An Open Letter to my Victim-Blaming Professor

Recently, one of my professors made a comment that upset me so much that I immediately began writing her a letter she would never read. Although this is a little different than my regular blog posts, I thought it was relevant. As teachers, we must be aware of our great responsibility. We must strive not to alienate any of our students by shutting them down, or by making damaging remarks that could affect them for the rest of their lives.

An Open Letter to my Victim-Blaming Professor

I used to respect you.

I used to think you stood with minorities and women. You claimed to. You proudly announced on the first day, “I am a feminist!”

But then you stood in front of a class of almost 50 young people, and you said, “the only reason women ever get attacked is because they act afraid. I used to walk around New York City alone at night all the time, and nothing ever happened to me. If you act timid and quiet and make yourself small, of course you get harassed and attacked. I am confident. I walk like I’m going somewhere and I don’t take that from anyone. Be more like me.”

I temporarily stopped breathing.

You are our professor. Your words should be used to teach and instruct, not to spew your own misguided opinions. I want to raise my hand and say: “professor, the reason women are raped is not because they’re small and scared. The only reason women are raped is because of rapists.”

But I don’t say anything.

A girl in the front row – a braver girl – raises her hand and says, “it’s good to be aware that that kind of thing can happen, though. I’ve been followed multiple times, and because I was aware of it I was able to escape the situation.”

“No.” You say.

“No?” The girl, who just boldly shared her personal experience in front of a whole class of strangers, asks uncertainly.

“No. You were followed because you seemed afraid. You made yourself weak.”

Everything inside me screams that what you’re doing is wrong. You shut her down, just like you shut down everyone who has a different opinion than you – but it never bothered me like this until now. Now, I’m invested.

A couple of girls sitting around me try to raise their hands to speak, but you either don’t see their hands or pretend not to. Instead of hearing from the class, you proceed to spend what must be a good half an hour bragging about your strong stature and rough exterior. With a captive audience of impressionable 20-somethings at your disposal, you drone on and on about how you shut down man-spreaders on the subway by insulting the size of their manhood to their faces. You demonstrate your walk for us. You call everyone with a different personality than you weak.

I’m genuinely happy for you that you’ve never been harassed, or assaulted, or stalked, or raped, or attacked. That’s a rare feat, especially for someone who’s been on this earth as long as you have. But I have no doubt that many young women in that classroom that day have been. And for you to tell us it’s our fault for not being like you, is shameful. You should be ashamed of yourself.

I know you’re not, though. I’ll write about this in your teacher evaluation at the end of the year, and you’ll tell your next class about the girl who whined about victim blaming and they’ll all laugh. I know you’ll do this, because you’ve told us about everyone who’s ever written a negative evaluation of you – delegitimizing their earnest claims by mocking them cruelly. You’ll certainly do the same for me – maybe you’ll even wickedly laugh that I was “triggered” or in need of a “safe space,” but I don’t care.

I pray that the girl who spoke up won’t allow her experiences to be diminished because of how easily you dismissed her. And I thank God that we are a class of college students – not high school students. For if a younger group heard those words, they might believe them. They might believe that they were deserving of any incidents that may have happened to them, because of their demeanors. And young boys may have heard those words, and thought they made it okay for them to prey on scared girls too – okay because they were weak, after all. They did it to themselves.

I call my boyfriend after class, shaking with anger. “She’s right,” I tell him. “Someone like me may be more of a target than someone like her. But that doesn’t mean I have it coming.”

I make myself small when I walk and sit. I clasp my hands together, I cross my legs. I wear a lot of pink, a lot of dresses, a lot of bows. My voice is soft and girlish. I don’t cuss or strut like you do. But that does not make you any better or stronger than me.

Real feminism, I want to tell you, is not putting other women down to elevate yourself. It is not discounting other women’s experiences and bragging about your own. It is not slut-shaming and it sure as hell is not victim blaming.

You have a responsibility as a professor to, at the very least, accurately relay facts. You have power. We have to listen to you because our grades depend on it. You have the Ph.D. (as you are constantly reminding us) and some people may believe that makes you better than us – smarter than us. But it doesn’t.

I see right through you. I smile when you mention bands and shows from your generation, berating us for not knowing about them (even when we do). And I have to stop myself from openly rolling my eyes as you brag about how well-traveled and worldly you are, while showing us pictures from your Western European vacations.

I understand what you’re doing – you have three hours to stand in front of us and gloat about yourself. You picked the right profession.

But when I teach, I’m going to use my small platform differently. Teaching is not about you. You can’t ignore statistics because they don’t match up with your own experiences and beliefs. Attacks on women are extremely common. Much too common. And people like you are only making the problem worse.

I still think I have a great deal to learn from you, and I’m sure I will. But I will now take everything you say with a grain of salt. I know there is nothing that anyone can say to you to make you realize you are not the authority on every subject. Some people are just like that. But I beg of you, please stop calling yourself a feminist. Praising masculine traits alone and suggesting that possessing feminine traits makes a person deserving of oppression and abuse does not make you a feminist. You are the enemy of feminism.