In The Chronicle of Higher
Education’s article, The
New Misogyny reminded me of an event that happened not to long ago at
Rollins College. During Fall 2014, Rollins had a speaker named Jackson Katz, and he came
to speak about men’s violence against women. When he came to speak the freshman
were required to attend one of his talks, which made for some interesting
conversation on Yik Yak.
Within the span of an hour, there were hundred of Yik Yaks in regards to his
lecture. Most, if not all, were negatively bashing his message about men’s
violence against women.
These are just a few of the nasty comments that were posted
during Katz’s talk last Fall. I was absolutely appalled by the amount of sexist
language, which came from a place that I thought was super progressive. I
thought the campus climate was quite neutral, but after I saw these Yaks, I
thought that I had stepped back in time. Granted, I know that most of the
students that were posting these comments were freshman, and “there is a
tendency for students to change in the direction of institutional peer norms” (Schuh,
Jones, and Harper 2010, 44), so that can be taken into account. I know these Yaks are not a full
representation of the male student population at Rollins, but it does make me
wonder.
John Schuh, Susan Jones, Shaun Harper, Student Services: A
Handbook for the Profession (John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 43-58
I also wonder if the negativity of these posts is in many ways an equal and opposite reaction to Katz's own rhetoric. In other words, does misogyny rise in negative tone through the negativity of second-wave feminist rhetoric? Would Marbles or someone like her have addressed the same issue in the same way? What would the reaction have been to a different approach?
ReplyDelete