i was talking to a (fully-formed, real) woman about feminism the other night. now, clearly that's a topic i'm no expert on, but knowing i could easily make myself look a bit silly i just heard her out, nodded when needed, throwing in the odd buzzword i've read the feminist folk chuck around on here. anyway, no disasters or anything.

one thing she said stuck in my head though, and rather than pull her up on it knowing she could just baffle me by being a bit wordy, thought i'd run it past you lot. would be great if someone could give me a sensible, compact answer rather than the trolls getting trolly, the feminists getting dismissive/preachy/accusing everyone of being deviants and the admins having to eventually administer a bit of delety threadsmashing.

basically, whilst talking about male privilege (which is clearly a thing) she casually dismissed female privilege completely, which i thought was a bit odd, but i didn't bite. is this a common opinion of feminists, or is she just a bit wrong? i'm not talking about LAD bloggers making questionable lists of female privilegy things, etc, but generally. when looking online i found women dismissing the idea of female privilege as "just benevolent sexism" pretty common. i don't even really know what this means.

another thing i found when doing my Googling were full-blown arguments between caucasian feminsts and, for want of a better term, women of colour. do we accept that white female privilege is a thing, because lots of black women appear to think it is. read lots of stuff like caucasian women being the beauty standard, it being more acceptable for them to be feminine, soft or financially looked after by men. one woman even said that white women ignoring their own female privilege is, in effect, upholding racism and directly supporting the suppression of black women. again, would be grateful if someone could explain this a bit better to me.

clearly i don't really undertand all this, but i'd like to. i don't particularly want ammo to chuck into any potential discussion, just so i don't come across like a complete simpleton if the subject pops up again. what privileges actually exist, and isn't denying that some of them do essentially just a bit narrow-minded. isn't there just a scale of privilege, not based on importance or anything, but well...being a thing-ness, where right at the top you've got rich white men, then...well, most men, then rich white women, right to the most serious supression of women in, say, the Middle East and parts of Africa?

tl:dr/CRICKET/congratulations/even more huge singular blocks of text/immediate deletion.