Buckle up, friends. It’s about to get very real. And kind of raw.
There’s a thought experiment ricocheting around the internet right now that merits our attention. It’s a simple question: Man or Bear? For men, the question is, would you rather your wife or daughter be in the woods alone with a man or a bear? And for women, the question is, would you rather be alone in the woods with a man or a bear?
The results from this little experiment are pretty telling.
Women report that when men are faced with this question, they have a lot of questions in response. Who is the man? What is his background? What does he do? How big is he? But if you switch things up a bit and ask, would you rather your loved ones be alone with a woman or a bear, the answer is immediate: a woman. For the more astute men, the dawning realizing this causes is kind of soul-crushing. Even men recognize that it’s a tough call between a man and a bear, because they can be equally dangerous. But make it a woman, and it’s all good. And the thing is, we know it’s not just because women aren’t as strong as men. Men aren’t as strong as bears – and yet men have to stop and think about which is more dangerous.
Other men find the question infuriating. Namely, because so many women don’t have to think about it – they choose the bear.
I will admit, this one is easy for me, too. If you ask me if I would rather be in the woods with a bear, or with Carl, my producer, I’d say Carl every time, because he is the perfect man. If the question is just “men” writ large, I’m going to go with the bear.
Some people may find that shocking. But the thing is, bears are predictable. They behave in basic, patterned ways. And if you leave a bear alone, it will probably leave you alone. These things cannot be automatically said of men.
Now, I know this is not true of every man. There are a lot of really solid dudes out there who I would be perfectly safe with in the woods. Or in my car! Or in a changing room! But the point is, there are enough men that would not be a safe companion, that women have reason to be afraid. Like, all the time.
So, I know it’s tempting to say, not all men. And that’s actually true. Not all men are creeps. But the problem is, ENOUGH men are that you can start making generalizations.
Ask any woman who has ever tried online dating. She’ll tell you.
Let me tell you a little story. Now, I am making an assumption that this story is about a man. But the person in this story did not sign their name to the missives in question and only has their initials in the email address, so they clearly mean to be anonymous. They are very brave to harass women that way. But when I share this story, I hope you can see why I assume it is a man.
I always ask for feedback at the end of my podcast episodes. I don’t get it a whole lot, but when I do, I generally enjoy it, and find it to be substantive and helpful. One of my favorite examples is when I did an episode on titles and names, and a listener reached out with a counterpoint. I had talked about the gendered nature of titles, and how calling somebody by their first name and a title, like Miss Elizabeth, was pretty infantilizing, and often gendered. A listener wrote in to say that in Southern circles that was a term of familiarity AND respect, so maybe these things were regional? I thought that was an interesting point, so I addressed it in my next episode. Ultimately, I had a different viewpoint than this listener, but I thought it was a healthy exchange. And the person who wrote in was thoughtful, constructive, and insightful. That’s how discourse and disagreement is supposed to work.
In the last week I got an entirely different kind of email. This person sent me a short email telling me they only occasionally listen to my episodes, the ones that that deal with legal issues, and that I pronounce my words all wrong and I had no idea what I was talking about when it came to the law.
Okay.
I wrote back.
I said the mispronunciation was probably a legit criticism! I’ve read these things way more than I’ve heard them said, and my Latin isn’t great, so it would not surprise me to hear I butchered some words. I’ll totally own that. I mean, to be honest, dear listeners, I’ve gone back and forth on how to pronounce stare decisis more times than I care to count! But that’s neither here nor there.
Then I told him, however, I am a recognized expert in legal rhetoric, the first amendment, and am the editor of Communication Law Review. So I asked him if he could point out specific concerns, so I could ascertain if these were just differences of interpretation (as is so often the case), or something else, and whether this was a particular problem with a singular episode or just a general gripe based on limited listening.
Oh. My. Goodness. THE RESPONSE.
It was explosive. According to this guy, I am rude, argumentative, dumb, and a bad professor. I am a liar and I spread misinformation. He also took it upon himself to stalk me on RateMyProfessor and quoted that. He informed he would not, in any case, point to specific mistakes more than he already had, because it was not worth his time, and he was a lawyer so my appeals to authority held no weight. And he emphasized many times how wrong-headed I am and had no idea what I am talking about. And also, he concluded, please don’t respond.
Listener, my guess is he heard my podcast about Marx and free speech and lost his damned mind.
But, this all took me by surprise. I showed this thread of emails to Carl just to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. I mean, I laughed when I initially read the email, but also – could this dude be dangerous? He was looking me up online – that weirded me out a little.
Carl looked over it, and was admittedly concerned. This was not stable behavior. But mostly Carl was a bit baffled.
