Very Challenging Assignment....Indeed

My philosophy professor is quite sneaky. He figured if we can explain feminism and empiricism to children...then we should be able to explain it and understand it ourselves... Not only is he sneaky..he was pretty smart to use this as a teaching technique.

I thought about this assignment all week. It was a very simple assignment. Have a bunch of college students explain something to children. How hard could that be. But I soon remembered that this was philosophy we were talking about, and I first had to decipher the philosophical text I was assigned to read (ugh!). Well it was far easier that Kant I tell you that and since I am female and I somewhat a pragmatist (i didn't know this until this assignment) it really became much easier for me to tackle this.

I do have some thoughts on feminism that are probably not so feminist. Please do not take this the wrong way, I am a strong believer that women are smart and shouldn't be discriminated against in the workforce, and in general, because of their gender...however I have learned over time that men and women are different -- period.

Each gender has strengths the other does not. While I believe we should teach our young girls that they can accomplish most anything. We should not send them out into the world thinking they are physically equal to men. We are not. I learned this through practicing martial arts. I trained just as hard has the men. However, when I went up against a new male member of the dojo with no training, their punch and strikes were powerful. While mine may have been powerful for a woman of my size and level of training, I could not match that of a man. That is not a deficit for women it just is. Women go through hormonal ups and downs monthly and all through their lives. We have to deal with it. These are not faults, these are just the facts of life and our biology and if we would approach it that way, maybe feminists would not be seen as anti-men. Whew!