Burning Words

Finally, tonight, I need to rant. I have the course from utter hell this semester, and it just keeps getting worse and worse with every passing week. It’s the ultimate in ignorant, entitled white middle-class feminism mixed with quite a bit of plain there-are-no-words crazy, and after a string of “OH NO YOU DID NOT JUST SAY THAT” moments for the half semester that’s now passed, I am badly wishing I’d dropped it early, or better yet never taken it at all.

When I went to the first lecture for this course, I was really impressed with the lecturer - an amusing feminist with little time for critical theory, to boot, and I even briefly considered asking her to be my honours supervisor. I am incredibly glad in hindsight that I did not.

It started about three weeks in. We had a lecture covering trans issues. I’ve had plenty of lecturers over the years that were ignorant about trans issues, but this was really special - it was as if she’d never read a book on us, let alone met one of us, and was teaching on the basis of something she’d seen on Oprah once. She’d sound generally lucid for a while, and then randomly drop in some comment that was so breathtakingly ignorant and offensive that my jaw literally dropped. The tutorial was worse. She started espousing something completely wrong, and I called her on it, and amongst other things, she asked me to my face something along the lines of “well, don’t transpeople just transition because they really want to do girl stuff?” - and several other things in the same vein. I left that tutorial thinking - dear god, if you don’t actually know anything at all about the subject, how in the hell can you feel so entitled as to think it’s okay for you to teach it?

We had a couple of average lectures, then, two weeks ago, while I was away sick, she did it again. Worse. Really, really worse. As I wasn’t there, I can’t relay all of what she said, but I heard plenty about it from my outraged friends: essentially, she argued that intellectually disabled foetuses should be aborted. Yes, she said that. At that point, a few of us considered dropping the course en masse, but decided against it because we were quite a way into the semester. Bad move.

It’s not really possible to top that effort for sheer offensiveness, but she’s certainly trying. Today’s fun topic was sex work. She went on this absolute batshit rant, literally screaming at the class about how sex worker rights arguments were bullshit (in those words), and pulling statistics out of her arse about sex trafficking going through the roof anywhere that prostitution was legalised. I can’t even argue the point in my coursework because I’m absolutely sure I’d be marked down for disagreeing, but it’s just…WHAT IS THE FUCKING PLAN? REALLY? Because forcing it underground has worked so very well so far to either improve the lives of sex workers OR help them to get out of it if they so choose. It’s worked oh so well to stop violence against sex workers, hasn’t it? Jesus. Perhaps if people like this woman dared pull their heads out of their collective arses for a bare moment, they might gain the opportunity to consider how, y’know, it might actually be helpful to the women actually affected to do something besides dumping sex workers in the shit for the rest of time while having a yayfun “war on prostitution”.

This is the worst course I’ve ever had the misfortune of taking, and god help the impression it’s leaving on other people in that class if this is the idea of “feminism” they’re receiving.

Tags: academia, assholes, disability, feminism, sex work, trans