When the very heavy topic of women’s oppression is raised, particularly in the context of an oppressed woman trying to communicate that to a man who is skeptical at best its acknowledged, but only in a subtle manner.
What I commonly hear, after dragging a thought process out for far too long is “yes women are oppressed but men are also oppressed”.
I’m going to go through explaining the difference between oppression in terms of sex and oppression in general.
We have to look at our society now in terms of social class. Women and men are two distinct social classes in our society. Men as a social class are not oppressed for being male. Women however, are.
Men can experience oppression, in fact the majority of men on this planet do face some kind of institutionalized oppression, often alongside women. But they do not suffer the sexual oppression that women do. A man may be suffering from every disadvantage and belong to every other marginalized grouping of people on the planet and he remains male, and as such will not face the oppression that women do.
So yes, men, I acknowledge there are various ways in which you can be marginalized and oppressed as individuals, but as men you are not. You have privilege in that one area of life.
What freaks me out is that a person can be so argumentative about whether or not women are oppressed, and yet pull at the end of an argument when denial is no longer an option, the “yeah but men experience bad stuff too”. If its so obvious that women faced these problems on a societal level, why have we been arguing to begin with?
Its that kind of willful sidestepping of any legitimate grievance that women have about their experiences as women that shows the nature of just how deep the socialization goes.