University

Anon

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Would be grateful if someone could please explain this to me please. Throughout my life, society has given me messages that as a woman, I have to smile and laugh at men’s jokes (no matter how bad they are) in order for them to like me. I have seen advice posted online recommending that women laugh at all of men’s terrible jokes in order to preserve the men’s egos (which apparently must be protected at all costs and never ever be deflated so as not to upset them), keep them as boyfriends and stop their eyes from wandering. I have laughed awkwardly at boys’ and men’s terrible jokes to appease them. For the record this did not make them treat me any better, nor did it stop them from discussing the bodily dimensions of “actresses” in bikinis or female porn stars. If anything it just made these men and boys brag more about how they were “comedic geniuses”. As there was no consequence to them making terrible sexist jokes, they just swaggered more and carried on making even more degrading jokes all the while thinking that they were hilarious. When one girl in the class told a boy that his joke was “not funny and discriminatory”, she got called “the b word”. Afterwards the boy flew into an angry rage at the girl and told her that “women should get back in the kitchen”. Unbelievably, I even remember reading an exercise in an English Language textbook I had for GCSE that pushed the idea that women had to laugh at men’s jokes on order to seem “agreeable”. It was an exercise discussing the “tone” of writing. I remember reading two cringey paragraphs about a fictional man telling a joke to the female character “Miss Tique” (“Female Mystique” anyone?). The first paragraph had Miss Tique frowning, saying to the man that his joke wasn’t funny while telling him she was busy trying to work. The second paragraph had Miss Tique flirtatiously bat her eyelids and laugh girlishly at the man’s joke while tossing her hair back, winking then saying she’d love to go out to dinner with the man. What made it worse was that in both cases, Miss Tique was a librarian with glasses that slid down her nose, hence the tired uptight/sexy librarian cliches. It was truly awful with all of the sexist outdated stereotypes. I had a female friend who wears glasses and was a librarian and she’s a full complex human being! The answer section in the book explained that the first paragraph showed Miss Tique as a more disagreeable, nasty and unfriendly character than in the second paragraph. Nowhere did it ever say that in the first paragraph that Miss Tique was just trying to mind her own business by doing her job, asserting her personal space and ignoring nonsense for the man’s sexual harassment. Unsurprisingly, this English Textbook and the story was written by an older white man. So basically, as a woman and according to society, I have to laugh at men’s bad jokes and protect their oh so important egos, lest I be ignored, thought of as a “miserable cow” or angrily yelled at with foul language. I have also been told by science media that women “naturally” aren’t funny due to Evolutionary Psychology, hence I am not allowed to make jokes. If I do make a joke and I am told it isn’t funny, then my joke just isn’t funny. I have never ever seen men pretend to laugh at women’s jokes, bad or otherwise. No wonder why much of my adult life has been utterly miserable. No wonder all my relationships with men failed. Not that anyone really cared of course.

Kelsey

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My boss told me I needed to stop reporting my lab assistant for sexual harassment because he only hired me for diversity in the lab of all white men and I could be easily replaced.

Emily (Australia)

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Listening to a post-grad Migration Law lecture. Male student asks our female lecturer a question about a legal definition. She answers with a detailed explanation and provides examples. Male student says that’s not how HE interprets the definition provided by the legislation so HE THINKS THE BEST THING TO DO IS…. and proceeds to MANSPLAIN his interpretation and what HE would do, as an unqualified, inexperienced student completing the introductory unit. Our lecturer is a qualified solicitor, runs her own Migration firm, is highly experienced, is the unit coordinator and the course coordinator. I wanted to reach through the laptop and punch his arm

Emma

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Everyday, everywhere. Never stops. Not until we cast it off ourselves. It starts with not caring so much. Stop internalising so much. Start demanding change. Start with yourself. Don’t presume those few women that stick their necks out is enough – because the pace of change is too slow. Think how you vote. Think what you buy, what you consume, how you present yourself to the world. Help your sisters. Create a sisterhood in the first place. Only through collective and collaborative voices can any change no matter how small be effected. It starts at home, it’s starts with you. We need to get back to nature, back to being the human beings we were meant to be. There’s simply nothing sexier and it’s the antithesis to this patriarchal ideal that we are brainwashed into. Read, listen, learn. The process never stops.

