One last picture from the Sansa-Alyssa Love Connection.
Jelani Cobb on the present and future of Black Lives Matter:
Black Lives Matter has been described as “not your grandfather’s civil-rights movement,” to distinguish its tactics and its philosophy from those of nineteen-sixties-style activism. Like the Occupy movement, it eschews hierarchy and centralized leadership, and its members have not infrequently been at odds with older civil-rights leaders and with the Obama Administration—as well as with one another. So it wasn’t entirely surprising when Pulley, a community organizer in Chicago, declined the White House invitation, on the ground that the meeting was nothing more than a “photo opportunity” for the President. She posted a statement online in which she said that she “could not, with any integrity, participate in such a sham that would only serve to legitimize the false narrative that the government is working to end police brutality and the institutional racism that fuels it.” Her skepticism was attributable, in part, to the fact that she lives and works in a city whose mayor, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, is embroiled in a controversy stemming from a yearlong coverup of the fatal shooting by police of an African-American teen-ager.
Romance-loving Toasties who live in Los Angeles should check out The Ripped Bodice!
Uterus transplant technology and what it will mean to some trans women:
“If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” she said. “Looking like a woman, feeling like a woman, and being able to bear a child like a woman. The whole notion of being like anyone else who wants to carry a baby — the opportunity for that is blowing people’s minds, in a good way.”
Bowick said she doesn’t expect bearing a child will make her feel like a more complete woman. “There are biological women who cannot bear children and they’re not lesser women because of it,” she said. She’d already been planning to adopt children and still plans to do so, even if she’s able to bear her own children as well.
do not do this unless you’ve been kidnapped and it’s an emergency
This thread very quickly became me RTing stories from (mostly) women about their (mostly) male high school teachers who crossed boundaries, please read:
Calling the Flint water issue a “crisis” does stress something serious, but it almost gives the impression that a natural occurrence happened, like when there’s a drought. Like when you live in the South and there’s a heat wave and you’re only supposed to water your lawn every other day.
Instead of crisis, a more accurate descriptor would be the thing in Flint when the government actively poisoned the residents for two years and the only reason the cycle is slowly being reversed now is because they got caught, but they probably never thought they’d get caught because so many of the residents are poor and black, but, news flash, it’s not just black people getting sick; it’s everyone in Flint, but unfortunately that’s what happens when you exist near black people.
All of this is important and infuriating:
In a 43-part tweetstorm on Tuesday, Doucette recounted a recent experience defending a 17-year-old black teen from claims by a police officer that the teen was doing 360s in the middle of the street. Over the course of the story, Doucette demonstrates many of the problems black people face in the U.S. court system and why changes never seem to stick.
We’ll let him take it from here.
I think Captain Awkward NAILED it in her response to this question:
Hello Captain,
I’m 29 years old, living with my parents, my older sister and my niece.My mother stopped work when she gave birth to me, so she’s pretty much been a housewife all her life. My father is that wonderful combination of breadwinner and financial abuser (i.e, he has enough money to buy expensive shoes and perfumes for himself, but asking him for money so we can have food and power supply is like talking to a wall), so when things are down, it falls to my sister and me to pick up the slack when it comes to money. My sister just started a new job, and I’m still entry-level at the job I’ve had for nearly three years.
The thing is, it usually falls to me to pick up the financial burden. I’m asked to pay the cable, the internet, the groceries etc all the time. I’ve asked my sister for both of us to split the bills, but she doesn’t agree. And when I ask my mother to talk to her, her preferred method is to placate me rather than talk to my sister. Usually, this means that I’m counting every cent until payday because I don’t have a lot for myself. Despite this, anytime I buy food/toiletries for myself, I’m expected to share with the two of them. I plan out my groceries and needs for the month, and I literally cannot afford to be replacing items if they finish earlier than expected.
I need help saying no, especially to my sister. Every time I try to be firm, I’m called ‘selfish’ and ‘I used to be so nice’ and ‘we’re family, so we share everything.’ I don’t think it’s selfishness to want to let my personal groceries last as long as possible, especially when I can barely afford to look after myself, and especially when my sister won’t do anything. I’m at that point where I’m seriously considering buying a small cupboard/fridge, putting it in my room and keeping everything locked up when I’m not home. What should I do?
On the dearth of diverse advice columnists in mainstream media:
Hiring is where resources like @WritersofColor comes in. In 2015, New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes, along with Durga Chew-Bose, Vijith Assar and Buster Bylander, started the database in part as a way of showing hiring managers that talented, qualified people of color aren’t difficult to come by, as long as you make the effort to expand your network.
“I generally don’t believe that people are malicious. I think that people are just lazy,” Hughes said. “Obviously there are egregious and explicit exceptions to this, but for the most part I don’t think newsrooms across the board are going, ‘We’re not going to hire any people of color, or any queer people, or any disabled people.’”
Y’all, Bim Adewunmi posted a link on Twitter to this amazing church house w/ old graveyard and now I want to go to England and live there:
Whoa. Sign me up.
Wow!! Not sure I could live there. Like, I’d want to pray all the time?
I think a real important question is how come this is always renovated church houses, how come they don’t just build regular houses like this.
I think it’s because today we pay tradesmen a living wage.
bah
Oh my god, that master bedroom with the beams and the stained glass window. How gorgeous.
No, Dave, don’t go! I’d miss you and your spouse.
That’s mostly true. But mostly I’d miss Beans and his cat posse.
I’m awed, and also can’t decide whether my mom’s desire to visit us if we lived there would be stronger, or my mother-in-law’s desire to not visit us (because she would be horrified.) (Doubly horrified now that she knows I write steamy romance novels, and would do so while sitting at a table where the altar used to be.)
Triply horrified if she knows I would come to visit. Not just gently atheist, an apostate!
quelle horreur!
I just cried over today’s Google doodle.
Feeling my heart like a large and looming window today, my Toasts.
Are we on some kind of brink? (Are we ever not on some kind of brink?)
(Daily thanks to you for these, Nicole!)
Now I’ve cried over the Google doodle too. Thanks for the heads-up; I often don’t see them and would have hated to miss this one.
Oh man oh man oh man!! Now I’m crying over it, too!
And I just clicked over and cried, too.
I am definitely not crying, you guys should see how much crying I’m not.
Me either, not crying in the least. Nope, not at all.
(Am I ever happy that I have a desk in a back corner and large monitors I can hide behind)
This chain of joy-weeping is easily the best thing I’ve been part of in 2016 (at least) and it makes me want to cry MORE. Women! You, we, are profound and beautiful and true! Never not astonishing me, right in the heart. Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for pointing that out, I would have missed it!
SUCH A NICE THING GOOGLE MADE FOR US TODAY. THANK YOU, GOOGLE.
Add me to the cry chain!
OH MAN THAT WAS PERFECT
Playing that doodle and crying over it was the very first thing I did on the computer this morning. I’m glad so many other people cried about it too and I’m not just a terrible baby. It was…. *sniff* it was MOVING, ok??
Happy International Women’s Day!
Shameless plug: I celebrated by donating to The Toast!
Thank you, Toast and Toasties, for being a safe haven in a sometimes vile internet.
This is exactly what my doodle-weeping self needs to do. Thank you! (Done & done! Thank you Toast, Toasts, every one of you. Gleaming safe haven indeed.)
Me three! A toast to the Toast. Happy International Women’s Day to all of you.
Amazing idea – I just donated as well. <3
Me too! Please turn my offering into Toast.
I like the “Sorry you feel that way,” non-apology apology as a tactic to use with manipulative people (from the Captain Awkward letter). I’ve started to do that a little with my own mom and I’m going home for Easter in a few weeks and really, that should just be the first thing out of my mouth always. It’s something I need to say all the time with her.
You know what? I think I’ll just respond to everything with that. “What should we have for dinner? I was thinking pizza.” “Sorry you feel that way, I think it should be bar-be-que.”
Just kidding, though. That, seriously, is excellent advice. Flip shizz on its head! Take it and make it yours! Fantastic.
I am also a big fan of “I’ll definitely consider that”
I have considered it and the answer is NO! Haha.
When I’m being a really obstinate shithead, it’s “Thanks for your input.”
This kept me sane during wedding planning, and then I realized how useful it is to deploy at any and all other times.
The one my playwriting prof gave me: “Wow, I never would have thought of that!” (Apparently people love to go up to playwrights and tell them how to “fix” their (already produced) plays!
Factual and secretly snarky, I love it.
I cheered for the “agree with their insults” advice. I’ve utilized that one for years; it silences the haters immediately.
That Jelani Cobb article is excellent. I love that BLM has managed to push these issues to the point where they’re being discussed in the (adults) presidential debates. White supremacy will not wither away because we refuse to talk about it. But I do worry, watching the feuds that are already springing up, that some of the modern activists have, in correctly rejecting a lot of the received wisdom about collective action, also thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The questions of who gets credit and for what, and of how to handle personal conflicts between organizers, are ones that have been slowly and painfully hashed out in activist circles for a very long time now. It seems like Garza understands that, but especially after watching the recent Deray/Shaun King slapfest, I worry that some of the other people who are very influential aren’t thinking about what it means to have that many eyes on you. (Also, I will be honest, Deray’s TFA background makes me incredibly skeptical about him as an elected official. TFA is a bad organization that endorses bad policy to attain bad aims.)
Do you mean Teach for America when you say TFA? Would be curious what your associations with that organization and Deray’s involvement are. Woefully ignorant on the subject over here.
Yeah, I do. I was a teacher for a short time, and I’m still very interested in educational policy. Deray is a TFA alum who moved into school administration; his initial activism began on a TFA blog, he connected with Brittany Packnett (a TFA administrator) in St. Louis, his candidacy in Baltimore has been supported by TFA.
My issues with TFA are numerous, but they mostly boil down to two points:
1. Their main stated goal is noble, but their efforts towards that goal are insufficient and in fact create more issues than they solve. You cannot learn to be a good teacher in 5 weeks. Dumping untrained teachers, no matter how smart they are or how good of a university they went to, into struggling school districts for a two year rotation hurts the students, hurts the institution of the school, and hurts the teachers who are being thrown into the meatgrinder. Students need and deserve well-trained teachers. Schools need stability to function as a part of the community. TFA destroys that stability and offers untrained teachers to students who could most benefit from good teachers. However, what makes this even worse is:
2. Their main unstated (or at least, fairly quietly stated) goal is school privatization. Their alumni leave day-to-day teaching, leaving destabilized and ineffective schools in their wake, and then enter politics, school administration, and the business world and explicitly work to take advantage of those destabilized and underperforming schools to privatize the school system. When possible, they break teachers’ unions, underfund public school systems, and bring in charter schools. They have almost broken the public school system in Chicago. They have destroyed the public school system in New Orleans, and tremendously damaged the public school system in Washington D.C. They are actively trying to do the same thing in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New York. TFA and the school privatization movement are actively engaged in destroying the concept of public education, primarily in low SES neighborhoods, primarily for students of color, at every single level of the system from the actual classrooms to superintendent’s and mayor’s offices around the country to the DoE to the White House.