“What is this guy’s deal?” he said. “This seems really out of proportion.”
“I think he’s just mad that I’m smart,” I answered.
Carl nodded sagely. “That’s what it looks like to me, too.”
The truth is, there are a lot of men out there who really hate the fact that smart women exist. It really just infuriates them when a woman is publicly, or even outwardly intelligent. I know. I’ve been smart all my life.
The RateMyProfessor thing really bothered me, though. I haven’t looked at that in years. I assume mine is bad. Because that is where angry students go to complain. And I have no shortage of angry students. But Carl got curious and looked it up. It’s apparently…not good at all.
But you know what?
I’m kind of okay with it.
Not completely. I mean, it affects who signs up for my classes, because while the website is totally disreputable, students still like it.
But I’ve been thinking about student evals and ratings in light of all of this, and I’m not convinced that I want a high score.
Let me tell you a little bit about evals.
White men consistently have higher evals than everybody else. Conveniently, white men advocate for using eval scores to decide things like tenure and promotion. Not all white men. But enough.
But let me tell you what I have noticed.
People who expect things of their students have lower scores. People who ask hard questions have lower scores. People who demand their students actually learn and produce have lower scores. In short, people who DO THEIR DAMNED JOBS have lower scores.
The people who have high scores, even perfect scores, tend to be people who don’t ask a lot. Who don’t probe difficult questions, and who don’t place a lot of demands on their students. Once again, this is a generalization. I know some people that are doing some amazing work in the classroom and are beloved by all. They are white men.
Let me clarify, when I talk about having expectations of your students, I am not talking about grading. That can certainly be part of it, but that’s not the whole thing. You can be a hard-ass grader and not teach a thing. If you spend all of your time taking off a gazillion points for missed periods in the bibliography or being half a page short, congratulations you have accomplished nothing. On the other hand, you can be a pretty easy grader, but ask your students to handle really hard concepts and topics. You can ask a lot of your students and not be hard-nosed.
The thing is, being an easy grader in a hard class doesn’t guarantee good evals. There will always be people who are mad at you for rocking the boat.
The people that RateMyProfessor loves are people who give out lots of good grades and don’t ask anything of their students. These are the classes that make you feel good but don’t do a lot to challenge you.
Here’s a tip: you could save a lot of money and get the same effect by watching a Reese Witherspoon movie.
Now, I am not making the generalization that all men are easy profs. Not hardly. But I have noticed in my 20 years of teaching that there are certain categories of professors, and two are particularly insidious: one) the easy, happy, cheerful prof that is completely invested in being well-liked and designs their classes to make sure everybody is happy all the time, and two) the prof that takes joy in being known as a hard-ass and makes no effort to reach their students. It takes a lot of privilege to fall into either one of those categories. So often you find a lot of men.
Students are not getting anything from either of these types of profs.
If you are the first type – what are you even doing? If you don’t ask anything of your students, if you challenge no one and nothing, why are you here?
There are a lot of profs, and this is especially problematic in comm and business, that see their jobs as preparing students for the workplace. I absolutely do not understand that. It’s part of the neo-liberalization of higher education and I do not get how you can just say, yeah, sure, that’s what I do.
I mean, how can you get up and go to work, and say, “Today, I am going to make some good little capitalists?” I mean, if your goal is to contribute to the crisis in the housing market and wage disparity, have at it, I guess. But I don’t know that you’re helping anyone.
And the second type of professor – who are you teaching? How are you reaching people? Why do you take pride in not being helpful? Who hurt you? I mean, is this just a superiority thing?
The truth is, there are a lot of people in this field who continually fail upward. And maybe they have all the markers of success. A few publications, some good evals. But they don’t do anything. They just create happy little salespeople or content creators who are no more prepared for the world, or sometimes even the job market, than they were when they started. But, you know, they’re in a good mood.
And I do see the value in uplifting things. My job as a professor is not make you feel sad all the time. But it is to challenge you. And if you walk out of my class feeling blissful and ignorant every day instead of thoughtful, then I am not a useful instructor.
Or conversely, if you just lord over a private little kingdom like a tyrant, you’re not teaching.
Now, not all men do these things. I know lots of men who are thoughtful, considered, provocative instructors without being jerks. And I know women who haven’t challenged anyone in decades. So to say this is a gender problem is painting with an awfully big brush, when so many women have the same issues. But like I said earlier, there are ENOUGH men that follow these patterns that it’s easy to start thinking in terms of commonalities.
But what I DO know, is that women get held accountable for this way more often than men do.
Our evals are automatically lower. Admin likes to hold us accountable to our worst students – the very students who hate us for doing our jobs. We get raked over the coals for being “too abrasive” when we have standards, “too political” when we ask hard questions, “and too unclear” when our students don’t come to class or read directions and fail. That’s DEFINITELY our fault.
