PHIL021

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It seemed like such a good idea at the time. I really can't tell you now why it seemed like such a piece of genius, but it did. How could I go wrong? I was 19 going on 20, I wanted to meet girls (you know how it is) and so the most logical and obvious place to meet girls was in a Feminist Philosophies class...

I wasn't just hoping to meet cute and smart girls, primarily I was hoping to get something out of the course, but dammit meeting cute and smart girls was a pretty good fringe benefit! Week 1 of the course was pretty interesting in the lectures, but it was when I arrived for my first seminar class and realised *gulp* that I was the only guy there and all the girls in the group were looking at me and thinking "What are you doing here?" ... Yeah, the novelty wore off pretty quick.

By about week three I decided that I was just going to keep my head down, study as well as I could, try and get as much out of the seminars as possible and afterwards never, ever, study feminist philosophies again. It didn't help that the course was completely assessed on various short pieces of coursework, including a diary that we had to keep of the thoughts that the lectures were provoking...

By the final seminar group I was looking forward to the end. The girls in the group were nicer to me by now, not looking on me as some outsider, and at the start of the seminar they were all talking about the Bridget Jones film that had recently been released.

"She's so real!" ... "She's just like me!" ... "It's so true to real life!"

I couldn't help but smile, and the tutor caught sight of me and asked me what was funny.

"Well, it just seems odd... For the last three months I've heard about how women should be independent, how they shouldn't need a man to make themselves happy, how they should be in control of their own lives and so on. This is the Woman that you've painted a picture of - and she's completely at odds with the Woman who the rest of the group seem to identify so strongly with. Which is it then, which of these descriptions is right, is true?"

The tutor tilted her head slightly to regard me: "They're both right," she said, smiling.

This was confirmation of my suspicion that I wasn't going to be able to scrape a B for the class.