Male Privilege

I am in a small neighborhood grocery market. The kind that has a lot of produce out front and inside select grocery items with a focus on a particular ethnic cuisine. For this one, that was Persian. I hear two voices at the front of the store, both speaking with non-English accents engaged in what sounds like an argument. One of the voices, a woman’s voice, is quite soft. I can not make out what she is saying. The other voice, a male voice, is escalating. It gets louder and louder. Soon this male voice is shouting at the other voice. Shouting at the woman. Suddenly my muscles tighten. I can feel the blood rushing to my head, through my muscles. My palms are sweaty. Images of my encounters with misogynistic and abusive men have entered my mind now.  I am scared and enraged. I want to rush to the front of the store to stop him. Stop him from hurting her. I see now that the woman’s voice belongs to a store cashier. The male voice belongs to a customer. I hesitate. Only because the man is a person of color. So too is the woman. I walk up to the man and say, “stop shouting at her! Leave her alone! Leave the store!” He starts telling me now about the wrong done to him, apparently not understanding where my allegiance lies. “Don’t shop here then if you have an issue with their policies. Stop shouting at her. Leave the store!” It took a lot for me to not go ballistic on him. None of the other customers said a thing. Sensing my rage building, I walked away.

A short time later the woman who was the direct target for this man’s aggression came and found me in one of the aisles. She appeared rattled, slightly, but was very calm and poised. This was a person familiar with male aggression, male violence.  She apologized to me for that man’s behavior, and started to talk about what she had done to warrant a verbal assault. I stopped her mid-sentence. “You did nothing wrong,” I say. “He was wrong for shouting at you.”

When I went to the front to pay for my groceries, the other cashier (a woman of color) was visibly upset and said something to me about the incident. “Ohh. I need an Advil now after that. I just bought these special $200 shoes because of my back pain and now my back is going to hurt all day.” Their fear and anger and shame was palatable. It hung in the store like thick smoke that you have to wade through to get out, to be free.

The establishment of women only spaces and then queer only spaces which followed, come out of second wave feminism and the need to publicly and personally declare the existence of “women” in cultural and social space. This was cis-gendered, middle class white women mind you. Thus, I’ve always been a bit suspect of such gatherings where “Women” is the headline. Yet, after this short 10 minute incident, I felt viscerally in my body, the need to not be around men. How triggering just hearing a male voice, can be.

I am not advocating for separatism. Rather, calling out an everyday instance of male violence against women. It needs to be called that, violence, to remove the socially sanctioned permissiveness of masculine aggression. Violence reveals the intention of the actor to cause harm. The ruthless taking of an Other’s humanity. It names a specific perpetrator(s) and victim(s). And naming it “male violence” puts the actions in the context of a structural attempt to maintain power and dominance. We must be careful, though, to not misconstrue the idea of “intent.” One might argue that this does not really constitute male violence as the perpetrator did not use physical force or prolonged psychological or mental mistreatment. However, this man was clearly intending to do harm in order to get his way with this woman through verbal intimidation. What is more important, though, is to pay attention to the social mechanisms in place that make this “everyday” display of male violence against women possible at all. If patriarchy is the institutionalization of cis-male white power, there are social mechanisms in place that maintain male moral and cultural dominance. One of these mechanisms is the permissiveness of men to be loud and aggressive in public. Further, it is the institutionalization of male aggression and violence, the cultural acceptance of it, the societal unwillingness to call anything but physical force violence that puts women, queer, and trans people in a constant state of vigilance and fear. This is why the two women clerks in the store did not “fight back.” They have learned that to fight back against male violence is to risk subjecting yourself to more violence. So women chose their battles. They reserve their energy to fight back against intimate male partners and male family members. What might seem like passivity or compliance to a male act of violence committed by a stranger, is actually silent resistance. We cannot see such people’s history of fighting back. We cannot see their sometimes daily endurance of male violence and aggression. This is why I’m highlighting it hear. It is the small daily occurrences of male violence that provide the opportunity for patriarchal dominance and control.