Awakening to Gender Privilege

A few things have been happening lately, from Hillary being called out for her shouting while Bernie screams continuously, to people scheduling a multi-city rape advocacy parade in freaking 2016, to an ongoing cavalcade of foolishness regarding women and every damn thing that they do. I watch all this go on, and I just start to feel like:

Race has been an issue for about 400-500 years. Gender has been an issue for at least a few thousand in most parts of the world. It’s so much more deeply rooted that it feels natural in a way race never quite does. To be honest, there is a biological component. Men and women are built differently, and process the world differently. Men and women also need each other in a way that two random people from different parts of the Earth don’t. I’m not an advocate for an equality that doesn’t recognize our differences, any more than I am an advocate for a racial equality that doesn’t recognize and allow for cultural diversity. But I am not an advocate for a system that has women as lesser either, or doesn’t allow for individual women to break a pattern that doesn’t make sense for them.

Historically, I would have described myself as pro-women, and that was mostly true. I didn’t believe in restricting women’s freedoms. I thought their underrepresentation in positions of power was wrong. I also would say I was aware that being a male conferred me certain advantages in our society. I wasn’t blind to the notion of privilege; on the contrary, I used it to better help me understand what it might be like to be on the upside of racial privilege.

But was I anti-sexism? When I saw weirdly sexy ads for hamburgers, did I roll my eyes or give a Beavis and Butthead chuckle? When an attractive woman walked by at work, did I remind myself that she was a colleague, client, or hell, supervisor, or did I just check her out? And in the latter case, how did that affect how I dealt with her in business?

I think about this more now that I’m older and differentially wiser. If I’m mentoring or leading a woman that I’m attracted to, even though I’m happily married and have no intentions of making anything of it, how can I do my job effectively? I have to take extra precautions to ensure fairness. I have to watch my mouth around my peers, and call my peers out in a way that feels unnatural and weak. And how far do I have to go, exactly, to ensure I’m creating a climate that neither feeds nor tolerates sexist behavior? The end result can be a kind of secular asceticism which is both frustrating and difficult to maintain.

It’s not about my desires and challenges, ultimately. As a man, the entire framework is built to accommodate my desires. Nothing is more difficult than speaking truth to power and demanding fair treatment with no protection from those same systems of power. That said, it’s time for me to engage in the second most difficult kind of work: dismantling the platform of advantage I am standing on.