What do we mean by ‘privilege?’ According to Allan Johnson, privilege is something one receives based on membership in a social category, that others not from that/those categories do not receive. It is not earned. Being white. Male. Heterosexual. Johnson’s conceptual framework includes four dimensions: a privilege system (male, for instance) is characterized by male domination, an obsession with control, male identification, and male centeredness. ‘White’ could be substituted for male, and the same thing applies. It is important to remember that Johnson was talking about a system. This is structural. In other words, it doesn’t matter so much what individuals are part of the system–individuals come and go, but the rules of the system predominate, and in this case, benefit males more often than females. We don’t choose to be part of a privileged category–all we can choose is how we respond to that reality.

Male-dominated. If you think about a hierarchy–at the university, in the White House, Congress, large corporation, city or county government, etc., male-dominated merely means that you’ll find more males at the top, more non-males at the bottom. Think we’ll be seeing a female president in the near future? We came close in the 2008 election cycle, but not yet. How many people who vote may actually think that a woman would be incapable of handling the presidency? Which people? What kind of media scrutiny would a woman with a serious shot at the candidacy have to endure? We saw that–reporters commenting on Senator Hillary Clinton’s outfits almost as often as her foreign policy positions. It will happen some day, and it will take a courageous woman to subject herself to the media circus likely to follow her every move. But think about it. Up until President Obama, we’d had only white men as president. Some of the presidencies were disasters. Did anyone influential ever say ‘that’s the last time I’m voting for a white man for president!’ ??

Obsession with control. Johnson mentioned control over sex, physical control over women. Here are some findings from a 1994 study of violence against women by the U.S. Department of Justice. Approximately 2.5 million of the nation’s 107 million females 12 years old and older were raped, robbed or assaulted in a typical year, or were the victim of a threat or an attempt to commit such a crime. Twenty-eight percent of the offenders were intimates, such as husbands or boyfriends, and another 39 percent were acquaintances or relatives. Women are more likely to be attacked by spouses, former spouses, boyfriends, parents or children than males by a factor of 10 to 1. In addition, women with family incomes of less than $10,000 were five times more likely to be attacked by an intimate than were women with family incomes of $30,000 or more. Eighteen percent of  women who were attacked [by intimates] did not file a police report because they feared reprisal from their attackers. Only 3 percent of women attacked by strangers did not file a police report. We can also think of control over emotions–it’s not okay for a man to break down and cry. In a book about Lyndon Baines Johnson, the U.S. president who escalated the Vietnam War, the author suggests Johnson knew two years before the 1968 election that the war was going badly and unwinnable, but he continued the campaign, a war in which over 56,000 American soldiers were killed, for fear that pulling back would make him seem less of a man.

Male-identified. This simply means that males are the standard. Check out the English language and the way words are used. Mankind (versus humankind?). The mail man (mail carrier?). Who’s manning the station? Does it have sufficient manpower? What do we mean by courage? It’s often associated with violence, doing death-defying acts. We don’t think of a single mother raising her children, going to school, working full time, as courageous. Arnold Schwarzenegger is courageous . . . So even courage often, at least in mainstream culture, has a masculine component to how it is socially defined or understood.

Male-centered. Spend a week looking at the headlines on the front page. You’ll find that the front page headlines are owned by white men. Look at movies (especially academy award winners)–how many are centered around a female character? Do you know about the Bechdel test?? The point here: White men are in positions of power. White men run the media outlets–newspaper, radio, television. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some women in these positions, but it does mean that men are far more likely to be in these positions. And that women in these positions might be there because they have had to assume the sort of character traits that would gain them the respect of the men they work with.

