Unpopular Opinions

I think men and women are different :eek: and I hate women who emasculate their male partners.

[I'm a woman and I'm not talking about women having to stay at home or anything like that, but I like men to at least have the appearance of being "a man"]
 
A homemaker.

That's the term my mother used when she filed our family's Form 1040 every year, even though there were 3 of us hooligans running around.

Before my older brother's birth, she had worked as an executive secretary to the president of the local paper mill - by far the largest employer in the immediate area.

I think men and women are different :eek: and I hate women who emasculate their male partners.

[I'm a woman and I'm not talking about women having to stay at home or anything like that, but I like men to at least have the appearance of being "a man"]

As in "My wife - I think I'll keep her"? :eek:

Mary Chapin Carpenter would not be happy with you at all, little lady.
 
I think men and women are different :eek: and I hate women who emasculate their male partners.

[I'm a woman and I'm not talking about women having to stay at home or anything like that, but I like men to at least have the appearance of being "a man"]

So what are you talking about then?
 
I'm one of those people who will only very rarely ditch a book partway through, or a tv series. I have been able to ditch a tv series at the end of a season but i just. Have. To. Know. What. Happens. I read the twighlight books because I wanted to know what happened and I never tire of telling people how much i hated them too :shuffle:
I will occasionally read a super crazy popular book that I have no interest in because my customers ask me questions about them. So, I have begrudgingly read:
Twilight - threw it at the wall;
50 Shades of Grey - threw it at the wall;
DaVinci Code - liked the story, HATED his "writing";
Gone Girl - was hoping both main characters would just kill each other;
Eat Pray Love - liked the eating, meh and meh on the praying and loving;
and absolutely cannot get through even one page of Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts or Nicholas Sparks - ugh, ugh, and ugh.
Most of the time I will just read a synopsis and a few reviews on the more popular books so I can claim to know what's going on. :p
 
My father made that commercial. Ms. Magazine (I think, some feminist group) gave him a lemon award, which he displayed proudly at home. I was in middle school at the time.

The information one learns only at FSU. :)

As was I when the commercials were first aired.

I remember watching, perhaps a few years after that, Lily Tomlin walked off the Dick Cavett late night talk show when Chad Everett of the "Medical Center" series referred to his wife as "his property - along with his horse and dog". :duh:

And then there was the infamous Paul Anka song "(You're) Having My Baby". :huh:
 
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I think men and women are different :eek: and I hate women who emasculate their male partners.

[I'm a woman and I'm not talking about women having to stay at home or anything like that, but I like men to at least have the appearance of being "a man"]

I think it's up to a couple to decide how they will regard their roles in a relationship and it's none of anyone else's business.

I like the term because it can apply to both men and women.

And to mothers and non-mothers.

And screw anyone who doesn't like it.
 
Where I live/work, the registered owner of a piece of real estate has to list their occupation for ID purposes. "Homemaker" is used for those who stay at home. In the olden days, you would have the husband with his job, and the wife's job was "Husband's Wife".
 
I will occasionally read a super crazy popular book that I have no interest in because my customers ask me questions about them. So, I have begrudgingly read:
Twilight - threw it at the wall;
50 Shades of Grey - threw it at the wall;
DaVinci Code - liked the story, HATED his "writing";
Gone Girl - was hoping both main characters would just kill each other;
Eat Pray Love - liked the eating, meh and meh on the praying and loving;
and absolutely cannot get through even one page of Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts or Nicholas Sparks - ugh, ugh, and ugh.
Most of the time I will just read a synopsis and a few reviews on the more popular books so I can claim to know what's going on. :p
I couldn't agree more; and your post made me laugh.
 
Just curious, what do you call women who stay-at-home if they aren't mothers? I do have a lot of respect for women and men who stay-at-home and do a good job of it. I don't think I can do it. I'm seriously bad at house work, and it is a whole lot of labor and being in charge of basically everything. I get it from my mom, and she loves it when I tell people that. :)
Community volunteer - at least that describes me.

I am not a house wife, I'm not married to my house. Together we make a home - not dependent on just me.
 
