Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
Instead of what? There are a finite number of school hours; from what other subject would you take the hours to cover this? Ideally everything would be taught in schools, but there are constraints.
(This question isn’t entirely rhetorical, and I would not be surprised to hear a good answer. Schools are far from optimal.)
English classes are usually designed to teach skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. There is no particular need for the subject matter to be historical literature, and discussions of topics like this would fit right in.
In fact, some English teachers try to do just that, by selecting literature with the appropriate subject matter.
I suspect that this subject matter would do a better job at teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking than covering historical literature would anyway, at least if the students have already done analysis of historical literature in some previous semester.
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
Massive ongoing discrimination that affects half the species and that could be, if not necessarily remedied, at least dragged into the open and ridiculed, surely deserves universal lessons.
The reason this doesn’t happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum: racists and sexists are the board, the concerned parents, the local news editor, the elected representatives and the voters.
The reason this doesn’t happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum
I’d say that anti-racism was very much part of the curriculum at my schools. It wasn’t until college that it got past “racism is bad, read these books about growing up discriminated against,” and reached the point of “these are some of the ongoing issues regarding race relations today on which there is actual public disagreement, here are some sources to inform your position on them,” but I did have one class which covered racial issues in this way (among other issues) which was a required course.
I don’t know to what extent my education was atypical, only that the schools I attended up to high school were pretty good as far as public schools go.
That’s too simplistic IMO…
I think it’s more a desire to avoid “politicizing education”, and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.
You hear “sexists” and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking “someone like us” for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won’t hire any women. Catcalling or saying “smile luv” on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won’t respond. Taking “no” as “keep asking”. Bothering her in Starbucks when she’s trying to read. Having a dress code that requires a shower and a suit from guys, but an hour’s makeup and high heels from women. Interrupting her and ignoring her in meetings. Treating women as a “special interest group”. Getting angry about “political correctness” and “man hating feminists” when somebody tries to start a women’s studies class.
Sexism saturates this culture. It feels normal. It’s accepted by men and laughed off by women who don’t want to be the party pooper. If you are not female and have not been following feminism, your inferential distance may be large indeed.
True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem. Though it’s only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic—if nothing else, it doesn’t have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view “most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture”, it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
I think it’s not. Basically, I think what I called “racists and sexists” are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in “male headship under God”, or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don’t even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA “political correctness gone mad”). Feminism that isn’t about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
I can’t figure out which part this is refering to.
Also: I’m pretty sure I agree with what you’ve been saying in these posts, including this one. (Has that come across clearly? I’m curious.) I also may have been strawmanning you (thanks MugaSofer for pointing this out), which is an interesting combination.
The thought behind it was not too simplistic, but I think its presentation in that comment was, largely due to leaving out this background information; I think this is why it was downvoted, and is also what left it open to strawmanning (sigh sexist language).
I think it comes from the fact that a genderless figurine looks male to our eyes—you can see it doesn’t have breasts, and any other pieces of anatomy it’s missing are either routinely stylized away or covered up.
Hmm. My attempt at answering this:
The “incidental decisions” is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for “excluding the threat”, maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you’re picking the man because he is male.
The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.
YMMV, in my experience anti-racism is, in fact, on the curriculum (I’m Irish) and most people don’t see themselves as belonging to the group “sexists” which must be defended (am I strawmanning you here?)
People don’t see their attitudes as anything but “normal” because being a sexist or a racist doesn’t feel like villainy, doesn’t even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.
Oh, yes. Always. I’m just not sure how many people both hold sexist beliefs and allow them to impact the curriculum. Again, I’m Irish, so i may be worse wherever you are.
… I have to admit, I was implicitly defining “sexist” as someone who holds sexist beliefs, not someone who is unconsciously biased. Hell, most people in our society are subconsciously biased against black people, but since we know this to be a bias we will try to work against this if we realize it.
According to the Implicit Association Test, I’m strongly subconsciously biased in favour of black people (though given the particular set of stimuli they used, I think the test only actually shows that I’m biased in favour of broad noses).
No, it’s not just that. When in this TED talk the guy said “Vultures are being poisoned because humans …”, some part of my brain expected to see white people, and when the slide showed black people that part of my brain thought “Wait… so black people do nasty stuff too? o.O”. Likewise, when I read stories about humans causing extensive damage to the environment, I don’t get the same gut feeling of indignation when it’s non-Europeans doing that (e.g. the Māori exterminating moa or the tragedy of the commons on Easter Island) as I feel when Europeans do that.
And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. A lot of Women’s Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women’s experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.
I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women’s Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor’s account of sexism in biology textbooks. “Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them.” In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.
And back to me:
Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.
