cimorene

so i went to class today for what was, to me, a fairly old-hat lecture on the history of feminism. and oh my god, i am now really full of feminist rage.

i don't think i've ever been in a discussion about feminism involving more than a few people--even in female-centric environments like the fucking girl scouts--that i didn't leave pissed off. and here, an introductory level course in the social sciences? we're talking auditorium mostly full of white male first-year college students. finnish ones. feminism has never really been in fashion here, from what i've been able to gather, and boy, did it show.

this reminds me vaguely of something

aralinde said last week about a kerfluffle on

blackfolk. shuffling it around a bit: when did it get to be the responsibility of the minority to educate the majority, or to defend the reasoning behind their movement?

is it so completely acceptable to question and attack the very existence of feminism that after an hour and a half lecture tens of young men have no problem with addressing their discussion "questions" to the foundational principles covered in the first two minutes of that lecture? it didn't even apparently occur to them that there was anything out of the ordinary about using the question period as an opportunity to attack feminism as a movement instead of to, you know, ask questions about the lecture.

the high points of my rage came when:

1. the teacher resorted to cake metaphors: "if someone has a big cake, and someone else comes along and asks for half of the cake, well, obviously it's much more unpleasant for the person who's giving up the cake than the one who's taking half of it, because he otherwise could have eaten the whole thing himself--" and a guy interrupted, "but it's men who have baked the cake." she actually tried to respond within the metaphor ("because they were the only ones who could afford ingredients or an oven...").

2. "you give all these statistics about women who are the victims of violence from men, but women can be violent too sometimes."

3. "but who gets sent out to die in all the wars?"

can you please take your ignorance, your defensiveness, your guilt and your goddamned sense of white male entitlement (even to reassurance and polite engagement in response to the most offensive and disingenuous questions!) elsewhere? because the poor guest lecturer probably gets that a lot when people find out she's a doctoral student in women's studies, but she just signed up to give a lecture today, not to stand trial for the most eye-rollingly basic bits of feminism there are, and the other women in the room are just here to get our five credits.