Harassed, Blamed, Trying to Move On

I think there are many fucked up (virtually lobotomized) people out there, and, with that in mind, I don't know what to recommend in terms of how to pursue redress. If you can find one administrator to advocate for you, then I think that would be a help--or another student to vouch for you, or professor. Even just talking to someone and having them know what you are talking about helps me in situations like these. Too often I feel like I'm live in the twighlight zone because many people (sometimes everyone) seem to have no scrutiny or moral ambition at all.. It's difficult to be intelligent and be female in this world. People are lucky there are laws because otherwise I think at least a dozen people would be dead by my hand.

 

Something vaguely similar happened to me last semester...where the professor of my ecology class regularly harassed me/humiliated me in front of the class--and to add the icing on the cake, I ended up getting a B- in the course, when I got at least a 98 on every single test and at least a 90 on every lab. There ended up being no way (that I felt comfortable with) to gain redress for this, because I didn't want to see the professor again who I felt intellectually molested by in every encounter.

Otherwise, I am a straight A environmental science / electrical engineering major...so go figure? When I went to administration to even ask how I would appeal for a grade adjustment, they just treated me like there was no possible way that the professor had intentionally given me an unfair grade--even though I knew he had.

The part that upsets me the most is that I sincerely didn't learn anything in that class. There was absolutely no content. On the first day, the professor asked the class if the sun rises in the east or west in the southern hemisphere... He also told us that we were too stupid to do logarithms (which--I'm sorry--are elementary) so he neglected to teach us population dynamics equations, which he later held us accountable for on the test. (He put it on a review sheet, and when I asked whether he had specifically skipped that part of the course because he didn't think we knew how to assess logarithms, he admitted he had, but that we were still responsible for doing it--exactly what he said we were too stupid do do--for the test.) Even still, this was better than him lying to my face, like he usually did.

I feel like I have had to deal with a lot of s*** in school--many of us do: often women, or gay people, or anyone creative or smart. Literally, in the first week of class this semester, a man essentially threatened to kill me for trying to address something sexist that someone else wrote in a paper. I just told the other student that the assertion that women suffer more from greed than men was not true. Then all of a sudden, this guy with PTSD from fighting in Afghanistan yelled, "I have a shovel in the back of my truck if you want."

I honestly don't know anymore. Most people just won't intercede or even empathize in situations like these, and there are a staggering number of people that will completely lie and purposefully harm other people--as evinced by the Milgram experiment. Everyone is just looking after their own little plot of piss and bulls*** above anything else, and it makes me so f***ing mad/sad.

 

Maybe you can get a LGBT friendly lawyer that will help you. Sometimes layers will take a case like yours for free because its good for their practice.A threatened law suit often gets the other side thinking...... I got a $1000 bonus from old boss's boss when I threatened to sue- got called a "radical militant feminist lesbian" 20 years ago before steel door to my gay closet was even cracked.

 

I can't say I've had much success in dealing with situations like these, and I have an endless litany of examples. I wish I could just beat the sense into people, because you are right; administrators, professors, bosses, bystanders, people shouldn't be ignoring examples of abuse. The trend should be to set people straight and absolutely speak out against any injustice, not just lazily, asininely dismiss abuse until someone gets raped and dies. I honestly think sexism is growing in this country, and we need to nip it in the bud. If I was there when that guy was messing with you, I probably would have been irate and possibly assaulted him.

There was a time last year when my chemistry professor gave me someone else's test/grade, and when I corrected him, and tried to make sure my actual grade was given to me, he said, "Everything you say is stupid and inane." One thing that made me feel better was going to talk to my physics professor. I was like, "He is a corny louse," ('cause he also is that) and my physics professor laughed, so that made me feel slightly better--but no, nothing really helps the fact that things like this should never happen. I mean, the chemistry professor was a douchebag, but the hardest part was that nobody was willing to admit it. Honestly, I didn't think people that were there even noticed. I feel like 80% of the people I deal with would prefer living in the bodies of slugs sometimes.

He also made a sexual joke about me and my female lab partner to a male in the class. I don't know exactly what he said, but my lab partner asked the guy if the professor was talking about porn while he was literally pointing and leering and laughing at is, and he said he was. I didn't do anything about this, just because I know there was no way this professor was going to get reprimanded.

A lot of people think that sexism doesn't exist, but it runs rampant. It has gotten so bad, and both sexes are involved in it, but there is a certain disturbing character to a man insulting women that makes me want vagina dentada. Sometimes women are jealous of each other and will call a woman a slut (which is sexist), but often a man genuinely wants to subjugate women or thinks they are inferior. It just makes me violently angry. How much of my life has to be dictated by other people's willful stupidity and willful injustice? It should be none.

In high school, my parents often used to tell me, "Pick your battles," essentially whenever I complained about anything that was unjust, but my parents were wrong. Because people shouldn't have to put up with this bologna.

 

There are a lot of ways you all can circumvent this type of harassment. It's simple really, you troll the living shit out of your aggressor in ways they can't begin to form a rebuttal. Do so in such a witty and passive way that they're not sure what to make of it because they don't realize you're making fun of them. I do it all the time.
The alternative is just keeping your mouth shut.

