Sexism in sociology and government spies

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone!!

I’m writing this in my sociology class because the funniest thing happened. So, there’s this one guy in my class that participates so much but everytime he says something, it sounds super controversial. Like he always ends up sounding sexist or biased in some way and it ends with a bunch of girls raising their hands to yell at him. Every class, he’s just digging his own grave. The professor can’t even help him, not matter how hard he tries. Now everytime that guy raises his hand to participate, everyone else in the class just anticipates that heated debate. It’s so funny but I almost feel bad for him. Almost. Anyways, today, we were talking about gender bias in teacher/professor evaluations. We were playing around with this animated graph thing that shows gendered language is all these professor ratings (on benschmidt.org). It was really interesting to see the frequency of different descriptive words used to describe men and women. It was meant to show that although there is clearly gender bias in professor reviews, there shouldn’t be because men and women are the same. No gender is smarter or kinder than the other. BUT this other guy raised his hand and started talking about how the difference in professor reviews is due to the actual differences between men and women. For example, there was a greater frequency of the word “kind” used in positive reviews of female professors than male professors. He was saying that this difference was because women are actually more kind than men. Everyone (including the professor) started yelling about how sexist that was, etc. His comment was especially problematic because there was a greater frequency of the word “smart/brilliant” used in positive reviews of male professors than female, and according to him, this difference was due to the fact that men can seem smarter than women. He was literally being attacked in the middle of class. The professor made us all raise our hands instead of just yelling at him so a bunch of people basically took turns destroying him. There are so many opinionated people in my class so it took like 30 minutes to get around to everyone. Now I guess there’s a new “most-hated” person in my class.

We also learned about the theory of the “panopticon” today. The Panopticon is a type of institutional building designed to make the inmates of the institution live under the assumption that they can be watched at any time by a singular watchman. It’s physically impossible for a single person to watch all the inmate but the structure of the building prevents the inmates from seeing the watchman. This forces the inmates to act as if they are being watched at all times. This theory is interesting because it can be applied to modern time and social media. We all have the freedom to do whatever we want on the Internet but there’s the running joke that there’s an FBI agent constantly watching us from our webcams. Creepy, but are we even sure that it’s a joke? What if the government is actually spying on us? I know that search engines and social media have some kind of agreement going on because the moment I search a brand or company ONCE, it’s all over my Facebook and Instagram. Like my friend searched that toothbrush brand “quip” once and now all the ads on her Instagram are all about quip. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were actually being spied on.

Sincerely,

Crystal