Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever.
Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.
Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.
Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.
This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more classism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse.
Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.
The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience.
(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.)
Thing of Things 
Guys, I think maybe this entire model might be broken.
Guys.
Guys?
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Can you hear that? It’s the fools at the institute, they’re laughing.
(I’m not making any particular point. I just couldn’t resist a mad science joke)
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I think “privilege” is backwards. It’s the phlogiston theory of social justice. I mean, privilege is a good thing that everyone should have.
Much better to look at disadvantage (or similar word). There are male-specific disadvantages, but as you point out they tend to also involve lower social or economic class.
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It’s especially problematic because one frequently encounters SJ feminists talking about how men need to be willing to give up their privilege . . . shortly after having defined “male privilege” as including a vast array of things that men shouldn’t be willing to give up. This works about as well as one would expect.
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Or saying “men are just scared of loosing their privilege” – shortly after that same definition.
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I think the reason privilege was a good way of putting it to begin with is that ‘having privilege’ as opposed to ‘not having disadvantage’ highlighted the important message that many aspects of white/male/fill in the blank existence is affected by power structures, discrimination and oppression (including historical oppression creating existing stereotypes and power structures etc), not just ‘default mode of human’.
But it has always been the aim of feminists I read to extend those privileges to everyone where possible, at which point the only sense in which it means ‘losing privilege’ is that it is then no longer a privilege because everyone has it.
I agree that the terminology is not always used effectively however.
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Here’s the problem with that line of thinking: I just went through the Barry Deutsch version of the Male Privilege Checklist (if there’s a more canonical form, I’m not aware of it), and out of 46 items (and mainly focusing on the primary statement, rather than what appear to be clarifying or qualifying addenda):
3 are broadly-applicable actual privileges (1, 6, and 18),
5 are actual privileges, but highly situational (11, 14, 15, 36, and 37),
3 are highly situational and entirely dependent on the choices that one and one’s partner make, thus not really privilege IMO (38, 39, and 40),
8 are expressed comparatively, and so are technically non-default, but could easily be re-expressed as default lack of disadvantages (5, 8, 16, 24, 26, 28, 42, and 45),
and the remaining 27 are all the default state of human existence, with respect to gender issues (some are only default conditional on the non-aggression principle and/or existence in an affluent, consumer society, but those aren’t gender-specific).
So under the most generous interpretation of the list, 59% of the items are default. If we re-express what are fundamentally statements about disadvantage to be so explicitly, that goes up to 76%. If we then drop statements that depend on the agreements one makes with one’s partner, that becomes a minimum of 81%, and as high as 92% for some men.
If a minimum of 4/5 of what one is calling “male privilege” is not actually privilege at all, I’d say that “privilege” is a pretty bad term for it.
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@osberend:
What do you mean by “default” ? For example, #42 says, “[Because I am a man], I am under less pressure to be thin than women are”. This obviously only applies to men who are not thin already; but most men are not thin (by definition), and thus most men would qualify for this privilege.
To put it another way, I interpret point #42 as implying something like, “Men who are less than 1.0 standard deviation (SD) thinner than average experience 0.2 SD higher than normal pressure to be thin. By comparison, women who are less than 1.0 SD thinner than average experience 3.5 SD higher than normal pressure to be thin. Thus, men have an advantage over women.”
Incidentally, one of my many problems with the SJ movement is that they never put numbers on anything, sometimes going so far as to say that statistics are just a tool that the privileged use to oppress minorities.
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I think the “male privilege checklist” is an example of someone – er, me – misusing the word “privilege.” It conflates “privilege” with “sexist disadvantage,” and thus depoliticizes the word “privilege.” The things on the list are often examples of the results of privilege, but they are not, themselves, privilege.
In hindsight, I wish I had labeled the list “a list of some ways sexism harms modern American women,” rather than labeling it the male privilege checklist.
Most people use “privilege” to mean the same thing as “disadvantage.” But I think that’s a mistake, both because it goes against how better academic writers discuss privilege, and because it’s pointless – we don’t need another word for “disadvantage.” If that’s all it means, then we should just say “disadvantage” instead.
Some academic writers say that privilege attaches, not to individuals, but to social classes. This idea of “privilege” is also political; that is, it’s about the way advantages accrue to the more politically powerful classes within a society. Thinking about “privilege” this way makes way more sense.
So, for example, both abled individuals and disabled individuals experience good things and bad things in their lives; but the abled class, being the more politically powerful class, has privileges as a class.
But of course, that’s not how most people – including, alas, most of the feminists tumbling around the internet, including myself years ago – use the word “privilege.”
