Lack of Patience

Maybe this is not a particularly strong time for me right now in the area of patience, but, I have been more annoyed then usual in the past few nights.

Before I go on, I need to reiterate my love for Latin American immigrants, both documented & undocumented. They are a beautiful people.

With that said, I get annoyed as fuck when it comes to the machismo displayed by many male immigrants. The anthropologist in me understands that it is a part of their cultural upbringing. The feminist in me wants to go ape-shit when they patronize me.

Throughout the night when I'm in the school to teach I constantly feel various eyes on me, and I'm not trying to flatter myself, the men do this to all women, both comely and homely. They greet you, "hi teacher," with a flirting smile and allow you to go ahead of them up the stairs after they insist on holding the door for you.

You then, as a woman, are forced to proceed up the stairs with the infuriating humiliation of knowing they did this to get a better eye-level view of your ass as you ascend.

I often wonder how they would react if, when they asked how I was, I responded "bloated and on my period." Or when they comment on how great my ass is in Spanish I respond back in Spanish, "hey thanks, you can't even tell I just farted?"

Again, a beautiful people, but sometimes my patience is thin.

women

I was going over the 3 waves of the Women's Movement in class the other night and became pretty frustrated. These are the types of situations which really test my ability as an anthropologist. It's hard to step back and understand that everyone has a different point of view and we all grow up in different situations even if we share a culture.
The students in class come from all over, Cameroon, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, the middle east... So it tries my patience when I go over these subjects with a checkered audience like this.
I tend to lean to the left when I'm teaching, (politically, not physically), so I slip in facts like how women still make 3/4 of what men do who perform the same job.
This is still not good enough, it's still not viable proof. I then bring up the NBA & WNBA comparison.
"How many of you watch the WNBA?"
One student answers, "I watched it by accident the other day."
Of course the class explodes with laughter, even I feel the urge to chuckle a little.
This, to me, is proof enough of just how ingrained sex discrimination is in this culture.

We say things like "he cried like a little bitch" "quit being a pussy" and most people don't think twice about what this means. We grow up learning exactly where we belong and we are expected to stay within this parameter. As women we need to step over these boundaries, that's why I can appreciate "controversial" figures like Madonna. Because despite being a "bitch" and being "ugly" and "old" now, she has never apologized for being who she is, a woman who doesn't listen when people tell her to be quiet.

This jumped to a lot of random subjects, but you get the picture. Women have come a long way and have a long way to go.