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First, a little background. I am a big guy: 6 foot 3 inches and over 200 lbs. And when I was younger, I was really, really strong. How strong? Well, my brother and I used to load market-size hogs (220 lbs) by grabbing each other's arms under the pig while squatting, and, throwing the pig over the tailgate of our pickup truck. At a party---in a excess of drunken stupidity---I once showed off by shoulder-pressing a full-grown, normal-sized woman. (Do I have to mention that she was not happy about this?) As a result, I've sorta just accepted that when push came to shove I could probably deal with just about anything the world can throw at me.
But that's changed. I'm certainly not the strongest guy at work now and haven't been for a while. To be fair, part of this is because the boss hired two young "jock type" guys who are much closer to 7 feet tall and weigh more than I do. I've also lost a lot of my strength. In addition, I have had pretty intense bouts of sciatic and tendonitis that have taught me to be very careful about what I lift. I also have a lot of arthritis, especially in my hands and feet.
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The above isn't an attempt to gain sympathy. I'm probably still in better shape than most people. (Taijiquan is actually a really good exercise for older people!) But I've benefited from thinking about what I have taken for granted in life and the nature of "male privilege". That's the thing about privilege, the key part of it is you take it so for granted that you don't even know it's there until it goes away.
One thing that I've noticed about this is that it has changed the way I function at work. It really bugs me to do this, but I sometimes have to ask someone else to help me because something is beyond my physical abilities. Even worse, I sometimes have to refuse to do something for fear of hurting myself.
This is an interesting issue, because to a very large extent the whole issue of strength and weakness at work is a totally artificial concept. What we consider "acceptable" or "too much" comes down to specific decisions. For example, at work we sometimes get asked to move extremely heavy, large, awkward power desks that don't easily fit through office doors or onto elevators. Moreover, because of their design, you cannot use any of the standard moving equipment (fridge cart, piano cart, etc) on them. I used to move stuff like this without thinking. But because of my failing strength I went through a phase of being increasingly thoughtful and even angry that my place of work buys these idiotic things---let alone asks us to move them.
These really hard jobs sometimes have a privileged aspect to them in that they are often the last places where you can still get good pay and benefits. I suspect that men in work like this have an unconscious understanding that the only reason that they make the money they do is because the work is hard and somewhat dangerous. If people who aren't "big galoots" can start doing this work, it means that it will eventually become "just another job" and the premium pay will disappear. As a result, a great many aspects of blue collar work are built around the idea that the average working man is built like king kong---eighty lb bags of concrete, 74 lb sheets of drywall, etc. This means that any small woman is simply "scaled out" of the job---even though there is really no reason why bags of concrete and sheets of drywall couldn't be smaller and weigh less. In nations where there isn't this sort of "heavy lift premium", women are routinely hired to do hard physical labour and they just shift smaller loads. For example, consider the following YouTube of women building a road in India. (Which isn't to diminish the hard work involved, but it is obviously something that they can do instead of something that is impossible.)
Carrying loads on the head is important to their ability to do the job, but it
comes at a price. I've read that you can break your neck doing this.
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Another thing I've had to reconsider comes from a comment that's been made to me several times by older women. They made a point of saying that I was an exceptional young man because I actually paid attention to and was interested in what they had to say. They told me that one thing that they found hard to accept was the way they became "invisible" as they aged. I'm beginning to notice the same thing. I've found that more and more young people simply don't have the time or interest to interact with me.
Being who I am, I admit that I often say things that are so out-of-sync with conventional wisdom that people just assume that I don't know what I'm talking about. But I've been doing this all my life. I suspect the key issue is that being an old man I am now someone (like women, brown people, etc) that can be safely "tuned out" by other folks. Again, that privilege thing is noticed when it starts to disappear---. As a result, I've learned to "bite my tongue" and keep my mouth shut unless I think that there's a chance that someone might actually listen to what I have to say. This makes me wonder about how many useful ideas are out there in grey heads that we never hear because they've learned no one wants to listen. And this, in turn, makes me wonder how many women, people of colour, disabled folks, etc, have had to get used to not being "part of the conversation" for most of their life.
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I don't want to leave the impression that I am now a member of an "oppressed class" or that I now know everything there is to know about being pushed to the margins of life. That would be absurd. I have and still do reap great rewards for being born a white man in a racist, sexist society. But I do think that a smart person takes advantage of every opportunity they have to learn a little bit more about what it means to be a human being. And I think that as we age there comes a time when our position in society begins to change and this affords an opportunity to get at least a glimpse of what it is like to be someone else. Only a fool would miss taking advantage of such an opportunity.
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