And for Crumb, I know you know you're in a male dominated field so the best thing to do is be anti-feminist. It's actually a lot of fun. Join the boys constantly making a mockery of women and how stupid most of them are. If they say something you find disagreeable, don't say a damn thing, and laugh if it's a joke. I'm probably out of line saying it to you as you clearly think otherwise... but still, look at the facts from the DoD, only 11% of people in STEM fields are women. The greatest minds in humanities history have been overwhelmingly of the male gender. You can think it's unjust all you want, but facts speak louder than opinion. The only fields that matter to humanity as a whole are STEM fields. A liberal arts major didn't invent plastic (Charles Goodyear, Leo Baekeland), nylon (Wallace Carruthers), soap (Michel Eugene Chevreul), commercial fuel refining (William Meriam Burton), discover alternating current (Nichola Tesla), lithium batteries (Michael Stanley Whittingham), or anything that advanced society. Also note, the preceding individuals are all male too.
You won't get anywhere in life being some loud mouthed advocate in scholastic situations that will do nothing but negatively impact your grade. It's all politics and regardless of how liberal the rest of the school is, you're in the engineering department honey and those boys don't screw around.
You had best become one of them till you have that degree in hand then fight against the tide and ruin your chances of getting into a graduate program, should you desire to do that. After all, you won't gain a damn thing from running your mouth but you stand the chance of losing everything.

My program is 100% liberal and I have to do the same thing. I don't agree with anything the professors or my classmates say about politics and I keep my mouth shut even if I really disagree with them, even when what they're saying makes me bodily ill and I'm doing just fine. Only idiots feel they have to scream about their beliefs at the top of their lungs because they genuinely believe the rest of us give a fuck.

The best thing you can do is get your degree and be one of the 11% of intelligent women, make a name for yourself in your field and do wonderful things! That's the only way to make a real difference. There's nothing more empowering and inspirational than an intelligent woman who makes things happen, like the famous NASA Physicist and astronaut Sally Ride (the first woman in space, also a lesbian).

Btw, I really loved how you singled out the combat vet. I'm a combat vet too you know, so I must really want to get out my shovel about now as well... Right?

 

WOW, NO. Your comment is 100 percent not okay, Saraph, and this is a support forum. You basically compelled me to register just to sweep up these terrible ideas because you're actively hurting people with this kind of thinking in this thread. WOW JUST NO.

Look at yourself. Look. At. Yourself. You are telling someone to deliberately antagonize someone she feels is going to sexually harass her. News flash, 'trolling' is not a good IRL solution to anything. Telling someone to be a dick to somebody who already makes you afraid they are going to commit an act of sexual violence upon you is NOT OKAY. NO.

You are actively telling people to laugh at jokes that make them hate themselves. Let's reframe this. Would an entire roomful of people making jokes about shaming non-hetero people make you feel really cool about yourself? Becoming an antifeminist, for many women, is telling them they should just relent and hate themselves. It's like telling someone to 'just be a homophobe.' What on earth is WRONG with you?

Women are kept out of science, technology, and other fields so they have fewer opportunities to become scientists, engineers, or inventors. It's not because women are inferior, it's because it's far easier to endure constant sexist bullshit if you aren't the one being discriminated against. You can take all of your male scientists and your shaming of liberal arts majors (??? OK keep proving you're an asshole if you want, go ahead) and take Marie Curie (discovered Radium), Admiral Grace Hopper (early computer scientist and high ranking navy officer, coined the term 'computer bug), Stephanie Kowlek (kevlar) and Gertrude B. Elion (ATZ, breakthrough AIDS treatment) and shove it where you like it.

Yes, because injustice should be tolerated and kept quiet about so it can hurt the next girl to come into the program. Let's blame somebody who wants to speak up and change things. Yep, let's blame the victim. It's not like THAT doesn't have unfortunate implications for anybody posting on this site.

No one cares about how set-upon you feel. This thread is about supporting the OP. No one cares how aparrently you are a special snowflake who is strong enough to just endure the comments and the OP is not. Did you not even read? This is not a case of some morons insulting and screaming their feelings. This was a case of a sexist asshole literally controlling her grade and academic future. No one cares about how your feelings remain unhurt in your daily life. OP stood to lose more than just unhurt feelings. She almost lost her academic progress to this dope.

You just spent the whole post telling her to ignore a person who literally controlled her grade, went on and on and on about how men are smarter than women and naturally are in the fields they are in, and went so far as to say that 89 percent of women are unintelligent, and then told her that she needs to be empowered and do intelligent things? I am unsure how you mean to support one by telling her that most of her gender are idiots. You need to take a huge, long drink, contemplate your life, and wonder if you are actually being a good person.

I am so glad that our armed forces is endorsing the culture that created OP's douchebag, and saraph. Really, I am.

I bet you're an okay person. Really. I do.

But you need to stop. You are not supporting anyone, this is way out of line, and is so disgusting I think I could puke.

OP, you did the right thing. It may feel uncomfortable, but trying can be painful. And failure is painful. But in the end, he can't hurt you. His goal is to get his way, and he didn't get it. And if he felt so threatened by you that he had to erect his man-feelings kill sat protocols to fight you, than he is a very, very small man indeed. Here is to your great future! You made it! Things may seem bad now, but there's a lot of happiness yet to come. I personally will support you all the way.

 

Idk, do you?

And thanks, but I'm really not interested in your philosophy.