And this is not particular to academia. Women in EVERY field and occupation will attest to being treated in different ways than their male colleagues. And it’s always the same – a dude takes the easy way and gets promoted. And woman does her job and has her feet held to the flames.
And let’s be honest – this is about a thousand times worse for women of color. In my position, I know so many women of color that are doing amazing work. They are publishing, teaching amazing classes, becoming leaders in research and industry, and asking all the right (and challenging) questions. And what do they get for their trouble? Students who balk at everything they say. Admin breathing down their neck. State legislators threatening them with all manner of restrictions. Women of color are holding higher education together. And that shouldn’t be their job.
Let’s take a quick turn, here. This may seem out of nowhere, but I promise this will all come together.
I want to tell you about my mom.
Growing up, my mom was one of the most talented and intelligent people I had ever known. And this isn’t just a kid looking up to her parent. EVERYBODY thinks that about my mom.
She was teacher of the year in our area. She is easily the most talented musician I have ever met. She was doing so much work for our church, and doing it so well and effectively that at one point they said, should we just hire her? I mean, she’s basically already doing full-time work for us. And they did!
But here’s the thing – my mom has been kept back all her life. I’m willing to say that. I don’t know if she ever would.
Honestly, everyone who has ever met my mom is just blown away by how smart, funny, and competent she is. She took care of our family, worked hours upon hours for us, and was a foundation for us in a thousand different ways. So, when I learned in church that women were supposed to be submissive, I was like, “no, that can’t be right.” My mom wasn’t submissive. She kicked butt! She was forthright and stood up for what was right. She took care of people. She stood up not just for herself, but for others. What I heard about women at church had nothing to DO with my mom.
But that’s just the context we were living in. The truth is, my mom could probably have done anything. If she hadn’t been raised in a shockingly rural Texas town by wildly conservative parents, she might have grown up to rule the world. But she was beset on all sides by people telling her she couldn’t, or shouldn’t, because it wasn’t her place.
When she took a job at the church we went to, she ran whole ministries of music. But they wouldn’t call her a minister of music. They called her an associate to the minister of music. Because a woman couldn’t be a minister.
This was a woman who consistently and constantly achieved everything she ever set out to achieve – to a certain extent. As much as the world would allow. But she was held back time and time again by a patriarchy hell-bent on convincing her that women have no business being as talented, smart, or as competent as she is.
Have my mom and I always gotten along? Please, what mother-daughter pair has? But I have never, I mean NEVER, doubted that my mom was smart, capable, and talented. And the thing is, nobody else doubts that, too. And people recognize it – she gets speaking invitations and that kind of thing all the time. But there are always people there, usually men, to tell her, that’s great, but you can’t quite do it all. We need men to do the real work.
And that just ticks me off. My mom taught elementary school for years. She seriously told me once that if she had had other options, she might have been a doctor or a singer. But a woman growing up in the 50s and 60s in a town whose claim to fame is that it’s the “Gateway to Possum Kingdom” just…doesn’t have a lot of options.
And all of this – I mean all of it – bears, evals, my mom – may seem a little disparate, but it all comes down to one thing – we women are chafing beneath our confines. And we are getting pretty angry about it.
I think women have been angry before. Throughout. But now we can voice it. Now we can say, “Actually, yes, I DO want to take advanced math,” or “No, you cannot speak over me.” If we’re brave. Because the reactions to those things often bring out a very bad side of people.
There are a lot of people, and not just men, who don’t like self-posessed women. They don’t like smart women. They don’t like self-confident women. And they will do everything they can to keep women like that down. Be it give them lower evaluations or pass them over for a job or for promotion. Because I’m 45 now and I can say with full assuredness – people are much more comfortable with a mediocre man than an outstanding woman.
The absolutely wild thing about the men or bear conversation is the complete lack of self-awareness of some men who are loudly proving women’s point with every word while they gripe about it. Any conversation about men or bears inevitably turns into a dogpile of men telling women they are stupid and shouldn’t be allowed alone in the woods to begin with. So, yeah, that bear sounds pretty good.
I got angry a lot in the last week or so. I got angry at the person who sent me harassing emails, I got angry at random men berating women they didn’t even know, and just my general anger at systems and injustice is juiced. And it’s not that I like being angry. I can’t sleep when I’m angry. But things aren’t okay. And so many people are just…fine with that.
So if a man gets snarky about it and tries to explain to me why men are better than bears, I know what I’m going to say.
Buddy, I AM the bear.
Music in this episode is “Fearless First” by Kevin MacLeod at https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3742-fearless-first.
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