Okay I guess I’m going to interrupt here with a not a white dude in his forties perspective: the thing that’s a weird kind of privilege for me is being butch. I rarely pass as a man but I’m unmistakably masculine in the way I dress most of the time, as well having a not really “feminine” figure, which prevents me from being the target of a lot of misogyny– catcalling and stuff like that. So sometimes I’m completely blind to what my more feminine friends/family experience. Of course I hear women talk about their experiences of being harassed all the time, and I think, wow, that sounds like it really sucks (as a female human I get harassed too but in other ways and not to the same degree I think), but it’s not on my mind until I’m walking down the street with my cousin and some asshole says “you should smile more often” in a creepy ass voice.
And then other times, because some straight-cis dudes read me as “not feminine enough to harass and exclude”, they feel comfortable talking about awful shit they want to do or have done to women, in front of me, expecting me to be complicit, and if I tell them they’re creeps, which I usually try to, they’ll act like I’ve betrayed the laws of the man-cult and revealed my feminine weakness. (The other option is to sit quietly and want to vomit.)
And I was thinking about that study with the fake twitter accounts, showing that calling people out works better if it’s coming from someone on the privileged side of things and worse if they’re not, and I’m wondering where I fall on that when it comes to these misogynistic behaviors–if I call these guys out to defend my friends, what does that mean to them? If I’m only read as masculine enough when I’m silent and complicit in misogynistic behavior then what does it mean to a misogynist when I refuse to be? Does it matter to them?
Hey, white dudes in your forties—do you notice if you call someone out if they respond by trying to undermine your masculinity or another privileged aspect of identity? Have you noticed a difference in your own response to being called out by someone with your level of privilege vs someone without it?
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