Daran, who I believe is one of our visitors from Glenn Sacks’s blog, wrote this in our comments section, and I thought it was worth further hearing:
Take me for example. I’m white, forty-three years old upper-working-to-lower-middle-class background. (My father worked himself into the middle class during my childhood.) I was a straight-A student at college. I am the first person in the family to be university educated, and a top university at that. Bristol in the UK is widely regarded as ranked third after Oxford and Cambridge. Does that sound privileged to you?
As a child, I was the upstanding nail that got hammered down so thoroughly that it destroyed me. I arrived at university so damaged that I couldn’t function. I left with the lowest level of achievement. The only reason I got a degree at all, is because after three years they hadn’t sent me down, and the only reason they didn’t send me down was because I was certifiably nuts and I had doctor’s certificates to say so. I managed to get a job after I left and held it down for four years. Then I had another breakdown. I haven’t worked properly since. The other thing destroyed by that childhood experience was my ability to form intimate relationships.
So when white female feminists working as lawyers and medics, and taking six figure earnings back to their loving families declare themselves to be oppressed and call me privileged, I tend to take the view that they wouldn’t know oppression if it bit them on the bum.
I think that the best feminist writers tend to be pretty careful about saying their piece in a way that doesn’t imply that all women have it worse off than all men simply because of sexism, but there’s no question that there is, often, just such an implication in some of what feminist activists say. It’s not, for me, a reason to reject the movement, but it’s a fair criticism.
