| > Good chance that this long-winded response will end up being lost in a stale thread The same is true of my post, I'm glad you responded :) And yes, doubtless we agree on a lot more than we disagree on, which I try to keep in mind even when I'm tempted to get heated in an Internet argument. But even so I'm gonna skip over most of the first half of your essay since you indeed appear to be saying things I agree with (the summary seems to be "privilege is complicated and people on all 'sides' routinely get it wrong"?), and chime in on what I appear to disagree with you on. > resulting in harrowing statistics like men comprising 3/4 of successful suicides. This seems to always be the centerpiece of arguments about "female privilege", because other examples tend to be much more nebulous whereas mortality statistics are concrete and factual. But there's nuance here, as you seem aware but don't at all address: though the numbers are less certain, experts agree that women attempt more suicides, they're just less "successful". From my understanding, this is fully explainable (but debated, don't get me wrong!) as just the differing lethality in the societally gendered methods of suicide, but for the sake of argument let's say there's a real, societal, systemic problem causing male suicide rates to be much higher. I'm still going to argue that male privilege is like white privilege (which you're "comfortable with" as part of a binary, right) and female privilege isn't, in spite of the higher suicide rate. First reason? You realize that suicide among white people is more than twice as high as among black people? "Toxic whiteness" is indeed rarely discussed, but "affluenza" is only ridiculous when used as a legal defense, it'd be like arguing that a black person is not guilty of murder because they were under the influence of racism; but there's nothing ridiculous about the idea that being rich is actually a curse, you ever seen Gossip Girl? :P (I think we can agree Gossip Girl didn't exactly pioneer that story element.) Other axes of privilege have similar ideas, e.g. "heteronormativity". There's nothing special about masculinity in this regard. The kyriarchy hurts everyone. So if heteronormativity hurts straight people too, and the patriarchy hurts men too, why is being straight and/or male a privilege? For the same reason that it's not "oppression olympics" to say that even though white people have a higher suicide rate and are underrepresented in hip-hop (just like men have a higher suicide rate and are underrepresented in nursing and stuff), being white is a privilege in black-white relations. Final note---did I mention that "acknowledging the distress while continuing to point out the difference in scale" is a quote from one of the best essays I've ever read? Have you read it yet? I would love to hear your thoughts: http://weeklysift.com/2012/09/10/the-distress-of-the-privile... |