So I was sat outside with my dad and sister and the topic of my sister learning to drive came up. I said I thought my mum’s reasoning for not getting the male driving instructor I had for my sister was extremely sexist. My mum doesn’t want my sister to have the same driving instructor as me simply because he is a man and wants to get a female driving instructor instead, under the basis that apparently male driving instructors have a tendency to sexually assault/ rape female students.

My dad and sister actually both agreed with my mum. I sarcastically replied that “yep, I guess all men you don’t know are rapists”. My dad then said that statistically men are more likely to commit those types of crimes so teaching women to fear men they don’t know is justified as being cautious. I then replied if we were talking about statistics, did he know that black individuals are much more likely to be convicted of a crime than white individuals. Does that make me justified in not wanting to sit next to a black person on the bus because they might steal something from me? Is me preferring to have a white driving instructor over a black one just me being cautious? I also explained that men are much more statistically likely to have a crime committed against them than a woman is. So, why are we teaching women to fear men? If it’s all based on cold hard statistics, why are we not instead teaching men to fear other men?

All this was to show that the judicial system is biased against men and blacks. Yes, the statistics might suggest that men and black people are more likely to commit crimes, but that doesn’t take into account the racist and sexist nature of judicial institutions. Women are less likely to be arrested for or charged severely for the same crime that a man commits, and so do whites receive favourable treatment than do blacks. This all then acts to skew the statistics to make it seem like men and blacks commit more crime when that may not be the case in reality. It was also to show how suggesting that all men are potential rapists is the same as suggesting that all black people are potential thieves.

After all this, I think my sister realised that she had no decent argument to come back with and thus reverted to the age old technique a lot of women use when losing an argument in order to emotionally manipulate the white knights into assistance and that is to cry. She went inside and cried, just enough to make sure my dad could hear her so he could go in and “comfort” her and obviously side with her. Because the crying woman is always in the right, no matter how poor her argument is. I’m sure if I went away and cried it would’ve been a very different story.

We’ve since got over it. My family doesn’t really do the talk things out and make up thing, we just all pretend to forget about it and act like everything’s normal. I can’t wait to get back to university