Johnson is careful to point out that he’s describing a system of privilege–he was not attributing the properties of this system to individuals, yet individuals often get defensive when a social category to which they belong is called ‘privileged.’ This isn’t about ‘bad men’ versus ‘good men,’ but couching the discussion in those terms likely prevents honest, open dialogue. No, he’s referring to a social system–in a sense, a game, with specific rules. He uses the example of monopoly–if you play monopoly, you’re expected to behave in a certain way–you’re expected to be greedy, to buy up properties, to charge others rent when they land on your properties. But when you finish the game, you can leave those rules behind–just because we may be greedy in the game of monopoly doesn’t mean that we’ll carry that attribute into our social world. With respect to the system of male privilege, we know the game, we’ve been learning the rules since we were children. Even if we don’t know the individual players, we still know the game and the rules.

Paths of least resistance

We all know how we’re supposed to behave in a classroom. Be attentive, or at least feign attentiveness, take notes or at least pretend to take notes, sit in our chairs, don’t interrupt, etc. What if we ‘breached’ these conventions? What if students, when they disputed someone’s point in class, got out of their chairs and went over to the student and stared them down, started talking trash? They would be straying from the path of least resistance. For men, the path of least resistance means paying homage to masculinity, being one of the guys. What happens if a group of guys is telling sexist jokes, and one of them objects, says ‘hey, my mom’s a woman. Your mom’s a woman. My sister’s a woman. My girlfriend is a woman. Show some respect.’

. . . . we can all probably speculate as to what the other group members, regardless of whether they say it, must be thinking. Women, on the other hand, are not supposed to be pushy–pushy is bitchy in women, where men are seen as aggressive. Staying on the path of least resistance is all that is necessary, Johnson says, to perpetuate systems of privilege. When we take that path, we reproduce the system in our actions. There are consequences for following other paths. For instance, in the National Football League right now, there is a brewing controversy over gay football players. Not one active player has come out, and many players have made homophobic statements in the press. The same kind of rhetoric occurred in the early 1990s in the military, where some male soldiers would be quoted saying they didn’t want to share their foxhole with a gay. People who take a path of greater resistance often pay a price.

Is there an institutional corollary for this path of least resistance that puts males in positions of privilege? What would it take for a more female-centered perspective on welfare programs, especially cash assistance programs used most often by single mothers? Can people from a position of privilege design a welfare system that meets the needs of the underprivileged? What reasons might those in power have for not wanting to do that?  Sociologist Gerry Mackie (1996) discusses a model for ending female genital cutting in Africa. She contends that even if infibulation– which has serious mental and physical health consequences for women, and which constitutes an even broader public health problem– has been practiced for generations, and even if it has the support of older women in a society (it is women who do the actual cutting), that the practice can quickly be brought to an end, given the right circumstances and events, which include:

1. a modern education campaign. This could manifest itself in different forms–on the radio, through books, talks, discussions, etc. People need to be made aware that their practices are not universal–that in other areas, women are not subjected to these procedures, and the society gets by just fine without immoral women, higher rates of adultery, etc. (we’re back to male obsession with control, in this case over a female’s sexuality)
2. explanation of benefits, health consequences–do people understand that it affects not only the health of women, but their prospects for complication-free childbirth, their vulnerability to infections, not to mention for some procedures the endurance of great pain during sexual intercourse. People may not see that there are benefits to not performing the procedure that may outweigh the costs of performing it.
3. formation of ‘pledge associations‘–in the case of FGC, one of the key issues is knowing that one’s daughter, if she does not undergo the procedure, will not be stigmatized, and will be able to find a mate. Thus it takes other people, groups, families, villages, willing to say that their sons are willing to marry women, even if they haven’t been excised. It is asking too much in this case for people to ‘go it alone,’ to stay alone on a path of greater resistance, so to speak. So a ‘pledge association’ is a group of people willing to adopt the change collectively (in this case, reducing the risks of being ostracized).

