Male Privilege, helpfully explained by a white dude

[hfojvt]

285. equivalent to what?

the video, from the OP, which I was responding to, very specifically said "I can walk down the street without HEARING ..."

So, no, having somebody SAY something is NOT the same thing as having somebody try to grab you (although some kid tried to grab/tackle me too (it was a kid four years younger than me who wanted to fight me, he ran out from some trees and slammed into me. I, thinking it was an accident, just brushed him off and kept walking, and then he started yelling at me, challenging me to a fight).

But the OP was fairly specific, about being able to walk down the street and not have people SAY things.

I simply pointed out that the OP was wrong.

Further, whether a man gets mugged, beaten or killed because he is a man is NOT relevant to what the video said. The video said that "it is safe for a man to go jogging at night" or "walk to his car at night".

Again, I am simply pointing out that the video is quite simply wrong. A male is NOT ten feet tall and bullet proof. Men can and DO get attacked while jogging or while walking to their car, and can also, just like a woman, get seriously hurt or killed or threatened.

Is there EXTRA risk, extra vulnerability for women.

Yes.

But the video made it sound like we men get to skip through life, untouched and alive at defcon zero, perfectly safe and perfectly happy (okay, maybe I added that last part about happy) while women are miserable and nervous always at defcon 4.

I am just reminded of the interaction between Bender and "Queenie" in "The Breakfast Club". Because I had this argument with the ex-prom queen at my twenty year reunion. As former valedictorian I was not doing that well. After I closed my store in 1998, here it was the summer of 2000 and I was still working as a factory temp, unable to find or get a job with benefits. And she was telling me some Horatio Alger bullsh*t about how "anything is possible" and I needed to pull myself up by my own bootstraps.

And I could not help remembering the time when I was doing my paper route and she and a bunch of her friends came by and started making fun of me. And I am thinking that she thinks "anything is possible" because all her life people have opened doors for her (literally and figuratively). People want her to be their friend. She can go into a job interview and smile and be charming and confident and likely win any job she applies for, just like she won the homecoming queen vote.

Me, I go into a job interview and probably make the interviewer think "this odd, funny looking guy thinks he is smarter than me" and end up only getting the jobs that nobody else wants.

So this whole frame of "men are privileged" and "women are victims" doesn't fit with the life I have lived. It's not a privilege to have the prom queen and her huge band of friends make fun of you while you are walking five miles through the snow delivering papers or riding your bike in the hot sun. It's not a privilege to clean toilets for a living. And, on the other hand, it sure does look like a privilege to have lots of friends, to have a spouse (and probably your pick of spouses) to be elected prom queen. Of course, most women are not elected prom queen. Even my three beautiful sisters, none of them even made the top five, much less got elected queen. But they also, unlike my brother and I, had no problem getting dates. That's not a privilege?