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Not saying that this is right or wrong, but I could as easily say:
“Women are sexually harassed more than men, but that only applies if they have jobs. So there’s no such thing as male privilege to not be sexually harassed, there’s just problems that the employed face that are affected by the fact that they are women”.
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I think there’s an even more fundamental point here.
Privilege / internationality is a model, how did it last for so long before anyone used it to make predictions, tested those predictions, and reported their findings to assess the validity of the model?
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My mistake. This was supposed to be a top level reply. I’m going to repost it properly.
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… … … … …
… have you heard of the field of ‘sociology’?
Academics make predictions based on intersectionality theory and test them all the time. You can say that sociology is highly politicized and therefore untrustworthy, or that doing good sociology is very very hard (both of those are true), but it is flatly wrong to say that no empirical work has been done based on the idea of intersectionality.
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@ozymandias: I don’t doubt that you’re correct here, but as far as I can recall I have literally never seen any of this work mentioned in discussions of intersectionality. I’m totally willing to give the model the benefit of the doubt as an academic tool, but at this point most uses of it on the Internet make me roll my eyes. Can we just say that the non-academic social justice community should avoid using this model to explain everything, just as armchair philosophers and physicists should stop using quantum mechanics as their own special version of phlogiston?
I suspect that would be an unpopular request among those invested in online social justice.
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Agh need to re-read before posting. That should be “I have literally never seen any of this work mentioned in *ONLINE* discussions of intersectionality.”
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The headline finding here is that the online social justice community is far more disconnected from the academic world than it likes to depict itself as being.
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“Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. […] gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.”
I’m not sure this shows disproportionate violence to gay *men* as opposed to lesbians, because:
* There seem to be more gay men than Lesbians; e.g. in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States : “The results of the cross-sectional nationwide survey stated men and women who reported frequent or ongoing homosexual experiences were 9% of men and 5% of women.” etc. – there are other numbers but they all seem in the same ballpark as the ratio of violence you’re showing.
* As far as I know men are more likely to be target of violence than women, though this is kinda your point actually 🙂
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Also note that chart did not include trans identity. So, when a trans women gets killed, how is it counted?
I’m pretty sure that 60% includes us.
I’ve never had someone call me a “dyke,” even though I am. I’ve been called “faggot” more times than I can count, even though I am not.
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This is off-topic, but isn’t “dyke” also a pejorative term ? I wouldn’t call anyone that, but maybe I am behind the times slang-wise ?
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“Dyke” has been reclaimed in much the way “queer” has. In fact, in my circles we tend to use “dyke” over “lesbian,” as the later sound kinda stodgy and more likely to be a TERF. Dykes tend to be cool and queer and have awesome hair.
Plus the word just sounds cool. “Tranny dyke” — I fucking love it.
Okay, so the thing is, your average bro-dude on the subway doesn’t know much about queer culture or how we use “dyke,” so if he shouts out, “Yo, you fucking dyke,” he probably means it as a slur.
Anyway, the point I was making above was, I seldom here any slurs used against me that specifically target queer women. Instead, the slurs I hear are those that target gay men. So despite the fact I am not a man, the average abusive jackass on the train doesn’t see it that way — he skipped his trans 101 class — instead he just sees me as a faggot in a skirt.
The result is, if I am attacked the statistics will probably be counted as “anti gay men,” despite the fact I am not a man.
So this make me wonder, what percentage of that 60% is *masculine presenting gay men* versus *gender non-conforming men* versus *trans women*.
Cis gay dudes outnumber we trans gals by like 20-to-1. Are the crime stats 20-to-1? I don’t know, but I bet we-happy-trans are way overrepresented. Furthermore, I bet my GNC brothers are second in line.
It seems they don’t bother to count.
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This entire discussion reminds me of epicycles.
At one point, people believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and that the planets were little balls embedded in perfect crystalline spheres that enclosed the Earth. It was a model of the world that worked reasonably well (you could use it for naval navigation !), and was deeply satisfying on many emotional and spiritual levels.
Unfortunately, as people got better telescopes, they discovered that planets don’t quite move the way we’d expect if they were embedded in those perfect spheres. The answer was “epicycles”: the idea that maybe the planets are embedded in smaller crystalline balls inside those spheres (naturally, the sub-spheres were also perfectly spherical). But that didn’t work well enough, so people introduced epi-epi-cycles. And epi-epi-epi-cycles. And…
The idea that planets move in perfect circles (which were centered on Earth) was very, very neat. It meshed incredibly well with all of the emotional, spiritual, and even ethical precepts of the time. It was, quite literally, sacred; and Kepler tried his best to preserve it. But in the end, he could not. As it turned out, the model of the Universe that everyone instinctively knew to be true… wasn’t.
