Light posting today

In honor of Terri Schiavo's death.

No, not really. But lord, the media circus....

Actually, the damn department meeting got moved to the two-hour slot between my classes today. I mean! How dare they take up my precious prep time with silly departmental business? Grr. So I actually have to prep this *morning,* since I foolishly assigned a new text this week (always a bad idea, assigning something one has to actually read) *and* I have grading to finish up.

So I shall leave you with this link to the excellent "Shouts and Murmurs" column in this week's New Yorker. Thankfully I never dated George, but I think I know the type....

If I want to be preached at, I'll go to church. If I'm in a pharmacy, what I want is my prescription filled.

I've blogged on the issue of pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions before; now there's a WaPo article that gives me an opportunity to do so again.

"He's a devout Roman Catholic and believes participating in any action that inhibits or prohibits human life is a sin," said Aden of the Christian Legal Society. "The rights of pharmacists like him should be respected."

Yeah? What about my right to fill my goddamn prescription?

If you have a problem providing health care to anyone, on moral grounds, then do something else for a living.

Wisconsin is one of at least 11 states considering "conscience clause" laws that would protect pharmacists [who refuse to do their jobs]. Four states already have laws that specifically allow pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate their beliefs.

Maybe while we're at it, we can grant to admissions officers and professors at medical and pharmacy schools the right to refuse to admit or teach religious fanatics. I demand the right to refuse to teach students who hold views that violate my ethical beliefs. No conservatives, no anti-feminists, and no anti-abortion students in my classroom.*

Brauer, of Pharmacists for Life, defends the right of pharmacists not only to decline to fill prescriptions themselves but also to refuse to refer customers elsewhere or transfer prescriptions.

"That's like saying, 'I don't kill people myself but let me tell you about the guy down the street who does.' What's that saying? 'I will not off your husband, but I know a buddy who will?' It's the same thing," said Brauer, who now works at a hospital pharmacy.

Whatever hospital employs this woman needs to fire her, now.

How about that Hippocratic Oath?

I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required. . . . I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart, a cancerous growth, but a sick human being. . . . I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings. . . .May I always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help.



*This is not true. Unlike some assholes, I have a sense of obligation to my chosen profession, which means that I teach everyone who walks in the door of my classroom, no matter what that dumbass David Horowitz thinks. But I am serious that medical and pharmacy schools ought not to admit students who have "ethical" objections to practicing the profession they are choosing to follow.

Laughing. Ass. Off.

Sweet, sweet poetic justice. Every teacher who reads this site will love this story. Don't forget to check out the comments, which got so numerous they went over into a new thread. I especially like the people who are whining about how unfair it is to the plagiarist to report her and embarrass her on the internet. Give. Me. A. Break.

Thanks to the person who sent me the link via email.

In which I stick my foot in my mouth

Bellatrys left a comment to this post that I wanted to respond to on the main page. Now, before I jump in: this is "mommy wars" territory, and I am philosophically opposed to the "mommy wars" and to any argument over feminism that pits women against each other over difficult "choices" that are dictated by the larger system, and it is very clear to me that the reason women think they have to "choose" between work and family is because (1) men don't; (2) employers expect employees to have no other major committments in their lives; (3) we've developed a nice healthy backlash culture against educated white women in which we now allow them the right to work, but hold them to ridiculous parenting standards that were heretofore unknown.

Also, let me say that what I'm about to say here is in no way directed at the individual choices individual women make in the face of those issues: as i've said before and will say again, we all make our compromises with the world we live in, and we all do the best we can, and I'm not especially exercised about hassling people over those decisions.

But. Here is my issue with the idea that women-who-stay-at-home-with-their-kids-because-their-husbands-are-making-good-money are benefitting from, well, anything: they aren't. As Ann Crittenden points out in The Price of Motherhood (which, if you haven't read it, you should; it's excellent), women who stay home with kids are taking an enormous financial risk--one that second-wave feminists were well aware of, and that somehow we seem to have mostly forgotten about. Staying home means you earn less social security; it means you have no income of "your own"; it means that god forbid you end up divorced, or your husband drops dead, or even once your kids grow up and you're ready to move back into the work force, you. are. fucked. It means you likely have little or no retirement income--even though you are probably going to live longer than your husband. It means you have no "work history," no wage history, no "marketable skills." Now, this is bullshit, of course, and there's good work out there (including Crittenden's own book If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything) pointing out that running a home does indeed involve marketable skills, but basically, yes, you are going to have to overcome that issue in the minds of future employers, and you are going to be way, way behind on the life wages scale. Which means, again, less social security, less money to retire on.

Now, I've looked at the little forms the government sends out telling us what our social security expectations are. And mine are, basically, jack shit--because I spent most of my adulthood to date in school, earning at most about $10K/year. Mr. B., who supported me through all that education? He's gonna get plenty of money from social security (assuming it's still around, of course). This is one of the reasons why, when we started IRAs, we started mine first, and contributed more money to it. Then, of course, we cashed them in to buy the house, so I'm back with jack shit for retirement money. One of the reasons I'm working now, and he's not, is because I'm well aware of what that means.

And what about divorce? No one gets married wanting to divorce, and very few of us have kids thinking that we won't be together forever, so saying "we're never going to divorce" doesn't count. The fact is, about half of marriages split up. And if you are so unlucky that some unforseen circumstance down the road means that that's you, and you've been staying at home raising kids, the court is *not* going to consider that "his" income was half yours. The paychecks have his name on them, they're "his" money, and if you're lucky you'll get some kind of "child support," and that is it. And you and the kids will be fucked.

For all I love Mr. B., and I do, and for all I feel sure (like everyone else who loves their partner) that we're not splitting up, I am hard-headed about this money shit. When we get back on our financial feet, my retirement savings will come first; we make sure that assets (like the house) are in both our names regardless of whose income is paying for it; we have always split income 50/50 after paying bills (including my student loan bills--he has none) regardless of who was "earning" it. And yet, even so: if we divorce, or if he gets hit by a bus tomorrow, financially, I am much, much worse off, now, and in the future.

So, one of the main reasons people often give for why it's the wife--and not the husband--who stays home is that her job pays less money. To me, that's precisely why women oughta keep working. And the other issue--that kids are "naturally" more attached to mama--well, if that's true, or if it's just because of breastfeeding or socialization (I actually, personally, think it's a bit of all three), then that, too, is a reason to have dad stay home instead. I don't know what people's individual decisions are based on, nor what they're doing in their lives to manage those decisions, and I don't want to know. But I do wish that, as a culture, we could look beyond easy simple arguments like "choice" and talk about what the consequences and effects of different "choices" are.

Whoa.

To the unknown person who just doubled my RAM: thank you, thank you, thank you. I really never expected anyone to do that. I am amazed, and grateful, and I thank you from the bottom of my multi-tasking little heart.

If you email me, I'll thank you personally.

If you went to Berkeley...

Your personal information may just have been stolen. You might want to keep an eye on your bank account.

Shocking news!

White men still earn 33-45% more than women, 20-30% more than non-white men. What I really like is that the lead for the story is how white women stack up against black and Asian women; the gap between all women and white men doesn't even get mentioned until paragraph four.

Yes! Because other women are the enemy! And the real crime is that those brown people are earning a little bit more than their pale-skinned sisters.

But let's look at the *real* gap, which is between white men and everyone else. Hypotheses?

1. Women and brown men are inferior.
2. White men are superior.
3. Some combination of 1. and 2.
4. Babies!
5. Other environmental factors; however, this is unlikely.

Thanks to mithras for helping with the snark.

Cross-posted at XX

How sex can save the world

Hey hey y'all. Now, I know that if you are reading this you are, not to point fingers or anything, a perv. Yes you are, go on, admit it. You like sex! There, was that so bad? And now that spring is here and we're shedding our itchy woolens and unflattering toques, we're all hornier than ever.

So! Aren't you just dying to buy a new vibe, or a nice pair of fur-lined cuffs or something? Sure you are. Well, now's your chance, because flea of One Good Thing--did you know she owns a sex shop?--has had pneumonia, and as a result has had to close the family business. Which sucks, since like most small business owners, she kind of depended on it to, you know, make a living. But she's keeping the online store open. She even sells Harry Potter books, which you can give the kids to keep the little monsters busy while you get busy in the other room. And, you know, maybe if you buy a lot of stuff, flea and the little fleas can keep a roof over their heads long enough to recover from pneumonia and figure out what to do next. It's a perfect opportunity to feel dirty and virtuous at the same time!

Happy Easter

Pseudonymous kid is totally hopped up on chocolate. If I weren't such a lazy blogger, I'd post a picture of his Easter basket which, if I do say so myself, was very pretty. Easter is a better holiday than Christmas, imho: the expectations are lower, the weather is better, and chocolate is good. So I tend to go a little nuts with the fancy foil-wrapped German chocolate butterflies, and flowers, and ladybugs (which Pseudonymous kid thinks are "too cute to eat")....

I have a couple of announcements. First, I'm going to start blogging over at XX from time to time--thanks to Ophelia, Trish, Antigone, and Sheelzebub for inviting me to join them, and I shall attempt not to disappoint. Second, I got an email today from Teri at ProKanDo: there will be a fundraiser for the organization in PA on 9 April 20 April. Attendance is by invitation only. If you are interested, you can contact the organization through their website, or through Tiller Patients Speak.

And with that, we return to our regularly scheduled program of dyeing eggs and fiddling around with conference papers....

You know what's really great

is that when Schaivo dies, we can get back to the Michael Jackson trial.

