Saturday, April 30, 2011

EMH is NOT Misogynist

Webster's dictionary defines "misogyny" as follows:

a hatred of women

I do not hate women.  Please let me make that clear.  If I communicated otherwise, I am sorry.

There are some things I do hate:

    1)  I hate Deans who sacrifice their department's accreditation in order to put adjuncts in their place.    (This happened at Lead Posoning CC in California.  I can not be any more specific without outing myself.)

    2)  I hate Principals who force art teachers and other non-qualified individuals to teach Math, only to fire them for incompetence.  (I witnessed this first hand.)

    3)  I hate students who have sex with people in authority.  (It happens more often than we want to believe.)

    4)  I hate authority members who have sex with students.

    5)  I hate corruption with a passion, even if it is the status quo.

However, I do not hate females.  I hate people who engage in #'s 1-5, regardless of their gender.  But I do not hate someone solely because they are female.

I also am not out to just accuse students of misconduct just because they give me a hard time.  In my post about the Crackhead Soccer Mom, I neglected to point out that the student had bragged about screwing the Dean, which is actually consistent with the other stories I have been hearing about him.  In the future, I will be sure to ask myself how I know something.  However, I doubt that I will ever have any video footage to back any of my claims. 

Do understand that sometimes there just isn't any evidence.  I don't see that stopping anyone else from posting.  You don't see me jumping out of the bushes when people post allegations of plagiarism, without any basis whatsoever.  But then, if people did that, no one would want to post.

I am here for the same reason(s) as everyone else.  The job sucks at times, and I cannot afford a therapist.

What set this off?  Good question.  A female student approached me in tears sobbing, and what I could make out is that she was told by her father that she did not have enough testosterone in her body in order to think abstractly and perform spacial calculations, and hence the poor performance in my class.  It made me sick to hear that and it activated all of my subroutines at once (struck a nerve).  Granted, the student may be looking for sympathy, but I've heard that conclusion before, mainly from MD's and Psychologists. It should be noted that some of the brightest individuals I have ever met are female.

10 comments:

  1. See my answer on the other thread. If you actually had evidence it is a different matter, and of course you don't have to produce it; this is a blog not an inquest.

    The accusation that a female is getting something because she has sexually manipulated an authority figure is a very common one, and is made far more often than it happens. It is made out of a complex of cultural assumptions (women have an unfair amount of sexual power; women are more devious than they should be; women are willing to take unfair advantage to get what they want) that underlie many things that are said about women. These are all misogynistic assumptions, and that's why I called the original accusation misogynistic.

    However, if she's bragging about it, she should be ashamed of her behaviour, and the Dean should be much more ashamed of his, and misogyny doesn't figure in the question.

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  2. Oh, and I forgot the really damaging assumption, that women couldn't possibly be getting anything legitimately because they are (underqualified, incompetent, stupid, etc etc) and therefore they must be using sex.

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  3. And that women's sexuality is so unimportant to them that they don't have sex for pleasure or love, only as a means of getting what they want (not sex itself) from men.

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  4. There are women who use sex only as a means for getting what they want from men. They're called "prostitutes" and, generally speaking, they're created by older males in the prostitutes' childhood homes.

    It's awful and it's true.

    Prostitutes are people and sometimes they enroll in college... just like "normal" people.

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  5. Some of them end up teaching in college too. Not every woman prostitutes herself for gain. Some women actually have sex for, you know, sex. Likewise, not every prostitute continues in prostitution once she has more options available to her.

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  6. As a woman living in the South, I enjoy rejecting the status quo by setting shit on fire and driving around in a pickup truck with my dog, some guns, and a cooler full of beer. "Lite" beer. Hell, I might just bang some of my male students too from time to time.

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  7. Wow, okay, nice.

    There seems to be so much going on here. Assumptions of a rigid behavior based on sex, for one; a clear lack of respect for a lot of people in your life for another. And, finally, some sense that maybe the world around you kinda sucks.

    Seems like an ideal post for CM.

    But can we agree that people are capable of people-oriented things and that you don't have to be a guy to teach math or a woman to cry?

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  8. Students who sleep with their professors for an A sicken me....I would accept nothing less than an A+.

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  9. @ Monkey

    Believe me, I've seen plenty of dudes cry. One guy last semester when he found out that the D he got in my class would mean he could not play football.

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  10. I'm not wanting to get involved in a sexism (or not) discussion. I just want to say that of *all* of the students I've caught cheating (unfortunately, a decent number and in a myriad of fashions), the *only* one to cry was a male. He is, as a result, the only one I felt compassion for.

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