No liberal should support them. No decent person should support them. What they do actively hurts the people they are claiming to help while rotting away the institution of public education. And Deray is quite actively involved with them. I find that very concerning.
Thanks. I figured something like the first point, but had no idea about their goal toward privatization.
That twitter thread yesterday kept hitting me harder the longer I read it. Because there’s knowing you have a story like that, and people you know have stories like that… but then, seeing the sheer number of people who all have stories like that, all across the country, is just so much more intense somehow, I don’t know. In a bad way, of course.
My first response to the thread was “well, of course everyone has these stories!” followed immediately by “wow, and that’s incredibly fucked up that we do”
Going through high school with the lists in your head of the teachers to avoid, the teachers who’ve been fired or arrested, the non-stop stories of people (rather, men) in authority abusing their power, is just normal for so many teens out there.
Like, our high school had two teachers fired/charged while I was there: one for looking at child pornography in the freaking staff room, and the other for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old student (he had been grooming the girl for a relationship & all her classmates knew & were talking about it for months before anyone in authority got involved). And this was all just stuff that happened, like someone’s house catching on fire. No one really talked about it.
Ugh, yes, that was my reaction too!
I also had this moment of being grateful that my “cool” teacher was just, you know… actually cool in the non-predatory way teachers should be. I was like “wow I am so grateful to him” and then I had this moment of thinking I should not be grateful for a teacher acting exactly how a teacher should act.
Yeah, I had the same reaction. I felt so bleak after reading through all the responses and realizing anew how incredibly common it is. To cope, I started a twitter conversation about all the awesome and appropriate teachers out there.
I had a couple of incredibly intense, awesome, charismatic teachers, who must have to deal with students crushing on them every year. (We’re in our 30s now, and we will still sigh when the name of one now-dead but particularly attractive teacher comes up). But they always managed to have close, but 100% professionally appropriate relationships with their students. You’re teaching teenagers, you’re an adult, be appropriate!!
Oh yay! Awesome, appropriate teachers! I was fortunate to have many. The 25 year old AP History teacher who joked with us but only about appropriate subjects. BOTH of my male college advisors (one for each major) whom I admittedly found very attractive, but NEVER in all the (legitimate, I promise) time I spent in their offices were anything but kind, cordial, and incredibly professional. They encouraged me academically and professionally while at the same time never showing any kind of favoritism or commenting on any of my attributes that weren’t intellectual. No wandering eyes, not even for a second, no offhand comments, nothing. Even at the time, not realizing quite how rare it was, I was extremely grateful for these men for being fantastic and appropriate mentors. And I definitely sigh a little when I think of them.
All of this was honestly kind of shocking to me, since there were no stories I heard like this as a kid in school. Granted, I went to small schools, so not as large of a pool of teachers to potentially be creepy. Still, it’s screwed up that I have to be grateful that all of the kind, supportive teachers I had were legitimately good people and not disgusting predators.
Yeah, I’ve also never had any of these experiences – and now I’m starting to wonder whether it was actually because all of my teachers were decent human beings, or if this kind of thing was happening and I was just protected by the fact that I was a teacher’s kid and too oblivious to notice it going on around me. Not a fun contemplation.
I’ve just remembered, my friend really fancied one of our teachers and it was super obvious. Years later, she found out that he’d actually had to send an email round to all staff members saying ‘I am categorically not in a relationship with x’. The fact that enough teachers were gossiping about it to make that email necessary, without actually trying to do anything to protect her if they had genuine concerns, is pretty fucked up. She was 16 at the time, over the age of consent here, but they still should have done something if they thought one of their colleagues was screwing a student.
And surprise surprise, that teacher was actually able to resist the feminine wiles of a 16 year old. Which is an incredibly low bar, but considering that whenever these cases come up there always seems to be a ‘she seduced me’ defence, it’s notable.
You’re an adult. In a position of authority. Teaching teenagers. Students are probably going to crush on you at some point or another. Learn how to deal with appropriately or stay far away from teenagers.
THIS. All of the this.
Sometimes I see threads of this nature, about all the awful perverts working in our school, and I think “it was never that extreme at my school, it was never that bad, it was all pretty good” – and yet, there was still inappropriate behaviour. There was a (butch gay, and therefore uncool) PE teacher who would always wait until you were in a state of undress to go strike up a conversation; literally every girl I’ve talked to who went to my school at least once had this teacher eye up her chest. It’s not assault but it’s sure as hell not appropriate.
Or the English teacher who was fired for “inappropriate behaviour” and who, amongst other things, gave his class frequent updates on how his novel was coming on – it being a novel featuring himself as the romantic hero and a fifteen year old student as the love interest.
Oh, and the computer-tech assistant who got engaged to his girlfriend, on her twentieth birthday, on their five-year anniversary? He wasn’t a teacher, but she went to the school he worked in. Maybe they’re the loves of each other’s lives, I haven’t kept in touch with her closely enough to know, but that doesn’t make dating a student ok.
How screwed up is it that actions like this pale into insignificance and seem very minor, not really bad at all compared to what goes on elsewhere?
Ugh, and I went to the best, cleanest state school in the county.
Yeah, that batch of tweets was hard to read. I actually cannot think of any such stories from my school days – the closest I can get is that one of the staff at my high school murdered his wife (and was arrested and went to jail), but that has nothing to do with abusing students. I’m close friends with many public school teachers now, and they’re all repulsed by the notion of getting involved with a student. A male friend who teaches in a pretty rough high school has talked about the difficulty of breaking up fights between girls – the most he will do is stand in between them with his hands up in the air, so there is no chance for inappropriate contact.
It was just pretty shocking to me that EVERYONE had stories to share on twitter. How does it all go so wrong with so many teachers, and then so right with others?
this article made me seethe. It has good points but also bullshit, like the final fucking line. The World Has a Problem: Too Many Young People
MIND YOUR DAUGHTERS?
This was totally my reaction, and also one of my most-used quotes.
Thank you all for sharing in my fury.
What the fuck.
That’s … just some fuckin’ racist as nonsense with a side of paternalism and sexism.
1.) Yes, there are more young people than ever before. Many of them are from non-white nations (Because let’s just call it like it is). This isn’t fucking news.
2.) Employment is a huge issue across the board for these individuals and poorly paid jobs are not going to completely cut it and may lead to temporarily destabilizing protests because of systemic issues in culture, economic and general inequality. Hopefully the issues are addressed and the world moves forward a more just place.
3. ) Oddly enough, this isn’t limited to just nations that are “not like us.”
4.) If you raised your daughters right, they’d be joining those protests or supporting them, since these things impact their future too.
5.) Did my deceased grandfather write this article?
The author seems to be Indian, so I guess that’s why her (YES, I double-checked, the author is a woman) focus is mainly on that country. But my mind is BOGGLING at that conclusion: female infanticide/abortion is a horrible ongoing practice that has created a gender imbalance, so…mind your daughters? What the fuck?
I thought it was generally accepted that there are too many old people, that people in general are living longer and that the economy/habits haven’t fully shifted to accommodate this, and it’s a known phenomenon that as people live longer, birthrates and so on eventually adjust (and it requires things like education and support for young women, which isn’t happening!), but until that happens, it only looks like too many young people (because they can’t take over where the old people still are!). And it’s a worse problem in developing nations or low-whatsit places, economically depressed regions.
But anyway, I skimmed that article and refuse to read it closely. Not going to get furious today!
I think it was also partly about the gender imbalance issue in places like China and India? (Also skimmed, enough fuckery in my day already.)
Augh, and that’s the same fucking problem, when it comes down to it. Also cultural misogyny/patriarchy, but what culture doesn’t that describe tbh.
“You can’t just say, ‘Hey look, I’ve got a youth bulge, it’s going to be great,’ ”
I mean yes this is an important and serious issue, but seriously? Can we come up with a better term than “youth bulge”?
Right?
God, I couldn’t get past the headline. More power to you for actually reading it.
Youth bulge?! What the hell is that phrasing?
And that final line is even more WTF worthy.
I’m about to leave work early to go and see my cat before she’s put down. (First heard this might be a possibility a little over an hour ago.)
(This sounds terse. I am not sure what else to put, but wanted to share it.)
I am so sorry. Poor kitty.
My heart is with you 🙁
My best to you, and no worries about how you sound. This is a tough situation.
I am so sorry.
Oh no! I hope it is painless and a relief for her
I am so sorry. Big love to you and I hope it is peaceful for her.
Oh, I’m so sorry. Thinking of you.
Oh, I’m so sorry. Hugs to you if you want them.
Oh no! My condolences for your sweetheart.
I am so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Oh, oh no. How terrible. I am so, so sorry for your loss.
I am so sorry. Sending love to you and your cat.
I’m so, so sorry. Sending you hugs and condolences.
I’m so sorry. Sending you lots of hugs.
Oh, I’m so sorry. Godspeed, kittyfriend.
I’m so sorry. I hope she goes easily and swiftly. HUGS if you want them.
You have my deepest condolences. Your kitty is lucky that someone like you can be there for her.
Oh, no!!! I’m so so sorry. Sending love and hugs.
I’m so so sorry. Gentle ninja hugs if you’d like them. Respectful nod of sympathy if you’re not up for hugs.
O no :'( ::toastiehungs::
*gentle hugs*
I’m so sorry, friend.
Internet hugs and comforting vibes!
Thoughts are with you.
*offers Toastie hugs*
I’m sorry for your loss. This must be an awful shock for you. My thoughts are with you.
Thank you to everyone for your condolences and kind words. I got to my parents’ house (about two hours away from my workplace) at 4.50; she died at about 5.55, right before we were due to take her to the vet’s. (Clever girl, saving my parents the money and heartache of having her put to sleep.) She was 18 and fine up until today (going a bit deaf and demented, but still energetic and happy) when she appeared to have some sort of major neurological problem; by the time I got home she was blind and fitting intermittently. I’m glad I was there, though, and I’m glad it was quick. I will miss her very much.
RIP. 🙁
Ugh. My math teacher the last two years of high school preyed on my younger sister, who, at 14, was at least 20 years younger than he was. It was obvious enough that his girlfriend (a former student of his) was quite nasty to her. My sister was good at track and he was the track coach. He did delightful things like try to give her alcohol on overnight trips for meets. So gross.