1. Thoughtful essay; 2. Me, myself, and I; 3. Foreshadowing

1. One of the great things about blogs is the way that, if you follow a particular blog over time, you can discern certain threads and topics being examined from different angles. An argument can emerge, or a picture of someone's life, or a reflection of a way of thinking. Getting caught up on bloglines, I found a nicely fortuitious combination of links and posts at Learning the Lessons of Nixon. In reverse chronology, I first found this link, to a blog I didn't know before: a long, thoughtful essay arguing that depression can and should be understood as a social construct as much as an individual "illness." Then, about a week ago, there was this, about "choice," particularly in conjunction with the "to work or stay home" question that gets asked of moms. But there's a broader point being made: "Individuals can make choices, but it is society that makes better choices available, and the mechanism for making new choices available, initially, is dissent."

This is absolutely true, and the same thing can be said of depression (and is, in the second link posted above): "Individual people have to find ways to cope with their individual situations, and often a medication is the best answer. But it is **not** the **societally** best answer **when there are clear social and economic reasons for this mental illness.**" Yes, as individuals, we operate within a limited framework: we choose to stay home, or to medicate, or to quit our jobs, or whatever. We sometimes have to make very hard choices indeed. But they don't happen in a vacuum; they're subject to analysis. It's not a coincidence that women have to make more "choices" about work and family than men do; it's not a coincidence that women are criticized for their choices no matter what choice they make; and it's surely not a concidence that women suffer more often from depression.

It's broader than that, though. Beyond questions of work and family, the fact is that women are judged constantly, every day, in ways that I don't think men can fully understand. I say this in part because I know I didn't fully understand, for instance, the judgment of mothers before I became one. I have never fully understood the judgment of fat women, because I have never really been fat. I have no idea what it's like to monitor everything you eat, because I've never dieted in my life. I do know something about academic depression. But even the things we don't experience ourselves, we can get some idea of what they're like by reading other people write honestly about them, and part of that honesty is the rage, the frustration, the complaint. These things matter not because they're abstractly unfair but because they affect real people, who have real feelings about them. There's an enormous amount of good writing out there about important stuff, popular though it is to dismiss it. But then feminists and feminist writers--and I do think that this kind of open, frank memoirish writing is inherently feminist--are used to being dismissed; it's water under the bridge, and the writing is still there.

2. I've been thinking about this in terms of this blog. First, there's the hit spike from the Drum and Volokh posts--I'm well over 2,000 hits/day now. There's a temptation to write more about politics, both in response to that, and in response to the whole "women don't blog politics the way men do" thing, but the fact is that the A-list type of political blogging bores the crap out of me, and frankly, feels false to me for precisely the reasons outlined above. Next, I find that writing every day, or almost every day, and often more than once every day, is fantastic for me; I was telling my therapist the other day that blogging lets me have an intellectual and social life that's not located here (where I have neither), and that it's something I'm successful at, praised for, and that that's very helpful for managing the depression. Then again, I feel a certain amount of guilt over spending as much time as I do on something that is "just a hobby," that makes no money and takes my attention away from my family.

At the same time, however, I think blogging has developed my confidence and skills as a writer and given me a window onto other ways that I can do the things I love to do--teach, write--whether or not they're my "job," whether or not I stay on the tenure track. As some of you know, I've been using the blog to make connections to people who do things that sound like interesting career alternatives to me--as well as to get advice from people who've stayed in academia. Thank you to everyone who's been generous with advice or information. One reader has been advising me--wisely--that to do op-ed writing, I'll need to control my ego: less of the "I." I've been thinking about doing or practicing some of that on this blog, but it feels false to me; this is, and always has been, a personal blog (which makes it amazing to me that it has so many readers now). This is okay with me; my academic writing is different from my blog writing, so the idea of having different voices doesn't bother me. And finally, there's been the fact that my own depression means my blogging pace waxes and wanes: when the anxiety is high, I post a lot; when I'm feeling catatonic (as today), I post very little. It's kind of nice, actually: the writing is always there, and I can come and go to it as I please. It's one of those things about writing I had always hoped to learn.

3. All of which matters to you, the reader, not at all. Except possibly in one minor way, which is that I've picked up another venue for the more overtly political news & events type blogging (albeit with a personal voice, no worries) so that Bitch can stay more or less the hodgepodge it's always been--and I can get practice writing in a slightly different vein. I'll have a li'l announcement about the other venue soon.

Well, of course

Man tries to steal gun to "rescue Schiavo".

Light blogging today, as I have that conference paper to be writing. Also I feel kinda cranky and have nothing really interesting to say. If brilliance strikes me, I'll let you know.

Friday reading

Hey, y'all. Wander on over to Orange Tangerine's place. She's got a post up about this little boy's favorite grownup, ovarian cancer, government funding, and medical research. Affecting stuff.

Quota of one

A handy little phrase to label the kind of "well there's only so many spots to go around" thinking in the Kinsley piece (and well beyond it, of course). From this FAIR study on--of course!--the "where are the women opinion-makers on television?" question. The piece points out that while partisan men are quite present on television news and opinion shows, women--when they appear--are seldom partisan: most are political correspondents (hence, women with a vested interest in neutrality). Non-journalists are virtually all centrists or conservatives. And finally, women of color? Two in six months, one of whom is Gwen Ifill.

Don't hurt your brain trying to reconcile the following stereotypes:

(a) Women are afraid of argument.

(b) Feminists are too outspoken.

(c) The media has a liberal bias.

(d) Women of color are too outspoken.

Uncle.

Ok, they win. I am too tired to even rant over this shit any more. I offer the link without comment. Y'all liberal men who find women boring can kiss my boring ass, because I am bored with you.

In other dull, domestic, depressed as hell news, I am back on the Paxil! Yes. Only this time in combination with the Wellbutrin. The idea is that the paxil should balance out the aggression of the wellbutrin (no one likes aggressive women) and hopefully calm down some of the suicidal thoughts (ok, no one likes those, f'real). My student cancelled my meeting, yay! This will give me a chance to crunch some budget numbers and make sure my research fundage will stretch to cover my conference expenditures next week. I may have to kneecap one of my student assistants's hours for April, but I am hoping that won't be the case. This afternoon cool mentor lady and I will go downtown for drinks and a late lunch / early dinner, and she will give me her feedback on the chapters I'm culling for the conference paper, and I will ask her about strategies for getting another job and whether or not academia is really worth it. I talked to Dad and Grandma and Dad seems stuck on the line that, since the home she is in is the best one he can find, it is therefore good and she is not unhappy. I suggested to him that perhaps listening to and acknowledging her feelings, while it might not change things, would be a kind thing to do, and he was struck by the originality of the idea. Grandma says she feels like she is in jail and would like more visitors and that I am her favorite granddaughter (shh, don't tell my sister that). Next up: calling the director of nurses at the home, and her attending.

Important Issues addressed in this dull, depressing, domestic post: elder care; health care; retirement costs; health insurance; problems treating mental illness; problems with academia--inadequate funding for necessary professional activities, the importance of mentoring, difficulty balancing disparate responsibilities with inadequate administrative support, morale problems associated with lack of choice about job type and location--interfamilial communication; the connection between personal experience and public policy issues.

Unimportant shit like that.

Questions for the universe

1. Do I have to take Psycho Kitty outside over this peeps thing, or what?

2. Does anyone care if I just throw some clothes on and skip a shower today? I have to be on campus in an hour to meet with a @%$! student.

3. Does it change your answer to #2 if I say that I'm also having a beer with my cool mentor-lady afterwards?

4. Can I write my conference paper this weekend? (Answer: I damn well better.)

5. Where is the damn coffee?

I heart peeps

Psycho kitty* hates peeps. To which I say, why? They are so cheerful, such horrible artifical colors, so wonderfully pointless. Even the official peeps website offers "recipes and crafts," as if to acknowledge that they are both "food" and, well, not-food. You can make crafts out of peeps. (But they are not for Christmas, no; only for Easter.)

Peeps, how do I love thee? I love the way they're always kinda stale. The horrid crunch of the sugar outside. The gooey oversweetness of the marshmallow inside, and the knowledge that you are chomping down on nothing but pure, pure sugar and that it's horrible and vile and you're going to have to brush your teeth for like twenty minutes right after you finish eating it, but you won't, of course, and as a result you'll end up with dentures by the age of fifty. They are yukky, and it is divine. And it is okay to hate them, because they are loathsome. They are like the most forgiving candy ever, which is maybe why they are the perfect Easter candy. **

Peeps are for eating one, and leaving the rest to lie around looking cheerful until finally you get sick of them and throw them out.

*Yes, I left a version of this post as a comment at her site, but then I felt inspired to post it over here.

**Link is to the cached image, to bypass the registration procedure--scroll down to the picture and click on the slideshow link. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

Alterna-academia

A couple of interesting finds: Idiocentrism, not-quite-a-blog but a big website about being an intellectual outside academia. While I don't quite view professors (as distinct from the profession as institution) as quite the smug anti-intellectuals that some of the essays on the site imply, I think there is a very good case being made here for the ways that the tenure-track discourages wide-ranging thinking. I found a lot of the stuff here very encouraging in terms of thinking about intellectual life beyond the ivy-colored walls.

A site (in progress) aimed at for students who are parents. It offers advice and a map of which colleges have programs in place to support single moms trying to raise kids and get through college. For those of us who teach, some very illuminating stuff about the ways that high schools and colleges actively discourage young women with children from pursuing an education.

Afraid that's it until much later today; am chock-a-block with meetings and other obligatory crap this morning.

I heart Katha Pollitt

Anyone who can't understand this just isn't trying.

"Older editors, who are mostly men, mentor younger men in whom they see their younger selves, and these young men richly pay them back in admiration, even (surely not!) flattery and sycophancy. Editors socialize with these acolytes, form friendships with them, offer them important career-making assignments (how often have you seen a "think piece" by a woman that wasn't about a "woman's issue"?), encourage them to take risks and give them more chances if they screw up. . . . Women rarely get that kind of opportunity — and the thing is, they know that. So what looks . . . like being easily discouraged or not trying is actually women assessing, fairly accurately, their chances. . . . Sexism, which is what we are discussing here, often justifies itself by assuming that women don't want the thing that is being denied them."

