Mongoose, 12/3

This last class of the semester definitely put a different and unique twist on things, both in the classroom and in life. I guess I never really thought that we were still in a time period where women would be considered to have less of a voice than men until reading this essay from Cixous. Even when I was reading her I kept having thoughts that she might be a little off base in some of her assumptions, that most women wouldn’t really feel that they have any less voice than men; that is, until I heard the women in our class speak. In my four years of college, I never felt that girls felt less compelled or any inhibitions about speaking up in class, in most cases the girls are the ones doing more speaking in class than the guys. I think the girls in this class held that same thought but obviously felt that there were othe areas of life where they were still held behind the eight ball. Overall it still appears that women are not given the same opportunities as men or still feel that they are not viewed on the same level as men. My thought as to why feminism is sometimes looked down upon is because of the radical views taken on by some; I don’t believe that there are very many men who would say that women are not equal to us or anything along those lines but many look down on the word feminist because of those who take it to extremes. My example of this is women who push for words to be changed, like our example of ‘history’ and ‘herstory’, these are the kinds of things that give feminism a bad name and people get turned away from it because of this, not because they feel that women are below us.
The one thought that kept going through my head during this class exercise was how much this related to the movie ‘what women want’. In this movie a man hears all of the thoughts of every woman he comes into contact with, good and bad. With us men not being allowed to speak, it forced us to hear the thoughts and opinions of women that we may not ordinarily get to hear in the classroom.