Here is a chapter from a book about feminism and evolutionary biology. Many pages are missing but you can get the general picture. Examples from the chapter:
Marzluff and Balda sought an “alpha male” in a flock of pinyon jays. The males rarely fight, so they tempted them with treats and considered instead glances from male birds as dominant displays and birds looking in the air as submissive displays. (This is actually plausible, since apparently the “dominant” males would get to eat the treat after doing this.)
About bird fighting, they wrote, “In late winter and early spring. . . birds become aggressive towards other flock members. Mated females seem especially testy. Their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the avian equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!”
The obvious alternative explanation is that dominance hierarchies may have been more fierce among females and that they instead should have been looking for an alpha female that determines hierarchies among the men.
That one is a bit old. There’s a 2010 book of theirs on pinyon jays but I couldn’t tell if it kept the same interpretation. So for something from the 90s the author points out that Birkhead’s work on magpies shows a similar gender bias. Female magpies can store sperm for later use, and “cheating” is common. Birkhead focuses almost entirely on males nest-hopping for extra mates, and treats female cheating as a curious anomaly: “Interestingly, some [female] magpies. . . appear to seek extra-male matings.” When you actually examine the data, “some” is not quite as accurate as “most.”
There are other examples in the chapter. Some are better than others.
To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women’s Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women’s Studies on these grounds.
However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.
I think a better statement of our position, is that we think it’s currently so full of BS and anti-epistomology that it’s better to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch.
I read an introduction to women’s studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women’s Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.
I’ve made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:
Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it’s quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.
Experiences in which women describe things that I don’t ever experience or witness (e.g. catcalls, poor treatment based on gender, personal harassment) or in which women perceive something in light of their gender in a way that I don’t (e.g. predominance of males in art, male-centric language, safety in public spaces.)
I certainly had much less empathy a few years ago, prior to paying attention to these kind of posts. I wasn’t aware how common the former kind of experience was, and I didn’t notice (and still don’t) a lot of the latter kind.
Being male, I never had any visibility into experiences like these until I first began reading anecdotes like this online, and then started talking with women I knew about how things were for them. So thanks for taking the effort to put this together.
This should be taught in schools.
Instead of what? There are a finite number of school hours; from what other subject would you take the hours to cover this? Ideally everything would be taught in schools, but there are constraints.
(This question isn’t entirely rhetorical, and I would not be surprised to hear a good answer. Schools are far from optimal.)
English classes are usually designed to teach skills like reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing. There is no particular need for the subject matter to be historical literature, and discussions of topics like this would fit right in.
In fact, some English teachers try to do just that, by selecting literature with the appropriate subject matter.
I suspect that this subject matter would do a better job at teaching reading comprehension and critical thinking than covering historical literature would anyway, at least if the students have already done analysis of historical literature in some previous semester.
In my opinion, the standard English/Math/Science that we expect elementary and high school students to learn are not difficult. I mean this as more than just “they were easy for me”; I think that with good teachers, the right motivation, curiosity, clear relations to other knowledge or interests, and paying attention, any reasonably intelligent child can learn them with far fewer hours of class time dedicated to the task than the current average. This would free up a lot of time to learn such “supplementary” material.
In fact, I think that the supplementary material is really, really helpful for developing interests in the core subjects. Reading and writing are, to a fairly large extent, the practice of thinking. If someone has had experiences facing discrimination and wants to relate their experience or what they think is going on societally, they will generally (or can easily be led to) learn to write well to express this. If someone is puzzled by what’s happening with the population of some animal around their house, they will be willing to learn basic ecological models and the associated math.
Of course, actually implementing any of these—especially good teachers—would require rather large changes to education as it is currently done, which seems difficult, to say the least.
Massive ongoing discrimination that affects half the species and that could be, if not necessarily remedied, at least dragged into the open and ridiculed, surely deserves universal lessons.
The reason this doesn’t happen is the same one that keeps anti-racism off the curriculum: racists and sexists are the board, the concerned parents, the local news editor, the elected representatives and the voters.
I’d say that anti-racism was very much part of the curriculum at my schools. It wasn’t until college that it got past “racism is bad, read these books about growing up discriminated against,” and reached the point of “these are some of the ongoing issues regarding race relations today on which there is actual public disagreement, here are some sources to inform your position on them,” but I did have one class which covered racial issues in this way (among other issues) which was a required course.
I don’t know to what extent my education was atypical, only that the schools I attended up to high school were pretty good as far as public schools go.
That’s too simplistic IMO… I think it’s more a desire to avoid “politicizing education”, and people not making sufficiently convincing arguments in favour of its inclusion, rather than just terrible people having power.
