None of us are equal, and men and women have different forms of privilege, but this is ultimately a distraction.
What gets you privilege in this world is money.
As a man, I’m more likely to be a victim of physical violence, but I’m also more likely to be able to defend myself.
The most dangerous, difficult jobs are populated almost exclusively by men, which is a sort of privilege, but it boils down to physical and financial realities. The average man is about three times as strong as the average woman, and most men and women in their right minds wouldn’t want these jobs, but some, like working on an oil rig, pay well, and while there are a few women who do these jobs, 95% of garbage men and oil rig workers are men. Over 85% of cops are men. Over 82% of soldiers are men. Over 92% of loggers are men. Almost 90% of construction workers are men. About 84% of sewage workers are men.
These jobs are dangerous, require strength, and/or are disgusting, and when you get above 90% male, especially in remote areas, it becomes even more risky to hire women from an actuarial perspective, in addition to being more expensive.
Men are in these professions because they’re typically more productive in them, and putting a woman into a workforce that’s over 90% male increases her chances of being mistreated.
I worked at a restaurant in NYC that has had an all male staff for over 100 hundred years. Maybe a few women would have helped, but the risk of even more interpersonal drama wasn’t worth it to the employers, and we were regularly expected to lug cases of wine and kegs of beer up from the basement.
In restaurants I’ve worked at with women servers—even upscale restaurants—there were always times when we got heavy deliveries of meat, booze, or whatever that were too much for the back of house to handle alone, and the male servers were exclusively asked to help because it makes more sense. If you need to move thousands of pounds of meat, crates of wine, and other crap that typically comes in boxes that weigh at least 50 pounds each, on average, men are going to be able to move that shit a lot faster.
Being a server is a difficult job and I respect women servers, but I don’t expect them to carry two cases of wine at a time from a truck, down through a basement, and then up to the bar. I actually appreciated doing this, as it gave me a break from the customers, so it cuts both ways.
Women were hit on more, but not by that much, and if a customer got rowdy or violent, the men dealt with it.
We were all privileged in a way because if we weren’t attractive and intelligent, we wouldn’t have gotten jobs as servers or bartenders in places like that in the first place.
I like working with women more in general because I like women and they have a palliative effect. That all male restaurant, we were like brothers in some ways, but we also got drunk and violent toward each other more than in the restaurants that had male and female servers. We also used more illegal drugs. Maybe most relevantly, we only had one dingy locker room in the basement. There wasn’t enough room for a women’s locker room. A woman server could potentially get dressed in the basement bathroom, but it was tiny, a few of us shot up or jerked off in there, and the only male policy of the owners was self-perpetuating. What woman would want to work in this zoo?
This robs women of opportunities and I know women have a shitload of other problems of their own, but so do we all, and being a woman, especially an attractive one, comes with privileges, too, as does being intelligent, or in some cases, like mine, being brown. I have a much easier time in rough neighborhoods than white people because I’m ambiguously brown, or people of every race tend to assume I’m either one of them or close.
That being said, as a brown person, I’ve noticed that in the corporate world, brown and black people have to be better at their jobs, whether male or female, and we usually hit a ceiling regardless.
As far as being a server, you have to be good, especially in NYC. You have to be good at just about every job here because there are thousands ready to take your place, unless you’re in the upper echelons of the corporate word. In that case, you have enough money and privilege to be incompetent.
Major League Baseball has no rule banning women, but no woman has made the cut yet, and I doubt it will ever happen because those guys are much bigger and stronger than people think (the average height of a MLB player is close to 6′3″). A team would sign an orangutan if they thought it’d help them win.
The fastest pitch by a woman on a regulation diamond was around 65 mph, and I could touch 80 mph when I was in high school and can still break 70 mph at 49 years old.
There is male privilege, but there is also privilege for women, the attractive, intelligent, strong, tall, etc.
We compliment each other, and again, most of us are getting screwed because the most potent privilege by far is wealth, and sports are probably the closest thing we have left to a true meritocracy.
Life should be more equitable, and I’m all for equality of opportunity, but we also have to acknowledge the reality that life isn’t easy for anyone who wasn’t born into wealth, and it is disingenuous to say it’s okay for everyone to be different while attacking people for acknowledging these differences.
We should concentrate more on those who are exploiting us, rather than fighting among ourselves, and frankly, we have much bigger problems to worry about.
Interesting
My biggest privilege is...I need to think on that. I'm still alive though, is it privilege? Could turn out differently so many times. Then it might be true for everybody
People in the know focus so much on trying to create a perfect median of the genders in all facets of life, socially, emotionally, and financially. Nobody ever told them that this is impossible.