there is this one place that does this one thing

Last week in class we experienced a perfect example of one of my biggest pet peeves (when I say one of I recognize that, according to some, I am relatively neurotic and may have many, many pet peeves). We were discussing the ever-present wage gap between men and women, and of course, someone had to rebut with "I don't know about that but I do know that this one tech company will only hire women, and you can't even get a raise if you are a guy, so I don't know about how accurate that is anymore." AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGHH! Stupid stupid stupid shut up shut up shut up!!

Don't get me wrong, I totally support first-hand experience as knowledge, but I have a lot of problems with this kind of example. First of all, it completely disregards all of the studies and hard work done that reveals hard data proving the existence of a pay gap. Second, it takes one example of one situation and mistakes it as being representative of all situations. Plus, you would think that someone in a WS class would pretty much accept the existence of the pay gap by now, considering the fact that it has existed since the beginning of time.

wtf?

A recent comment by my political science capstone professor, describing the limits of the political science faculty: "We're not a bunch of whores where we're going to do anything."

Just let that one sink in a little bit.

accountability & cooking

For my very very first blog post ever, I'm going to share something that has been bothering me for a while. Recently, a coworker of mine mentioned that his wife was out of town and consequently, that he and his three sons were going to eat nothing but ramen and frozen pizza while she was gone. When some coworkers and I suggested some very simple things he could do to make the ramen marginally more nutritional, he protested, "That takes cooking. I can't cook. That's my wife's job." In other words, he can't and won't cook for his kids because he's a man; cooking is the responsibility of women.

Aside from my beliefs about Americans' increasing lack of culinary skills, the sentiment that my coworker was expressing is fairly abhorrent. As a human being, you ought to be able to feed yourself, but if you want to eat shitty, fatty food lacking in any redeemable nutritional value, fine. As a parent, you ought to be able to feed your kids, and it is not ok to feed them shitty food because you find the idea of cooking emasculating. My coworker should be setting an example of self-sufficiency to his kids (and perhaps he should also be setting an example of good parenting, but there is clearly no hope for that).

Essentially, I see the ability to cook as a measure of self-sufficiency. I think I'm probably not alone on this. I would extend this idea to say that the ability to cook is an aspect of personal sovereignty. I think that we need to be able to make the decisions that most affect us ourselves, we need to be aware of the decisions we are making for ourselves, and we need to be responsible for the decisions that we are making for ourselves. Sustenance and nourishment are a fundamental part of this. I'm not saying that all human beings ought to cook every meal for themselves, but I am saying that we all ought to be able to. On the most basic level this is an issue of accountability. If you are able to make the decisions that most greatly impact your life, you must also be accountable for those decisions. I guess I just don't see the inability to cook for yourself as a way of being accountable to yourself. Plus, I don't like this particular coworker, and this gives me one more reason to think that he is a total dink.