Fem-Rage!!
This is what happens when I spend too much time of a night thinking about what I'm doing with my life, combined with reading an article by the [yes, definite article] woman in physics [Lisa Randall, in Discover; also, she had a book out last year, Warped Passages, which I really need to read], being in a Fem-Rage mood in general recently [saw an author talk a couple weeks ago, mentioned it in my last entry -- on a book that *just* came out, I Do, but I Don't, which I think partially ignited it, but also, I mean, I had to go to a lot of effort to *get* to see her talk, cutting out of a class, getting out to where she was speaking, etc, so the Fem-Rage had already been starting :P], and poking around the website of Professor Eckhart, the Linguistics/Fem Studies professor that I'm determined to make my advisor (:D).
So, yea. Without further ado, my babble:
Perfectly stable equal interchanges are extremely rare. This is exemplified in the Japanese language, where an elaborate system of pronouns and so on must be used to encode the relationship of the speaker to the listener directly. This is only one of many cultural customs that encode our knowledge of how people interact; there are varying heights and methods of bowing, curtseying, kowtowing, and so on, depending on your culture and relative rank to the recipient of the gesture. It is an issue that we often try to ignore, with our modern worldviews and ideals, but the free capitalism that we are so proud of itself encodes the very idea of inequality. We might refuse to acknowledge it, when asked point-blank, but as my philosophy professor pointed out a few weeks ago, when asked why people earn different salaries, the response is usually along the lines of “they deserve/work for/earn it.”
A wolf pack never has two alpha males. There is one; his rank may be challenged, and he may be overthrown, but there is only ever one at a time, and the rest of the pack has a strict rank that they know and adhere to.
Where does this put us? The feminist movement, among a number of other movements in the past century, has been calling for “equality of the ______,” in this case, the sexes. But what does this mean? We have made steps forward, but how many more are there to make to reach this ideal? How many more can be made? There are only so many things that can be done. What about the proposal? Only one person can ask, and the other person has to simply sit back and accept or decline, and, in the meantime, wait. We could toss it overboard as an outworn tradition, but somehow, the world doesn’t seem to like that. We’ve seen a resurgence in ‘traditional’ weddings, complete with traditional dresses, and dropping huge amounts of cash on what amounts to a day of putting the bride on show. Women still do most of the planning for weddings. Women still do most of the child-rearing, and have most of the household responsibilities. Women are still the ones who put their careers second to that of their husband in the majority of cases. And why? Division of labor? Someone has to give up something. That’s almost the definition of any relationship, and certainly love - being willing to make sacrifices, compromises. But where does the sacrificial end and the sacrosanct begin? Where should the boundary be?
So many of these are questions that many of the other civil rights movements don’t have to face. There is no possible justification for treating a black man and a white man differently; a Jew, a Sikh, and a WASP… or, for that matter, a man with a boyfriend and a man with a wife. But, when you enter that microcosm - the man and his wife - the complications suddenly pour into the woodwork. Someone has to do the laundry and someone has to cut the grass, right? And, if there’s anything the industrial revolution taught us, it’s that having specialists is far more efficient than having everyone do everything, with less training and experience that is necessitated by such a set-up. So why decry the setup?
------
I'm not entirely sure where that's supposed to be going, but I think it's the beginnings of where I want to go with research in the next couple years. I touch on a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in, actually, in just those few ramblingish paragraphs; embedded cultural practices that sort of... perform ideas of inequality, parallels and contrasts with other civil rights movements, problems we still face, the nature vs. nurture issues... I mean, what I really want to focus on is this kind of "backlash" that seems to be occuring, with the reclaimation of a lot of more traditional practices that had seemed to have been ditched in the 70s and 80s, and the kind of... "conversion" phenomena that I see whenever I walk into a bookstore, and there's approximately eight million books written by former feminists, very earnestly denouncing their former ideals, and going on and on about how much happiness they get out of raising their kids and so on. Because there's certainly something to the sentiment, and I certainly agree that there were a lot of things wrong with/out of hand about some of the earlier feminist movements. But I absolutely can't stomach the idea of just going back to square one and surrendering. [There is always, of course, the issues of women in male-dominated fields, and just how different techie departments etc feel and such, but I don't know how to work that in... not to mention, if I do go on this Fem Studies kind of direction, I'm not going to have all that much time left to do physics anymore, so I don't know how much authority I'd have to really say much other than "I did a lot of the stuff in high school, but I hit college and the physics department just terrified me, so I bolted..." or even, really, to tell younger girls to not give up -- I mean, the world's best role model is someone who gives up, right?]
