Do any of you have childhood memories of sexist teachers/adults?

CaptainChewbacca · 2012-10-15T04:58:41+00:00

I had a teacher in eighth grade who allowed a female classmate to write a (completely serious) paper on why girls are smarter than boys.

That was pretty much when I realized that our school was heavily biased towards women. There was only one man who worked there that wasnt a janitor.

Edit: Oh and there was the time that all the boys, and none of the girls, had our backpacks checked because one boy brought a razorblade to school.

Arcnsparc · 2012-10-15T04:36:04+00:00

I remember this teacher in gr 7. who would only ever pick the girls to answer questions. Some of us started keeping records of who was picked, after a month it was 10:1 in favor of the girls in the class. We even convinced most of the girls to start answering incorrectly thinking it may sway the preference. It didn't, it's weird it was only one class so many years ago but it sticks out for me so clearly.

bobbybouchier · 2012-10-15T04:53:49+00:00

Yes, when I was in 7th grade i had a teacher that used to always use the term she when referring to god (because "she" gave birth to the world). She would also tell us society was prejudice to women because it expected them to raise their children and work. Then one kid said he thought child birth was exaggerated so she said all the male students had to wear their bags as if they were pregnant. I also had a college professor recently have us write an essay about some paper about men being over privileged in society. She also complained about society's unreal standards for woman and marketing of them as sexual items, but laughed when I told her there are just as many magazines/toys/actors that portray men with extreme bodies (like muscle magazines, GI joe, and half of male celebrities and football players)

C0CKPUNCHER · 2012-10-15T07:26:22+00:00

I remember the female teacher who would watch all the boys change after swimming. At the time I said she shouldn't, she laughed and said it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before.

2012-10-15T05:48:41+00:00

/r/sonsoffeminists

loose-dendrite · 2012-10-15T09:04:45+00:00

Yes. I had a teacher very purposefully punish all of the boys in class and none of the girls. What's worse is she was willing to let me off on the word of two girls. Because even lowly students had authority over others so long as they had a vagina.

Ten years later I had a teacher give, across the board, every girl a full grade more than every boy. After she got fired, I got one of the highest grades on the final but finished with a C because the first teacher was bigoted. I knew her outside of class as well and yes, she was bitter about men.

2012-10-15T10:23:02+00:00

Many, and I became very aware of it around age 15.

One example: Several teachers always had the girls enter the classroom first, meaning they got the first pick of seats. In most classes, this was little more than a subtle reminder to us boys of which gender was favoured and more valuable, but in IT class, this systematically disadvantaged boys almost every time; There around 35 computers in that room, and around 32 students, and every time, you could bet your ass that between 1 and 5 of the machines would be screwed up.

The result? The poor saps who had to share a computer and thus get a more or less worthless, waste of time lesson, were ALWAYS boys. Every. Single. Time.

2012-10-15T07:23:01+00:00

Classmate: "Why are those floating things called 'buoys'?"

Teacher: "Because boys are stupid and just jump in the water."

CptSeaCow · 2012-10-15T06:33:36+00:00

Someone in my 10th grade class was caught cheating. On the next test the teacher forced all the men to take off their sweatshirts during the test... in December, but not a single girl was forced to take of her sweatshirt. I pointed out this grossly unfair act and was told to be quiet.

FireTruth · 2012-10-15T11:35:24+00:00

ya.... female teachers forcing 11 year old boys to pull out chairs for girls... focing boys onto the school bus last... or the lunch line.

female teachers spewing anti male lectures in class... teaching 14 year old girls to expect special treatment and men to ignore there own sexual needs..... profemale anti male lecutres...

teachers giving girls special treaqtment in class.... and admiting they do so.... and jusfying there sexism with bull shit excuses.

brain washed male teachers focing boys to gibe up seats to girls in class.

the school system is sexist agaisnt males in general of course.. thats why we need to fix this.

tallwheel · 2012-10-15T07:33:36+00:00

In 6th grade I remember a large number of students (10-15) being kept after class for some offense which I can't remember. Only one was a girl. By some coincidence the girl was the first one who was allowed to leave. One of the boys was quick to point this out to the teacher after the girl left.

TheNeRD14 · 2012-10-15T13:52:46+00:00

I remember having a Grade 6 teacher who, all year, gave me marks far lower than other teachers did before and after. Her reason: "Boys don't get As".

SteelCrossx · 2012-10-15T12:46:41+00:00

My middle school English teacher liked to have boys v. girls competitions. If the boys scored the most points she would erase some off the boy's tally, put some on the girl's, then give them the reward. She was very open about it.

