Poor potential teachers, who daren’t take up teaching in primary schools lest they be thought gay! Oh, dear! Poor souls!
This finding comes in a report from the UK’s largest teachers’ union, the NUT.
“The reality is that men and women become teachers because it’s an invigorating job,” says Tony Souter, a joint divisional secretary of the union, “and working with kids gives a real kick to people who want to do something that benefits society, rather than become a banker.”
I think he’s spelling that last word with a w.
“But we’re not paying teachers enough, which leads to a perception that it’s a woman’s job providing a second income.”
But aren’t women paid the same as men? And what’s wrong with “a woman’s job”? And, anyway, how much money do they want?
Anyway, if these real men think being thought gay is is a crap idea, it’s as well that they won’t become teachers, because schools don’t need men like them.
It’s a nice, neat, elegant, convenient, self-regulating mechanism?
2 comments:
Sometimes the prejudice is even dafter.
For example, as today, back in the early 1980's the Isle of Man had a shortage of primary school teachers and a scholarship scheme to train interested people. I applied but mysteriously never got interviewed.
I later found the problem was a selection panel dominated by small town godbotherers who assumed any bloke still unmarried by his mid-twenties must be gay and was therefore a potential child molester, especially if he couldn't produce a reference from a clergyman!
I kid you not - things were really that bad here in those days, and are only very slowly improving.
You are right, Andy, it is a self-regulating mechanism, one that highlights how anti-gay prejudice is actually a tool that is used to oppress all men and maintain the patriarchal system that controls and disadvantages women in so many ways.
Some heterosexual men I know are enlightened and sophisticated enough to know that gay equality is important for them too, because while the right to live a gay life freely and openly is one they don't care to exercise, they don't want some religious or political nut taking that right away from them either.
Anti-gay prejudice (I am loath to use the term "homophobia" as it's one of those weasel words that smacks of social engineering), restricts and polices the lives of straight men and the options they have in life, just as much as it oppresses men who are gay.
Choose the wrong career, drive the wrong car, order the wrong drink in a bar, play the wrong sport, or take an interest in something like musical theatre or poetry and you can be sure there'll be some twat, somewhere, ready to ridicule or even ruin your reputation with smears and innuendo.
Indeed, it could be argued that gay oppression is just a by-product of this kind of prejudice and discrimination which is really there to police the desires, behaviour, social choices and career options of ALL men, regardless of their actual sexual orientation.
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