Thoughts on womenfolk and whatnot...

(Disclaimer: I think I sound dumb in this post. I'm just trying to get some thoughts out there. Work with me here...this could be gold for my eventual billion-dollar book deal. Please be kind.)

It was a pretty quiet weekend here in Central Va., without many of the rollicking adventures you've come to expect from me. Be excited though, because this Wednesday I am headed to D.C. to celebrate America and then go hang out at the Chesapeake Bay. So anticipated an action-packed entry (with pictures!) in about a week.

Meanwhile, though, I can regale you with the adventures of the mind I went on this weekend. Not having many real adventures to go on, I consumed a lot of pop culture-y items. Three of said items had a lot of interesting connections to female empowerment, advancement, the history of feminism, etc. and I am now going to talk about those issues in an extremely uneducated and likely offensive way.

I say likely offensive because my initial sentence is one that is often maligned when used by any woman who cares about female issues but wants to differentiate herself from more militant, for lack of a better word, crowds. When I say I don't consider myself a feminist, I understand that is not true, at its base, because I'm an educated woman who believes in equality and would like to advance in the world and wants everybody to get paid the same amount and whatnot.

But I've also met people who are a lot "more feminist" than I am, for lack of a better phrase. My two favorite professors in college were an unmarried couple with an adorable five-year-old daughter. There were a lot of elements to their reticence to marry, but one of them was that they were both students of classic literature and history and very aware of the non-empowering (read: it's kind of like buying a woman) nature of traditional marriage. More power to them, but I am not that feminist.

And here's where my weekend pop cultural experiences come in. Friday night, Barrett and I watched the movie Hitchcock, a movie about a man who had a very complicated relationship with the powerful women in his life. Saturday, I read basically all of Tina Fey's Bossypants - feminism inherent self-explanatory. Sunday, Barrett and I watched An Education - a film that details a young woman in 1960's Britain losing her innocence and questioning the value of female advancement for the sake of female advancement (not the best way to put that, but hopefully I'll express more thoughts later).

All of these things are great, and you should check them out. They also reflect different sides of the feminism coin that I frequently ponder. Fey's fundamental argument about feminism, at least as read by me, is along the lines of the truism that the best revenge is living well. If you're working in a male-dominated field, you don't necessarily need to spend all your time reflecting on your position as a mantle-carrier for the women of the world. You also don't have to do what the boys want you to do or try to conform to their ideals of success.

You just have to be good at your job, so good that people cannot and will not ignore you. I'm really glossing over her thoughts, and kind of oversimplifying them (because I think she would, actually, identify herself as a feminist) but I liked what she said. (Especially an anecdote where Amy Poehler verbally bitch-slapped Jimmy Fallon for taking umbrage at a woman telling an off color joke.)

She reminds of my good friend Anna, who is apparently too busy and important to read this blog (read: she secretly hates me now that she has cooler friends), but whom I respect a lot for not thinking of herself as a "female computers scientist." She is just a computer scientist who happens to be female.

As to my other feminism encounters this weekend, I'd just recommend you check them out, because I have some vague ideas but no real definite takeaways. Basically, my thoughts on each are as follows:

After watching Hitchcock, which prominently displays the role Hitchcock's wife had in his success, I was disappointed to find that the epigraph of the movie mentioned that upon receiving his lifetime achievement award Hitchock said something along the lines of, "I share this, as I have everything, with Alma." Or something.

Here's the thing: that's great. But if the movie presented an at-all accurate picture of her involvement with the production of his movies, she deserved a lot more than that little line. She deserved a producer credit on Psycho as well as a screenwriting one - things Wikipedia illustrates she did not get.

An Education is a great movie, but one that I don't think answers an important question it poses. That may be, and is likely, intentional, but it's still frustrating. Near the end of the movie, the protagonist questions the point of being well-educated and getting an Oxford degree when she'll likely either become a teacher or a housewife. She tells the headmistress that they need to be able to tell the students what it's all for - and the headmistress cannot.

Then some other stuff happens that I don't want to spoil. But no one ever says, in the movie, what it is all for. Sure, the main character was about to enter a time period and a world where educated woman could do a lot more than just teach or get married - but is that all education if for, for getting the best job? I know it's not, but how do you really explain that?

I used to think about jobs post-graduation, and whether the things people were doing were "using their degree." The fact is, unless you major in engineering, computer science, math, etc. you aren't necessarily "using your degree" no matter what you do.

And say you do get married, pop out a few children and become a stay at home mom...have you wasted your education? Was the $50K a year tab worth it?

I think I sounded dumb in this blog post, but maybe my readers who have more nuanced thoughts about feminism and education and whatnot will contribute in the comments.