“She also can’t go for a walk alone at night without thinking about her safety a lot more than I would - without planning what to do in case a man approaches her with something other than goodwill. She has to worry about what a man might think if she smiles in a friendly way and says hello as they pass on the sidewalk, or what he’ll think if she doesn’t. She has to decide where to park her car for the greatest safety, to remember to have her keys out and ready as she approaches it, and to check the back seat before she gets in. In other worlds, she has to draw a tight boundary around her life in ways that never occur to me, and her being female is the only reason why.”
When reading this I think of institutionalized oppression, the facts above are just a part of the experience of being a woman. Females are taught these things from a young age, to protect ourselves, because we believe and are told it is “just the way things are”. An estimated 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female and 9% male. Nearly 99% of perpetrators are male (more sexualized violent stats can be found here). There is risk involved by being a woman. When I was 16 I got mace in my Christmas stocking, I was going to be getting my license a few weeks later and my dad wanted me to be prepared, it was ingrained in me from a young age to be wary - to not dress like “I was asking for it”, don’t park in dark corners, never walk alone, etc. Did my little brother ever get mace as a gift? No. But, I never thought much of it, it was just how it is, until I took a gender and women’s studies class in my undergrad, and I got mad about it! I never thought of myself as a feminist until then. I wasn’t going to go burn my bra, but why should we have to live in fear and always be on guard, simply because we are born female, we have to control how we present ourselves to the world and be prepared for potentially the worst because men cannot control their impulses? It was then I began to have a better understanding of privilege and oppression. It is a privilege to be a man because they don’t have to worry about these kinds of things - and the statistics prove that.
I recently listened to a podcast (if interested in listening to this podcast, it can be found here) about a woman who was murdered by her husband in Greenwich, CT a few years ago. She was white, very wealthy, from a very affluent family and grew on 5th Avenue in New York. When she went missing, it made national news. The FBI was immediately called in by local police to assist. It was eventually found that her estranged husband had killed her, but what struck me is that I listen to these types of true crime podcasts all the time, and so many women go missing and are victimized, murdered, all the time, but it never makes national news, the FBI isn’t called in to assist. This is clear example of privilege, of how being white and upper class has benefits and makes a difference with how society responds to you. Privilege didn’t change the outcome for this woman, but her “belonging to a privileged category improved the odds in favor of certain kinds of advantages and preferential treatment”. This woman was not a famous person, but because she was white, came from extreme wealth and lived in an extremely affluent area of the country, the response to her tragedy was completely different than those of lesser social class and even more so when compared to female victims of color. “It’s important to be aware that we don’t have to be special or even feel special in order to have access to privilege, because privilege doesn’t derive from who we are or what we are or what we’ve done. It is a social arrangement that depends on which category we happen to be ordered into by other people and how they treat us as a result.”
Last year, I watched a special about the crisis of murdered and missing indigenous women in Montana (if interested in watching, information can be found here). Indigenous women are victimized at much higher rates than non-indigenous women, but this is not making national news. The series was developed by other indigenous women fighting for recognition, help and acknowledgment for their peers. The differences in the societal responses to situations like these means “we live in a society that attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class. If I don’t see how that makes me part of the problem for privilege, I won’t see myself as part of the solution, the default is to leave it to blacks and women and Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, lesbians, gay men, and the lower and working classes to do it on their own. But these groups can’t do it on their own, because they don’t have the power to change entrenched systems of privilege by themselves. If they could do that, there wouldn't be a problem in the first place.” This exemplifies Alan Johnson’s argument that we cannot deny privilege exists, privilege that is connected to being white, male, heterosexual, etc, and this cannot be changed, the way society treats and responds to situations like this for those of oppressed and marginalized groups cannot be changed, unless dominant groups are involved in the conversation and the effort to remove these barriers.
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