Although I acknowledge the brilliance of Shakespeare, I think more current and relevant works should be taught in high school literature classes.
I'm an English teacher, and I have to argue with this opinion. I hate the way most teachers teach Shakespeare, because as an actor who has acted in Shakespearean plays many times myself, I believe that Shakespeare is a living work and is best enjoyed and understood when seen on stage. One of my pet peeves in life is teachers who make students memorize Shakespeare and then give them marks for having the words perfect, without giving any thought to meaning, phrasing, emotional interpretation, etc.

However, I believe Shakespeare can be taught well without actually turning an English class into a drama class, and I think most, if not all, Shakespearean plays have universal themes that make them still relevant today. Also, I question the idea of current = relevant; we always try to introduce new novels and other current works of literature into the curriculum (when there is money to do so... don't get me started on that!), but the percentage of kids who actually read the whole book and don't whine about hating it is usually exactly the same as the percentage who read the book when it's an older classic. Most kids these days are automatically inclined to hate anything they're "forced" to read for school and read SparkNotes or other online sources rather than actually reading the book.
 
Also, I question the idea of current = relevant

I don't know why Skakespeare is always used as an example of non-relevant literature, either (addressing the point, not accusing dramagrrl of making it). Is Chaucer relevant? How about Milton? Spenser? I think Swift is about as relevant as today's headlines; is he out because he wrote in the 18th century?

Literature is mostly old works with a few new works in the mix. Yet the same human behaviors show up again and again. How is that not relevant?

This does not mean that some old works are not difficult to read, but so are some modern works.

Most kids these days are automatically inclined to hate anything they're "forced" to read for school and read SparkNotes or other online sources rather than actually reading the book.

Have students ever liked reading something because it was required reading? I never did.
 
I think men and women are different :eek: and I hate women who emasculate their male partners.

[I'm a woman and I'm not talking about women having to stay at home or anything like that, but I like men to at least have the appearance of being "a man"]

What it means to be a 'woman' or 'a man' is socially constructed, and those meanings vary widely between cultures.
 
I don't know why Skakespeare is always used as an example of non-relevant literature, either (addressing the point, not accusing dramagrrl of making it). Is Chaucer relevant? How about Milton? Spenser? I think Swift is about as relevant as today's headlines; is he out because he wrote in the 18th century?

Literature is mostly old works with a few new works in the mix. Yet the same human behaviors show up again and again. How is that not relevant?

From that perspective, you can always find relevance. When I say relevant/current, I mean that students can more easily relate to Catcher in the Rye than Dante's Inferno. And that modern language is more accessible than Shakespearean English and other old forms of English.

Have students ever liked reading something because it was required reading? I never did.

I loved everything I had to read in university for Lit classes! Mind you I only took three (was Film Studies major), but they were all taught by inspirational instructors who brought the works to life. I even enjoyed Middlemarch, which I am sure I'll not read again in this lifetime.
 
From that perspective, you can always find relevance.

Why, yes. And so can the students! It's a win-win.

When I say relevant/current, I mean that students can more easily relate to Catcher in the Rye than Dante's Inferno. And that modern language is more accessible than Shakespearean English and other old forms of English.

Um, Shakespeare wrote in modern English.

I absolutely loathed Catcher in the Rye and hope I never have to read it again. And there is a very popular class on Dante's Inferno where I teach. But for what it's worth, I am not, frankly, all that interested in what students relate to when I teach literature. That's not the point. Literature is an academic discipline; it's not about helping the students find themselves in a text.
 
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I woke up one day about two weeks and decided I really dislike movies and never want to see another one.

Facebook is the stupidest piece of crap ever. I don't care about your ugly dog, your chain restaurant meal, or how much you "love, love, LOVE!!!" anything.

I sort of like Kris and Kim K.

I think Ryan Gosling is sort of fugly. Also Ryan Reynolds. Good thing I will never see another movie.

Sometimes I like to smell stinky things and then bitch about how stinky the smell is. Except never poop.
 
Have students ever liked reading something because it was required reading? I never did.

I never loved it, but I gave most of the texts a chance, at least... and the biggest difference I would say is that most students in my day (which wasn't that long ago!) understood that in order to pass, they would actually have to suck it up and read the book even if they hated it.

