On Sexism in High School

I recently got out for summer break from my local high school, and I really only had one thing that bothered me this year. It wasn’t any sort of drama, nor was it an event. My main source of irritation was a group of boys at my school who were obsessed with cutting down and insulting anything and everything that supported gender equality.

It started with a group of guys in my history class making derogatory comments whenever feminism was mentioned, and since feminism is included quite often in my history book, it happened nearly daily. They would always respond to logical arguments with responses such as: “We all know what happens when you let a woman do a man’s job.” Or the ever popular: “Go make me a sandwich.” One of them even went so far as to call women’s suffrage a mistake.  After dealing with this for an entire school year, I finally had enough. I jokingly asked one of my friends if they had any duct tape so I could shut his mouth for him, since he didn’t know when he needed to shut himself up. The boy who kept making these loudmouthed comments heard this and proclaimed to the entire class that he’s “not into that kinda stuff” which resulted in the group of guys laughing and jeering at me.

I know they’re just idiotic teens, but it all starts somewhere. I think it’s wrong that many parents allow their children to behave in this way, and I think it’s even worse that authority figures like teachers, who could be role-models and mentors, don’t try to correct this issue when they see events such as this one occur. This gender bias is heavily promoted in today’s culture with phrases such as: “Cool story babe, now go make me a sandwich” gaining a huge amount of popularity. Phrases such as these have even been put on T-shirts, and I’ve even seen a few people wearing them at my own school. If shirts that have slogans that are too “racy” (i.e. tees that proclaim the wearer is: “sexy” or anything of that nature) are banned from school, shouldn’t shirts with sexist phrases branded across them be banned too? We live in a culture where these sort of messages are okay, and people who wear them are just "messing around.” But that raises the question: When does it stop being okay? When is it just sexist? I think it's sexist from

In closing, I only have one thing to say to that group of ignorant, self-proclaimed "men:" Go make your own effing sandwich while I go buy more duct tape.