Tag: privilege

Because some or many men have committed crimes
against women, all men benefit from the consequences.
These consequences … include women giving up control
to men; putting men’s needs ahead of [our] own
through fear of annoying, bothering, or “provoking” a
man, thereby remaining incongruous with one’s own
beliefs and perceptions; and remaining “shuffling,” second-class
citizens. (Leidig 1981, pp. 104-205)

When a previously dominant group begins to speak the language of cultural unity or diversity, it is understandable if their subordinates detect in this rhetoric a way of perpetuating their privileges in displaced form. When men begin to speak of how much, after all, they and women share in common, feminists are properly on the alert.

Terry Eagleton, 1995, 271