Male Privilege Research Articles

Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure

Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos’s refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.

A Woman's Lot: Realism and Gendered Narration in Russian Women's Writing of the 1860s

This article examines the issue of realist literary narration portrayed as male privilege in Russian women's writing of the 1860s, specifically in Avdot'ia Panaeva's novel A Woman's Lot (Zhenskaia dolia). A Women's Lot was published in 1862, under Panaeva's male pen name Nikolai Stanitskii, and, taking advantage of this indeterminacy of gender, Panaeva's narrator alternated between its male and a female narrative personas. I argue that Panaeva used this self‐consciously transgressive narrative voice to challenge the gendered aesthetic conventions of contemporary relist writing. Employing the theory of “narrative transvestism,” this article demonstrates how Panaeva's narrator borrowed the male voice of authority, at the same time exposing its limitations. In A Woman's Lot, Panaeva discussed the subject of realist narration in a wider framework of male privilege in society and the arts, negotiating her text's problematic status as a realist narrative created by a woman writer.

Intergroup dialogue: A justice‐centered pedagogy to address gender inequity in STEM

AbstractGender inequities in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields persist and calls have been made for continued efforts to challenge systemic sexism in STEM. In response to these calls, we examined the experiences of undergraduate and graduate STEM students who participated in an intergroup dialogue (IGD) focused on gender and sexism in STEM. We conceptualize IGD as a form of “justice‐centered” STEM pedagogy, designed to bring together individuals from different social identity groups with a history of tension between them (in this case, women and men in STEM) for sustained, face‐to‐face communication. The goals of the dialogue included (1) building relationships and understanding across genders, (2) developing a critical awareness of male privilege and systemic oppression (i.e., sexism), and (3) promoting capacities to work toward gender equity in STEM. The dialogue followed a modified version of an empirically validated model of IGD. Eight students participated in the IGD and post‐IGD interviews. Through grounded theory analyses of these interviews, four themes emerged including Barriers to Dialogue, Facilitative Factors, Cognitive and Attitudinal Outcomes, and Behavioral Outcomes. Ultimately, we engaged in theoretical integration around a core theme of perspective‐taking to characterize these young scientists' experiences in IGD. We explore the implications for STEM education and research and practice of IGD and conclude that IGD on gender, sexism, and intersecting forms of privilege and oppression in STEM has the potential to challenge inequitable cultures.

A tale of two masculinities: Joaquin Phoenix, Todd Phillips, and Joker’s double can(n)on

ABSTRACT Dancing on the thin edge between tragedy and comedy from the very first tear that rolls down Arthur Fleck’s face into the painted creases of his clown smile, Joker revels in ambivalence. In fact, it exceeds its diegetic bounds to stage a clash between two kinds of masculinity: the conformist masculinity of director Todd Phillips, known for the alcohol-fuelled bonding and casual misogyny of numerous frathouse-cum-road trip films, and the deformist masculinity of star Joaquin Phoenix, whose loner roles have plumbed the depths of masculine alienation, rage, and malaise. While Phoenix’s star persona is inseparable from his reflexive disassemblage of masculinity – to the extent of attempting to dismantle his own celebrity in the mock-documentary I’m Still Here – Phillips’ canon celebrates the comic fortitude of the male ego, able to reassemble itself after each stab at self-destruction. This article examines the ‘masculine indemnity’ common to Phillips’ films in contrast to Phoenix’s celebrity, which has been built on the willingness to flout the indemnification of white male privilege. In the unresolved mash-up between Phoenix’s and Phillips’ star-brands of masculinity, both masculinities prevail, adding fodder to the male can(n)on.

We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire by Joy McCullough

Reviewed by: We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire by Joy McCullough Deborah Stevenson, Editor McCullough, Joy We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire. Dutton, 2021 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780525556053 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780525556077 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 9–12 Em—short for Marianne—has been a tireless advocate and fighter since her older sister, Nor, was raped by a member of the college football team. Now Nor’s rapist has been let off with no punishment despite being found guilty, and Em’s rage knows no bounds. Struggling to find a way to deal with her anger, she explores it by writing a historical free-verse narrative about the 15th century Frenchwoman Marguerite de Bressieux, who took up the sword to avenge her family’s murder and her and her sister’s rape. There’s horrifying authenticity in the book’s depiction of the social-media reviling of Nor (under the hashtag #IgNorTheWhore) and also in Em’s ongoing failure to account for others, whether it be her sister or Em’s new nonbinary friend, Jess, as she seethes and crusades. The book’s intense focus on the price women continually pay, whether in the past or now, for male privilege (“To service men/with our bodies/would be appropriate// To speak/our minds:/ obscene,” says Marguerite bitterly) will resonate with many young readers. Marguerite’s story (drawn from a legend that’s considered unlikely to be historical fact) is unfortunately not that compelling, however, since it’s a heavy-handed ahistorical narrative that takes forever to get to the satisfying revenge fantasy. Additionally, the present-day story starts to lose focus with revelations about Em’s mother’s past and her own accidental injury, and there’s very little acknowledgment in either strand of the kinds of privilege both Em and Marguerite do possess. Downham’s Furious Thing (BCCB 12/19 and Caletti’s Girl, Unframed (BCCB 6/20) are more cogent explorations of female anger, but the truths here may still resonate. The final copy will include an author’s note. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Origin, Impact, and Reaction to Misogynistic Behaviors

