Friday, December 08, 2006

The feminist lurking inside of me

Is more upsetting things happening, or is everything just upsetting me more?

I finished up my philosophy class today; an intro class to logic, something that filled my schedule at 8am three days a week, that I never really had to study for or try real hard because of previous classes taken already addressing the material. It was boring in some parts, in terms of how often the same concept was explained, especially days before tests, and what not, but altogether a pretty easy run. Until today's final.

The last question was detailing how 'Pete' doesn't like to be treated as a child, so therefore he shouldn't treat his wife like one. So I'm going along underlining the premises, as per the directions, and otherwise answering the questions, thinking there are probably a dozen more reasons why this dude shouldn't treat his wife like a child, I come up to the last part: write a counterexample that illustrates a situation where this would not be the case.

Immediately, I shockingly(especially having just diagrammed various other reasons to myself why this would be the case) can't think of anything. Then, as I'm trying just to finish up the test, and tell myself there are plenty of times where I've taken the other side of the argument, and a measly four point question where I do just that, shouldn't be any type of problem for me; I decide that I really don't want to. I don't want to spend any time trying to think up a situation where it would be okay for a guy to treat his wife like a child, because it's not okay. Maybe I'm thinking about this way too much, or not putting the question in context or something; but I feel like that act would always intrinsically be offensive and sexist. And furthermore, (because let's face it, if I'm taking it this far, I might as well go all the way) thirty people thinking about a situation where it would be okay to treat a wife as a child is probably a bad idea. So, just getting more upset really, I just wrote that (not that I didn't want to do the question, though if I hadn't spent the time fuming I probably could have wrote a lot about that too) and that the correct answer is there is no logical example where this would be permissible. And I probably got it wrong, but I feel like the question was wrong also.

1 comment:

Katie said...

RIGHT ON. That is ridiculous. I think you did exactly the right thing.