From: muffy%remarque.Berkeley.EDU@ucbvax.berkeley.EDU (Muffy Barkocy)
Subject: Re: denial
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Organization: Natural Language Incorporated
Date: 6 Oct 92 20:57:50 GMT
	<1992Sep30.203548.144919@zeus.calpoly.edu>

In article <1992Sep30.203548.144919@zeus.calpoly.edu> dgross@zeus.calpoly.edu (Dave Gross) writes:
>I realize that me-too-ism has irritated many people in soc.feminism,
>but I couldn't help but respond to this post.  Denial and
>insensitivity is yet another sexism complaint that turns out to be a
>two-way street.

Well, first of all, you have not proved this at all (see below).
Second, so what?  I never said whether or not this happened to men.  In
fact, I don't think that it does happen all that much, though.
Certainly, I have not seen it on the net (note, however, that I do not
read soc.men or soc.women, so I could have missed it).  I see people on
the net saying that they don't want to work on men's problems first, but
I have not seen many saying that they do not *exist*.  I could go out
and find at least a hundred articles right now on my system saying that
various problems of women's do not exist.

In addition, this posting of yours is just another example of the sort
of thing I was talking about.  Someone says "here's a problem that women
have."  Someone else comes back with "actually, this is a big problem
for men (which is usually attributed to oppression by feminists)."  What
this does is to attempt to hide the problem for women by turning it into
a problem for men.  Every once in a while, someone instead says that it
is a problem for "people," which is often reasonable.  However, it still
tries to obscure the fact that there is a serious problem specifically
for women.

Honestly, I wish that all problems *were* just problems for people, but
they aren't.  Some problems *are* focused on people of one sex or the
other, because our society *does* treat people differently according to
their sex.  It is important to recognize it when a problem is more
specific to members of one sex, especially as it may be a factor in why
the problem exists and how to fix it.

>[story of Women's Studies  professor telling offensive joke about male
  anatomy]
>The real punchline, though, came the following quarter, when I
>had the same professor again for a different WS class.  She
>was doing a unit on sexual harassment and made the following
>comment:

>"There are still some professors here at Poly who
> don't realize that making jokes about womens' anatomy
> constitutes sexual harassment."

>So there you have it.  Denial from a professor of the New
>Sensitivity.

This isn't denial at all.  Where did she *deny* that there was a
problem for men?  It does seem that she has not thought this out very
well and is therefore applying a double standard, but that is not the
same as denial.

Also, I could have sworn you said she was a professor of "Women's
Studies."  What, exactly, is "New Sensitivity," and where do they give a
degree in this?  It seems to me that you are simply trying to disparage
Women's Studies with this remark.

Muffy
--

Muffy Barkocy                               muffy@mica.berkeley.edu
~Little round planet/in a big universe/sometimes it looks blessed/
 sometimes it looks cursed/Depends on what you look at, obviously/
 But even more it depends on the way that you see~ - Bruce Cockburn

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