Scary:
Genuinely feeling like you’re going to die; hospitals; naturalizing life experiences and implicitly rejecting an outside….Sincerely having the thought, “sure she’s cute but what’s her family like”…yikes…
Beautiful: Engaged 1020 students who almost forget that you’re there because they are too busy disagreeing and debating each other.
One student opened our class discussion with a vehement dismissal of Chris Rock’s humor as misogynistic, treating women as sex objects who have no being outside of pleasuring men. That opening carried our class into an investigation of Rap (which I clearly differentiate from Hip Hop) and the politics of listening to “just the beat,” i.e. ignoring the lyrical content. Many said that club rap, namely artists like Lil’ Jon, aren’t at all interested in lyrical content the same way Mos Def, The Roots and the like are. However, I complicated the picture by asking if we can similarly dismiss Comedy’s political content because it too uses an equally disarming structure of address, a move they were less willing to make because of Rock’s charged delivery.
Returning to the misogyny question, a student commented that indeed men do see women simply as sex objects because some women present themselves that way. Catching the stereotype in play, we reversed the power dynamic in play by asking if such a characterization of men, by Rock, is as problematic as his alleged misogyny. A moment the class pointed to as evidence of his misogyny, his claim that he would have had sex with his wife’s friend, turned into evidence of a deeply prejudiced view of men as slaves to their penis.
This conversation alone would make for a good class, but one clever student turned the critical screw once more to say that Rock ultimately denigrates women through his simplistic view of men. That is, the sexual objectification of women reinforces their understanding of men as libidinal machines and their relation to men as one predicated solely on sexual desire, a cycle that damages both women’s experience of the world and themselves.
Good stuff!
p.s. This is my first broadcast from my shiny new laptop; Say hi everyone!
Also, my writing is clearly suffering from post-episodic neuronal misfiring; God save the queen!!…wait…that doesn’t go there….
