Many men will object to the very idea that male privilege exists, but their objection also insists on a kind of invisibility that patriarchy depends on. Few men realize how much their lives would change if women weren’t treated as subordinate. Instead, men take credit for their hard work and achievements without taking into account how much harder it would have been if they had to compete with women on a level playing field or do without the supportive (and unpaid) domestic labor that so many wives and mothers perform. Because patriarchy defines women as subordinate and “other,” men can take women’s exclusion from serious competition for granted. As a result, many men have been rudely awakened by women’s entry into hitherto male-only workplaces. When men complain about the advantage some women gain from affirmative action, they ignore centuries of pro-male affirmative action that, in spite of the women’s movement, continues as the largely unexceptional default condition under patriarchy.
Allan G. Johnson, The Gender Knot (via wretchedoftheearth)
