Our teacher isn't allowing us to do our final project on sexism against men because he doesn't believe it exists.

191 points109 commentssubmitted by winty6

Hey Reddit. We're three juniors (M16, M17, M17) at a small tech charter academy high school in Northern California. I'd prefer not to provide any more details than that as we live in a small town and word could spread fast, we also don't want to break sub rules on doxxing, personal information, or advocating for violence, as that is not our intent with this post.

For our final project in our combined English/History class (which is meant to be a workshop where students in groups of 2-4 host workshops involving the whole class on a specific oppressed group of people, how they are oppressed, and how to be an ally for them.) Our group chose to focus on sexism against men, compiling a list of multiple sources and jotting down ways in which men are systematically oppressed. Here are the links we found:

https://www.military.com/military-fitness/army-fitness-requirements/army-basic-training-pft

https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/college-scholarships/scholarships-by-type/scholarships-for-women/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/28/look-how-women-outnumber-men-college-campuses-nationwide/YROqwfCPSlKPtSMAzpWloK/story.html

https://www.scholarships.com/financial-aid/college-scholarships/scholarships-by-type/scholarships-for-women/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap\_n\_1874742

https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/22457-studies-show-judicial-bias-against-dads

https://www.cor-law.com/blog/women-get-child-custody-90-percent-cases-isnt-gender-discrimination.html

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/12/19/fatal-employment-men-10-times-more-likely-than-women-to-be-killed-at-work/#7f023c7652e8

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/ironic-misandry-why-feminists-joke-about-drinking-male-tears-and-banning-all-men.html

https://www.esurance.com/info/car/why-women-pay-less-for-car-insurance

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6915387/Drink-driver-spared-jail-female-judge-WOMAN.html

https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questioning-the-value-of-diversity/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mansplaining

https://prostate.org.nz/2014/01/men-die-earlier-womens-health-gets-four-times-funding/

https://www.webmd.com/sexual-conditions/guide/circumcision

However, we quickly ran into problems. For this specific project, the teacher whose class we are doing the workshop in has to approve the project. We also were required to read, annotate, and discuss a reader that was more or less blatant left wing propaganda, along with being several years outdated, discussing how all white people, all straight people, and all men cannot be oppressed in any way, which is obviously false. I can provide text from the reader if it helps but I don't want to link it because it has our school's name on it. (again, don't want to break sub rules) Our English teacher happens to be extremely biased against our idea of focusing on sexism against men, even though the entire project is based around doing a workshop focusing on a subgroup that is the victim of sexism, racism, classism, sizeism, or ableism. Even after explaining our subject to the teacher, explaining the activities we had planned for the workshop, going through all of our sources and explaining how each one was an example of either systematic or societal oppression, and writing multiple pages of research on the issue, along with rewriting most of the plan for the workshop, the teacher still refuses to approve our project because he "doesn't see how men are oppressed systematically" even after we have shown multiple ways in which men are oppressed systematically, such as getting 63% longer criminal sentences then women, losing 87% of all custody cases in court, and being required to sign up for the draft. We also explained to him how his denial of the existence of sexism against men is itself an example of how little publicity mens' rights issues get, especially since there are 2 or 3 'sexism against women' teams that have already been approved. He basically gave us an ultimatum saying that we either have to do our project on 3/4 women's rights issues and 1/4 men's rights issues or we have to find a new subject, either way wasting the 10 pages of research we already did and having to plan out entirely new activities for our workshop. We don't feel that this is reasonable, and it seems very much like discrimination, especially since none of the 'sexism against women' teams have faced these problems or been forced to discuss men's issues.

On Monday we're going to talk to the History teacher since our History and English classes are run collectively. If that doesn't happen and we can't get anywhere, we're thinking about taking it to the school office, and possibly even the school district or the school board. We all agree, along with the other team in a different class that is also attempting to do sexism against men for their workshop, that this is unfair and discriminatory.

Anyway, we decided to make this post because we feel that we are being silenced because of a teacher's opinion and have no way of getting a good grade while drawing attention through our workshop to a legitimate issue. We'd also like some support and possibly some suggestions on how to solve this without bending to the teacher's demands. Thank you for reading this.

TL;DR: We're high school juniors and we're trying to do a project about men's rights issues. The teacher shut our project down even after we provided sources and data by simply saying that men aren't systematically oppressed, and now we're pretty much out of options if we want to get a good grade while also showing a commonly misunderstood or unknown issue.