In the Name of Gloria Steinem, I Command the Foul Demons of Sexism to Depart

There is a group of students from Michigan State University in town, touring parts of the country and doing something or other nutrition-project related for academic credit.  Good on them!  Also, their professor likes to get in touch with the local Peace Corps volunteers so the students can spend an evening with a volunteer asking questions and learning about Peace Corps service.  Thus it was that I got a free dinner last night in exchange for having a bunch of enthusiastic undergrads ask me questions about life and culture and Kiswahili.  This is actually part of my job, too, educating Americans about people and cultures that aren't them, on the grounds that there are better ways than war for teaching Americans geography.

I found the experience a little odd.  Meeting Americans just off the plane who aren't Peace Corps brings a wee itty bit of culture shock.  They talk about how weird it is to find watermelons with seeds in them, and when they find out I make wine the followup question is "what kind of grapes do you have here?" You need grapes to make wine?  And how would I know what kind?  They look purply-blue, and more than that, who knows?  On the other hand, it does remind me how cool this place is when the newcomers start exclaiming about the giant bats.

Then one lady said to me "I really want to join Peace Corps, but my parents say that by the time I get back I'll be 26, too old to get married, what do I do?"  Sigh.  I advised her to tell her parents that many volunteers find spouses during their service, reminding myself firmly that change happens only slowly and it's usually more convincing to phrase objections in terms people will be familiar with and sympathetic to.  After all, science education for women was originally argued in terms of how chemistry would make for better cooking.  Besides which, I did not have an internet-enable device at my disposal at the time and couldn't do a fact check from the U.S. census, which helpfully informs us that as of 2010, women in the U.S. married for the first time at an average age of 26.7 years.  So there.

Despite knowing that this isn't terribly conducive to long-term sustainable change, I still want to go beat this lady's parents with my righteous fists of equality, because seriously, the U.S. is supposedly a developed nation that has embraced equality regardless of a lot of things.  Supposedly.