My Intro to Gender and Women\u2019s Studies class began with a simple phrase: \u201cThe personal is political.\u201d\u00a0 The class\u2014a typical mix of students from different colleges and different grades\u2014discussed how our daily lives can reflect our political beliefs, from the clothes we wear to the shows we watch to the clubs we choose to participate in. Even if we weren\u2019t doing so consciously, our choices definitely sent messages to the rest of society. It wasn\u2019t the first time I\u2019d discussed this, but after being away from my Scripps friends and the campus for over a year, I was happy to return to a space of more critical thought and discussion about our culture.<\/p>\n
It turned out I spoke too soon. As the school year dragged on and I eased back into Scripps life, I realized something: Rarely do we Scripps students look at our lives with a critical eye outside of the classroom. If this does occur, it\u2019s typically in private groups, among friends or SCORE CLORGs. Occasionally these discussions transcend our comfort zones\u2014the \u201cdifficult dialogue\u201d event about the problematic Browning dorm decorations was a great start, but an anomaly on this campus. We preach feminism and critical analysis in the classroom, but we don\u2019t always apply it to real life.<\/p>\n
Take a minute and count the number of pairs of TOMS shoes you saw this week at Scripps. It\u2019s impossible, right? I wonder how many of the people wearing those shoes know that the founder of the company spoke at a 2011 Focus on the Family event, and later claimed he didn\u2019t know that the organization was actively anti-gay. Even if we give him the benefit of the doubt in that situation, TOMS\u2019 marketing promotes the \u201cwhite savior\u201d complex, and giving free shoes to the poor may negatively impact local shoe businesses and make the poor dependent on handouts instead of learning to help their community. Of course, these acts of charity are based in good intentions, and maybe the wearers of TOMS around Scripps have read these facts and decided that they still believe in supporting the company. My suspicion, however, is that they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n
And then there\u2019s the\u00a0Twilight\u00a0<\/em>craze, which, as an incoming student, was the last thing I expected to encounter at Scripps. I\u2019ve been a part of A-Team since my first year here, and every year we\u2019ve held a\u00a0Twilight<\/em>-themed event the night before the latest movie comes out. As the current co-head, I brought up discontinuing the event, but we ultimately decided to go ahead with it. Why? Because it\u2019s one of our best-attended events of the year. Some of those attendees may be \u201chate-watching\u201d the series, as many people do, but I\u2019ve talked with multiple Scripps students that genuinely enjoy it. From a feminist standpoint, there\u2019s so much to dissect about this series\u2014the abusive relationship, the fact that the main character and the promotions of the book portray this abuse as romantic, and her overwhelming desire to give up her human family, friends, and education for said abuser. Yet outside of my close friends, I\u2019ve never heard Scripps students talk about these issues.<\/p>\n But nowhere has this glaring lack of critical thinking been more blatant than our campus\u2019 universal celebration of Taylor Swift\u2019s upcoming concert at Harvey Mudd. From SAS to overheard conversations at the dining table to the words of faculty, I\u2019ve heard nothing but excitement\u2014which is understandable, given that Mudd won the concert, and the tickets are free. But in the midst of all this, I\u2019ve heard no one talking about the irony that a women\u2019s college, a space for feminist thought and female empowerment to blossom, is celebrating a singer whose songs and videos recycle the virgin-whore dichotomy and whose public persona is infantilized beyond belief. She sends a message to young girls that boys are everything, and her insistence through her music and her image that she\u2019s a \u201cnormal\u201d girl is insulting, given that she fits every beauty standard our society perpetuates. Swift isn\u2019t waging a war on women, but she\u2019s definitely not a feminist icon, either.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t bring these things up to mindlessly attack the Scripps community, or to police what women should like. It\u2019s okay to enjoy something that\u2019s problematic\u2014if we rejected everything with even the slightest bit of racism or misogyny, we\u2019d have nothing left. The trouble is that instead of having campus-wide conversations about problematic aspects of our culture and the media, we just mindlessly consume it. When I chose to come to a women\u2019s college, I expected to enter a proactive, critical environment, and after three years, I\u2019m disappointed. If we don\u2019t apply the critical thinking we learn in Claremont classrooms to real life, we\u2019re wasting it.<\/p>\n What I want is for Scripps students to realize that learning doesn\u2019t end after the bell. I am proud of our campus\u2019 progressive and vocal stances on LGBT and environmentalist issues, but I wish we were just as progressive about issues of race and womanhood. Just because we go to a women\u2019s college doesn\u2019t mean that we don\u2019t need to talk about feminism. Being a smart consumer is about more than just saving money, and being a good citizen requires more than helping old women cross the street. The personal\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0political, and it is our responsibility as future leaders to have \u201cdifficult dialogues\u201d about our society.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My Intro to Gender and Women\u2019s Studies class began with a simple phrase: \u201cThe personal is political.\u201d\u00a0 The class\u2014a typical mix of students from different colleges and different grades\u2014discussed how our daily lives can reflect our political beliefs, from the clothes we wear to the shows we watch to the clubs we choose to participate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":43,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/43"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/community.scrippscollege.edu\/invisible\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}