Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever.
Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.
Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.
Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.
This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse.
Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.
The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience.
(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.)
When a model starts getting used to justify choices about politics and personal identity, it doesn’t stay just a model for long. At that point it becomes a plank of self-image — how crucial a plank depending on how sweeping its implications for thought and behavior are — and people are very, very bad at handling even the most inconsequential challenges to self-image. Evidence usually gets vetted against identity before the reverse happens.
I don’t have a perfect method of telling when this is going on in a culture, especially from the inside — if I did, I’d be making millions of dollars speculating on commodity futures or betting on football games. But I suspect one warning sign might be the development of a lot of elaborately justified special cases none of which happen to impinge on the central thesis.
This isn’t specific to social justice circles, of course. We all do it, whether we’re activists, scientists, Baptist ministers, or football fans. But social justice at the very least doesn’t look unusually good at getting its models to serve reality and not the other way around. And I’d expect this to become increasingly problematic as SJ activism gains traction, if it’s not already.
Another example, if I may:
Today, my husband applied for clerical/administrative work through the same temp agency I use. He was told, flat-out, “You probably won’t get offered as many of these jobs as your wife will,” even though he has just as much (if not more) experience in the field as I. It took two people to interview him, because – even after he and I both made a point of mentioning he was trying to switch fields – they were still trying to shoehorn him into a manufacturing/ warehousing “manly” job.
It’s still sexism. Just not the type that gets talked about as much. And it’s just as much bullshit as every other type. I think it all just goes to prove that the system of oppression holds everyone back, no matter where on the totem pole they end up.
I’ve noticed that there definitely is a trend of failing to see the trees for the model in some SJ, especially gender-related, in a variety of rather different cases. I call this ‘oppression essentialism’ because it interprets oppression as some property of the universe rather than as a trend in society. This is probably my true objection to Twisty Faster.
This results in people being told that they are oppressed in a way that doesn’t even slightly fit their experience, and some really weird predictions such as that once women are no longer ‘the sex class’, heterosexual men will cease to desire pornography depicting women.
@penny
My husband has been facing exactly the same problem in trying to get an administrative position. He *needs* to get himself into a desk job, because his back is fucked. He is an amazing organizer, and has better admin skills than I do, but people keep assuming he doesn’t really want the jobs, while I got myself hired with minimal related experience
penny: Yeah, sexism is weird and complicated because you have both oppositional sexism (“Girls are X and guys are Y and never the twain shall meet”) and misogyny (“girls suck!”). And yet lots of people insist on acting like there’s only one. What you’re talking about isn’t precisely what I’m talking about, but it’s also an important way a simplistic privilege analysis breaks down.
One from history– he Victorian panic about male masturbation. You’d think no one could be more privileged than a white upper class Victorian man, but there was cruel treatment of ordinary male behavior. I’m even willing to bet a small amount that poor boys and men were much less subject to that nonsense.
I don’t see how it fits into a privilege/intersectionality model at all. You could stretch matters by saying that adults are privileged relative to children, but then you need to add that adults are ex-children. Or maybe that everyone can be disprivileged relative to medical nonsense, but I’m not sure much is left of privilege at that point.
One would always get nonsense when engaging relative reality with essentialist viewpoint. Add ‘ceteris paribus’, meaning considering other conditions being equal to the privilege/ intersectionality model and you’ll ‘fix’ it. Everytime when people understand social justice as a riddle to solve, rather than an evergoing process to engage, they end up blacking out important aspects of reality.
P.S. What I was clumsily trying to say there is that theoretical models are more guidelines to understanding society than instructions how to do it. Though sometimes we all fall prey to the illusion of actually knowing what to do rather than having relatively reliable guidelines what is better not to be done and what are the tricky points we need to be aware of when dealing with certain injustices.
I can’t say much about the intersectionality model, but I think the thing going on here is a standard issue about binaries. Namely, whenever there’s a binary opposition (e.g., men vs women) it is rarely a true opposition, rather it’s usually an X vs not-X sort of thing. That is, when policing the borders between genders, there’s a very big difference between policing women acting like men vs men acting like women (i.e., “not knowing one’s place” vs “corrupting the purity of manliness”). This is part of why NSWATM is/can be a legit issue. Women are oppressed because they’re not men; but men are forced into very tight strictures of what it means to be a “man”, lest they be booted out of the elite club. But the real kicker is, men who fail to conform aren’t just given the same oppression as women, they’re going to be punished even more severely, in order to (a) prove to the attackers that they’re distinct from the victim, (b) convince the victim they can never come back, (c) serve as a warning to other would-be violators, etc. Kicking someone out of your special club is very different than keeping an outsider out.
