Tag Archives: sexism

Treating girls differently

politics of education, sex education, teaching cultural competencies, , ,

NPR did a short piece on ‘sexting‘ yesterday on All Things Considered. They opened with two 16-year-old girls who took a cell-phone picture of themselves naked together. One girl had erased the pic, the other sent it to a friend and, after one thing led to another, everyone at school had it on their phones, the administration had print outs, and lawyers were involved.

But here’s the catch: both girls were punished (suspended from being cheerleaders), but no one else was. Aside from issues of what the school has jurisdiction over (can they suspend students for weekend behaviors?), the fact remains that the administration saw fit to suspend the girls from their team–the cheerleading squad–but none of the football team who apparently forwarded the photos on were punished at all.

So why do we still insist on holding girls and women to different standards than men and boys? This school is simply reinforcing the gender double-standard that says that boys can be sexual, but girls must be chaste. The adminstration may not see it as such, but when they use the defense “The girls understood that as athletes, they would be held to higher standards of behavior”, but don’t hold the male football players to that standard, they are underscoring the old saw that women should know better. Never mind that one of the girls involved didn’t forward the picture on and deleted the original, meaning she did less than the football players.

Schools, of course, do this sort of thing all the time. It’s called abstinence-only education. We pay for it as taxpayers and the curricula developed for it, while differing state-by-state, seems all to reinforce the double-standard. Statements like “girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts,” and blaming a victim of rape based on her reputation for having sex (i.e. being a ‘slut’) coupled with the fact that the boy was drunk and therefore, didn’t really know what he was doing. Pretty awful stuff.

So what is your school teaching your kids? Have you asked? What are you telling your kids about being a boy or being a girl and what that means? Are you having authentic, non-judging conversations about sex or just telling them “don’t do it” and letting them figure it out on their own (they will!).

So, who are you?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, whites navigating racism, , , , , ,

We all develop a sense of who we are, and this process is a juggle of one’s sense of self and our culture’s sense of us. Even  as adults, we are constantly refining this sense of self and even working on several different versions of it. Much like having several different resumes that highlight our skills in different ways, we all have several different hats we wear, whether at work, with our children, or while pursuing a sport or hobby or other avocation. Right now I am a blogger, but I’m also a Dad, I’m straight, I’m white, I’m a researcher, I’m an employee, I’m a partner. And many things beyond that. As I approach 40, I am still struggling with what it means to be any number of these things, but for school aged youth, this struggle is often what their lives are consumed by.

Majka Burhardt has been blogging about a sense of understanding who she is, especially relating to what I understand is a very U.S.-centric question: “what do you do?” How do we articulate who we are in a one-sentence soundbite? And what if ‘what you do’ is not really fully how you understand yourself? Like Majka, I have climbed for all of my adult life, and this is a major way that I understand myself, even if I barely get out these days because of other responsibilities. So “what I do” is not necessarily who I am. This is also going to be true for many people of color, for women, for anyone who struggles against the culture. I’ve always struggled with the common dinner-party question Majka talks about: “what do you do?” and I’ve never come up with a really good alternative, but I’m certainly open to options. I usually ask something like “what do you do with your days” as a way to allow someone to answer outside of their job, but it still implies “what is your job?” to many people.

If we take this sense of self one step back to a more basic sense of human identity, I am male. But that simple fact does not encompass who I am anymore than the fact that I am a climber. I am male, but I have struggled against culturally-force-fed stereotypes of gender my whole life, especially in classrooms. I like to take students’ comments about being one gender or another and start a bigger conversation about what gender means in our culture: “Wow, so do you really think you’ve got to be ‘tough’ like that to be a man? Can’t women be tough too?”, or, perhaps more commonly, “do you really think women are less valuable than men? Why do you say ‘don’t be a girl’ like it’s a bad thing? What are you actually trying to say then?” 7th graders ‘get it’ when they are encouraged to talk about it, because so much of these gender stereotypes are ‘received knowledge’ that they’ve heard but never questioned. Dollface is talking about these gender stereotypes on her blog and asking what we’re doing to reinforce or break these gender stereotypes. For me, I always enjoyed talking about how I like to sew and quilt and cook and parent and yet still climb and get dirty and use tools and fix things: I can be my own definition of man.

One issue with these cultural stereotypes is the idea of homophily, which the Guardian had a piece on last week. Homophily is “The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us.” One of the reasons I always tried, as a teacher, to talk about my own experiences and life (to a reasonable degree) is that I was different than many of my students. I felt that if I talked about this, they would see that the stereotypes (of whatever, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, class, rural/urban, etc. etc. etc.) are just false social constructions. If teachers allow themselves to be vulnerable in this way, students often respond to that with authentic thinking. Other students, especially (in my experience), the LQBTQI students, seem to feel a sense of relief in an adult being open to these conversations and in an adult who is willing to talk about these issues.

So do we surround ourselves with only people like us? Is that a good or bad thing? Don’t we want to have interactions with other viewpoints? To what degree is this line of questions white- or male- or hetero- or able-centric? Can members of any non-dominant group truly surround themselves with only like points of view in a culture so fiercely dominated by straight-white-male-able-culture?

I guess the bottom line to me is that we ought to be having these conversations with youth early on.

American Apparel

advertising, media literacy, politics of education, ,

Dov Charney is a sexist lunatic who is given huge amounts of power by virtue of being the CEO of a hundreds-of-millions of dollars a year company. He founded American Apparel and seems to have the business acumen to keep it rolling, although I do wonder if it’s the corporate version of a Ponzi scheme and once it stops growing at 100% or more each year, it’ll catch up with itself and fold under its own weight.

But until then, Charney likes to dismiss domestic violence (contrary to all available evidence, he seems to think that nearly all DV is perpetrated by women). Charney likes to have sex with employees. Lots of them, and the models for their photos too. He doesn’t seem to grok that as the CEO, he has an enormous amount of power in the company and no employee under him should be expected to be able to make any decisions that do not take that power into consideration. He still claims these are consensual sexual acts.

Is it any wonder that American Apparel advertisements are criticized as being pornographic? I won’t even bother you with the link to the most pornographic AA ads, but suffice to say, collected, they are over the top.

So where do conversations about companies like this happen? Young people are buying this stuff, and a lot of it, and they continue to be the target of their marketing. Where are responsible adults talking to their kids about what these advertisements are actually selling? Can we have these conversations in schools? Because if we don’t, then people like Dov Charney will continue getting away with everything they do and making monster piles of cash off it…

h/t to Womanist Musings for the original post that got me looking at this. My response there was the start of this post….