Invisible Privilege OTD

[brynndragon]

Men in Power - Men's advocacy group at U of Chicago, which amongst a slew of privilege observation fail notes that women earn more college degrees than men yet fails to notice that women still make less money than men. This does not assure me that they're anything more than a group of guys who are afraid of losing their privilege in the exceedingly gradual evening of the playfield between the genders.

Comments

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Despite being raised with the idea of privilege apparently it failed to sink in that co-ed spaces are actually male-oriented spaces. Thus men don't need to specifically create male-oriented spaces - they're not merely common but so normal that you fail to see them. Creating a women-oriented space is far more tricky because as soon as a man goes into a space it becomes male-oriented (women are no less subject to societal programing than anyone else) so the only way to pull it off is to make the space women-only.

I sincerely wish that wasn't the case, but it still is. I'd love to be able to say that everyone is all equal so we don't need to do such things anymore, but real life has this unfortunate habit of proving me wrong on that score repeatedly. So we have this nasty kludge of women-only spaces in order to practice living in a world where men are not privileged over women - men seem to object to this for some reason. . .

[londo.livejournal.com]

As long as you acknowledge that it's a nasty kludge and hopefully temporary while we sort things out, my objection pretty much disappears.

I don't think that I agree with the blanket statement that "co-ed spaces are actually male-oriented spaces," but I do think it's true more often than not.

[londo.livejournal.com]

Addendum:

"Temporary" may not get sorted out until we're both dead and gone. I mean, I hope it doesn't, I hope we all wake up tomorrow and everything is fixed, but this is not a small problem and will not be fixed quickly.

[benndragon.livejournal.com]

Agreed to both of your comments - I'd much rather have a safe diverse space than a safe undiverse space, but I'd also rather have a safe space than an unsafe space.