Being that I am a part of the honors program at Stockton, it is mandatory to go to one Dialogue session per semester. This semester, I decided to attend the Womyn at Stockton Dialogue. At first, I didn’t know much about the premise of this particular session. I knew that the spelt “women” wrong intentionally, and I was very interested to find out what the purpose was behind this misspelling.

This dialogue was primarily about how even though today women are treated “equally” we aren’t equal with men. What was probably most ironic about this dialogue was that the entire room was filled with girls, aside from Daniel Tome. This, right off the bat, bothered Daniel and Diana, who are the Service Learning coordinators that were running this dialogue, because just because the topic is about women, doesn’t mean that men aren’t involved. Men are one of the primary reasons why women are being neglected in certain ways. And no men at Stockton found it necessary or fulfilling to attend this session.

 I found out in this powerful conversation that, in general, women get paid 70 cents for every dollar a man gets paid. Why is that? Personally, I think this is appalling being that a 30% difference in annual salaries is a lot of money. Also, I was informed that out of the major news stations such as CNN, Fox, NBC, etc., when covering the case regarding the teenage girl who got raped by teenage football players while she was intoxicated, the news stations took the sides of the teenage boys, instead of sympathizing and empathizing with the young girl. How or why is this happening? Why do people side with the individuals who are clearly wrong in this situation, while the young girl couldn’t even defend herself?

What probably took me by most surprise was a mere statement that Diana said in the midst of one of our conversations. She said: have any of your teachers, either in college or in high school, refer to the subject of history as “her-story”? I never thought that meaning behind this word, this subject that is vital to our education, was “his”-story. Why is this subject referred to as “his-story”? What about her story? It was at this point in our conversation when I found out why “women” was misspelled in the title of the dialogue. The word “women” contains the word “men”. Why should women even be remotely defined by a man? That is why the “e” was changed to a “y”, to make a clear distinction between the two genders.

I got a lot out of this dialogue, more so than any other dialogue I’ve attended. It was beyond informing and eye-awakening. I wish some men at Stockton would have come to participate in our discussion as well. Maybe next year! I fully advise anyone who has not attended this particular dialogue session to attend it next year.