If reality seems to contradict your model at every turn, then, at some point, you should consider discarding the model.
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Human societies are a bit more complicated than planetary orbits; if you can summarize how human society works in a sentence without including “…except that this general trend doesn’t really seem to work in condition Y or for people in situation Z, and I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is up in Q”, then you are wrong.
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I think there’s a difference between saying, “this model works except for these special circumstances X, Y and Z”, and saying, “this model only works in these very narrowly defined circumstances A, B, C which almost never occur in real life”. Admittedly, you can see this as a difference in degree, not in kind; but this is the difference between Newtonian Mechanics (“works for most situations except deep space travel and the orbit of Mercury”, roughly speaking), and epicycles (“don’t work at all in the real world, except for this one special case where you can use them to illustrate the perfection of God or something”).
So, where does privilege fit ? Does it have any explanatory power at all ? Can you use it to make predictions that will “pay rent” in some way ? Or is it the case that, whenever you try applying the privilege model to real life, you always get a bunch of epicycles ?
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My take on this would be that general trends aren’t actually entities, but abstractions. They don’t actually have an existence of their own, but they can be useful as long as one is careful to keep that in mind.
The very idea of Social Justice*, however, is premised on ignoring that basic fact. And that’s where the trouble begins.
*Which should be distinguished from the set of concerns which are championed by those who belive in SJ, some of which are quite reasonable, and some of which aren’t.
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Bugmaster: I think the problem here is that there are both the general and special theories of privilege. The general theory of privelage is that people in general, granted certain advantages over other people, will develop predictable attitudes towards both advantages and people, especially when those advantages are threatened. And we can take a look at this in situations where the usual dynamics of who is being given special advantage is different from usual society; there was an article in the New Yorker a few months back about transmen attending Wellesley (a woman-only college) which covered the discrimination they faced not for being trans, but being men.
The Special Theory of Privilege is that certain groups or categories are absolutely privileged over others, and that they are granted the special advantages inherently, and as such, there’s no need to examine any given situation for specifics; you just multiply out the demographic factors and can determine how any given social situation will play out.
I’m Jewish, so the Special Theory is obviously bunk to me. The Jewish experience in some areas of the rural midwest is vastly different than the Jewish experience in certain areas of California or New York, and this is all within one country. The idea of considering Jews in Israel and Jews in Saudi Arabia equally privileged or disadvantaged for their Jewishness is absurd to me.
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There’s also the split between the idea that privileged people tend to not know how bad oppressed people have it, which I think is generally true, and the idea that in every interaction between a privileged person and an oppressed person, the privileged person is in the wrong, with (possibly as a corollary) the idea that the pain of privileged people doesn’t matter.
I’ve noticed that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t distinguish between what everyone should have and what no one should suffer. I’ve seen the idea floated now and then, and it never seems to register.
That distinction doesn’t matter for the point about privilege and ignorance, but it *does* matter a lot for political choices.
I’ve seen SJWs argue against having general principles of justice, and I think that’s strategic. They want power without having to be responsible in how they use it, and the way they make it look sort of respectable is by framing themselves as purely victims.
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I think there’s one other crucial point in the privelage concept; people who aren’t dealing with shit tend not to have awareness of said shit when other people are dealing with it, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily the case that dealing with shit makes you automatically aware of it when other people are dealing with it.
The general statement is that as a rule, it’s really hard to know what other people are going through, so as a rule, saying “This thing I haven’t seen you experience as a problem obviously can’t be a real or important problem.” is a bad practice, regardless of who the I and you are in the above statement.
It also means that if you want to declare something sexist, you actually do need to figure out what about the menz; declaring a problem that’s actually equal-opportunity as gendered almost certainly means you won’t be directly addressing the root of the problem.
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@Robert Liguori:
Ok, I mostly agree with what you and nancylebovitz have said, but I’m going to push it a step further.