2012-10-15T13:07:47+00:00

I lived in a boarding school for my junior and senior years of high school. During my senior year, we went through the "great porn purge" wherein every male had to turn in all electronic devices to be searched for porn.

The dean of students, who was male, brought me into his office, took my flash drive and combed through it. It was only 256MB, but I had about 15k small images on it, because I was working on an image processing problem for a class. Looking back on it, it's funny to remember him clicking through about 2k of them, before giving up. At the time, the fact that I was being searched under threat of expulsion was not so funny. Especially while he was sitting there, pouring through my files asking me where I was hiding my porn every 10 seconds.

neilthecoder · 2012-10-15T08:52:22+00:00

In grade six, one of the kids pulled one of the cables from the computers in the classroom, which led network downtime. They assumed that it must have been a boy, so they disabled the computer accounts for all the boys in the classroom, until they could figure out who it was. Rumour was that it was actually a girl who tripped over it, but I could never confirm it.

While it wasn't something serious, it felt pretty bad to be treated like you did something wrong just because of your gender.

SageInTheSuburbs · 2012-10-15T09:27:29+00:00

I remember in high school i had two male teachers who made deriding comments about men and boys quite often, my psychology teacher and my biology/health teacher. I should have said something but i was young and it was just a bit shocking to hear a teacher telling the class how boys are inferior to girls.

GimmeBackMyBullets · 2012-10-15T13:25:36+00:00

My son is in 6th grade, and he currently has a sexist teacher.

Usually it's just the standard "she clearly likes the girls better" stuff, but when Drama Club began this year, it was scheduled for two after-school practices per week--one for the girls, and one for the girls and boys together. Umm...huh? My husband called the school and talked to the principal. The principal thought it was odd too and told him to leave a message for the teacher. Of course, the teacher never got back to us, but our son told us the next day that she had changed her mind. The girls were still doing "something special" but the boys could come to both practices. Um...yay?

jackvenom · 2012-10-15T18:52:00+00:00

Yes I do. I had a teacher in eighth grade who was a feminazi. She taught history, but we were required to call the subject HERSTORY. Refusal to use the term would result in a demerit against your final grade. The boys were put in the back of the classroom, and the girls upfront.

xionaxa · 2012-10-15T18:31:53+00:00

oh god, you don't know how many times i have gone to the principals office since 3rd grade. I was beat up by a girl in 3rd: i got detention, i called a girl a retard in 4th grade: i got detention, in 5th a group of 5 girls literally created a group that's entire job was to torment me, surprise: they never got in trouble. Later in 6th grade I had this one old as hell crazy teacher. She put me in ISS three times for refusing to let the girls enter and leave the classroom first, later she made us do a half year long assignment on creating nation or something. I was paired with the two dumbest girls in my class. I did all the work for the project FOR HALF THE YEAR and got a freaking C, they got A's because at the end of the year they told my teacher that i did none of the work. By then i lost my temper as kids do and screamed across the class that this is sexism and that they deserved the C's not I: saturated detention that time. In 7th grade i had decent teachers except my ELA teacher. Her husband had left her when she was pregnant so she found it as her duty to make sure that the entire class know that all men were tyrannical cheating bastards. I never said anything and just did as she said because I was afraid. By 8th grade it things got way better, I had a male English teacher that respected all views and did not give privilege, later in his class we had to do a project on an oppressed group, and I did mine on men. And I got a B (would have been an A if citations were correct).

ClaudeKenni · 2012-10-15T19:08:37+00:00

One french teacher, who thought that girls were much smarter than boys, and didn't make much of an attempt to hide it. When it came to the final exams, there were two tiers of exams. Basically the first was supposed to be for most of the class, but the second for those who were good with the language, which was more difficult, but allowed them to get a top grade overall in the year. Even though myself and a couple of other guys had top grades in the class, only the girls who had top grades were allowed to do the higher tier exam.

Was pissed off, but had the last laugh kind of, as the grade was based off the work over the year, I went and aced the standard tier exam, and so did my friend from the class, and we ending up acheiving a higher grade than any of the girls who had taken the higher tier exam.

Another time was a single situation in class with a teacher who was otherwise ok, where someone had stolen something from the science lab. No-one knew who did it, so the entire class was given collective lunchtime detention for the week. Now I was pissed off as it is, as being punished for something someone else does wrong doesn't sit with me well at the best of times, but the girls from that class manage to talk their way out of having to sit the detention. End of that school day, I get my parents to kick up a fuss about it, the teacher backs down on the thing, and doesn't try anything like that again with us.

