Right: “Woman: without her, man is nothing.”

Good to know that it’s okay to say that men are nothing without women but wrong to say women are nothing without men.

*vomits*

Sorry, just doing my duty to speak out against sexism.

There are days when I do check myself. I really do. I look back and say , “Travado, you are dead wrong…” but there are days when I am totally oblivious. Remember, I am a guy. So i totally miss the mark.

Pretty much, I speak for all men when I say keep doing what you are doing. I never said it was your job (or any women’s job for that ) to keep all men in check. in a perfect world, all men would be able to sit back and reflect and admit their part in the treatment of women as second class citizenship, but alas, we don’t live in a perfect world.

I need help like several of my brethren.

Haha…you know what the road to hell is paved with, right?

(Just in case, or for other readers…”The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” ) !

The only thing I have to say though, is that…I’m sorry, but I totally don’t consider that story a good example of good intentions! The instructor may not have been giving them those push-ups specifically to keep them weak, but he did want them to stay what he considered good-looking while taking his class…he was placing their physical attractiveness, or his opinion of it, above their progress in capoeira. And not only is that a flawed assumption (what is “becoming”?), but who’s to say the girls wouldn’t mind growing muscles if it meant they’d get stronger? Not to mention that it’s not even true; women have to work REALLY hard to build muscle like men do…they still gain the strength, but the actual muscle mass builds more slowly. (Assuming your instructor was worried about huge rippling-type muscles on the women…not just well-defined muscles that show a person has an above-average fitness level.) Think of it this way: what if the instructor also kept them from eating while in his class, just because certain weights/sizes are considered unbecoming on women? And what right did he have to stunt their progress (however inadvertently) and implicitly (if not explicitly) tell them their physical attractiveness was more important than anything else they were doing there?

Anyway, I still get the point you were trying to make, and sorry if I went off on you there! Hope you saw why, though…

On another note, you said something really important in passing, about it being also a raw deal for guys…soooo many people don’t seem to get that sexism isn’t just bad for women (though we do bear the brunt), but it hurts EVERYONE. We’ve touched on this in the comments of another post…I think it was “Women, Men, and Brazilian Bikinis” (the conversation between “a man” and me). Thanks for the reminder, now I want to write a post elaborating further on this , some time in the future!

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Like I said to Sean, I think you have to pick your battles…because if you say something every time some comment is made, every class, even if it warrants it…then you might just lose “cred” in the class, like in Cigana’s case, and credibility argument-wise, and possibly have lessened the chances that a stronger, better placed/timed action/comment would succeed later.

About leaving your group though…I’m pretty convinced that this kind of thing is universal, unfortunately. Well, maybe not in some angola groups, but unless you’ve already spent time in the other considered group and know what they’re like, you still might come across more of the same.

Good luck! I wish I could help more.

Well…this is the place for it! (For getting it off your chest, I mean.) And that sounds really horrible, I’d feel/think the exact same way if I were you.

Honestly…I don’t really know what to suggest. This sounds horrible, but if I really enjoyed the classes themselves, I might actually just try brushing it all off…and I’d feel like a hypocrite for telling you you should tell him/them off, when I wouldn’t/haven’t yet done anything like that in capoeira myself.

One small thing you could try, though, is to pass it off as a joke (in that you tell them what you think but somehow with humour in it)…like dry sarcasm might help get your point across, without actually sounding preachy or whiny or what not. Just some quick, cutting line you insert in passing in response to one of their sexist ones that makes it clear where you stand.

I don’t think I’d do something like bring it up out of the air and list all their past comments or something, but you could just react the next time it happens, and then if that actually goes somewhere, you can point out how they “always” do that, etc.
At least this way they’d be aware then, right? And that also gives them benefit of the doubt…because if you make it clear how you feel about it all and they STILL act the same, especially with you being the only girl, then it’s a bit clearer whether they’re jerks or just ignorant (though those are hardly appealing options)!