On male privilege

Is it still a helpful concept? Discussion group tomorrow!

This guy is what comes up in Substack’s stock photo search for “male privilege” and he is restoring my faith in the concept!

Well, here we are hurtling to the end of 2024. It’s been a crazy year for me. My book, Boymom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity came out in June and I have spent the intervening six months doing approximately one million talks and interviews and discussion groups about boys and men. It’s been fascinating and exhausting and at times deeply moving. Thank you all so much for all your incredible support- all your shares and comments and likes and reviews and kind words. And if you are searching for a holiday gift for that special someone who is is raising a boy or who has ever been a boy or who is interested in gender or feminism or is just horrified and exhausted at how we got here and wondering where we go next, then perhaps consider a copy of Boymom!

Tomorrow (Tuesday December 17th) and 9:30am PT/ 12:30pm ET/ 5:30 pm UK time I will be hosting the final Boymom/ I Blame Society discussion group of 2024. These discussion groups have been really fascinating so far. So many different types of people have showed up to them and shared their insights and perspectives. Boymoms, boydads, young men and older men struggling with some of these issues in their own lives, trans folks, people who work with teens, sexual assault survivors’ advocates to name a few, and a real range of ages. We have heard so many interesting perspectives and generous insights from a real range of different types of people about issues concerning boys and men, a topic that can often feel fraught and loaded to discuss.

In tomorrow’s group we will be digging into the concept of “male privilege.” Even the punctuation there feels politically loaded. Did some culture war-torn part of my psyche just spit out those sneery scare quotes? Am I slowly turning into one of those liberal sell-outs, proudly shouting my feminist credentials while sneakily undermining the movement’s foundational concepts? In reality I am more filled with questions than answers about the privilege framing when it comes to trying to understand boys’ and men’s lives. It is clear that men still carry very real, material advantages in our culture, but I am still genuinely trying to figure out how meaningful, and/ or useful this framework is for understanding modern gender relations, especially when it comes to teenagers and young men who are living through a deeply ahistorical moment when it comes to gender power dynamics.

Since I started researching Boymom, when I’ve tried to make the case to progressives that boys and men are worth caring about, I’ve often heard some variation on the sentiment that, “when you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” This the idea that boys’ struggles in this moment are basically just sour grapes at being forced to give up even the tiniest smidge of their outsized power.

But in a way, power is the least of it. Although there have been some social and economic shifts, generally men and boys are still at a significant advantage in this domain. (See, feminism 101- our inability to elect a woman president, the gender pay gap, abortion rights, shocking rates of sexual and gendered violence etc etc ) Sometimes the barrages of think pieces and statistics about the “boy crisis” or the “masculinity crisis” - about boys’ underachievement and declining employment and college attendance rates for young men, can feel a little beside the point.

But for men and boys, privilege and disadvantage have always co-existed in a complex relationship. Male privilege comes with built-in harms. In a patriarchal system boys and men may gain in terms of power, but they lose out significantly when it comes to intimacy, emotionality and connection. Gender privilege functions in a different way to say, racial privilege or economic privilege. Because when it comes to gender, the disadvantages of being in the privileged group are not incidental, but foundational to the whole system. Rigid masculinity norms are keeping men sick, emotionally stunted, lonely and disconnected. As I wrote in Boymom- “Under patriarchy, men and boys get everything, except the thing that is most worth having. Human connection.”

So in tomorrow’s group we will dig into the idea of male privilege. At a time when women and girls are making significant gains, and in many disciplines there is probably some uneasy truth to the idea that a white man is the last on the list to get hired, what does male privilege now consist of? What are the material advantages of being male in this political and cultural system? What are the costs? Is male privilege a useful framework for understanding the lived experience of children in America? How about teenagers? Young adults? Older adults?

In the last discussion group I was struck by how hard it is for people to believe that seemingly contradictory things can co-exist. That young women and young men can both feel powerless and unheard in this moment, and that both of these can be real and valid. The concept of privilege can easily become a way to shut down conversations rather than opening them up. But I hope some of you will join tomorrow and we can dig into the contradictions and complexities together in a generous, judgement free environment.

This group is open to all paid subscribers- monthly or annual - any gender/ parenting status etc / political viewpoint (within reason!) as long as you show up in good faith. To join, upgrade to a paid subscription (cancel at any time) and I will email the link in the morning! Or forward to a friend who you think might be interested. And if you would like to join but a paid subscription is financially prohibitive- just message me and I’ll sub you, no questions asked. Again, it’s at 9:30am PT/ 12:30pm ET / 5:30pm UK tomorrow, December 17th. I know it’s the holidays and this is a heavy and complicated topic, but I looking forward to seeing some of you there. Let me know if you plan to come so I can get a sense of numbers. And if you can’t make it tomorrow, I’d still love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments here.

In the meantime- to everyone else- happy holidays, happy new year and thank you for all your amazing support in 2024. I love this community and you have restored my faith in our ability to have good faith, rigorous discussion.