I said a slur at a party last night and I feel really bad about it. Since this is where I go to proverbially "sit down at the typewriter, open my veins, and bleed" (Red Smith, cf. Quote Investigator.), I guess I'd better talk about it.
As a straight white male I've become obsessed and, truth be told, a little concerned, by the idea of privilege. The idea that the privileges I take for granted are much harder to earn for people in a less-advantaged position is, truth be told, not so hard to accept. The harder pill to swallow is the part where I may be completely ignorant of the privilege that I'm heir to, and, more embarrassingly, may be completely unaware of the things I say that belie my ignorance. I'm ignorant of my ignorance and, just as bad, am ignorant of my non-ignorance. So I have to grapple hard just for common ground, is what I'm saying. All this if I even think to try, which privilege means I generally don't have to. So in essence I'm stumbling blind through my own privilege. I'm benefiting from my privilege, and - since one cannot properly exempt one's self from, say, the search for jobs - these benefits are almost inevitably received and so subtly that I might never even know my privilege if not for sociology and anecdote.
And so I kind of have to wade through all the information and insights that advocacy groups and personal anecdotes provide. The only problem with this approach is, well, it's like trying to read a book in a foreign language, in a way. And not just an impartially-authored book but generally written by the directly and personally aggrieved.
Can I use an extreme, extended example to spiral into my point? Like, Men's Rights groups (MRAs) really, really bug me on a fundamental level, and I know that they exist partially to give rise to the facetious equivalency between the supposed wrongs of feminism and patriarchy. Much of the blame allocated by MRAs to the former inevitably can be blamed safely on the latter. Like, take father's rights: feminists aren't saying mothers are better caretakers by nature, as MRAs tend to claim; they're saying almost the exact opposite. Patriarchy actually is working against men here, as "father" is not seen as being as fundamental as "mother" in our society, or, rather, is seen far more in a provider role rather than an emotional caretaker. And so worthy fathers are cast out as exceptions and less-worthy mothers are given more leniency when it comes to a custody case. The vast, vast majority of feminists are not advocating for this or any other "female privilege", and, even when they are, are generally working against men having unjustified privilege, you know, like marital rape. Whatever the case, I use the example of MRAs because they absolutely bug me, and it's hard to understand why. So let's talk about it.
After all, here's the thing about those pernicious MRAs for me: Most of those people personally are not hateful misogynists - they're actually people that are personally aggrieved by some imagined fault of feminists. Like, they feel they lost a job to affirmative action to a woman. They feel they personally were falsely accused of assault, or weren't believed to be a victim in their own domestic abuse case because they were a man. They feel they lost custody of their children because they were the man. They perhaps had a divorce and are lamenting the death of the traditional family. Whatever the case, from their personal perspective, these disgusting-writ-large MRAs probably have some kind of good personal point.
And, to wit, writ large the MRAs probably do have a good point or two in there - there is a chicken-and-egg thing with fathers not getting custody of their kids and fathers being overworked and uninvolved, even if this is completely a patriarchy problem. Sexual assault is by and large a male problem against females, but we should probably have legislation and social institutions that protect men just in case, especially if the power dynamics ever change. And anecdotally, I have seen feminists being openly hostile and dubious to men that claim to have been assaulted, which is of course terrible. But it's just an anecdote, which is kind of my point.
After all, I take the small, the incidental, and the anecdotal good points with a proverbial Lot's Wife of salt, because the ideology that supports the MRAs' good points is totally out of wack: That is, MRAs seem to have a seriously distorted view of things - it's not just that males might be victims of a false accusation or that males might suffer sexual assault.... no, MRAs seem to think that it's more or less an even playing field and that it's pretty much 50-50 on both counts, save for a liberal, feminist conspiracy of misinformation. In other words, MRA groups just tend see the proverbial chicken in the chicken-and-egg cycle. They don't see women being seriously staggered and exhausted by the awful statistics and social stigma and long-term psychological distress of sexual assault... they just see a lot of accusations flying and apply their personal ideology to those accusations, and, voila, men are being oppressed by the false-accuser hegemon! Voila, both sides are equal! Quod erat demonstratum, bitches ain't shit. It's such a simple bit of logic that it barely even has to be set up for conscious scrutiny. And it took a lot of fortunate coincidences - and a lot of well-respected, patient bearers of my early, formative, curious mind - to really get over myself and get past the natural ideological tendencies to make my privileges into an ideology. If I didn't have that, or the people in charge of helping me get to young adulthood from adolescence had been less patient or less big-hearted or more privileged overall? Well, as they say, there but for the grace of God go I.
And that's what bugs me, because, like, while I can laugh at the MRAs pretty safely, I mean, I used a homophobic slur at a small party. And no one cared, and like, while I could easily go on the defensive, and no one is perfect, and on and on with all the gays I've known and deeply respected, that have stood up for me and tried to make my life a little easier? The point is I acted like a bigot and didn't think anything of it for several seconds, before I immediately and silently regretted it. And when I was in high school I had deeply questionable ideas about conservatives, about Christians, about blacks, about women... and I would make jokes and only much, much later get the sense that, wow, I was really prejudiced and simple-minded. In a sense, it was this little slip-up, in a macrocosm. I would go years without realizing that I had these prejudices and small-minded ideas. And the prejudices are still very attractive to me in a sugary-sweet way that stand-up comics and video games and TV more-often-than-not pander to or consciously set themselves against. Those silly MRAs, with all the deconstructionist capacity of Karl Marx and all the sexist distortions of modern society, disturb me because I see them and their ilk of hatred as foreign to myself, but not inconceivably foreign: That is, I see their unironic bigotry in myself as three men: one dangerously-aggrieved potential future, one narrowly-avoided potential present, and one callously self-righteous and hateful past.
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