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[This post is basically a holding page for a discussion that started on Twitter but quickly spiralled beyond 140 characters per point.]
I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; I'm objecting only to the signifier, not the signified. The reason I think "privilege" is an unhelpful term is that the word's ordinary meaning hides the fact that it has a nonobvious technical definition, leading the uninitiated to think they know what's being talked about, draw (wrong) conclusions, and get offended/drag the argument off in the wrong direction/generally mess things up. This annoys equality campaigners and impedes the enlightenment of the uninitiated person.
The workaround is to say "blah blah blah privilege - which I am using in a technical and nonobvious sense which you should read up on quickly if you haven't met it before - blah blah pay gap blah." But this is unsatisfactory because (a) it takes (perhaps unnecessary) extra time and effort from the equality-campaigner every time, (b) you have to do it early on or you're already off down the wrong path.
This is one of the reasons I prefer the term "kyriarchy" to "patriarchy": it sounds like jargon, sure, but it doesn't have an obvious wrong meaning for your interlocutor to focus on. If they haven't met it before, they'll have to ask what it means, and you can tell them, and then you'll both be on the same level.
Some possible objections
1. Who the hell are you to tell us what term to use?
Oh, nobody in particular. Ignore me if you like. But I've seen this failure mode play out a number of times (most recently this morning, kicking this discussion off), and I bet you have too. Think of this as a bug report, which you're free to mark as WONTFIX.
2. Other scholarly disciplines give technical meanings to ordinary words all the time, and that doesn't cause a problem.
Well, sure. But those subjects don't deal with the basic stuff of everyday life. If I see "jerk" in a physics textbook or "exact" in a book on homological algebra, I'm probably going to assume that they're not using those words in their ordinary sense, and turn to the index. It helps that those words are very unlikely to be used in places where their ordinary meanings would make sense, of course. However, if I as an uninitiated person encounter the word "privilege" on a feminist website, in a piece about something I already think I have some handle on, I'll read it with the ordinary meaning, decide it more-or-less makes sense but is WRONG, JUST WRONG, and charge off in the wrong direction.
3. Why should we change our established terminology to make life easier for people who can't be bothered to do their own Google searching?
Well, the problem is not that they can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, it's that they don't realise they need to. Something which flags up "this is a technical term" would solve this problem (while still leaving you with the folks who genuinely can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, who constitute a more intractable problem).
Besides, you want your ideas to be widely disseminated and understood, don't you? Just think about the current penetration of feminist ideas into the wider culture. As a society, we still struggle with "equal pay for equal work" and "rape is bad". Anything more sophisticated, like the concept of privilege, is (I believe but have not checked) understood only by a depressingly tiny minority.
4. We've already got loads of books and websites that use "privilege". Are we meant to change them all?
This is a genuine problem - something I remember vividly from my time among mathematicians is how hard it is to change entrenched terminology. The problem is particularly acute when there's wide agreement that the old terminology is bad, but not about what to replace it with, because then you get lots of splinter factions using different words, and the only sensible default for the unaligned is the bad old terminology.
But as I said above, if "privilege" is entrenched terminology, it's only entrenched for quite a small fraction of the people who would benefit from understanding the concept.
I don't have any good suggestions for how to achieve a switchover, but hopefully one of my lovely commenters will.
5. Do you have a better term to suggest?
Alas, no. Sorry. But perhaps you do?
[Also: Happy International Women's Day! If you're feeling depressed about the much-tweeted statistic that women do 66% of the world's work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property, then cheer yourself up with The Guardian's top 100 women or the Awesome Shit Women Did tumblr.]
I think that the term "privilege", as used by feminists and other equality-campaigners, is unhelpful. I think the concept to which it refers (which I attempted to explain here) is extremely helpful and important; I'm objecting only to the signifier, not the signified. The reason I think "privilege" is an unhelpful term is that the word's ordinary meaning hides the fact that it has a nonobvious technical definition, leading the uninitiated to think they know what's being talked about, draw (wrong) conclusions, and get offended/drag the argument off in the wrong direction/generally mess things up. This annoys equality campaigners and impedes the enlightenment of the uninitiated person.
The workaround is to say "blah blah blah privilege - which I am using in a technical and nonobvious sense which you should read up on quickly if you haven't met it before - blah blah pay gap blah." But this is unsatisfactory because (a) it takes (perhaps unnecessary) extra time and effort from the equality-campaigner every time, (b) you have to do it early on or you're already off down the wrong path.
This is one of the reasons I prefer the term "kyriarchy" to "patriarchy": it sounds like jargon, sure, but it doesn't have an obvious wrong meaning for your interlocutor to focus on. If they haven't met it before, they'll have to ask what it means, and you can tell them, and then you'll both be on the same level.
