Not Feminism 101

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There’s a bit of a contradiction in the article – it mentions near the top that women avoid pelvic exams because it’s such an unpleasant experience, and then at the end they talk about how the current speculum is working gone for doctors. Um, if your patients are actively avoiding you, it’s not working fine.

Pet peeve: doctors who think asking the sexual activity/number of sexual partners questions during the pelvic exam is totally fine (yeah, 'cos I totally want to recall my assaults while this hunk of metal is inside me).

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Has this writer never heard of “the dose makes the poison”? All of the behaviour she describes is what gets taught as masculinity, to some degree or another.

Nor, most women can tell you, is this year any different than any other. Even when there wasn’t a Harrasser-In-Chief, men have always managed to engage in and get away with this behaviour. And it is primarily men. Sociopathy crosses gender lines, unrestrained ids cross gender lines, but it’s men who seem to be the ones pulling out guns or expecting women to worship at their bodies, whether women want to or not. And if you listen to their excuses like “locker room talk” they’re pointing to the lessons taught on “how to be a man”.

So, yes, let’s do call it toxic masculinity, because masculinity doesn’t ride in on the Y chromosome, but it’s decided by our culture in what it values as markers of that social role. Which means, no, all men don’t have a core of it – though most do simply from existing in our society – and it can be unlearned. But until we face the root causes, it won’t go away.

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This reminded me of something that actually I think about fairly regularly, for whatever reason - my freshman year of high school my English teacher was a young woman frequently discussed by male students because she was “hot.”

I don’t really remember what I learned in English that year (edit to clarify - I am just forgetful) but I clearly remember one time her discussing in detail - including showing the math - how leasing a car was a rip-off.

Then another time, I don’t remember why but the topic of calculus came up as something stereotypically difficult and a student asked out of curiosity what a calculus problem looks like. The teacher - again, a 9th grade English teacher - paused just briefly, and without referencing anything, wrote an example calculus problem on the board, and solved it.

I did not specifically study math but I did earn a Bachelor of Science degree, which involved two calculus courses and then several higher-level math classes that build on calculus. I would struggle to even come up with an example of a calculus problem, much less solve it.

Anyway, the more women in any work or similar situation, the better literally everything about it is! Things go more smoothly and more actual work gets done, to a higher quality. You and I have discussed around this topic previously but though I’m a week late I wanted to chime in because my experience is very similar to yours, and it’s baffling how uncommon people with this sort of attitude really are. I see first-hand and hear about the sexist (and racist) micro-aggressions against my girlfriend literally every day, even here in the progressive bay area and even from people who would probably call themselves progressives, and I guess like you said it comes down in large part to how people are raised.

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Man, that’s an excellent story, and one that really makes me think. I want to describe my mind’s first reaction, but I feel the need to couch it in terms that recognize my own prejudices based (again) upon my upbringing, as well as experiences. I have no way of knowing, based upon what you wrote, how happy or fulfilled your teacher felt in her career. What’s odd to me is not that she’s a woman who has the kind of mind that can pull calculus out of her pocket whenever the need arises, but rather that she’s an English teacher who can do that. My own SAT score balance aside, I’ve found it relatively uncommon to see people who are comfortable working in a language-arts-based career and a math-based one. It tempts me to wonder: was she a teacher who normally specializes in math, but was assigned to an English classroom by an administrator who felt such a class was more “appropriate” for a female teacher? (Ugh.) Was she perhaps such a teacher who ended up in that class not because her boss held such a retrograde view, but rather because that class had a vacancy, she was available and qualified and willing, and so she took the gig? Was she perhaps a teacher who specialized in English who also just happens to enjoy and have a facility for math? Was she simply a philosophically ambidextrous teacher who is fully comfortable in any kind of high school classroom?

Whatever the answer may be, my first thought was “that poor woman,” under the (very possibly erroneous) assumption that, with a mind like hers which she chose to devote to teaching the young, a choice that I consider as noble as can be, this choice very likely earned her painfully low pay and not nearly the amount of respect from society she deserves. (I’m inclined to put good teachers on pedestals.) I hope I’m wrong, and that she found her career very fulfilling indeed. And lucrative too, though that’s pretty damned unlikely.

