Professor Claude Drolet, Lecturer / Credit: George Mason University Korea
Have you ever made sexist jokes at school or with friends, thinking it’s OK because it’s “just teasing”? Ever tried to persuade someone to go one a date with you who wasn’t really into it? How about catcalling someone? Maybe it is time to look at ourselves and wonder if it is me, too.
Far too often I have been in a room when a man has made a sexist remark as a joke. The same goes for a male colleague making a woman uncomfortable with too much attention. This is the world we live in. It has been this way for as long as I remember. It is how classrooms are set up, board room and social gatherings. TV dramas and movies build whole plots around a man pursuing a woman. The jokes are so familiar they almost tell themselves. The problem, as I see it, is that these jokes or advances have been seen as trivial in the eyes of the person who is carrying it out. Certainly, a sense of perspective is always important – but whose perspective? Who gets to decide what is trivial? Surely it should be the person affected. That’s not the case at the moment. Much sexual harassment can be casual, unthinking and uncaring of the person who is the object of it.
I think that is high time to start taking some personal responsibility for these types of instances. It’s not enough to just think that sexually charged jokes are unacceptable. Whenever I see someone trying call out the bad behavior, it is a woman. This has to change. If you witness some sort of harassment, you should do something. It will most definitely be awkward for you, but imagine how the woman feels.
Of course, I am concerned that we are increasingly inclined to confuse genuine abuse of power with simply men who have made ‘unwanted’ passes. In the complicated dance of courtship, someone has to make a move, and the conventional way is to make an advance and perhaps accept rebuff. Were I still a young man looking for a partner, I would not wish to live in world where a man had to secure a countersigned contract before he tried to date someone.
I can understand the frustration that individual men feel when they are asked to personally answer for women’s inequality. From the beginning, there’s been a reflexive cry from men: we shouldn’t lump all male misbehavior together. But, men benefit from gender inequality in a way that women do not from perceived feminist overreach. I have to think, so what if men are scared and confused? For ages, sex has held heavier consequences for women. Perhaps we are just getting closer to gender parity, to a place where women’s desires in sex matter as much as men’s.
Claude Drolet | Supervisor
cdrolet@gmu.edu
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