Why do male students in Doloff’s assignment have more trouble that the female students getting
started on their essays?
Josey Moss
Professor Bradley
ENC 1102
9 October 2011
The Opposite Sex
Imagine if you were the opposite sex. Steven Doloff assigned his students to write an
essay as if they were the opposite sex. He noticed that the girls started to write immediately and
seemed more enthusiastic than the boys, who seemed to have trouble getting started. The boys
were less excited about this subject and wrote less than the girls did. Most men do not give much
thought to what it might be like to be in a female’s shoes; this would make it harder for them to
write about being female. Girls are more open to the assignment because females often try to
analyze males and in doing this often imagine what it would be like to be a male.
When men get together it is rare that the topic of conversation is ever about what it would
be like to be a female. If men talk about women the conversation is usually about what the men
like or don’t like about the woman. Not to say that a man would never care about a woman’s
feelings, but he would not put himself in her place to understand her feelings. A woman’s logic
differs from a man’s logic; a woman will often put herself in the place of a man in order to figure
out what he may feel. I know that I have had the conversation on more than one occasion with
my girlfriends about what it would be like to be a male. The female students of Doloff’s classes
mostly write about “of envy men’s physical and social privileges, and curiosity regarding man’s
true feelings concerning women,” and they all began to write immediately (Doloff 796). It is
understandable that the girls in Doloff’s class wrote about these aspects of being a man, as I have
often thought about many if these characteristics myself.
The boy’s in the class were young men so the assignment was most likely the first time
many of the boys had ever given any thought to what it might be like to be female. That would
explain why “the male students tended to wait a while (in several cases half the period), in
something of a daze, before starting” (Doloff 796). The boys in the class had to think about what
it was like to be a girl before they started writing, whereas the girls had given it thought before
ever given the assignment. This is why it took the boys longer to start the essay.
Work Cited
Doloff, Steve. “The Opposite Sex.” Exploring Literature. Ed. Frank Madden. Person, 2012. 5th
ed. 796-797. Print.