hey professor? it's me, your student. please stop insulting my intelligence. kthanx.
I need to get this out:
My Classics class fills me with so. much. HATE. Literally every class and story has involved rape or assault, bestiality, cannibalism, killing children and infants, enforced slavery that is often sexual in nature, and/or a general contempt or disrespect of women. And while it's depressing, I can, in some ways, accept it. The time period was a few hundred years BCE--the feminists hadn't exactly come in and made the world a better place yet. However it is the rationalizaion of this behavior that is driving me absolutely insane. The professor and all but one of the grad student instructors are male, so I suppose they're just going along with this all like "Cool story, bro." Okay, hello? That so doesn't fly with me.
Let's look at my professor's rationalization of child brides. To keep any sexually-reproducing population stable in numbers, each sexually mature female must produce with a male-bodied individual one male and one female offspring that lives to further reproduce one male and one female before dying. Apparently the Greeks were cool with romantic and sexual LGBT relationships as long as you were part of a reproducing hetero couple as well (actually, they probably weren't much cooler about transgendered individuals than we are in modern America, but that's just a guess). But given that disease and starvation were common fates of the Ancients, kids often died before reaching sexual maturity. It's estimated that, in order to compensate for this, each male and female would have had to produce six or seven children just to keep the population stable. So the professor then says the obvious solution to this is to make sure women have as many children as possible. Okay, I suppose I'm sort of with you. Except child birth in Ancient Greece was serious business--so much so that the expected life expectancy for the average Ancient Greek female was 35 years old, a full ten years shorter than that of her male counterpart. This discrepancy can mainly be attributed to complications with pregnancy and birth. So basically, to make up for the age gap, a woman basically had to get married and start having babies as soon as she hit menarche, and then be continuously pregnant for the duration of her truncated lifespan. I'm sorry, this just defies logic for me. I understand the need to have children, but instead of saying "Hey, our woman are dying in childbirth, maybe we should see to that," we're expected to accept the idiotic notion that the right choice is that women should be put at greater risk of dying in order to sustain a population. There is no criticism of this cultural decision, no remark that maybe the practice of endangering women's lives is a bad thing. No. Just "This is how it was and that was perfectly acceptable and we do not question the ideas of people who hadn't yet fully conceived of gravity." I CALL BULLSHIT.
I hate this class.
For another example, take the story of Ion. In the translaton we're reading, Creusa, the mother of Ion, repeatedly states that she was raped by the god Apollo. In another story, Apollo kills the man who attempts to rape his mother Leto. And I'm like "Wait what? That makes no sense." So I bring this up in lecture, and the professor basicay misdirects my question and gives a meaningless answer like "the ancient Greeks thought rape was bad." No shit. Then he goes on to tell me that Creusa really wasn't raped. (Sound familiar? Yes, it does. Because slut-shaming is a favorite of misogynists trying to condone rape.) Apparanty the original Greek says something along the lines of "Apollo appeared to Creusa in all his magnificent glory [barf] and Creusa was so out of her mind that she just couldn't resist, so Apollo had sex with her." So that's okay, right? No. Because translated for the modern era, that reads as "Apollo slipped Creusa some of his magnificent and divine GHB and then had sex with her when she was so intoxicated that she just couldn't resist." Which is STILL! FUCKING! RAPE!
Have I mentioned yet that I HATE! this class yet? I have? Oh, well then, just for emphasis, I HATE THIS CLASS. It's one thing to make us endure these awful stories; it is quite another to so pathetically attempt to rationalize these horrific crimes committed against human beings. In fact, this kind of rationalization is downright insulting to my intelligence.
ROAR!
On a happier, feministy note, PopMatters is towards the end of a five-week spotlight on Joss Whedon. Excuse me while I go rabidly fangirl in the corner over there.
My Classics class fills me with so. much. HATE. Literally every class and story has involved rape or assault, bestiality, cannibalism, killing children and infants, enforced slavery that is often sexual in nature, and/or a general contempt or disrespect of women. And while it's depressing, I can, in some ways, accept it. The time period was a few hundred years BCE--the feminists hadn't exactly come in and made the world a better place yet. However it is the rationalizaion of this behavior that is driving me absolutely insane. The professor and all but one of the grad student instructors are male, so I suppose they're just going along with this all like "Cool story, bro." Okay, hello? That so doesn't fly with me.
Let's look at my professor's rationalization of child brides. To keep any sexually-reproducing population stable in numbers, each sexually mature female must produce with a male-bodied individual one male and one female offspring that lives to further reproduce one male and one female before dying. Apparently the Greeks were cool with romantic and sexual LGBT relationships as long as you were part of a reproducing hetero couple as well (actually, they probably weren't much cooler about transgendered individuals than we are in modern America, but that's just a guess). But given that disease and starvation were common fates of the Ancients, kids often died before reaching sexual maturity. It's estimated that, in order to compensate for this, each male and female would have had to produce six or seven children just to keep the population stable. So the professor then says the obvious solution to this is to make sure women have as many children as possible. Okay, I suppose I'm sort of with you. Except child birth in Ancient Greece was serious business--so much so that the expected life expectancy for the average Ancient Greek female was 35 years old, a full ten years shorter than that of her male counterpart. This discrepancy can mainly be attributed to complications with pregnancy and birth. So basically, to make up for the age gap, a woman basically had to get married and start having babies as soon as she hit menarche, and then be continuously pregnant for the duration of her truncated lifespan. I'm sorry, this just defies logic for me. I understand the need to have children, but instead of saying "Hey, our woman are dying in childbirth, maybe we should see to that," we're expected to accept the idiotic notion that the right choice is that women should be put at greater risk of dying in order to sustain a population. There is no criticism of this cultural decision, no remark that maybe the practice of endangering women's lives is a bad thing. No. Just "This is how it was and that was perfectly acceptable and we do not question the ideas of people who hadn't yet fully conceived of gravity." I CALL BULLSHIT.
I hate this class.
For another example, take the story of Ion. In the translaton we're reading, Creusa, the mother of Ion, repeatedly states that she was raped by the god Apollo. In another story, Apollo kills the man who attempts to rape his mother Leto. And I'm like "Wait what? That makes no sense." So I bring this up in lecture, and the professor basicay misdirects my question and gives a meaningless answer like "the ancient Greeks thought rape was bad." No shit. Then he goes on to tell me that Creusa really wasn't raped. (Sound familiar? Yes, it does. Because slut-shaming is a favorite of misogynists trying to condone rape.) Apparanty the original Greek says something along the lines of "Apollo appeared to Creusa in all his magnificent glory [barf] and Creusa was so out of her mind that she just couldn't resist, so Apollo had sex with her." So that's okay, right? No. Because translated for the modern era, that reads as "Apollo slipped Creusa some of his magnificent and divine GHB and then had sex with her when she was so intoxicated that she just couldn't resist." Which is STILL! FUCKING! RAPE!
Have I mentioned yet that I HATE! this class yet? I have? Oh, well then, just for emphasis, I HATE THIS CLASS. It's one thing to make us endure these awful stories; it is quite another to so pathetically attempt to rationalize these horrific crimes committed against human beings. In fact, this kind of rationalization is downright insulting to my intelligence.
ROAR!
On a happier, feministy note, PopMatters is towards the end of a five-week spotlight on Joss Whedon. Excuse me while I go rabidly fangirl in the corner over there.