" I keep making promises that I'm going to post more often to this blog, but the fact is that I rarely find things about my life that are interesting enough to blog about."

That sentence right there is an example of something I've actually said, and of the argument I'm going to make in the context of this post. I find myself often thinking about myself as uninteresting. I have my hobbies, I love what I love, mostly television and movies, and I enjoy the idea of discussing these things with other people. But when it comes to actually writing anything down, I find myself rereading my own words and thinking "this sounds so boring. What a boring life. Why is she telling other people about these boring things?", as if I'm reading words someone else had written. And then I delete my whole post and go to do something else, immersing myself even more into my own head. 

This isn't really ok behavior. Its divisory, putting barriers between myself and the rest of the "more interesting" world. It derides me as a person, and it derides the things I enjoy, which in turn derides all the other people who also enjoy those same things. 

That sentence didn't come from me, though. It's the voices of a hundred other people I've known, some men, some women, speaking through me, and leading to conclusions that those people didn't really think about when they first turned to me and asked "why don't you get out more? You must be bored sitting by yourself in your room all day." I'm not bored, in fact. I enjoy my life. I enjoy solitary pursuits, and the company of stories through television or movies. I think about things that I watch, and I'm content with my thoughts whether or not they are ever shared with anyone else. I am not bored, and I am not boring, but I think that I am sometimes, simply because other people long ago carelessly tried to put their own thoughts and feelings onto me, without my permission.

All this thinking comes from a post I recently read on a blog I read often, which linked to this article by a well-known feminist writer. A quote;

"It's not like we've never argued, or that I've never had to explain where I'm coming from, but the thing he's always had going for him is that he doesn't want to hurt me. (A sentiment I return, naturally.) And so he's been willing to hear me out when I say: What you're doing is hurting me.

If he hadn't been, our relationship wouldn't exist. If I couldn't say "this behaviour hurts me" and have that matter, I couldn't feel safe.

If I can't trust you not to care when I tell you you've hurt me, how can I trust you at all?

That's the terror underlying this terrible bargain, the secret we don't speak. Or didn't, until I made a little noise and a cacophony of voices rose."

Her article is about all the little ways that men, all sorts of men, in all sorts of women's lives, display casual mysogyny to varying degrees all of the time, and the ways that all that casual hatred has made her into a compulsively cautious person. Every day, thousands, millions, billions of women, independant or not, working or not, married, engaged, in a relationship or not, are subjected to the sort of pervasive hatered against women which men, mysoginist or not, seem to have no trouble expressing. These men don't mean to hurt. They love the women they are speaking to, a lot of the time, and those women love those men, but men still say things which are hurtful and derisive and they don't often realize they are doing it. The problem arises when women, so historically and thoroughly opressed, try to speak out and are slapped down, gently or not, as being hysterical, or overly sensitive, or just plain wrong. I myself have been called overly sensitive more times than I can count. And it makes me feel like shit. Those words leave the mouth of someone I love and immediately, I feel guilt for feeling bad.

I feel guilty for being hurt.

This is not ok. It is not ok that I feel guilty for expressing my feelings. This is how oppression works, not through big acts with chains or laws, but in little words that people use every day, not realizing what they're really saying. I have heard from my own boyfriend more than once, a math major interested in engineering, that my English degree is somehow less worthy than his own scholarly pursuits. He says it jokingly, with a smile on his face, but he says it often, and I have had no luck in convincing him otherwise. Setting aside for a moment the simple importance of having achieved that level of education at all, I am always insulted by the implication that an English degree is useless, or a waste of time. The fact is, a statistical fact, that most 70% of English degrees awarded are given to women. The converse is also true, that NINETY percent (90%) of Engineering and technical degrees are awarded to men. So to deride the worthiness of an English degree, to place it below more scientific or technical pursuits, is to deride the efforts of millions of women. It is a mysogyinst act, conscious and recognized or not.

More than that, however, I feel that an English degree does, in fact, have a purpose, have a real benefit to any person pursuing it. So many problems arise from people saying things and not truly understanding the consequences of their words. They speak and don't know what they're saying, not really, because they haven't taken the time to study the roots of expression, of cliche, or of simple language coventions, like the use of "mankind" to refer to humanity. It is a subtle thing, that application fo gender, but it is real, and it is pervasive, and it *does* say something about the culture that it is the standard in speech. 

To pursue the dream of equality, every person must understand what they are saying when they stand up on their soapbox and speak their minds. Without an understanding of language, we are all doomed to repeat cultural and gender slurs through simple uncomprehension, and in a day and age when more people than ever are attaining college level education, that is simply unacceptable. We can do better, and we must.