Finally, there was a lot of sexism from the female sports teachers. For the first year of school, sports were mixed, so we had both boys and girls competing in everything, and both male and female teachers. The male teachers were pretty relaxed about most things, uniform for sports didn't have to be spot on, as long as it was close enough, and the same goes for any equipment we had to bring in. The female teachers, and in particular one female teacher, who was fired at the end of that year, were different, and would always give the boys a hard time about uniform, even when the girls were breaking exactly the same rules (things like having stripes on sports trousers, plain trainers etc). Also one time, she told all of the girls that they needed to bring in some equipment for a lesson, but never told the boys about it. Cue the lesson, all the girls have it, all the boys don't, and the teacher rants at us like it's our fault that she never told us that we needed to bring anything in.

duglock · 2012-10-15T13:46:03+00:00

Apparently the teacher was telling two 15 year old girls that men need sex all the time. I stood there listening as she said "if there are no women around, then they will do it with another man, if not then they will find sheep or some other animal.

I remember that exact same conversation from my 5th grade science class. This was a class lecture where that was said and yes the teacher was a woman.

2012-10-15T16:46:13+00:00

In a science competition that I was winning much more over the other remaining competitor (just being truthful here), my teacher/judge chose the other competitor as the winner (the other competitor was a girl) because, "there are too many men scientists". Ouch.

nik15 · 2012-10-15T17:44:48+00:00

My teacher always took the girls side of the story. Even if she cheated, we were at fault.

double-happiness · 2012-10-15T19:45:38+00:00

My teacher: "Boys are slugs and snails and puppy dog tails, girls are sugar and spice and all things nice"

It's bugging how hard it is to forget these things you were told when you were a kid.

AndIMustScream · 2012-10-15T21:35:53+00:00

Copy paste from another thread long ago. I didn't edit it since I don't particularly like reliving this. Hope this is what you wanted.

Fair enough.

First grade: I was tormented by a female bully(she had been held back a year, so she was bigger than anyone else).

I couldn't do a damn thing about it, she would literally chase me all over the playground. Eventually the teacher got tired of me asking for her to do something about it, and sent me to the Principal for a spanking.

Eventually the teacher got tired of this and issued a 'restraining order'. Which basically meant she got to take anything I had, and chase me off of whatever I was doing. I got in trouble a few times for not giving her what I had.

I'm pretty sure my parents intervened at this point, cause suddenly the Damn teacher started doing her job.

That was my first indication things were fucked up.

Growing up in the country was difficult. It was made exceptionally frustrating when all of the guys would be forced outside to do hard work, while all the gals sat inside watching TV. I was still to young to really see it, I just remember the frustration I felt.

After the work outside, We'd be forced to wait until the girls were finished having first pick of the food. Again, minor shit, but extremely frustrating when your starving from sweating in the sun, while I doubt they got up from the couch the entire time.

And that was before I was 8.

So if we skip forward quite a bit to high-school, it was a caricature of what you would normally expect. The girls were the ones pulling the pranks, since they knew that the teachers would go out of their way to pin something on the nearest Guy.

Some chick stuck some metal into a wall socket and shorted out the entire hallway. Some other dude and I were immediately blamed, even though we were no where near that wall.

We just had to burst out laughing, it took willing ignorance to come to that conclusion. We never got in trouble, they had no proof.

Some Guy in my fraternity had a rape accusation leveled against him from his then girlfriend. It took her all of four hours to admit she was lying, but he still got kicked out of school. He later attempted suicide, and my now exgf physically pulled him out of the window he was intent on jumping out of.

There's just shit everywhere.

Small or large, it doesn't matter. It wears you down over time.

Back to high-school, I remember just snapping at one of the (much fairer) teachers and breaking it down why exactly she was being a sexist dumbass.

I have never seen anyone embody the 'deer-in-headlights-look' so well. I probably could have been expelled for that, but she just said that I was exactly right. I don't respect anyone more than I respect her. She was probably the first person to ever listen, even as fucking rude as I had been.

On A side note, she was legally(contractually) required to sign all of the men up for the draft. She also told us it was utter and complete BS, and personally told us she'd help us get to Canada if we were ever drafted. That lady had some Gonads.

Yeah, its a lot of minor shit, but its minor shit that would happen on a weekly basis.

It just wears you down after a while. Also, I'm on painkillers, so be gentle.