As far as the intersectionality model goes, it could/should be able to incorporate these details about policing borders. For instance, black gay men face a lot more crap than white gay men, and that extra stigmatization comes from other black people and is due to specifically black issues about gayness (i.e., it’s intersectional).
First off, thanks Ozy! I think that it would be beneficial for people to keep in mind that theoretical models are not an iron-clad predictor for individual hardship/privilege. In the myriad, complex interactions of every sort of social issue that is apparent in our society, I have always believed that we, as individuals, would be very well served by focusing, at times, on the positive things in our lives. I’d love to see a fight, once in awhile, over whose life is awesomer instead of the usual squabbles over the oppression olympics.
Cross-cutting intersectionality privileges (wow, so jargon-y so fast!) are a natural outgrowth of radical politics. Check out any SJ blog or Tumblr. To the wider world, it’s essentially permanent rageface – the media, the government, the justice system, every microagression from any poor schmo who isn’t so profoundly self-aware as those on the inside.
There is just so much more to be done!
So instead of gradual change, we get a simplified, inverse system in which everyone knows their place in the world, just like under the traditional hierarchy, but the opposite. When your belief system revolves around tallying up privileges and assigning blame for all manner of sh*ttiness accordingly, that’s the level of discourse you get.
“The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.”
Take a person randomly selected from all Americans, and a person randomly selected from all straight, white middle-class-and-above American men. Do you think think that the second is no more likely to be affected by anti-gay hate crimes and the PI complex than the first? Because we can look that up.
Oh epicycles– let’s add more!
L: EPICYCLES FOREVER
GudEnuf: White men are about 36% of the general population and about 30% of the incarcerated population; I can’t find the class numbers with a cursory Google, but since most prisoners are poor I assume it would make the chance of an arbitrary white middle-class-or-above man going to prison even lower. I do not have statistics on how many anti-LGB hate crimes are perpetrated against straight men vs. against all other groups.
Rhubarb: Well said.
Ozy: Yep, exactly. The deeper I get into social justice issues, the more I realize they overlap – that the women’s rights movement overlaps with LGBTQIA rights, which overlaps with civil rights, etc. etc. None of us are free until all of us are free. Giving (or taking) privilege hurts everyone – even the privileged groups.
And the more different groups intersect in your corner of the activism world, the more breakable those simple models of privilege are.
Ozy, I think you made a very important point about misogyny being different from gender essentialism. Of course they’ll often overlap, and of course one can often lead to the other (going from “women are more emotional and less rational than men” to hating on women because they’re stupid and ruled by their emotions and that makes them WRECK SOCIETY for instance), but you can still distinguish the too.
Now misogyny has obviously no benefits for women. Gender essentialism is more complicated. Overall, gender essentialist beliefs are construed so that men benefit from them, but occasionally, in particular contexts, it’s women who benefit.
Take this idea that men are naturally more aggressive than women. Usually, this belief benefits men as a group (although individual men who fail to live up to this ideal may of course suffer from it). However, in a particular context, that of criminal justice, this belief actually benefits women. If a woman is charged with a violent crime, people are more prone to look for causes (since, you know, women are naturally non-aggressive, so there must be particular circumstances that explain why this woman committed a violent crime) which might easily turn into mitigating circumstances. If a man is charged with a violent crime, people are less surprised by this, less prone to look for causes that can be seen as mitigating. So, men receive harsher sentences on average than women.
Men are also seen as more sexual, in addition to more aggressive, while women are seen as nurturing. In the particular context of child-care, this benefits women. If a woman wants to work in child-care that’s considered normal, while if a man wants to, people might suspect that he’s secretly a pedophile.
As long as we’re talking gender essentialist beliefs, it would be strange if there WEREN’T at least SOME contexts where women rather than men benefited from these beliefs.
The privilege model is the go-to explanation that blinds us from exploring certain phenomena further. While it’s true in some cases, a foolish adherence to it victimizes a lot of people with sheer apathy.
Nancylebowitz: well, complicating matters is that male homosexuality was illegal in the UK from the 19th century until the 1970s, while lesbianism was not – and not because, according to rumour, Queen Victoria didnt believe lesbianism existed.
Here is the problem I see with the privilege model: The privilege model itself conflates two separate problems, and then slaps an ‘Oppressed Persons Only’ label on it. The guy who wrote the Meditations of Privilege and Creepiness touched on this, but not entirely.
First, there’s inferential difference which cuts both ways although it tends to be biased by overall societal stuff. Men are unlikely to understand the whole sexual harrassment/high rape risk thing unless it’s explained to them, and women may not understand how confusing and frightening the dating arena looks like for shy, awkward men who care about not creeping out women. (even though this isn’t that much of a worry.) White people who are aware of racism probably don’t *get* the full degree of risk, while black people are probably unaware of what it feels like to have all the wealth and little of the respect.
