So I'm taking a sociology class for the first time. It's cross-listed as a women's studies course and the professor is a mega feminist. There's a ton of reading, and so far it's been pretty interesting stuff. However, this is one of three women's studies I'm taking currently, and I've noticed it's getting easier and easier to overdose on manhate.
So last night I was doing one of the readings for this course, which can be found here. It's a sort of lengthy satire by Douglas Hofstadter, and the point is that the English language has a very obvious male slant with terms like mailMAN, MANkind, sHE, etc. And he chose to illustrate his point by writing a really long angry letter that disputes this and then replacing all the "male" references with the word "white" and all the "female" words with "black." He was trying to say that it doesn't seem so bad at first, but if we replace gender with race, then it becomes really shocking.
So anyway, I'm sitting on my couch reading this piece. By this time it's roughly my fifth consecutive anti-patriarchy reading and I'm starting to get a little frazzled and overwhelmed by manhate. I'm trying to read this article, and I think there's something wrong with me because I can't understand a goddamned word the guy's saying. I'm starting to see things like this:
Nrs. Buford also finds it insultingly asymmetric that when a black is employed by a white, ble changes bler firmly name to whis firmly name. But what's so bad about that? Every firm's core consists of a boss (whis job is to make sure long-term policies are well charted out) and a secretary (bler job is to keep corporate affairs running smoothly on a day-to-day basis). They are both equally important and vital to the firm's success. No one disputes this. Beyond them there may of course be other firmly members. Now it's quite obvious that all members of a given firm should bear the same firmly name-otherwise, what are you going to call the firm's products? And since it would be nonsense for the boss to change whis name, it falls to the secretary to change bler name. Logic, not racism, dictates this simple convention.
I think, wait a second this could not possibly be what he's saying. Bosses? Firmly? ble? And then something happens.
And that is why you should not take three women's studies courses in one semester.