2012-10-15T21:55:02+00:00

In elementary school the girls were given preference on which seats to take on the bus (many seats were ripped/dirty). I had enough of it for half a year and went to the principal with my parents. I stated I felt beneath the girls and one gender should not have preference over the other. After a week of my parents calling the principal every day, yelling at her for allowing such a thing, she told the bus drivers to allow anyone take any seat they saw vacant. Before this, all the girls were allowed on the bus first, and the boys had to wait until they all got on, and chose the best seat. Last year I visited my elementary school and saw both boys and girls getting on at the same time. :)

Reddit_Gravedigger · 2012-10-15T09:15:03+00:00

I can state that my freshman year of high school, after several freshman boys were sent home from the final exam of a class for not being prepared, the teacher launched into a short speech - "now that it's just us girls in the room" - about how boys don't mature quite as quickly as girls.

In an essay posted here earlier, there are a couple personal anecdotes about discrimination in elementary school that might be worth quoting and re-posting:

Second grade was when the assistant teacher decided that, since he had no idea who had pegged him in the back of the head with a foursquare ball, it would be a good idea to practice collective punishment and say that none of the boys - even the ones he knew were innocent - would be allowed to play with balls at recess anymore. I very soon had the male half of the classroom muttering about sexual discrimination. This worked surprisingly well, and we got to see the school counselor for negotiations quite quickly. To me, it was just one episode in a year-long struggle for power between the assistant teacher and myself, but in retrospect, it was something special. Later on, I learned that this episode of trouble-making was one of the few that didn’t involve a phone call or letter to my parents; I think the school didn’t want to call parents’ attention to the episode.

...

I mentioned an episode of mischief-making in elementary school that my parents never heard about, the one where I taught the male half of a second grade class that collective punishment by gender was an instance of sexism in action; I was surprised to discover my parents hadn’t heard about it only because my parents did hear plenty from the school about my misbehavior in elementary school.The episodes my parents did hear about were mostly the ones involving ﬁghts. I was a short-tempered young lad, always looking for a good excuse for a ﬁght. What I considered a reasonable casus belli ranged from calling me names to bullying other kids. Being a child who’d been told he should treat boys and girls equally, I - unlike many of my male peers - didn’t shy away from getting into ﬁghts with girls. I got in scuﬄes with other boys much more often, of course - boys play more often with boys, and girls more often with girls - but it was the episodes involving girls that attracted the harshest reactions from teachers and administrators. A little boy punching another little boy is just “boys being boys” and can be forgotten in ﬁve minutes, but a little boy punching a little girl is a serious incident that must be brought to his parents’ attention at once.

rightsbot · 2012-10-15T04:28:19+00:00

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DavidByron · 2012-10-15T23:47:01+00:00

Well here's a short extract from "Child of the Glacier"

One Sunday morning in the spring of 1961, my family had invited our next-door neighbours to go to church with us. I was nine years old. After parking the car, the seven of us were walking the several blocks down St Paul Street to the Church. My mother, my sister and the woman from next door walked and chatted together, while my father and I, the man from next door, and his son walked silently behind. It was a bright spring day and I was full of a child's energy. I decided that I wanted to be the one to point out our church to the visiting neighbours, and I began to run ahead of the group to do so.

I never got the chance; as I ran ahead, my father grabbed my wrist and yanked me back violently, hurting my arm and almost pulling me off my feet. "Never walk in front of the ladies!" he said sternly, still holding my arm. "That's not polite! Always walk behind the ladies!" Immediately, two thoughts came into my nine-year-old mind. First I wondered why in the world men should have to walk behind women, and I decided that I didn't like that rule. Then it occurred to me that my father would never have yanked on my sister that way, no matter what she had done. From that moment on, I hated - consciously - anything that anyone expected from me simply because I was male.

I imagine I was one of the first masculinists... or at least one of the youngest, for it was with conscious awareness and a conscious opposition that I mentally noted and logged every form of discrimination against males that I encountered for the remainder of my childhood. At that age, it was athletic expectations and the training in points of etiquette that plagued me. I was expected to participate in every boy's sport, to want to participate, and to do well -or at least to keep trying until I could do well. Whenever I tried and failed, I was mocked and chided; whenever I said I wasn't interested and refused to try, I was severely scolded. Girls, I could see, were not expected to perform in these capacities, and though I could never quite see what it was they were doing on the other side of the playground, it always looked a lot more interesting, a lot more imaginative, a lot more creative... a lot more fun.

