Brittany Ritter
Women and Gender Studies 200
Oppression: the thing that holds you back with no mercy. The one thing that can actually be many things, things that are human and males, males who bring oppression to women all over. Marilyn Frye talks about oppressing women in her passage “Oppression”. I personally liked this passage because it made me think more about women’s rights and how they really are being treated. Frye compared oppression to a bird cage, the wires being the struggles and challenges in an everyday woman’s life. “The configuration of bars restricts men, as well. But the system, as a whole, benefits men”, this is my favorite sentence from the whole reading. It talks about men doing things for women in need too only receive a payment of some sort. Frye also went into discussion about males opening doors for women, which as well means men want something back when they go out of their way. The privilege of women is ridiculous still to this day, women are still expected to do so much!
Peggy McIntosh is the author of this next article that I read, in this we talk about white privilege and how much we take for granted and she compares that to gender privilege. Gender privilege means that as a certain gender, you will have different advantages and different disadvantages. So McIntosh starts off with white privilege and how we as whites take a lot for granted. She lists things like going to work and it is always whites, kids going to school and being taught the history of their own race, and speak for all the people in their racial group. I can only imagine how long the list is for male privilege. McIntosh referred to white privilege as “unearned advantage and conferred dominance”, which means we as whites do not need to work hard to earn greater things and we automatically are being seen as higher authority. She states that the word “privilege” now seems misleading, we use to think of privilege as earned or luck but now it simply confers dominance. McIntosh then asks “What will we do with such knowledge about male privilege?” and I believe the answer is women need to educate males about female roles and assumptions that aren’t true or should even be considered.
In the final passage that I read it discussed how people should educate their opposites meaning if you are lesbian you must teach a straight person everything you believe they should know. “The difference between race, age, and sex is humans refusing to recognize the differences” is the most memorable text from this passage as well. If people of different viewpoints learned to understand and accept more things then I feel the world would be a better place for everyone. The article also talks about the problems faced by black individuals. Black individuals, and most other people of color, often face daily discrimination and are constantly battling racial profiling and white privilege. However the article also touches on the worse problem of being black as well as being a woman. So a black woman has to deal with racial discrimination as well as gender discrimination. It’s a double-whammy of oppression which is unacceptable in today’s time!
These articles were very eye opening for me. I learned new things about certain subjects I hadn’t thought about. I now feel like a have more knowledge on these topics and I have learned some new things to help spread more awareness to other women.