Shameless

I shouldn't point to this, b/c it's all about me, but it's so freaking cool....

Feminist bloggers on labor & the economy?

I've had an email from someone looking for feminist blogs on labor & economic issues. I told him about all the blogs I know that *touch* on labor & economy & women from time to time, including blogs written by women who are living those issues, but for the most part, I haven't found a blog that focuses exclusively, or even primarily on US labor or economy issues. Interesting challenge, hm?

So if anyone knows of a feminist economic blogger, or a feminist blog that discusses labor & the economy fairly often (as opposed to "once in a while"), leave me a comment and I'll pass it on (and blogroll it).

Addendum: my correspondent explains "Actually, for our purposes feminists who talk about the economy along w/ other topics are great. Sorry I wasn't clearer about that in my email; I just assumed that most feminist women writing about the economy would write about lots of other stuff too." He/she also mentions a specific interest in daycare issues. So, if you know anyone, pass the links along.

Aargh, quit twisting my arm...

So Geeky Mom wants to know what kind of stuff I read. Cool.

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Mrs. Dalloway. Without question or hesitation. I also think the Vanessa Redgrave movie was very well done, and I liked The Hours, too. Woolf has been well served, for the most part, by films of her books.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Well, I'm in love with Mrs. Dalloway, but I'm straight, so let me think of a man I have a crush on. Hm. Darcy, of course. Lord Peter Wimsey. I have an enormous reader crush on David Foster Wallace, which counts because it's really only DFW the author I love; from everything I hear, I would not love DFW the man.

And no, I am not particularly proud of the originality of my taste in fictional men. I'm much better at picking real-life men.

The last book you bought is:

Honestly, I do not buy books much any more. Too poor. I think it was the comics edition of McSweeney's, though I am not a fan of Dave Eggers, on the grounds that it was such a beautiful book, physically, that it was worth owning rather than borrowing. Plus it was edited by Chris Ware, and I'm a fan.

The last book you read:

I can't remember the last time I read a book from cover to cover. Mostly I dip in and out. Sad, and one of my dissatisfactions with academia--it seems to have beaten out of me the ability to just enjoy reading time guilt-free. Let's see. I read most of Oblivion, and like everyone else I found "Incarnations of Burned Children" sublime. I've also been reading my way through Where I was From for months now.

What are you currently reading?

Well, I still haven't finished Didion. I've been in a Neruda mood a fair bit. I'm hoping to read the new Don Quijote this summer. The other day I was re-savoring Prufrock.

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

I hate questions like this. Ok, real quick, no linking, Mrs. Dalloway, Infinite Jest, Tristram Shandy, The Tale of Genji, and..... the collected poems of John Donne.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons)? And Why?

Dr. Pretorius, b/c of aforesaid blogcrush; Dorcasina, on grounds of preexisting friendship; and Ding, 'cause I like her, and Orange, 'cause I like her too and I'm a girl, so I'm bad at math.

Ok, no more blogmemes. I swear.

Pseudonymous kid explains astronomy

Pseudonymous kid: Mama, I am a little bit bored with all my toys. Can I watch a movie?
Me: No, you've been watching tv all afternoon. Let papa and me talk, and when we're done I'll find you something else to do.

Pseudonymous kid wanders off for a little while, then comes back.

Pseudonymous kid: Mama, can I make a model of the solar system?
Me: Yes, that's an excellent plan. Go ahead.

Off he goes again. Then back.

Pseudonymous kid: Mama, papa, stop talking. I want to show you something.
Us: Ok, what?
Pseudonymous kid (standing, right hand on hip, gesturing with the left): Ok. I have made a model of the solar system. As you can see, the planets are all in a nice straight row. But I don't have all the planets, because I don't have enough balls. So. Ok. So this (pointing to a cedar ball under the bookshelf in the dining room) is Pluto, because it is the farthest from the sun.
Mr B: (meaningful look, meaning "our son is a genius")
Me: (arched eyebrows look, meaning "yes, isn't he?!?")
Pseudonymous kid (strides to the other side of the long living/dining room): And heeeeere, this is the sun. (Pointing to yellow ball, a little bigger than a tennis ball.) Ok. And this (smaller, golf-ball sized play rock from a Fisher Price bulldozer) is the earth. And this (walking to a golfball at the mid-point between the earth and Pluto) is the moon.
Me: Wow, honey, that's great. But I think the moon is a little closer to the sun than that.
Pseudonymous kid (picks up the golfball): Ok. How much closer?
Me: Well, it has to go around the earth, right? So it has to be close enough to go around and go between the earth and the sun. I think right about here (an inch or so from the boulder earth).
Pseudonymous kid: Ok, that's great. Ok, so this is the earth and the moon.
Me: Pseudonymous kid, that's fantastic. It's a great model of the solar system. Now, can I talk to papa some more?
Pseudonymous kid: Ok, sure.

A little later, he comes back again.

Pseudonymous kid (interrupting): As you can see--'scuse me, can I teach more about the solar system right now?
Me (turning to the laptop, madly writing that sentence down verbatim for later blog entry): Yes, of course.
Pseudonymous kid (returning to the sun. He now has a stuffed parrot in his hand, which he is using as a pointer): Ok, if this ball (gestures with the parrot) was the sun, for real, and someone stood with their foot right there (placing his foot between the "sun" and the "earth"), if they stood right like that, for real, then they would block the light, and the earth would get no light!
Me: Yes! Exactly right. That is true.
Pseudonymous kid (pauses for a moment): Then what would happen?

Nothing special (just war & women)

So the war in Iraq has been going on for a little over two years now, and I missed the "anniversary" on the 19th. I did bookmark International Women's day on the 8th, but only in a kind of halfassed way.

Then again I have also been known to forget my wedding anniversary, and I can almost be counted on to forget my husband's birthday, 'cause I'm bad like that. I can't even remember my own age: I constantly waver back and forth between the age I am and the age I will be after my next birthday. Commemorative dates are not my strong suit.

But whatever, I didn't notice that we all woke up on the 20th and the situation in Iraq had magically resolved itself over night. And it ain't like women disappear for 363 days of the year, whenever it's not "Women's Day" or "Mother's Day." Like birthdays, nothing suddenly changes because the date has passed. It's a nice marker, I guess, but it doesn't actually do anything.

So, although this isn't a "special" day, women-wise or Iraq-war-wise, here's a link someone sent me to an interesting article in the New Republic about women in the middle east, published in part (I guess) to mark both women's day and the start of the third year of the current war. It's a pass-through link, even: no subscription or registration required.

Blogrolling: or, every storm has a silver lining (something like that)

So one of the nice outcomes of a big brawl, besides the expected increase in traffic (hi, everyone! Make yourselves at home) is discovering some rocking new bloggers. In the spirit of Pen-Elayne's declaration that this is "Estrogen Month" (appropriate, given the brouhaha), let me introduce you to some of the new women I've met. Addendum: Plus one token guy. My bad. Hope Mr. Heretik doesn't feel, like, all emasculated or anything.

Rampaging PMS. How could you not love a blog with that title? Plus, she talks about s-e-x. Ooooh, scandalous. Be sure and check out her awesome, moving, horrifying, strongly-written post about why abortion must remain legal.

First Draft (everyone has great titles), a group blog that has both boys and girls. And they talk about politics. Even the girls. Although I must take exception to their calling Barbara Bush a bitch; that's my title.

The Heretik. Gorgeous, smart, clever, snarky blog. My only complaint is that the RSS feed doesn't reproduce the look of the thing, and the look is important: one of those great creative blogs that really takes advantage of the medium to do something new.

Whirled View. Three women. International affairs specialist, chemist, poet. World politics. Hot damn.

Blondesense. "Progressive female bloggers (and Petey)" who write about all sorts of stuff.

An Insomniac's Dreamblog. Pretty writing, and I feel a kinship with her on account of our dads.

Welcome to the Nuthouse. A mommy blog and politics! Imagine!

Pinko Feminist Hellcat. She's been around for ages; don't know why I hadn't added her before, but there ya go.

My new girlfriend, Shakespeare's Sister. See also Big Brass Blog (love the double connotation of brassy dames / brass balls, by the way), a brand new group blog that she works on. BBB also has, being a group blog, links to the other women who contribute. I predict great things.

The Sideshow. I love her because she wasn't afraid to call bullshit on a certain male blogger who was lamenting the lack of women, even though he said he read her every day, but somehow had forgotten to put her on his blogroll. Excellent, excellent news & commentary blog.

Sisyphus Shrugged. Again, has been around; why I haven't added her before I don't know, but now I have.

Finally, although War on Error isn't new to my blogroll, I have been dying to point out the fantastic series of posts she's been doing on social class in America. Start here, and use the sidebar to navigate to the other six posts on the subject. In fact, really, I recommend just reading through her archives. I am in awe of her brilliant, incisive, thoughtful, feeling analysis.

There are also several other new titles scattered throughout the blogroll; and if you're new here, well, dip in and out of the old folks, as well. There are a lot of good, smart people over there on the right side of your browser window. See what you can find.

Addendum: here are a couple of others I meant to add, but it slipped my mind. Apologies! The Goddess and Watermelon Punch.

Addendum the third: oh, and don't forget Jenniebee!!!

Not snarky. Straight-up funny.

Start with Angry Bed Positions. From the man who brought you Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About. If you've never read the latter, you are missing one of the best things about the web--but be warned, once you start reading you won't be able to stop and, well, Mil and his girlfriend have argued about a lot of things. But that's okay, it's Sunday afternoon. You weren't working anyway, were you?

Apparently now there is also a book, which I simply have to read.

Via Dr. Pretorious, who I am rapidly developing a blog crush on. I don't believe him that he's never been in that situation, though.

