Checking My Male Privilege<br />With the recent rash of high-profile accusations of sexual harassment<br />and assault — from Harvey Weinstein to George H. W. Bush to Mark Halperin — I found myself feeling shocked at the pervasiveness of this sort of behavior, and embarrassed that I was shocked.<br />According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center:<br />• One in five women will be raped at some point in their lives.<br />Every man must work as hard as every woman to elevate gender equality and to eliminate gendered violence.<br />Furthermore, a 2015 Cosmopolitan magazine survey of more than 2,234 female employees between 18 and 34 found<br />that roughly one in three said they had been sexually harassed at work.<br />The survey also found that 71 percent never reported the harassment,<br />and of the 29 percent who did report it, only 15 percent felt the report was handled fairly.<br />(Men are also sexually assaulted and raped, but the scale of those occurrences is dwarfed by scale of those problems for women.)<br />• One in five women are sexually assaulted while in college.<br />No matter how many times you hear them talk about their struggle,<br />and even when you feel deeply moved by their expression of it, unless you have experienced that same pain yourself, a gap remains.<br />I move through the world with the privilege of never even considering the idea of being sexually assaulted or harassed.
