[Bigi] Re: Bigi digest, Vol 1 #5 - 5 msgs

[Joe Decker]

At 12:56 PM 11/18/00 -0800, Thadd Liszkowski wrote:
>Ironically, in education we're trying so hard now to have tolerance for all
>the kids, including sexual identification, and it's one thing to be the
>queer club advisor, but quite another thing to be queer. You could get
>fired for *that!* "Isn't that a sex crime?" I would laugh if it didn't hurt
>so much.

Your school has a 'queer club'?  Wow.  Was never like that I when
I was a kid...  :)

>Also of note, we are taught in teacher school as a male teacher never to
>give a student a ride home, especially a girl, and never to be alone in a
>room with a student, especially a girl. Because, after all, "only girls get
>raped." [1]

Agreed, and while that situation is a lot more common, it makes
it all the more difficult to find and to protect against cases of
molestation by women and/or molestation of men, and I've known folks
who fit all three of the and/or possibilities involved, "less common"
of course doesn't mean "never happens".

>Not that I would rape anybody(!), but the idea that a male is
>not a sexual object is the just as pervasive flip side of the notion that a
>female is not a sexual agent (or subject).

Absolutely.  I think to some extent there's cyclical feedback here,
I think that societal expectations of male predation and female victimhood
in some ways create the environment they expect, which in turn gets
realized in studies and serves as further evidence for the expectation.
Oh, I'm sure there's physiological effects as well, but in particular
I see through my involvement with BAMM (which I won't digress into right
now) that a many women are taught that they have no power to protect
themselves, that they are helpless to contribute to their own safety.
I think that the increased economic freedom and personal freedom women
have won in the last couple decades is slowly ablating this meme, but
it's still a long and difficult process.

(Again, I'm speaking in generalizations here.)

As a geek kid, I internalized a similar sense that I was incapable of
defending myself.  Bits of that occasionally still affect me today,
sometimes when I'm "out" with a guy in public.  While this is a small
effect and only an occasional one, it's not particularly one I want
to live with, and I'm doing a few things to address.

--Joe

Joe Decker  (joe@bi.org, jdecker@liberate.com, joe@polychromatic.com)
http://www.polychromatic.com/bigi/ -- BiGi: A Bi Men's Community
http://www.polychromatic.com/ -- poly-related book reviews
http://alumni.caltech.edu/~decker/ -- home page

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> >[1]  Yes, yes, I know how false this statement is, but it is
> >widely believed in the gestalt, if not in words, in my experience.
>
>Couldn't agree with you more.