Checking My Male Privilege
With the recent rash of high-profile accusations of sexual harassment
and assault — from Harvey Weinstein to George H. W. Bush to Mark Halperin — I found myself feeling shocked at the pervasiveness of this sort of behavior, and embarrassed that I was shocked.
According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center:
• One in five women will be raped at some point in their lives.
Every man must work as hard as every woman to elevate gender equality and to eliminate gendered violence.
Furthermore, a 2015 Cosmopolitan magazine survey of more than 2,234 female employees between 18 and 34 found
that roughly one in three said they had been sexually harassed at work.
The survey also found that 71 percent never reported the harassment,
and of the 29 percent who did report it, only 15 percent felt the report was handled fairly.
(Men are also sexually assaulted and raped, but the scale of those occurrences is dwarfed by scale of those problems for women.)
• One in five women are sexually assaulted while in college.
No matter how many times you hear them talk about their struggle,
and even when you feel deeply moved by their expression of it, unless you have experienced that same pain yourself, a gap remains.
I move through the world with the privilege of never even considering the idea of being sexually assaulted or harassed.