Kate A. Manne is an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University, where she has been teaching since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2013), did her graduate work at MIT (2006–2011), and was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne (2001–2005), where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science. Her current research is primarily in moral, feminist, and social philosophy. She is the author of two books, including her first book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and her latest book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Manne has also published a number of scholarly papers about the foundations of morality, and she regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews in venues—including The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow

Excelsior! Inspirational Verse, the Victorian Working-Class Poet, and the Case of Longfellow Kirstie Blair (bio) Even though Ronan was snarling and Noah was sighing and Adam was hesitating, he didn't turn to verify that they were coming. He knew they were. In three different ways, he'd earned them all days or weeks or months before, and when it came to it, they'd all follow him anywhere. "Excelsior," said Gansey, and shut the door behind them."Excelsior," Gansey said bleakly.Blue asked, "What does that even mean?" Maggie Stiefvater, from The Raven Boys The shades of night were falling fastAs through an Alpine village passedA youth, who bore, 'mid snow and ice,A banner with the strange device, Excelsior! Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from "Excelsior" In Stiefvater's popular young adult fantasy sequence, The Raven Cycle, "Excelsior" is a catchphrase used repeatedly and superstitiously by the protagonist, Richard Gansey III, whose quest for a lost Welsh king buried in rural Virginia shapes the four-book narrative. "Excelsior," roughly meaning "ever higher," was a term popularized in the nineteenth century by Longfellow's eponymous poem, in which a mysterious youth climbs onwards and upwards into the Alps, ignoring various warnings, and is then found frozen to death in the final stanza. For Gansey to cite it at the outset of new adventures or when entering a magical location is entirely appropriate. Like Longfellow's hero, he is on a lonely, [End Page 1] self-appointed, and grimly determined mission, likely to end in his death. In addition, Gansey's "Excelsior" is a signifier of his excessive white male privilege. His elite private education, his wealth, his family's standing, are thematically central to the series. That he is familiar with a poem by Longfellow, a highly educated, cosmopolitan, white male Harvard professor with a love of all things European (while Blue, a working-class woman, is unfamiliar with it) is not at all surprising. "Excelsior" signals Gansey's resolve to venture into the unknown and strength to keep going in the face of danger and despair. However, since none of the other characters in The Raven Cycle recognize the allusion, referencing Longfellow also signifies something unusual for the twenty-first century; a young American hero who not only knows his poetic canon but is in many ways attuned to perceived nineteenth-century ideals of duty and perseverance. Longfellow's poetry, as this example suggests, still has a ghostly inspirational presence in contemporary literature. I select this particular instance because it shows how far Longfellow's "Excelsior"—and indeed our perception of Longfellow—has traveled since the poem's mass circulation in the Victorian period. From being common property, in all the senses of the word "common," "Excelsior" is now a symbol of eccentricity and high-class education. From being arguably the popular poet, the poet of the people, Longfellow is now the poet for a privileged few. This article considers Longfellow's vital importance for British working-class poets and readers in the mid-late Victorian period, and suggests that he is the single most important contemporary influence on their work, and possibly the second most important literary influence more broadly, after Robert Burns. Yet I also seek to use Longfellow as a means to frame the highly neglected genre of inspirational verse, to offer a brief taxonomy of this genre, and to suggest the complex ways in which it operates, and how it can be deployed for political and indeed radical ends. While "Excelsior" is hardly a positive poem, since the youth is dead at its close, his motives and his cause a mystery, the term "Excelsior!" became Victorian shorthand for being inspired to persist against all odds. As the Star of Freedom (formerly the Chartist Northern Star) suggested in 1852: "Excelsior" is the battle-anthem of all who combat for freedom and right! Excelsior, exclaims the martyr, even though friends should fail, and the night gather darkly around. "Excelsior," shouts the patriot, though the scaffold loom ominously in his way, though the axe gleam, and his next step be the death-plunge into the grave.1 From the Excelsior manuscript magazine of an unknown...

