It’s Only Tuesday and I’m Ready to Take Down the Patriarchy
It started innocently enough — at a Saturday barbecue hosted by the friend of a friend. At one point, conversation turned to college life and a girl friend and I began to tell a story from our first year at Wellesley College. We were interrupted by the white male host — “You mean your freshman year?” No, actually, we meant our first year, as this is the gender neutral term that Wellesley chooses to employ because it is a women’s college. The host continued, “I don’t understand why we can’t just accept fresh ‘man’ as being gender neutral. I would be just as fine using fresh ‘woman,’ you know?” (Unlikely, but sure…) “I understand the imbalance and that one is more prevalent than the other but why is this a big deal?”
Trying somewhat ineffectively to quell my inner rage, I looked at the white male in question and asked him something that has been on my mind for some time now: “Can you tell me what white men are so angry about? What do you possibly have to be angry about?” Sensing trouble, another white male guest, quickly made for the exit. The host tried to solicit the escaping man’s advice for the debate that was about to ensue. Escaping man replied simply, “You are fucked.”
With no well-thought-out strategy to defend himself and lacking the moral support of his friends, our host resorted to complete and utter honesty: “The truth is white men have enjoyed great privileges for a really long time and now that we feel that privilege slipping away, becoming less reliable, we are angry about it.”
There are two sides to the coin — a lot of white men sure are angry — but indeed, if losing the privilege they once enjoyed is the source of that anger then they should be prepared to be really pissed off because we (the non-white male majority) are, I believe, more dead set on exposing, shaming, and tearing away white male privilege than we have been at any point in history. And we are more capable of doing it.
On Sunday morning, I awoke to Stanford rapist Brock Turner’s sparkly baby blue eyes all over my Facebook feed. Here was a man who had raped an unconscious woman behind a dumpster. A girl friend and I wondered — why would this even be enjoyable to this man? Why would someone want to have sex with a partner who is unconscious? That doesn’t sound pleasurable. I don’t know Mr. Turner obviously, but it strikes me that this rape was not only about sexual pleasure, that perhaps sexual pleasure was only a minor consequence when wrapped up with his feelings of privilege, entitlement, and well… invincibility that arose in his thoughts when he saw an unconscious woman laying on the ground — in his mind, there for his taking.
On the surface, it would appear that society has failed to disabuse Mr. Turner of these notions of privilege. The judge, Aaron Persky (another white male), gave him a six-month sentence, acting on the premise that a longer sentence “would have a severe impact” on Turner. His father was daring enough to author a letter in which he complained to the court that even six months was “a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.” (I’m not sure how long Turner senior thinks it took to drop the atomic bomb, but he would do well to take note that at least those of us who have not lived with the trappings of white male privilege are well aware that life can change in an instant, as it certainly did for Turner’s rape victim). While pseudo “mug shots” of innocent young black men appear in the news instantly after they are murdered (mostly by white men), it took months of requests for Turner’s actual mug shots to become public — again reinforcing what we all know to be true — that the white male patriarchy will protect its own.
All of this is exacerbated with the presidential campaign as the backdrop — an election charged with white male privilege and anger if there ever was one. Trump is a verifiable sexist and bigot to a degree that the evidence bears little repeating. Nonetheless, for good measure, The Telegraph is keeping a running record of every sexist comment Trump has made publicly. Much to Senator Sanders’ chagrin, his bevy of Bernie Bros have also been known to attack women online with statements like “their vaginas are making horrible choices.”
When the news broke on Monday evening/ Tuesday morning that Hillary Clinton had secured enough delegates to win the nomination, social media was full of criticism that the nomination had been called too soon, that the media was giving Clinton an unfair advantage. White men I know, including womanizing ex-boyfriends, predictably posted that they would not under any circumstances vote for Hillary. As in, they would rather see the violence and slander of a Trump presidency than they would vote in a woman who while not perfect (and Trump is?) is extremely intelligent and arguably more capable of executing the role of president than any other candidate.
On Tuesday afternoon news reports surfaced describing a pricey jacket that Hillary Clinton wore on the campaign trail. I have never seen a single article about what a male political candidate was wearing. Never.
Add to this friends’ passing complaints about the men they are dating, men who are frankly lucky to stand in their presence but who nonetheless mistreat them, relying on the promise that a woman’s highest aspiration is marriage and therefore she will put up with anything for the hope of a diamond ring and being impregnated.
It’s 2 PM on a Tuesday and I’ve seriously had enough of the patriarchy for this week.
But again, this is one side of the coin. The other side is that while white men may have cornered the market when it comes to protecting and looking out for one another — the rest of us are now more than ever capable of doing the same. In the wake of the Turner sentencing, the social media world exploded with criticism surrounding the case. The victim’s letter to Turner went public and garnered more than 8 million views. A petition was launched to recall Judge Aaron Persky, with nearly half a million signatories. In my personal network, friends posted in solidarity with the young woman who was raped by Turner, several describing their own challenges to confront the men who raped them and escaped punishment while they were left to deal with the physical and emotional consequences and often made to feel that the rape had been their fault.
Hillary Clinton remains the most likely candidate to grip the Democratic nomination sooner or later and my alma mater released the 1969 audio recording of her speech at Wellesley’s commencement in a show of support. Again, Hillary is not perfect, but it is at least clear to me that we need the shift that would come with a strong and competent woman becoming the leader of the free world.
In the same way that we might at least in part be able to credit a black presidency with empowering the voice of America’s black community over the last eight years, creating #blacklivesmatter, we might also hope that a female presidency will empower women across the country to speak out against the patriarchy, to continue to stand up when the judicial system fails them, to be freed from the notion that marriage and children are anything less or more than a choice as opposed to an ideal that we are enslaved to and for which we must suffer to attain. Oh, and I invite all the ladies reading this to continue to wear whatever they want and to name and shame anyone who has a damn thing to say about it (including other women).
And for all the enraged white men out there who feel shaken by these possibilities, in the words of the escaping man at Saturday’s barbecue- you are fucked.