Two of my math teachers, my 9th grade Geometry teacher, and my 10th grade Algebra II teacher, were middle-aged men who were also the school’s football and track coaches. Just about the most boring and unimaginative men I’ve ever spent time with. Not only that, but I got the distinct impression that they’d been teaching their classes at the same level, from the same old textbook, for a generation or more, and that they’d struggle to describe how to find a derivative just as much as I would today. And God help them if someone asked them how to compose a sonnet or diagram a sentence or what subtext could be found in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

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I remembered partway through reading your reply that the teacher in question actually became the principal of the school - not sure when but a few years ago at least, so not that long in career terms from when I was a student; I believe she was just starting out as a teacher at the time, so she made principal within ~10-15 years of starting out - that may at least partially answer your question!

(I wonder what my high-school English teachers would think about that sentence structure…)

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That’s a happy outcome indeed. Thanks for the update! Helps me feel better.

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i graduated with a double major in math and english and when i went back to get a teaching certificate i had a choice between a math specialization or an english/languange arts/reading specialization. in the end i went with math because i know myself well enough to know that i am too lazy to spend my life marking student writing samples. still, i can help any student check spelling or grammar and at the academic contest we go to in the spring i always judge oral reading because i’m really good at it.

i also know at least a couple of jokes that involve calculus–

what is the indefinite integral of the reciprocal of a cabin?

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house boat

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What do you get if you cross a mosquito with a mountineer?

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dingdingdingdingding!!!

nice work. it’s the constant of integration that makes it.

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doesn’t it depend on the species? or are they all . . .?

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perhaps this should be split off into a new topic?

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you can’t cross a vector and a scaler

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See? Happy mutant!

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And I got told I couldn’t do a double in English and Computer Science because comp sci was for math people. This was the same year Brenda Laurel got the first PhD in Computers and the Humanities.

CP Snow’s Two Cultures book and just plain history show us the language/math divide is a recent thing. Before the Industrial Revolution, a well-educated person was well-versed in the arts and the sciences.

My suspicion is that there are actually quite a lot of people who would be good all-rounders – except our education system constantly drums into us that if you like literature you must be bad at math, and if you enjoy doing math and have a facility with it, you must be bad at literary criticism.

ETA: correction – if you are good at math, you must disdain and hold contempt for literary criticism is a more accurate way of putting it.

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i am a poet and artist with a mathematical education and i can still do epsilon-delta proofs of limits of functions.

for 15 years i was a math teacher who loves words and art. now i’m a science teacher who loves words and art.

i do what i can to foster well-rounded students regardless of gender, ethnicity, or race. sadly the girls i push to do the honors level science and math courses find themselves squashed by the junior high teachers who “know” that math and science are masculine fields. also whites-only fields but that’s a different thread.

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I quibble with that. It seems to me that one reason we haven’t gotten as far as we should in terms of human and civil rights is because we’ve allowed “divide and conquer”, instead of remembering Aesop’s fable about the bundle of sticks:

http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/72.html

AN OLD man on the point of death summoned his sons around him to give them some parting advice. He ordered his servants to bring in a faggot of sticks, and said to his eldest son: “Break it.” The son strained and strained, but with all his efforts was unable to break the Bundle. The other sons also tried, but none of them was successful. “Untie the faggots,” said the father, “and each of you take a stick.” When they had done so, he called out to them: “Now, break,” and each stick was easily broken. “You see my meaning,” said their father.

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Seconded. To a large degree more often than one might hope; there is a very popular ideal of masculinity that isn’t even chivalry, but straight-up selfish cruelty.

Do you know how Orcs first came into being? They were Elves once, taken by the dark power and enlightened. They got their testosterone back, bulked up, and started acting like alphas instead of chicken-necked cucks. And sure, not everyone appreciates their strength and love of human flesh now, but when the world falls into peril won’t they be sorry. Orcs have studied the blade; Orcs can actually win battles.

Just for some closure, it seems a lot of people did see through it, and it didn’t last long.

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