One of the hardest things to understand about male privilege, as a man, is that you benefit from it, even if you otherwise consider yourself a supporter of equal rights for both genders. This is particularly true in fields that have historically had an unequal bias toward men and are slowly rectifying that bias.
That's why the above video — produced by Feminist Frequency's Anita Sarkeesian — is so great. So much of the seemingly relentless harassment of women online, harassment that reached a new apex with 2014's Gamergate controversy, has been unknowingly aided and abetted by men who otherwise might be sympathetic to what these women have had to put up with, yet fail to see the problems of what is too easily written off as people being trolls online.
Entitled "25 Invisible Benefits of Gaming While Male," the video is read and presented by men, including such video game industry luminaries as game designer Tim Schafer and many writers for the games site Polygon (a sister site of Vox, where a text version of this article was originally presented). The video is written by Jonathan McIntosh, a fellow producer of Feminist Frequency.
Though this video is skewed toward gaming, its lessons can apply to just about any field, especially online, where harassment of women is an important issue that too few people are cognizant of. It's not that hard to twist the lessons of this video to be about nearly any space where there are a lot of men, and women who want to be included as well. In that regard, it's a useful video analogue to sci-fi author John Scalzi's terrific post about how being a straight white man is the "lowest difficulty setting" one can have in life.
And if you make it all the way to lesson 25 in this video, you may realize something even more damning than the fact that it has to exist in the first place. But we'll leave that for you to find out.