Does the “general theory of privilege” just mean, “some people have advantages others do not, and it’s difficult for anyone to fully understand another person’s life experience, including its disadvantages” ? If so, then this notion of privilege is completely non-controversial, but also not very useful from the social justice point of view — because it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
You suggest that the general theory is more than that; it also means, as you said, “that people in general, granted certain advantages over other people, will develop predictable attitudes towards both advantages and people, especially when those advantages are threatened”. I am totally on board with this definition, but I don’t think it’s applicable to social justice, either (at least, not directly). It’s a purely descriptive sociological theory that lets us predict people’s behavior, assuming we already know exactly what everyone’s advantages are; but for social justice, we need something more prescriptive,
One thing we can do, of course, is to use Bayesian reasoning to flip the theory around, and thus figure out which people have the advantage (or disadvantage) by examining their attitudes. This would let us know which groups need help, and which ones need thwarting. If that’s what you’re suggesting, then I could get on board with you, but a). I’ve never heard any other SJ activist suggest something along these lines, and b). I’m not convinced that it’s even practical, because people in the real world do not actually form monolithic groups (as per the rest of the discussion on this thread).
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Nitpicking here, but telescopes are newer than heliocentrism.
The epicicles thing was developed in the ancient era, a lot earlier than telescopes.
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Side note: If Wikipedia is to believed (an admittedly non-trivial assumption, but one that is accurate more often than not), there’s no actual evidence of multiple levels of epicycles having been used prior to Copernicus.
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I think there’s an even more fundamental point here.
Privilege / internationality is a model, how did it last for so long before anyone used it to make predictions, tested those predictions, and reported their findings to assess the validity of the model?
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“This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts.”
You mean “poor women more classism”, I think.
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Fixed.
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I’m not if I 100% believe what I’m going to say next. It’s probably too uncharitable. Take it with a grain of salt.
The privilege/intersectionality “model” isn’t a model, it’s a frame. It’s a slippery, squirmy thing that mixes normative with positive; connotation with denotation. Judging a frame by its lack of correspondence with the territory is like judging a dairy cow for it’s inferior production of wool.
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People use it to draw conclusions about the world so the shepherds ought to be wary of the attempts to sell them cattle.
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I model “frames” as models we use for the purposes of conversation. Are there any other possible ways of framing them?
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Is *that* what intersectionality means? I thought it meant that different sorts of privilege/oppression were independent, so that a woman could be privileged for being white and oppressed for being a woman simultaneously.
It might just be a matter of context, since a lot of people have a mixture of privilege and oppression (this would be almost everybody) is consistent with privileged traits tending to amplify privilege and oppressed traits tending to amplify oppression.
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If I understand it, the point of this post is that different sorts of privilege/oppression are *not* independent.
Internationality says that you can look at them independently, then add them all up. That is not true – therefore internationality is seriously flawed.
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First of all, the word is ‘intersectionality,’ not ‘internationality.’ Second, that is literally the exact opposite of what intersectionality means.
Before womanists developed intersectionality theory, each oppression was typically studied independently: Sexism, Racism, Homophobia, whatever. However, womanists pointed out that, as black women, they did not experience The Racism That Black Men Experience, plus The Sexism That White Women Experience; they experience a unique combination of sexism and racism which is different and worse than either black male racism or white female sexism. Marginalization is not additive, it’s multiplicative. I recommend that you read Mapping the Margins by Kimberle Crenshaw, the essay which coins the term.
OTOH, complaints about white feminists bastardizing intersectionality to mean that marginalization is additive are as old as intersectionality itself, so it’s pretty easy to get confused.
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This may be a stupid question, but what’s a “womanist” ?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womanism
TL;DR: as Ozy mentioned above, a school of black feminism which argues that mainstream feminism ignores/does not adequately address the ways in which racism combines with sexism in the experience of black women and develops theory from there
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Yeah, I actually think what you said there was really missing from your post. The problem with intersectionality isn’t the idea itself. I think it’s a very important idea. The problem with intersectionality is how the term is horrifically misused. The actual problem, I think is one of the notion of unidirectional power dynamics vs. bidirectional power dynamics. I.E. in terms of gender, the idea that “men oppress women”, which is still a fairly popular idea. Proper intersectionality has no room for unidirectional power dynamics. It entirely goes against the idea that depending on the circumstances, people might be advantaged or disadvantaged and power dynamics can change drastically.
The example I like to give, is if you change the unemployment rate by 2%, the power dynamics between an employer and an employee change dramatically. And that’s probably one of the most important power dynamics we have in our society. (Which is why it’s so problematic when identity comes into play with that sort of thing).
Just because one clucks and sticks feathers in their butt does not make one a chicken. Just because someone claims to be “intersectionalist” does not necessarily make them one. It’s a skill more than anything else. And there’s a lot of people who are really bad at that particular skill.
Please note. This is coming from a feminist PoV, albeit an individualist feminist. I do believe that on the whole, women get the worse of things, although honestly, I may change my analysis of that in 10 years.