Natasha

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When I was a masters student at university, I would use the uni gym; a couple of times I noticed one of the older academics – he was the Chair of my panel – looking at me when we were in the gym. I thought nothing of it at first (your eyes have to look somewhere!) but I would move to a different piece of equipment or different area & minutes later he would be nearby again, looking at me in my exercise gear. It made me feel that feeling…that icky feeling where you can’t say for certain that someone is doing something wrong, but it ~feels~ wrong. I remember describing the situation later to a male friend who worked with me, a person who cared about me & in all other ways had looked out for me in the past. He immediately dismissed my version of events & gave the academic the benefit of the doubt, lightly admonishing me for not doing the same. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it, I’m sure he wasn’t being creepy”. I felt like there was no way to describe to him how a lifetime of these small interactions had led me to just ~knowing~ that it didn’t feel right or comfortable. That friend went on to become my partner & become much more understanding of his own sexist attitudes, but the incident always stuck with me – not necessarily the being watched at the gym, that memory probably would have faded into the background with the countless other creepy men interactions – but being so easily dismissed by a loved one in favour of a man he barely knew, in a situation he didn’t even witness.

Anon

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I had an ex-boyfriend tell me I was only put up for election in my university’s student union because I was a girl. Amongst other forms of persistent abuse, it validated my feelings of imposter syndrome with long-lasting consequences.

The Rodent

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Way back in the year 2015 my daughter graduated with a first class degree. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that, nor the fact that she was a single mother with two young children and unsurprisingly, no special allowances or commendations came her way. The same year a single father of one also graduated and it made all the national dailies. I don’t think there were ever any plans to make a film about it starring Tom Cruise but the story created a great deal of interest and the man basked in a warm sense of approval for a short while. Not a massive insult to womankind I admit but just another small example of everyday sexism. I suppose a single man looking after a child while pursuing a university course is far more unusual than a single women with a child/children doing the same and is therefore more newsworthy but it does explain the fact that it was somehow seen as a much greater and more praiseworthy achievement for a man than a woman.

Black Mamba

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When I was about 12 I had a school friend who was about 2 years younger, but tall and developed early, with big breasts. She told me petrified once as we were walking home together, in the middle of the busy city, that a man (she pointed him out) was following us because he was following her often on her way to the bus stop and talked dirty to her. I became very angry, and as the oldest I felt very protective of her. My late parents had always instilled me with a lot of confidence and taught me to be ballsy and not to take shit from anyone. They always told me to have self-respect. I turned and looked at the harasser and he looked old and haggard, more like a homeless, with dirty hair and a grey long beard. As we were in a busy road, as soon as we turned around a corner I told her to wait. He soon was there having followed us. I started shouting at him in the middle of the road and screaming to leave us alone and go to hell. He mumbled something, seemed nervous, looked around and backed off. I remember my face getting red with anger, and a lesson I learned that day was that in the middle of the city, around 1980, and NO ONE came to two young teenagers, two children 10 and 12 years old, to check what happened and that we were OK. I learned very quickly that I had to only count on myself. Then I got sexually assaulted on a bus twice. Once when I was 14 and once when I was 18. Disgusting men were rubbing off against me. I was petrified and didn’t know what exactly was happening. I was worried I could get pregnant and I was trying to analyse where my fault was, because in my mind this is something that happened to girls wearing provocative clothes, and I didn’t. I was ashamed to speak to my mum or anyone else, which I now know was typical victimised behaviour. This experience left me very angry. I decided not to be a victim again and I started to choose my position on a busy bus very carefully. I took a zero tolerance approach and became very edgy and aggressive towards men making any kind of inappropriate comment to me. I accepted no shit any more. I started carrying a knife. I noticed how men became astonished when I spoke back at them, swore like a sailor and exhibited aggressive behaviour. It seems it was the only language they could understand and respect.I felt empowered, but sad at the same time that I had to become so hardened. I have been called a bitch among other things quite a few times. If I were a man they would call me a ‘fighter’. On other occasions when I was a young new car driver men of various ages would give me road rage and abuse. I learned to always lock my car doors from the inside and keep the windows up, because on a few occasions abusive men tried to open the car door and drag me out. Since we have mobile phones, I didn’t hesitate to tell them I’d call the police right there and then. That made them leave. Once I pulled a knife at one of them and stuck it under his chin. He quickly backed off and left. I was very sad that I, a girl from a respectable family and a boarding school had to behave like this to protect myself is a supposedly conservative and God-fearing Christian community. Once, when I was about 32, I experienced sexual abuse by a colleague. This was a 60 year-old supervisor who asked me to drop by his house to review some boxes with project-related photos. Keeping such material at home wasn’t unusual for that profession (poorly paid, no official premises, people work as freelancers often) so I went, as he was also very well known and people spoke highly of him. After all, he was short, plum, around 60 and suffering from diabetes and dizziness, so he couldn’t be a threat right? He could be my dad FFS. As I was sifting through photos, he approached me from behind and kissed my neck a couple of times. I shouted at him and told him to stop politely, because I didn’t want to make him panic and attack me or lock me in his house. I kept calm and I managed to leave the house without any escalation of violence. If he attacked me, I was prepared to kill him. Unfortunately even now, after all these years I have experienced lots of micro-behaviours at work: men wink at me, make subtle comments (“I will let you take me anywhere” wink-wink) and mainly try to patronise me and gaslight me, by telling me that I am imagining things, that the reason i don’t get promotion is because I don’t believe in myself, that I should leave my current role (which is more ‘masculine’) to get promotion in HR, that it is my fault i don’t compromise etc. It is almost impossible for a woman nowadays to just be herself, without either sexualising herself and dumbing her intellect to get promotion, or without copying the male behaviours and becoming loud, bullying and aggressive. I try to stay as neutral as possible, but it is a struggle. One thing I would say to younger women is respect yourselves and your bodies and don’t compromise.

