Ask Lemmy

I learned women actually don't have the same access to higher education as men. That misogyny and rape culture is real and heavily affect people's lives in present day. And that it's about isolated incidents with bad apples, but about the structures around bad incidents, and how they systematically facilitate bad situations, don't help or silence victims.

I genuinely believed it was safe to give my peers the benefit of the doubt and assume that their ironically bigoted jokes weren't their actual views. And it was heartbreaking to realize that that is not an assumption you can make. You don't know people's values unless they tell you, seriously and genuinely, straight from the heart. You cannot infer values from ironic jokes, and you cannot assume that the nice people around you share your core values, that you'd otherwise take for granted that everyone but lunatics agree with. You don't know before you ask.

I learned that humor isn't always innocent. That not everyone who hears you make an "ironically bigoted" joke laughs because of its absurdity - they laugh because they agree. They think you agree with their bigoted views and values, and your joke further cements their worldview, that everyone thinks like them, everyone else is just too scared to say it openly. That jokes can be used as a weapon to create a culture where i.e. overt "ironic" racism is considered normal, and genuine conversations about real racism is taboo.

None of this was in the curriculum. It came from experiencing the social setting and viewing the effects of a broken administrative system at an "elite" engineering college.

I was not a feminist when I walked into my STEM education, and I was when I left.