Male Privilege Quotes

“Perhaps you can explain it to me, then,” she said, “how is it fair that my utterly inept cousin is in command of me, for no reason other than that he’s a man and I’m a woman? How is it fair that I master Latin and Greek as well as any man at Oxford, yet I am taught over a baker’s shop? How is it fair that a man can tell me my brain was wired wrong, when his main achievement in life seems to be his birth into a life of privilege? And why do I have to beg a man to please make it his interest that I, too, may vote on the laws that govern my life every day?”
― Evie Dunmore, Bringing Down the Duke

“History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she had abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

“When I say he’s not rude, what I really mean is he’s male and moneyed and got to that age where we allow him his chosen degree of rude as some sort of social entitlement, along with his bus pass.”
― Mhairi McFarlane, Don't You Forget About Me

“A woman writer, except in rare instances, has no protection such as enjoyed by men who use their wives and mistresses as a marline to save themselves from the wear and tear of interruption.”
― Miles Franklin

“That’s exactly the point: when the playing field is uneven to begin with, you don’t have to be “a bad person” to benefit from nasty institutions or unwarranted privilege. You don’t have to be a bad person or even have bad intentions to personally profit from sexism, homophobia, or transphobia. You don’t have to do anything. As a heterosexual, cisgender masculine guy, you simply have to throw your name in the ring against someone like me and automatically you have those forces on your side. All you really have to do is say nothing against them. All you really have to do is keep quiet, remain “neutral” in the face of fucked up power structures, and those fucked up power structures will go on to do what they do best: walk all over people of difference. But just barely.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“The Easiest Way to Fuck Everything Up Is to Ignore Black Women”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“At the time, presenting in this masculine of a fashion didn’t feel like selling out. But that, in and of itself, is part of the problem. Throughout my senior year, when I was faced with obstacles or competitive processes or selection committees, I reverted to masculinity out of fear every time. I feared discrimination at every turn, feared that if I were to truly wear my identity on my sleeve, I would lose everything.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“When I walked in and saw four old white men and one older white woman on my interview panel, I knew my odds were slim to none. I prayed that maybe one of the dudes was at least gay or something, but didn’t hold out hope. The fact that anyone could set up an interview panel for the southeast region of the United States in a black-as-fuck city like Atlanta, Georgia, and not even put a single black person (or any person of color) on the panel was beyond me.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“Isn’t it interesting that you don’t even have to say “Duke Men’s Basketball”? You just say “Duke Basketball,” and everyone assumes you’re talking about the men’s team? As if the women’s team doesn’t exist? Isn’t it interesting that you just say “the NBA” and everyone knows you’re talking about the (Men’s) National Basketball Association? But if you want to talk about women’s professional basketball, you have to say “the WNBA”? Anyway.”
― Jacob Tobia, Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

“For years the physicist Donna Strickland was not deemed notable enough for an entry. She finally got her place in Wikipedia on the day she won the Nobel Prize. Surely that cannot be what it takes to be remembered? No man is held to such a standard.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“War is a masculine merchandise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim's life to absolute zero.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

“As hip hop has made clear—and black religion, too, for that matterwhen we conceive of the horrors we confront, they have a masculine tint; we measure the terrors we face by calculating their harm to our men and boys. Thus the role of our artists has often been limited to validating the experiences, expressions, and desires of boys and men. When we name those plagued by police violence, we cite the names of the boys and men but not the names of the girls and women. We take special note of how black boys are unfairly kicked out of school while ignoring that our girls are right next to them in the line of expulsion. We empathize with black men who end up in jail because of a joint they smoked while overlooking the defense against domestic abuse that lands just as many women in jail. We offer authority and celebration to men at church to compensate for how the white world overlooks their talents unless they carry a ball or a tune. We thank black fathers for lovingly parenting their children, and many more of them do so than is recognized in the broader world, which is one reason for our gratitude. But we are relatively thankless for the near superhuman efforts of our mothers to nurture and protect us.”
― Michael Eric Dyson, What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America

“She had difficulty accepting adultery despite its prevalence among high-born men of the era.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen

“Sarah poured the tea, thinking how narrow Mina’s assessment of a woman’s role was, how restrictive. Why couldn’t a woman aspire to more? Why shouldn’t she? Why did Raven get to do whatever he wanted? She was convinced that they were of similar backgrounds and she was damn sure they were of similar intellect, yet he had opportunities that were denied to her, and seemed not always to appreciate his privilege.”
― Ambrose Parry, The Way of All Flesh

