Female Privilege: The GOP, the War on Women, and Class

Let's talk about privilege.

priv - i - lege (n): a right, immunity, or benefit enjoyed only by a person beyond the advantages of most.

There's the now-ubiquitous take down of white male privilege explained in gamer terms (that I love, for the record, and I don't even play video games). And honestly, public discussions of privilege generally center on white male privilege, and for reasons well and good, but there are other types of privilege.

Female privilege, for example. Now, you must understand before you decide to crucify me that "female privilege" and "white male privilege" are not exact correlations. The kind of privilege I am going to talk about with regard to women is not the all-encompassing power of cultural superiority that white men hold. But still, there have traditionally been some privileges afforded one by being (white and/or wealthy) female. These privileges fall generally under the condition of "immunity" rather than "right," but that doesn't preclude them from being privileges, as you can see, from the above-quoted definition.

It's a political truism that there are two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. Generally, people don't specify which they mean because (in my extremely humble opinion) the people that yell the loudest about "freedom" usually mean "freedom from" and that's a rather inferior sort of freedom, don't you think? I think so. I mean, I'd much rather have the freedom TO go where I please than have the freedom FROM men yelling at me on the street. It is more important to me that I be able to set my own goals and accomplish them, which requires a more or less absolute freedom of movement, than it is to never encounter something unpleasant. That's how I parse the difference between freedom to and freedom from.

(N.B. - Ideally I'd have both, but I am, despite my unflappable optimism, a realist, and getting both is a little greedy so I'll take the freedom to, thankyouverymuch. And do whatever I can do ensure that maybe my great-great-great-great-great-granddaughters will have both.)

However, that's how I value-weight things. I am not the only person, nay, nor even the only woman in the world. And women have, since time immemorial, enjoyed a particularly privileged position when it comes to "freedom from." There are concrete examples, like street harassment: only going out with a male chaperone is a pretty effective way to not have dudes cat-calling and/or trying to grab parts of your body.

But the female privilege of freedom from extends much farther than such concrete examples, as privilege is wont to do. The privilege of freedom from is the freedom from all sorts of unpleasantness. Let's face it, everyone, the world is a pretty awful place. Navigating it is hard work. Making decisions, weighing options, walking the tightrope between self-care and caring for others: these are difficult, draining things. They are difficult and draining things for everyone, regardless of gender. But women have had the privilege of avoiding these things, by letting men make such decisions for them. The privilege of women has long been the freedom from having to chart a course through the universally-determined awfulness of the material world.

Sexism is, at its core, a belief that women are not capable of doing this. Women are not capable of making decisions, weighing choices, wielding power, and navigating the world. Because they are not capable, they must be protected, given freedom from having to do these things. That explains men that want to limit women's choices.

But what about women? They must realize that they're capable of choosing things for themselves, they must realize that they are capable of navigating the world. They must. Particularly high-power, high profile women, women like Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin and Nikki Haley, they must realize that the perception that women can't do the things they have done is wrong. So why do they (and hundreds of thousands of other women) align themselves with a political party that is dedicated to legally limiting women's choices? This is the question of the hour! Everyone is asking it!

Here's my take: privilege. It's not that these women are stupid, or self-loathing, which are the two explanations I see advanced most often. No, they are neither. What they are is deeply, deeply aware of their female privilege. We're at, you might say, a tipping point. Feminism has advanced to the point where women can indeed become Ann Coulter and Nikki Haley and even Hilary Clinton. But it has not advanced so far that actual equality is achieved, and thus, female privilege is preserved.

The option of retreating from the world, of ceasing to navigate it's awfulness and messiness, still exists for women of a certain class. The option of being protected and deferred to still exists. Women like Coulter and Haley and all the others are scared of losing that privilege.

At the Republican National Convention this year, there is something called the Women's Pavilion, organized and presided over by GOP women, where salon services and feminine hygiene products are available, and where women can meet to talk to other women "in ways women can relate to." The whole thing strikes me as redolent of a harem, minus the sexual overtones. Women winking over what the men say and speaking to each other in a coded, female-specific language; women occupying a place where men are forbidden; women assigned a specific sphere of influence. Even the name, "pavilion," calls up images of ladies sitting on comfortable chairs and shaded from the sun that might damage their complexions whilst they chat idly over lemonade. This is the privilege of women: a space "just for them," a language all their own. But, of course, by virtue of gender-exclusionary practices, nothing will get done in this women's pavilion. There will be lots of talk and no action. No decisions will be made, only communication, only translation.

Because the privilege of women is the freedom from decision-making. In an interview with Mary Anne Carter, organizer of this women's pavilion, a telling quote turns up:

I would think that the current healthcare bill that may or may not be repealed — I don’t want to call it ‘Obamacare’ but I can’t remember the name of it — is potentially a serious war on women, allowing women to make their own healthcare choices.

Allowing women to make their own healthcare choices, instead of having them dictated by a husband or a father or a doctor or even (in a pinch?) the government that is run by men is the real war on women, for those that are terrified of losing their female privilege. Having to take responsibility for those kinds of things, those things that happen in the real and awful and terrifying and messy world is a pretty scary thought. It's much easier to rest on female privilege, on the perception of the fairer and weaker sex, on the idea that women need a space and a language all their own, on the construction of the general world as male and therefore outside your purview.

Women have historically been great enforcers of gender roles. We shame and punish each other for being sluts, for breaking the rules, for doing what women aren't supposed to do. Why? Because we all know that we're capable of managing our own lives, but some of us really don't want to have to. The world is awful and living is hard.

