March 8th was International Women’s Day, which makes this week a very logical time to discuss Female Privilege, muse on how it came to be part of our society and exactly who is it harming.
To discuss the topic we are best served by dividing the female population into some slightly general sub groups. We will also ignore feminists, partly because ignoring feminists is a great way to trigger them and a triggered feminist is always good entertainment, but mainly because the current generation of feminists have absolutely no intention in interacting with a society that doesn’t place them firmly in charge.
Now, lest our readers start to believe that your author is a fat, woman-hating, bald loser who can’t get a date on Friday night, (Spoiler – some of the above may be correct… cough…) we are going to open with the group of females we shall call ‘Well Adjusted’. These ladies are basically the people who have realised that the only things that revolve around them are flies at a barbie and manage to get on with the other people in their life by showing respect where respect is due.
Now, assuming of course that you are also ‘Well Adjusted’ and not a total dick, you will most likely identify these Well Adjusted females by the fact they are good to work alongside, are fun to talk with and can make trusted confidants. We add the caveat that the other party must also be Well Adjusted because we at XYZ are in no way suggesting that all males are wonderful flawless people. Many males are, unfortunately, problematic with their personalities but we are going to have to wait until International Men’s Day before we can discuss those issues further.
Back to the women.
The next group of women are probably the literal personification of Female Privilege. These we shall call the ‘Princesses’. These people believe they are entitled because, well, they are a Princess and expect to be treated like one. Whether these people are using their powers deliberately, or are simply honestly under the impression they deserve special treatment because that is how the world is meant to work, is probably a question answered on a case by case basis, but there does exist a significant percentage of these Princesses who sincerely do not believe they are doing wrong in the world.
Which leaves us with the last subgroup of women, the Whores.
This group should be self explanatory. They have Boobies, Men Like Boobies, ergo Men do as they are told and the Girl Gets What She Wants.
At this stage it would be nice to offer up the suggestion that the term Whores is not actually a literal term but we all know that is not true. The desire to Get What She Wants can often be more powerful than one can control. Hollywood existed for a reason and the entire ‘Everyone Knew’ statement exists for the simple fact that, for want of a better term, the system worked. Female Privilege has victims. More on that later.
So how did all this come to pass?
To muse on that question we are probably best served by looking back to the schoolyard and how society attempts to raise both girls and boys. Here it should be of no surprise to anyone that not only are boys and girls different, but they are treated differently from a very early age.
‘Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice.’
‘Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails.’
If we ignore the core fact that the only place puppy dog tails should be located is on the back end of a puppy, can anyone fill in the missing lines to this little rhyme?
How about a few simpler ones instead.
‘Girls First.’
‘Don’t hit girls.’
‘Boys are such a handful to raise.’
We probably do not need to go on. The underlining theme from an early age being constantly reinforced here is that boys are trouble makers and girls are angels.
Part of this actually has a lot to do with the fact that in many cases boys are trouble makers. Boys and girls mature at different rates and for great periods of their pre-teen years a boy’s default social skill is attempting to push something over.
This is in many ways a mammal thing. When cute furry animals do it on BBC wildlife documentaries it is adorable. When young boys do it the act becomes Slugs and Snails personified. Lacking the social reasoning at that age to work the concept out for themselves, they are instead verbally reminded that you do not push girls and the slowly growing male brain becomes to be trained that girls are not only different, but somewhat special.
Which for most of a male childhood does not really matter, as for most of a male childhood girls are smelly and best avoided. Problems however then start when that smell starts to become pleasing and they are left trying to socially interact with them using only their hard earned skills in pushing things over.
And for those younger readers out there, sorry, but that really doesn’t work that well.
This is generally made worse for the male types in that they are at this stage of their lives on the losing end of the gender based growing race.
Girls mature faster to the extent that by the time teenage boys really want to get to know teenage girls better, the vast majority of teenage girls wouldn’t be seen dead with something so immature. ‘I’m not interested in Boys,’ the saying goes, ‘I’m interested in Men’.
So what is happening is that for nearly their entire pre-adult life boys are either socially inferior in skills to girls, are having society drum into them that they are inferior to girls, or both.
