What About Eve?

I keep starting this post, only to freeze up and postpone the entry till later. Basically, I want to write something about Eve, but I'm wondering what all of you think about Eve.

Did she exist?

Was she good/ bad/ in-between?

Symbolic or not, does the fruit-eating story portray her in a good light or a bad light?

Oh mother, where art thou? (from Erica)

Yesterday was my now-deceased grandfather's birthday. If he were still around, he would be 95 years old. His wife, my grandmother, was born just a couple of months before him. Both of them have been dead for several years now, but they both survived into the 1990s and their lives saw many changes.

Consider this: when my grandparents were born, women didn't have the vote. Abortion was illegal. Sex discrimination was acceptable on and off the job, and sexual and domestic abuse weren't uniformly recognized as crimes. Segregation and overt racism were the norm. By the time my grandmother was my mother's age, the world was on the brink of radical change as social movements everywhere erupted into life. By the time she died, my grandmother was every bit a citizen as her husband.

In spite of this, my grandmother was an incredible woman. She was orphaned at the age of 14, and went to work supporting her sister and her cousin thereafter. She raised five daughters, the first people in the family to graduate from high school, who have all gone on to have successful careers and family lives. When she wasn't employed while raising my mother and aunts, she dedicated her time and energy to the local Red Cross chapter. To this day, that chapter holds an annual blood drive in her name.

Sometimes, I think we look at the rights we do and don't have codified and see those as the limits of our capabilities. We don't have the right to vote, so we have no social power. We don't have the right to sit on the train, so we have no humanity. We don't have the right to get married, so we don't have the ability to take care of each other. But we forget that those codified rights aren't our limits. We're amazing, strong, forceful people regardless of what government organization tells us we can and cannot do.

So here's today's question: what do YOU do in spite of your perceived limitations? How are YOU changing the world, one step at a time?

Dating: How Old Is Too Old?

Today's question is a juicy one, if I do say so myself.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot, as I look around myself and realize that most of my dating prospects are men who are a couple years younger than I am. My mother was three years older than my father, and that's never seemed strange to me. And yet, when I meet a man who is three years younger than me, I find myself thinking of him in endearing terms like "cutie," "adorable," and "little boy." It doesn't help that 21- and 22-yr-old men comprise a good portion of my English 150 students.

When I was 22, I dated a man who was five years my senior (or was it six? I don't even remember). So why should I hesitate for even a second with men who are just a year or three younger than I?

And yet I do.

Try as I might to understand this hang up, I just plain don't get it. So I'm opening the question up to all of you:

What do you think of different ages in dating, and are your feelings different if the older party is a man vs. a woman?

Why do you feel/ think the way you do about age differences in couples?

Coping with Hopelessness (from Erica)

For a variety of reasons, mostly academic, the subjects of hopelessness and despair have been on my mind lately. They're things that most of us feel at one point or another in our lives; they come from depressive disorders, stressful life circumstances, overwhelming loss, and sometimes from watching these things appear in the lives of others. They can be associated with anxiety, anger, and apathy. They can be political and they can be personal.

A couple of days ago I received an email from my father-in-law's friend, a conservative man who informed me, among other things, that "social justice...is destructive to all involved." This man doesn't know me very well- he has no idea what most of my identities are, my politics, or my career. But he knows I'm a self-identified woman. The fact that he would say something so blatantly stupid and offensive to me got me very riled up, as you can imagine, but also left me feeling more than a little drained. If I can't even get someone to acknowledge some of the most basic, generalized benefits of social justice- citizenship for African-Americans and for women of any race and our rights to vote, for example- then what chance do I have of convincing that person even to begin considering the more intricate and important details of real social justice?

So the questions for today: how do we cope with hopelessness, as individuals and as political beings? What do we do to keep ourselves going when all odds seem against us? How do we motivate people for change when they can't acknowledge basic truths? Most basically, how do we keep ourselves from going crazy?

What do you wonder? (From Emily)

Call it a cop out if you want, but I'm dying to know what questions you have about gender, feminism, equality, humanity, etc. etc. Whether they're questions you want to discuss, or just things you wonder about sometimes.

For instance, I wonder... what it's like to be a man. I've never been one, so I'll never fully understand them.

What Makes Men Men? (from Emily)

I'm going to springboard off Erica's question today. As her question pointed out, men are as affected by their hormones, physiology, and socialization as women are. It's not uncommon for people to talk about women as if they're a deviation from men, but that view is simply inaccurate. So, in an effort to combat that misperception, but also to give men the time and space they deserve, my question today is all about men and maleness.

What makes men men?

What is masculinity, and how has it impacted your life, whether you're male or not?

Military gendering (from Erica)

Today's question is going up a bit late, and I apologize. Here it is, though, regardless: bearing in mind that male hormones have as strong an impact on human behaviour as female hormones do (i.e. testosterone induces aggression just as much as progesterone induces dysthymia), and that socialization has an impact on male and female gendered behaviours, what are some of the advantages or disadvantages to having a predominately male or predominately female military?