How teaching highlights the double standards applied to men and women

[niyad]

One teacher was fired after parents found out they were an underwear model while another was crowned ‘world’s sexiest teacher’ and won a modelling contract. Guess which one is a female teacher?



We know that men and women are often judged differently by society, but it’s rare that an example comes along that highlights the double standard as clearly as this week’s parallel news stories about two teachers and their modelling photos.
The headline on one reads: “A teaching assistant was fired after parents found out she was an underwear model.” The other, a story about a male teacher, reads: “A maths tutor who was crowned the world’s sexiest teacher is now an Armani model.” According to some reports, Gemma Laird, a 21-year-old teaching assistant who worked in County Durham, argued that her school employers were aware of her modelling work with Lexi Fashions when she applied for her position. The school spoke of particular photographs that were “not appropriate”. But after a parent found her modelling photographs on Facebook and complained to the school, she says she was fired out of fear it would “damage the school’s reputation”.

The story surfaced in the same week as the news that Pietro Boselli, the model and engineering lecturer who hit headlines last year when his students Googled him and found his modelling photos, has been chosen to front Armani’s EA7 clothing line. The stories are not identical – Boselli is currently taking a break from teaching (although his modelling work became widely known while he was still lecturing), and there is a big age difference between his university-age students and Laird’s primary school charges. But there is an interesting question to be asked about just how “damaging” an external modelling job, which presumably had no impact on Laird’s ability to teach, should be considered to her career.

The fact that the school was reportedly concerned about its reputation suggests that perceptions may have been important in this case, and our perceptions of male and female bodies can be very different indeed. Not only does society sexualise women’s bodies to an uncompromising and extreme degree, but it also reacts with horror and vitriol when women choose to take sexual agency over their own bodies – and with delight when men do the same.

Consider, for example, the 2011 case of Benedict Garrett, also highlighted by the same Twitter user who brought the double standard in Boselli and Laird’s cases to wide attention. Garrett – who had left his job as head of personal, social and health education (PSHE) at a school in London after parents discovered that he sometimes worked as a stripper and had appeared in pornographic films – was reprimanded at a disciplinary hearing in front of the General Teaching Council, but told that he was free to resume teaching in the future.

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http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2016/mar/31/how-teaching-highlights-the-double-standards-applied-to-men-and-women