This Is deep...bring Your Snorkel

My hip is feeling much better now, thanks for asking.  Still a little stiff, but I'll keep doing stretches.  I can walk again without excruciating pain, although I think I'm unconsciously limping.

I'm taking a cultural anthropology class.  It is most satisfying. ^_^ (yay dumb faces)  I'd like to think that I'm above my culture, that I'm not some conveyor belt product of my society's beliefs and past traditions.

But let's face it: I'm the perfect product of my culture. 

I live in Utah, I met my husband in an LDS Institute class, and got married at 22.  I'm a cookie-cutter Utah Valley girl.  And that bothers me.

How many of our choices are made because that's what we, as human beings according to our core personalities, really want? And how many choices are made according to what our society has brought us up to believe we want? 

Do I attend college because that's what I really want...or does it have to do with our country's past of repressing women and discouraging them from going to school (or the workplace), and in an effort to destroy that bias the new generation has made a phenomenal push to get women in colleges and universities and corporate offices, to prove that women are equal in their abilities.  The push is now in the opposite direction from what it was forty to sixty years ago; now the pressure is "Go to school! Learn! Grow! Because you're a woman and you have to prove that YOU CAN."  Are we really still proving that point?

I feel I can honestly say that I'm in school because I love it.  I crave it.  The sense of accomplishment and camaraderie I get there is unmatched in value to any other endeavor I've undertaken or any other aspect of my day-to-day life. 

But I suspect that these other social variables have played their part to get me here.  Not explicitly; my grandmother never sat me down and lectured me on why she never went to school and why I should. But it's part of my subconscious.  I feel the subliminal pushes from the Feminist Movement and part of my satisfaction is knowing that I'm doing extremely well, not just as a student, but as a woman.  One more nail in the coffin of Female Repression.

If you were to ask me outright, I'd say that the coffin of Female Repression has so many nails in it at this point that it no longer resembles a coffin as much as a piece of modern abstract expressionist art.  My subconscious may not see it that way.  The social pressure of "equal rights for women" is so great that I can't deny it has influence over my actions and decisions.

How do I feel about that?