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Comment by delecti | Hacker News Reader

Considering the term "privilege" (in that sense) was coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege, it is definitionally not "female privilege", though clearly that on its own isn't a very convincing argument.

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.

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> Considering the term "privilege" (in that sense) was coined specifically in regard to male (and white) privilege, it is definitionally not "female privilege", though clearly that on its own isn't a very convincing argument.

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".

Sorry but common ideas like "privilege" cannot be coined by anyone.

Leaving aside the discussion about privilege, if you go back far enough, any commonly used term/idea will be entirely unused. For any term, there's someone who used it first, and for some of those terms we can identify who that person was, and some of those people are responsible for popularizing the term in question.

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.

It looks like the term "privilege" was used in the 1200s, and even earlier in Latin, so restricting its use to male white privilege in the 2000s seems silly to me.

Where did you get that idea?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/privilege

So its a bad argument you disagree with but don't present an alternative?

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?

Did you miss the second paragraph where I make an argument aside from the one I said was unconvincing on its own? Also, I didn't say it was bad or that I disagreed, just that it was unconvincing on its own, and that's exactly why my comment didn't end there.

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.

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