These days, the percentage of students who actually do the required reading is scarily low. Obviously, part of it is that Internet sources have become more and more rampant and more and more easily accessible in the past decade, and there are more recent and more accessible movie versions of many novels and plays that are studied, but part of it seems to me to be part of the culture of entitlement that many of today's students seem to be stuck in. I've actually had students get angry at me when they did badly on an essay, test or quiz after fully admitting that they didn't do the reading and only read the SparkNotes. They really seem to believe that the reading is optional and unfortunately, by the time they get to the higher secondary grades, most students have had at least a few bad teachers who have lent evidence to this belief by only assigning and marking work that would allow a surface-level Internet-source summary version understanding of the text to be more than sufficient.

I absolutely loathed Catcher in the Rye and hope I never have to read it again. And there is a very popular class on Dante's Inferno where I teach. But for what it's worth, I am not, frankly, all that interested in what students relate to when I teach literature. That's not the point. Literature is an academic discipline; it's not about helping the students find themselves in a text.

I also hated Catcher in the Rye with a passion and did not relate to it at all. I definitely can say I related more to many Shakespearean works than I did to that novel - maybe not Romeo and Juliet, but parts of Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and even Macbeth.
 
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Have students ever liked reading something because it was required reading? I never did.
I'm probably a really bad example because of the way my mom chose to homeschool me, but I loved doing required reading because I could usually use it to get out of math, I was good at math, but I found it boring and I preferred to read so when I could use having to read stuff for school as an excuse to skip math, I would. I spent most of my time reading anyway so it wasn't much of a stretch.
 
Um, Shakespeare wrote in modern English.

The iambic pentameter may be modern, but it is certainly not accessible to many of us. I sure as heck have no interest in reading it.

But for what it's worth, I am not, frankly, all that interested in what students relate to when I teach literature. That's not the point. Literature is an academic discipline; it's not about helping the students find themselves in a text.

Um, I do understand that it is an academic discipline (did study it in university, do tutor it, though infrequently and with a good deal of reluctance).

Could you provide a bit more detail about what you are interested in when you teach literature? What do you want your students to get out of your classes and out of the works you assign? What specific academic skills do you want them to cultivate? If they don't relate to the works or find any personal meaning in it, what is the point, really? Except in specific circumstances, 100-level literature students aren't learning about integrating research, providing/extending research frameowrks and formulating hypotheses. In my experience, they are analyzing meanings/motifs/contexts, which is fine, except it can require rather a stretch of the imagination when a student doesn't care for a work, relate to it, or find anything of value in it. If they have to rely on other people's analyses to find meanings in seemingly meaningless works - meanings that seem always required to be 'hidden' or 'deep' - they are just copying rather than using their own mind.
 
I will occasionally read a super crazy popular book that I have no interest in because my customers ask me questions about them. So, I have begrudgingly read:
[snip]
DaVinci Code - liked the story, HATED his "writing";
Gone Girl - was hoping both main characters would just kill each other;

I felt exactly the same way about these two books! Especially Gone Girl. I read it on holiday and Mr Antmanb kept asking me why i was shouting angrily at the book, and then asking whether it would be better to stop reading it than hating it so much :shuffle:

The iambic pentameter may be modern, but it is certainly not accessible to many of us. I sure as heck have no interest in reading it.

It has been over 20 years since I studied any English literature, but my recollection is that iambic pentameter is about meter (clue is in the name ;) ) and the ten syllables per line and short-long stresses on the syllables, it's not about the type of English that is used which could be modern or old. Whether or not you read it in the correct rhythm or meter, the words are still there to be read and understood.
 
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That's the term my mother used when she filed our family's Form 1040 every year, even though there were 3 of us hooligans running around.

My grandmother graduated from Cornell with a degree in homemaking. Came in handy when she got married and had 6 kids to raise, 5 of them through WWII when my grandfather was stationed on Guam (including my dad, who was #3 out of the 6). My dad learned how to cook from her, as did the rest of his siblings. She was also a quilter and a weaver, all of which she passed down to her daughters. She was a true artist in so many ways.
 

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