'benevolent sexism'??? It sounds like newspeak to me.
Surely this should just be called 'female privilege'.
Surely this should just be called 'female privilege'.
Benevolent here refers to the intent, not the outcome.
If I say "women are so caring" and then use that as a justification for why I shouldn't hire them, the result is a sexist policy with a benevolent origin.
You see this all the time with stereotypes - queer men are so good at fashion, Asians are so good at math, Black folks are such good athletes, etc. We might think these are compliments, but when they are used to deny opportunities they can be as harmful as any other stereotype.
Any sexist or racist prejudice will either be against one group (women are so weak), leading to a disadvantage for them; or benefit one group (Asians are so good at math), leading to a disadvantage for everyone else. Both are leading to discrimination based on gender or race. Calling one of the two benevolent is just a bad name.
The whole point is that the outcome is not benevolent.
But it's useful to have a nominative difference between sexism that has roots in hate ("women are hysterical") and sexism that has roots in a "positive" stereotype ("women are nurturing").
Those are two different types of sexism with two different root causes and need to different solutions.
That is indeed right in the definition, which you should read:
Hostile sexism reflects overtly negative evaluations and stereotypes about a gender (e.g., the ideas that women are incompetent and inferior to men). Benevolent sexism represents evaluations of gender that may appear subjectively positive (subjective to the person who is evaluating) but are actually damaging to people and gender equality more broadly
I quite like the idea that prejudice becomes race/sex/whateverism when used to cause harm.
Thus benevolent sexism (i.e. just prejudice and no power) and prejudice based on sex would essentially be synonyms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prejudice_plus_power
Edit: this comment examplains it better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33177570
That's bit icky, because "causes harm" is extremely relative. Any negative attitude (or the shadow of a positive one) causes harm to some degree. Wasn't "microagression" a buzzword not long ago?
Everyone has some degree of power, and ignoring that feels like just another kind of marginalization.
What's so wrong with leaving those words with their current meaning, and if you mean X + power, just say the extra word. Otherwise we wind up with heated arguments over nothing more than the sounds our throats make.
Just want to chime in on this bit here, since it's a bone I have to pick with society on some level, and your comment is providing a good way to maybe hopefully explain it. (I agree with you btw, just to be clear) Though to start off first, I want to make clear that I don't intend harm or any sort of 'flamewar' with this comment, though I can see how some people might take it out of hand.
Sure, there may be degrees to which harm is caused depending on the situation and context at hand, but we (logically, as I see it) should not be concerning ourselves with the lesser degrees overly much; as it creates a societal numbness to the more important things when rallied against too fiercely.
It's like the old "Boy who cried wolf" story. Sure, there WAS a wolf eventually, and so the villagers should have just listened to the boy anyways perhaps, but because the boy fooled them so many times at lesser levels of potential harm, they failed to believe him at higher levels of potential harm.
And yes, I realize that old story is about lying, but sometimes there are similar parallels in life that fit the stories narrative to some degree. Claiming that something is harming you, when there is no immediately understandable effect beyond getting emotional about whatever that thing is, is basically in and of itself, a lie.
Example: If you insult me, have you harmed me in any way beyond possibly injuring my ego?
My answer is no, because the ego is a personal psychological construct. It sucks, sure, but it's not hurting you in any way unless you are already in a mental state where such things become magnified. (I.E. some type of psychosis for example.)
Anyways. The reason why I bring this up, is because I've seen similar arguments about harm being used in the past to try to degrade and reduce the liberty of others, all because someone feels they have right to be more 'equal' than those others all due to the supposed harm being caused. I don't agree with the notion that one should be able to constitute small infractions against another as 'harm'.
I think this is why some people here are quibbling over the differences between 'benevolant sexism' and what they see as 'real sexism'. It's all ultimately some sort of ism, but some have different connotations depending on how they are applied. Ultimately, it's all stereotyping of some degree or another.
In any case, I doubt this was a helpful expansion, just felt important to say.
In my opinion as someone who was constantly bullied in school and have had to deal with people through my life who (in a just world) would have been committed to a psych ward to figure out their issues in why they insist on psychologically harming others... I think we as a society are going too far now with being worried about hurting some random persons feelings over things they technically have no right to be offended over. Which is a tricky thing to discuss, because 'right to be offended' is a hard thing for some people to wrap their heads around when all they ever are is offended at everything.
Which is why I bring up the boy who cried wolf story. I think it suits the situation, since these people are essentially crying wolf at what the rest of society sees as 'nothing'.
Anyways, don't worry about whether or not something is a helpful expansion when discussing these things with me. Sometimes what ends up being the case is we actually agree on many points; but our lexicon differs. That's helpful because others will too, which means now both parties are giving a description that different people will now understand (hopefully) more accurately.
I can't begin to tell you how much I have to say on this subject. I've already written and deleted multiple paragraphs due to the potential of my words being against this sites rules.
Another analogy I've seen used is that in countries where men violently force wifes, daughters and sisters to veil their entire body, they are all very surprised to be accused of misogyny: they love and admire women like we do dogs, and only aim at protecting them from dirty cavemen as much as possible. But, just like them, you wont ask you dog to vote and you ll give it a slap if it disobeys. Women in turn can then accept this fact of life and embrace their newfound respect for a masculine God protecting them from base men and would show proud humility and obedience, while men burn cars and foreign effigies at the first sign of minuscule disrespect.
This is just a thinly veiled criticism of Iran(?) that has almost nothing to do with the parent comment.
tl;dr: Benevolent sexism towards women is considered harmful to women. Benevolent sexism towards men is considered harmful to men.
You can read more about what it really means here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambivalent_sexism
The phrase "benevolent sexism" is not an oxymoron though. "Women should stay at home with the kids because they're so nurturing" is a belief that leads to reduced opportunities for women, despite ostensibly being praise of their inherent characteristics. At its simplest definition, "privilege" just means that a particular trait won't be the cause of things being harder for you, and by the example of women being nurturing, that's clearly not an example of privilege.
It's one thing to say that we don't know who coined the term "privilege" in the context being discussed, but to dismiss the possibility of knowing who coined any common term is just clearly false.
And doesn't women being viewed as more nurturing doesn't deny opportunities to nurturing men or men who would like to stay at home and raise their kids?
But I was just talking about "benevolent sexism". The fact that I didn't address a different topic (reverse sexism) isn't a rebuttal, it's just whataboutism. You made some arguments, there are other arguments for and against the idea, none of those relate to my point, which was solely that benevolent sexism alone isn't an oxymoron.
That is indeed not a very convincing argument. A derogatory word invented by a political advocacy group is rarely useful. In this context however it was not coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege. It was coined in the social class struggle in regard to the privilege held by the nobles vs the common folks. The meaning was people with legal immunity or exemption from the law that the rest of the people had to follow.
That definition of the word hasn't change much since the 15th century. It is also from this period that the negative connotation occurred with the word pravilege, "an evil law or privilege".