Mackie’s approach is somewhat different than Johnson’s, focusing less on paths of resistance and more on cultural (‘others do it differently’) and economic (costs and benefits) factors. With respect to culture, most every society in the world is patriarchal, and thus is characterized by some for of male privilege. Mackie’s third step gets more at the idea of a path of least resistance, but she still addresses it as an economic decision. Her analogy is a movie theatre. Let’s say that in a given culture, it was a tradition to stand up to watch movies, even though there were seats (okay, a little absurd, but … ). For one person to say ‘this is ridiculous, I’m sitting down’ won’t do much good–he/she won’t be able to see anything, unless somehow s/he convinces neighbors to do the same. But unless everyone does, those sitting will not be able to see if people in front of them are standing. However, it’s possible that if everyone tried sitting, they might see benefits. In some villages in Senegal, the practice of FGC was eliminated within a generation. Of course, it helped that the government was supportive of efforts to do this–in other words, the climate was conducive to change.

Some questions related to poverty, welfare

So, is welfare in a sense a system for the underprivileged in our society? Development for the poor around the globe? People below the poverty line are disproportionately minority and female. But where did this stratification of societies come from? Is poverty an achieved status, as conservatives would like us to believe, and attributable to individuals’ laziness and lack of motivation? Or is it in many cases an ascribed status–our chances of escaping or avoiding poverty decrease the further away we get from white and male? With respect to women and violence, forced marriages, divorce, even property rights conflicts, how do you think males might be privileged in the judicial system? The law-making (legislative) system? Are rules and standards of evidence ‘stacked’ against women, making it difficult to prosecute or at least to win a criminal case against an abuser, or to declare illegitimate an arranged marriage?

Think also about the social services model of welfare. This is not dissimilar from many development models, and in fact early WID was a welfare-based model. These may be effective for reaching a large number of people. Bureaucracies are excellent models for that, as Max Weber noted long ago. But can a bureaucracy, can the ‘case management’ model of social service ‘delivery,’ have any effect on a system of privilege? Or might it serve to reinforce it? Or is it more like rearranging the furniture? Is the welfare system set up to help the underprivileged become part of the privileged class? Because if you think it is, you’re suggesting that poverty is not an ascribed status, and that people’s chances of escaping it have little to do with their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, etc. Think about how male-centered third world governments and other bureaucracies are (just based on the little knowledge we have from the gender measures in the human development report).

With respect to advocacy for the poor or for women in many parts of the world, what is the path of least resistance? This is especially important for those within the society. What does it take for men to acknowledge women’s contributions to economic productivity, and accord them equal status with respect to productive resources (i.e., land, labor and capital)? When a woman’s fortunes depend on the goodwill of her husband, and there are no institutional or other protections for her, her struggles for greater equity in resource sharing depend on those within a system of privilege taking a path of greater resistance. A man could evict a woman from a field she’s trying to farm. But if he tries to kick out a whole group of women farming their vegetables in a draw area, for instance, he may encounter more difficulty (but then, part of that difficulty might come from other men who don’t want to end up in a similar situation). But providing relief food for poor people doesn’t address the inequities built into systems of privilege. Why do we so often follow the path of least resistance? What are people afraid of? How about politicians, what are they afraid of?

So, looking at the big picture, we here in the U.S. live within a system of male, white privilege. It is a system, one which rewards certain kinds of behaviors, punishes others, and where resistance is often met with a great counterforce. For many cultures, there are ethnic pecking orders or status hierarchies, but male is a category that explains much in terms of power and privilege, and we usually refer to it as patriarchy. In our case, there is also a privilege system associated with being American. In a war, whose lives are valued most, reported on most, drive U.S. foreign policy? In an increasingly interdependent world . . .

And keep in mind that many of the development theories of the past have been the result of deliberations among white male scholars (e.g., economists at the World Bank) or government officials, many in the military (think colonialism here).

Sources:

• Johnson, Allan. 1997. The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Johnson, Allan. 2001. Power, Privilege and Difference. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Mackie, Gerry. 1996. Ending Footbinding and Infibulation: A Convention Account. American Sociological Review 61( 6):999-1017.