Tag: gender

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:
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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.

Until We’re All Free

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about what constitutes racial reconciliation, and what needs to happen to bring us together. In that process, though, I have found something else under the hood which is more troubling. Our society is deeply, fundamentally misogynistic. I know this doesn’t come as a revelation to many of you. It is obvious to the casual objective observer. What’s not obvious is how much it matters. Because we refuse to face how deeply disregard and hatred of women is embedded in our interaction, we’re having an incomplete conversation, laced with hypocrisy.

I hear it in hip-hop and rock-and-roll (let’s not focus on the rappers alone), where women are prop, scorecard, something to use and discard. I hear it in politics and acting, where women are asked about their families, emotions, and fashion while men are asked substantive questions about the issues or their craft. Our misogyny even informs our interaction with LGBTIQ issues. Through this lens of misogyny, a lesbian is just a confused woman who hasn’t met me yet, and who hopefully will bring her partner along to run up my score once she comes around to my way of thinking. A gay man is disgusting because he’s seen as being so much like a woman (and who in their right mind would give manliness up?). A transgender F-to-M is a child in a grown man’s shoes, playing at manhood. A transgender M-to-F is the ultimate deception.

We are trying to understand a three-dimensional cube by looking at lines and squares. Intersectional understanding is predicated on the notion that our system of interaction has unequal inputs and we should have conversations about how to ensure just (not necessarily equal) outcomes. We can’t evaluate the problems being black causes completely separately from the problems being a woman or being poor causes; they feed into each other and amplify each other.

We also know that oppression traps the oppressor as much as the oppressed, though the oppressed suffers more. Men live daily with the limitations placed on them by patriarchal notions of manhood. We can’t cry (except maybe when our sportsball team loses). We can’t be gentle and soft. We are only given anger, stoicism and strength as blunt instruments to deal with everything. What happens when we give a man a full range of healthy tools to become who he needs to be?

Each time we free a segment of society, tremendous potential is unleashed. Much of the creativity and innovation of the 20th century came from people who would have been stifled and lost a century earlier. How much business and technical innovation did we miss because of our rules? What are we still missing as technology booms and is conspicuously missing the contributions of women, black, and Latino people in proportion to their societal presence? Considering that women are half our population, how much potential are we missing by not giving them space to be their fullest selves?