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All men that are not active feminists, that are not actively doing everything they can to undermine and destroy their privilege, are not "as innocent as the oppressed." You aren't going to get a cookie for not beating your wife recently. Feminism is not that easy; being a male ally to women isn't that easy. The point of the concept of privilege was to force men to reflect on how they benefit, usually without their active intervention, from patriarchy. >And to offend or annoy those who are meant to be recruited to the cause is perhaps not the best process to a desirable outcome. Especially as the premise is, these are the people holding all the cards. I know it can be hard to imagine, because it was once hard for me to imagine, but men are actually entirely tangential to feminism. There are enough women that all feminism needs to do to succeed is win a baseline amount of political power and then command vast numbers of women. This has already happened to the degree to which it has and it is responsible for all social change won by feminism. Freedom can never be given. It can only be taken. Either by oppressors who take it away, or by the liberatory struggle that takes it back. As in any political struggle, no individual person or even group of people hold "the cards", the cards are a socialogical construct that the ideology with the most memetic power has control over. Also, you do indeed have control over whether you access privilege. This is more apparent in some situations than others; a good example is culture fit. If you are interviewing and the interviewer makes a misogynist joke, do you laugh (exploiting your privilege, as a man, both to laugh at the joke and to be told it in the first place) or do you call the interviewer out on his misogyny? When you start, do you join in objectifying women with your co-workers, do you meekly avoid the issue, or do you confront it? The degree to which you have privilege is the degree to which you make yourself an ally of the patriarchy. You can be a good ally, you can try not to take positive action (in which case you cannot be called a good ally, but you cannot be said to be helping feminism either, siding as you are with the status quo), or you can sabotage patriarchy at every chance you encounter. |