And there’s another issue! We’ve got this cultural narrative of younger women ~stealing~ older men, so the older men’s wives and girlfriends have been trained to blame teenage girls for being sexually harassed/abused.
This came up a lot in the snark squad reviews of Pretty Little Liars I read before I gave up on that show again.
We had a *middle school* teacher who was a creeper. Like, openly checking out people’s breasts. Naturally, he was in charge of all the Racial and Gender Equality Task Force-type things.
The Apartment with Occasional Dogs is no longer available (the person whose room I would have rented is going to stay there.) As I am sad, and as the Toast has sometimes been a place to discuss Attractive Irish Men, do all of you know about Barry Ward? I saw a movie with him over the weekend (“Jimmy’s Hall”, about the Church kiboshing swing music and dancing and jazz in rural Ireland) and I am feeling infirm of purpose with regard to my misandry.
Give me the daggers!
The foxy men on the internet are but as pictures.
If he do bleed, I’ll gild the faces of your fave with problematicness…
Etc etc.
May the Misandrist Angels rain down fragrant pears and heart-sized rubies into your life. This is perfect.
Aw, thank yew! *noms pears, pockets rubies*
TBH, I would feel infirm of purpose too, and not because he resembled my father as he slept.
I haven’t heard of him, but his profile shows he had a part in the TV show a friend of mine made (Lip Service), so I approve.
And he has slightly wonky teeth, which is…relevant to my interests. ETA: speaking of relevant to my interests, how can I watch this show?!?
Teachers and boundaries: there was a ‘cool’ teacher at my secondary school, and my friend was in his class one year. She started taking me along to chat with him and soon we would hang out in his classroom talking about books during breaks sometimes. This started when we were about thirteen. As I was in my last year at school, I noticed his behaviour start to change – he started getting creepy. When I went back to the school during my first Christmas holiday from uni for a little ceremony thing where we got our A level certificates, he (obviously drunk) hugged me tight and whispered in my ear that he hoped he’d see me at a local club the next evening. I found out after that that he had a habit of grooming girls throughout school, waiting until they’d left and were at least 18 and then coming onto them. He’d had a long-term relationship with at least one. It made me incredibly sad because all that time I’d thought he was just being encouraging and supportive and fun he’d had one eye on fucking me at the soonest available opportunity.
It’s such a fucking betrayal when you realize that, and it just casts doubt on everything they ever said about your abilities and interests.
I’m starting to think that upon graduation, female students should be given a gallon of gasoline, a match, and immunity from prosecution.
I missed the twitter thread because twitter overwhelms me, but reading it now reminds me that the physics teacher who encouraged me to think of myself as good at science, and to consider pursuing a career in it, was the same one who tickled me during after-school lab work, made a joke about “bending me over a desk,” and once had a seemingly Freudian slip about my breasts in front of the rest of the class.
I’m embarrassed to say that it never once crossed my mind to complain about it. It made me kind of uncomfortable, but not in a way I wanted to spend a single second thinking about. I liked his class. I didn’t want to complicate that.
On the other hand, I also had an incredibly dedicated calculus teacher who clearly cared deeply about his students, boys and girls alike, who came to every play, concert, and sports event any of them were in, was kind of weird and awkward but quite beloved, and (as far as I know) was completely goddamn appropriate. It’s not like being a caring, involved teacher requires men to also be on the icky-to-abusive spectrum, for fuck’s sake.
Yes! It’s possible to be “cool” (or at least caring) without ever being disgusting. Teachers need to learn boundaries.
I had a physics teacher who made sure to include lots of puns on his worksheets, let us race RC cars down the hallway as part of a lab project, and would stay after class/school to help anyone who needed it (with the door open, and on opposite sides of the desks). Everybody loved his classes, he was involved and caring without ignoring boundaries, and was a genuinely cool teacher (I mean, in that “massively dorky physics teacher” way, which is the best way to be a cool teacher). Treating teenagers like teenagers: it’s not actually that complicated.
It’s not that complicated, indeed. And that’s what makes all the commenters who complain that sexual harassment policies mean that no one can ever have a warm, friendly relationship in the workplace so disingenuous. It serves their interests to pretend that it’s really hard to tell the difference between friendly good fun and inappropriate/unwelcome sexualizing of their coworkers/employees/students.
Oh, I’ve just remembered that our homework sheet on resistance and circuits was called “stuck at ohm with my twisted resistor.” Man, that guy was the best, and has since won at least one award for excellence in teaching (my younger brother was one of the students who recommended him for it).
Yes! I have had mildly flirtatious, fun, relaxed relationships with SO MANY colleagues. The only people who think sexual harassment policies are people who were using those kind of relationships as cover for something less consensual.
It’s not just memories of the bad teachers. It’s also stuff like how the bad teachers made it so I didn’t react well to the good teachers. I remembering having a bad term once in middle school and my grades were slipping not because I struggled with the material but because of emotional stuff I had going on. My (genuinely cool) male teacher in one class could tell something was up and knew my grades should’ve been better, so one day he held me back after class to ask if I was alright and if I needed to speak with someone (him or a counselor or whoever) and to tell me he believed in me. And to this day I regret that here he was, a teacher genuinely reaching out to me for once, and all I could think about was how he was sitting in the desk next to mine to talk to me and how I just wanted to run away and be invisible. He was totally encouraging and appropriate the whole time, but I just couldn’t handle it and was near tears at the thought of being confronted about my issues. I was so used to bad attention or no attention from teachers that I didn’t know what to do with myself.
This is a totally inadequate response to your story, but still accurate: SOME PEOPLE JUST RUIN IT FOR EVERYONE ELSE.
Ugh, I can so relate to the letter writer of the Captain Awkward letter. I have been in those shoes, where I felt completely financial and emotionally responsible for the well being of a manipulative and abusive family member. And it is SO HARD because you do feel like if you stop, that person will flounder and not survive, and that you’re responsible for their power turning off or them not having food or getting evicted. “Where would they go?” I kept asking myself. The thing is — they had options, and even though it took me a LONG time to figure it out — me not enabling them anymore forced them to take those options they saw as less favorable.
Wish I had had that excellent response in my life back a few years ago, and could have gotten out of that cycle way sooner.
I will say this–and this isn’t referring to your situation, or that of Captain Awkward’s correspondent, or anyone’s in particular–that I’ve been on both sides, both that of the provider and that of the dependent, and that there can be some pretty heavy dysfunction on both sides; as aggravating as it can be to be the one who is depended upon, there’s also the payoff of the ego boost of being the strong provider. In fact, I’ve known people who subtly or not-so-subtly encouraged the dependence, as long as it suited their emotional needs, by doing what the PUA types call “negging”.
Definitely possible, I’m sure, just not my experience. 🙂
Reading about recovery has been really helpful in recognizing manipulation on the dependent’s part and my own enabling behaviors. Truly, it’s often the kindest thing to let the person figure things out on their own, even if that means temporary discomfort or distress.
Oh gosh that CA article! The advice is FLAWLESS, but I’m so angry on behalf of the LW that this is even a thing that can happen. Why are people so terrible?
Wow. There’s a lot to rage against in this LR.
If anyone wants a break, can we talk about The Night Manager? I just watched Ep 3 last night and now I’m really getting into it and I just want them all now. (It took me awhile though, I really struggled to get past Tom Hiddleston and his beautiful face.) Huge Laurie is perfection as always, and I love Olivia Coleman and how she’s working being heavily pregnant into the character.
I am absolutely loving it, I would watch Olivia C read the phone book (and Hiddles, although I’d be paying less attention to what he was saying).
I love her so much. She’s literally magic in Broadchurch and she’s wonderful in this, though I hope we get a lot more of her!
Did you see her and Hugh Laurie on Graham Norton? I loved her story about getting the part and the director saying they could work with her pregnant.
I also loved ‘cold office’ running joke in the first ep, I didn’t realise she wasn’t supposed to be pregnant yet for awhile.
Hiddles… sigh… god he’s just so beautiful. For some reason I could see him ‘acting’ a lot early on, which is annoying, but I kind of love him, a nice guy, playing a nice who’s pretending to be a bad guy!
Just to add to the Olivia-loving, she speaks out on behalf of the British charity Refuge which provides refuges and advice for victims of domestic violence. She met the charity when she was researching her role in “Tyrannosaur”.
Oh my God that scene in the church – I thought that was so great, and perfect for the character, and totally proved that swapping the character’s gender was a really good idea. Like, of course it gives her advantages dealing with these male chauvinist pigs to be the soft gentle understanding woman when she needs to be.
Don’t look too closely at the plot or it falls apart, but the whole show is very enjoyable and I really like the pacing: it’s taking its time while still managing to hold my attention, and given I have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to TV, that’s no mean feat.
Yes! I love the character they’ve given her; She uses womanly smarts to get around all the boys (Oh don’t mind me and my little agency over here, we’re not doing anything important…) but is just as smart and manipulative as the rest of them.
Without looking at it too hard, I’m actually really enjoying the plot and the pacing; I do like a good spy thriller, but so many of them are not good, they just have violence and big explosions instead of plot! There are a few things that have happened where I’m like ‘wait what?’ (How did they manage to oust Ropers right hand man with one comment about his drinking? If he’s such a smart criminal, why does he have all this shit hanging around in printed papers? There’s no way that kids Iphone is secure enough that Pine can cover his tracks, there is definitely a tracker on it. How did he know that alarm was going to go off for so long? Does it do that every day? Even alarms that are tested regularly only go off for a few blips) but then there’s a topless Tom Hiddleston running on the beach and I forget what I was complaining about.
ETA: I think the largest reason I can forgive all the plot holes and enjoy it is that Hugh Laurie is an amazing villain and he needs to be evil more often.
Yeah I think it has suffered slightly from being updated to the present (no security cameras?) but I’m all for willing suspension of disbelief – it’s a story after all.
One thing I found quite believable which judging from reviews other people didn’t, is the way the wife of the other dude just told him all that shit when they were sitting by the pool. I can totally believe she’d do that, if you have a secret, it’s natural to want to tell it to someone, especially if the person whose secret it is has wronged you. And Pine was the perfect person to tell – she doesn’t really know him, but knows he’s not going to get her in trouble over it (so she thinks).
I haven’t read the book, and I have wondered sometimes when it was set. They’re making an effort with the ‘tech’ stuff, like the sim cards and so on, but then there’s such blatant things that they overlook (serious, iphones are the most unsecure thing in the world, I was surprised that Roper allowed his son to have one in the first place. Especially since no other phones are allowed on the island. It must be tracked/disabled in some way at least, right?). I can kind of forgive the no cameras thing, Roper is a very private person and this is his home, so I can imagine him not wanting any camera/recording of people coming and going.
