Quote:
Originally Posted by Valhalla
But see that sounds so much more interesting than what I'm reading. The last thing I read from the book was that text books/people shouldn't say that menstruation is wasteful. Even though I've always thought it was. I mean the body prepares to have a baby, the woman doesn't get pregnant, so it disposes of it's preparations. I never thought of it as being a sexist male way to make my body seem inferior. So after I read that bit I started trying to come up with a way to explain it without using sheds, wastes, disposes, loses, or any other word that could sound negative. Don't think I can do it.
|
Ha, that's a point that we keep coming back to in later classes. Part of it is how linguistics shape how we think of ourselves, and part is he curious trend of women's bodies being dynamic and life giving, but we equate "feminine" with wastefulness, death, destruction, while we equate "masculine" with dynamic, life, energy, and even in fields like medicine and science which are supposed to be objective, our sexism leaks out in our language.
Even for traits that we equate with "feminine", love, empathy, selflessness, its debatable whether we give "feminine" these traits in an effort to enforce patriarchy on women (you're supposed to be a selfless mother, that's your point in life!) or if we view those traits as unmanly and weak because women have claimed them well.
I should also point out that the text is an anthology of interesting articles about feminism and women's studies and not necessarily presented as absolute truth. Our prof made us write journal entries every week on our readings that required a bit of research that provided more context, so that was helpful.