Female privilege

[lose24lb]

There is a lot of talk of male privilege but not female privilege? Can we discuss things from the other point of view?

As a white female in a developed country, my privileges are:

1. If I am a child and I go missing, the media is far more likely to give my case more attention than if I were a boy. And if I'm pretty with blonde hair then all the better, I can guarantee the entire country will know I'm missing and be out looking for me.

1. From an early age the opposite sex will be instructed never to hit me but I will be given the same instructions. And should I strike males I can expect not to be hit back and any social penalties that occur from my actions will actually fall on the male.

1. If I'm not smart and unable to get a well paying job, all I have to do is marry a wealthy man.

1. Most homeless are men, yet most homeless shelters are created with my gender in mind. Which means if I go homeless I am more likely to get a bed in a shelter than if I were male.

1. If I commit a crime I am more likely to get more leniency than a man in the exact same circumstances. People will want to try and understand what made a pretty woman like me do such a thing and look for reasons. Unless I go on a mass murder spree I don't really have to worry about going to prison.

1. If I am attacked, passers-by are far more likely to intervene to protect me than if I were male.

1. As a female I am less likely to be physically attacked in the first place or challenged to a fight.

1. Despite killing almost as many people, prostate cancer gets only a fraction of the funding than breast cancer does. It benefits me if my health issues are given priority over men's health issues even if the men's issues are almost as deadly.

1. If a man masturbates it is seen as disgusting and perverse. If I masturbate then I am seen as pleasuring myself. Female masturbation doesn't carry the same stigma as male masturbation.

10. If I am pretty and/or I can make myself cry I will be able to get away with anything and everything.

11. If I am upset I am allowed to cry without being ridiculed. I don't have to be all macho and bottle my feelings up like boys and men have to do.

12. Similar to #11, I am encouraged to seek help if I need it. Seeking help is not seen as a weakness for my gender. If I seek support I will get it and people won't laugh at me or ridicule me or tell me to "man up" or "take it like a man".

13. I can wear almost anything I want without having my sexual orientation being questioned. If a man doesn't want people to think he is gay then his wardrobe will be extremely limited. But with the possible exception of dungarees I can wear anything I want.

14. One word- chivarly. Because I am female I can expect little perks here and there. One seat left on a bus? It's mine! Expensive dinner bill? The guy can get his wallet out.

15. If my husband lays a finger on me he will be labelled as a wife beater for the rest of his life, be beaten up by other men and spend time in prison. But if I hit my husband people will say "you go girl!" and say he must have deserved it. I can hit my husband and he won't dare hit me back out of fear of what I just pointed out.

16. Violence against women is the worst crime on earth. Violence against men is hilarious, especially if it involved injury to the titter penis/balls.

17. On today's TV programmes my gender is portrayed as being smart, strong and independent. The male characters in today's soaps, comedy's, cartoons etc are shown as complete idiots, deadbeat useless fathers or criminals.

18. I can work with children without being worried about people thinking horrible things or making horrible allegations.

19. If I live in the USA and there is a military draft, I won't be forced against my will to sign up to the army and go fight in battle.

You don't need to answer all my questions BFG - I was thinking out loud and making my point through questions, not as a challenge to you in particular. Most of them are probably fairly rhetorical anyway and cannot be answered in evopsych terms without skating on the very thin ice that is that men are naturally violent, predatory, exploitative, cruel and 'unevolved' and that women are naturally a bit thick.

And when I said 'biology', I meant biology. I didn't mean genes.

Not all human males carry the same genes.

Not all human females carry the same genes.

If you look at some historical cultures being very big was considered sexy for women, more "round" than curvy.

If it is low ranking men who rape then how come so many successful footballers, actors, musicians rape? They could have the pick of any woman they wanted, no?

Please, please don't make me have to say it. Not ALL men who rape are low ranking (i.e. have low socioeconomic status, education etc). As I quite clearly said, this is a very complex area in which, the last time I read about it, little inroad has been made. I can't comment further.

I asked you Beachcomber why men had different bodies to women and you replied 'biology'. What causes the differences in stature, for example, if not genes? Perhaps boys are getting fed more protein as children by their sexist mums?

Flora I'm just laughing at your poor effort to criticise my comments. Thanks for cheering up my day .

Flora SaidLeBFG "elucidate you with" ? Your grammar is no better than your science.