Snark, for the fun of it

Argh. Ok, more edumacatin'. I'm gonna try that style Amanda's so good at, of just interspersing text and comment. Btw, I found the link over at Sisyphus Shrugged, one of a number of new blogs (mostly but not exclusively girl blogs) I've added to my blogroll. I hope to do a more formal introduction of some of the new folks I've found soon, but in the meantime, feel free to check it out. One good thing to come out of shitstorms is finding like-minded bitchy women who are also engaged in the poo-flinging.

Ok, so, on to Kinsley. Btw, I realize that he's trying here (everyone is so, so trying), but I don't care. It's fun to mock, and hopefully educational to those who are willing to learn.

When the New York Times anointed Maureen Dowd as a columnist nine years ago, I gave her some terrible advice. I said, "You've got to write boy stuff. The future of NATO, campaign spending reform. . . .

Dowd wisely ignored me and proceeded to reinvent the political column as a comedy of manners and a running commentary on the psychopathologies of power. . . . Dowd is different, and she is the most influential columnist of our time.

Let's trot out Dowd, the everywoman columnist. She's great, b/c she's not like the boys! Pat, pat, good Maureen Dowd. Thank you for being our token.

As the guy in charge of opinion at the L.A. Times, I have endured some horrendous insults, such as being compared to the president of Harvard University.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers is in trouble for suggesting that inherent differences between men and women may be part of the reason so few women are at the scholarly peaks of fields such as math and science. To be a university president, you are supposed to reject any such notion out of hand.

Har har, those crazy feminists. So much for free inquiry, eh, boys? All that political correctness crap....

In the op-ed controversy, by contrast, talk of innate differences between men and women is not merely permissible, it is the very justification offered by some women (and deeply resented by others) for demanding more women's bylines. Dowd declares a girlish reluctance to be mean, which she says she overcame, but she urges her sisters to play the boys' game with the boys. The linguist Deborah Tannen pretty much shares Dowd's analysis, but says women shouldn't have to adapt to the peacocky political culture created by men; the culture should learn from and adapt to women.

But on the other hand, I guess it's okay for women to talk about this stuff. Reverse sexism! Also, see, some women admit that girls can't write boy's stuff. Also, gosh, ladies, can't you make up your minds what you want?

Meanwhile Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate, observes that this discussion has been all-girls so far, and she demands that the boys jump right in. This is a terrifying invitation. Even the most testosteronic male commentator might be excused for deciding that developments in Uzbekistan really require his insights this week.

Women scare me.

In such circumstances, I always ask myself, "What would the president of Harvard do?"

Haha! No offense! I'm just joking around here! Poor Larry Summers, he sure did get the short end of the stick. Those castrating bitches...

It is hard to think of a hiring decision in which sex or race ought to matter less than in choosing a professor of mathematics. That makes it a good focus for a discussion of meritocracy, reverse discrimination, innate abilities, cultural prejudice and so on. It's too bad that Harvard seems incapable of having -- or at least allowing its president to participate in -- such a discussion.

Poor Larry. Feminists suck.

By contrast, there cannot be many places where "diversity" is less a euphemism for reverse discrimination and more a common-sense business requirement than on a newspaper op-ed page.

I admit that the op-ed pages are pretty much a white boys' club. See? I'm being reasonable here.

Diversity of voices, experiences and sensibilities is not about fairness to writers. It is about serving up a good meal for readers.

We don't have to listen to the women who are complaining because they're right; but we don't want this thing to get out of hand. It would suck if the reading public started to notice how narrowly "news" and "op-ed" are defined, so maybe we oughta hire some window dressing.

Sure, it's possible that a man might have come up with the Maureen Dowd formula that has so enriched the New York Times op-ed page. But in this busy world, diversity in the traditional categories of ethnicity and gender is a sensible, efficient shortcut.

Tokenism works.

Everyone involved should be trying harder, including me.

I'm a reasonable man.

Newspaper opinion sections also want diversity of political views. In recent years, that, frankly, has led to reverse discrimination in favor of conservatives. And an unpleasant reality is that each type of diversity is at war with the others. If pressure for more women succeeds -- as it will -- there will be fewer black voices, fewer Latinos and so on.

Be careful what you wish for. B/c the old white boys aren't gonna give up their seats. Y'all are gonna have to fight for the one open chair.

Why should this be so? Aren't there black women and conservative Latinos? Of course there are. There may even be a wonderfully articulate disabled Latino gay conservative who is undiscovered because she is outside the comfortable old-boy network. But there probably aren't two.

This p.c. stuff is ridiculous. Disabled Latinoa gay lesbian conservative, indeed. See how silly all this feminism stuff is? It'll lead to ridiculousness, like creating special slots for disabled Latina lesbian conservatives. If indeed they even exist. Because everyone knows that those minority types--disabled/Latina/lesbians--all hew to the p.c. radical feminist party line.

It's not a question of effort, it's mathematics. Each variable added to the equation subverts efforts to maximize all the other variables.

Hey, don't blame me for the lack of women columnists. And be careful what you wish for, b/c I'll just fire the black guy. That'll show you radicals.

You can seek out the best Japanese restaurant in town, or the best steakhouse. But if you want a Japanese steakhouse, you will have to settle for Benihana's of Tokyo. Or something like that. Where is that Harvard math professor when you need her?

Haha, women can't do math. And everyone knows that there aren't very many women who can write, either. There's only one Japanese steakhouse in town. Get it?

All about my father

A long time ago I wrote a little bit about my mother. At the time, I said something about maybe writing about my dad some day, but I never did. I don't really have the energy to go into a lot of detail, but there was a little background into that side of my family here, and the situation has been ongoing and troubling. I've had some back-and-forth with my cousin, as usual I'm finding out that everyone has a different version of who said what. (No one in my family can ever be relied on to tell the truth about this stuff. They're all very self-serving. Maybe this is why honesty is so important to me.) Anyway, I have been talking to my father about the possibility that my grandmother is depressed. In the last year her house was sold, all her posessions sold or given away. Many of them are in my house now; dad was going to dump the lot but I insisted and had Mr. B. drive down to get as much of the furniture and family mementos I remember from my childhood as he could fit into a Ford F150. Grandma's other son died last year as welll, just before the house was sold; he was retarded and had lived with her his entire life. She has been going blind for years, and with that and her other health problems, had several employees who would come to the house to take care of housekeeping, paying bills, overnight care, and so forth. When the house sold, of course they went away and found other jobs.

So Grandma sits in the nursing home now, her entire routine gone. Her former bookkeeper, who worked for Grandpa's medical office for many years, goes and visits every day, I think. The rest of the family visits when they can, occasionally, usually only for very short visits; my dad, by his own admission, tends to make a perfunctory stop on his way to see my sister and his grandkids, who live not far away, and my sister, by her admission, is very busy with the kids and so doesn't get up to see Grandma as often as she'd like. And I, by my own admission, do not call as often as I should. It's awkward, and frankly it's depressing to me, and those are shitty excuses, I know. I should call.

So yes. I feel pretty sure Grandma is depressed, and that this is part of the background to the wanting to give my cousin power of attorney so that he can make sure she is denied care next time she gets sick. Maybe this is the right decision; her quality of life obviously sucks, and it's not going to get any better. But still, it is upsetting (obviously), and at the very least I would like her depression and loneliness acknowledged so that, perhaps, she can get some attention in her few remaining days and perhaps enjoy the time she has left a little bit more.

Anyway, I've been communicating with my father and my cousin. Cousin is very businesslike; Dad is very Catholic and, well, you'll see how he is below. They are no longer speaking to each other, so I have to be the go-between (as always). I've been asking Dad to please talk to the nursing home about the possibility that Grandma may be depressed. He has been sending me lots of email--sometimes several per day--basically trying to "prove" to me that she isn't depressed, that in some weird Catholic way the relationships with her we have still matter to us, and a bunch of other crap that's totally beside the point and, really, only expresses his denial of the situation. (Back story: my dad is terrified of depression, which was really great growing up, since my mom had it. His usual method of dealing with unpleasant facts is to deny them: "oh, your mom just gets like that sometimes, and then when she's ready, she stops." I suspect part of the reason he cannot deal with depression is that his own mother was severely depressed, following his sister's death in a plane crash, and when my father was 13, his mother shot herself. He found the body.)

Anyway. So yes, how can you not empathize with my dad? And yet, his coping mechanism of stubborn denial is very, very difficult to take.

So here's the email he sent me this weekend. I haven't edited it at all, by the way, except to replace my sister's name with "your sister" and her baby's name with "baby F."

Your sister just took granda out to lunch she says grandma is not depressed
and enjoyed her lunch and enjoyed baby F. and ate a little chocolate pie
a few french fries she says grandma is unhappy for example she said
she wishes she were dead to which your sister replied it yyou were we could
not have this visit and grandma said your right i hadnt thought of
that..she said grandma did not like where she was and your sister explained
that that had been talked about and they had not found a better place
adn grandma seemed to accept that..your sister said the staff would turn on
hughl howser tv probram for her and get her to a tv to watch it if
they knew what time and what channel..the staff was good about geiing
granda out of bed to go with your sister..Ill see grnadma this week too
..love dad

Grandma is not depressed. Grandma wishes she were dead. But everything is just fine. Don't worry, honey.

What. The. Fuck. Can. I. Do. With. That.

I live a thousand miles away.

Still more bitching women

This post, by my new bestest girlfriend says something I wanted to say, but couldn't find words for, about the Drum post (third link on that page).

The contention that we must first define “women’s issues” belittles this entire quandary to a semantic argument. The truth is, women’s voices are still not heard in the upper echelons on most issues; suggesting they must be incorporated simply so that “women’s issues” are effectively addressed conveniently ignores that fact.

We must not let ourselves be bogged down in a debate about defining “women’s issues,” and women’s role in addressing them, to the exclusion of continuing to question why women’s thoughts in the upper ranks on any and every issue continues to be elusive.

It's a classic "let's change the topic here" argument technique.* Every woman alive knows it, even if it's hard to pin down when it's being done to you, and every woman alive finds it infuriating.