You hear “sexists” and think terrible people, I think ordinary people. Giving a higher salary offer to Mike Smith and judging his work better than Mary Smith. Picking “someone like us” for promotion the board, so you end up with single digit female representation at CEO level. Having to do orchestra auditions behind a screen, or you won’t hire any women. Catcalling or saying “smile luv” on the street, and then calling her a bitch when she won’t respond. Taking “no” as “keep asking”. Bothering her in Starbucks when she’s trying to read. Having a dress code that requires a shower and a suit from guys, but an hour’s makeup and high heels from women. Interrupting her and ignoring her in meetings. Treating women as a “special interest group”. Getting angry about “political correctness” and “man hating feminists” when somebody tries to start a women’s studies class.
Sexism saturates this culture. It feels normal. It’s accepted by men and laughed off by women who don’t want to be the party pooper. If you are not female and have not been following feminism, your inferential distance may be large indeed.
True. Sexism is frickin pervasive, and that is the underlying problem.
Though it’s only pointless quibbling at this point, I still think your previous comment was too simplistic—if nothing else, it doesn’t have any of the depth of this, and, though it is perfectly consistent with the view “most people, even good people, have sexist tendencies due to our culture”, it appears to be coming from a less well-developed view, which is why it has been downvoted. This again may be a question of inferential distance, which thus demonstrates itself to be a very useful concept.
I think it’s not. Basically, I think what I called “racists and sexists” are people of whom only a minority foams on /r/mensrights and A Voice For Men, or listens to right wing talk radio, or believes in “male headship under God”, or attends the local Klan. The majority are people who think they are normal, whose biased ideas don’t even show unless provoked by a situation where their privileges are under threat (AKA “political correctness gone mad”). Feminism that isn’t about shopping provokes them. Anti-racism that is neither anodyne nor cap-in-hand provokes them. And they react, often in ways that look like incidental decisions, to exclude the threat. Such as, here, by marginalizing equality for half the species into an academic backwater.
I can’t figure out which part this is refering to.
Also: I’m pretty sure I agree with what you’ve been saying in these posts, including this one. (Has that come across clearly? I’m curious.) I also may have been strawmanning you (thanks MugaSofer for pointing this out), which is an interesting combination.
That refers to “I still think your previous comment was too simplistic”.
The thought behind it was not too simplistic, but I think its presentation in that comment was, largely due to leaving out this background information; I think this is why it was downvoted, and is also what left it open to strawmanning (sigh sexist language).
I think it comes from the fact that a genderless figurine looks male to our eyes—you can see it doesn’t have breasts, and any other pieces of anatomy it’s missing are either routinely stylized away or covered up.
Also, waist-to-hip ratio—it would be harder to make a scarecrow with wider hips than the waist.
I agreed with everything you said but this line. Could you clarify it please?
Hmm. My attempt at answering this: The “incidental decisions” is about such actions as choosing male candidates over female candidates with identical qualifications, ignoring women`s contributions at meetings and then agreeing strongly when a man later says the exact same thing, and so on. As for “excluding the threat”, maybe it refers to perceptions of women as being less skilled, rather than having the cognitive dissonance involved in admitting you’re picking the man because he is male.
So subconscious bias, then? “Excluding the threat” makes it sound deliberate and disingenuous.
In my interpretation, yes, subconscious bias, and avoiding the issue or finding various non-answers when it is raised to conscious attention.
I habitually define racism and sexism to exclude such bias, which seems to have led me astray in this case
The reactions are driven by social instinct reacting with defensive in-group cohesion to out-group threat, so they have effects without feeling like attempts to achieve effects. They feel like righteous indignation, or wanting someone who looks like us, or fear, or moral disapproval, or dismissal as uninteresting, etc.
Ah, OK. I was confused by the anthropomorphism there.
Just because something is ordinary doesn’t mean it’s not terrible. :-)
YMMV, in my experience anti-racism is, in fact, on the curriculum (I’m Irish) and most people don’t see themselves as belonging to the group “sexists” which must be defended (am I strawmanning you here?)
People don’t see their attitudes as anything but “normal” because being a sexist or a racist doesn’t feel like villainy, doesn’t even feel like a moral choice, it just feels like facts.
Oh, yes. Always. I’m just not sure how many people both hold sexist beliefs and allow them to impact the curriculum. Again, I’m Irish, so i may be worse wherever you are.
Yep. They don’t see themselves as sexist, but they are. That makes it more difficult to effect change.
… I have to admit, I was implicitly defining “sexist” as someone who holds sexist beliefs, not someone who is unconsciously biased. Hell, most people in our society are subconsciously biased against black people, but since we know this to be a bias we will try to work against this if we realize it.
According to the Implicit Association Test, I’m strongly subconsciously biased in favour of black people (though given the particular set of stimuli they used, I think the test only actually shows that I’m biased in favour of broad noses).
