A SELF-DAMNING PRELUDE

A belated welcome to Jen Perkins, formerly a classmate of mine at Hillsdale College, now in Missouri teaching at an all-male boarding school. Not exactly what I expected her to do. ;) Shows how much I know. Anyway, she launched her blog a little over a month ago, so I'm late in delivering this proverbial fruitcake of welcome, but here goes anyway.

I was looking at one of her first posts this morning and the brain juices started flowing, connecting the dots with a number of thoughts that have been dogging my footsteps for the past several months. The brain juices haven't flowed much lately, and I didn't want to waste the opportunity. Moreover, since I am currently in limbo between work and school, and have been spending my time sitting at home cooking, cleaning, reading cheap fiction (but no soap operas) and generally playing housewife and feeling sorry for myself because I'm not being the big strong man defending hearth and home and supporting the family, and thus actually have time to kill, I'm going to let them flow. (note: the preceding paragraph exists by way of being ironic, since I'm about to post about feminism and women in the workplace and so forth, and since I dropped my wife off earlier this morning and then came home to blog, I am fully aware of the irony--let the laughter commence)

I've always been fairly careful not to express much of an opinion about feminism--I remember thinking about it briefly while still in high school, when I was worrying a lot about what it meant to be a man, and it struck me that, even if I could figure out what manhood was, I still hadn't even the first clue what womanhood was. The thought process at the time was, "Well--I'm not a woman, so I don't have to worry about that." Followed closely by a tremendous sense of relief. In my interactions with females in the years that followed, I usually kept my mouth shut apart from saying (if asked) that I figured women could do whatever they really wanted to do, that I personally would prefer it if my future wife stayed at home with the children, but wasn't quite sure about that either necessarily, and please don't get mad at me for saying it. Then I changed the subject by telling them that they should have long hair.

Huh. What a wimp. And a stupid one at that.

But that was about all the opinion I had at the time. I now have more of one, and, being a bullheaded human specimen of the masculine variety, I will now carry on.

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