8 Simple Rules for Womenfolk

jamin | September 12, 2013 | 0 Comments

I ran across this little article today because of my Twitter friend Imani Gandy, who writes over at Angry Black Lady and with whom I’ve broken bread twice now. I try to see her whenever she’s close because I enjoy the conversation and it’s fun to see her react to the vast idiocy all around us. Her reactions to this article were funny on Twitter and Facebook.

#MyLaugh

But listen, y’all, this article? This article is so bad. This woman is a Catholic woman, and unless she’s writing this as parody, I can’t take her seriously. She says that college is bad for women for 8 reasons. Womenfolk being educated is a bad thing because it tears down their virtue, or something just as asinine.

You know, come to think of it, SOME women probably don’t need to go to college…or 4. Because they still don’t learn anything.

iCanNOT with this today. Everything she says applies to men, too, and it’s very short-sighted to apply it to only women. It’s also backward and seems to long for the days of the Eisenhower Administration when no one gave a Protestant white man a chance to prove himself. (/sarcasm)

1. She will attract the wrong types of men.

You know what? You don’t have to go to college to do that. You can attract the wrong type of man in high school, marry him, and then regret it 15 years later at your divorce settlement. College doesn’t guarantee having a better man picker.

2. She will be in a near occasion of sin.

A “near occasion of sin”? Is this a Catholic term for what everyone encounters in their daily lives anyway? Sin is all around us and we’re born into it. Just because you’re in college and tempted by sex and other things doesn’t mean you have to take part in it. I graduated from college un-sexed and un-alcohol-ed. I know, I totally did college wrong.

3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother.

Ah, yes. She will learn how to get a job. I thought that being a good wife was a choice and that being a good mother was more instinctual than most new mothers first thought. Isn’t this one related to choosing to be a good person, period? And, I mean, what exists outside of the college experience that would teach her how to be a good wife and mother? What is the alternative? You learn that stuff through experience, which comes to you whether or not you went college.

4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup.

Yes, ladies, by all means stay away from college if you don’t like years of debt. It obviously isn’t worth it in the end. Debt hurts your husband. It hurts your kids. It hurts YOU. Think of your hypothetical-at-this-point family, you selfish cows!

5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world.

No, and they don’t have anything to prove to their hypothetical-at-this-point husbands, either. You only owe you and God a life lived well, so do what you need to do to make that happen. She’s right in that you don’t have to prove anything to the world, but you must prove yourself to yourself. If that’s through a husband and kids, so be it, but let’s not act like all women who go to college are looking for a husband or for careers in which they can be ball-busting spinsters…with 77% of the pay of the men who own the balls that they’re busting.

6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents.

So the author feels that because of debt from sending kids to college, this could mean that parents choose to not have more kids, which Catholics feel is a sin. I’ma just say ‘dis…I don’t know of any Catholic who has not used birth control. And by the time the kids are ready for school, Mama been ’bout done with kids for a good decade.

7. She will regret it.

Yeah, because every woman I know who went to college regretted it. This woman needs to shut all the way up. The social experience of college on its own is more than enough to want to attend. Friends for life? Crazy stories? A 4-year (5-year? 6 or more if you’re a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.) pre-adulthood “break”? Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t give that back for anything. Unless it’s swapping net worth with Oprah Winfrey.

8. It could interfere with a religious vocation.

She shoehorned this in here because some Catholic companies or schools won’t take you if you have large debt, and college can lead you to having large debt.

I’d sincerely hate to see what Raylan Alleman thinks of grad school if she thinks college is the worst thing to happen to women since Feminism, Suffrage, and the bikini.

Bottom line: do what you need to do, women. Great is what you’re meant to be. Go be great. God will be more pleased with that, wherever you choose to be great that still honors Him. Don’t let people like Raylan put you inside of a box…just because she’s probably bitter over how her life turned out.