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Ok, so here’s a joke. It’s about the women’s studies class I’m taking. It’s quite an old joke considering how relatively new the field of Women’s Studies is. Here goes.

So there was this old hillbilly lived way back in the woods and made his living chopping firewood and selling it to the flatlanders who drove up on the weekends. His real name was Howard Jackson Oliver but everyone called him Uncle H’aird for short. Well one day Uncle H’aird rode his mule wagon into town to get a new axe since his old one had been sharpened so many times it had gone out of balance.

Well, there Uncle H’aird was looking at axes in the hardware store and a new salesman came over and said “Uncle H’aird, you still cutting firewood with an axe? Why don’t you buy one of these new chainsaws?”

Well, Uncle H’aird said he thought he did pretty good with his axe, like he’d always done, and so he didn’t think he needed any new chain saw. The salesman asked “Well how many cords of wood are you able to cut a day with one of your axes?” Uncle H’aird allowed as to how if his axe was sharp and balanced he could cut twelve to fourteen cords a day.

“Twelve cords a day?” Said the salesman, “Why if you bought a chain saw you could easily cut twenty a day!”

Well, it didn’t take long after that for Uncle H’aird to buy a chain saw, load it onto his mule wagon, and head back home up in the woods.

Two days later, though, he showed back up in town with the chainsaw on his mule wagon and he told the salesman he wanted his money back. The salesman asked why and Uncle H’aird said “Yew said I could cut twenty cords a day and I barely cut eight! I want my money back.”

“Now calm down, H’aird” says the salesman. You got to give it a little time to get used to it. You might get eight cords the first day but you just need practice. Give it a week and then we’ll talk.”

Uncle H’aird figured that sounded like there must must be some sense in it so he got back on his mule wagon and headed back up to his home in the woods.

A week later there sat the salesman and wouldn’t you know it, here comes Uncle H’aird on his mule wagon looking awful! His hair all stringy and his hand blistered and raw, his clothes in tatters and his hat stained all the way to the brim with salt from sweat. And he gets down off his mule wagon and he picks up his chain saw and he limps over to the salesman and drops it at his feet and says “Ah gave it time like you said, and I practiced, like you said, but try as I might I never was able to cut more than fourteen cords in one day and that’s just about kilt me. I want my money back and I want my old axe back.”

Well the salesman felt pretty bad but he also felt like maybe something was wrong with the chain saw so he bent over, picked it up, set the switch, checked the spark, primed the fuel, grabbed the starter cord, tightened the fuel trigger with his index finger and did a perfect drop pull.

Well the chainsaw started right up with a roar and Uncle H’aird stepped back, scared to death, and said “what’s that noise?”

Now that might not sound like a women’s studies joke… and truth be told as far as I know no one else ever has, and maybe ever will claim it is. Except me. Because every day when I come home there’s something else I’ve learned — a new concept, new vocabulary, word about research, or new-to-me ideas that keep making me want to say “what’s that noise?!?!” Because I feel like I’ve been sitting at home reading and blogging about stuff for years, and, like Uncle H’aird, I do ok — I can recognize right from wrong, I can see directions society could go in that would defuse tension, increase truth, justice, liberty, and equality, and I can think of maybe fun ways to think about it. But it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that human factors researchers and instructional designers long ago demonstrated that individuals gathering information mostly on their own tend not to choose the, um, most direct path through the material. And that’s fine, really. Seriously! But then when you do get someone to point out prominent landmarks and answer questions it really helps pull a lot of stuff together.

Update: Anyway, I happen to think I’m not alone in this — sure, it’s possible for people to figure out a lot of stuff on their own, and when you look at some of the work that, say, Betty Friedan or Germaine Greer produced with very little formal infrastructure to support them it’s not like you can’t do anything. But check out this post and conversation in comments about why the allegation that men won’t ever take hormonal contraceptives for themselves because, in effect, it would be so easy to just lie instead. Again, chances are you could separate wheat from chaff in their on your own, but a solid foundation in, oh, say, women’s studies, would give you not only critical skills (which you might get elsewhere) but also an informational infrastructure and a rich theoretical framework in which to question whether the effect of predominantly anti-feminist narratives about men and women merely enable men to behave irresponsibly or whether they actively coerce men to select dishonesty over integrity.

In other words I’m not the only man, let alone the only person, who might react with the same startled “what’s that noise” when someone actually fires up women’s studies instead of just wearing you out with how you heard you’re supposed to use any other kind of saw.

I’m starting to love that joke about Uncle H’aird.