I am learning all this new stuff!! Except I have this question, which is: why haven’t I learned about this shit before??
Basically this class is about… well. Everything! We learn history and economics and social theory, and even some medical science!
In fact, the only difference that I can see between the history we learn in Feminist Theories and the history I learned in history class is that…
…Feminist Theories history is like history, if you took into account that ladies and people with vaginas existed.
Or like economics, if you noticed that people with vaginas have and/or need money too.
Or like science, if issues pertaining to bodies with vaginas and the health thereof were counted as important parts of science.
Or like social theory, if social theory actually paid attention to historical disparaties between men and women/humans with vaginas.
Which, you know, to me seems like a whole lot of givens. I mean, seriously. Vaginas account for like, 52% of the population. So, logically, 52% of history should be about people with vaginas. Does this or does this not make sense??
I mean, I am seriously grateful to be learning this shit. I honestly am! I am learning all the things they didn’t teach me in high-school, like: how economics as a practice ignores the majority of women’s work because it is unpaid, or how medicine up until around the 1930s was complete bullshit and midwives were basically hounded until they stopped practicing, or how the United States’ marketplace is structured around an outdated, conservative-romantic notion of business as emotionless competition made bearable by the devotion and emotional support of a subservient wife.
My question is: why didn’t I learn it before? The entire idea of “Women’s Studies” or even “Gender Studies” is that stuff concerning vaginas makes up so little of the mass of human knowledge that it is a specialty, and that the only people who get to learn about it are weirdos with some sort of attachment to knowing the history, cause, and effect of the patriarchy on half of humanity— not to mention only the weirdos who can afford to spend their higher education on it, or even afford higher education at all.
Basically: people wonder why there’s so much debate about our bodies and rights, why we allow war to be waged on us. Maybe it’s because most people don’t even know that a war is being fought! Maybe it’s because those who deserve to know about their history, their bodies, and their oppression will never get a chance to learn!!
This makes me want to learn moreeeee