I really liked that scene, although it took me a few minutes to understand what was going on; for a second I thought maybe she was a spy as well and had spotted him and was passing on info? And then I thought maybe she was going to seduce him, because he ‘sees’ her. And yes, it makes sense that she’d tell him, he’s an ‘outsider’, he’s probably not going to run straight to Roper, and she’s obviously in a ‘burn it all’ place with her husband at that point; Although I don’t know how much sense it makes that Roper and her husband would just let her leave like that, if she really does know everything then she’s a very dangerous woman for them to have walking around while very angry at them all. Maybe they’ll pick that up later, but I doubt it
The book was published and set in 1993, which explains some of it: some of the stuff that doesn’t make sense in the updated setting would have done then, I suppose. I haven’t read it.
I was also wondering whether something’s going to happen to her, I suspect it will given that Roper knows she told Jed about it all. My guess is a “suicide”.
Ah, that explains why everything is printed out in hard copy then!
I think something has to happen to her; its definitely been set up like it. Oooh, maybe Roper kills the wife and Pine uses that to turn the husband guy against Roper?
I have never heard of this! Thank you for pointing it out to me, it’s exactly what I want to watch.
You’re welcome! Its only a 6 part mini series, and there’s only 3 episodes so far, just to warn you in case you get really into it and it comes to an abrupt end (this has happened to me before and its very sad.)
Thanks for mentioning this! I’ve been holding off watching until it’s done (I don’t mind spoilers, in fact I appreciate them usually). Thanks for letting us know what you think and I would love hearing your opinion after it wraps up.
So far I’m loving it; there is a bit of violence, but its justified within the story. Hiddles does get his beautiful face broken in and that was very distressing to watch (as in I was shouting ‘not his face!’ at the laptop) but turns out he looks bloody hot with some healing bruises and a haunted look in his eye.
I’m looking forward to re-watching the whole thing, I forget so much during the week between episodes!
Yeah, I um…might have saved a gifset of his banged-up face. So that aspect, at least, won’t bother me at all because YES YES HE DOES look bloody hot with some healing bruises and a haunted look in his eye. I would include a pic here, or at least a link, but Tumblr seems to be down.
In high school there was a science teacher who everyone knew would look down girls’ shirts any chance he could get. He wasn’t “cool” – he wasn’t a great teacher and no one really liked him – but he was the union rep. He was untouchable.
Funny that another common theme in this conversation is that these people manage to work their way into positions that make it very hard to complain about them or get them fired. As ever.
I think a lot of would-be abusers fail. The ones who are unable to pass themselves off as “cool” or embed themselves in powerful positions disappear quickly. They rely on status to make their word unchallengeable.
I’d like to think you’re right, but I’m not entirely convinced.
I mean, it’s grim either way. I think it would just mean that there are more people out there who are perfectly willing to be abusive, just that they don’t get the opportunities to act.
It shrinks the pool of supportive, decent people.
They might fail at their first choice form of abuse, but I think abusers always find a way. Can’t get away with groping girls as a teacher? Grope them on the crowded subway, etc.
No longer asked to volunteer with the church youth group? Volunteer as a youth soccer referee! Fired after getting your entire office blacklisted from having interns? Start your own business!
More open-thready but I am off to Iceland tomorrow morning! I am mega-excited even though the aurora forecast isn’t great, I am optimistic!
Oh, wow–seeing the northern lights is the entirety of my personal bucket list. I hope all forecasts are wrong and you see them while you’re there!! Have a wonderful trip. 🙂
I saw the aurora when I went several years ago in April, so there’s hope! Have a blast!
Yay!! The aurora was gorgeous up in Yorkshire the other night, looked like. Fingers crossed it makes an appearance while you’re up there!
I was glued to a cliff-cam from Shetland all evening!
Good luck! The forecast wasn’t great when we went but we ended up having an amazing (albeit freezing) show! It first started as a cloud that was moving a little weirdly but was normal in color; however, when you took a picture, it was a beautiful green, and then it exploded across the sky.
TL;DR, take pictures of oddly moving white/grey clouds and if the picture is colorful, the show might be starting up!
Safe travels! <3
Bon voyage!
I had a math teacher whose son was my age. We briefly dated, the son & I, & his dad was polite to me, though borderline inappropriate with his jokes & comments.
The next semester, after & the chillest breakup ever, I had said teacher. He would perch on the edge of girls’ desks during exams/etc, peering down their shirts, assigning one-on-one meetings in the evenings if they needed help, & it was so widespread that I remember a classmate bitterly joking that she had “even work a v-neck during midterms, I can’t believe I got a C.”
I changed teachers the end of the fall term.
The next year, the teacher was arrested for solicitation – the sparkling young woman happened to be an undercover cop. My friend, son of the teacher, went years (I believe) before he spoke to his dad again.
This has all been a really long time ago, so my details are a little fuzzy, but god damn.
Holy crap. I usually don’t think too kindly of undercover cops in schools–less 21 Jump Street, more that one This American Life episode–but that sounds like a righteous bust.
Tbh, I’m not sure if the bust happened in school or elsewhere – I want to say out of school – but approximately zero people I know were surprised when the news broke.
Pre-college teacher abuse not only happened in my school district, I’d say it was *commonplace*. Elementary had 1 teacher fired for it (never found out exact charges, forgot his name by now), middle school had two– one fired quietly after the school year for illegal material on school computers, one fired in the middle of the year for soliciting a 14-year-old girl who was actually a cop. (This was just while I was attending the schools, I’m sure there have been more since.) High school, I don’t think anyone got in trouble with the law, but there was a whisper network among us girls of which teachers would seat girls in the front row to look up their skirts or give unsolicited shoulder massages or “give you test answers” if you wore a low cut shirt or whatever. In my junior year, the district implemented a policy on social media, forbidding any staff from connecting with current students– not sure if that was linked to a specific incident, but one can reasonably assume…
Similar in my school: the creepy misogo tech teacher who I once overheard saying to the boys in my class, “Life’s a bitch, lads, and then you marry one!” (this is actually a positive memory, because all the boys could see that I was standing behind the teacher, and despite the fact that I was not REMOTELY popular, none of them were going to laugh at it with me there. I stayed very composed, and the teacher looked vaguely baffled that no one was laughing at his hilarious wit, then followed to boys’ gaze, turned around, saw me, and visibly, guiltily, jumped. I said sweetly, “Sorry, sir, could you help me with this?”) He was in his forties and had a toddler with a woman in her early 20s, who was rumoured to be an ex-student of his. He creeped on all the girls, and was apparently fired a few years after I left for “jokingly” locking two twelve-year-olds in his office.
When we were in sixth-form, a middle-aged music teacher sent a friend of mine a note telling her he was in love with her and offering to leave his wife and kids for her.
We did exactly what kids usually do: told no one, and set up a buddy system to make sure she was never in a practice room alone on days when he was in the department.
I remember talking to my mum about this years later, and saying how weird it was that nobody ever asked teenage girls which teachers were creepy. My mum said, “Ah, but you couldn’t do that. Teenage girls lie.” 🙁
AHH unsolicited shoulder massages! This just sent a shiver through me because it brought back an extremely visceral memory of my 6th/7th grade math teacher. It only happened once, and I shook it off because I liked him, but looking back…damn. Other kids all thought it was weird and I defended him!!!
He also had a terrible anger management problem, which was more heinous than his slight creepiness. He once took a kid’s backpack and emptied the contents across the front of the room before throwing the backpack out the classroom door.
Wait. Why did I like him again? Ugh.
When I was in high school, our band director brought in a guy (I’m guessing under the table, in hindsight) to help anyone in the wind section improve their skills, like free private lessons. He would hold them in the band director’s office after school hours, between classes and marching band practices (which started at 7pm). A lot of us signed up, excited for free lessons, and then over the course of the few months he was there, us girls all started dropping out of the free lessons one by one.
The guy was basically Newman from Seinfeld, and he would make constant remarks about how “mature” we looked. He would comment on our breasts, especially those of us with larger ones, and he would constantly make remarks about how he enjoyed teaching such “beautiful creatures.” I quit the private lessons after he put his hands on my shoulders and then slid them forward (I stopped him from reaching his intended destination) while I was playing through something.
The band director eventually started asking us why we had all quit the free lessons, and the guy disappeared shortly after that. But I think it says a lot about the way we were all socialized that not one of us came forward and complained, and instead we all just gave up on the private lessons. I think we were all scared of “rocking the boat.” As an adult and with hindsight, it makes me exceptionally sad that none of us came forward.
O_o I had an inappropriate band teacher, too. I was a percussionist, and he liked to “encourage” me while I was adjusting the stands for my instruments. Only now, 20+ years later, have i ever told anyone that story.
The nuns who ran my all-girls high school made a lot of weird, questionable decisions about running a school, but one thing they excelled at was not hiring creeps. We only ever had one or two male teachers, and they were usually so awkward and/or old that they were never going to be object of anybody’s affections, and we weren’t inclined to let them get away with anything either (once our male gym teacher tried to teach us to ballroom dance and there was practically a riot). That particular environment (at least at my school) is so precarious when it comes to that, though. There were girls at my school who would freak out when they smelled cologne in the hallway because it meant there might be a boy around, so I kind of shudder now to think about how a youngish, kind of attractive male teacher could have so easily taken advantage of that situation. At the time I thought it was just kind of a coincidence that all of our male teachers were 90 years old and very cranky, but now I recognize it as a conscious decision our administration was making and am very grateful.
I too went to an all-girls school run by nuns, and the only male teachers during my first few years there were older, awkward nerds with penchants for sweaters. Our maintenance man/”lawn boy” was a babe, but he only came around in the afternoon when the students were leaving.
I did band and musical at a nearby all-boys school, and that was the only place where I ever felt even a bit threatened, and that was only by one person. The musical director (with a history of being a creep) told me I was “blossoming into a young woman.” Reading all the posts today and Nicole’s thread yesterday, I am so SO SO grateful that that was the only encounter of that kind that I had. Thank you nuns!!!
Ha, our super awkward biology teacher was a big fan of the sweater vest. And I agree- so so grateful to those nuns. They were backwards in many ways, but they knew how to create a safe, nurturing environment in which girls can learn.
What the fuck is wrong with men?
I ask myself this question far too often.
I am getting more and more serious about how women need to be in charge of all the shit, from government to business to the Catholic church to schools. Yes, internalized misogyny and victim-blaming would still occur, but this level of enabling systemic predatory behavior would not go down.
alphabetically? chronologically? thematically grouped?
