Hey everyone! It’s me, your host. It has been way too long since we last chatted. To be honest, wrapping up summer, moving from Greensboro to Wilmington to Raleigh all within a single week, and then starting a new job alongside a new semester completely wiped me out.
Now that classes started a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been getting back into the swing of things and finding my rhythm. It’s definitely a process, seeing as there’s always a new task to tackle or a meeting to attend. With two club leadership roles, three jobs, and five classes this semester, it’s going to be a wild one. But… enough about me! This blog is about the people I meet and interact with, so let’s talk about today’s topic.
I had a hard time deciding who to feature in this post because I talk to a lot of people (shocker, I know). But I realized I desperately needed to write about a specific conversation I had with some family members a couple of months ago. To respect their privacy, I won’t be naming names, but I do feel it’s an important discussion to share with y’all.
It all started at a seemingly normal family dinner. We were chowing down on some buss-tastic food and chatting about our days when the topic shifted to the classes I was registering for.
I started listing them off: Business Analytics, HR concentration courses, coding classes, and then—saving the best for last—Sex, Gender, and Islam. Yep! You read that right. The class is literally named Sex, Gender, and Islam. It’s a high-level religious studies course with only eight students, and it is genuinely one of the most interesting classes I have ever taken.
(Quick caveat: If you ever come across an essay I’ve written for my religious studies classes, there is about a 95% chance it touches on the patriarchy, veiling across religions, women’s positionality in religious institutions, or the roots of oppression that predate modern religions.)
Anyway, dropping any of the “Big Three”—Sex, Gender, or Islam—at a family dinner with super conservative Christian relatives probably isn’t the best recipe for smooth conversation. Alas, I didn’t filter myself before speaking, and the cat was out of the bag.
Naturally, an awkward silence fell over the room. Because is it really a family dinner without a little politically charged silence? Then came the prompt to explain what the class was actually about (which feels self-explanatory given the title). I gave my standard spiel: how we examine how sex and gender are viewed across different eras of Islam, and how those views are influenced by changing Western standards, ancient fiqh (jurisprudence), and modern-day fatwas. I suppose that just dug the hole a little deeper, because suddenly the table was debating women’s rights,
oppression, and the patriarchy.
Here is where things turned into a full-on debate. We started discussing the concept of men as the head of the household versus stay-at-home mothers. Out of nowhere, I was hit with the claim that liberals are coming with pitchforks and flames for any woman who wants to be a
stay-at-home mother.
Right… Right…
I realized where the conversation was heading, but I couldn’t stop myself—I wanted my point to be heard. The justification behind their argument (which is super common even outside religious spaces) is that women are biologically better nurturers, so motherhood should be the ultimate desire for any woman. But let’s be real for a moment: it takes two to tango to make a child. Operating under the blanket assumption that carrying a baby automatically means a person must be more
nurturing—and that motherhood should be their only goal in life—ignores the full picture.
I’m not saying all women aren’t naturally nurturing, or that all men are, or that anyone fits neatly into a box. I’m simply pointing out that applying rigid roles and assumptions to an entire group ignores the huge diversity of human experience across personality types, environments,
genders, and sexes.
Claiming “liberals shun mothers” feels a bit silly to me. Both ends of the political spectrum tend to grab the most extreme stereotype and slap it on the other: one side assumes all conservatives think women should only exist to serve husbands and raise kids, while the other side assumes all liberals hate marriage and children.
Like… girl. What are we doing? We can’t expect to have a good conversation if we both approach it from such a black-and-white understanding of a complex topic. After that lively debate on women’s “predisposition” to raise children and stay home, we moved on to the patriarchy and everyday sexism. Or at least, I brought it up.
Turns out, my family members don’t believe the patriarchy exists or that people face sexism in everyday life. Do you know how hard it is to convince a group of men that I, a young woman, experience sexism?Pretty hard, tbh. At the time of this conversation, I was working in an office with mostly older men, so I shared a real-life example of sitting in a meeting and trying to propose an idea. If you present in a feminine way, you probably know what comes next.
The most common reaction to me sharing a thought is either getting completely talked over, or having someone hear me and repeat my exact point two minutes later just to take credit for it themselves. My family member’s response? That it was my own fault and I just needed to be “more assertive.”
Awesome! Super helpful advice, thanks!
How do you accurately explain how men often respect other men’s voices before respecting a woman’s? It’s easy to get talked over when people subconsciously believe your male peers are more qualified than you are.
(Another caveat: This isn’t to say every man acts this way, or that every meeting goes down like this. These behaviors are learned over time. As a society, we’ve operated within patriarchal structures for so long that these dynamics reproduce themselves automatically without us even
realizing it—or acting fast enough to stop it.)
This whole conversation with my family really made me realize how vastly different two people’s worldviews can be. Even within the exact same family tree, we can hold such opposite viewpoints that it feels like we’re living in different realities. Usually, when I write these blog posts, I try to wrap things up with a neat, well-thought-out lesson. But honestly, this is something I’ve just been sitting with and pondering for a while.
It’s hard to stay calm and be an active, receptive listener when someone is arguing a point you feel is 100% incorrect and harmful to a population of people. It’s even harder when the person making that argument is someone you love and want to understand.
I don’t have a perfect formula for reconciling those moments. But maybe that is the lesson: we’re all learning how to love each other, navigate tough conversations, hear things we don’t want to hear, and maybe even re-evaluate our own opinions.
Respectful discourse is hard, but holding onto resentment forever is harder. Your homework this week is to be an active listener to someone you disagree with. You might learn something new—either about them or about yourself. Either way, there is genuine value in discourse.