*I'm narcissistically referencing my own comment to a previous post; read the ensuing discussion. I also want to assure Unapologetic Athiest that I am not trying to single him out (even though I just did; am hoping the link will make up for it, along with my assurance that this is a far from egregious example of this move--which in this case I think was wholly unconscious--in action); it's just that the discussion was such a good example of the point.

I leave you with the wise words of Ms. Flea

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Popular, Liberal Male Blogger: Why don't women blog? I've looked on my blogroll and I don't see any women bloggers. Therefore, they must not exist. Women must not be interested in thinky stuff like politics or computers.

45 Women Bloggers respond in the comments section: WTF? We all have blogs!

Liberal, Male Blogger: I don't mean blogs about tampons. All women do is talk about feminine hygiene products. I mean, Where are all the women who blog about important stuff; the stuff *I'm* interested in.

45 Women Bloggers: You're right. We only talk about feminine hygiene products. Here's more talk about feminine hygiene products: You are a douche.

Liberal Male Blogger: Wahhhh! You're oppressing me! Censorship! My civil rights are being violated!

One Asshole Woman: I am so embarrassed to be a woman right now! Don't you listen to those hairy bitches, Liberal Male Blogger! *I* understand you!

Liberal Male Blogger: See there? One woman has validated me! That means you all are wrong and I am right!

45 Women Bloggers: douche.

Liberal Male Blogger: Wahhhh!

'Scuse me sir, I have something to say

I know I didn't want to blog much this weekend, but fuck it.

So y'all probably know about the big brouhaha over Eugene Volokh's yay-for-torture post. Which I didn't blog at the time because, among other reasons, calling for torture and public executions is not worthy of any civilized human being, in my very not-so-humble opinion, and also, of course, because I was too busy painting my nails to be paying attention to "politics" that day (assuming that Volokh's personal feeling that torture is good counts as political, which I guess it does since he's an Important Man).

Anyway, so now he's changed his mind. Sort of. On the grounds that the opposition would make it very difficult to run a legal system. Not, mind you, on the grounds that it's fucking disgusting (I know, just like a girl to get all emotional. That's not a substantive political argument! Next you'll be saying that it "makes you feel sick," and we'll be able to accuse you of being Victorian. Which of course is a substantive political argument, because we say so).

And apparently a number of people seem to think that this is real big of him. This is how low the bar is set? It's reasonable to debate whether or not torture is ok while tut-tutting the inexcusable level of personal abuse that someone advocating torture gets, praising him for his usual even temper?

Yes. Let's all toss bouquets about when people advocate torture in measured tones, and distance ourselves from those who are horrified. Let's nod our heads sagely and have a discussion: is torture a good idea? Let's denigrate those who express incredulity and anger at said discussion by calling them "abusive" without tasting the bitter irony. And, having whetted our appetites over a rousing gentleman's debate, let's buy torture advocates dinner when they allow that, well, torture may be desirable but, alas, it's not practical.

You look a little nauseous nauseated.* Here, have a mint.

*Updated to satisfy the pedants in the house.

Some boys get it

I just love PZ Myers.

We're all concerned about politics, so most people toss a link to the political blogs, just to keep track of what's going on in these things that affect all of our lives…but you know what that means? The political blogs are the lowest common denominator.

And then he lists seven excellent blogs by women. All happen to be scientific, by the way. (I must also point out in good conscience that he lists one of my other favorite blogs, The Well-Timed Period, a blog that clearly demonstrates that yes, in point of fact, "women's issues" are political--just as Myers himself demonstrates that science is political.)

Go check it out if you need a little relief from this business. I know I certainly do.

Mo-ther-fuck

You know, I try. I really try to give credit where it's due, to not be such a bitch, to be understanding that men don't "get" feminism, for the most part. I know it's not their fault. I know privilege is blinding.

But fuck me.

I saw that first post yesterday, after I wrote this one. And it clearly implies that Drum was at least one of the bloggers who said some of those things. But I thought, ok, well, let's hold off, I don't know that for sure, he's trying, ya ya ya. But you know what? He is trying. But goddamn, goddamn, how long do we have to stand around and be grateful for men "trying" when they continue to say shit like this? And not have the--excuse me--balls to admit it unless someone forces them to?

Women don’t give me much linkable material.

Women write on subjects that don’t interest me.

Women don’t know how to compromise on abortion rights.

Why don’t women post about Social Security? It affects them, too.

Women don’t write commentary, don’t come up with new ideas.

Gender politics is all secondary issues.

And he's still flogging the "women don't like hard-edged argument" bullshit, and he's still--trying! Yes I know!--ghettoizing "women's issues," and the commenters at his site are still unrepentant misogynists and I am getting really fucking sick and tired of men who don't get it. It is not that hard. Truly it isn't. Open your fucking eyes and listen. And I am really fucking sorry, my sisters, that I had even a moment of doubt about what you were clearly saying in those posts.

And don't fucking dare tell me that I can't hold my own in a verbal fight.

And you're goddamn right we're not going to compromise on abortion rights.

And thank you for trying, but goddamnit, try harder. Because you are trying my goddamn patience.

Dear everybody,

How are you? I imagine the spring is arriving where you are; maybe it's already even there! I hope you manage to get out and enjoy some of the nice weather over the weekend.

As for me, I am not feeling well today. My throat is scratchy and I am very tired. My nose is running too. Work's going along, but you know how it is: I have a paper to write, and a panel to prepare for, and I just collected a big pile of student rough drafts that I'll need to turn around this weekend. I'd forgotten they were coming in; just goes to show how out of it I've been! Haha. Boy will I be glad when the semester's over. I think I will go find a beach somewhere and sit there with a margarita or a mai-tai or something. I bet you have great plans for the summer, too. Maybe we can get together sometime.

Anyway, I am just writing to ask you a favor. Do you think you could please not give me anything to read over the weekend? I have a lot of stuff to do, you see, and I would really appreciate it. Go outside or something. Maybe, you know, play with the dog or have a beer. I heard there's that great thing going on, you know, or maybe it's the next town over; maybe you could go check that out. I hate to be like this, and I really hope you don't take offense. I'm just writing because I hope you will understand.

Ok, well, that's all I wanted to say. Thanks for understanding!!!!

Dr. B.

Quickie on women columnists

Addendum: I am so, so sorry for that title. It was late. I don't know what I was thinking.

Nice piece in the Denver Post by a columnist named Cindy Rodriguez, who often writes about women and race and is therefore, of course, in the "Lifestyle" section rather than the op-ed page. She points out that it's not just women who are underrepresented in the op-eds; it's also people of color.

And of course, she's pointing that out because she herself is Latina. Which kind of proves her point. I don't know that many of the white men or white women who have written on this--myself included--have thought to point that out. Because just as feminism is invisible to the boys, race is often invisible to white folks.

Rodriguez makes some good points:

Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist Joan Vennochi calls [it] "the formula." . . . Vennochi said the formula of having one slot for a woman and one slot for a minority - typically a black male - has not been updated in 25 years, even though the demographic landscape of the country has changed dramatically. "It has satisfied someone's opinion of diversity," she told me. "As long as there's one woman, one black guy, it's enough. It frees up the other jobs to go to white men." . . .

Changing the formula isn't about affirmative action. It's about challenging you, the reader, entertaining you, offering you a different take on issues.

Good stuff.

Argumentative women

The ongoing discussion of "do women like to argue" is going on all over the place, as you've no doubt seen, and apparently Deboarh Tannen wrote a piece on it in the LA Times. (Drum mentioned it, but I don't remember that there was a direct link: I found it at Trish Wilson's. She has a good post on it too, go read it.) I read that, thought, "huh, maybe I should blog this," and then thought, "eh, I don't really have anything to say," and kept surfing. Next I clicked on XX, where I found this post, which is mostly just a pointer to this one, on a blog I've never heard of but it certainly looks interesting.

And something clicked. Now, as we all know, I am not a huge fan of speculations about essential differences between the sexes, although I do get that what Tannen is saying there is that there's no real reason that political discourse must necessarily be agonistic. I agree with this, and I've argued (agonistically) before that there is a lot of politics in so-called personal blogs if you just pay attention to what you're reading.

On the other hand, I am one of those women who adores, and always has adored, agonistic, argumentative play. I like batting around ideas, I like playing devil's advocate, I enjoy being tested by someone else playing devil's advocate. I have a tendency to make bold pronouncements, which either scare people into not arguing (yay! I win!) or else stimulate them into arguing (yay! An argument!), and once the argument gets under way I usually temper my polemic and start getting very earnest and reasonable. It works well in the classroom, and it works well in social situations--with men. I hang out at unfogged, much as I give them shit, in part because of the frat house vibe--I like giving people shit, I like the tussling.

Now, does that make me one of those "rare" women who doesn't fit the gendered norm? Sure. Although in other ways I correspond to what Tannen is hypothesizing about here: I care a little too much about being liked (Dowd admits the same), and it annoys me when pseuodnymous kid knocks down my block towers. Then again, I've learned to take out my annoyance by knocking down his towers, which he thinks is fun, and then I feel better, plus I'm being a good entertaining mama, and it ends up being enjoyable after all.

Plus, another thing I'm wary of is the frequent "well, you're just not like other women" thing. I've heard it all my life, and it's crap. Everyone knows how that sort of tokenism works, and that it's an insult disguised as a compliment, and I'm not having that. And then there's the fact that Trish Wilson herself says, I don't like the combative nature of talk radio and TV talk shows. . . . I don't like being attacked and then goes on to say in the same paragraph, It's fun to have spirited discussions with people who are my polar opposite politically. She, too, says that she liked playing with boys in elementary school. And there are a lot of women who strike me as being like that on my blogroll: Ophelia Payne of XX and I have had a go-round ourselves at some point (I think it was on CT); Kameron at Brutal Women leaps immediately to mind; we all know that Dooce can dish it out (I found that particular gem through not Zombie, by the way); Advice at Your Own Risk and Cheeky Prof aren't afraid to bitch. In fact, I met Advice and Cheeky (as I did Ophelia) through a fight--we were on opposite sides of the "are kids annoying" argument--and we all immediately blogrolled each other, if memory serves: bonding through argument in action.