In addition to "walking behind the ladies", there were such customs as opening doors, pulling out chairs, having to stand whenever a woman entered or left the room, and having to pay for things. The "ladies first" syndrome always made me fiercely angry. The old "I can hit you, but you can't hit me back because I'm a girl" routine angered and humiliated me beyond description. That boys were always dealt much more severe punishments for a given act than were girls would throw me into a rage. It was significant to me that these unfair customs and punishments were condoned and administered by adult women as well as by adult men. No matter how many times my parents and teachers told me that these things were traditional and correct, none of it made sense to me and I couldn't tolerate any of it.

http://feministhate.tripod.com/id63.htm

2012-10-16T03:02:42+00:00

When I was a kid in gym class the girls were not at all required to do the daily workout (Pushups, situps, jumping jacks). In the fourth grade a girl hit me multiple times so I took her hat and threw it away (pacifist). Later that day, I was punished for bullying her and she was made up to be the victim.

nathandrakesdick · 2012-10-15T22:33:36+00:00

Back in 7th or 8th grade I remember during one of our classes the teacher let the girls go before the boys(this was the end of the day) for absolutely no reason. I said that was sexist and got detention. The only detention I ever had in my life too.

THESHITISTHIS · 2012-10-15T23:03:14+00:00

I had one teacher in 3rd grade that tried to get a great majority of her male students on medicine for ADHD, including me. I even went and got checked, and of course, it turns out I didn't have it. She never did this to the female students though.

2012-10-16T00:02:55+00:00

Mostly but they were against me as a female. It was most often done by teachers.

Aaod · 2012-10-16T02:19:50+00:00

I had a few but the biggest example I can think of was the home ec teacher who treated the boys in class badly because her ex husband was an ass and treated the girls very well. She was a complete incompetent in her job but that is not relevant (What kind of screw up fails at teaching a home ec class). She graded the females better than the males, allowed them to stay in her classroom during lunch to work on projects, and had zero tolerance for male misbehavior but allowed the females to do whatever they wanted. She also occasionally bashed her ex husband during class as well as males in general. For one project we were working on we had a teaching assistant a nice older lady who actually treated me decently and I learned more from her than I did the rest of the class combined.

polewiki · 2012-10-16T20:33:55+00:00

I always thought it was strange that a female teacher telling a guy to pull his pants up was just fine, but a male teacher telling a female student to wear shirts that are less low-cut was creepy. I was asked a few times by male teachers to ask girls to cover up, because they felt uncomfortable doing it themselves.

2012-10-15T17:22:28+00:00

Yep. When I was in high school, my English teacher gave all the boys D's, and all the girls A's. It was so pathetic. I put so little effort into that class, and still got an A.

xendylu · 2012-10-15T23:34:31+00:00

the whole school system I went through. how can I praise the system for teaching me when they failed my twin brother? I'm so angry about that.

billywms · 2012-10-15T21:03:14+00:00

I had this bitch of a bus driver in 2nd grade who said she didn't like men because they're mean. To be honest, i think she was just upset because she could never get one(she was old, mean, & ugly).

2012-10-17T07:36:53+00:00

I had a very sexist PE teacher and I thank him for it.

He was a fantastic PE teacher who held boys up to a higher standard than the girls. He made boys play by special handicaps that always helped the girls. However, they were always enforced fairly. At first we complained, but we noticed that the competition was fierce. fierce enough that the girls wanted to compete with us. eventually, girls who proved themselves were put on "boy rules" and had to play with the handicaps. He was a good PE teacher.

2012-10-17T21:20:58+00:00

At my primary school the boys would always play football before the bell went, even though they weren't allowed to. Two girls I knew also played with them, and when they got told off the boys were yelled at while the girls sat outside waiting. The Head then invited them inside, and told them calmly that 'It's great that you're playing football, but would you mind not doing it before school's started?' PS: doesn't it annoy you that 'MensRights' has no apostrophe?

yolo1999swag · 2012-10-15T06:38:54+00:00

Yes, in the early 90s in grade 7 maths class. We had redhead twins (Emily & Fiona) and the teacher made a comment, "They would sell for a lot of money in some countries because of their red hair, you know, for sex." Then he laughed and continued the lesson.

I don't remember how in the hell he brought it up, but he was a really great, relaxed guy who was there my entire primary school life so I think he was pretty cool and just slipped something by accident. We had all already gone through sex ed.

(Another time we had some skipping rope exercise and he was teaching us how to feel our pulse so we could count our heart beats. One of these girls couldn't find hers, so she went to him, and he tried to feel her pulse and said, "I can't find her pulse", and she started crying because she thought she didn't have a pulse. LOL.)

They were wonderful girls too. They always treated me well despite being a bit of an outcast.

JockeVXO · 2012-10-15T18:34:10+00:00

Yes.

Title	Do any of you have childhood memories of sexist teachers/adults?
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	53
Comments	80
Date	October 15, 2012 4:27 AM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/11hws6/do_any_of_you_have_childhood_memories_of_sexist/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/do-any-of-you-have-childhood-memories-of-sexist.1011330 https://theredarchive.com/post/1011330

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