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From my experience, the privilege model may apply even less in more patriarchal societies – like in Russia. By nearly every metric you can invent to gauge the gender gap, it’s way stronger there – wage gap, the representation of women in the government, the representation among the richest people, the representation in tech, etc. Women are even banned from being employed at several “hard work” positions – http://elementy.ru/library6/p162.htm?page_design=print – which is marketed as the way to protect them. At the same time, there are multiple ways in which discrimination targets men in a big way, not present in the American society.
The biggest one is military draft. Being in Russian military sucks in a very big way. Aside from the very real possibility to be sent to Chechnya or Ukraine, fight against the regulations of the Geneva Conventions, be killed, and have your death listed as accident during exercises, you have very decent chances to be severally mentally and physically abused, maimed, or even killed during hazing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Sychyov , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedovshchina . Some categories of people are exempt from the draft: men with debilitating conditions, caretakers of two or more infants, doctorates, and college students but only for the period of their education. Other than that, every man from 18 to 27 years has to serve in the military for (as of now) one year. It affects rich people a bit less that poor people – often it’s possible to bribe recruiting officers, and going to college allow men to postpone this problem while coming up with better solutions – but not that much: not everyone is corrupt, and college education is mostly free, so it’s more accessible to the poor. Thus, most life choices of men of all classes from 18 to 27 years old revolve around not getting into military, under the fear of having their life, minds, and bodies wrecked.
The retirement age for men is 60 years, while for women it’s 55 years. All pensions and retirement savings are controlled by the government, so there’s very little one can do about it, and that affects all classes equally. At the same time, the average life expectancy for men in 62 years, and 70 years for women, so on average men have way less chances to even use their savings.
Going to prison, as you noted, is not a large risk for the middle class, which is true, but in Russia it is also conditional on not being a political activist or a business owner – these categories face higher risks of going to prison, if the authorities want to shut them up or to seize their business. And it’s not just the likelihood of going to prison, it’s what happens in prison. Male prisons exclusively have a caste-like system of sex slavery: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20081019111824513 , http://www.interpretermag.com/homosexuality-in-contemporary-russia/ . Every male inmate who was raped in prison, who committed rape outside of prison, who is gay, who has earrings, who who has ever given oral sex to a woman – and there are couple more “offenses” – permanently becomes an untouchable sex slave. They can only be touched with others’ genitals; otherwise the one who had touched them also becomes the untouchable. The untouchable cannot refuse to serve as a sex slave under the punishment of severe beatings, all the way up to death. The prison administration knows very well about it, and if the untouchable tries to complain, he will be forced to write ridiculous papers stating that he accidentally fell on the floor, or that it’s him who asked for sex. In internet discussions, whenever the prospect of incarceration appears, the discussion quickly converges to sex slavery; men don’t fear the prison per se – they fear slavery.
The classical patriarchal upbringing that answers to boys’ problems by saying “stop whining, man up, fight back, and if you don’t, we will punish you for being a pussy” is also in place, and is probably stronger than in the US, which is probably reflected by suicide statistics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate , http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/russ.pdf . The average suicide rate in Russia is 1.5 times higher than in the US, but in the US men are 3.8 times (3.7 / 0.97 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_ratio ) more likely to commit suicide than women, whereas in Russia it’s 5.7 (4.9 / 0.86) times. Thus, not only the total suicide rate is 1.5 times higher in Russia, but the suicide gender gap is also 1.5 times Besides, that’s an interesting point by itself – why is suicide nearly universally much more prevalent in men than in women?
Some examples of sexism are double-edged swords. For example, women are clearly culturally discourages from pursuing STEM degrees, and the gender gap in tech majors may well be over 10. At the same time, may professors explicitly value those scarce female students, and commit to not give them anything less than B.
Given all that, I wasn’t particularly surprised when I heard several transwomen claim that one of the reason for transitioning was that it’s way easier to live as a woman than as a man. I don’t take at the face value their other claims like that it’s the main factor that motivates transition, but I would totally believe that for them personally, male social role was completely unbearable, and there wasn’t enough space to fiddle with it. I can totally relate to the feeling that the male social role as prescribed by the Russian society is unbearable, due to my strong preference to crossdress, and the knowledge of what can happen to crossdressers in Russia: http://vk.com/video_ext.php?oid=88600057&id=166069833&hash=f72ec3f30b1f459d&hd=2 . I just solved this problem by emigrating
So. On one hand, we have an incredibly patriarchal society that bans women from several jobs, that discourages them taking highly paid positions of from being politicians, that expect them be housewives, that expects them to always dress feminine and care about their look, and judges them hardly for not doing that. On the other hand, in this society men exclusively face the risk of being maimed in the military, the risk of becoming sex slaves in prisons, and 5.7 times higher risk of suicide. I dare to contemplate that the privilege model fails to predict this kind of society.
