(Week 3 and 4) Well, just one mishap...

Alright, outside little twins aside, I am impressed with this book. It goes into detail, it explores the fact that women, while oppressed and fighting for their rights, do want a good family structure and a mutual lifestyle with men (where I was expecting more of a militant outlook.)

While I agree with Ahmed's premise and means to a more peaceful end, I do see Amin's point more; that a woman-while needing to be a part of the society and, by the religion, kept from the prying eyes of man who aren't husbands- but it is the husband's job to control their own urges, not the women to control who they look for the men. They should be able to do it themselves. That's a very important argument to all of this.

(Week 2...And 1 too.) Okay, Ahmed really is all over the place..

I enjoy her style, and she's very informative, but she doesn't just talk about the Sassyrian Empire, but also Alexander the Great, the Byzantine, the inculsion of Christianity and other religious beliefs that effected women from the region, and the pervasive standards that women were treated in all aspects, not just familial....Hell, even the ideas on veiling are so shifted as well; I wonder how it became from just high-class women and "respectable women" differentiated from prostitutes, to all women wearing them...

While we are on this subject, I might as well bring out something that has seriously bothered me since I found this part in the book; supposedly, misogynist attitudes about women concerning divorce, property ownership, marriage, etc...were all carried over through cultural diffusion through the different cultures in the Middle East at the time, but not the treatment of day-to-day relationships between husband and wives, which were far better and more mutual? What the hell? Sure, I understand pressures from other males to act more aggressively, which lead husbands to take the aspect of wife degradation even more (I just see the logical extension behind it, nothing more.), but you'd think that base kindness and affection towards a member of a "lower class" on the scale of gender in the Middle East would be seen as novel and important to adapt, or at least make the women think that their treatment within society is wrong, and push for mutual treatment sooner.

The only conclusion I can come up with for something like this is simple and something I have seen before. Patriarchal pressures. The men band together, develop their own band of social understanding, and make assumptions about how their lives should be run, and how their women should be treated.

Well, history has shown us that assumptions make fools of us all. But something it hasn't shown all that well is something I'll likely be saying throughout the entire course in some way or another:

Patriarchy hurts men, too.

Intro Post

Hi, I'm Matthew Szlapka. I joined this class to learn more about the subject matter, now that I have been given the chance due to changes in my schedule. While I was not able to make the first class due to my schedule switch which happened on the first week, I will work hard and continue to push forward from this point onward.