Women's and Gender Studies Newsletter

The College of New Jersey April 2002

Male Privilege, Men’s Responsibility

by Michael Robertson

At the end of the semester in my “Men and Masculinities” course, I always have my students read Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay on white privilege with its list of forty-six privileges, ranging from “I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me” to “I can choose bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin.” After reading McIntosh, each of the students writes a list of male privileges for homework, then we compile a collective list in an exuberant class session that is by turns funny and sobering.

These being college students, a lot of the privileges have to do with bodily functions: “I can pee standing up” appeared on one list, along with “I can burp in public” and “I don’t have to shave my armpits and legs.” As you’d expect, many privileges concern sexual behavior: “People don’t stare at my chest” or “I can sleep around without being called a slut” or “I don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.”

The mood in the class turns somber when students come up with privileges that reveal women’s vulnerability to male violence: “I can go the bathroom at a bar by myself”; “I can feel safe going out alone at night”; “I can go on a date with someone I don’t know well without worrying about being raped.”

I’m always impressed by my students’ lists, thrilled by the way they all--women and men alike--have become conscious of the ways that male privilege suffuses our supposedly egalitarian society in ways both large (“I can find lots of representatives of my sex in history books”) and small (“I am not talked down to when I buy a car”). However, every semester I’ve found it necessary to add one final male privilege to the list: “I can stand up for women’s rights without being dismissed as a man-hater.”

In adding my contribution to the list, I try to move our discussion from the topic of male privilege to the question of men’s responsibility. Over the course of a semester in any Women’s and Gender Studies course, students become aware of how, despite extraordinary advances in recent decades, gender inequality still permeates our society. Every male in the U.S., no matter his age or race or class, finds his path made just a bit smoother every day because he happens to have an X and Y chromosome.

The question, then, for any man in Women’s and Gender Studies becomes, “Now that you know about male privilege, what are you going to do about it?” I try to convince my students that male privilege entails men’s responsibility, that once a man becomes aware of gender inequality, he needs to transform personal belief into social action and join women in the movement for social change.

Fortunately, we have lots of models to follow, even if they may not be well known. If women acting for change have been “hidden from history” in Sheila Rowbotham’s phrase, pro-feminist men have been equally neglected. My students are always surprised to learn that men made up a third of the signers of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration, the founding document of the U.S. women’s rights movement.

But we don’t have to turn to the past to find models of pro-feminist men. One year ago my colleague John Landreau, who started the “Men and Masculinities” course, brought Canadian psychologist and social activist Michael Kaufman to campus. Kaufman is one of the founders of the White Ribbon Campaign, an organization of men dedicated to ending men’s violence against women. White Ribbon began in Canada in 1991 after a gunman shooting from a Montreal highrise killed fourteen people, all women. Dramatic cases like that make the news, but White Ribbon is dedicated to raising awareness of the less publicized forms of violence against women: the more than 700,000 rapes every year in the United States, the two to four million women battered by their partners, the one out of every two women sexually harassed at school or work.

Following Kaufman’s campus visit, John Landreau and I decided to start a White Ribbon Campaign chapter at TCNJ. We talked to students in classes, held meetings in dorms. At every meeting, I asked students to raise their hands if they knew a woman who had been the victim of male violence or had been sexually coerced; usually every hand in the room went up. It didn’t take long to find a group of people who were not only appalled by the problem but wanted to do something about it. An executive committee of five men and one woman came together to direct White Ribbon activities: Larry Cowdrick, Ryan Farnkopf, Christine Mesropyan, Scott Pennock, Tom Scheuren, and Hasson Thomas. During the fall, they sponsored White Ribbon Week, which began with a speech by Michael Kimmel, who attracted almost 400 people to hear his talk on “Mars and Venus, or Planet Earth? Women and Men on Campus in the New Millennium.” White Ribbon distributed hundreds of ribbons and information sheets, posted flyers about men’s violence all over campus, and signed up numerous supporters. This spring, the organization is co-sponsoring the Vagina Monologues and Take Back the Night and raising funds for WomanSpace, a battered women’s shelter in Trenton. Members have assisted at educational events for high school students and talked to Women’s and Gender Studies classes.

With its recent recognition as an official student organization, White Ribbon is poised to become even more active and effective next year. Though the parent organization is all male, the TCNJ chapter welcomes both men and women; it can be reached at wrc@tcnj.edu

Men couldn’t give up male privilege even if they wanted to; it’s an unearned gift they receive every day. But they can take responsibility for helping to build a more equal society; White Ribbon is one tool for getting the job done.