,
18 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Reverse [oppression] is always a conflation of the personal and the structural.
A woman can be personally prejudiced against men. (One might argue that that merely levels the playing field. That's a separate discussion.)
However prejudiced an individual is, it doesn't change the fact that men still hold the majority of economic, political, & social power.
That's the structural stuff - the way our society has accreted advantages to men over time, and made it feel "normal."
An individual man may not be successful; an individual woman may be. Neither case disproves the existence of structural sexism.
What's structural sexism look like? It's when both men & women prefer lower-register voices and find higher-register ones annoying.
It's when men & women with equal qualifications are judged differently.
Both those phenomena have been confirmed many times by different social scientists over the years - which is exactly how you see this stuff.
Structural sexism can only be seen in aggregate.
Your individual experience of personal prejudice is relevant only to you. It is irrelevant when discussing structural oppression.
I've never experienced racism, but I still believe it exists, because I understand how statistics work.
Think of statistics as the rigorously-verified aggregate lived experience of that group.
Hearing & believing people's lived experiences is still important. It gives color to the numbers & helps us understand how it manifests.
We should also believe folks when they experience something personal that the aggregate research doesn't support.
Aggregate numbers are not absolutes - they're, um, just statistics. They merely state how often something happens in a large sample.
There will always be individual instances that don't line up - like the man who experiences personal prejudice from a woman.
Or the woman who is successful in a male-dominated field. In both cases, we should believe these things happened.
But at the same time, we should be careful, because for most people, this is not their lived experience. That's what the stats tell us.
