Is male privilege “deceptive”?
A wave of feminist-lite manfluencers, who position themselves as champions for a healthier masculinity and gender equality want to throw basic feminist language out the window.
They decry many gender specific harms that men face, our socialisation into emotionally unintelligent adults, the fact that men lead in suicide statistics, die younger, are more likely to be sent to war or die on the job. They claim men need allies.
These men reject the worst of us, the Brands, Tates and Weinsteins, but also reject foundational social justice and feminist principles such as privilege or that the personal is political.
They claim that systemically, and historically privilege is a valid concept, but in reality it is “deceptive” that most men are hurting, and not living a privileged life. That the term paints men with the brush of the most successful and harmful, dehumanising us and creating ground for a lack of empathy when dealing with us.
What a knot we’ve tied ourselves in.
This interpretation is only possible under a simplistic understanding of the concept of privilege. They claim to seek nuance for the situation men find themselves in but never the nuance that men can be both oppressor and oppressed under patriarchy. These men never point to patriarchy as the source for the issues they rally against or the situation men find themselves in — they seem to be allergic to the word. They cry out for nuance but reject it for themselves.
Privilege is the absence of systemic barriers.
I believe privilege is best defined as the absence of systemic barriers.
This may not be the most orthodox way privilege is defined, but it has been present since the term was coined by Professor Peggy Macintosh in her essay White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1989) in which she describes privilege as a list of invisible advantages she experiences because of her whiteness in the USA:
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
3. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
4. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
5. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
6. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
7. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
8. If I want to, I can be pretty sure of finding a publisher for this piece on white privilege.
9. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods that fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
10. Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
11. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
12. I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
13. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
14. I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my race.
15. I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.
16. I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of persons of color who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my culture any penalty for such oblivion.
17. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
18. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to “the person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.
19. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
20. I can easily buy posters, postcards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
21. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
22. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of race.
23. I can choose public accommodations without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
24. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
25. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.
26. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more less match my skin.
It should be telling — but is not a standard interpretation — that this list of privileges outlined by McIntosh are not merely perks and benefits, for instance being offered a job because she is white — instead they are descriptions of times in which as a white woman her life is not impeded by social and institutionalised forms of racial violence. She can live her life and specifically not know she has been able to access some part of public life without a barrier.
Privilege is often invisible to the holder. And truly so! I as an able-bodied person am able to open my heavy front door, walk down the stairs to the street, have a name for my street, read that name on a sign provided by local government, cross that street at traffic lights, enter into a post office and speak in the same language as the customer service staff, show my Spanish ID and pick up a parcel. At no point during that activity is it visible to me that I have passed an endless series of checkpoints that for someone else may be a barrier, specifically a barrier caused by some systemic discrimination or failure.
Given this, is it not chilling to see men who are positioning themselves as champions for gender equality campaign on the message that male privilege is deceptive, when the phenomenon itself is often invisible to the holder?
Sure a man named Barry might be suffering with depression, be unemployed, really and truly hurting, but who is going to have an easier time applying for a job in England, Barry or Mohammed? The whiteness assumed to the name Barry has removed barriers (islamophobia, racism) from that man.
Is white privilege deceptive because some white people are poor too? Is able-bodied privilege deceptive because some able-bodied people also suffer depression?
Importantly what this definition does is provide the nuance that privilege is not a guarantee of outcomes. It is an experience of societal advantage.
Is male privilege deceptive? Only in the sense that privilege functions via its own invisibilisation.
Two people enter a room full of men. Who is more likely to feel fear, Jessica or James?
Did you see it?
