Feminist professor offers extra credit to women who stop shaving legs and arm pits

[MADem]

103. I'm going to give you a link to read, because you probably need more information on the assignment.

You're just wrong about the purpose of the assignment and the goals of the class, too.

And the American Psychological Association disagrees with you. But hey, you're the "smart one" and you know best!!!!

Maybe you can give us a list of YOUR awards, and all the papers YOU have written on this subject and related ones, to stack up against this professor's!

Her resume is at the end of the article--I think she's got more than enough credibility to teach on these matters--certainly more than you've demonstrated to this point.

I doubt her strategy in the classroom is put downs or insults, for example.

Oh, and you know what "insight" is, don't you? It's a byproduct of ... feelings.

https://asunews.asu.edu/20140703-body-shaving

.... For the extra-credit assignment, she asks male students to shave everything below the neck and maintain it for ten weeks. This makes the process labor-intensive and gives men some insight into what women who shave go through, she said.

Some male students have come up with strategies to add a “macho” element to the project. “One guy did his shaving with a buck knife,” Fahs said. “Male students tend to adopt the attitude of, ‘I’m a man; I can do what I want.’”

“Although a co-worker questioned why I shaved my legs, I felt comfortable in my own skin,” says a former male participant, Kurt Keller. “It helped having classmates who were so willing to lay it on the line too....Jaqueline Gonzalez credits the body hair project with helping to shape her into the activist she is today. “The experience helped me better understand how pervasive gendered socialization is in our culture,” Gonzalez said. “Furthermore, by doing this kind of activist project I was no longer an armchair activist theorizing in the classroom. So much is learned by actually taking part in the theory or idea we learn in the classroom, and we could benefit from this type of pedagogy being taken up by similar classes.”

Gonzalez isn’t the only person who believes projects like this should be implemented elsewhere. “I’ve been surprised by the amount of positive feedback I have received,” Fahs said. Faculty members at other universities are considering using the exercise in their classes. Fahs said she looks forward to seeing how the exercise works in other settings. “There is a big difference between imagining not shaving and actually trying to not shave,” she said.

And the American Psychological Association was so sufficiently impressed with the body hair exercise that the organization gave Fahs the Mary Roth Walsh Teaching the Psychology of Women Award through Division 35 in 2012. She has had papers about the project published in academic journals, including Feminism & Psychology, Psychology of Women Quarterly and Gender & Society.