Break It Down
Last October I wrote:
The US with 27% of world product has about 46% of world military spending. … Though of varying quality, there are a great many detailed and quantitative analyzes of the marginal value of aggregate medical spending. In contrast, the lack of even remotely similar analyzes for military spending is really quite stunning. … I’d most like to see an itemized budget detailing the expected annual costs the US would suffer in a world that had adapted to the US only spending $300B/yr on defense.
Megan McArdle yesterday:
I view myself as feminist(ish) because I believe the following:
Society is set up in ways that limit women’s choices and opportunities–men’s too …, but women more. …
Privilege exists, and is in many unfortunate ways invisible to those who possess it.
We should try to change those things.
My first reaction was, it is really clear male privilege is stronger overall that female privilege in our society? It might be, but as with defense spending I’d like to see some sort of calculation. A little web search finds a male privilege checklist and a female privilege checklist. The next obvious step is to assign point values to such privileges, so we can add them up and compare totals.
Of course there would be many ways to disagree about such point values, including how they should account for differing abilities and preferences. You’d open yourself up more to ridicule by posting a calculation, as folks could trumpet your most vulnerable estimate as evidence of your insincerity. And you wouldn’t show your impressiveness nearly as much as you could via a fancy math model, statistical data analysis, or semiotic text analysis.
But the essence of analysis is to "break it down", to take apart vague wholes into clearer parts. For the same reasons we make point lists to help us make tough job decisions, or ask people who sue for damages to name an amount and break it into components, we should try to break down these important social claims via simple calculations. And the absense of attempts at this is a sad commentary on something.
Having written my own Female Privilege List (and thanks for the link!), and having debated the merits of the male and female lists, I decided that the next step was to write a list of the privileges that would be gained if either the male or female list "won". Here it is - the Victim Privilege List
First of all, Robin, a rather belated thanks for the link to my 'female privilege checklist' post; it sparked a fair bit of traffic to Feminist Critics and seems to have spurred a number of blog discussions on the topic.
I did want to clear up a few misconceptions that some commenters here seem to have formed from reading that checklist. Cyan said, "The irony of the female privilege checklist linked above is that it is presented as as part of an argument against feminism ..." It may surprise Cyan to learn that I am in fact a feminist myself (with caveats) and completely agree with the ostensible goal of (some) feminists to eliminate gender penalties for both sexes.
I say "ostensible" because it's been my experience in the feminist blogosphere that the awareness among most feminists about the extent of male 'disprivilege' is rather extraordinarily low, and far lower than the awareness that many feminists think they have, which was one of the reasons I compiled the 'female privilege checklist' in the first place. It was not my intent to prove that 'men have it worse', only that it isn't self-evident that women have it worse. Indeed, though I suspect your suggestion that, "The next obvious step is to assign point values to such privileges, so we can add them up and compare totals," was a tad tongue-in-cheek, the suggestion is a not-unreasonable rejoinder to many feminists who assert that women (only) are oppressed and men (only) are privileged without providing the requisite theoretical argument demonstrating that this is so.