Even on your own analysis you are getting it wrong. In other species, where there is an ornamental sex, it is the other sex that does the choosing, which is the point of the ornamentation - female peacocks choose male peacocks. I would say that has no relevance for human social behaviour. You seem to think it does but you are so determined to fit your social, MRA theory around pseudoscience that you somehow think:

• women are the ornamental species
• women choose male partners
• animals tell us "so much about our own species"

Your logic is absent. Your analysis is vapid. Your conclusions are stupid.

I am not sure why your so upset with mew pointing out that you were the one that started with the whole "Thats's not real science thing", what else could you mean by the above quote. Calling in to question other forms of science that others use to justify what they are saying is dishonest. But yet you continue to tell me that I do not need to defend the fact that other sciences exist, even though your unprepared to taker them seriously. Flat earth indeed. Your reservations about ERIC are not with the institution but with the books and articles it holds. So in fact your argument is back to the point of not agreeing with the ORIGINAL text, which to be fair you kinda said. So why the smoke and mirrors game, apart from being purely argumentative, about the use of the word source. The source as quoted by me was as you seemed to acknowledge a reputable and quality checked repository. In other words the source was what I said it was reputable. Not as you would have it, just the place I happened to find a book lying about, other people better equipped than I have judged the book to be specifically academic enough to be in that location.

I think these so called female privileges sound rubbish. I'd like some of the privileges the menz get if that's ok.

LL I'm not upset. Please do try to keep emotions out of this. This is the second time on this thread you have thrown accusations of hysteria and being upset. If you want to be taken seriously having a discussion with women, please bear in mind Beachcomber 's statement above:

"I don't know a single feminist who will take any man seriously when he starts accusing us of hysteria and 'denying science' when we are discussing women's issues"

Your contribution to this discussion has basically been "Oh look, a book" On only a very cursory examination it does not support the so-called science that LeBFG has been unable to articulate. The writer of that book is a cognitive psychologist - he is not writing about evolutionary psychology nor about gender nor sex roles. He is writing about language acquisition in infants.

It is not dishonest to call into question evolutionary psychology. Many scientists do not accept that it is good science.

I have no reservations about ERIC as a place to find information. But the fact that a book exists there does not mean it is (a) relevant to the topic actually being discussed or (b) correct in its hypothesis or its research.

I don't see why it is controversial to say that female privileges exist as well as male ones.

Privileges are all equally undesirable and should be eradicated, and it's not a competition so there's no need to compare sizes. It's apples and oranges anyway- how do you directly compare, say, the damage done to women by society's sexual objectification of them with the damage done to men by society's general scorn/dismissal of any signs of emotional frailty. (A perfect example of this scorn is the phrase "What about the menz?" i.e Stop thinking you can have feelings you silly man. It tries to make men feel pathetic for even entering the conversation and giving their perspective.)

Focusing on one set of privileges doesn't have to mean ignoring the other. In fact many male privileges have a corresponding female privilege which would not be able to survive without it- for instance Male Priv.:Greater freedom to be sexually forward- Female Priv.:Not expected to have to take the first step/initiate contact romantically. One collapses without the other.

I think for a female to presume that they can authoritively say that men's burden is nothing much to complain about trivialises men and the male experience, and falls foul of rule 1 of privilege theory: You have the privilege to not be aware of your own privilege.

Female privilege exists. Accepting that doesn't mean saying it's bigger than male privilege and it doesn't justify male privilege in any way or mean that it's women's fault that FemalePriv happens (as it's the patriarchy's fault).

That doesn't stop it being very real, and that a large number of feminists try to deny it completely is part of the reason why many men and women are reluctant to call themselves such. We're in this together, and we should both respect the other gender's issues and grievances.

Just to add that, for me, a privilege is an advantage that society gives to either gender regardless of whether it's enacted by the same gender as the disprivileged one or not- so men having less pressure put on them about their bodies/weight is male privilege, regardless of whether most of the pressure put on females is coming from other women. The same applies to male on male violence and female privilege.

I'm with you Chub these sound totally crap. Not one thing on that list is a privilege that is available to women as a class.

ayahshca : ^"A perfect example of this scorn is the phrase "What about the menz?" i.e Stop thinking you can have feelings you silly man. It tries to make men feel pathetic for even entering the conversation and giving their perspective."*

This is not "stop thinking you can have feelings you silly man". "What about the menz" means "can't we have a discussion about women's issues without someone immediately popping up to say 'what about x men's issue' and insisting that women give equal or more time to discussing that issue before they can discuss an issue about, you know, women.

