That certainly would be the crux of male privilege. It’s not as if you can even ‘look out’ for it to try and educate yourself, the outsider will never have a personal experience of the abuse suffered by the insider. I think that is where all the false equivalences we hear so often come from.
It’s okay to try and understand but attempting to draw on ones own experiences and translate them across the divide is less helpful and more alienating, unfortunately.
Perhaps one of the most central issues in attempting any kind of dialectics on matters of discrimination, to my mind, even of those participants who attempt sincerity, is the provincialism of the peer group of those people who have been discriminated against.
There is definitely some kind of similarity between a cis-woman who is discriminated against and a trans-man who is discriminated against if the situation is similar enough but there is obviously an uncrossable divide to some aspects of discriminatory practices as they are inflicted upon different groups.
I guess the open minded conversation is most important in a world of words where no fixed position has been achieved or even possible… or perhaps even necessary.
…but I think we’ve already established the limits of my introspection.
I love that detail, because I think it encapsulates the issue: when you’re perceived as male, even doing something quite unusual like riding a unicycle doesn’t draw attention the way simply being “female” does.
In public, we are always an object first rather than a subject.
Let’s go by the data. There is no appreciable underreporting of male rape. Females account for the vast majority of rapes in college and generally in the USA. So, therefore, Edith’s assessment that it is a woman problem was forthright and correct and this whole males-get-raped-too thing is utter bullshit and a distraction.
That said, it’s not just a woman’s problem; it’s an everyone problem that is only now starting to be addressed and taken seriously. Fact.
Before sending my daughter to college, I am going to take a long look at the rape statistics and culture that she will be immersed in at all of her potential schools and try to come up with some good recommendations for her. I will NOT be sending her to a place where she’s in extra danger.
One of the things that really makes your blood boil is that by hassling women generally, but not when they are with a man or say “I have a boyfriend”, people show that they respect the woman as a person less than the fact that she belongs to someone else.
When I read that, it reminded me of how one of my daughters handles large public crowds (she’s a fan of music festivals like Pitchfork and Lollapalooza): she travels in a group, and they pair off into boy/girl couples because that way the girls aren’t hassled by strangers. jsroberts is right: what is respected is the man’s “ownership” over a woman, and thus men won’t hassle her in deference to “her” man. I don’t believe this was being represented as positive, just reality.
OK, I get it now. In politer company, the man-ward is true. Well, it’s often true, but not always. I’ve been to many a bar or venue where a woman could be hanging on physically to her guy and other dudes are around her actively trying to peel her off, verbally and physically. Primates are nothing if not relentless.
I wouldn’t let fear solely dictate anyone’s actions. With that said, being a woman does require more precautions when interacting with others (even though we shouldn’t have to). That’s life, even after they graduate from college.
I would expect the large out of state/out of country tuition to be a big downside though.
OK, I know I’ll get raked over the coals for this, but…
Here’s the thing. An individual story tells you almost nothing, but imho the fact that it’s being reported is an encouraging thing imho; the press is actually doing its job, shining a flashlight, and the cockroaches are scattering.
In some ways, I think the United States might get a bad rap for this because we are trying to crack down on it, and it’s really hard to pin down stats.
If you’ve never seen the “Sweden rape puzzle” before, it’s one that I have seen before, claiming that Sweden has the highest number of rapes in the world. And the source I usually see touting this: European white supremacist groups claiming it’s the Muslims’ fault, or take it at face value because hey, there are cultural barriers to reporting rape. And on that map, you’d have to drop all doubt and believe that it’s safer for a woman to be in Egypt or South Africa than it is to be in Sweden.
I guess the tl;dr is that the world sucks, especially toward women, but the U.S. is still a reasonably safe place…unless you’re talking about the safety of your finances when sending your kid to an American university. Don’t buy into the hype that the U.S. has much worse crime stats than the rest of the world, because it doesn’t. It could be better, though, I must confess.
In the Anglophone world, New Zealand followed by Canada for lowest tuition costs. I can’t speak for the quality of NZ universities, but both countries are highly ranked for educational attainment in the OECD. Canadian universities can be very good - from what I’ve seen, there is quite a bit less variation between top- and bottom-ranked schools than in the USA.
Don’t buy into the hype that the U.S. has much worse crime stats than the rest of the world, because it doesn’t. It could be better, though, I must confess.