Interesting: Women in MBA Schools...

From a friend

"E. Thought you'd find this interesting. Just attended a presentation on women attending an Ivy League MBA class: the findings were that women-minority students were highly conscious of their gender, while the male majority and male teacher was not conscious of either their gender or the gendered experience of the females in the class room. Women are fucking insane."

I did find it interesting.

What interested me, then, is that at least in this case, females are responsible for their own dis-empowerment: discrimination, harassment just isn't there: it's not the 1960s News Room or Wallstreet bidding floor.

But the basic idea is that in order to advance as citizens and professionals, in order to gain status and independence, women had to emasculate themselves and take on male tastes.

I am sexually equal became I, like men, can enjoy casual sex. I, like men, I can play sports.

The interesting thing is that in doing this, women lost a lot of the power they traditionally had: power over relationships, the idea that men should financially and emotionally support women; the sense of guilt men traditionally had, for example, over sleeping with a girl and then not talking to her, or, if a girl got pregnant, the implication of not getting married - all of this has disappeared.

Casual sex, it turns out, produces a lot of single mothers, abortions, and difficulty finding someone to settle down and marry. And women enter the work place, but still more often than men switch to part-time work or house-wife themselves entirely when they have children.

I think the feminist movement forgot a few things: women are most fertile in their 20s, and fertility rates begin to drop dramatically at 28. Women are physically transformed by producing children. Women age differently than men. Heterosexual women still want relationships with men.

So - listening to the presentation, I was inclined to think that womens' consciousness of their gender: dressing up for class, acting flirtatiously, performing femininity, is a strange way of reasserting traditional aspects of female power.

To conclude: is true gender equality ever possible? Highly doubtful.