10 years later…

Is sexism still a problem?

As a self-declared (thirteen-year-old) anti-third-wave feminist, I often read articles by feminists about sexism so that I can see what I am arguing against. At first I thought that everybody who complained about sexism was overreacting, and many are. For example, I have no problems with gendering babies, seeing thin Barbies, or looking at men sitting a certain way on public transportation. After a while, however, there were too many personal anecdotes for me to ignore. I read “Model Physicist” (link below) by Yangyang Cheng the other day, and I was astounded and horrified by the blatant sexism and lack of encouragement for girls going into STEM fields. It was easy to write the lack of encouragement off as being in China, but the comments by the supervisor at her American graduate school were just as despicable.

I, on the other hand, have seen students reprimanded for even joking about sexism. I was recently with a boy around eight years old and his mother, a friend of the family since I was a child. He was talking about some argument he had had at recess with his friends. It had been boys against girls, and he expressed that the boys had won. When discussing the event, he said something along the lines of “Besides, boys are ‘awesomer’ [his words] and better than girls.” His mother immediately pulled over the car and reprimanded him.

“That was a disgusting thing to say. Neither gender is better than the other. Girls are just as good as boys at everything, and saying otherwise is a very yucky thing to say,” the middle-aged mother scolded. She was completely serious and very angry at the boy. “Anyways,” she added, “I think girls are better than boys.”

This seems to be a perfect example of my upbringing in regards to sexism. The boy had meant no harm in his statement. He was simply a child gloating over winning. In elementary school, I remember gender contest to be a common occurrence; we often competed to “beat the boys” at trivia games or tag. His mother, on the other hand, was appalled at what she seemed to perceive as early signs of a misogynistic nature, and felt that his words were a cause for concern.

I can honestly understand both points of view here. The mother overreacted, but I realize that she was only using this as an example to teach the boy a lesson. What bugs me are her last words, about how she thinks girls are better than boys. She just yelled at the boy for putting one gender above the other, and then she does that same thing, feeling totally justified. This made me think about what seems to be socially acceptable. I remember saying “Girls are smarter/better/cooler/funnier/etc. than boys” dozens of times, in front of teachers, my parents, and other adults. I have even said it a couple of times in front of this woman. I don’t remember ever being reprimanded. This seems to be the case with most of the kids I know: boys can’t say they’re better, but girls can.

Of course, I see the reasoning behind the double standard. Women have traditionally been oppressed while men have traditionally been thought of as better. The mother and others were trying to compensate for thousands of years of sexism suffered by women. However, will shifting the privilege towards women help those who were wronged, most of whom are dead? Or will it just shift the tides against the men who are now suffering (think affirmative action) for the actions of their predecessors? Won’t there be the same problems as before, except for with reversed roles?

The reason I bring this story up is that it seems to be completely in contrast to the hundreds of stories by (even slightly) older women. They speak of everything from teachers belittling women and expressing misogynist views to outright discrimination by employers, teachers, and others against young girls. These could not further from my experiences.

Basically, my question is this: Is it possible that human nature has changed so much in the last ten years?

Can society change so quickly? All of these 20-something people growing up a decade ago seemed to have faced obvious discouragement and discrimination from the adults in their lives.

This is a difficult question to answer because of the varying opinions of sexism. There are teens out there speaking about their experiences with sexism, but many of these seem to be ‘third-wave sexism’ (the Barbie kind of thing I mention earlier, notably the uproar over school dress codes). The official definition of sexism (according to Merriam Webster) is: “unfair treatment of people because of their sex; especially : unfair treatment of women.” Classifying individual events as sexism or not is difficult; what is unfair treatment because of gender versus just a mean comment or personal dislike? For example, take Donald Trump’s comments about Rosie O’Donnell. While almost everybody agrees that they are rude and objectionable, people are divided over whether they are sexist or just bad taste. In the same line of thinking, a modern teen girl called “hot” or “fat” or anything else that is not obviously polite and complimentary by a random guy can see it as sexism.

Of course, there is going to be SOME sexism among today’s generation, but I hardly believe it is the norm or even close to common. We are so heavily conditioned to be tolerant and PC that we almost favor girls, a totally different world than that which older women describe. After all, Yangyang Cheng’s story about being discouraged from STEM fields could hardly be more different than mine about special district STEM classes to get girls to code.

My point is that sexism among our generation is a much smaller problem than it is made out to be. When 50, 40, 30, or even 20-year-old women speak about being kept from STEM classes and write about being told that they “don’t need to learn math” or that “science is too hard for girls” people think that modern school-age girls face discouragement and discrimination. These experiences are used to prove that there is sexism in the American school system, when, in reality, feminists have already eradicated the problem. These people keep fighting an evil that no longer exists, and it has started to do more damage than help.

An interesting article about the modern push for women in STEM fields: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/truth-women-stem-careers/