Yea. I'm done. For the night. :P [aside from, y'know, the twenty+ minutes that I then spent editing this entry and floating around my LJ archive to look for earlier Fem-Rage entries... haha]
So, yea. Without further ado, my babble:
Perfectly stable equal interchanges are extremely rare. This is exemplified in the Japanese language, where an elaborate system of pronouns and so on must be used to encode the relationship of the speaker to the listener directly. This is only one of many cultural customs that encode our knowledge of how people interact; there are varying heights and methods of bowing, curtseying, kowtowing, and so on, depending on your culture and relative rank to the recipient of the gesture. It is an issue that we often try to ignore, with our modern worldviews and ideals, but the free capitalism that we are so proud of itself encodes the very idea of inequality. We might refuse to acknowledge it, when asked point-blank, but as my philosophy professor pointed out a few weeks ago, when asked why people earn different salaries, the response is usually along the lines of “they deserve/work for/earn it.”
A wolf pack never has two alpha males. There is one; his rank may be challenged, and he may be overthrown, but there is only ever one at a time, and the rest of the pack has a strict rank that they know and adhere to.
Where does this put us? The feminist movement, among a number of other movements in the past century, has been calling for “equality of the ______,” in this case, the sexes. But what does this mean? We have made steps forward, but how many more are there to make to reach this ideal? How many more can be made? There are only so many things that can be done. What about the proposal? Only one person can ask, and the other person has to simply sit back and accept or decline, and, in the meantime, wait. We could toss it overboard as an outworn tradition, but somehow, the world doesn’t seem to like that. We’ve seen a resurgence in ‘traditional’ weddings, complete with traditional dresses, and dropping huge amounts of cash on what amounts to a day of putting the bride on show. Women still do most of the planning for weddings. Women still do most of the child-rearing, and have most of the household responsibilities. Women are still the ones who put their careers second to that of their husband in the majority of cases. And why? Division of labor? Someone has to give up something. That’s almost the definition of any relationship, and certainly love - being willing to make sacrifices, compromises. But where does the sacrificial end and the sacrosanct begin? Where should the boundary be?
So many of these are questions that many of the other civil rights movements don’t have to face. There is no possible justification for treating a black man and a white man differently; a Jew, a Sikh, and a WASP… or, for that matter, a man with a boyfriend and a man with a wife. But, when you enter that microcosm - the man and his wife - the complications suddenly pour into the woodwork. Someone has to do the laundry and someone has to cut the grass, right? And, if there’s anything the industrial revolution taught us, it’s that having specialists is far more efficient than having everyone do everything, with less training and experience that is necessitated by such a set-up. So why decry the setup?
------
I'm not entirely sure where that's supposed to be going, but I think it's the beginnings of where I want to go with research in the next couple years. I touch on a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in, actually, in just those few ramblingish paragraphs; embedded cultural practices that sort of... perform ideas of inequality, parallels and contrasts with other civil rights movements, problems we still face, the nature vs. nurture issues... I mean, what I really want to focus on is this kind of "backlash" that seems to be occuring, with the reclaimation of a lot of more traditional practices that had seemed to have been ditched in the 70s and 80s, and the kind of... "conversion" phenomena that I see whenever I walk into a bookstore, and there's approximately eight million books written by former feminists, very earnestly denouncing their former ideals, and going on and on about how much happiness they get out of raising their kids and so on. Because there's certainly something to the sentiment, and I certainly agree that there were a lot of things wrong with/out of hand about some of the earlier feminist movements. But I absolutely can't stomach the idea of just going back to square one and surrendering. [There is always, of course, the issues of women in male-dominated fields, and just how different techie departments etc feel and such, but I don't know how to work that in... not to mention, if I do go on this Fem Studies kind of direction, I'm not going to have all that much time left to do physics anymore, so I don't know how much authority I'd have to really say much other than "I did a lot of the stuff in high school, but I hit college and the physics department just terrified me, so I bolted..." or even, really, to tell younger girls to not give up -- I mean, the world's best role model is someone who gives up, right?]
Yea. I'm done. For the night. :P [aside from, y'know, the twenty+ minutes that I then spent editing this entry and floating around my LJ archive to look for earlier Fem-Rage entries... haha]