*checks clock*
how much time do you have???
I’d tell you, but Halloween is less than eight months out, and we don’t wanna miss that, do we?
TL;DR: LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
Science has been unable to successfully determine that so far. This is probably because men have been in charge of the funding.
I’ve recently instituted a new tag on my tumblr: “my misandry is less ironic by the day.” Because it’s true. UGH.
Entitlement.
Privilege corrupts.
JKR’s first piece on North American magical history is up and it’s on Native American magical traditions
It could be worse I guess?
I see she has made Native American wizards quite a lot like African wizards, and thus the problems she introduced in her article on Uagadou persist in her writings on Native Americans, at least the parts about wandlessness being seen as “more primitive” than wanded magic as well as the implication that Animagi come with a negative and spooky-mystical connotation.
There seems to be some hint that there was only Muggle/No-Maj immigration from Europe to the Americas. It would be interesting if almost all the wizarding families in the Western Hemisphere were people of color.
…and white people descended from “Navajo princesses”. 😐
Native Appropriations had a thoughtful and critical discussion of it- http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/03/magic-in-…
and another response too: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogs…
Guys I saw Hamilton on Sunday and it was unbelievable and through a friend of a friend we got to go backstage afterwards and stand very close to all of the stars. He kept telling us to talk to them but they were all talking to real people and I didn’t want to bother them, and standing 3 feet from Daveed Diggs is good enough for me. I took a selfie onstage and you can see Javier Munoz in the background, so that will be my souvenir. I know this is more open thread-y, but there are few people in my life who fully appreciate this and I know you guys will. I will post the picture(s) if someone can explain how that works.
WAT. WAT. WAT. OH MY GOD.
Photos below! 🙂
How to add images in HTML
Thank you! It’s below. 🙂
Wooooooooooooo! Thanks and HOW EXCITING FOR YOU!
NAILED IT! Javier Munoz in white shirt, Leslie Odom Jr. in suit in back. Also, my “act cool” face.
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Also, here is me realizing the Jonathan Groff was like 4 feet from me. (That’s also my lovely fiancee.)
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omg what a good face
OH MY GOD I AM SO JEALOUS!
I appreciate the hell out of this! So jealous! (I got a copy of the Reynolds Pamphlet and met Anthony at the stage door, but this–!)
Why do so many of us feel shame related to how creepers have treated us? It was in the article yesterday– the recipient of the gross declaration of “love” felt shame that she provoked it somehow– and it’s in so many of our stories. It’s in mine too.
But what utter bullshit. Why in the world did I feel embarrassed? No one ever flat-out told me I should feel that way about inappropriate sexual attention, but the first things I felt were embarrassment, guilt, and shame. Awful.
I am trying to teach my kids that it is NEVER their fault when someone harasses them or makes them feel uncomfortable and that they should yell and scream and make a fuss. Imagine if every time a dude tried to fondle a woman on the subway, she turned and yelled “NO!” Or if we replied to “bend you over your desk” jokes with “That’s gross and you should be ashamed of yourself.”
I know it’s not just that easy- fear of retaliation is real and there is so much pressure to not make a fuss. But I am pissed off. What if we all made such a fuss that we couldn’t be ignored anymore?
But then part of the shame is because you’re often so shocked that you don’t react, or at least not forcefully, and then afterwards it increases the guilt. I mean, absolutely, if you have the wherewithal and the presence of mind: go for it! But girls are not causing this, and it’s not their responsibility to stop it.
I mean, I remember I wore a cute (admittedly low cut) new shirt to school one time. Substitute physics teacher spent half the class staring at my boobs. Took me years to dare to wear that shirt again. Of course it wasn’t my fault, but telling me I should have just defiantly kept wearing the shirt wouldn’t have helped me much, either: that would’ve just put me in a lose-lose situation.
Part of the shame is often from freezing up in the moment and not reacting, which makes one feel complicit. That’s totally true and I do not in any way mean to say girls have responsibility to stop predatory behavior.
What I meant was more like, what would the world be like if we empowered girls to make a fuss? Part of the freezing up is because we are socialized to not make waves. What if we started telling our girls to make waves? Make big fucking waves.
We need to not only empower people to make a fuss, but back them up immediately when they do. I was sexually assaulted at sixteen by a 10 year older “friend” who was (in retrospect) 100% grooming me. I said no, stop, and pulled away, but my other onlooking “friends” laughed and told me I liked it or clearly wanted it, since I had let him hold me while I cried after a 9/11 memorial, held a couple weeks after the attacks.
It took me a couple years to truly believe that I was assaulted and that I hadn’t cheated on my now-husband. It also damaged my sense of appropriate boundaries in ways that have only recently been repaired.
Absolutely! One of my stories involves a church Sunday School teacher who everyone loved. My parents taught me from an early age that if something made me uncomfortable I should speak up and they would back me up. One day the teacher hugged me at church during the time in the service where everyone would greet each other. I hugged a lot of people during that time because I loved them and I enjoyed hugging them, but this guy’s hug made me feel really weird. I couldn’t explain why or what was different, but I didn’t like it (he was later accused of molestation by someone else, so I was picking up that predatory vibe even though I didn’t know how to label it at that point in my life).
The next week he tried to hug me, and I stuck out my hand for a handshake, saying I didn’t feel comfortable hugging him. His face turned beet red with anger. After the service, he told my parents that I had disrespected him by refusing his hug. They immediately defended me and told him he was wrong. That kids have the right not to hug people if they don’t want to and that his getting upset about it was ringing alarm bells to them. They ended up talking to the pastor about it, who said the teacher was beloved by many and had been for years, and that we were making too big a deal about the whole thing.
My mom will still launch into a rant about how she was right about that man and about how people need to back up the rights of children to bodily autonomy. I am so, so glad that I had the kind of parents who would get mad FOR me and not AT me in a situation like that. And so sad that so many others in authority refuse to see the red flags when they show up.
Somehow I didn’t connect that experience to creepy high school teachers making gross comments or giving creepy looks. But it’s not like you can tell someone to stop looking at you. And when all the girls are talking about Creepy Teacher, including to other teachers, and it just get ignored, what can you really do?
Kids don’t generalize things well, and it never occurred to me that “an adult should never touch you in a way that makes you uncomfortable” could also translate into them saying gross things, etc. So I didn’t know how to speak up or what to do.
My parents never talked about those kinds of situations being a possibility or how to handle them. The schools don’t either even though every school seems to have shit like that happening.
Your mom sounds amazing! And yes, I do think it’s very important to teach kids they have a right to bodily autonomy (and not to force them to hug or kiss people if they don’t want to for any reason)
She is really good about that issue and I’m grateful for it. We often have a difficult relationship for other reasons but I am glad she taught me to be a loudmouth.
What wonderful parents!
Good for your parents, bad on that pastor.
This. There have been too many times when I’ve frozen up, and in retrospect I wish I’d done anything but. It breaks my heart to think about what I would have done differently if I hadn’t been socialized, as we all were, to “not make a fuss.”
Yes. It’s only in the past few years I’ve realized how much that training’s affected my life (mostly in the negative) and how hard it is to cast off. Nothing on par with what other women here have described, but still. I really wish we’d stop teaching our girls to be polite.
Yeah, but also tell them that freezing up is completely normal, and the sassy, confident, fights-back lady that we all dream of being is mostly a male fantasy. (“Sassy confident lady fights back! This lady is not fighting back, so she either lacks sass and confidence, or she’s enjoying it!” Lots of women buy into the “sassy fights back so empowering”
trope as well, of course, but I firmly believe that the reason it’s so popular is because it works out really really well for men.)
I want girls to know that freezing up with surprise, amazement, and sheer disbelief are normal reactions. That someone assaulting you is INCREDIBLY counter-intuitive and unnatural and bizarre, and you’ve not let anyone down or failed anyone if you don’t react.
I absolutely, totally agree. I didn’t realize until this whole discussion thread today that I don’t think I have ever told my kids this- that freezing up is normal and okay. I’m going to start.
And, you know, sometimes saying nothing is the best defense mechanism at the time. Unfortunately.
I was a college student in the 90s when the women’s self-defense classes were really popular (are they still?), but unfortunately also very victim-blamey (implied you could “prevent” rape/assault by not adopting a victim attitude, by dressing conservatively, by never going anywhere unsafe alone, by living your life in constant fear, etc etc). However, the one good thing that came out of taking that class was practicing vocalizing ANY TIME someone invaded my personal space. Like, shouting really loudly. Fast forward a few years and this shouting had become a reflex, so when some asshole teenager slapped my rear end when I was walking home from the train station I turned around and unloaded on that kid, making so much noise that by the time I was through shouting at him we had an audience of 15 or so people, including the police officer who was assigned to the high school where the kid was a student. My point here is that freezing is a 100% natural reaction, you will never know how you’ll react to a situation until you’re actually in it, but you can practice how you want to react. And practice. And practice. So that when something does happen (because apparently it will, holy fuck reading all these tweets/stories has been horrifying), your body knows what to do and doesn’t need to wait for your brain to send it instructions.
I’m sure a lot of it comes from the fact that (at least in America) sexuality is often introduced and taught to youth as being shameful and sinful in some way, and so from there the general mentality around anything sex-related, even harassment, is colored strongly by shame. The whole way people are socialized around sex is so negative and so full of blame and shame that of course people feel shame and negativity and embarrassment that such things are said about them or that sexual acts are forced upon them by other people. It’s a massive problem, and I think going back to the beginning and teaching people that sex is normal and natural and that sexuality is not a sin or a burden is a major part of overhauling the overall conversation on sex and sexuality.
I think that’s true. I know I was taught a lot of “girls are the gatekeepers” and “dress so you don’t tempt men” bullshit, so when creepy teachers hit on my I was immediately embarrassed that I was wearing something I didn’t realize was revealing or whatever. It’s awful.
But also the flip side that I’ve seen men use, which is, “but baby, sex is natural and healthy! You should be proud of your sexiness!” So that you become the prude and the scold if you object to anything they say or do.
This is just me thinking; but I think there’s a bit of shame about not liking it.
As in, I see all these women around me laughing at this creeps gross comments, but I don’t like it, what’s wrong with me? Because when you’re a teenage girl, you’re so unsure of everything (at least I was) and you’re trying to take your cues from the ‘adults’ around you, but what’s happening feels wrong so you must be the wrong one?
I think a huge part of it is to let children trust their instincts and let their no be a no. If you can keep that intact into their teenage years they’ll be a lot stronger (So if a child doesn’t want to hug someone, let them say no. Don’t tell them to override their gut feelings and instincts to appease the person or group harmony)
That happens too! Cool girls laugh along, they like the attention. If you don’t like it you’re no fun. That definitely happens sometimes.