The problem is, of course, that not all women have the option, the luxury of relying on the female privilege that is largely the demesne of the wealthy. And setting public policy for the comfort of the wealthy has never worked out indefinitely for any culture. But still, that doesn't stop people from clinging to their privileges with terror-hardened fingers.

Who Deserves to Die?

A year ago, during the awful lead-up to and then even more awful execution of Troy Davis, I started thinking about the death penalty. And now, as Texas sets itself to execute (another) cognitively deficient man, I'm thinking about it again.

What is a "death penalty?" Killing someone for a crime committed. Lots of people find such punishment appropriate: "An eye for an eye," goes the refrain of the religious who support it; "Some people just can't be trusted," say the less Biblically minded. In essence, a death penalty is a judgment of irredeemability. Killing someone for a crime necessarily means that society has judged that person incapable of rehabilition; they will never be a functioning member of society, and therefore must be removed from it so as to prevent further harm.

You might be able to guess that I am not a supporter of the death penalty. I find the idea of judging someone beyond redemption a horrific display of hubris and privilege that leaves me sick to my stomach. Of course, as soon as I start to talk with anyone about my moral objections to the death penalty, they'll inevitably come up with one scenario or another for which I have no good rejoinder. The expense of keeping people behind bars (if we quit locking people up for years for non-violent offenses, the cost of locking up violent offenders would be much more tolerable), the danger to other members of the prison population posed by certain offenders (sociopaths are a thing I really have no solution for), the inherent inhumanity of a lifetime of isolated confinement in an 8 by 8 space (a point made eloquently to me by a man that vowed to get himself shot before being locked up again; I think he meant it, too).

I don't have practical solutions to these issues. All I have is the absolute conviction that killing people is wrong. And it is just as wrong to kill someone that has killed someone else as it is for that person to kill someone else in the first place. The practical issues of human beings being awful to each other are messy, but the morality of it is crystal-clear to me: killing people is wrong. Full stop.

So what does it say about us, as a society, that we have authorized the state to validate our own worst impulses and kill people? What does it say about us that we suffer a governing principle that does not demand of us to better ourselves, but rather allows us to close our eyes and stop up our ears like children frightened of something in the dark? Because desire to hurt another being always stems from fear.

It says nothing flattering about us, to be sure. It says we will suffer stagnation. It says that we, as a culture, refuse to move beyond fear and reactionary retribution.

And I can't help but draw corollaries between state-sponsored execution and vigilantism and mass murders. We continue to grant the state this power of life and death over its citizens because we will not let go of the idea that we ought to have the power of life and death over each other. The different, scary Other deserves to die, and we will be the instrument of death if no one else steps up, it is our RIGHT to extract pounds of flesh and harvest souls.

Yes, I know that generally sane, well-adjusted people don't tend to be the ones that take up arms and kill people. But that's the point, isn't? Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't do that sort of thing. Generally sane, well-adjusted people don't kill other people. So why are we, collectively, killing people left and right? We must not be generally sane, or well-adjusted. Perhaps we should do something about that.

A culture that continues to hold that there are people that deserve to be killed will continue to breed Loughner's and Holmes' and Page's.

Walking a Tightrope

Every relationship has rules. There's a sort of standard set of them (monogamy, financial sharing, modicum of care) that is the basic template for modern, American relationships. Individual couples work out the details of their particular relationship and apply variations of these rules, or chuck them completely and start from a blank slate, building as necessary.

Many relationships break down when the rules aren't followed. Many others break down because the rules were never explicitly defined, and so one party or another violates them unknowingly or someone starts pushing for a defined set of rules which is often casually referred to as "labeling" the relationship and the other person freaks the fuck out because defined rules mean they have to follow them, too, and not having any rules to follow is so nice.

I've got very little problem chucking the basic template and building from scratch. Most things in my life are negotiable. I don't have a great many strong convictions about anything (although, to be fair, the few things I do have strong convictions about are pretty much iron-clad and you will never get me to negotiate on them) so I'm willing to compromise a great deal.

What I have a hard time dealing with is uncertainty, or operating without a defined set of rules. I am a person that needs to know where the lines are, and why they are there, and how important each one is. This is equally so that I don't unintentionally cross any boundaries, and so that if I do cross a line, I know what the likely outcome will be. I like to rebel with purpose, you see. If I'm going to set something on fire, I will be very careful to pick the thing that will produce the exact impact I'm going for.

I really do weigh things that carefully; it's the natural consequence of being a worrier. I calculate risk with an internal scale that is so finely calilbrated it distinguishes between 6 hours of sleep and 5.5 hours of sleep; between a margarita and a manhattan; between $20 and $25; between "I love you" and "I am in love with you."

But all this calculation depends on data, on having the information necessary to weigh risk, and so in relationships with undefined rules, I have no data on which to make decisions. This is how I get hurt. When I don't know what I'm leaping into, I tense and hit the ground hard and shatter. When I can see, I can relax and roll with the punches.

Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is how to roll with punches while blind. Maybe what I'm supposed to be learning right now is the value of the undefined, the freeing nature of letting go of risk calculation, the joy of floating even if there's a 100-foot waterfall just up ahead pulling you inexorably toward the precipice.

Mostly it feels like walking a tightrope without a net, and falling every other step. I'm not ready for this. I need some rules to work with, I need some data on which to make decisions. I need to calculate whether the tightrope is worth walking.