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

Love and Depth in the American Novel: From Stowe to James

The Human Rights of Privileged Victims. A Marxist Satire on Shouting Matches

In contemporary Western nations, gender issues are being used to split the oppressed and make them fight among themselves. Men and women spend endless time and effort squabbling about the so-called “male privilege” and an alleged set of attendant disparities, rather than combining their efforts in order to pursue better wages, better working conditions, sensible monetary and fiscal policies by State authorities, true economic security and autonomy, a life-saving stop to the all-embracing profit-motive that is destroying the planet, as well as emancipatory self-ownership and democratic self-stewardship towards full human-rights enjoyment. Working men and women of the world: stop shouting at each other and unite!

Undergraduates\u2019 awareness of White and male privilege in STEM

BackgroundIt is well-documented that experiences in STEM courses for women and students of color are different from the experiences of White men. As part of a larger interview study, 183 college seniors from diverse gender and race backgrounds were asked their thoughts on whether the experience of being a STEM major was different for people of different races and genders. We use a framework of “science as White property”, derived from critical race theory, to frame this study and results.ResultsWhite men were largely unaware of any impact of race or gender. In contrast, women of color overwhelmingly report, consistent with results from a large body of prior research, that both race and gender impact their experiences as STEM majors. Students who acknowledged race and gender impacts did not always attribute these impacts to cultural or systemic factors (i.e., some reported women are underrepresented because they are less interested in STEM rather than a structural reason). Impacts identified that were attributable to systemic factors included impacts related to being a demographic minority (i.e., intimidation, feeling out of place, feeling pressure to work harder) and/or discrimination (i.e., job discrimination, bias against women or people of color and cultural assumptions implying the superiority of White people and men). A small number of students (mostly White women) stated that women or people of color benefit from their underrepresented status, often attributing this benefit to a perception of extra encouragement and opportunities. A common theme across categorizations was that women and students of color work harder than men and White people either because they are perceived to be harder workers or as a response to the sexism and racism they encounter.ConclusionsWe found that White men are largely unaware of the impacts of race or gender on the pursuit of a STEM degree. Additionally, with the exception of women of color, students are less likely to perceive race as having an impact on the experiences of students than gender. We conclude with a discussion of implications for future work related to gender and race representation in STEM.

“The people’s commune is good”: precarious labor, migrant masculinity, and post-socialist nostalgia in contemporary China

ABSTRACT Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male privileges. China’s decades of de-ideologized reforms and waves of informalization of work have not completely deprived migrant workers of the moral and symbolic resources which they use to make claims. Migrant informal laborers’ capacity for collective resistance in post-socialist times is deeply entwined with their gendered experience of work in rural, pre-reform China.

Reading Milton Today: Delight, Instruction, Admonition

ABSTRACT Milton is still read hundreds of years after his death primarily because of the breathtaking beauty of his poetry. We read him today for the same reasons that we still listen to the works of Mozart or Beethoven and still stand before the paintings of Raphael and Rembrandt. Milton's medium is words, and with his words he is always arguing and championing ideas—ideas about politics and government, gender relations, free speech and toleration. Here he has much to teach us, not only about ideals toward which we still strive, but also pitfalls we would do well to avoid, for Milton is in many ways a divided figure: a proto-egalitarian on gender question who is also a fierce advocate of male privilege; an advocate of free speech and toleration, but within limits; a republican who distrusts the people; and a theocrat who inspired architects of democracy.

Situating Race in Cultural Competency Training: A Site of Self-Revelation

Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.

Mulier cum sola cogitat male cogitat: le astuzie dell’etero-patriarcato

Heteropatriarchy needs to permanently perpetuate the distinction between men and women as a legitimation of its own supremacy. This distinction works making the feminine a receptacle of all negative values and an element of contrast aimed to create male privilege. The myth of sexual difference is the psychic tool through which supremacy anchors on each individual creating categories like that of “abstract masculinity” and “concrete femininity”. In this frame the exclusion of women out of the field of knowledge, analyzed in its historical depth by Michele Le Dœuff, appears as a tool of the perpetuation of heteropatriarchy, but when the exclusion does not occur properly and when some thinkers talk about rationality, flaws of this almost perfect systems come to the surface. It comes out that rationality is epicene, and it has a subversive charge towards the whole patriarchal structure. Nonetheless, myths are hard to die; as a psychic declination of a material oppression they place themselves as imaginary and shape individuals’ minds transforming them, very often, into oppressors of themselves. The “school of difference” seems doomed to this: becoming agents of the myth producing analysis that do not go further than the symptoms and false liberating instances. So, the need of a theory of oppression that keeps together the material level and the symbolic one, and of a theory of subjectivity that looks at the interdependence of individuals and collectivity, is reconfirmed. Critically analyzing the thought of Christine Delphy, this paper will try to lay the foundation to elaborate an alternative that suggests a coordinate action of liberation from material and symbolic oppression.