It seems to me that it would be reasonable to claim that there is a system of structured gender discrimination. In some cases, it objectively hurts one gender or the other – like exposing men to the draft or paying women less. In other cases, it limits their number of the life choices, the perception of which depends of one’s preference – a woman who wants to be a stay at home mom, and a man who want to be an engineer would be reasonably fine, while a stay at home dad and a female engineer would face very strong social pressure. However, I would be cautious about making claims beyond that – like what gender faces more problems, and which of these problems should be prioritized to solve.
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Great post!
This would be expected under the general perspective of men having higher variance (for genetic reasons, or because they make more risky life choices, or are forced to take more risks by society).
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Does this model also account for: a) persons with disabilities, b) non-native English speakers (regardless of skin color), c) only children, d) the short, e) the ugly, f) the stupid?
I am not trying to be trite – but the premise seems to invite different ways to slice and dice the question.
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Ableism, including cognitive ableism, is commonly accepted as an axis of oppression. Language-based marginalization is usually understood as a subset of racism AFAIK but can totally be understood as its own axis if that’s what helps understand the situation you’re analyzing. Lookism and ageism are more controversial than ableism, and heightism more controversial still, but you’ll find solid minorities that consider them in their analysis. Regardless, all of those seem to function to me as ordinary axes of oppression? (i.e. a conventionally unattractive child has a different and worse experience of those marginalizations than a conventionally attractive child or a conventionally unattractive adult)
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Heightism should definitely be considered. The statistics are pretty clear, being a short dude has costs.
Also this is a great example of (the real principle of) intersectionality. Both women and men pay a price for their height, but not the same cost and not in the same way. Man + short-or-tall is a different calculation from women + short/tall.
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So are you saying that there are no forms of gender discrimination that primarily negatively affects men that can not be explained by them being oppressed on another axis (class, race, sexuality) unlike women who are discriminated against purely based on their gender? Or in other words that a white straight cis middle class man won’t experience harmful gender discrimination?
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Not quite that simple– I also think that men can be targeted by oppositional sexism (i.e. they have to conform to their gender role and are punished when they don’t). But substantially yes.
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Doesn’t this rather depend on the situation ? For example, if our straight white cis middle class man gets a job at some female-dominated workplace, there’s a good chance that he’ll be discriminated against, even by his peers (e.g., if he is a middle manager, his fellow female middle managers may shun him, discount his input, be promoted over him just because he’s male, etc.).
I will grant you that this situation is unlikely, because there are few female-dominated workplaces. However, there’s a difference between saying that, and saying, “no, it is impossible to for women discriminate against the straight white cis man, period, because he’s got all the privilege”.
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Do women also face oppositional sexism? An example of oppositional sexism against men would be negative attitudes towards men that want to be stay at home fathers right? So would negative attitudes towards women who want to work instead of being stay at home mothers be classified as oppositional sexism because they are not conforming to their gender roles?
Also is your definition of oppositional sexism broad enough that for example it includes people ignoring and having less sympathy for men who have been raped by women because these men are not conforming to the gender roles of “men always want sex” and “men are stronger than women”? Or the retirement age in the UK being 5 years older for men than women because men have the gender role of “men are workers” ?
If so than most examples of gender discrimination against men that I can think of would be considered either intersectional or oppositional. The only counter examples I can think of are male circumcision and men being presumed to be pedophiles (like when men are banned from sitting next to unaccompanied minors).
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@Bugmaster: I can’t find the links at the moment, but I have seen a couple different stories that suggest that being a man and working at Jo-Ann Fabrics can be a rather unpleasant experience, mostly due to customer interactions, although IIRC one of them faced gendered crap from his coworkers as well.
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@Bugmaster –
Research has shown that men in female-dominated occupations often encounter a “glass escalator,” in which they tend to get more promotions and raises than their female co-workers.
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Seems like the only factor that frequently results in violations of the intersectionality model is gender. Race, disablity, poverty, sexuality, you just don’t see them flipping around to produce privileges (outside of subcultures dominated by people from an oppressed identity). Meanwhile, gender flips to provide advantages or disadvantages in entirely predictable ways. I mean, it’s not like its a shocker that black men will experience more violence than black women, and black women more poverty than black men to anyone who has paid any attention to how gender operates in society.
My own take away is that gender just doesn’t work the same way as other sources of oppression and it is foolish to try an make it. There aren’t a few exceptions regarding gender, gender is an exception.