No, it’s not just that. When in this TED talk the guy said “Vultures are being poisoned because humans …”, some part of my brain expected to see white people, and when the slide showed black people that part of my brain thought “Wait… so black people do nasty stuff too? o.O”. Likewise, when I read stories about humans causing extensive damage to the environment, I don’t get the same gut feeling of indignation when it’s non-Europeans doing that (e.g. the Māori exterminating moa or the tragedy of the commons on Easter Island) as I feel when Europeans do that.
It is—obscurely, and too late, and to those who already know.
It’s called Women’s Studies (though it’s about more that women’s experiences).
And people (for whom the inferential distance is too great) love to hate on it.
I don’t think that’s all that’s going on here. A lot of Women’s Studies has other ideas and claims which are much more questionable, and the good points (such as the substantial differences in women’s experience v. men) can get easily lost in the noise.
From my wife:
I learned many interesting and useful things from my Women’s Studies class, and am glad I decided to try it out. However, I became a pariah when I questioned the professor’s account of sexism in biology textbooks. “Eggs are portrayed as passive, while sperm compete to reach them.” In my experience, textbooks say what actually happens in the reproductive system, with no sexism to be found. She stuck to her guns. It was unfortunate that she used that example, because there are real examples of gender bias in biology publications.
And back to me:
Just thought it would be useful to provide an example of a questionable claim. She says other people in the class hated her for pointing it out.
Like what? Just curious.
Here is a chapter from a book about feminism and evolutionary biology. Many pages are missing but you can get the general picture. Examples from the chapter:
Marzluff and Balda sought an “alpha male” in a flock of pinyon jays. The males rarely fight, so they tempted them with treats and considered instead glances from male birds as dominant displays and birds looking in the air as submissive displays. (This is actually plausible, since apparently the “dominant” males would get to eat the treat after doing this.)
About bird fighting, they wrote, “In late winter and early spring. . . birds become aggressive towards other flock members. Mated females seem especially testy. Their hormones surge as the breeding season approaches giving them the avian equivalent of PMS which we call PBS (pre-breeding syndrome)!”
The obvious alternative explanation is that dominance hierarchies may have been more fierce among females and that they instead should have been looking for an alpha female that determines hierarchies among the men.
That one is a bit old. There’s a 2010 book of theirs on pinyon jays but I couldn’t tell if it kept the same interpretation. So for something from the 90s the author points out that Birkhead’s work on magpies shows a similar gender bias. Female magpies can store sperm for later use, and “cheating” is common. Birkhead focuses almost entirely on males nest-hopping for extra mates, and treats female cheating as a curious anomaly: “Interestingly, some [female] magpies. . . appear to seek extra-male matings.” When you actually examine the data, “some” is not quite as accurate as “most.”
There are other examples in the chapter. Some are better than others.
See this article on Sarah Hrdy.
Agreed.
To clarify: in my experience (and supported by other anecdotes on this thread), Women’s Studies is, unfortunately, often very badly done. There are big problems around being less concerned with contrary evidence than is appropriate, its often very un-rigorous, and though they are undoubdetdly a small minority, women who unconditionally hate men are drawn to it. It is legitimate to criticize Women’s Studies on these grounds.
However, I originally meant people who seem to think it should not exist. It should, and this post illustrates why.
I think a better statement of our position, is that we think it’s currently so full of BS and anti-epistomology that it’s better to throw the whole thing out and start from scratch.
I read an introduction to women’s studies textbook and it was all inside baseball commentary. It was not like reading this. At all. It was a survey of all the different fields that Women’s Studies engages with, but it did not teach this, it assumed it. This is consistent with some male acquaintances experience of some such courses as hostile to them. Also, Hugo Schwyzer is a dick.
I’ve made a number of comments on this post that were addressing specific, somewhat-tangential issues, and though I think those are important too, I just want to echo cata here:
Thank you for this post, daenerys, and for collecting these anecdotes. I think it’s quite valuable and look forward to subsequent posts in the series.
When you say “experiences like these” … experiences of sexism? Experiences narrated by women? Experiences of Dungeons and Dragons?
Experiences in which women describe things that I don’t ever experience or witness (e.g. catcalls, poor treatment based on gender, personal harassment) or in which women perceive something in light of their gender in a way that I don’t (e.g. predominance of males in art, male-centric language, safety in public spaces.)
You really had no experience/empathy with sexism? Huh. Maybe this is more useful than I thought.
I certainly had much less empathy a few years ago, prior to paying attention to these kind of posts. I wasn’t aware how common the former kind of experience was, and I didn’t notice (and still don’t) a lot of the latter kind.