June 2013
Participation grades are, in effect, inherently sexist, as well as ableist.
Teachers, first off, favor boys speaking in the classroom, even ones who think they do a good job of classroom equality.
- teachers are more likely to call on boys and then go on to reinforce, praise and encourage them. When a boy gives a wrong answer, a teacher will spend time to help him reason out the correct answer. However, when a girl answers, a teacher is likely to either respond with a bland “okay” to her right answer or simply to move on to another student if her answer is incorrect.
- Boys are eight times more likely to call out in class without raising their hands and tend to dominate discussions. Boys are twice often used as role models in class and five times more apt to get a teacher’s attention when they raise their hands to recite. Boys often recite even if they have not done the day’s homework, whereas even well prepared girls hesitate to participate. The older girls get, the more they let boys take over the class.
- Teachers learn boys’ names more quickly.
- An underlying theme of coeducational schools is that if only boys would work harder and behave better, they’d get better grades. The underlying message for girls is “You are nice and well behaved, and you work hard, but you’re not very smart.”
This is not even considering students who suffer from social anxiety or autism, or who are maybe even just introverted. This is generally an ableist phenomenon. Besides, anxiety mostly affects—wait for it—women. Women are twice as likely to have anxiety than men are.Classrooms need radical change. Learning gender roles begins during childhood, and what are we teaching children? That boys get to talk, and girls get to submit to them.
That’s fucked.
“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording —all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”
—Sylvia Plath (via ghostlip)
“(about female superheroes) Toymakers will tell you they won’t sell enough, and movie people will point to the two terrible superheroine movies that were made and say, You see? It can’t be done. It’s stupid, and I’m hoping The Hunger Games will lead to a paradigm shift. It’s frustrating to me that I don’t see anybody developing one of these movies. It actually pisses me off. My daughter watched The Avengers and was like, ‘My favorite characters were the Black Widow and Maria Hill,’ and I thought, Yeah, of course they were. I read a beautiful thing Junot Diaz wrote: ‘If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.’ (on whats next for him)And back to the female-hero thing, I’m not going to let nobody do it. It doesn’t have to be me, but it could be.”
—Joss Whedon on female superheroes, and what pisses him off about the industry via The Daily Beast (via albinwonderland)
Brazilian followers, please listen up!
This is very important!
In Brazil abortion is legal under some circumstances, which is a huge deal for women and for feminism. However, if this law is approved, our social and political rights will be taken from us. Just like that. Women will no longer be able to abort
- a rape-conceived child
- a product of pedophilia
- an anencephalic baby
- and even if her pregnancy is highly risky
It could be - apart from absurd, ridiculous and preposterous - a health care problem in our country.
So I BEG YOU to, please, sign and reblog.
I’ve been wanting to reblog a post like this for a while now and never found it.
This bill is called “Estatuto do Nascituro” that the estate is trying to pass, where it gives a fetus more rights than the woman carrying it. A fetus will be given the same rights of a born person and the woman carrying the fetus’ rights will be revoked. She will have absolutely no right to do anything as long as this right prejudice the fetus in any way.
It doesn’t matter if the fetus was conceived from rape. Or pedophilia. Or if you’re baby will be born dead anyway, or die immediately at birth. Or if your live is at risk. A fetus, a bunch of cells immediately after conception, will be more important than the woman’s life.
This bill is also VERY worrisome because it puts that if the rapist is identified he will be obliged by law to register and give support to the child resulted from rape. Do you guys understand how absolutely terrifying this bill can be? If a woman is raped, a child is raped - because there is no differentiation in this bill - she will not only be forced by law to carry the pregnancy full term, but risk being faced with her rapist for the rest of her life and give him the title of fatherhood.
This is a huge step back to all of us who fight for our women’s right, for those who fought for them for years. Our body is not anyone’s property. The decision is ours, the body is ours. No one in this world has any right over someone else’s body, be it a woman or a man, specially when it deals with something as horrible and violating as rape.
“
I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.
There are not any.
By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.
Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.
Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?
They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.
” —At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR
The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.
(via kdhart)
“My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.”
—Maya Angelou (via loveyourchaos)
