Speaker: Michael Kimmel
Michael Kimmel - Why gender equality is good for everyone - men inclued
So the black woman says to the white woman, “When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, what do you see?” And the white woman said, “I see a woman.” And the black woman said, “You see, that’s the problem for me. Because when I wake up in the morning and I look in the mirror,” she said, “I see a black woman. To me, race is visible. But to you, race is invisible. You don’t see it.”
“That’s how privilege works. Privilege is invisible to those who have it.”
So making gender visible to men is the first step to engaging men to support gender equality.
“I have just one question for you guys, and it’s about the title of the show, ‘A Black Woman Stole My Job.’ Actually, it’s about one word in the title. I want to know about the word ‘my.’ Where did you get the idea it was your job? Why isn’t the title of the show, ‘A Black Woman Got the Job?’ or ‘A Black Woman Got A Job?’” Because without confronting men’s sense of entitlement, I don’t think we’ll ever understand why so many men resist gender equality.
Note:
0:11 I’m here to recruit men to support gender equality.
- recruit v. 招募
0:35 Now, I wasn’t always a middle class white man. It all happened for me about 30 years ago when I was in graduate school, and a bunch of us graduate students got together one day, and we said, you know, there’s an explosion of writing and thinking in feminist theory, but there’s no courses yet. So we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that. We said, OK, let’s have a study group. We’ll read a text, we’ll talk about it, we’ll have a potluck dinner.
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feminist n/adj. 女權主義者(的)
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A potluck is a gathering of people where each person or group of people contributes a dish of food prepared by the person or the group, to be shared among the larger gathered group.
1:13 … this is going to sound very anachronistic now – the white woman said, “All women face the same oppression as women. All women are similarly situated in patriarchy, and therefore all women have a kind of intuitive solidarity or sisterhood.” …
- anachronistic adj. 過時的;不合時宜的
- oppression n. 壓迫
- patriarchy n. 父權制;父系社會
- intuitive adj. 直觀的
- solidarity n. 團結
4:14 So I hope you all can see, this is what objectivity looks like.
- objectivity n. 客觀性
4:35 Because if you are going to embody disembodied Western rationality, you need a signifier, and what could be a better signifier of disembodied Western rationality than a garment that at one end is a noose and the other end points to the genitals?
- embody v. 使具體化
- disembodied a. 脫離現實的
- noose n. 套索
- genital n. 生殖器
4:56 That is mind-body dualism right there.
- dualism n. 二元論
5:12 … This results in a syndrome that I like to call ‘premature self-congratulation.’
- syndrome n. 綜合症
7:26 Look, we think this is a level playing field, so any policy that tilts it even a little bit, we think, “Oh my God, water’s rushing uphill. It’s reverse discrimination against us.”
- discrimination n. 歧視
7:36 So let me be very clear: white men in Europe and the United States are the beneficiaries of the single greatest affirmative action program in the history of the world. It is called “the history of the world.”
- beneficiary n. 受惠者
8:49 … They have lower job turnover. …
- turnover n. 營業額
9:36 … They expect their partners, their spouses, their wives, to work outside the home and be just as committed to their careers as they are.
- spouse n.配偶
10:01 … When I was a lot younger, there was a riddle that was posed to us. Some of you may wince to remember this riddle. This riddle went something like this.
- riddle n. 謎語
10:17
- physician n. 內科醫師
12:15 And I’m going to propose something a little bit more radical, one word: “share.”
- radical adj. 激進的