wrote, “The first big privilege which whites, males, people in upper economic classes, the able bodied, the straight (I think one or two of those will cover most of us) can work to alleviate is the privilege to be oblivious to privilege.” This checklist is, I hope, a step towards helping men to give up the “first big privilege.”

The Male Privilege Checklist

1. My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

2. I can be confident that my co-workers won’t think I got my job because of my sex - even though that might be true.

3. If I am never promoted, it’s not because of my sex.

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

5. The odds of my encountering sexual harassment on the job are so low as to be negligible.

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

7. If I’m a teen or adult, and if I can stay out of prison, my odds of being raped are so low as to be negligible.

8. I am not taught to fear walking alone after dark in average public spaces.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent.

12. If I have children and pursue a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.

13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.

14. Chances are my elected representatives are mostly people of my own sex. The more prestigious and powerful the elected position, the more likely this is to be true.

15. I can be somewhat sure that if I ask to see “the person in charge,” I will face a person of my own sex. The higher-up in the organization the person is, the surer I can be.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters.

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male heroes were the default.

18. As a child, chances are I got more teacher attention than girls who raised their hands just as often.

19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.

20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented, every day, without exception.

21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.

22. If I’m careless with my driving it won’t be attributed to my sex.

23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.

24. If I have sex with a lot of people, it won’t make me an object of contempt or derision.

25. There are value-neutral clothing choices available to me; it is possible for me to choose clothing that doesn’t send any particular message to the world.

26. My wardrobe and grooming are relatively cheap and consume little time.

27. If I buy a new car, chances are I’ll be offered a better price than a woman buying the same car.

28. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.

29. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

30. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

31. I can be confident that the ordinary language of day-to-day existence will always include my sex. “All men are created equal,” mailman, chairman, freshman, he.

32. My ability to make important decisions and my capability in general will never be questioned depending on what time of the month it is.

33. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.

34. The decision to hire me will never be based on assumptions about whether or not I might choose to have a family sometime soon.

35. Every major religion in the world is led primarily by people of my own sex. Even God, in most major religions, is usually pictured as being male.

36. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

37. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks.

38. If I have children with a wife or girlfriend, chances are she’ll do most of the childrearing, and in particular the most dirty, repetitive and unrewarding parts of childrearing.

39. If I have children with a wife or girlfriend, and it turns out that one of us needs to make career sacrifices to raise the kids, chances are we’ll both assume the career sacrificed should be hers.

40. Magazines, billboards, television, movies, pornography, and virtually all of media is filled with images of scantily-clad women intended to appeal to me sexually. Such images of men exist, but are much rarer.

41. I am not expected to spend my entire life 20-40 pounds underweight.

42. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover.

43. Complete strangers generally do not walk up to me on the street and tell me to “smile.”

44. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.

45. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

(Compiled by Barry Deutsch, aka “Ampersand.” Permission is granted to reproduce this list in any way, for any purpose, so long as the acknowledgment of Peggy McIntosh’s work is not removed. If possible, however, I’d appreciate it if folks who use it could tell me about how they used it; my email is barry-at-amptoons-dot-com.)

(Updated since the original posting to add some new items to the list.)

[Note: This version of the list is not the current version. The most up-to-date version of the list can always be found at this link.]