So said the Privileged White Male

So, I’m a feminist. I have been for a long time, but it took me awhile to come to this conclusion. Maybe it began the first time I was publicly harassed, when a boy rubbed against me in the hallway at school. Or, when I was at the library, and a man commented on my body out loud, in front of my 11-year-old sister. Maybe it was when I was walking to get my younger brother from school, and a man yelled at me from his window, and I was paralyzed with fear before I walked away as fast as I could, too scared that if I ran, he would follow me.
Maybe it was the realization that all of these things happened to me when I was 15 years old. Maybe it was before that, when my mother said that women can do almost all the same things men can (apparently she didn’t get the memo about the childbirth thing). Maybe it was when I first started taking birth control pills to regulate my heavy periods and PMDD, and my father told me not to refer to them as birth control pills but as hormone pills, because birth control is slutty. Maybe it was my father claiming that women get breast cancer because they don’t nurse their babies. Maybe it was when he said that the cervical cancer vaccine was wrong because women get cervical cancer from having sex. Maybe it was his constant referral to Sex and the City as Sluts and the City. Maybe it was him and my mother referring to fashion magazines as slutty. Maybe it was him always referring to women as girls, or cute, or calling them honey or sweetie. Maybe it was before this, being raised in a Presbyterian church, where we were told to prepare ourselves for marriage by learning how to do housework, take care of babies, be sweet, and submit to our husbands, and not to go to college because Jesus wanted us to be mommies. Maybe it was my mother, who was, and is, desperately unhappy, yet has no education and nowhere to go, because she is dependent on my father.
Probably, it’s all of this. I do believe, though, that it started young, and that it was a natural evolution for me; perhaps my feminist roots took shape before I was even born. It is more spiritual than anything else for me, the belief that the world is a better place with feminism.

But, now that I’ve covered that, I want to mention something that happened a few days before the inauguration. My older brother’s (I have five brothers and two sisters) friend was at our house, and he mentioned that he was looking for a job. My dad started making jokes about how Obama is keeping him from getting a job, how Obama is going to ruin everything, blablabla. [Also, racism is apparently over now, too. I wasn’t aware, but apparently having an African-American president means there is no more racism. Or something. Whatever; that line of reasoning is ridiculous. The very fact that it’s such a huge deal for Obama to be elected shows that it’s not over.]
I rolled my eyes. "Oh, too bad, you don’t have your White Male Privilege anymore." [I don’t believe this is true at all, obviously there is still privilege. The fact that we have to argue about it is just like the racism-is-over-because-of-Obama argument.] "Uh, I guess," he said, but than my dad jumped in with, "We haven’t had White Male Privilege in fifty years." I didn’t know how to respond, so I just walked away. Sometimes there is no point in arguing, and there is never any point in arguing with my middle-aged, conservative parents. I was unbelievably frustrated; mostly because I couldn’t think of a way to frame my arguments in a way that made sense. Any suggestions? And, if you have stories about similar crap, well, I’d love to hear them. This site keeps me encouraged and lifts my spirits on even the worst days.