The College Fix

At first I thought this column titled “Women can’t be sexist” was a parody, like the hilarious condemnation of microaggressions against left-handed people by the University of Michigan’s Omar Mahmood, which got him fired by the Puritan scolds at the Michigan Daily.

Nope, it’s sincere!

In a guest column for The Post at Ohio University, one of its own reporters shares her experience manning a table for the school’s Women’s Center on International Women’s Day last week.

Erin Davoran said she was confronted by a man who claimed the Women’s Center was “sexist against men” and who complained that he was treated unfairly in a job interview, because his female interviewer claimed that “all white men created poverty”:

I apologized for his experience and explained that one woman does not represent all women or the entirety of feminism, which works toward the equality of both sexes and all genders — not women over men — socially and economically.

It could have ended there, but the guy came back to ask how it wasn’t sexist that the school has a “Women of Appalachia” group but not a parallel group for men. This is where Davoran goes off the rails:

I started to explain that women can’t be sexist …

Wait, what? That’s even less credible than claiming men can’t be pregnant. Back to Davoran and her airtight explanation:

… that reverse racism doesn’t exist, but he cut me off before I could finish. He started yelling, “That’s bullshit! That is complete bullshit!” and walked away. I tried calling after him, asking him to hear me out, but he just kept walking.

So, sir, if you are reading this, please listen. Women cannot be sexist; the same way people of color cannot be racist. In the 2014 film Dear White People, the main character says, “Black people can’t be racist. Prejudice, yes, but not racist. Racism describes a system of disadvantage based on race. Black people can’t be racist since we don’t stand to benefit from such a system.” Replace “black people” with “women” and “racist/racism/race” with “sexist/sexism/sex” and that is the point I was trying to convey.

I was at the Dear White People premiere in Seattle last year, incidentally. (The crowd was overwhelmingly white, of course.) The middling film’s most interesting takeaway for me was how people become trapped by their own identities and orthodoxies – only two characters show anything like personal growth and open-mindedness.

Davoran doesn’t seem to grasp that she’s trapped within her own orthodoxy, speaking of equality between the sexes while elevating women into some theoretical construct that bears no relation to the humanity of women, warts and all.

Women can’t be sexist by definition, because they “don’t stand to benefit” from a “system of disadvantage.” Never mind they are blowing past men in higher education by practically any yardstick, short of engineering degrees.

It’s clear from Davoran’s recounting that her inquisitor indeed wasn’t interested in a good-faith debate. This is just laughable, though:

[I]f I have learned anything from my Women’s and Gender Studies and diversity studies classes, it’s about how to talk about the issues without shutting people down.

Telling someone by definition they are wrong is exactly how you shut people down, even if you call them “sir” and stay “calm,” which is just patronizing.

“We all need to have conversations about what feminism means and how to achieve equality,” Davoran says – but that’s not going anywhere if you tell men they are the problem. Only they can be “sexist.” They were born that way, to use Lady Gaga’s turn of phrase.

It’s hard to take her seriously when she encourages readers to “email me, let’s talk.” If any of you ask Davoran to talk, let us know how the conversation goes.

Greg Piper is an assistant editor at The College Fix. (@GregPiper)

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IMAGES: Frank M. Rafik/Flickr, Erin Davoran’s LinkedIn page

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