So today in class, I had the distinct pleasure of discussing last night's reading, a feminist work called The Second Sex. I had some idea of what would ensue, but I didn't anticipate how bad it was going to get.

Basically, my teacher led the majority of the class through the "sexism" of the use of such terms as "man" and "mankind" to refer to the race as a whole, despite it being pointed out repeatedly by myself and a couple others that the word "man" was originally in Old English as gender-neutral, that one of its definitions in the dictionary defines it as gender-neutral, and that even colloquially it is used as gender-neutral. No matter, they weren't letting little things like that get in the way.

The comparison was even made between the use of "man" and "mankind" to "oppress women" and the use of the n-word to oppress black people and slaves. It got to the point where one guy in my class was speaking and qualified his statement with "I don't know if my point is valid, since I'm a guy."

If you can't tell by now I was quite angry, wanted to share, and thought it would be somewhat relevant here.