We had another discussion yesterday, the topic was whether or not women should be allowed to drive. No really, it was a little controversial. The class split up primarily along gender lines, all of the women were in favor of being able to drive while only one guy was in favor of them driving. The guys started the argument by saying that women would cause more accidents. Naturally, I scoffed at this, but later on Tami made the point that you have almost zero peripheral vision when wearing Niqab. There seems to be an easy solution to that, but that wasn’t discussed… Later the guys asked the women what they would do if the car broke down. The clear assumption is that they could not ask a man for help and any other woman would be useless. I was tempted to ask if maybe the problem wasn’t with women driving but with learned helplessness and strict gender segregation, but I decided not to go down that path.
Eventually, the argument went into the area of what women could and couldn’t do. Luckily, there weren’t too many of the guys that stuck to the idea that men are always better at all things. Most of them even admitted that they would allow their wives to work if they were going to make significant money. But still, it was another amazing day. The trouble is that none of the students really understood how weird the topic was. In my youth, I remembered seeing films from the 30’s and 40’s with old men saying that women can’t drive, that’s about as close as I’ve ever come to this topic before, I plan on discussing it more in my class…