Why Men Should Not Be Allowed to Teach

It was Germaine Greer who said, and I paraphrase, that it is women who teach and men who ‘train’. I thought the statement interesting and did a little reflection on what it meant and whether it might be true. Teaching, at least from my perspective as one who has taught on and off for over 21 years, is a symbiotic relationship. The teacher is a guide, whose role and scope depends completely on the student or students under her responsibility. The students depend on the tools, information and guidance given by the teacher and use it to grow and learn. Despite the interdependence, it is also a power relationship. The teacher does indeed have more power than the student(s), and the level and shape of that power depends on the age and sex of the students and the sex of the teacher.

What does it mean that ‘men train’? Well, training is completely rooted in a power imbalance. The trainer shapes (even forces) the mind and behaviour of the trainee into the desired form. The trainer is not expected to learn from the trainee. When I think of male teachers that I’ve had, this sounds familiar, with the often added component that that male ‘teacher’ or trainer takes from the trainee and gives little in return. The training or controlling mentality is natural for men. For the most part, higher education is based on this model. But it is applied differently to male and female teachers.

And indeed, when you look at expectations that institutions and students have for male and female teachers, women are given harsher standards. Women are expected to give, nurture, understand, coddle, and be compassionate as well as be knowledgeable. Oh, and they are very much expected to be fuckable or beautiful to have any kind of legitimacy as a teacher. Age is a weird thing for women. If you are young, you are not taken seriously (especially at a university), but there is a magical, unknown point where you are deemed too old to be taken seriously too. Men are expected to be cold, distant, sometimes charismatic or humourous. Attractive? Not required. Because what does attractiveness have to do with imparting knowledge? None! Age? Ditto. Doesn’t matter. If a dude teacher walks in, lectures at students, doles out punishment, and then leaves, he is doing his duty as a ‘teacher’. Same behaviour from a female teacher, and she gets called a ‘bitch’ (the misogynist equivalent of ‘nigger’ or ‘kike’, except that the latter are verboten and taken seriously as slurs, and can get you into serious trouble if you say them). Personally, I like strict teachers who tailor their instruction to the student(s). I don’t want to be coddled. I don’t want a friend. But I want a flexible teacher who will change the game plan if she sees that something isn’t working and who doesn’t believe in one-size-fits-all lessons. I certainly don’t want to have a sexual relationship with a teacher. But males, whether teachers or students, seem to have very blurred lines when it comes to what is acceptable.

And that brings us to the one added component that we often see in male ‘teachers’. There is frequent abuse and sexual abuse of female students. It happens in all countries at all levels of education. All men benefit from rape. Some men rape. All rapists are men. Some teachers are men. Therefore, some male teachers will be rapists, and all males – teachers, students and the general public – will benefit from female terror in the classroom. And the data show this. Many men see rape as a ‘training tool’ or a job perk, and indeed even in these modern times, women have been trained by rape and the fear of rape to fall in line and allow men to continue to wreak havoc on the world and gain unfair advantages in the classroom and workplace. I am against having men in the helping professions, because a) the helping professions (teaching, medicine, law enforcement, etc) are based on power imbalances by definition, and b) men seek out and abuse power relationships by definition. The only way you can minimize abuse in relationships where power abuse is possible is to disallow those who are most likely to abuse that power to have access to it. To do otherwise is to invite heaps of trouble, and we see that this is true every day, everywhere.

All of this is prompted by another real world example of stuff girls and women deal with every single day. Today, I was talking to a former student of mine from about 5 years ago. He asked me if I’d heard the news about our former college. I said I hadn’t. Honestly, I don’t like to think about my former employer. It was a horrible place where I was locked into my staff accommodation at night (photo in this post), and a lot of other horrible stuff happened that badly hurt me physically, psychologically, and financially. It was such a bad place to work that they have to fire all the foreign staff every couple of years in order to bring on a fresh, naive batch to abuse. They cleaned house the year I finished there and relocated for a better job. Anyhow, my student told me that the college made the news recently. Graduation just happened, and a female student returned to the college to receive her diploma. One of her male teachers refused to sign off on her graduation unless she let him rape her. LUCKILY, she complained or told the right person. Shockingly, they took her seriously, and fired that ‘teacher’ (trainer/rapist). Rape is not talked about very much in China, and I’m guessing it is even more poorly reported than it is in ‘free’ countries where women are more vocal, but are still very much unequal and enslaved. As it is, we female students around the world must put up with all sorts of weird male teacher abuse, sexual or otherwise. Myself, the best letter of reference I got as an undergraduate was from a male professor who enjoyed frequently squeezing and pinching my upper arms so hard it left bruises. Did I say anything? No. I needed that letter of reference. And he was my only ally against another male professor who tried to fail me on my senior thesis and who psychologically abused me for two years. Couldn’t say anything about him either – he was an untouchable full tenured professor. And I was dependent on him for my part-time job (I solely supported myself) and my final grade. I guess I should be thankful none of them tried to rape me. It was only physical and psychological abuse. And guess what? No male students had to go through that. I laugh when males try to tell me how hard their lives are… Try living as an object aspiring to be human and see how much fun you have…

So, I wonder about two things.

1. How often do male teachers actually rape (forced rape, coerced rape, etc) female students? It is much harder for girls and women to report or rationalize reporting assault when it is committed by someone they know and/or someone with very clear and socially/legally accepted power over them. My guess is that it happens all the time, and it is often reframed by the teacher-rapist, the student-victim, and by society at large as a ‘relationship’, a ‘mistake’ made by the student, a misinterpretation, one of those ‘that’s life’ events that seem to always happen to girls and women, or it just didn’t happen.
2. How sensationalized and overblown is female teacher abuse of male students? It is a rare thing indeed and gets more play than any male crime ever would. So rare, they make documentaries on the same few deranged female teachers. Keep in mind two things:

a) women who abuse power should be punished (and yes, women abuse power too – one of my current excellent female students in China is physically KICKED and yelled at by a female professor every time she is forced to meet with her), and

b) women cannot, by definition, be rapists; and males, by definition, cannot be raped. The language has been deliberately confused by liberals in order to downplay what men do constantly to women and to falsely play males as victims. New language should be created by women to accurately define crimes.

Suffice it to say though that virtually all sex crimes are perpetrated by men, and the vast majority of sex crimes are forced on female victims. Given these overwhelming data – you’d be stupid to argue anything else – it is in the best interest of the entire population to keep men out of the helping professions and any professions where abuse of power (male against female) is dangerously possible, and dog help me, oh so very tempting. We (not I) argue that men have brains so they can both control their behaviour and learn from their mistakes. But they don’t. They don’t because they aren’t forced to. And men won’t change unless they are forced to. There is no better nature to appeal to. We’ve been waiting thousands of years for this better nature to magically appear. Keep men away from tempting power abuse situations with females. Female health and safety are more important than hurt male feelings. Any day. One day, I’ll talk more about false positives and why they don’t matter when it comes to female health and safety. For now, for all of you out there saying “Not all men…” or “That’s not fair to men…”, how about the current sitch, where we already operate on these get out of jail free philosophies? We already operate on the “Not all men” principle. It doesn’t work. And what do you say to all of us who have been abused by men in the helping professions? You negate my (your mother’s, your sister’s, your daughter’s, your) right to safety and living free from threats and fear when you give men the benefit of the doubt. That’s not fair to women and girls. It’s not okay to take away from us in order to let men do as they wish.

[This post is part of the Wolves in Women’s Clothing series.]

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