Disregard and danger: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and the voices of trans (and cis) African feminists

In March of 2017, best-selling Nigerian author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4, was asked whether being a trans woman makes one any less of a ‘real woman?’ In the clip, which went viral shortly thereafter, Adichie responded by saying ‘When people talk about, “Are trans women women?” my feeling is trans women are trans women.’ Echoing the essentialist, predominantly white Global Northern, feminist politics of trans-exclusionary feminists (TERFs), by implying that trans women are not ‘real’ women because, as she assumes, they benefited from male privilege, Adichie set off a social media maelstrom. The publicised responses to her comments largely came from feminists and trans women in the Global North, and though many trans people from the African continent responded, with hashtags such as #ChimamandaKilledME, very few of these received any attention. As the hashtag suggests, for trans people living on the African continent, given the general lack of recourse to rights, Adichie’s words as an African writer carry considerable weight. Given this, the absence of media attention is curious. This article offers a recentring, by focusing on those voices, maligned in the broader debate – trans people from the African continent. I argue that while Adichie might be stumbling over the questions that lie at the heart of TERF politics (what does it mean to be a woman? and does it matter how a person arrives at being a woman?), trans women on the African continent have been busy reconstituting the terms of the terrain.

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Women, Gender, and Rights: Past and Present

Women’s representation in business case studies – a framework of postmodernism to uncover hidden assumptions

A review of entrepreneurship literature indicates a gap in women representation in business pedagogy. Studies emphasise the importance of business schools and effective curriculum in influencing potential entrepreneurs in venture creation. To identify the gap of women representation and to evaluate the effectiveness of curriculum materials, the paper examines the role of pedagogical materials used in entrepreneurship programmes to develop more women entrepreneurs. The lack of an integrative framework for understanding the nature and implications of women representation related to issues of power and dominance, ‘white male privileges’ in decision-making, and representation of marginalised groups are hardly studied. The study used a framework of postmodernism to help inform and interpret past research and frame the research problem and discussion. The paper compared and critically examined the assumptions made in case studies of a widely used entrepreneurship textbook and used deconstruction to understand women's representation and portrayal in case studies.

La vida es sueño Reimagined: Inversion, Mimicry, and Communitas in Teatro Inverso’s Rosaura (2018)

Abstract In Rosaura, Teatro Inverso revisits Calderón’s La vida es sueño as an arena of contention in which women struggle against men for control of their lives. Directors Sandra Arpa and Paula Rodríguez call into question systems of male privilege operant in the play and foreground the self-actualization process of their protagonist. To this end, they invert outcomes that consolidate male power in the original text by replacing key points in Segismundo’s trajectory with similarly pivotal moments in Rosaura’s development. In addition, they satirize phallocentrism through mimicry of the instruments, language, and gestures of male privilege. Throughout the action, the actors create a sense of community and inclusiveness by engaging their audience, humanizing themselves, and dispelling any illusions of absolute truth and authority, unlike the male characters contending for the throne in Calderón’s classic.

Petro‐masculinity and climate change denial among white, politically conservative American males

AbstractWhite, politically conservative males in the United States have been widely found to maintain petro‐masculine attitudes that include aspects of racism, misogyny, and climate change denial. These beliefs and their associated behaviors, including climate destructiveness, can be conceptualized as compensatory reactions to modern‐day racial, gender, and climate‐related anxieties that are experienced as threats to traditional white male privilege and power. They then manifest as and energize authoritarian desires and their associated sociopolitical movements, including the current Republican effort to Make American Great Again. This paper utilizes psychoanalytic concepts concerning individual and large‐group identity, group psychodynamics and processes, and the intergenerational transmission of idealized myth and fantasy to further elucidate and expand upon these complex phenomena. It then suggests specific strategies for disentangling the strong links between white hegemonic masculinity, fossil fuel use, and climate change denial, thus opening doors to alternative, non climate‐destructive yet still empowering notions of individual, large‐group, and national identity that are, instead, based in communal concern and climate care.