Katherine

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Whilst on a variety of nights out (mainly at University) middle aged men used to come to our uni nights at local clubs. They would stand alone staring at us and making passes. On a number of occasions we were groped, had hands up our skirts and dresses and told we were “moody bitches” when we told them where to go. Worst of all, we told bouncers in the club and they replied “what do you expect, wearing a short skirt like that”.

Anon

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In English Literature class, we were given the task of writing a “love story” for homework. After the teacher had marked our work, he went round the class handing it back to us in turn and I noticed a distinct pattern. The girls were mostly getting As, Bs and Cs. They were getting comments from the teacher such as: “Good dialogue, imaginative, interesting characters, well done, good description, original writing” etc. He was giving Fs, Es and Ds to most of the boys and as he went along he said these comments about the boys’ work: “Sexual fantasy; sexual fantasy bad spelling; rape fantasy with no intelligible dialogue; rape fantasy; sexual fantasy, questionable anatomy; boringly unrealistic sexual fantasy; no that’s not how you unclip a bra; breast obsessed; please check an anatomy book; you have no chance with that celebrity; what you’ve written would be illegal in real life; you have only told me about that woman’s bottom and nothing else about her character.” As a girl, I found this funny and sad at the time. It’s like most of the boys only saw women as scantily clad breasts on legs. Fast forward about 20 years and I discover many male authors of erotica writing non consensual rape fantasies with bizarre metaphors involving breasts and questionable physics. It is sad, terrifying and tragically hilarious to read fictional depictions of women written by some men. The females in these stories have paper thin personalities, are young and have attractive hair. Some male authors seem to have fantasies of sexually assaulting women on the bus, in the library or at the shopping centre and the women secretly enjoying it or begging the men to have intercourse with them in public places. People could argue that this is fiction, but I have never known any women in real life who would want to be abused in this way. Most worry about unplanned pregnancy, disease or trauma caused by a man doing this. These works about women by some men are completely tone deaf to the sexual abuse that many women have had to endure on public transport, public places and on campuses. These works were probably written by men and for men who like to imagine women (especially young women wearing short skirts and “panties”) not resisting sexual assault and begging for more. It is like these men were trying to understand women’s behaviour and anatomy from a bad anime. Some of the stuff male characters do to women in these stories would be physically and biologically impossible. These men seem to forget that there are stools in public or campus libraries to stand on, so women can stand on these to get a book down from the shelf. Some men seem to think that women have to stand on tip-toes revealing their knickers and thighs to reach for a book without using a stool or a ladder. Why? Reality is not like this. Most women know what a stool or ladder is and can stand on one to reach a book. No women ever seem to wear trousers or sensible clothing in these “erotic” stories: they either wear revealing dresses or skirts. Disturbingly, in these stories the man assaults the woman and/or tears her clothes off of her within about two minutes of meeting her with little to no meaningful dialogue. Also there is text about men taking women’s silence as a “yes” in the stories. What about consent, friendly dialogue and affectionate gestures? Either that or there are fictional women enthusiastically leaping onto the man after just meeting him, even when they are sober and it’s the middle of the day in a public place. It is like some men are projecting their short-skirted, large breasted, willing “waifu” fantasies onto women they meet. Pathetically hilarious and utterly terrifying. Many female video game characters are also typecast in this way. So sadly not much has changed since my English teacher marked the boys’ ethically questionable “love stories written as breast obsessed sexual fantasies” in class.