I do not conclude we have genes for wearing lipstick - you've misunderstood. Let me explain more simply. As I said in that very same post, it doesn't matter a jot if women wear blue bananas around their necks. Something must serve as a proxy or correlate to a desirable trait. Fashions change. The desire to mate with suitable partners does not. The hip-waist ratio is chosen consistently by men as a marker of attractiveness despite weight. Women consistently choose and cite correlates of wealth and power as attractive traits in the opposite sex.

LeBFT yes you're quite right, the point of EP is to support the things you want to agree with.

I asked you Beachcomber why men had different bodies to women and you replied 'biology'. What causes the differences in stature, for example, if not genes? Perhaps boys are getting fed more protein as children by their sexist mums?

Well, I took your question at face value. I assumed you meant differences such as those with regard to our reproductive roles and capacities. Women have wombs, ovaries, vaginas, breasts, etc. Men have testes, and an absence of wombs, ovaries, etc.

These things are biological and the direct result of the biological fact that humans are complex mammals.

As to why our 'stature' is different - I suspect that that is biologically complex too. Hormones presumably play a part as does the fact that female humans carry and birth babies and human males do not.

None of the above, however, explain the current sociopolitical human organisation whereby female have lower status, less freedom, less power, less autonomy and fewer human rights than men.

My 'what about the menz' comment was fully intended to be dismissive and express disdain. But it was a very specific context. This is an OP who came onto the feminism section with a thread called 'the myth of male privilege'. When his waffly twaddle highly nuanced and thought through argument didn't win many converts, he started a new thread where he tried to disguise his true point a little, come across more reasonable and hopefully get people to agree with him.

Commenting 'what about the menz' was exactly what the others have said - a retort to someone trying to shout down the issues surrounding women by yelling that mens issues are at least as bad, probably worse. It is not a silencing technique for genuine discussion, or any sign of scorn for emotional frailty. It is a retort to bullying techniques.

And it seems that there is a misunderstanding of the term 'privilege' as used in discussions about sexual politics, on this thread.

For example, being a 'lady who lunches' (sorry to invoke horrible sexist phrase but am trying to build an analogy), seems like a privilege.

And in a way it is - it is a class privilege.

What it most certainly is not, however, is female privilege (the subject of this thread).

Privilege is a binary system (politically). It is a system of 'haves' and 'have nots'.

Privilege is a hierarchy .

In a male supremacy, male and female privilege do not and can not coexist, just as in a white supremacy, white and POC privilege can not and do not coexist.

In a supremacist society, the oppressed class, are by definition not privileged. (This is basic politics.)

What is often considered 'female privilege' is actually benevolent sexism .

yy Beachcomber

oops pressed too soon, and Amanda and When I agree with all of that

If you like, whether you have privilege or not is a direct and fundamental result of your status.

In male supremacist society, women and girls are awarded lower status than men and boys. This manifests as male privilege and female oppression. The lower status class have neither privilege nor access to the the structures and institutions which award status.

It really is very simple. (But cunning.)

Privilege is a much misunderstood concept IMO.

Primarily because it is a pervasive sociopolitical system of control and exploitation.

Which is what makes it fascinating and a concept that poses serious questions to the lived reality of the majority of humans vis a vis their so called human rights.

The ops position seems to be best summarised as "men get the privilege of owning about 95% of the worlds wealth and resources but don't worry girls, you get the dubious privilege of not being laughed at when that fact makes you want to cry".

Well. Gosh. Thanks.

Round of applause for Chubfuddler.

Concise, incisive and on the fucking ball.

I love women.

that although men are more promiscuous, it's women who have more control over who the father of her children will be (obviously in UK society and similar)

They actually aren't just her children! He should be playing a role here too, and it starts when he decides not to use a condom. Yes women have more ways to prevent pregnancy, but when a man gives up his right to use a condom he gives up the right to say he never had any control on whether to have a child.
I don't think having children is solely a female privilege as you seem to be saying with this but more often than we care to think the man will indeed run off and say it wasn't his 'responsibility' which again diminishes any privilege you may be appointing here as the woman will then spend the rest of her life looking after his offspring (assuming you are basically saying women rape suitable men for babies?) Your point is unclear.