@Olivier5,
whitebars is no teacher. Real teachers who work in real public schools have protocols, colleagues, and administrators, to help them deal with the sort of student behaviors whitebars allegedly needed our advice about. The classroom teacher is not left to act on their own in this sort of matter--they are not the ultimate authority, and they would, in fact, risk a lawsuit for the school district were they to take any independent action toward a student based on an issue they considered to be sexual assault.
In fact, no one that steeped in an ideology, any ideology, to the extent it entirely distorted and colored their perception and interpretation of events, and their attitudes toward their students, as was/is the case with whitebars, could likely be found teaching in any public elementary school--for years yet. You wouldn't likely find religious fanatics, who might interpret a student's behavior as attributable to demonic possession, and requiring an exorcism, teaching there either, nor would you find outright bigots of any sort displaying clear discrimination toward particular students either.
There are standards and codes of conduct for those allowed to teach in our schools.
And a child would never be removed from a public school for displaying the particular behaviors whitebars cited in this case, as she claimed was the outcome of this situation.
Nothing about whitebars rings true.
Quote: I think these types need to be taken seriously
What "types"--the mentally ill? That's primarily what someone like whitebars represents.
whitebars is a fictional creation, apparently conceived as a sockpuppet, by an anti-feminist, who I suspect is a regular A2K poster, to promote the alleged dangers of allowing feminists to teach in our schools. She represents every cliché and negative stereotype of a man-hating feminist that an anti-feminist could dream up. You've chosen to swallow, and believe, the bait, despite the fact that anyone who sounded like that, or even thought like that, wouldn't be employable in a public school--their craziness would be way too apparent, and it would have become apparent long before they had been teaching
for years.
Quote:That level of toxicity is dangerous to society and to our kids, boys and girls alike
I think the level of toxicity toward feminists, expressed in the noxious fictional persona of whitebars, as well as in various other threads, is dangerous to society and to our kids. There is nothing inherently evil about those who promote equal opportunity for women, which is the essence of feminism, and a very brave 17 year old Pakistani young woman was just awarded the Nobel Prize for doing just that. And Hillary Clinton, who might well become our next President, is considered to be one of the world's most influential and highly regarded feminists.
Do either of those two women sound like crazed man-haters to you?
Are there bat-**** crazy feminists? I'm sure there are. There are bat-**** crazy Christians too. And, the most evangelical among that latter group, insist that everyone who doesn't embrace Jesus is headed for Hell, and they incessantly tell non-believers, and those of other faiths, and even those already in the flock, including little children, that they will perish in a Lake of Fire if they're not firmly on the Jesus bandwagon .
But we don't generally negatively characterize all Christians as being bat-**** crazy the way that feminists are being routinely negatively characterized, in thread after thread on these boards, by self-avowed male anti-feminists who are extremely ignorant of the fact that current mainstream feminism opposes all forms of gender discrimination--which is why they strongly support LGBT rights, and oppose discrimination against men as a group.
Clearly, this thread was never about a teacher seeking advice about how to deal with a student's behavior. It was all about presenting a rather warped view of feminists as destructive man-haters, which is essentially the negative stereotyped view of feminism promoted on the men's rights activists Web sites which continually blame "feminists" for disadvantaging and marginalizing men.
People seriously interested in addressing and understanding societal problems aren't going to childishly reduce them to a pro-feminist or anti-feminist dichotomy, or conceptualize them exclusively in terms of some sort of gender warfare or gender competition. Yet we seem to suddenly have an abundance of threads at A2K taking that simplistic line of thought. It's all the more puzzling because we haven't had any genuinely committed feminists posting here in years, and, even in the past, they were few and far between.
So the anti-feminists, who start and engage in most of these threads now, are attempting to stereotype an extremely diverse group for the sole purpose of setting up a straw man to oppose, and it's actually an artificially manufactured controversy because it really doesn't represent the views of either most men or women who post here at A2K. These anti-feminists are, mainly, disgruntled men grinding their individual axes and using feminism, or their particular distorted view of it, as some sort of scapegoat. But all that does is encourage more stereotyping because we have no posters strongly representing a current legitimate mainstream feminist perspective on particular social issues to provide balance--most of our members, including the anti-feminist contingent, are not even familiar with the current philosophical views of today's leading feminists, nor can they even name these individuals, nor do they know how their issues and views differ from those of feminists 30 years ago, nor do they know how these feminist views differ from those of the average woman, nor do they particularly care. All of that ignorance simply promotes more inaccurate stereotyping of feminists and thread discussions on the subject that are essentially meaningless and shallow.
To emphasize "feminists" in these discussions fails to consider the views of the average woman, or even to recognize that the average woman posting at A2K may have particular views on social issues that are gender-influenced, by virtue of her particular life experience as a female, and by her capacity to empathize with other women, even women in distinctly different cultures, and these views were independently arrived at with no influence from any feminist thinkers . So some of the negative comments ostensibly directed toward "feminism" in these threads are regarded by other posters, both male and female, as being misogynist mainly because they are negative statements about women in general, and mainly because they reveal general antipathy toward woman in general.
