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cemery | 14 years ago
When we talk about privilege in a social justice setting you want to think about the privilege of being the default. Ignore every other privilege and think about that one in particular. You point out all the downsides of that privilege in your post, which are all true and valid, which is why calling whiteness and maleness a privilege breaks our brains a bit. It's not unadulterated good, there are a lot of bad things that come about due to the default of maleness and masculinity.
Lets look at the idea that you put forward about Weakness, how in women it's ok, and in males it's not ok.
In males it's not ok because it violates the default maleness that is expected (a negative aspect of the default maleness), and in females it is ok because it goes along with the !default of femaleness.
When you start thinking of privilege not as things that you get for being male, but about expectations of the world, what we view the default as, and what we view the other as, the idea that male privilege could be bad for males and females makes more sense. In a lot of ways the word privilege is a crappy way to put it, because it makes us think about things that are privileges in our lives, not the privilege of being the default.
unknown|14 years ago
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