Female privilege, beauty privilege, and intersectionality

Last week, 2elle made a fascinating and thought-provoking post on female privilege, beauty privilege, and how they intersect. Various commenters left equally fascinating and thought-provoking comments. My comment got a little out of hand, so I’m making it a separate post, but I strongly encourage anyone who hasn’t done so to read 2elle’s post and the comments to it first, since I’ll be referring and linking to them throughout this post.

I agree with other commenters that I have a hard time getting outraged by seemingly preferential treatment of women and that it is important to consider the context. For me the context for female privilege and female beauty privilege is the discrimination women face, both as women and as members of other minority groups.

Women did and do experience various financial perks. Prior to litigation by feminists such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, women were given formal advantages over men in obtaining alimony, survivor’s benefits, and benefits as dependents. Women still receive a variety of informal financial perks such as lady’s nights and men buying women drinks and paying for dates.

Unfortunately, however, these occasional financial perks don’t even come close to making up for the pervasive financial discrimination that structures women’s (and men’s) lives.

Joan Williams argues that our society operates on a heavily gendered split between idealized workers and marginalized caregiver. The idealized worker (almost always a man) works long, hard hours outside the home to earn money. However, the idealized worker is able to function in this way only because the marginalized caregiver (almost always a woman) puts in equally long, hard work cooking, cleaning, and caretaking, reducing or erasing her own income in the process. This pattern continues even after divorce, with the woman typically continuing to provide most childcare. (Joan Williams, Unbending Gender (2000))

In other words, women put in long hours of housework and child care that enable men to reap high salaries. In return, they get a few meals paid for and highly limited, poorly enforced child support and alimony. (Williams 121-123) Put in this context, female privilege starts to look less like real privilege and more like a half-hearted sop.

Female privilege is not just inadequate compensation for discrimination but, also, more insidiously, an opportunity for sexual exploitation and assault. As other commenters noted, most men buy women drinks not simply to be nice but because they are hoping to start up a relationship or a one-night stand. Most men understand that this is not a guarantee, but unfortunately some men think a woman owes them sex or a relationship in exchange for this and other female “perks.” And, unfortunately, a small minority of men use drinks as an aid to sexual assault. (Koren Zailckas, Smashed 202-204 (2005))

Even worse, this type of entitlement and manipulation isn’t exclusive to the social realm. As gtg263r points out, some employers carry it over into the work realm, offering women “perks” (that they may well have deserved anyway) in exchange for sexual favors. And while some cops will let a women off just because she's cute, some cops expect more.

Female privilege takes place not just in the context of discrimination against women, but also discrimination against racial minorities, LGBTI people, the working class, and the disabled. UCLA Law Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989 to refer to the ways different forms of oppression and privilege intersect with one another. However, the basic concept has been around since at least 1851, when Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, saying:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?

Essentially, Truth pointed out that female privilege was often if not always denied to black women. I think this is still the case, although hopefully to a lesser extent. Women of color are less likely to experience favoritism from police and more likely to experience abuse. Less dramatically but still significantly, men (and, to a lesser extent, women) appear to be less likely to ask out black women (and therefore presumably to buy them drinks and dinner and so on) and I would bet the same is true for women who are visibly disabled, queer, or trans or just not conventionally beautiful.

I think there is also an intersectionality issue regarding women and beauty privilege. (Or rather, many issues.) Men also receive advantages for being attractive, without having to face the same risk of being sexually exploited or perceived as bimbos. I agree with 2elle and FeministGal that it’s important to understand that beautiful women receive beauty privilege, but I also think it’s important to understand that female disprivilege makes beauty privilege less valuable to women than it is to men.

No form of discrimination takes place in a vacuum. Sexism takes place in the context of beauty privilege, which takes place in the context of sexism, which takes place in the context of racism, which takes place in the context of classism, ad infinitum. To quote bell hooks:

One system cannot be eradicated while the others remain intact.