Yes, especially with teachers; all the cool girls are talking to him about boys and sex, so you have to be like that too if you want to be cool.
And they point out in the slate article; when you’re an awkward AF teen girl, special attention from an adult who’s treating you like an ‘equal’ is flattering too. Its why I dated so many older guys! And its also why we have age of consent laws BECAUSE TEENAGERS DON’T KNOW ANY BETTER. Teens will often go along with the agenda set by the adult (so long as its not a parent), so as an adult its your responsibility to keep the conversation/relationship appropriate.
See also: many comments about the Erin Andrews situation.
I remember when I was a teenager, I got invited over to a friend’s house and he groped me repeatedly. We were in a basement room; his mother was upstairs, and I could have yelled for help if I wanted to. But I didn’t- why? Because I was too embarassed.
I actually find it very easy to forgive Past!Wench for her (non)reactions to creepers. Which fits with at least one scholar’s take that “shame is a violation of cultural or social values while guilt feelings arise from violations of one’s internal values”. (Wikipedia summary of Ruth Benedict, from page on “Shame”.) It’s not my failure to uphold my own values (“Fuck off, shitbags” is definitely a value of mine now) that sorts some memories into my “OH GOD TOO PAINFUL TO EVEN LOOK AT IT” file. So my hypothesis has two parts:
1. Socialization that treats romantic/sexual interactions as supreme to all others. While I picked up a lot of dumb things about romance and sex from the culture in childhood, the socialization that romantic love (and its co-entanglement with sex) is the Most Important Thing, composed of pieces that Can Destroy a Human, it’s the Greatest Measure of a Human’s Worth. In my case (many of our cases), this was compounded with so very little experience in this realm, so there was so little real (ie, not fictionalized) context for each one.
2. Socialization sez we are responsible for the other person’s emotions in this context, and maybe also for any bystanders’. Some of this is very well-documented, including how much women are taught to be responsible for everyone’s emotions all of the time. But I think this can combine in this context with the above: now we are responsible for someone else’s Most Important Things, the Measure of Their Very Worth.
So a fear response to another human behaving aggressively + a worldview that this is The Most Important Thing + a sense of a moral obligation to take care of your own aggressor = the memories that sometimes make me stop in the middle of a sidewalk because of the painful shame.
(Obviously, I can see how guilt or even shame at one’s own lack of aggressive response can twist and compound with this! But I appreciated the prompt to build my own thought exercise around this question.)
Re your excellent point number 1
“Socialization that treats romantic/sexual interactions as supreme to all others.” – I’d say yes, but mostly for women and girls. The patriarchy wants it like that.
“Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,
‘Tis a woman’s whole existence” (from Byron’s Don Juan).
Eh, for me, it’s related to “Well, they like you” from elementary school. Which leads to disgust, a terrible idea of what people do when they like you, and deep shame about being paid attention to.
I should probably just see a therapist.
it me. Early twenties, still horrified about physical intimacy because “how could you possibly want to do that to someone you like?”
I too have an inappropriate teacher story (well, he was coach); and what the whole experience taught me, was to trust my instincts about a person, if you think they’re creepy, they’re creepy. It was my first venture into the ‘adult world’ and I knew something was off, but all the other responsible people around acted like it was fine, so I thought that this was just how the world works and I was supposed to play along.
There was a lot of your classic charismatic predator tactics; but the big one was getting all the girls he was interested in to hate each other, he created a weird competitive environment (which of course worked a charm on me cause I’m a competitive demon who just wants approval), and of course I realised afterwards, he did this so that none of the girls would talk about him and realise how fucked up it all was.
And what eventually ended it (after this man had worked there 20 years and done this to countless young and very vulnerable girls), was my friendship with another girl there. He tried like hell to make us not be friends, but we became friends despite him and eventually had the conversation of ‘Hey… this guys a bit weird right?’. It was just joyous relief to know that I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t crazy like he was telling me I was. And then we were able to support each other to report it, even though we knew we wouldn’t be believed and would be blamed for ‘playing the game’, which we were. In the end he lost his job, and any clearance he had to work with vulnerable people, but the criminal investigation didn’t go anywhere. And I got my closest friend in the world out of it and a keen ‘fuck this creep’ sense.
I read something on Tumblr about Justin Trudeau being a submissive in the BDSM relationship with his wife and I’ve never been more jealous of another country ever.
Um, link plz?
http://kehinki.tumblr.com/post/140643500211/my-gr…
Merci! Imma just go ahead and assume that this is NSFW and spend aaaaaaaallllllllll day imagining it until i get hime and can finally click excitedly 😀
Aw yisssssss, that was totally worth the wait! Ty!
RELATEDLY, I have been to the Ripped Bodice with a Toastie friend and I currently live pretty close (I’m moving away from LA next month) so if you want to hang out there and look at books I’d be up for it!
A friend of mine hung out there this weekend (for a signing? with some of the novelists?) and it sounded awesome! I used to like near there too, but I stupidly moved away.
I was there this weekend for the Tessa Dare book signing (who is awesome)! Courtney Milan was chilling there too. The store is amazing. I love that THE ENTIRE shop is filled with only romance and is sub-categorized by genre. Plus, got to love the free tampons in the bathroom and the little kids table with crayons and Mr. Darcy coloring pages. I’d be up to hang out with anyone there too!
The name makes me so happy because my mom would always sigh and call my romance novels “one of your bodice rippers”. I wish I had a local store 🙁
Wow, there are so many teacher stories. I always thought my school system was just sketchy, but I guess this is widespread. Mine are:
– Weird middle-school substitute teacher caught dumping child porn in a dumpster behind the mall.
– A couple years after I graduated, my high-school band director had an affair with a color guard instructor, who was not technically a student but was his subordinate and was just out of school herself (much younger than he was). He ended up divorced from his wife, who of course had just had their first baby.
– The worst was the most beloved teacher in our high school, who was gay. It was a conservative area, so he stayed sort of officially closeted despite this being common knowledge. (Happy to report things have improved for gay teachers since then, but this was 10+ years ago.) Anyway, a sophomore who was struggling with his sexuality turned to this teacher as a mentor, and the teacher showed him gay pornography and statutorily raped him. Teacher was prosecuted, but boy do you not really spend much time in jail for raping a student! I hope that kid is doing okay today – what a betrayal.
Oh yeah, my husband also has a story about being like 16 and catching his science teacher looking down his girlfriend’s shirt, which was something this teacher was known for.
We had a gross P.E. teacher in our all-girls Catholic high school. You all know the type – the subject of all the “what do you call Mr Smith in the shower? Gorilla in the mist!” jokes. He just gave off that creepy vibe. He once told a girl, in front of the whole class, that he would date her if she was 10 years old and he was 10 years younger. He was also our (very insufficient – as I’ve mentioned before, I didn’t know what a condom looked like until I started looking stuff up on the internet) sex ed teacher and we were all incredibly glad that he didn’t have the stones to actually teach it. He’s still teaching.
Another teacher married a former student. He would have been in his early-mid 20s at the time when he met her. Ok. 10-15 years later, she died, and he married another former student. This time he would have been in his 30s when they met. A few years ago (in his 50s) he was asked to resign because of inappropriate relations with a current student. He’s still teaching, just not there.
My 7th grade teacher made inappropriate comments to several girls in our class, but no one reported him because we had no idea what to do. He was finally asked to resign when, on camp, he ran his hand up and down a girl’s calf and said something like “ooh, do your parents know you’re shaving yet?”. I’m pretty sure there were other teachers present, but it took a boy telling his mother when we got home for anything to happen. She then raised hell, and 20 years later even though I never met her I wish I could thank her. He’s still teaching – he owns his own dance school. He has two daughters 🙁
My Catholic high school decided it was a good idea to have an incredibly creepy old man be the counselor for all of the freshman year girls. I guess to teach us all to have trust issues forever?
This is why I’m going to send my eventual kids to public schools!
God bless that woman and everyone like her.
Yep – if you can’t tell from the “asked to resign” response that both schools had, justice in these things moves like treacle, if at all. I guess I can just hope to react like that if I’m ever faced with a similar situation.
I meant 10 years older, not 10 years old. Still not a happy situation, and she was super freaked out.
i am aboslutely delighted to see that a busted-ass Nokia is the phone of choice for that video.
Kind of related to Nicole’s thread/topic, there’s something i’ve been wondering this weekend: trigger warnings on tweets. I am all about trigger/content warnings and very grateful for their existence sometimes, but I’m very confused about why/how people use them on tweets. The examples I saw this weekend were “trigger warning” or “TW” at the beginning of the tweet containing the thing to be warned about, but the “TW” didn’t list what it was, and by the time I parsed the “TW” I had already read the rest of the tweet? and there weren’t any follow-up tweets on the topic?
So…why is it done like that? Isn’t it defeating the point to say TW but not separate the content somehow? Someone I follow regularly uses “TW: topic” and then gives a blank line before the content, but also with the size of a tweet, I’ve already read the dang thing before I fully digest the “TW” line (also, you know, scrolling up and reading from below, rather than top-down). I don’t really want to bring it up with them, because I wonder if this is my failing?
Is there a reason people do it this way?
(Also, how much do you hate the recent innovations of more or less full-size images instead of the 3×4 cropped preview, so that it’s harder/longer to scroll past upsetting pictures?! because every time Science Friday tweets/retweets that stupid 3D printed ear, I want to throw up, thanks SciFri)
I think a TW can be helpful if you’re going to be replying to yourself, but yeah, if it’s all in the same tweet, 140 characters is tough to do it right in.
Yes, I would have expected the reply-to-self but when it isn’t…? and the one person I follow who leaves the gap, which is nice, but doesn’t really solve the problem.
Someone I follow does it in a really smart way, I think: they say something like “TW for x in this thread” and then thread the rest of their tweets below that one by replying to themselves.
Yes, this is kind of how I would expect it to work, especially now that it takes effort to expand a thread (which is annoying, but.)
Just a guess, but it’s possible some people have extensions that automatically hide tweets tagged with trigger warnings/certain keywords?
Oh, that makes sense, if it exists! I hadn’t heard of it.
I felt so confused because the people doing this are so conscientious about such things, but then to tweet “TW blah blah blah” felt so perfunctory and perhaps even performative rather than actually considerate, you know? Especially with the size of a tweet, and the way so many people read in chunks rather than word by word.
Yeaaaaah I mean, I would agree that most of the time it’s probably more performative/ass-covering than actually meaningful, unless they’re threading the triggery content.
