It's only ben a week in my psychology of gender class, and already it is filling my brain with ideas that keep me up at night. In our second day of class, our lesson that was intended to introduce us to the course, our professor did an activity where he asked us to list examples of male privilege. We came up with an extreme abundance of examples, many you could consider negative. This is, of course, not surprising considering our class is 18 women and 2 men.
What I found surprising was what happened when our professor turned the tables and asked us to list examples of female privilege. For a few minutes there was no response. You could practically hear the wheels turning in all of our heads as we tried to reverse our male supremacy thinking. Eventually we came up with answers but the list was much shorter than the male privilege and most statements were accompanied with the phrase "double-edged sword".
In class I didn't think much about the activity but once I left, it wouldn't leave the back of my brain. I was wondering why we had such a mental block when it came to thinking about female privilege. I realized that in most of the feminist writings I, and I'm sure many of my counterparts, come across on social media, they make this big deal of pointing out the male privilege and their superiority to us. I know that sounds rather counterintuitive but it does give them a cause to fight for.
Now I don't have anything against feminism, I actually consider myself a feminist, but I do think there are flaws in the way that it is often approached. If the mission of feminism is to attemp and make women and men equal then we need to look at the inequalities that exist for men too.
There is such a thing as female privilige. We can wear make up without being ridiculed for it. We can be alone with minors and not have other adults worried about rape. We are more likely to recieve custody of our children than a man. We can wear skirts or pants or dresses or scarves and we are seen as strong or cute or hot but when a man puts on a dress or a skirt he is prosecuted by his peers. We need to acknowledge that these inequalities exist. We need to make sure that feminism really means equality. Being a woman is special, no doubt, but being human means we are all equal, and should be treated as such.
