Male Privilege - Against The Notion of Male Privilege

Against The Notion of Male Privilege

Men's rights activist Herb Goldberg, claimed in 1976 that "the myth that the male is culturally favoured ...is clung to, despite the fact that every critical statistic in the area of longevity, disease, suicide, crime, accidents, childhood emotional disorders, alcoholism, and drug addiction shows a disproportionately higher male rate." He sees males as "oppressed by the cultural pressures that have denied him his feelings, by the mythology of the woman and the distorted and self destructive way he sees and relates to her, by the urgency for him to 'act like a man' which blocks his ability to respond ... both emotionally and physiologically, and by a generalized self hate that causes him to feel comfortable ... when he lives for joy and for personal growth."

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly and conservative author Ann Coulter have argued in the course of their campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment that “of all the classes of people who have ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged. We have the most rights and rewards, and the fewest duties.” As examples, they point to the traditionally nonreciprocal obligation on husbands to financially provide for their wives, and women's immunity from conscription into military service.

Warren Farrell’s book, The Myth of Male Power, which Farrell has himself described as “a 500-page debunking of the myth of men as a privileged class” Farrell points to the over-representation of men among groups such as the homeless, suicides, alcoholics, the victims of violent crime and prisoners. He argues that men disproportionately occupy the most dangerous and unpleasant occupations and that “if a man feels obligated to take a job he likes less so he can be paid more money that someone else spends while he dies seven years earlier, well, that's not power.” In addition, he points to discrimination against men in such spheres as the military draft, family law and the criminal justice system. Far from being privileged, he argues that policies such as conscription, the women and children first convention and the over-representation of men among the most dangerous occupations illustrate men’s status as "the disposable sex".