I think...

I can, for all of my look-at-how-much-of-a-feminist-i-am….erm- let’s call it posturing, for want of a better word, even though it makes me sound far more insincere than i really am- have, quite frankly, the kind of mindset that, were any of the trail-blazing women of history to know of it, would probably make them throw down their weapons in disgust.

I never really considered it until today….and I don’t mean I found myself thinking “You know…I really HATE having the right to vote” or “God,don’t you love being objectified?”

It was completly random, just a memory of a particular seminar, when we were all picking texts for next term.

I didn’t scream for Brecht because I don’t scream for anything, ever (or hardly ever. Concerts and when people jump on me from behind are the exceptions).

But the boy beside me did scream for it (or….well, shouts a bit more masculine, isn’t it?) and thus secured it fairly as his own property.

And my reaction was fair enough: I think I said something like “……FML” or “Wow, I’m really bad at this”, conceding that I had lost.

BUT.

BUTBUTBUT I wasn’t really that dissapointed, despite losing out on the one text I really wanted to do.

Why? Because I didn’t believe that was the end of it.

Of course it wasn’t. He’d won, because he was a boy, and therefore better at securing things by shouting for them (or maybe because he was just more on the ball than I was at that moment, which is also fair enough).

But I was a girl.

I was the fairer, weaker sex, I was, to put it bluntly, the better gender, and after all, they do say ladies first, don’t they?

I honestly don’t know what I expected- not for the boy to be orderd by our tutor to give rights to the text up to me, exactly. I think I just assumed that my jokey reference to my own slowness, half aimed at the tutor himself, would be enough for either the boy to say”Oh, its okay, you can have it and I’ll take Nabakov instead”, or for the tutor to gently entreat the boy in the spirit of being a gentleman to offer me Brecht, and for the boy to graciously concede.

And I, of course, would graciously and greatfully accept.

But strangely….that ISN’T what happend.

Before I go on, I should point out that I’m not an utterly selfish bitch with an entitlement complex, too stupid to pay attention in seminars for more than half a second.

I don’t generally expect things, and, had it been that my rival was another girl and I had gotten there first, I would probably have offered it up to her (not out of gentlemanliness but out of the less nobel spirit of getting-people-to-like-you).

But anyway: nothing happend. The tutor and the boy smiled (as I had expected them to do) at my self-deprecation….they conceded it sucked that I had lost.

They did not, however, offer, or entertain the idea that I should be offered the text.

(Probably while the rest of the group wonderd why the hell it was taking so long to sort out the allocation of a single text)

Of course, I was dissapointed. I was even slightly piqued at their “ungentlmanliness” (although moreso because it meant i was stuck with Nabakov).

However, in hindsight, it occured that, in actuality, i was given, no more and no less, everything that the feminist movement has ever asked for: in short, the wholehearted acceptence of the fact that women are mens entire equals.

The boy and I are equals: we are about the same age, of the same level of intelligence (i base this on the fact that we both survived Warwicks intense interviewing process rather than on actual evidence gatherd in subsequent seminars, which would actually lead to the conclusion that he is rather more intelligent than me).

There is no reason why I couldnt have secured the text under my own efforts: it wasnt any inherent weakness or frailty in my gender that stopped my getting the text, it was my habit of starring intently out of windows that did it.

To offer me the text would be implying that we were not equals, that as a girl, i somehow needed extra help, either from the male tutor or the boy himself, because girls always need mens help to get anywhere, and so, by not offering me the text, they were really acknowleging the inherent equality between the two genders.

“We respect you” they were saying ” too much to patronize you”, and for that i am greatful.

(Or at least, i tell myself this now that i’m stuck doing Lolita…..)