Reddit MRA: My eminent businessman friend who is totally not made-up refuses to be alone in a room with a woman

hellkell, you laugh, but would you believe how many haploid males get disposed of in wads of tissue every day?? It’s horrible!

So are we sure that Joe is not MARL, yet again, proving that he has no life?

I’ve seen that before.

I want to say it was a Miss Manners column, reprinted in a book years ago, though that would imply MRAs would take etiquette advice, and from a woman besides. In any event, the specific sentence “if a women is in his office, the door will remain open, with his assistant as witness” looks extremely familiar.

Andie: It is quite common to see male students and professors sitting together in the pub or cafeteria, but a male prof would have to be mad to ever take a female student out for a beer to discuss methodology or theory. Even a hint of impropriety can derail a professor’s career. I admit that even I shy away from anything less than totally public, formal interactions with female students, particularly the ones who come to class half-naked.

I’m not sure where you and your husband teach, but I’m a faculty brat (born in 1955 to a professor who became dept. head and Dean when I was in graduate school), professional student (kept taking graduate degrees because it was hard to find a job, so multiple schools, etc), then took my doctorate and have worked 19 years at a small university in NE Texas.

The blurring of the boundaries between student/faculty member back when most were men (i.e. hanging out at pubs together, bringing male student home for dinner that wife fixed because godforbid there were many women faculty, let alone any who dared bring home male students, etc.) were common in the US in the 195s, 1960s, etc. Things did begin to change when more women were being admitted, and there are still some hangovers from that tradition–recent debate about The APA’s (American Philosophical Association)’s “Smoker” (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/12/women-job-candidates-philosophy-appalled-smoker) make that clear. (Philosophy btw in the US at least is still the most sexist and racist of the humanities.)

I remember being a grad student under such circumstances, before the regulations against sexual harassment were instituted, and the bullshit that went on at professors’ houses and in such “social” circumstances.

With power inequalities, ‘socializing’ between faculty and grad students (especially) has to be handled carefully–the fact that some faculty are treating male students differently than female and somehow blaming the women (omg they are half naked! they dress whatever), and the changes that have led to some (very) flimsy protections against sexual exploitation of graduate students (a very vulnerable population esp. in some disciplines and departments) pisses me the hell off.

I’m a faculty member. I’m a queer woman (and it’s fairly well known on my campus, well enough so that rude graffitti was written up in the women’s room accusing me of making a pass at an unnamed student). Amazingly enough, a report was made, the graffitti cleaned off, and my dept. head (woman) who has known me since we were hired together did not in fact throw me off campus and ruin my career (no doubt it’s my pussy pass privilege).

Generally speaking: I would not meet in my office with a student after hours or on a weekend (male or female); I’d meet with them in the library. I often meet with students, and the door is open (because it’s office hours); if a student is horribly upset or freaked out, then with their permission I close the door. I would never meet a student at a bar (not in the Bible Belt), nor would I have public meals with students–though I’ve gone out with a group. I wouldn’t students to our home (my partner is a woman, and a dept. head on campus) for many reasons (mostly, who wants to clean up all the cat hair). That is true of most of my faculty colleagues–and yet my dept. is known for close and good mentoring or ALL our students, male and female, through a variety of ways, including a grad student organization that invites faculty to speak to any who are interested; through faculty working with groups of students to help them submit to conferences, and get published (a lot of that gets done by email, btw, with drafts–I don’t have time to spend a lot of time meeting with individual students). I run a weekly support group for students working on their thesis or dissertations. I have at least ten office hours a week, and I have no problems with getting a group together to mentor on a topic (I gave a workshop on human subjects issues a few weeks ago). We do guest lectures in other faculty’s classes, and we have a welcoming reception and end of term reception for ALL faculty and ALL graduate students, and when we have candidates on campus, grad students are invited to all the events EXCEPT the committee interview (including the meals). So there are all sorts of opportunities that do not involve one/one interactions in a place where alcohol is sold or in a home.

If women students are being disadvantaged by the academic culture, the fault is in that culture, not in the students nor in the changes that came about because of very real issues (when I began my first MA degree, at the same program I got my BA, one of the two women faculty who kept her door locked after hours and on weekeneds when she worked because of male colleagues met with me privately–first time ever, despite a whole lot of mentoring–and warned me against specific male colleagues by name that she knew would make passes at me based on her observations of them in the past–several were on their second or third graduate student wife–ex-grad student, more appropriate to say. She was right to every single one. This was when the men took female students sexual availability as a job perk, and the private warning system she embodied was known among the faculty wives and wives of graduate students and the largely female staff at my dad’s university-the women looked out for each other, as best they could, and warned each other about the predators).

Yeah, it is MARL.

Someone mentioned Miss Manners: one of my fave writers. She has a lot to say about how ‘business’ events have to be different from (and understood as different from) social events with friends, and how the two should never mix (she’s usually talking more about corporate/business things, but I think there’s a lot that academics could learn from that).

Ithiliana: yeah, there seems to be a LOT of confusion here as to what’s not a good idea because it’s just not professional, vs. what’s not a good idea because it violates personal boundaries. Taking a student to a bar might *not* violate their personal space, but it’s definitely not what I’d think of as professional.

Not so much in India and China – see the mass gendercide of female babies/infants out there, in response to mandated population reduction measures.

I’d love to hear your theory as to why one gender is being targeted in this instance.

Wait, the suffragettes were the same as the white feather women?

…What?

In what universe besides “paranoid, complicated, and increasingly self-referential MRA fantasies” does that make sense?

Next we’ll be hearing that the white feather suffragettes were all Titanic survivors.

Well, if JOE isn’t MRAL, he’s certainly every bit as boring and more so as MRAL!

Old, stale, talking points.

so, Joe, tell me what you think about hard library chairs: misandry or not?

Joe, do women spit on you?