The intersectionality model works just fine as soon as you remove gender (although as it was created to explain race/gender interaction, a model that does not include gender could probably not be called intersectionality).
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This is probably correct. There are a few reasons I can see. First, the numbers are usually about equal, so neither men nor women are really a “minority.” (Yes I know there are exceptions.) Likewise, men and women often live together and share their material lives. Furthermore, most families will have sons as likely as daughters. Thus homes will tend to have both men and women in equal measure. These people will share many of the big social factors: race, class, wealth, education, etc. Even health probably tracks to a fair degree.
Which is not to say gender isn’t important. I think it is. (Which, obviously!) But there are clear structural differences.
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More than similarity of big social factors, it seems to me that gender is strikingly unique in the pervasiveness of cross-cutting ties, many of them involving biological reinforcement of positive attitudes. It is therefore much harder (particularly for heterosexuals) to have an entirely negative view of the opposite sex than it is to have an entirely negative view of people who differ from oneself in other ways.
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Question: Weren’t all of these factors true decades or centuries ago, when women couldn’t vote, own major forms of property, and so forth?
I mean, I can definitely see repeated exposure to a group in a positive or neutral context as a great way to normalize attitudes towards them and reduce prejudices born from ignorance or fear, but clearly that is not sufficient.
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No, it is not sufficient, but it is important, and qualitatively, not just quantitatively. For example, gender is rather unique among axes of oppression in the historical* lack of support for either genocide or residential segregation**, and that’s not a mere coincidence.
*The craziest radfems and MGTOWs are exceptions, but both of them are both (a) ultra-fringe and (b) products of the past half a century or so.
**Sparta might be an exception to the latter (I’d have to look up some more details), but Sparta was weird in a lot of ways, and was also quite progressive in its treatment of women by the standards of the era, so it doesn’t fit the “more bigotry = more support for segregation” pattern that generally obtains.
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The biggest historical examples of gender segregation would surely be monastic communities. I am by no means an expert on the subject, but I have encountered scholarship which seems to suggest those are not exceptions to the pattern of more bigotry being correlated with more support for segregation.
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That’s true, but monastic communities have never been complete societies (or even the bulk of a society) precisely because of their dependence on the outside world for new novices. And, notably, monastic communities aim fairly explicitly at destroying most human ties, including the major cross-cutting ties between men and women—not only do they seek to prevent romanticosexual ties, but they also undermine ties to parents of the opposite sex, retroactively through the isolation of monastics, and proactively by taking in foundlings to raise within the community.
Also, I tend to view demands for segregation of the broader society very differently from localized separatism—for example, I’m 100% in favor of allowing White Separatists to buy up all the land in a particular unincorporated region* and establish a new community that forbids non-whites from entering, not least because it removes them from the society that the rest of us live in.
*That doesn’t encompass have a public road already passing through it, etc.
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“Weren’t all of these factors true decades or centuries ago, when women couldn’t vote, own major forms of property, and so forth?”
That assumes those things were the product of some kind of hatred or resentment, it seems far more likely that it was a product of people not being willing to die for you if there wasn’t some kind of status in it for himself
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I think the Duke rape accusation scandal counts as an example of privileges flipping to harm white people and rich people.
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I’ve hoped that intersectionality would lead to making such fine distinctions that people would end up actually paying attention to each other’s lives. Is this too wildly optimistic?
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To the extent that politics happens, I think this sort of failure is inevitable, since politics, to operate at scale, must abstract and generalize, and whenever that happens someone’s always going to get cut out of the narrative
On the individual level, though, perhaps we can hope…
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But why is it so hard to form alliances across similarities of actual experience, rather than of demographics? Why do people find it so much easier to rally around protecting group X from violence (for example) committed by group Y than to rally around protecting innocent individuals from violence commited by other individuals?
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Damned if I know. Unless I’ve missed something, African Americans aren’t notable for opposing slavery in general, either.
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Nor even for acknowledging its existence, when doing things* like arguing that describing computer drives as “master” and “slave” is somehow “racist” against them.
*Obviously not all blacks, nor even most, participate in this sort of idiocy, but their (sometimes self-appointed) spokespeople frequently do.
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So because Black/Male and Gay/Male are particularly shitty intersections, involving lots of getting murdered/jailed/etc, and because they both contain “Male”, which is supposed to be “privileged” forever if you *don’t* buy intersectionality – you want to throw out intersectionality? Seems like those are a pretty solid *example* of why intersectionality makes sense, not a counter-example like you somehow think?