Question, because I’m still getting used to Twitter: if a threaded tweet is RT’d, it just looks like any other RT, right? Do some people append the TW directly to the tweet so that it remains with the tweet if it’s RT’d? As opposed to a threaded tweet which could be separated from the TW if it’s RT’d?
You are correct! Also when you view someone’s profile directly, the tweets aren’t threaded. So that is a possible reason for the TW tag. Except that it still runs into all the other problems, where it doesn’t actually serve the purpose of giving people and opportunity to consider the topic and if they want to read it or otherwise be prepared for it, since it doesn’t mention the topic itself and tweets are so short/small that it’s too easy to read the content before registering it/the TW note. (Edit: which is why I’ve been wondering if I’m missing something or otherwise just not understanding the use of “TW” on tweets.)
A lot of people will use the “quote” function for RTs and give a TW with topic there, and those are a bit easier to skim over because they’re offest and smaller, in my experience. (Still visible, so not perfect, but better.)
This is what I was hoping isn’t the case, because some of the people whose tweets I saw over the weekend are some of the most outspoken people I know regarding content warnings and social justice practices.
That’s how it works on tumblr, so I can see how people who use those extensions might forget that not everyone knows about them.
Lin-Manual Miranda was on Another Round and I spent my morning commute listening to that instead of reading the paper and it was great, 100 % recommend. It is episode 45, which for some reason isn’t up on the homepage but is available via whatever your podcast download method of choice is.
AAAAHHHH SO EXCITED can’t wait to listen later!
It was so good and fun! I love how Lin manages to give us new stories and anecdotes in his infinite press appearances.
Toasties, this is more OT than Link Roundup, but I needed to share. My boss informed me yesterday that our option for flex time will be going away, so I won’t be allowed to telecommute in one day a week anymore. This is what has allowed me to visit my significant other, who is in a different state (I can take long weekends to travel; we’re currently long distance for dissertation reasons), and comes on top of three years of no raise (never in the budget), with a low pay to begin with (I was just out of grad school when I accepted my current salary and didn’t know better). My boss threw me a weak “I did mention to the director that we should get you a new title,” but he’s been saying that for over a year, so I consider it a false promise at this point.
Toasties, I am done. I am shining up my resume and sending out applications in the area where my SO is. I am making an exit strategy. I just needed to share, because it is a big move for me – I’ve rationalized staying at this job I don’t really like for a long time now, and I’ve finally got my courage (or at least enough rage) to move forward.
Yay! Remember to polish your rage into a tiny gemstone you can rub when applying for jobs gets too annoying.
That might be the best job hunting advice ever.
Man, that stinks. My company FINALLY introduced the ability to WFH two days a month (LOL). I am a corporate remote employee, so I am literally never face to face with my clients as it is, so does it really matter if I’m in the office out here, or in my house out here? Anyway, I am hoping it all works out well so that they keep the policy in place, because while I don’t enjoy WFH, I know it can be a HUGE benefit for so many people.
Best of luck in the job hunt.
May the job listings ever be in your favor! Best of luck and all the support for your decision.
Good luck! It’s hard to make that decision, and I’m sorry that it’s come on the heels of so much baloney. On to bigger and better things!
GOOD. Everything you’ve listed points to “find another job asap,” and I am so glad that’s your plan. You deserve better!
Everybody, thank you for your nice comments. It means a lot to feel supported and validated.
Good luck finding a job worthy of you! I think it’s very much the right thing to do. Companies shouldn’t be able to treat employees that way without consequences.
Do it!!! You have totally got this. It sounds like the Universe is conspiring to spring you out of jail and give you a shiny, new opportunity. Meanwhile, don’t be down on yourself for accepting your salary – this has been a learning experience. You’re stronger, smarter, better, and more valuable in a quantifiable way now. Go get ’em.
Good luck! Keep us posted. 🙂
UGH all of these high school teacher stories are horrifying, not the least because I can add a few from my own high school.
The band teacher (band teachers come up A LOT in these stories, have you noticed), who fucked a student (he was married with kids, of course). It only stopped when she told her mother.
The English teacher (just out of college) who approached my best friend as she was waiting for her mom to pick her up from school and made all sorts of inappropriate comments and offered her a ride (!). She declined, and made an excuse to be picked up at a different entrance from there on out.
The young janitor who hooked up with a student (they may still be together?).
Then there was the speech teacher, whose Speech and Debate class was surprisingly empty. I took his class because it counted for double the credits and I got to travel to tournaments with friends. However, this particular class had only three members…and eventually no one but me, because the others stopped coming. I knew that wasn’t good, but I wanted the credit and the easy way out of speech class. He would get very, very close to girls, leaning over them, touching an arm or a shoulder whilst giving us criticism. I froze every time he did it, but it never went any further. I thought about how I might get run out the door if it went any further. My friends, who had been through his class the year before, joked frequently about his creepiness (as did I, in the manner of teenage girls), and did so in front of our theater teacher. In the middle of the semester, the theater teacher asked creepy speech teacher to let me be the stage manager for the current play that was being rehearsed, and he agreed. Suddenly I wasn’t in a classroom alone with creepy dude anymore, and it was great. The semester ended, the class was over, and the obligation was done. The next year, we noticed, the creepy teacher had left. We found out, years after graduation, that he had been let go, and that our theater teacher had accused him of inappropriate behavior. With us. When I last talked to these friends, we all wondered what would make him act on our rumors and jokes, to the point of pulling me out of the creep’s class and getting him fired. My BFF figured it out: “He had probably been hearing these rumors and jokes FOR YEARS.” She also answered the question of why the creep never went further than standing too close and touching our arms: “He was waiting for reciprocation.” UGH.
And that’s the story I have to tell. Because even the most well-protected girl has these stories. And it’s not til later that you look back and realize how fucked up that is.
Wow. That theater teacher is a good person. And “event he most well-protected girl has these stories” is so painfully true.
I am the most well-protected girl. My parents were both teachers in the school system where I went to school (and so were my grandmother and my aunt), and I have a protective older brother, and our last name is very distinctive so everyone knew whose kid/younger sister I was, and apparently even as a teenager I radiated fuck off vibes (I have since perfected this skill, obvs.) And I still have stories–the show choir director who was a little too hands-on with all the girls (but never the boys, I know you’re shocked) when teaching the dance moves, the theater teacher who thought it was A-ok to cast said choir director as the lead in one of the musicals (only time that ever happened, WTF) opposite this high-school girl he had been solicitously hovering over for months, with said theater teacher later (and to absolutely nobody’s surprise) divorcing his wife to take up with a just-turned-18 former student, the psychology teacher (who was married to a former student about 20 years his junior) who spent entire class periods looking the girls over from head to toe. And I never said anything, because I didn’t want to make a fuss or cause problems.
That sounds like a hideous clusterfuck of gross. And it’s just so omnipresent we don’t even realize it.
Obviously, the danger of “cool teacher” is something that I have always known but rarely articulated. You know, like gravity. It’s so obviously there I don’t even think about it. It was the cool teacher, or the teacher who thought they were cool, who pushed the boundaries with students.
On the other hand, that Slate article made me think about my behavior as a youth group leader. Obviously, I never expressed any sexual interest in the kids I worked with (pretty much because I NEVER HAD INTEREST IN TEENAGERS, GROSS) but I did want to be considered “cool.” I learned about what they liked, I tried to make sure they would like all the events, I thought about everything I said so they would want to be around me more. I treated them like equals, so they would come to me with their problems.
And some of that is important. Certainly, knowing what drives the youth you’re working with is the only way to get them to participate. But it’s a fuzzy line; at what point did I rob those young people of an adult role model by de-aging myself to their young level? Of course this isn’t as serious as sexual harassment, but still. I realize now that the young people in my life don’t need another teenage-acting friend. They need adults who care about them enough to be adults.
The USOC has a training program for coaches called “safe sport” that you might find helpful- it’s aimed at sports coaches, but it addresses the sorts of issues and abuses that can crop up in the types of relationships that coaches have with players, namely close relationships with minimal supervision, a severe power imbalance and a role that kids really want to please. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t pull many punches and it’s pretty comprehensive.
The uterine transplant article is marvelous – the developments we’ve made in science may not have given me a hovercar yet, but this seems better.
However – does anyone else feel weird about the last quote in the article, from Angelica Ross? This part specifically: “Because of getting fired from job after job, most trans people, especially trans people of color, are barely able to take care of themselves, much less a child,” she said.
She goes on to say that she thinks the possibilities are exciting and it’s great that she as a trans woman would be able to do this, but… I don’t know, the article up to that point made no mention of cost, or the socioeconomic plight of many trans people, and her sentence feels almost antagonistic somehow.
Am I reading too much into this?
I think “barely able to take care of themselves” is a really loaded phrase that implies that the trans people in question are emotionally/mentally incompetent to take care of themselves/children, when what I think she means to say is that they’ve been systematically denied the resources they need to live & raise children comfortably. It’s a good point (if that’s what she meant), but poorly phrased.
Okay, that’s what I thought… you phrased it way better than I could even in my own head 🙂
Only tangentially related to Flint, but today is Michigan’s primary! Fellow Michigan Toasties, get out the vote! (our primary is confusing because it’s called a “closed” primary, but you don’t have to be a registered party member to vote. You just check off which ballot you want).
Also, found out today we’re a voter ID state, which is maybe closer related to Flint because of the way that voter ID’s intersect with poverty? Idk, just trying to relate this to the actual links, ha.
YES!!!! I was at the Bernie Sanders rally last night! And while I am happy with either Dem candidate, it has just been so wonderful to see an actual candidate with progressive and idealist platforms such as his.
Ah, thank you! A friend of mine who lives there said it was closed, but I’d heard NPR say it was open and got confused, and who the hell was I to try and correct her when SHE LIVES THERE and I’m hundreds of miles away.
IDs are NOT mandatory in Michigan. You can sign a… thing, I am totally blanking on the word right now, that basically is a sworn statement that you are who you say you are and that you’re in the correct precinct, instead of showing ID.
AFFIDAVIT that’s the thing you can sign
(I am voting after work!)
I voted! Thank you!
How terrible is it that I’m grateful for the fact that I never had any interactions with teachers like that in school and don’t know of any that had reputations for it? That should be a given.
Hi Toasts—stopping in to say I haven’t heard if my dad’s out of surgery yet, so that’s stressing me out. (heart cath).
Also, Teen unilaterally decided the antidepressants weren’t doing anything. So he stopped them on Friday. Today he overslept, didn’t study, started yelling at me for it in the car, and when I said, “too bad, sorry that happened, your not studying isn’t my problem though”, he sat there in his hate-stew (which he curates, it’s a glare state, I think), and said, “You telling me that the first time made me want to punch you in the face. You saying that a second time made me want to pull the car keys out of the ignition and slit your throat”
This is my KID. Fuck this shit. Do you know how easy it would be to say, fuck you, don’t treat me that way, go live with your father (the one who modeled this abusive shit to him his whole life? that I put up with WAY too long?).
