[sciborg2]

Seems odd to make some comment about seahorses and then bow out.

I thought you might be interested in engaging some larger amount of females who might disagree with you, rather than Bakker fans who are more likely to support your initial conclusions.

eta: Apologies if my tone seems harsher than necessary. I find I come across as more of a dick than intend to.

[Meyna]

eta: Apologies if my tone seems harsher than necessary. I find I come across as more of a dick than intend to.

I constantly worry about this on the internet, so I end up overusing the exclamation mark to avert it!

[sciborg2]

eta: Apologies if my tone seems harsher than necessary. I find I come across as more of a dick than intend to.

I constantly worry about this on the internet, so I end up overusing the exclamation mark to avert it!

Well, I am the resident Contrarian Wanker, so some of my dickishness is intentional. :-)

In the case of this topic I think low probability of sexual assault is pretty much a privilege of being male. I find it to be self-evident, so I cannot really fathom what the counterpoint is.

[Callan S.]

Looking at the word privilege for now, if you're a teenager and your parents bestow upon you the privilege of taking their car out for the night...are rapists bestowing privilege upon men in general by not targeting them as well(/as much), just like mum and dad bestowed a privilege?

It stinks of just world fallacy to me. When someone doesn't have something bad happen to them, another mind inventing the idea of a marvelous system of justice in place that made it so (just as much as 'oh, she got raped because she did X' is just world fallacy inventive thinking). It stinks of people in safe places projecting their patch of safety, like the patch of safety mum and dad give, across a whole world. Anything in it, any bad act withheld (like mum and dad withholding grounding you), must be an extension of a system of justice - a privilege.

Makes me think of an experiment - have a scientist stand over a series of test subjects, who have an apparatus attached to their hands that can apply an electric shock.

Afterward ask them if they felt some people were more privileged by the white coated scientist standing in front of them than others.

When really all the shocks were randomly assigned.

I bet there will be hypothesies of privilege expouted by the test subjects.

Run it again, but this time gender biased, yet still random since it'll randomly decide either males or females will get more shocks, for a given test.

Oh, you'll definately get hypothesies of privilege expouted then.

Oh, sure, it's someone handing out a privilege. Not just shit happening, of course! Bad things are only met out by a system of justice, aren't they? A system of privilege!

I'm waiting for someone to shift the goal posts on the word and say when a casino one armed bandit pays out, that's privilege as well (ie, as if the usage of the word 'privilege' was synonymous with 'random' all along)

[Cüréthañ]

Did someone say Contrarian Wanker?

I don't think its appropriate to use rape targets here. 
If you look in prison society you will see that male rape victims are also selected to a criteria of percieved weakness or vulnerability.  It's a predatory act.

In public, more culturally motivated displays of violence men will generally target other men - here it is a display of prowess and agression.
Can this be defined as male privilege?

[Callan S.]

I'll just add: If the word 'privilege' was being redefined into something utterly negative, I think that'd be a small injustice. But atleast it'd be assigned an utterly negative term to the issue of sexual assault.

But while the word 'privilege' has connotations of being a possitive thing (like in the phrase 'it's a privilege, not a right' it's a possitive word), to me people who talk about male privilege in regard to the lower number of sexual assaults on males are assigning a possitive element to the issue of sexual assault! Affirming sexual assault!? All the while looking at me like I'm the one not acknowledging the slanted statistics because I don't support their wording/affirmations.

Perhaps it was just co-opted from the idea of men being promoted ahead of women in the workforce and that being male privilege - though even there, given I think the biased promotion is a bad thing, I'd be inclined not to call it privilege (yet another crime, as laws atleast give lip service to these issues now)

[Castel]

As much as regular law is seen as legitimate and regular law hands out privileges, to call who a sex preditor will or wont rape some distribution of 'privilege' seems to legitimise the sex preditor as some governing authority as much as regular law is legitimise.

I have to say that I'm surprised by the use of privilege in this way.

Maybe it's just the natural next step from "Men get certain benefits purely because they are male, including rationalizations for their sexual assault" but I don't think I've ever seen it used in the situation you're describing.

Not to get personal, but I was in a very brief relationship with a woman prone to extremely violent outbursts. I only got a few slaps and loogies in my face for my trouble, but her next boyfriend she stabbed. The difference here is if I laid a hand on her I could have probably very seriously injured her, while that might not have been the case in reverse.

Which it's why that has been put forth as the reason  women pick up knives and scissors. They feel inadequate so they try to even the field.

Men can physically overpower women, so I'm not so inclined to start the waterworks for some poor 200 lb. guy who got chased around the house by a girl half his size. There are definitely outliers but we're not talking outliers here.

So...he should just have controlled her or it's his fault?And he was 200 lb.?  When faced with someone with a sharp object who seems angry enough to actually hurt you the real problem here is that you're the weakling who cannot stop her.

[Callan S.]

As much as regular law is seen as legitimate and regular law hands out privileges, to call who a sex preditor will or wont rape some distribution of 'privilege' seems to legitimise the sex preditor as some governing authority as much as regular law is legitimise.

I have to say that I'm surprised by the use of privilege in this way.

