frouella, 11/14

Well. Tonight's class was certainly...unexpected. I mean, the class itself wasn't unexpected (**checks calendar** Yup, still Tuesday night!), but the strong reactions from our XY brethren were. To me, anyway. I didn't expect to see so many of the guys get so agitated over the discussion, especially when they couldn't voice their opinion and had to rely on the women to read their opinions aloud (if they so chose). To be fair, I know that being in a situation like that would've definitely pi$$ed me off too, so maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised. Then again, I also know that I have been in that position before, so maybe that's why I didn't have much sympathy for them, either. Part of me was saying "Come on, this is only a classroom excercise, ya big babies! It's not like you have to live with this kind of treatment for the rest of your lives!"* And I'm not saying that people actually tell me not to talk (except maybe in Writing About Lit., but that's another story >.>), but that there are more subtle and pervasive ways that the same message is communicated to women. I don't have the data right here in front of me, but I've read studies where male students were shown to be called on more in class, given more attention, etc., than their female counterparts. That's just one example, and that's not even going into what happens in math and science classes...

I do think the point that Dr. Rog made about how the guys weren't actually forced to keep silent is incredibly important here too, and that it proves a point about the nature of oppression in general. At the beginning of the excercise, the direction was simply given to the men that they could not speak, only write, and no one challenged this directly. So: a group of people who usually enjoys a large measure of expressional liberty suddenly found it taken away by a verbal command. This was not enforced by violence or by fear; they simply obeyed the command they were given. From what I could see, the group was not very satisfied with this, but they complied anyway. So the peer pressure, the sociological conditioning, the ISA, the Panoptic gaze, whatever you want to call it, was enough to keep them from speaking, despite the fact that they actually could at any time. So: take this evidence and apply it to the experiences women have been subjected to for centuries, oftentimes with more than a little force and violence used to keep them in line, and is it any wonder that women for so long remained silent? That they're still trying to find their voice? That the issue has not yet been resolved? They've got waaay more than an hour in class to make up for.

I know that most American males of today do not: own slaves, advocate abuse, buy their wives, keep said wives barefoot and pregnant (and force them to bake pies), kick small animals, etc. BUT just because they might not be doing it now doesn't mean it never happened. Yes, I realize that the decisions passed down through history are not their fault in particular, but they should also realize that the system is still skewed in their favor from centuries of male hegemony; as the female theorists from class have already pointed out, it's very difficult to equalize the dialogue between the genders when the imbalance is built into the language! Personally, I try (because I know I'm susceptible to generalizations, too) to not place blame on men today unless they are actively trying to perpetuate that imbalance. I think that's fair, no?

*The other part of me was saying that I totally empathized with you guys. No, really, I did! I just also happened to think that a few minutes of personal experience would be good for you, too.

Random Po-Moment:
......sorry, this is where my brain died...... I'll come up with a good one for next time, K?