“Margrie himself was made the first ‘Mr London’, a title which has the pleasing sense of them having had a swimsuit round in the competition. Margrie believed that he was a perfect example of a new evolutionary stage in human development, which he called Peckham Man. It never ceases to amaze me how many women struggle with self-belief while the vast majority of men have no trouble with it at all. He must have been insufferable.”
― Sandi Toksvig, Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus

“Male privilege is assuming one has the right to occupy any space or person by whatever means, with or without permission. It's a sense of entitlement that's unique to those who have been raised male is most cultures - it's notably absent in most girls and women...Combine male privilege with capitalism (which rewards greed and acquisition) and mass media (which, owned by capitalists, highlights only the rewards of acquisition and makes invisible it's penalties) and you have a juggernaut that needs stopping by any means...Male privilege is, in a word, violence.”
― Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us

“Girls are not meant to think like this. So they say. They never ask us what we actually do think- certainly not without telling us first what it is we should be thinking.
And if we are not thinking what they have said we should then they say our thinking is wrong. If we tell them (men) what we think, they correct our thoughts. Thoughts leave our brains, exit via our mouths, hang in the air. ready to be shot down by their artillery all day long! We say we think a thing and they (men) ignore it or they (still men) say we just don't fully understand it. Then they expect silence. Or an apology. If neither is forthcoming, they look away. Perhaps they walk out a door. They rewrite the words that come out our mouths by teaching us to edit them inside our brains. No?”
― Jenni Fagan, Luckenbooth

“We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“Male" contraception is something novel for many people. There are still very few people using these methods, so they receive a lot of attention and a certain amount of approval among activist and feminist circles. The fact that you're seen as this cool guy, just because you're pushing up your family jewels...it says a lot about the state of things, in terms of the contraceptive burden. All we're doing is trying to make things more equal. There's nothing heroic about it...it's just natural.”
― Bobika, Le coeur des Zobs

“Being a supporter of feminism means becoming aware of your privilege and trying to break it down every day. It's not "trendy." It's actually a really basic thing, and highly political. And you get no benefit from it, no reward for doing so. It means agreeing to give up the privilege you enjoy as a white cishet man. You have to stand alongside your woman in her fight.”
― Bobika, Le coeur des Zobs

“[Fashionable Beard]
I asked a friend growing a fashionable beard playfully: “Has your beard increased your fans?”
“You have no idea how much it has!” He responded.
“Do you wonder why people can’t see you clearly without it?” I asked.
“This beard reminds me every day that people simply refuse to see things as they are – bare and naked. They will notice and see things covered with any cover, except not as they are!” he added with a laughter.

[Original poem published in Arabic on January 16, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“Compulsory confessions of privilege evoke parallels with religious confessions of sin.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“To one male seminarian, who complained that all the talk about discrimination dominated too much class time, Murray responded, 'If you have to live with anger, I have to live with pain. I'lI trade you both my pain, my sex, my race and my age--and see how you deport yourself in such circumstances. Barring that, try to imagine for 24 hours what it must be like to be a Negro in a predominantly white seminary, a woman in an institution dominated by men and for the convenience of men, some of whom radiate hostility even though they do not say a word, who are patronizing and kindly as long as I do not get out of my place, but who feel threatened by my intellect, my achievements, and my refusal to be suppressed.' Of their differences, Murray told him, 'If I can't take your judgmental statements and your anger, I am in the wrong place. If you cannot take my methods of fighting for survival, then you have chosen the wrong vocation.”
― Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice

“I know what it feels like to be helpless,' I ground out. 'You don't. You don't know what it feels like to be surrounded by five men and know you can't stop them from hurting you. You don't know what it feels like to see the people you've grown up with wither and die. You-'

You don't know what it feels like to watch yourself die.”
― Carissa Broadbent, Six Scorched Roses

“There are always people willing to defend men accused of rape by arguing that consent was in place, even though their conviction is based on nothing other than the say-so of the man involved. A gang rape becomes group sex, the rape of an unconscious woman a case of 'next-day regret'--and the truth is whatever the man being defended by the public and/or his immediate community says it is.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“How do we know that she consented? Because Johns says so. And if a man says sex was consensual, nothing a woman says to the contrary will ever be enough to convince people determined to protect his reputation and preserve his entitlement.”
― Clementine Ford, Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and the Toxic Bonds of Mateship

“Don’t presume to tell me that you think him one-dimensional and incapable of pain simply because he is a man.”
― Molly Collier, The Paragon

“Oh, natürlich", rief Emma, "einem Mann ist es immer unverständlich, daß eine Frau einen Heiratsantrag ablehnt. Ein Mann bildet sich immer ein, daß eine Frau den ersten besten nimmt, der sie fragt.”
― Jane Austen, Emma