Maybe it's just the natural next step from "Men get certain benefits purely because they are male, including rationalizations for their sexual assault" but I don't think I've ever seen it used in the situation you're describing.

I asked my partner about it and she asked how were they using the word 'privilege' and I said it was in regards to how men are less victimised by sexual assault. She just asked why would they use that word? I laughed as I felt a rug pulled out from under me, in terms of being primed to intellectually argue but then having no intellectual responce to how she took the issue, so I just dumbly replied "I dunno?"

I kinda fear it's actually sex preditors winning - actually fostering a culture where even their victims ascribe the sex preditors as 'privileged'.

Like one might call an overbearing tyrant a 'warlord' which is more legitimising and is still calling someone 'lord', thus legitimising their position.

[sciborg2]

'Privilege' just means benefit, it doesn't confer intrinsic worth over someone else.

Here, low probability of sexual assault is, in most situations, an advantage of being male.

For example, my friend and I was once carjacked and then put in the back seat so the thieves could find an ATM so we could withdraw cash for them. They also demanded they go to the house my friend was staying at (his aunt's), and robbed the place.

Now there were times I thought we'd be killed, but I never feared we'd be sexually assaulted. I suspect if we were women we'd at least have been groped/fingered, if not raped.

This is actually one of the few times I think there is a clear cut privilege, most other examples I see used in social justice circles don't IMO take into account factors besides gender/race/sexuality.

[Callan S.]

You attribute the car jackers as granting you a privilege, Saajan?

Or are you using the word privilege as in just how things turn out, in a shit happens sense - if I find a lump of gold on the ground by chance, I'm privileged over those who didn't find such? Birds are privileged over men, because they can fly? Which isn't, as far as I know, granted by anyone?

What I fear is that how the word 'privilege' is being used is alined with the idea that the car jackers were 'looking after you' when they did not inflict any sexual assault.

In other words, something worthy of a kind of respect, like maybe if you were in an accident, in pain and a paramedic gave you some pain killers, they'd be looking after you. The carjackers gaining some of the same legitimacy as the paramedic example.

The pain killer from the paramedic is a privilege? The lack of sexual assault from the car jackers is a privilege?

That equal naming is what scares some shit out of me.

[sciborg2]

You do posit a good question on the car jackers doing me a favor by not raping me. I suspect it didn't occur to them, which I guess is more good fortune than some respect they accorded me.

I don't know if there's any big reason to worry about the word having different meanings, but that example does better illustrate the concern you have.

Scalzi may have the right of it at a theoretical level, with bonuses being accorded depending on intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics. Where I veer from Scalzi is his belief that such bonuses can be summed up without accounting for region, class, etc.

That said, I do think the usual lack of concern about sexual assault is a male privilege, though it would also be fair to ask if those men who are victims of sexual assault face equal, lower, or steeper barriers than women do in trying to make their voices heard.

[Callan S.]

which I guess is more good fortune than some respect they accorded me.

Aye. I in no way want to associate 'respect' with rapists and who they happen to attack or not attack.

In the end, if I'm walking a quiet  street at night and a woman happens to come out on the path in front of me, I tend to cross the road to the other side so I don't appear to be following (and what's embaressing is if she then crosses to that same side and if I cross again I look really stupid! But then I do anyway!)

[Callan S.]

Oh, in regard to males being heard, one thing I'll note is how the system forces you to agree the asshole did anything to you, in order to do anything? If anything the system compounds the assailants actions by reinforcing 'oh, he got you! Admit it - or we'll do fuck all!'.

Well, that's in regard to an in company investigation - but I'm guessing that the legal system does the same thing.

It's a pretty fucked up concept - it's like if someone called you a fuckwit, that you have to admit to now being a fuckwit before the authority will do something about the person who called you that.

I don't know about female culture and whether they don't share any parralel with this idea of 'well, he did the physical actions, but he was just trying to get at me and he never did' or if they just want to accept any physical assault as being succesful at affecting their mind/soul/will/part that matters.

But to me the systems fucked up when you have to say the fucker did get to what matters, for them to do shit all.

And even then, atleast with the in company stuff, they don't admit they can't find a conclusion (because of, say, a camera blind spot), they instead say the person did not do it! They don't even know that, yet they pull conclusions out of their ass (I bet so the status quo can just blunder on). Fuck, even call up about it and the women spoken to might complain that you were just making the call during lunch to make her skip lunch. Oh, poor darling!

So there's a tip - if you're thinking of just using an company internal investigation, ask what they print when they can't come to a conclusion. If they utterly disrespect your position and say not that they can't come to a conclusion but instead act as if the other person did nothing, just go to the cops. I know it'll seem like a big hassle - either take the big hassle, or take the fact they'll exonerate a pervert just to so they don't have to think.

Oh, and if you're reticent on talking about anyone, they will keep grilling you. Tell them to fuck off or you'll go to the cops.

Amen.

[Srancy]

Male privilege? It has to be a Bakker-related board.

[Baztek]

To be fair, this is one of the better discussions of male privilege I've seen on the internet. Everywhere else devolves into either invective ALL WOMEN ARE WHORES bullshit or hysterical claims that by simply having a pair of testes your every thought and action is an endorsement of rape culture.