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Nov. 24th, 2008 11:07 pmMadame Ferly thinks I should try to major in French. I think it's only two extra courses to double-major instead of minoring. Two issues: one of those is National Imagination, which I don't really want to take, and also there's an abroad requirement. Madame said something about (since it's obviously way too late to do a semester in Dijon) doing summer courses in Quebec. Which would be awesome. It would be doubly awesome if I could also still work for at least part of that summer. Probably at least worth looking into.
I heard once that one commonly used measure for being "fluent" in a language is whether or not you can crack jokes in it. I'm nowhere near punning my way through my French homework but I'm starting to be able to make an effort towards being horribly sarcastic, mostly because my head will explode with righteous feminist indignation if I keep having to write all these damn papers I'm writing without finding some way of expressing my complete and utter contempt for a world in which this shit is still possible. A week or so ago we had to read and write on an article about attacks on single women in Algeria (no, seriously. Grown women who live by themselves are getting violently attacked on the street simply FOR BEING SINGLE). Now I'm in the middle of a four-page essay about a "society in transition" re: the film "Moolaade," which is about a group of women who, having listened to ~nasty subversive radio programs oh horrors~ in which they find out that female genital mutilation is NOT, in fact, mandated by the Koran--oh, and also having been through it themselves, so they know how much it sucks--start a huge to-do in their cute ickle traditional Burkina Faso village when they decide to give protection to four nine-year-old girls who ran away from a "purification" ceremony.
I have spent a LOT of time in this freaking hippie school reading about the evils of globalization and guess what, globalization has its ISSUES. HUGE ISSUES. I am not a huge fan, on most counts, like how it lets people economically screw other people over on bigger scales than we have ever seen before, or how it causes ridiculous and easily treatable health crises that still never get solved. I can even shed my hippie liberal tear for this nebulous idea of "cultures" being destroyed, although I still think there's a huge difference between actively trying to obliterate use of a language (bad) and omg trying to also teach people languages spoken by more than like four people, how dare we (useful! this is what language is FOR!).
But... not with the women's rights stuff. Not with any sort of rights issue that could very easily be solved by people opening their eyes and recognizing what a HUMAN BEING looks like when they see one, instead of making up whatever sort of bullshit they can think of so they can hang on to whatever sort of power the old system was giving them. If MY society contains occasional enlightened individuals who truly believe that women are people, and even the misogyny that still surrounds me leans more towards instances of personal asshattery by individual asshats that do absolutely nothing to prevent me from driving, voting, going to school, talking to people, or getting a job, and YOUR society cuts women's girly bits off to make them "pure" and "marriageable" so that they can never enjoy sex enough to ever be tempted to run away from their husbands, then I live in CIVILIZATION and your picturesque little traditional "culture" CAN'T GET IMPOSED ON FAST ENOUGH. MISOGYNY IS NOT A CUTE LITTLE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CURIOSITY. IT HURTS PEOPLE, AND IT IS WRONG--MORALLY, SCIENTIFICALLY, BIOLOGICALLY, AND COMPLETELY WRONG.
And I will NOT adopt a neutral academic tone when writing about it. I am NOT being biased in condemning it. I am pointing out the self-evident scientific fact that the human species has two genders and they are both still human and I WILL NOT PRETEND THIS IS A MATTER OF OPINION.
*climbs off soapbox*
So, that was your feminist ranting for the day. I have to go finish ranting feministly in French, and you should all run to Netflix or your nearest purveyor of difficult-to-find West African movies and rent "Moolaade." A bientot!
I heard once that one commonly used measure for being "fluent" in a language is whether or not you can crack jokes in it. I'm nowhere near punning my way through my French homework but I'm starting to be able to make an effort towards being horribly sarcastic, mostly because my head will explode with righteous feminist indignation if I keep having to write all these damn papers I'm writing without finding some way of expressing my complete and utter contempt for a world in which this shit is still possible. A week or so ago we had to read and write on an article about attacks on single women in Algeria (no, seriously. Grown women who live by themselves are getting violently attacked on the street simply FOR BEING SINGLE). Now I'm in the middle of a four-page essay about a "society in transition" re: the film "Moolaade," which is about a group of women who, having listened to ~nasty subversive radio programs oh horrors~ in which they find out that female genital mutilation is NOT, in fact, mandated by the Koran--oh, and also having been through it themselves, so they know how much it sucks--start a huge to-do in their cute ickle traditional Burkina Faso village when they decide to give protection to four nine-year-old girls who ran away from a "purification" ceremony.
I have spent a LOT of time in this freaking hippie school reading about the evils of globalization and guess what, globalization has its ISSUES. HUGE ISSUES. I am not a huge fan, on most counts, like how it lets people economically screw other people over on bigger scales than we have ever seen before, or how it causes ridiculous and easily treatable health crises that still never get solved. I can even shed my hippie liberal tear for this nebulous idea of "cultures" being destroyed, although I still think there's a huge difference between actively trying to obliterate use of a language (bad) and omg trying to also teach people languages spoken by more than like four people, how dare we (useful! this is what language is FOR!).
But... not with the women's rights stuff. Not with any sort of rights issue that could very easily be solved by people opening their eyes and recognizing what a HUMAN BEING looks like when they see one, instead of making up whatever sort of bullshit they can think of so they can hang on to whatever sort of power the old system was giving them. If MY society contains occasional enlightened individuals who truly believe that women are people, and even the misogyny that still surrounds me leans more towards instances of personal asshattery by individual asshats that do absolutely nothing to prevent me from driving, voting, going to school, talking to people, or getting a job, and YOUR society cuts women's girly bits off to make them "pure" and "marriageable" so that they can never enjoy sex enough to ever be tempted to run away from their husbands, then I live in CIVILIZATION and your picturesque little traditional "culture" CAN'T GET IMPOSED ON FAST ENOUGH. MISOGYNY IS NOT A CUTE LITTLE ANTHROPOLOGICAL CURIOSITY. IT HURTS PEOPLE, AND IT IS WRONG--MORALLY, SCIENTIFICALLY, BIOLOGICALLY, AND COMPLETELY WRONG.
And I will NOT adopt a neutral academic tone when writing about it. I am NOT being biased in condemning it. I am pointing out the self-evident scientific fact that the human species has two genders and they are both still human and I WILL NOT PRETEND THIS IS A MATTER OF OPINION.
*climbs off soapbox*
So, that was your feminist ranting for the day. I have to go finish ranting feministly in French, and you should all run to Netflix or your nearest purveyor of difficult-to-find West African movies and rent "Moolaade." A bientot!
