Friday, March 1, 2013
Blog about women..and stuff
Okay women, I have a couple questions for you as a gender race. These are things that got stirred up in my mind during the Socratic seminars and since I won't directly receive evil glares after saying this, I'll write them on here instead. First off, women. And yes I'm talking to just women. Why do some of you get offended when we refer to you as a group of people? Because you are your own group of people. There are very distinct physical differences between us. Just because we group you into your own sections for a lot of things doesn't mean that we are singling you out because you are lower than us. Think of all the equal ways we group men and women. Locker rooms, bathrooms, and dorms. Just by giving you your own dorm doesn't mean that the dorms are automatically worse than ours. (from the inside of some women restrooms id say that your bathrooms are actually nicer than ours). But there is still this strive for equality. And I know you're probably thinking 'Nelson, you dummy, we have different dorms bathrooms and locker rooms because you obviously can't have men and women getting naked together' and to that I would say. Very good, you're starting to grasp the concept that sometimes men and women need to be separated. Another no brainier for this would be sports. Simply because of our physical makeup, you could never put men and women in the same physical sport at a professional level. (as good as Rachel Boohar is, she would be broken in half if she had to play on an NFL team.) If you talk to the women of sports, I'm sure that you'll find they are very glad there are 2 separate categories. There is a 2 minute difference in the mens and womens 10k race, 3 feet higher in the pole vault, and almost 20 m in the javelin throw. Women would not want to go from being the best at the Olympics to all the way behind the men. In almost every event, if you placed the men and women in the same race (by time), the entire mens group is abead of the womens leader. So women, i ask you where do you want your line for equality? Clearly it can not be anything physically related.
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I don't think this would have been a bad issue to discuss in class Nelson... you aren't afraid of a few physically inferior women are you? ;-).
ReplyDeleteThere are too many issues raised here for me to hit every single one, so I'll concentrate on answering your question directed at women, yes, just women. I think you are slightly missing the point in why some women get upset about this. It is not because anyone is claiming that men and women are the same (as Virginia Woolf said, "we have too much likeness as it is..." in the point she makes about celebrating differences).
The issue some women have with this has to do with being judged collectively as a group. For instance, if you are driving in your car and a man cuts you off, you would say, "What a ^$&%." If a woman cuts you off, you might say, "Women can't drive." This is a very minor example that illustrates the larger problem. As Clare Boothe Luce said, "I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, 'She doesn't have what it takes. They will say, 'Women don't have what it takes.'"
Men (straight, white men anyway) are mostly judged as individuals, not collectively. The only example I can think of for you to even attempt to relate is how you might feel hearing a girl say, "all men are pigs" because one boy acted like a pig.
You illustrate my point perfectly when you ask women as a gender to answer a question, because a handful of women acted offended about something. I can't imagine taking something one man says to me, or how one man acts towards me, and drawing the conclusion that every man must feel/act in that same way... and yet that's what you have done. You have assumed an entire group of people (yes, a group of people) must feel a certain way, because a few feel that way... rather than judging individuals as individuals.
And then to drive home your point about the absurdity of women taking offense at collective judgement, you end with your very own, age-old, "women will never". Yikes.
I was going to launch into my opinions on this as well (of which I have plenty I can assure you), but this response is already longer than I intended... maybe after the AP Exam we can continue our discussion. (Or maybe I'll find you an article about evolution and physique... written by a man of course so you can trust it).
Oh yeah... and make sure you are making a literary connection in your blogs :-).
Ahhh Mrs. Burnett, i love you and that comment, but as a person with drive and competitiveness, I simply can't let this go after your evident disgust in my opinions. Ill just hi light a few parts of my original post so I dont stir up any new flames.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, i was very concerned not to set my judgements on all women. When i said "Why do SOME OF YOU..." i wasn't talking about every female on the face of the earth. Indeed, i do adress women in this post not only because that is what the unit is about but because that is who is being attacked. Wether i single out women in the essay or not affects very little of what all the wackjobs in society are doing. I doubt that Rush Limbaugh reads my blogs every month and is morally changed by my writing. But yet when he says something about women, as a whole mind you, it gets brought up in class. Now i don't know what Arianna was thinking when she brought it to class but I'd venture to say there were a few generalizations in there about men and about republicans. My point being that women make just as many collective judgements and generalizations about men as men make about women. Neither group is talking about the entire other side, but like you said, a few bad experiences skew our judgement. (P.s. Im doing this is AP psych, its called a Schema. Any experience related to men good or bad is added to you schema. However bad schemas tend to effect an individual much greater than positive schema additions)
Could that count as a literary connection to my AP psychology textbook?