I could go on, but you get the idea. It's not all that exceptional for women to argue. Hell, the very existence of the word "bitch" belies the premise.

But. Go back up to that Beauty Dish post (last link in the first paragraph; yeah, I'm citing the same thing twice in one entry, deal with it). That kind of thing, right there, might have a lot to do with why women are either afraid to argue, or get nasty when they do. So, so much of our experience of criticism, as little girls, isn't playful playing the dozens. It's genuinely nasty, mean-spirited stuff. And lest you float some mean girls kind of theory, boys do it to us too (read the post, there's plenty of examples). There's a big difference between fun arguing / teasing and mean-spirited remarks designed to cut people down, and I suspect girls get a lot more of the latter than boys do. Certainly we get cut down as girls way more often then boys get cut down as boys; when boys get cut down like that, it's because they're like girls, not because they're boyish. So, girls are "bitch," "cunt," "feminazi," etc; boys are "pussy," "fag," and "wimp" (and yes, sometimes they are "dicks," too--but somehow, despite the obvious anatomical reference, that word seems a lot less innately gendered as an insult than "bitch"). When every criticism is personal, when every conflict is mean-spirited, hell yeah you're gonna want to avoid arguments.*

So, no, I'm not buying that the female is less argumentative than the male. Or, if so, I'm not buying that it accounts for the fairly wide gap between the ways men are comfortable with arguing and women aren't. We ought to think about the ways women do argue, and the ways men argue with women, and we oughta think about it real hard, before we decide that women just aren't up to it.

*This suggests an interesting possibility vis a vis the internets: brawling in flamewars online is a lot less personally threatening than brawling face-to-face is. If some asshole on a usenet group snarls sexist epithets at me, I don't really give much of a fuck. If some asshole on the street does it, you're damn right it makes me uncomfortable. Which again suggests that, even if women are less confrontational in person (though again, try hassling a woman with her kid, and watch her get hostile really damn quick), that doesn't explain why we're so severely underrepresented in the realm of written argument.

Addendum: Jenniebee is thinking along the same lines

More props to deserving men

If I keep this up, my reputation for man-hating is going to go all to hell.

Drum has a new post on Women and Blogging. Only wait. This time it's different. I am impressed, and I will go so far as to say that my vitriol last time was, if justified, apparently somewhat misplaced, based on the outcome. It seems to me that--barring a little bit of defensiveness at the end there--Drum's continuing thoughts on the subject of women bloggers are balanced, thoughtful, and show that he's done some research. It takes integrity to deal with a big smackdown by going away and doing some reading and coming back and continuing to try to think through the subject: while that's what people should do, of course, it's hard, and the turnaround here is pretty quick, which is harder. And the point he's making, which is that men need to step up to the plate and take this stuff seriously, is exactly right. And it's exactly what men need to realize. And so, good for him.

There's also a bit in there about women not self-promoting--Drum specifically cites this Slate column by Dahlia Lithwick, which is practically begging women to pitch ideas to Slate.

Ok, ok. It scares me half to death, but I'll see if I can start poking around on the edges of the web news sources. Eeek.

By the way, I restored the complete alphabetical blogroll. Enough people objected, and no one approved, so it's back. Enjoy!

I'm actually shocked

According to the NYT, exclude Jews and blacks from death-penalty juries. As recently as 1994.

Ancarett is the one who told me about it, in the comments to the previous post.

In other news, you may yourselves be shocked to see that the blogroll has gone completely nutso. I decided it wasy waaaaay too long, so I took advantage of the blogroll feature where you can designate that it show only X # of links at any given page load, and directed it to select based on which blogs were most recently updated. Tell me what you think. Crazy-making b/c of loss of alphabetical order? Frustrating, b/c now your blog may not appear? Or handy, b/c it was getting to the point where no one in their right mind was gonna scroll through all that?

Calling investigative journalists

(If, that is, there are any of you left who aren't just joking around in the green room while the latest government-produced "news" video airs. Yes I'm looking at you) . . .

(you may take a breath now)

would someone please look into who is behind this ongoing, state-by-state seizure of women's medical records? Now it's Indiana.

Seriously. Someone is behind this. It's not just coincidence. I want to know who, and I want them to be hauled in front of a court for violating the 14th amendment. Or something.

As long as I'm bossing people, why don't those of you who are lawyers come up with a reason to go after those bastards. You've got a little while, while the journalists track them down.

Thanks to Tweedledopey--who, ironically enough, I just insulted in a mild, teasing kind of way over on unfogged--see what I mean about the gray area of having a "no tolerance" policy for potentially offensive remarks? Though of course tone and context are everything--for emailing me the story.

Kudos to the boys

Credit where credit is due: the frat house over at unfogged has run a fine three-part series on mommy blogging in the last few days. Excellent discussions, too, with some very informative troll-type activity. (By the way, Geeky Mom linked to it first; and while you're clicking, go on over and wish her a happy birthday.)

What I really like about unfogged (I may have to quit calling them a frat house, now that they're writing about mommies and have added a woman blogger--who by the way wrote the second post in that series) doing that is that it is the kind of thing that I, myself (and I wager most of the mommy bloggers and occasional mommy bloggers who've been in the trenches for a while) could not do. Because, see, when you're a mommy (and by the way, this is sort of allegorical here, ok? I'm also talking about feminism more generally), certain kinds of "fucked up people" are "a lot more visible . . . than they are to the rest of us." Ogged deserves major props for noticing that and saying it out loud (and that sentence was what prompted me to write this post, by the way). When fucked up people are pushing themselves in your face day after day after every motherfucking day, you get a little touchy, see. You get a little sick and tired. You get a little bit aggressive, more prone to spit when you see someone coming at you with what looks like another goddamn piece of straw.

So, I couldn't have written those posts. I couldn't have made that observation, because I am just too impatient with the whole thing to be, well, patient enough to maintain that nice calm tone of polite observation. Alameida gets big credit from me for managing to sustain that, I don't know how the fuck she does it. And a huge bouquet to ogged for starting it off and winding it up, because it is very very rare for people who are not themselves beasts of burden to pay any attention at all to the weight of straw. What's more common is that, if you're wandering around with a bit of straw--or maybe not even straw, maybe you're just carrying around a pencil or something--and someone spits at you, you yell at them What the fuck? Why did you spit on me?, and they say Get the fuck away from me with that straw, asshole, and you say You stupid fucking animal, I'm not even carrying straw. And then, best case scenario, you decide that the camel in question is a bad camel, and you avoid it; or, worst case scenario, you walk away muttering something about how camels are a benighted species of animal, and this just proves it.*

But sometimes not. And this camel says, thank you.

* Just in case something gets missed: I wasn't the spitter in that thread; pseudo-Adrienne was. And she was right: I decided hey, I'm feeling patient today, the straw feels a little bit lighter, I'll try to talk calmly to this guy. And then, sure enough, he walks right up and throws a big ole bale of straw on my back. More fool me. This all ties into my ongoing thoughts about what the hell to do about trollish commenters, now that I'm getting more of them; I've already had one asshole (contributions now deleted, because I wasn't feeling patient that day) mutter that, of course, I would delete her comments because you know how those camels are, they want to censor free speech. I don't want to lend fuel to that fire. On the other hand, I'm not really interested in having my comment threads turn into flame wars, and I'm too goddamn sick of straw (just as you are by now growing sick of this metaphor, no doubt) to be patient with every dumbass and their tiny little extra piece. If anyone has any brilliant troll-handling ideas, let me know.

Post 1 of 3

I have two very exciting new posts in the hopper for tonight, ladies and gentlemen, but first I am going to eat my dinner. Plus they will take a bit to compose. However, having just gotten home from work, let me first thank profgrrrrl for the lovely postcards! Agreed: getting out of the USA occasionally = +++. Glad you had fun. Pseudonymous kid will be absolutely thrilled with the postcard you sent him, as soon as he and his papa get back from their trip.

Ok, dinner time. Tonight we are having:

Turkey melt on a poppyseed bagel, with sliced tomatoes, and tortilla chips with home made salsa (store-bought salsa = yukko). A simpler meal than yesterday's, to be sure. But note that it still goes well with beer.

Well, this just makes me feel much better

Bush Administration: Yay Propaganda!

The Bush administration, rejecting an opinion from the Government Accountability Office, said last week that it is legal for federal agencies to feed TV stations prepackaged news stories that do not disclose the government's role in producing them.

The legal counsel's office "does not agree with GAO that the covert propaganda prohibition applies simply because an agency's role in producing and disseminating information is undisclosed or 'covert,' regardless of whether the content of the message is 'propaganda". . .

I saw this in Sunday's NYT but didn't blog it. Anyway. Look at what they are saying. Covert propaganda is illegal. But, see, videos that the government produces and then sends out to t.v. stations, about government programs or policies, without disclosing to the stations that the government was the one making them, so that they then get broadcast to the American people as "news," well, that may be covert but it isn't propaganda. Because they say they didn't intend it to be propaganda. So it's all hunky dory.

How do you define "propaganda"? Do government-produced videos, filmed to look like news reports, that do not disclose their origins, count as propaganda? Because if not, the word has no real meaning.

These people have no shame. No shame at all. They have no respect for the law, no respect for the American people, no respect for the English language, no respect for truth in any form. They can do whatever they like--torture, propaganda--and if they get caught, well, that's no big deal because you just deny that what you're doing is really torture or propaganda. Because, see, we're the U.S. government. We don't do things like that. Which means it's not possible. You don't see what you think you are seeing. The emperor is not naked.

