: Last girl in class
Have to tell this story in a very boring way to remove identifying details.
In college, I took a class in a subject that was of far greater interest to boys than girls. On day one of the class, there was only one girl in the class of about fifteen, and she seemed very shy. However, a round of introductions revealed that she was actually planning to minor in this subject (for which the class was a core requirement), and thus although it was awkward to have such a skewed gender ratio, I think the general mood was to be “cautiously optimistic” that there was a brave woman in the room. We were all progressive, young types who wanted (to some extent or another) to see gender roles shaken up, right?
Anyway, during one of the first few lectures, the girl’s phone went off. I’m not sure if it was a phone call or an alarm, but she’d forgotten to silence it, and the ringtone was some silly Nicki Minaj song. I think the lyrics were about sex, I don’t really remember. The girl immediately got a mortified look on her face, grabbed her stuff, ran out of the classroom, and never came back. Not to that lecture, not to any other lectures, just dropped the class and disappeared.
A few weeks later, I remember the professor (a man in his 50s or so) saying something like: “I know it’d be nice if we had more women in this class. I feel bad that the gender ratio is so uneven. But I have to admit that I feel a little relaxed now that it’s all guys in here.”
I have spent the years since wondering exactly what he meant by that: relaxed about what? This prof wasn’t an utter curmudgeon (although we had those); he was a hip college professor who probably voted for democrats, and it wasn’t like he had suddenly started going on weird sexist tirades in the girl’s absence. Nor did he think that this field was a “man’s game”—his own daughter later enrolled in the program. If we take a charitable interpretation, I think this was the height of hashtag MeToo and the prof was just genuinely afraid of being “canceled” and the pressure to watch his words had been weighing on him.
But then … why say that part, about feeling relaxed now that the girl was gone? Why not just keep that thought to himself? I wonder if part of what prof was doing was seeking reassurance from us—young, progressive boys who knew the “language” of MeToo and cancel culture better than him but also had experienced anxiety over being canceled—that his feeling of “relief” didn’t make him a sexist, or at least not the worst kind of sexist. The ironic thing is that his words had the exact opposite effect: the number one rule of fight club is don’t talk about fight club, viz., the number one rule of accidentally shaming the only girl out of your classroom is don’t acknowledge the gender dynamic responsible.