Some possible objections
1. Who the hell are you to tell us what term to use?
Oh, nobody in particular. Ignore me if you like. But I've seen this failure mode play out a number of times (most recently this morning, kicking this discussion off), and I bet you have too. Think of this as a bug report, which you're free to mark as WONTFIX.
2. Other scholarly disciplines give technical meanings to ordinary words all the time, and that doesn't cause a problem.
Well, sure. But those subjects don't deal with the basic stuff of everyday life. If I see "jerk" in a physics textbook or "exact" in a book on homological algebra, I'm probably going to assume that they're not using those words in their ordinary sense, and turn to the index. It helps that those words are very unlikely to be used in places where their ordinary meanings would make sense, of course. However, if I as an uninitiated person encounter the word "privilege" on a feminist website, in a piece about something I already think I have some handle on, I'll read it with the ordinary meaning, decide it more-or-less makes sense but is WRONG, JUST WRONG, and charge off in the wrong direction.
3. Why should we change our established terminology to make life easier for people who can't be bothered to do their own Google searching?
Well, the problem is not that they can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, it's that they don't realise they need to. Something which flags up "this is a technical term" would solve this problem (while still leaving you with the folks who genuinely can't be bothered to do their own Google searching, who constitute a more intractable problem).
Besides, you want your ideas to be widely disseminated and understood, don't you? Just think about the current penetration of feminist ideas into the wider culture. As a society, we still struggle with "equal pay for equal work" and "rape is bad". Anything more sophisticated, like the concept of privilege, is (I believe but have not checked) understood only by a depressingly tiny minority.
4. We've already got loads of books and websites that use "privilege". Are we meant to change them all?
This is a genuine problem - something I remember vividly from my time among mathematicians is how hard it is to change entrenched terminology. The problem is particularly acute when there's wide agreement that the old terminology is bad, but not about what to replace it with, because then you get lots of splinter factions using different words, and the only sensible default for the unaligned is the bad old terminology.
But as I said above, if "privilege" is entrenched terminology, it's only entrenched for quite a small fraction of the people who would benefit from understanding the concept.
I don't have any good suggestions for how to achieve a switchover, but hopefully one of my lovely commenters will.
5. Do you have a better term to suggest?
Alas, no. Sorry. But perhaps you do?
[Also: Happy International Women's Day! If you're feeling depressed about the much-tweeted statistic that women do 66% of the world's work, produce 50 percent of the food, but earn 10 percent of the income and own 1 percent of the property, then cheer yourself up with The Guardian's top 100 women or the Awesome Shit Women Did tumblr.]
Re: I've read this post and it's comments a number of times...
You're not alone: as you've seen above, plenty of people agree with you, including some people who've read a lot deeper into this stuff than I have. But I think the idea of invisibility - that it requires a conscious effort and some education to notice your own privilege - is, at least, widely understood among equality-campaigners and not among the general public, and that means that misunderstandings occur.
BTW, did you read this post (http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/03/11/faq-what-is-male-privilege/)? I found that helpful for understanding how feminists think about privilege.
Doesn't "women and men should be treated equally now let's get on with doing that" cover the entire thing?
Well, yeah, but "let's get on with doing that" turns out to be both complicated and hard. It's a bit like saying "an operating system should allocate system resources to userspace programs" - that covers the entire thing, but there's quite a lot of detail to get right, and often it helps to invent some specialised concepts and terminology.
[If you don't think that's a fair comparison, reflect that it's possible for one bright hacker to write a basic-but-functional operating system, but (as the stats from the UN page linked above make clear) women are still worse-off than men in all sorts of ways, despite 150 years of worldwide activism.]
In particular, we need to know about existing inequalities so that we can address them. And if some of those inequalities are invisible to those with the upper hand, that's important to know.
You could well be right about the jargon - it's a common complaint, and I certainly find it offputting at times. I haven't read many feminist books (and wasn't too impressed (http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/153178.html#cutid2) by the last one I tried), but I'd be surprised if none of them have anything interesting to say...
Re: I've read this post and it's comments a number of times...
I don't think it does. What doing that tends to do - outside of technical/engineering fields where the words and concepts genuinely don't exist - is make the people inventing them feel clever and important while achieving very little.
"let's get on with doing that" is actually very easy. You make and enforce laws which ban sexual discrimination, you educate young women that they're equal (not better!) to men (thanks, Spice Girls), then you wait for the older generation who are set in their ways to retire/die. But that doesn't get you any awards or praise from your peers and nobody thinks you're clever. So you start writing masturbatory essays and inventing technical terms and so on. Shut up, and go and chain yourself to some railings outside a government where women have no legal rights. I'll be right there with you (well, in spirit at least, but hey, you know my thoughts of the pointlessness of direct action)
I'm also reminded of Morgan Freeman's thoughts on racism - to paraphrase him: "I am going to stop calling you a woman and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a man." Problem solved.
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/10482634/ns/today-entertainment/