Remember 1984? "the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. . . . Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."

What's for dinner?

The boys are out of town visiting Mr. B.'s sister. I'm on my own! Ah, the sound of silence.

So, I am having for dinner:

A porkchop, breaded with coconut, fried.

When it's done, I'll fry a potato with some ancho chili in the same oil (I wish I could find the salt).

I sliced up a tomato already and put it on the plate (must find salt), and cracked a beer.

Afterwards, I might have some of those Peppridge Farm cookies I spy up in the cupboard, or maybe I'll pop some corn (on the stove, in a real pot with oil--not that disgusting microwave popcorn stuff, please) and watch a movie.

I should have worked on my conference paper today, but I did not.

Today's freaky sex- and gyno-phobic legislation

Brought to you by email correspondent fullnelson (1) and feministing (2).

The catch today, though, is that I myself am unsure about what the probable effects of the proposed laws are. See if you can help me think them through.


(1) Bill calls for reporting of sexually active teens
By Matthew Franck
Post-Dispatch Jefferson City Bureau
03/14/2005

JEFFERSON CITY - A bill that seeks to overhaul Missouri's child abuse reporting laws could require teachers, doctors, nurses and others to report sexually active teenagers and children to the state's abuse hot line.

Until Monday, the bill had been sailing through the Legislature with little formal debate. It was scheduled for a House vote this morning, but on Monday the bill's author sent it back to committee for revisions.

Critics say the bill offers confusing and unnecessary changes to a law that has been in place for years. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Richard Byrd, R-Kirkwood, said the legislation offers a needed fix to a child abuse reporting law that has recently been contested in court.

Perhaps the most controversial provision of the bill is one that many say would require educators, medical personnel and other professionals to report "substantial evidence of sexual intercourse by an unmarried minor under the age of consent."

Critics say the language would, in essence, require child abuse reports even of cases of consensual sex between two teens. Byrd claims the bill seeks only to target sex by children under the age of 15.

Regardless of the age covered by the bill, some opponents say its consequences would be stifling for those who are required by law to report child abuse.

That list of "mandated reporters" includes educators, physicians, nurses and other professionals who come in contact with children.

Otto Fajen, a lobbyist for the Missouri chapter of the National Education Association, said the bill, as written, could stifle the ability of teachers and counselors to speak candidly to teens about sexual activity. Fajen said that by forcing teachers to always report sexual activity as abuse, the law removes sound professional judgment of what constitutes abuse.

Byrd said his bill has been misinterpreted to include sexual activity by older teens. He said that the "age of consent" referred to in the bill is 15. He said sexual activity by children under that age is something that should be reported to the child abuse hot line, regardless of the age of the sexual partner.

Missouri law on age of consent differs by the circumstances. An adult, for example, can be prosecuted for having sex with anyone under the age of 17.

"If somebody says to me, what's the age of consent in Missouri, I say it's 17," said Ed Postawko, a sex crimes prosecutor in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's office.

Postawko said it's statutory rape or statutory sodomy for anyone to have sex with a child under the age of 14.

Rep. Margaret Donnelly, D-Richmond Heights, said because the bill is unclear about the age of consent, it could create confusion among mandated reporters. Donnelly is a lawyer who works in family law.

The bill also could cost the state money by requiring more staff to screen calls to the child abuse hot line. Deb Hendricks, a spokeswoman for the Department of Social Services, said the department has estimated that the bill could cost an extra $269,000 for the current fiscal year.

Missouri's child abuse reporting laws have been the subject of legal debate in the past two years. Most recently, a nurse in Springfield was prosecuted for failing to report bruises on a boy who was later killed by his foster father.

The nurse's lawyer had argued that the state's mandated reporter law was too vague. The statute requires mandated reporters to act if they have "reasonable cause to suspect a child has been or may be subjected to abuse or neglect."

The Missouri Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Missouri's current law is constitutional, which has left some questioning why Byrd is trying to change it.

"We don't think this bill is needed," said Ruth Ehresman, of the group Citizens for Missouri's Children.

Byrd said a close reading of the Supreme Court ruling suggests that the child abuse law might not stand up to another legal challenge. He said the law was deemed constitutional only as it applied to the Springfield case.

Opponents of Byrd's bill were troubled that it had been moving on a fast track toward passage. Until Monday, the bill was listed as a "consent bill," a classification typically reserved for noncontroversial bills.

Byrd said he decided to pull the bill from the consent calendar to make some changes suggested to him over the weekend by medical personnel.

As drafted, Byrd's bill would allow mandated reporters to report abuse for any reason. But the bill also specifies circumstances that should always present suspicion of abuse. In addition to "substantial evidence of sexual intercourse," those include malnutrition and numerous physical injuries "which are inconsistent with the explanations given for the condition."

Byrd said he'd like to add more detail to the bill to clarify cases that require a call to the child abuse hot line. But he said he will not budge on the bill's requirement to report sexual activity by those under the age of consent.

Robert Patrick of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Ok. Now, clearly it's dodgy to presume that sexual activity is in and of itself evidence of a crime. And yes, I know that statutory rape is, by definition, a crime and that under statutory rape laws, sex with a minor (however the law defines it) is, by definition, criminal. For the record, I think those laws are stupid, although I sympathize with their intent. Anyway. My question as far as this law goes is, let's say that your 14yo daughter is having sex with her boyfriend. You disapprove of this, but you can't really stop it short of locking her up. So, you figure, the least you can do is provide her with birth control, talk to her about disease prevention, talk to her about consent and coercion and "no means no" and "it's okay to wait" and do the best you can. Does this law then presume that you, the parent, are guilty of child abuse? Because it isn't clear to me. Or does the law presume that your silly daughter's silly 14yo boyfriend is guilty of child abuse? Or are the two 14yos abusing each other? The thing seems unenforcable.

Having said that, it certainly makes sense to me to include "signs of sexual activity" as possible signs of child abuse, to be reported by doctors in some cases. But presumably docs aren't required to report every kid who shows up with a bruised knee as a possible victim of abuse; there's no reason to think that a 14yo who goes into PP to get birth control should be presumed to be a victim solely because of that fact.

(2) Michigan Senate Bill 365:

when any portion of a human being has been vaginally delivered outside his or her mother's body, that portion of the body can only be described as born and the state has a rational basis for defining that human being as born and as a legal person. . . .

A physician or an individual performing an act, task, or function under the delegatory authority of a physician is immune from criminal, civil, or administrative liability for performing any procedure that results in injury or death of a perinate while completing the delivery of the perinate if, in that physician's reasonable medical judgment, the procedure was necessary to save the life of the mother and every reasonable effort was made to preserve the life of both the mother and the perinate.

Yikes! I realize that as a culture we've pretty much agreed that intact d&c is gruesome, but I know a woman who had one. The fetus she was carrying had no brain. Zero chance of survival. Her choice was to have a d&x--far safer--or to induce labor and then go through the risk and trauma of birth, not to mention the godawful fucking experience of carrying around a brainless fetus in her body for however long it would take. LIke any sensible person would, she chose option one.

But ok, let's just leave that aside. Screw those women who get diagnosed with aggressive cancer in the third trimester, or who are carrying fetuses with horrible, unviable birth defects, or who suffer some sudden health problem that means that continuing with the pregnancy could kill them. Forget about them. Does this law, as the ACLU is arguing, potentially outlaw all abortion? I can see how it fucks over women who arrive at the hospital with a miscarriage in progress--if the doctor doesn't try to "save the life" of the dying fetus, even at the risk of compromising the speed or effectiveness of treatment, he's criminally liable--but I'm not quite sure I see how it constitues a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade. I'm not saying it doesn't--I'm sure the ACLU's reasoning is better informed, legally speaking, than my own. I just don't get it, and if anyone can explain it to me, I would appreciate it.

Edited: Lizard Breath explains, in comments, why the law effectively outlaws all abortions: "for most methods of abortion, it is not impossible, or unlikely, for the fetus to remain alive past the point of removal from the woman's body. Even a first trimester suction abortion may end up with a miniscule fetus, entirely unable to live outside the womb, who has a heartbeat for seconds or minutes after the abortion is complete. Under this law, that's murder." Speaking as someone who once cracked open a fertilized egg to find, yes, a beating heart and a few veins (and I always think of this when I see those "abortion stops a beating heart" bumper stickers), I get the point. Christ. You'd think legislators would have an obligation to learn something about the shit they're trying to legislate. . . .

I love Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I really do. But we had her as feminist of the day not too long ago.

I'm posting this just to let y'all know that I do realize she's a repeat. Not my fault.

Dear New York Times and Washington Post

Maureen Dowd thinks we need more women op-ed writers. Allow me to offer myself as someone--a woman!--who feels very comfortable indeed "writing very straight opinion stuff" and perfectly happy "hearing something on the news and batting something out." Really. It's my bread and butter.

Of course, it may be true that "Guys don't appreciate being lectured by a woman." So, you know, you might not want to hire a woman writer because, just as in children's books, we assume that boys won't read books about girl characters but girls will read books about boys. But then again, girls can read books too!

So, if you decide to hire anyone, I'm available.

Family troubles

Over the weekend I got a couple of bits of news.

First. My dad's wife's daughter, who is my age. Her husband died maybe six months ago of a heart attack. He drove a forklift, sometimes, when he was employed. She's a bookkeeper. When he died, his employer-provided health insurance paid the family a few thousand bucks. Enough for a funeral. She has four kids. The oldest son is now thinking of joining the marines. The youngest daughter is over at my dad's house watching t.v. while she recovers from chicken pox because her mom's tv has been cut off.