I know he’s tired, crabby, coming down off antidepressants that he actually need, but i.don’t,need.this and I shouldn’t have to take it. And it hurts. And I know he’s a hyperbolic teen and a drama king at that and always has been and I know he’s suicidal but damn. This sucks. And I can’t go heavy consequences on him because that will just start another can of fucking over his life that I cannot do to my kid but it is getting really hard not to.
We have an appointment friday with his counselor but I think I need to call him, again. I know the kid feels attacked when I bring this stuff up but ugh, there is no good solution.
sorry. I can’t tell anybody else this and I might explode.
Oh man, that is a seriously awful thing to be dealing with. Sending warm, gently-buttered toastie thoughts your way. Do you get to have your own counselor in all of this?
Distance hugs to you. I can’t even imagine having to deal with this; I can barely keep from crying if a stranger raises their voice at me. Seconding the hope that you have your own therapist to help you with this, and that you are safe.
Call him again, yes, and fast.
Seconding the comment to call the counselor before Friday. Today, if at all possible. This is so horrible and you should not be dealing with it alone (I don’t imagine how any mother could). Please get some professional advice for navigating this so it doesn’t happen again.
I’m so sorry that you’ve got all this shit to handle, it’s not fair and you shouldn’t have to go through it. Teenage boys can be awful. I really hope that you’ve got a good therapist to help look after you, and a friend to share wine or your choice of indulgence with, and I hope that you can do what you need to look after yourself.
First of all, I’m so sorry you’re dealing with all that. What a disrespectful way to talk to you; good on you for not dishing it back at him, you’re strong as hell, but WOWZA, you do not deserve that shit. That’s so rough. Big hugs, and I hope you talk to your counselor soon.
And best of luck with your dad’s surgery. I’ll be thinking of you, and hoping for the best re: both generations of men in your life right now.
I feel awkward saying this, but, I am worried for your safety. That is very specific violent ideation. I hope you can speak to your son’s counselor very soon.
it is, unfortunately, the way his father talks to women.
Thank you everybody. He seems to be doing better this afternoon. I am safe, I know this is the only way he has to say how strong his feeling is. We have been trying to get him to use other words! (you would think “use your words” would get easier when they got older, but I guess not). I am more worried about him hurting himself when he’s this upset.
I just get triggered like hell when he’s like that, obviously.
My dad’s cath did not give good news. He’s not supposed to work, do stairs, lift anything, and they are consulting with another cardiac surgeon. 2 arteries are completely blocked and 1 other is mostly blocked.
I am grateful I have extremely complicated homework to distract me at the moment because I’m not holding it together otherwise.
ETA also I have a therapist, I see her next week.
On the topic of the inappropriate teachers thing, does anyone else absolutely *hate* the move “The Election”? Like, with flames?
“Earlier in the year, another teacher, Jim’s best friend Dave Novotny, had seduced Tracy and began carrying on an affair with her. When Tracy’s mother learned of the affair and reported it to school authorities, Dave was fired from his job and divorced by his wife, Linda, while Tracy’s reputation was unscathed.”
…
“When Tracy presents Mr. McAllister with her list of nominating signatures to qualify for the election ballot, she makes a remark about ‘working closely’ together that he interprets as an indication she may try to seduce him.”
…
“As the film draws to a close, Jim is at a conference in Washington D.C. and sees Tracy enter a limousine with a congressman who she appears to work for as a member of his congressional staff. Enraged at the thought of Tracy, yet again, manipulating her way into political success, Jim hurls a soda at the limousine, then makes a quick getaway.”
The teachers are indeed, portrayed as losers who make poor decisions, but the Tracy character is also set up as a terrible person. It fills me with rage.
I really liked the movie, but I watched it as a teenager, so I don´t know how well it would still hold up for me.
I loved Reese Witherspoon´s portrayal of Tracy. She is intelligent and driven, but you totally get why others think she´s annoying and why she has problems making friends. The only teacher who notices her loneliness and could have helped her improve her social skills grooms her instead and takes sexual advantage of her.
I despised McAllister, especially in the end when he ignores the little girl at the museum whose only fault is that she´s eager to show that she knows the right answer (and that she reminds him of Tracy of course).
I hate that the ending implies that Tracy has an affair with the older politician. As if she couldn´t be successful on her own merits!
In the original ending Tracy confronts McAllister and he apologizes. That would have been so much better!
I loved this take on it: In Defence of Tracy Flick
Wow, sorry for this wall of text (and my mangling of the English language), apparently I have a lot of strong feelings about `Election´ and the handling of Tracy Flick.
Dingdingding.
My big annoyance is that the POV character is McAllister, and even though we are supposed to think he’s making terrible choices, they also want us to sympathize with him. Well fuck him and his terrible choices.
Exactly!
After he apologizes to her in the alternative ending, she confesses to being scared about going off to college and he reassures her that she’ll be okay and upon her request signs her yearbook.
I said I liked this ending more and I do, but that still enrages me.
Like look, he did something wrong, but he apologized and now everything is forgiven and look what a nice guy he is comforting her!!! Uggh! And of course she has to show her softer side (being afraid of college) and need his assurance for the audience to sympathize with her. 🙁
I still like the movie because it made me feel for her so much (maybe in spite of the movie´s intent???) but you are so right:
Fuck him and his terrible choices!
I have a story that might cheer up some of you who have been subjected to gross, inappropriate, feed-them-to-wolves-this-very-second experiences or stories starring horrible male teachers,
After a round of terrible health knocked me out of school temporarily, I decided to get my qualification for massage. When it came time to specialize, shiatsu resonated with me. The teacher was Caucasian with a Chinese wife he had collected while working on his O.M.D. over there. He was arrogant, callous, unkind, critical, and everything he did was saturated with scorn for his female students and with the dudes, an overly knowing overture of collusion. He regularly told us highly inappropriate things about his poor wife and their sex life and the general power dynamic of their household, which he made clear was as it should be and why Chinese women were superior mates to American women. It was so bad it was not even believable. We would so often sit in shocked silence because none of us could fathom that someone was actually being that racist and misogynistic for real, in person, right in front of us. All of us dreaded moments where he would demo something and have to touch us. He was a master at making you feel awful about yourself, for so many reasons (intelligence, fitness, health, race, gender, scholastic performance, etc), and would frequently do so while he had his hands on you.
Every student in the program hated him, and it was a small enough group of us in the specialty that we had a good understanding even where there was no real affection. At one point, he was doing a demo on one of the female students and started unfastening her pants and sliding his hands down them while she was on the table. Everyone in the room got extremely uncomfortable. You could have heard a pin drop when we all froze in disbelief at the moment we realized what he was doing. She looked utterly stricken and I spoke up to stop him. I stated that that seemed unnecessary for the demo and wouldn’t be something we did with clients, as a baseline rule of maintaining comfortable boundaries – if you are doing deep work on someone’s hip or groin, there are specific techniques to maintain a sense of clinical, therapeutic intent and we had covered that in deep tissue, sports massage, and prenatal to really hammer home the right way to communicate boundaries in touch and verbal communication. I then mentioned that the student looked extremely uncomfortable, and asked, weren’t we as practitioners supposed to notice and respond to that? He informed me it was fortunate for me and unfortunate for the rest of the word I was not living in ancient China, where I would very definitely have been killed. That’s a quote.
I had one of those reactions that you hate yourself for – unable to say or do anything, angry and outright scared even while knowing it was a load of utter malarkey, and horrified about his blithe willingness to physically transgress with a student *right in front of us*. I was by that time already a sexual assault survivor, and knew how official investigations went, and I had no faith in any system, ever. Regardless, since it happened to someone else, my sense of social justice was stronger than my dread and anxiety over my own confrontation. I went to the head of the school and told her what happened.
He didn’t come in the next day and we came to find out he had been fired that very day. I’m regretful now that she – or any of us – didn’t press charges. We didn’t realize how far out of line he was or how firm we were allowed to have boundaries, and we were adults. It’s terrifying to think of being a kid and coping with this.
Still, it felt like a win.
Holy crap. Even though justice was done, I am so upset that a person like that even exists.
It makes me sick to my stomach to wonder how he went on like that for so long, or wondering if his wife is okay, or what he is doing now and who he has hurt since. This is a person who by profession touches people, in private. The world is too scary sometimes.
But you’re here. And I’m here. And The Toast is here. All is not yet lost.
Very well said.
I had an Italian teacher in middle school who I reported, along with a group of girls from my class, for inappropriate behavior. He was just slimy – always telling girls (at 12 and 13) they were beautiful and sexy, in Italian. One girl in particular, who was part of the group with me. He was also an awful teacher, and spent his whole classes just talking about his personal life. He got audited at one point (from what I could understand, because all of this feels fuzzy now) and he pulled out all the stops to plan a pasta-making day on the day the superintendent observed his class. So to this day, I didn’t learn language from him, but I have an idea about how to make gnocchi.
Looking back, I’m super proud of preteen me for speaking up – except that the school said it couldn’t prove anything and other people liked him, so they gave all of us the choice of staying in his class or dropping out to take study hall for the rest of the year. And actually, during that study hall, another male teacher went crazy yelling at a girl for crying about something minor one day, turning bright red and screaming at her until she ran out of the room (still crying).
Fuck all of that. (Although the Italian teacher did get canned a couple years later, and I hoped I contributed.)
Couldn't read all these replies because of PTSD. I didn't have a predatory teacher, I was married to one. He was the "cool guy" in college and he told me how special and beautiful I was. Got married when we were 21. I kept working so he could get his PhD, we had some kids, he started teaching, and he kept right on telling high school and college girls how special and beautiful they were. He screwed as many as he could. We're divorced now. I'm 7 years out from when I found out and still occasionally suicidal from the pain and shock and disgust of the betrayal. It's been a hell of a ride for my children, too. He still teaches.
I am so sorry that happened to you. Both that your teacher was so disgusting and that your mom treated you that way. You deserve so much better.
"Prayerfully submit", hahaha. Most of my adolescence was met with "You have big tits, therefore it's your own damn fault that men are interested because you are a sinful daughter of Eve!"
Toastreaders, I was a shy and awkward teen, and this shit seriously fucked me up.
I don't believe women are 100% kind and benevolent leaders. I'll settle for "better than the status quo," because this is getting pretty unbearable.
As someone who currently lives in London: save yourself and your wallet and stay away.
and another response too: http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogs…