Discussing privilege with the privileged

Seeing that my approach wasn’t working well, I backed off and thought about it for a while. The problem was, we weren’t using the same definition of privilege, and he wasn’t able to let go of the adjectival, personal definition of privilege as an advantage or source of pleasure granted to a specific person and replace it with the sociological, cohort definition of privilege as advantages specific groups of people have relative to other groups.

Here's a wild thought: maybe it's because he's NOT part of a privileged group and the fact that sociologists and academics think he is, is because of those demographics themselves being privilege blind and being hopelessly tied up by political correctness. Maybe, juuusssst maybe, the fact that virtually every white male denies their privilege is because the notion violate their experience and because they're NOT privileged enough to have corrupt sociologists and academics arguing for them. Maybe, you should take your husband's word seriously, the word of virtually every similarly situated male seriously, and not try to shove ivory tower jargon that wildly contradicts virtually everybody's lives upon the lives of virtually all people.

Now, the only reason this did work, though, is that white cis straight females do have a few privileges to speak of, so I could use them as an example.

Yeah, maybe since it actually conforms to most people's lives that the cis white females have privilege, he's open to the concept. It's kind of like how I'd resist the statement "rocks don't exist" because that contradicts my life and virtually everyone else's but I'll accept the statement "Peter Pan doesn't exist" because it fits what I know about the world.

What tactics can sociological groups without privilege, use to communicate about it effectively to a member of a group that does..?

Use actual examples of privilege. Male privilege doesn't exist; female privilege does. So use female privilege and people will understand it. Explain to your husband how much more likely he is to be imprisoned, raped, beaten, paying alimony, a wage slave, barred from education, how he pays more taxes and receives fewer benefits, how affirmative action mean's he's had to out compete everyone for the same results for his entire life, how you could take the kids and stop him from ever seeing them again if you wanted, how brutally fucked up child support is, how despite all this we've got hundreds of women's organizations and no male organizations, and all that. Trust me, he'll understand privilege.

/r/FeMRADebates Thread