Second, there are the lines of actual privilege or oppression, which are much more cut-and-dry.
The problem with the privilege model is that it combines those two totally different things, sets it up so that it sounds like a claim that being lucky or awesome makes you a bad person, and conceptualizes it as a unidirectional thing. And then you get MRAs reacting against this and saying ‘female privilege’ when they do have the inferential distance but not (usually) the oppression.
Thanks, Ozy. Why do you think it’s valid to compare white, upper-middle class men to the average American, rather than to white, upper-middle class women? If a female banker makes $100k while her coworkers doing an identical job makes $120k, would that not count as sexism since she’s making more money than the average person?
On the subject of NSWATHM, are you still going to write the book? I really liked the first chapter, and want to read the rest.
Excellent Articles About The Concept Of Privilege | Lynley Stace
I think if a model is flawed, and repeatedly fails to predict certain outcomes, the best choice is to find another model which DOES predict those outcomes.
Steele: Except that sociology is really really complicated. Anything that accurately described the way an entire society works would be far too complicated to fit into a single blog post. I think we have to accept that we’re working with flawed models and be willing to put them away when necessary.
“Men are unlikely to understand the whole sexual harrassment/high rape risk thing unless it’s explained to them, and women may not understand how confusing and frightening the dating arena looks like for shy, awkward men who care about not creeping out women.”
…how are those equivalent? o.O Am I the only one who notices that “justified worry about harassment and assault, in a society that obscures the ability to accurately identify actual threats by normalizing and endorsing certain behaviors and ideas with consequences that cut across gender lines” is not exactly evenly-weighted with “the frustration, confusion and fear experienced by that subset of people who, for whatever reason, cannot easily get dates because they don’t know how to go about it and have internalized that difficulty?” (Also, why is that second thing taken to be representative of men? You know that happens to women too, right?)
I can see why you might wanna make the first one *all of society’s problem* — it’s about changing the pattern of externalized costs. Men routinely get away with sexual assault and harassment at incredibly high rates; not all men engage in it or take deliberate advantage of it, but systems of male domination have effectively spread the social cost of these behaviors onto women (as well as men who wind up raped by anyone regardless of gender) — the “asking for it” phenomenon, the idea that marital rape is a contradiction in terms, the slut-shaming and victim-blaming that go on *even on the occasions a rapist is charged, tried, and found guilty*, the way people fret about the male perpetrator’s character being impugned… One group (men) is able to forcibly externalize the costs (criminal sentencing, ostracism & censure, being brought to trial in the first place, the difficulty in masking one’s actions or the reputation that arguably would go with them if there were no differential treatment here) onto the targeted group (women), and all of society pays.
That doesn’t look anything like the case of someone who is awkward, intimdated, worried about being taken as creepy and harassing, and unsure of how to navigate this — and above all frustrated at the difficulty this poses for their efforts at mate-seeking. (I say this as *one of those people*…) Is their situation unfortunate? Absolutely. Is it a situation created by one group for their own advantage at this population’s expense? No. Is it even exclusive or particular to men? No. Does it pose a case of oppression against men? No. It’s hard to say if it imposes a cost on society (the prevalence of involuntary celibacy is not even remotely well-known, and even definitions vary; data on the results of any given background rate are similarly lacking).
So why should we expect people to care about Bob’s involuntary celibacy in the same ways, and to the same degree, as Alice’s (widely-shared) fear of harassment and assault and uncertainty about how to avoid these things? They don’t look anything alike.
The second example is downright baffling:
” White people who are aware of racism probably don’t *get* the full degree of risk, while black people are probably unaware of what it feels like to have all the wealth and little of the respect.”
There are wealthy black people who have *every* idea of what it’s like to have lots of wealth and little respect. Henry Louis Gates, anyone?
You seriously contend that rich white people, as a demographic, get little respect?
Or that white people in general get little respect in society?
I mean, what the hell?
(Okay I’m about to sound really elitist, but I really do not mean to). – I think a lot of the problem in the current widespread use of privilege models is that so much is done by armchair critical thinkers…or armchair philosophers…or armchair social theorists. (I say on a blog…go figure).
But by that I mean…so you get a lot of people who read/hear the word “social privilege” and so they Google it and read the Wikipedia page and then they start using the term. Or you get people who remember the term from their Gender Studies 101 class (or whatever) and then they use it. Or you get a politician who is trying to pander to a certain demographic, and so they have some staffer give them some buzz words, and they use it.
And so all of the above results in people using the term while forgetting that we left behind the idea of reaching universal truths quite a long time ago. All social theories are only applicable some of the time (and the good ones are applicable most of the time). And that’s precisely because, as you say Ozy, life’s all complicated and thus any model will necessarily end up simplifying it.
It strikes me as a problem of people being taught what to think, instead of how to think.