The #MeToo movement has wracked Hollywood, Capitol Hill, and Silicon Valley, but most of Laura Winnick’s students at the Urban Assembly Maker Academy hadn’t even heard of it. That's why she decided to tell them about the women who publicly shared their experiences with sexual harassment and assault, and all that followed from that. Several lessons later, Winnick found she had built a curriculum around feminism and gender roles.
One lesson involved showing the video from Time magazine's 2017 person of the year: The Silence Breakers. Responses from her sophomore English class ran the gamut. After learning that 122 public figures have been accused of sexual harassment or assault, one student said he was “heartbroken.” A few other suggested the accusers could be “gold diggers.”
For some, the topic was personal. Student Katiri Wright said she was writing a essay about sexual harassment to be published in the class e-magazine. Wright said boys she dated told her things like, “I have extra money, I could pay you for you, [and] that means you owe me something in return.”
When she resisted, Wright said she got the silent treatment: “They manipulate you to get something that they want from you.”
Ninety percent of girls will experience sexual harassment before they graduate high school, according to research by Christia Spears Brown, director of the Center for Equality and Social Justice at the University of Kentucky.
By middle school, Brown said, “Kids already believe that girls need to be sexualized [and] they get their value from whether boys find them to be attractive and that boys are supposed to be sexually voracious and treat women as sexual objects.”
Brown said it’s a rare occurrence in schools, but teaching young people to understand gender stereotypes is one of the most effective ways to combat sexism.
That’s exactly what Winnick was doing in her classroom. She asked students to examine stereotypes using the gender-box exercise. The walls of her classroom were lined with colorful posters with boxes drawn on them. Inside the boxes, students wrote what it means to “act like a man” or “act like a lady.” Outside the boxes, they wrote the labels society slaps on people who break with gender expectations — labels like “weak” or “gay” for men and “slut” or “gold digger” for women.
Winnick acknowledged that a group of teenagers would not necessarily shift their views over the course of six weeks but she said some had real breakthroughs.
After class one day, Thomas Dejesuscarofano leaned forward in his chair and said the unit on feminism made him think a lot about how his parents viewed masculinity.
“Say I got into a fight with my brother and I was to cry,” he said, “My dad would make me wear a dress because he’s like men don’t cry after. Men take it.”
Now, he’s started to question his parents for that kind of gendered thinking. And he told them about the gender boxes.