The ideas that most stuck out for me this week were

1) The relationship between slaves and masters
2) Why there’s inequality
3)Inequal, but different

1)I may have heard this before, but I found it to be really thought-provoking idea. You would typically think of the slaves as earning the spot of powerless and weak, with the master being a strong, dominating figure. Yet, neither of the two holds absolute power over the relationship. They’re co-dependant and neither can exist without the other. Also when Jill talked about how the master gets his identity from the slave. She/He learns what he/she should or should not be from the slave. It would seem though that the slave who has knowledge of the co-dependancy has more power since, knowing that the master needs them, they would be able to manipulate situations in order to get what they want. This makes me think of the movie the Experiment (based off of a true story) where there’s the pretend jail mates and pretend guards. The guards are only able to hold power when the jail mates give them the ability to control them and you can see how fragile the role of the guard is when the jail mates refuse to obey and instead attack them. It shows also that there has to be fear in the relationship for it to work.

2) I just did my essay and Adam and Eve where I talked about something similar to this. De Beauvoir believes that women are not naturally inferior while men are not naturally born to dominate. She believes that we are labelled certain ways and thus act in those ways, but going back to Hacking you can see that there’s a cycle which happens. People being labelled certain ways, acting in those ways and then being labelled again.You can’t say that women and men only follow their given labels because you don’t know what came first, the label or the way humans naturally are. I believe that in order to have been given these labels, men and women must have had some sort of natural inequality to create these labels. There has to be a reason for these labels to have formed.

3) Jill talked for a bit about how it is said that men and women are equal, but just in different way, yet this is still inequality. This is something that I’ve thought about for a long time especially after religion awareness day that was happening in the SUB a couple of months ago. I was speaking to an Islamic woman and she was telling me about the wrong ideas that people get on there religion, specifically concerning female inferiority. She told me that even though men went to work, women were allowed to do whatever they wanted with their free time and that men were obligated to supply them with whatever they wanted/needed. Men were forced to work, while women were given the freedom to do whatever they pleased. She also told me that their religion’s prophet’s last words were “be good to women”. It was a while ago so I don’t remember everything she told me, but there was a lot and throughout her entire “rant?” I kept thinking how can this be equality? Yes, both genders are being forced to do something or inhibited from doing something, but why does that make it equality. Equality should be both genders being allowed the possibility to do everything the other gender can. Being equal, but in different ways just means being equally oppressed.