Guest post: At the pinnacle of privilege all these years
Originally a comment by iknklast on Those theorists whose lives are most directly affected.
I hate the idea of no longer calling myself a feminist, but I also hate the idea of being associated with this brand of repressive ideology. Maybe we just need to invent a term that can let people know we stand for equality without having to take on all this baggage.
I am also white and feminist; I suffered my entire life (and still do) from the whims of people who believe that gender is essential, and that I therefore am some sort of grotesque mutant who isn’t a woman at all – but not a man, either, because reasons. As a teenager, I was forced into high heels, make up, and dresses. We were not allowed to wear anything but dresses to school until I was a freshman in high school, and even then, it had to be “pant suits” with matching tops and pants. When I was a senior, they finally (grudgingly) allowed girls to wear jeans, which the guys had been wearing all along. I was required to take Home Ec, and was discouraged from taking Calculus or Economics, for which I had to wait until college. I was shuffled into the slow Biology class because that was all I could take that didn’t conflict with honors English (the assumption being that, since girls are good at English and boys are good at Science, you wouldn’t have people who were eligible for both classes…in fact, my entire honors English class was filled with people who qualified for both, but none of us could stand the pain of going back through this is a noun, this is a verb, see John run, which is the noun which is the verb…).
I have been beaten for being insufficiently female, for reading the wrong books, taking the wrong classes, thinking the wrong thoughts. I was vilified and pressured until eventually I found someone and got married, more to prove that I was a woman than out of love (I realize that now; I didn’t then). He (my ex) was getting married to prove he wasn’t gay (he was). It was a marriage doomed, and would never have happened if I hadn’t been put into the spot of being expected to “prove” I was a woman, and he hadn’t been put in the spot of being expected to “prove” he was a man.
The young feminists doing all this screaming have no concept of what the earlier feminists went through to gain these rights, and they don’t really care, because they have convinced themselves that these rights were only gained for white, cis-hetero women. Not true – they apply to all women, even those, like my mother, who would rather die than make use of most of these rights.
Now, I find out in the declining years of my life that I have lived at the pinnacle of privilege all these years, a pinnacle apparently even higher than that of the rich white males who just took health care away from millions and continue to do everything they can to make choice an impossible option.
“I have been beaten for being insufficiently female, for reading the wrong books, taking the wrong classes, thinking the wrong thoughts. I was vilified and pressured until eventually I found someone and got married, more to prove that I was a woman than out of love (I realize that now; I didn’t then).”
This situation sounds as bad as Saudi Arabia or Taliban dominated parts of Afghanistan.
I was allowed to drive.
I’ve lost count of the number of guest posts you’ve had here, iknklast. How much bloody privilege do you want? :-)
As much as Ophelia will allow me, Acolyte. ;-)
Seriously, I am trying to get a blog started, but it has been rather a slog, since I’ve been teaching 24 hours this semester. When I get it up and running, I’ll definitely post a link.
Looking forward to it, iknklast. :)
iknklast, I look forward to it too, but I’ll only read it if you promise not to write anything like the following quote (from a post yesterday on the ftb blog of a certain short-tempered Horder) except in jest or parody (bolding mine)
So women have now lost the exclusive rights to pregnancy? Of all of the mammalian species that have ever given existed, sapiens sapiens is apparently the only one to have done away with the need of females to carry its young to term.
And there was I thinking that human exceptionalism was a mainly religion-linked hypothesis. It’s about time for some people to start getting over themselves, methinks.
Personally I prefer anti-misogynist. I began to identify as a feminist after misogyny and sexism killed the atheo-skeptical movement. What convinced me to stop was seeing some of the stuff other (usually male) “feminists” were able to pass of as “feminism”. I think this is where we can legitimately speak of appropriation. My current view was inspired by another man on twitter (I believe it was Mr. Fancy Pants) who said that instead of self-identifying as a feminist he would try to oppose misogyny in any way he could and let women decide whether or not he was a “feminist”.
As an older, white, blue-collar male, driving an eleven year old car, I too have just discovered I’m living at the pinnacle of privilege. In fact, my pinnacle of privilege is so ‘pinaccley’ that the life expectancy for men of my group is actually falling. What else but a falling life expectancy could best describe ‘privilege’?
Could it be that there is so much racist invective directed against privileged White males ( like me!) that some of it is now spilling over onto privileged White females like you?
And before we thoroughly condemn White males, we should remember that the networks of socialized medicine found in countries like the UK and Canada were all designed and implemented by that very same set of males.
That said, I agree with what you saying
I take it you missed the word “rich,” John? And the fact that they’re Republican members of Congress [in the US]? Here it is again so that you can see:
See? She wasn’t talking about you. She was talking about a much much smaller set of white men, who really do occupy a pinnacle of privilege. Just for one thing they have health insurance that they themselves made exempt from the “ok to charge 5 times more for pre-existing conditions” clause of their own bill. That’s a genuine pinnacle of privilege: the ability to pass laws that harm other people but not you, because you can include a clause that protects you.
Also…
1. Are you sure there were no women involved? Are you sure there were no non-white people involved?
2. Do you not grasp the important point that the reason it was all or mostly white men involved is the systematic exclusion of women and non-white people? It’s a bit fatuous to make that exclusion a reason to ignore the exclusion.
I too was struck by that passage. No one here, and very few people overall, ‘thoroughly condemn’ white males; and let us not make the mistake of generalising traits or actions to an entire demographic. It is the same flawed reasoning whether the thing being attributed is positive or negative, and is unfair either way: either all people of a demographic is being saddled with the undeserved stigma of a negative thing, or all people outside of the demographic are being unfairly denied credit for a positive thing.
And yes, it is especially unfair if the reason other demographics were underrepresented in something is because they were denied entry.
“I hate the idea of no longer calling myself a feminist”.
Iknklast,
My wife wouldn’t identify herself as a feminist, even though by my standards she was. She mentioned the mysogyny of male members of the medical profession she encountered when working as a hospital nurse and she was conscious and resentful of any demonstation of male privilege. I received a rather angry reply when I described her as a ‘feminist’. As far as she was concerned, feminists were noisy ideologues who were in fact counterproductive to the cause.
We were both born in the late 1940s, the first of the baby boomers. I’m not sure whether that means we grew up in the first or second wave of feminism.
“The more things change…..”
Well of course feminists are noisy ideologues. We have to be.
But all the taken-for-granted “arrangements” that keep women down are ideological too, and they get noisy as fuck when they’re resisted or criticized.
Ophelia,
My late wife’s argument wasn’t against feminism but the effectiveness of its promotion. It’s rather like describing an individual as ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-islamophia’ or ‘anti-fascist’, the terms could mean anything these days.
She was talking about a much much smaller set of white men, who really do occupy a pinnacle of privilege.
So on the basis of that MUCH MUCH smaller set of white men we can extrapolate to the point of claiming a generalized White Male Privilege?
As a general rule, groups of privileged individuals rarely, if ever, suffer from a declining life expectancy.
You cite a small group of exceptions within a group and then claim those exceptions as the rule of the entire group.
I did not claim that. You’re still missing the point. “a pinnacle apparently even higher than that of the rich white males who just took health care away from millions” isn’t a generalization about white male privilege.