[x] (via neighborly)

As a teacher, I give girls what I hope is a lot of attention.  I don’t know if I give girls their fair share, but I aspire to, especially after noticing that boys are willing to use their greater share of teachers’ attention to get girls who they feel aren’t being quiet and docile enough punished.  I have therefore acquired a reputation for “caring more about the girls.”  This has had two marked results: Some straight boys have gotten more hostile toward me, and most girls have gotten more confident around me.  This makes me think I’m doing something right.

Longer thoughts on how this phenomenon relates to sexual harassment in classrooms, if you’re interested: The girls figured out I won’t report them if they hit boys who are sexually harassing them, I’ll only report the boys.  This led to an increase in how often girls got the last word and boys got smacked in my classes, and, also, to a DECREASE IN HOW OFTEN GIRLS GOT SEXUALLY HARASSED.  The sexual harassers seem to have been depending on the sort of “equal blame” and “retaliation is never warranted” and “don’t hurt others’ feelings” perspectives so many schools try to instill in kids; the sexual harassers were usually the ones bringing me into the situation by saying, “Miss, she hit me!  You should write her up!”  Once they figured out I was only ever going to respond, “If you don’t treat girls like that, they won’t hit you,” the girls got more confident and the sexual harassers largely shut the fuck up.

In schools, fighting against sexual harassment is often punished exactly the same as, or more severely than, sexual harassment — a lot of discipline codes make no distinction between violence and violence in self-defence, and violence is ALWAYS the highest level of disciplinary infraction, whereas verbal sexual harassment rarely is.  Sexual harassers, at least in the schools I’ve been in, rely heavily on GETTING GIRLS IN TROUBLE WITH HIGHER AUTHORITIES as a strategy of harassment — creating an external punishment that penalises girls for and therefore discourages girls from fighting back.  Sexual harassers are willing to use their greater share of floorspace to ask to get girls who won’t date them punished.  By and large, teachers do punish those girls when they swear or hit.  Schools condition girls to ignore sexual harassment by punishing them when they speak up or fight back instead.

Once the sexual harassers in my classes understood that girls wouldn’t be punished for rejecting them, they backed off around me.  And there started to be a flip in what conversations I get called into — girls are telling me when boys are being nasty (too loud and dominant), instead of boys telling me when girls are being uncooperative (louder and more dominant than boys think they should be).

(via torrentofbabies)

reblogging again for the wonderful commentary.

(via partysoft)