On the plus side, by either dumb luck or design most boys come out of these difficult years much better equipped to handle life than may be first apparent. The ‘skill’ of pushing things over is how boys become to understand the unwritten social pecking order of life. Life – spoiler – is not fair, is not equal and understanding that you may not be at the top, or that even if you are the power structure may suddenly change, is very important for social survival. Groups of adult males are usually most successful when they allow themselves to fall comfortably into their correct social positions, and within those positions they learn that deep down there is no such thing as privilege, only what has been earned from within the group.
Fair? Probably not, but it works. We are mammals and you all found it adorable when it happened in those nature videos.
The other thing boys grow up learning to accept is rejection.
While there are of course exceptions, most men will if pressed admit they spent their teenage years being rejected by everyone not directly related to the Palmer family. While at the time damaging and depressing, any man who survived that period usually reached adulthood understanding that rejection wasn’t, for the most part, fatal and also that bending over backwards like a love sick puppy for the first woman to tempt them with an offer of romantic affection usually wasn’t worth the effort.
Men learnt that ‘No’ was a perfectly good answer to the question of ‘I have Boobies!!!’ and that life could go on without needing to constantly chase them.
Which brings us to who exactly is getting hurt here by this toxic sense of female entitlement and, quite frankly, it is very rarely the men.
There is a meme that sometimes resurfaces. Normally there is an overly sexualised woman as the artwork with the text of ‘No matter how good she looks now, someone, somewhere, is sick of putting up with her bullshit.’
Sorry girls, this is true.
Being a Princess should not be your path through life beyond the age of five. Men are not going to put up with pouting for ever and are going eventually going to join the social republican movement to start spending time with people with whom they actually enjoy the company, people who, for want of a better term, might even be those ‘Well Adjusted’ people we mentioned earlier.
Also, failed Princesses should not consider promoting themselves sideways into the Whore camp. In the literal sense of the term you are doing no one any long term favours, not yourself and absolutely not the other women out there who are going to be dragged into the culture you are helping to encourage. Hollywood. Everyone Knew. The System Worked because enough women were prepared to take part in that sort of activity because they believed it was an acceptable price to Get What They Wanted.
Sorry. Not the correct hashtag response here, but if you swim in the toxic waste you are not only failing to clean the waters, but you are openly suggesting to all those who come later that this pool is the correct place to bath. People get hurt with this sort of culture and, sorry girls, very few of those people are men.
Even without the literal use of the word there is very little to recommend to this type of false privilege as a way of moving through life. Men may go through a stage of their lives thinking with their penis, but for the most part once a man finally stops being the Last Virgin On Earth their genitals tend to stop being the ruling party and instead usually take on the role of Court Adviser. Their words are often listened to, but when a man can literally be rejected by every single woman in the room, being rejected by one more doesn’t really hold much fear. They were once socially unskilled and pimple infested teenage boys. They have been rejected many many times before. You and your boobies no longer hold power over them.
Plus there also comes a time in a young woman’s life where they are going to be replaced by the new group of 19 year old perts who are finally legally allowed into the night clubs and are trying to find themselves a more mature version of manhood than the still not fully developed examples that fill their tute class at uni. Fail to be aware of this change in the playing field and yesterday’s successful 18 year old will find herself as today’s 20 something stuck desperately trying to remember how to successfully use her personality in order to get attention.
Toxic Female Privilege. It exists. It is not necessary as proactive as the overt feminist type movements that form Emily’s List style militant groups, who promote the myth of the wage gap and use the word ‘misogyny’ as an excuse for every single thing that goes wrong in their lives. They are toxic in different ways, actively breeding mistrust by raising questions comparing their actual professional skills verses their role in filling a diversity quota. As Milo Yiannopoulos says, ‘Feminism is Cancer’, but that is not the self destruction we are trying to talk about.
Instead this is about the Princesses and the Whores. Being either will not get you long term respect. Princesses stop being cute at age six and anyone who thinks otherwise is using you for their own amusement. You are not a real Princess and you are not getting real respect because the other people in the world stopped having the ‘Girls are Special’ manta rammed into them when they left primary school.
Being a Whore will also stop working. The power of your Boobies works best on the sort of male dickheads even most men begin to despise.
Respect is fleeting and easily transfered to a new release model. You do yourself no long term favours and help reinforce the toxic male aspects in society who prefer not to respect women as their social equals.
Respect is earned, confidence is admired, the world owes you nothing and the only place you are truly SPECIAL is within Bethesda games.
We’re XYZ, and what men really want is a strong woman to proudly stand beside.
Happy International Women’s Day.