Final Blog
As a male taking a class aimed predominantly at females, the class was a struggle from the start. Right off the bat, articles attempting to disprove biology 'cause it makes people feel bad about themselves assaulted my senses and incited my anger. Indeed, for the first part of class, I read each new article with more disgust. The lone exception, ironically, was the Allan Johnson piece which was presented a much more level-headed argument and was more reasonable in its assertions. If I take anything away from the course readings, it would be Johnson's +5 system. When we hit the articles on sexuality, the absurdness of Catherine MacKinnon and Anne Koedt struck a chord in me. MacKinnon especially, with her asinine assertions that male sexuality is activated by violence against women and quivering children. How she graduated from an Ivy League school and was also a assistant professor of Law here at the U of M is beyond me; what a joke! The whole "men are evil" thing started to get a little stale by the time we hit the domestic violence unit.
Also, it was hard for me to connect to the class entirely because I felt like all the material was relatively well-known: feminism, gender and race oppression, domestic violence, etc. It's all pretty much common knowledge. Though it's good to refresh ones knowledge about these subjects, the people claiming that they view their life in a very different manner after going through the readings are probably embellishing a little bit. I will say however that the in-class discussions were always superb, and Katie and Rebecca did an admirable job with the material at hand, as controversial or offensive as it may be.