Jacob Caldwell
I understand there to have been a surprising and bemusing number of negative responses to an article (and by proxy, the views expressed by many female and nonmale students) in the Sept. 12 edition of the Voice regarding the presence of microagressive misogyny in the handling of women’s contributions in the philosophy classroom. The purpose of this piece is a preemptive response to such critics, systematically anticipating and either refuting outright or offering significant reasons to doubt any objection within a reasonable space of possibility of occurrence.
Objection One: “Women” are naturally more sensitive than “men” to the rejection of their class comments, and so of course they would think that their contributions are being disregarded.
Reply: Sexism aside, this objection behaves like a quasi-straw-man, as it reframes the issue and then ignores the claim itself. Obviously, gendered discrimination could exist whether its victims notice it or not, in which case we may conclude that the presence of discrimination and the behavior of the wronged population are mostly if not fully independent. Thus, since this objection only targets the latter and not the former, it is not even a valid objection.
Objection Two: I haven’t encountered this to any significant degree, so I disagree that it is actually a problem.
Reply: One, things can exist whether they are personally experienced by all or not, so the objection is logically untenable. Two, we might say that norms of this nature are rarely if ever visible to the people who actively participate in said norms. We often become aware of norms’ existence once we step outside them or “transgress.” Of course, most men would never fall outside a male-centric norm, so we shouldn’t reasonably expect men to notice them under normal circumstances. (Again, this is not to say that men cannot notice, but just that they often don’t.)
Objection Three: The events described by the original article didn’t happen.
Reply: The question was never whether the specific events reported by Melissa Griffith occurred, but whether microagressive acts of misogyny vis-à-vis taking women’s comments less seriously than men’s; this objection is merely a red-herring.
Objection Four: Statistically speaking, there are more “men” than “women” in college, so of course women would be talked over more frequently than men.
Reply: This objection fails because it doesn’t actually account for the more nuanced claim that women’s comments are not taken as seriously as men’s. Even if the gender distribution were 99 percent women and one percent men, if any member of the 99 percent is taken less seriously, it still counts as gendered discrimination.
Objection Five: Such a phenomenon cannot be measured empirically in a reliable way.
Reply: It probably is difficult to measure from a male-centric perspective, as to men, such behavior would seem natural and thus go unnoticed.
Objection Six: The “genders-stick-together thesis,” which states that male professors are predisposed to agree more with other males because of their perceived gender solidarity.
Reply: This is not really an objection so much as it is an affirmation of the original problem. An explanation for a behavioral norm is not a justification in any sense.
General Concluding Remarks: Microagressive misogyny is often perpetrated unconsciously. Consequently, the idea here (inherited from the original Voice article) is not to vilify those who do so but to draw attention to the fact that it exists at all, even at Wooster. Gendered microagressions in the classroom can, though they don’t necessarily, take the form of interrupting, presuming a comment’s point, condescension, “mansplaining,” etc.
On an unrelated note, special thanks to my friends for helping me dream up these objections.