Does it exist? What is the impact for men and women in society that contains such a social construct? Is it a bad thing, necessarily?

The recent Gillette commercial nonsense has inspired a deeper look into this phenomena - I'm sure somebody around her has an opinion to share and/or argument to make.

... let's hear it.

 

Privileges aren't a bad thing per se, but I'd say any kind of privilege that hasn't been acquired through some kind of action is a bad thing.

As for the existence of a male privilege in general, it's pretty obvious in some professional sectors. Anybody that has worked in finance has seen how hard it is to get through if you're a woman. This is something that has started to change, but there's a lot of inertia and will take many years still.

 

Nah ..it doesn’t. And ..this thread probably shouldn’t either. Not only am I an equal ..I feel like I’m equal. All day ..every day.

 

You make the assumption that all men display masculinity or assume a dominate role.

But in reality, it has more to do with one's personality, be it man or woman....

 

I think there are advantages and disadvantages for both men and women, and they balance each other out in many ways. Different does not always equal bad.
I am absolutely treated differently at work than the men are, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just different.
I make more money than most of my male colleagues, and I have a lot of clout in my position as a female executive in a male-dominated field. I'll take that any day.

 

Trump i on live right Fox News the privileged

 

The center of her argument seems to be: since men have it rough (depending on how you define that) in certain aspects of life, they can not be a privileged class. After gently cautioning her audience not to cherry pick statistics, she does just that for 5 minutes. My favorite part was when she acknowledged the overwhelming ratio of men in positions of wealth, power and influence, but just skips the point altogether! Wha? Unless we are going to define the very word, "privilege" differently, shouldn't we start with the people who own the most assets, control the most land, run the most powerful entities? Why not ask why they are overwhelmingly male? Is there an inherent bias built into our modern western society that favors men in this regard? If not, why is it so overwhelmingly male?

Based on some of her other work, I think I understand why, but I wont regress into a genetic fallacy this early in the discussion.

I agree. We shouldn't do that. But, we do. In fact, along with other higher primates, I would submit that focusing on, and behaving ourselves in accordance with, prescribed in-group/out-group societal norms is one of the things that humans do best. It is deeply ingrained in our brains because it served us so well for so long. Just because we now have the intellectual capacity to recognize that a particular set of norms is less than ethical, doesn't mean we can cure, or have cured, ourselves of it.

Lastly, suggesting that someone can simply "take steps to ensure they aren't 'under a bus' " is akin to saying I can wish myself to be an NBA center. I will never be 6'10"+ tall. I can not will myself to be 25 years younger than I am. No matter how much I cry out about discrimination against shorter, older guys like myself, no one will feel any sympathy about my plight. We accept that you need to be a certain height and a certain age range in order to even complete for the job. I believe that the situation is similar for women, in certain aspects of modern life, and the more robust arguments from the feminist movement have been pointing towards these facts for some time.

 

But while being an NBA basketball player may require a certain height and athletic ability, few jobs require a penis (or a vagina, for that matter). So when those jobs, 99% of which aren't gender specific, go disproportionately to males, or when males get paid better for the same work, it's a problem.

 

Solid point. My question would be what job, anywhere, requires gender specificity, that one could argue isn't a social construct, but critical to the performance of the job requirements.

 

I would say that she used a rhetorical dodge to move away from the question about why males, on the whole, are in positions of power, wealth and control at a ratio way out of proportion to the gender ratio. Rather than fit it into the point, the move to the "dangerous jobs" citations did, in fact, avoid the central question that she brought up. Is she suggesting that men perform a higher ratio of the dangerous jobs available, and therefore have earned the right to occupy a higher ratio of the jobs that literally control how society is operated? Seems like quite a stretch to me, and certainly not logically supportable since the two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Ah! If you're going to put an argument in my mouth, I'd prefer you put one in that is less absolute. I do not subscribe to the idea that "all men have privilege" - I subscribe to the idea that male privilege exists. Currently, I also happen to believe that females also enjoy certain privilege, but that on the whole, it is not well-balanced and currently is skewed towards those of us that happen to have a penis.

 

If you believe that men and women are truly equal in terms of opportunities provided, I'm not sure where we can go discussion-wise. I understand that there are few laws left on the books that give obvious favor to one gender or the other, but the letter of the law is not the spirit or the law, and by no mean defines how we actually conduct ourselves in the real world.

 

Simple clinical psychology does not account for the ratio of women who are by all objective measurements ready, willing and able to assume positions of power in the modern corporate world, yet for some reason don't seem to get the majority of those jobs despite spending entire careers devoted to attaining that responsibility. I doubt there is any evidence to support the idea that being "better at things" rather than people is a reasonable way to pick between two candidates for positions such as this. If I were on the board of a global corporation like Proctor & Gamble, and that was the criteria I used to choose a male CEO, I hope the shareholders would vote my silly ass off the board.

 

Our anthropological reality is not social engineering. It is being human. We've been doing it for as long as we have been social creatures. For a hundred thousand years, the proto-humans that got good at discerning who to let near or into the tribe, and who to shun, tended to survive. Those that didn't died off as intruders killed, conquered or bred that less discerning tribe out of existence. I am asserting that male privilege, as with any other privileged group in modern history, is born from that deeply embedded wiring - and that it isn't going away anytime soon.

 

I have yet to see data to support the idea that gender discrimination (either direction) doesn't happen "often" - I'll leave it to you to define where the tolerable line ought to be - but I will also ask you how many times is it OK for a woman to be denied a job, a raise, a promotion solely because she has a vagina. I'd also love to see evidence that this form of discrimination is being "rightly" punished - especially since the majority of voices I hear in the counter-argument seem to believe that it isn't happening.

 

Actually, I think we SHOULD have paid parental leave for both parents. They have it in plenty of other countries. It's the US that's behind the times.

As for occupations that skew heavily female, that used to be the case for nursing and paramedical positions like x-ray techs and physical therapists. Now, with the cost of medical school being in the hundreds of thousands, more men interested in medicine are becoming nurses, physician's assistants and paramedical technicians. Demand for these workers is high and salaries are going up. Hospital nurses routinely make $70K+ and physician assistants can make $100K easy. These medical professionals may not have the income potential of a heart surgeon, but they also don't have the hassles of being on call, having to run a practice, etc. Conversely, ambitious females are more likely to become doctors than previous generations. In fact, over half of medical school students in the US are now female.

However, one thing that hasn't changed all that much is that women are still more likely to be the primary caregivers for children AND elderly family members. Taking time away from their careers for these things can affect their salaries for YEARS beyond the initial time they take off. This has a downstream affect of reducing their income in retirement. Female senior citizens are twice as likely to be living in poverty as males.