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“Intersectionality” is generally understood as meaning that people suffer unique forms of oppression as a result of belonging to multiple “oppressed” groups, not as a result of belonging to one “oppressed” group and one “privileged” group.
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That’s neither how it was ever explained to me nor sensible.
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Hold what views you will, but that’s a pretty common understanding, and almost certainly the one ozymandias was suggesting does not apply in these contexts.
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Your very setup (POC are affected more, the poor are affected more) could also be applied to any number of women’s issues, such that I could say middle-class-or-above white women are not really affected by the issue. After all, most bad things affect POC and the poor more.
White men are still affected more than white women. Are you somehow unaware of this? Serious question, because I have encountered SJ types who seriously seemed to think that white men and women are treated equally w/r/t to sentencing and that the gap was solely due to a gap that only appeared in POC.
The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.
The “average” isn’t the appropriate comparison, even without getting into the factualness of this statement. Straight white middle-class-and-above men suffer a sentencing disparity compared to straight white middle-and-above-women. Women enjoy a sentencing disparity across the board, such that poor men have it worse than poor women, Latino men have it worse than Latina women, white men have it worse than white women, etc. This makes it a systemic gender issue. There have been many studies on this. (Mustard et al. 2001 and Starr 2012 coming to me off the top of my head.) Furthermore, for what it’s worth, the general consensus of the studies is that the gender component is anywhere between somewhat to very significantly stronger than the racial component, such that holding all else equal, a white man is more likely to get a worse outcome than a black woman.
Middle class-or-above white men are not the group worst affected by the American CJS, but middle-class-or-above white women are certainly the group most privileged and protected, in this and related/ancillary issues, occupying a pole position every bit as conspicuous as middle-class-or-above white men do on certain other issues. There’s really no running, hiding, or squirming away from this.
***************
Prison (and for simplification purposes I’m including all CJS-related punishments under this umbrella) is sort of a binary condition – you’re either in it or you’re not – so on the face of it, it’s a poor comparable for something like the wage gap, which occurs along a gradient. So it’s easy, and ideologically convenient for some, to say that everyone, including rich white women, are affected by the wage gap, but not everyone’s affected by prison. This is facile. While not everyone directly goes to prison obviously, to suggest that everyone who doesn’t go to prison is equally affected by the social forces that created and shaped the disparities surrounding it offends basic common sense. So we have to find a way to conceptualize this differential along a gradient that affects everyone in a way that’s at least theoretically quantifiable.
The probability of ever being subject to CJS and/or severe correction in general does affect everyone, and the fact that these probabilities can affect people’s psychologies and behaviors. The latter can be a significant source of unseen gender privilege itself.
One of the things I do agree with feminists is the basic theoretical concept of rape culture. Perhaps not in all the details, and I do find statements like “rape is socially condoned/encouraged crime” to be completely eye-rolling. But I do agree with the core idea that even those not directly victimized by a crime can be hurt by ancillary psychic harms enabled by its existence. For instance, someone’s life being structured around avoiding sexual assault or rape or euphemisms thereof; which leads them to miss a late night social engagement that others that didn’t; missing a series of such engagements leads to disadvantages in professional networking that lead to disparate salaries further down the road; and so forth.
The knowledge, the emotional safety crutch that non-poor white girls have of knowing that more than anyone else they’ll be treated with kid gloves if they find themselves in a severe disciplinary situation, is a privilege. And for non-poor white boys, even if they never end up arrested for real, if the fear of some sort of justice system regulates their behavior or minds in any way (other than deterring actual crime, which would be a good thing) that it doesn’t do for non-poor white girls, that’s an example of psychic harm.
Now when it comes to the actual big State Federal Clink, it’s still probably significantly remote for middle-class-or-above white kids. But sentencing disparities do not occur in a vacuum. The underlying social forces that produce it in the first place manifest in many areas several tiers of severity below actual prison, which on the other hand are more likely to enfuse everyday life. For instance, “quasi-legal” entities such as school disciplinary boards being more likely to be lenient on a female than a male for the same violation, particularly if the consequences are severe, or parents being more likely to beat their sons than their daughters. (There’s a significant amount of research supporting the latter; AFAIK, no one’s rigorously studied the former yet, though I strongly suspect that it’s true. I do recall reading much to suggest that teachers are harsher on boys than girls, though isolating “for the same violation” would be pretty much impossible in the free-flowing classroom environment.) The cumulative effect of all these can be immense, and most definitely affects upper-middle class white boys and girls as well. Especially and even more so when you take into account the psychology of probabilities mentioned above. Not everyone has be directly victimized by something to be negatively affected by it.
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