I wanted to share this “response” I received to my male privilege post on Tumblr to illustrate male privilege at work. I could not get fiend-and-dreams’ name in his response, so I also capped the snippet I saw on my Tumblr homepage so there would be no confusion as to whom the comments belong. 

As you can see, in typical male fashion, fiends-and-dreams did not read my post, but had a lot to say to me about how wrong I am. This is typical male behavior that stems from privilege; the thought that I don’t have to listen to you, but you need to listen to me tell you why you are wrong.

He quickly justifies people who may be trying to bully and intimidate me as well as threaten me because male privilege allows him to ignore how often women’s lives are truly in danger from men. He then goes on to mock how women would like to have personal spaces away from males/men because as women, we deal with violence, advancement, harassment, etc. from men every single day. We need to be able to be in safe private spaces away from males, especially those males who see fit to show their genitalia to women and girls as a part of their fetish (which is what most MtF transgenders are: fetishists), but instead of seeing and understanding that, he mocks it.

He also mocks women who would feel uncomfortable in a private space, such as a rest room or changing room with a naked male bodied person. This is clear privilege at work, because only a man could mock women fearing for their safety when statistics show that 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted in their lifetime; and most of us believe this number to be higher, especially since it doesn’t attribute women who are assaulted more than once.

Men do not see this threat to women because they do not have to and this man is a perfect example of how male privilege allows men to view women who fear for their safety: that we are being silly and just need to “use (our) damn heads.”

He also mocks women who do not want to have sex with male bodied people because most men seem to believe that every woman in the world just needs a little dick and everything will be ok. The assumption that one would have to be in the throes of passion to figure out that said male bodied person has a penis is (a) insulting to women everywhere because it assumes that we cannot tell a male in a dress from a female, and (b) shows us how devious he would be if the time to disclose that he has a penis would be when the clothes come off and we would be expected to say “no,” which, according to him would be “rude”; the implication being that we should just shut up and have sex with him already.

Finally, he shows us that he has not examined himself or his life at all by ignorantly exclaiming that trans women have no privilege, when in fact, he is proof positive that most, if not all transwomen still carry internalized privilege and the attitudes about women that have been instilled in them since birth. He, once again, mocks women by insisting that male privilege has to be a conscious thought when the rest of his comment shows us how sneaky privilege is. His attitudes towards me and other women come roaring out of his post through his mocking of women who fear for their safety, mocking sexual violence towards women, and mocking women who do not want to have sex with a penis.

The last sentence where he calls me a bitch is just typical male behavior that I see all the time from men who cannot believe I have a mind of my own and do not bow to their whims, desires, and opinions.

Thank you fiends-and-dreams for helping me to make and illustrate my point.