An Interesting Incident

At dinner, I was talking to my father about the womens' studies conference. My brother looked at me, as asked: "Aren't you afraid that people will think you are gay?" I gave him a weird look, and asked him, "How does that make any sense?" All he said was a continuous wave of "whatever, I don't care".

But my brother, whose social consciousness is still in development, asked me that question. Isn't that just interesting?

I do not know if he notices that the question itself makes no sense, because why would a gay guy study women?

What he is getting at, I think, is that I am talking about a subject matter that is not "masculine". All the more it is weird because he gets equally annoyed when I talk about philosophy, which is as masculine of a subject as it can get.

I think this little incident just shows how far our social consciousness have gone in the past 100 years - not very far. The status quo of masculinity/femininity still stands, if not more augmented by our media. It is a good thing that we have a conference for such studies, but unless we can actually change social consciousness, these conferences are nothing but academic games. "Cultural critics" gathering for a conference is no different from the gathering of a bunch computer gamers. While I am not stressing on superiority/inferiority, the nature of the two kinds of gathering must be at least different: cultural critics must try to change social consciousness; computer gamers don't.