Friday, January 22, 2010

A little bit of history can be a bad thing.

I have a search set up on my Twitter account for "Seneca Falls." Usually, the results are various jobs available, the local radio station plugging itself, folks tweeting about listening to The Distillers sing their song about the first Women's Rights Convention held there in 1848, the odd news story.

This evening though... a completely different story. Several tweets floated by with some variation of "Finally, the Seneca Falls for Men’s Rights!" I knew I'd get bent, but I clicked the link anyway. I really don't want to link to the dreck that's out there on this, but if you google "Finally the Seneca Falls for Men's Rights" and MWD (that's Men's World Daily), you'll hit it. Apparently this watershed moment is the inception of a Men's Studies course at Wagner College, Staten Island New York. The drivel is the same old crap about how teh menz have been deeply wounded by the existence of Women's Studies courses, how men weren't allowed to take them, how the world is out to get them, etc. etc. The irony of this following so closely on Mary Daly's death is not lost on me.

The same old crap bugs me; a lot. But what really gets my goat is likening a Men's Studies course at some college to the Seneca Falls convention. This level of understanding of the Seneca Falls convention must come in somewhere around "some thing feminists think is important" to be likened to a university course. Because, you know, fighting to be acknowledged as actual persons, with the right to vote... that's TOTALLY the same thing as someone offering a class about people who have always been people.

I'm not entirely sure I have been coherent. This post brought to you by ARRRGH.

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