True Story from Graduate School

The scene is a graduate classroom in which we are discussing factors that people find desirable in a mate. As various students give answers, "emotional stability", "wealth", etc. I raise my hand and answer, "fidelity"

"Bark!" responds the professor. Not the word, but the sound of a barking dog.

Then class moves on. I don't know exactly what to think. Much later, months later, I process this event with a colleague. (Much like Christians "share" with each other, psychology graduate students "process" things with each other.) She confirms that I did not misperceive something else as a bark. I was actually barked at in a graduate classroom of a public university. Only then, processing it with a friend, did I get a bit angry. For two reasons:

1. Had a barked at any of my Psych 101 students for any reason whatsoever, I would be out of the program. Guaranteed. This would be considered the height of inappropriate behavior. We have an institutional statement on creating a Civil Learning Environment and this certainly would qualify as incivility coming from me.
2. As far as I know, and I believe research would support this contention, fidelity is valued not only by heterosexual, religious men, but also by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered individuals, by feminists and by liberals. I was expressing a wide-open opinion: that people want their mates to be theirs and not other peoples. Of course you could take issue with my opinion, but I could take issue with someone else's assertion that wealth is valued in mate selection. Taking issue is different from barking.

In processing the incident with a colleague, we figured out what happened. This was my first and only class with this particular professor, who is well known for work with women's issues. My reputation preceded me – the professor knew that I was a religious person and it was quite obvious that I am male. The professor might also have heard me refer to my wife as "my wife" rather than "my spouse" which is normative in my program. The professor must have expected me to espouse patriarchical values, to be controlling over my spouse (which a brief conversation with my wife would readily disconfirm) and to be intolerant. When I said something innocuous, the professor heard it through that lens of expectation. This is exactly the intolerance that we are so thoroughly drilled to resist in my program.

No, this incident didn't hurt my self-esteem or wound me intrapsychically. If anything it gave me a great story about my graduate training. I'm sure to get some mileage out of it. It illustrated for me the one-sidedness of tolerance that is preached in our public universities. I was a "victim" of religious intolerance (albeit so slight as to be trivial), and I know for a fact that had I done the same action in reference to someone of a minority sexual orientation or ethnicity, I would be searching for a new profession.