Second. My cousin wrote my dad saying he wants power of attorney over my grandmother in the nursing home. His mom has had a power of attorney, although it's never been invoked because grandma is, in fact, lucid (which my cousin seems not to understand). Grandma has congestive heart and lung disease and periodically gets pneumonia, goes into the hospital, recovers, then back into the nursing home. My aunt has M.S., which is another reason her son is suddenly getting involved in her affairs. Cousin says, very clearly, that he wants the power of attorney because grandma says she wishes she hadn't been treated last time she was sick, and because grandma has a do not resucitate order that "isn't being honored." My understanding is that this is bullshit: she has never been resucitated from anything; she's had a feeding tube when she's too sick to eat, but I don't think that her treatment has been extraordinary: antibiotics, careful care, and feeding tube if needed. Interestingly, my cousin says that D (grandma's bookkeeper and friend, the only local person who ever visits grandma, and if anyone should have a power of attorney over grandma's life, it would be D) says that grandma wishes she hadn't been resucitated. My dad says that D says grandma has been depressed and that she doesn't need a p.o.a. because she is lucid and makes her own decisions.

In other words, everyone is interpreting D--the local witness--'s statements in terms of what their own agenda is. So far I've managed to keep on a good footing with everyone in the family. I don't know if there's jack shit I can do about any of this. Grandma is clearly depressed. Who wouldn't be? Her home was sold, she is in a nursing home with people who are demented, she is lonely and feels she has no dignity left and her situation isn't going to get better. And yet, I am not ok with a decision to kill her by withholding medical care. And I don't know if what I think makes any difference anyway.

So. Two people, one who seems to be putting himself in harm's way for god knows what reason, although his family's poverty surely has something to do with it. Another who is sad, depressed, lonely, and looking at death, has lost her home because her money to hire help ran out, so she sits in a mediocre understaffed institution, and it seems the family's primary goal is not to help her--how?--but simply to hasten the inevitable.

In other news, I wish the goddamn snow would go away. I am ready for winter to be over.

More disclaimer fun!

Dorcasina's professorial disclaimer should be handed out with all syllabi, now and forever. IMHO.

My favorite part:

I am not, by my choice of material, necessarily advancing its agenda. Nor am I interested in your refusal to read things that do not conform to the childhood beliefs you carted with you to college, along with your boombox and your fantasies about fraternity life or finally losing your virginity.

Bwah!

To person, or persons, unknown

Thank you very much for sending me Nonfiction Book Proposals and/or Achieving Against the Odds. Not only for the books, but more importantly for the vote of confidence. It means a lot, and I am really touched.

I'd be grateful if you'd email me so that I know who I am thanking.

Sincerely,
Dr. B.

Anti-abortion legislation in Minnesota

I have a dog in this fight.

The Minnesota Governor, who is kind of a dick (he's also gutting education spending), supports the "Positive Alternatives Act", which gives $2 million to anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy centers." (Free registration required; from Bugmenot, I got "albymangels" as both login id and password.) The money isn't available to organizations that offer abortion, nor--and this, I think, is the best argument to be made to Minnesota lawmakers and the Minnesota public--to organizations that are neutral on the abortion question, like the Lutheran Social Service and Children's Home Society.

Julie Seminitis, a member of NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota, told the committee that she recently completed a research paper on two crisis pregnancy centers and found that women were being misled about the risks of abortion and the amount of community help available to women who keep their babies.

So. The bill funds anti-abortion organizations that misinform the women that come to them, but not established adoption organizations or established women's health organizations like Planned Parenthood. This isn't about "Positive" anything. It's about the state paying people to lie to women.

The bill moves next to the House Civil Law Committee; write to its members, and/or to other members of the Minnesota Legislature to express your objection to this bill.

Thanks to feministing for the alert.

Things one might want to know when one reads my blog, as well

Swiped, nearly wholesale, from feministe, bless her.

1.) I have been writing on the internet for close to ten years, and maintained a blog for nearly five. Over this time, I have been called every name in the book, received idle death threats, been contacted at my home address and phone number, and had my son and my parenting skills insulted, berated, chided, and belittled. Chances are, if you have something nasty to say, I have not only heard it before, but have heard it several times. Thus, if you intend to hurt my feelings, please be creative.

Let me help you get started. Here is A Helpful Guide to Words and Phrases That Do Not Hurt: feminazi, socialist, Marxist, ugly, dyke, man-hater, man-eater, misandrist, frigid, sexist, bitch, slut, whore, etc. in all their various incarnations and related terminology. I will be more insulted if you badmouth one of my favorite bands than if you revert to name-calling. Really.

2.) This is not a feminist primer. I assume that my audience is well-versed in feminism, feminisms, and has a critical mind intelligent enough to argue in an intelligent manner without resorting to sarcasm and the above-mentioned insults. If you believe I am in error, please state so, but only if you are interested in a civil debate.

2a.) I am not interested in meeting feminist standards of card-carrying feminism. If you read feminist literature, it is likely you have run across the term “feminism(s)” or read that “there are as many feminisms as there are feminists.” If I do not meet your feminist standard, I heartily apologize, but do remember that I and my comrades are complex individuals in a complex world that have taken on a complex label belonging to a very complex theoretical tradition. Feminism is not composed of a bullet-point list of talking points and behaviors. If you don’t understand that, chances are you are not operating from a viewpoint educated on the subject.

3.) If you address me with sarcasm, I likely will address you with the same. One cannot expect a thoughtful and intelligent answer to an unthoughtful comment.

To which I might add: look, hyperbole and pointed flippancy is part of my rhetorical style. Note, however, that in comments I (usually) drop the bitching and treat questions earnestly. The basic recipe is: provocation, followed if necessary by more nuanced explanation. If you don't like that, fine, but don't bother telling me that I shouldn't call myself a bitch, that I shouldn't swear, that my tone is excessive, or wtfever. It's not like I named the blog "Pretty Thoughts from a Pretty Nice Girl." Go find a blog that's more to your taste.

8.) Do not assume that you know everything there is to know about me simply because you read my weblog on a regular basis. Any judgements you make will be based on the information I have provided you about myself, which is probably vague, incomplete or embellished. If this subject offendeth thee, please refer to narrative and autobiographical literary theory. It ain’t that unusual.

. . . .

Also, if you see something you don’t like remember you are free to stop reading at any point.

I've only had a blog here for about eight months (though I did blog elsewhere for a year or more, before), and I haven't received death threats yet (!) but other than that, Lauren pretty much sums it up.

Rivka's back

And as always, she rocks my world. (Plus, I'm glad someone else has noticed that CT comment threads so often degenerate into pointlessness.)

The real insanity is the idea that credit cards are my generation's unemployment compensation, GI bill, and health insurance. . . .

Be sure and read the rest of it. And if you haven't seen the LA Times series on economic instability yet (I linked it here a long time ago, and it's been linked a lot of other places too), please do go read it.

And so it begins.

Scene: a public bathroom. Pseudonymous kid is in one stall, I'm in the other.

Pseudonymous kid: I'm going to pee standing up this time.
Me: Ok.
Pseudonymous kid: Help! I can't.
Me (zipping, flushing): Ok, hang on a second.

I go into his stall. PK stands there, pants around ankles.

Me: What's the problem here? Don't forget to lift the seat if you're going to pee standing up.
Pseudonymous kid: I'm afraid if I lift the seat the toilet will flush.
Me: No, that black rubber thing is just there to keep the toilet seat from banging. The handle is for flushing. It's okay, see? (Lifting seat.)
Pseudonymous kid: Oh! Ok. Go away, I don't need a woman in here.
Me (raised eyebrow): Excuse me?!?
Pseudonymous kid: You heard me. I don't need a woman in here.

This page won't open at your public library, probably

Over on CT, Belle Waring's comment on this list of swear words that you can't print on an NFL jersey is, effectively, "Huh. Who knew there were so many euphemisms for ass-fucking?"

Mine is, "Huh. Guess I can't put my name on a jersey. Que lastima."

Also, it just goes to show that people should just spell it "come" instead of "cum."

A late post for PZ Myers's birthday

I had no scientific postings to make earlier, but I do now. Well, science of a sort...

Scene: dinner. Pseudonymous kid is gobbling his food and deliberately being messy.

Mr. B.: Pseudonymous kid. Do not gobble your food like . . . a little mudskipper gobbling mud. (Pause.) Although actually mudskippers don't eat mud, so it's a bad analogy.
Pseudonymous kid: What is a mudskipper?
Me: It is a kind of crazy fish, with feet, sort of.
Mr. B.: And eyes on the top of its head.
Pseudonymous kid: That's crazy! Why does it have feet?
Me: So that it can walk on land! As well as swim.
Pseudonymous kid: Can it breathe air?
Me: Yes, yes, it can.
Pseudonymous kid: Then why does it have eyes on top of its head?
Me: So that it can see out of the water, and see if anything is going to come and eat it.
Pseudonymous kid: How come I don't have eyes on top of my head?
Me: Well. People are hunting kinds of animals. So we have eyes in front, because that helps us see how far away things are. So we can chase them and catch them and eat them. But mudskippers are not hunting animals, so they need to see behind them, if something is sneaking up on them, so their eyes are on top of their heads.
Mr. B.: Right. Animals that hunt, like people or kitties or dogs, have eyes in front. And animals that don't hunt, that eat plants, have eyes on the sides, or maybe on top. Usually. So. What is a horse?
Pseudonymous kid: A hunter?
Me: No, a horse has eyes on the sides of its head. What is the cat?
Pseudonymous kid (looks at the cat, who is begging for food): A hunter! Because she eats meat.
Me: Yes, exactly. She is a carnivore.
Pseudonymous kid: Like T-Rex?
Me: Yes.
Pseudonymous kid: We are carnovores?
Me: Well, actually, we are omnivores, because we eat everything. Meat and plants. "Omni" means "everything."
Pseudonymous kid: Omvinore?
Me: No, om-ni-vore. There are three kinds of animals. Carnivores eat meat, like "carne," which is meat in Spanish. Herbivores eat plants, like "herbs," the little plants you put in food when you cook. And omnivores eat everything.
Pseudonymous kid: T-rex is a carnivore.
Me: Yes.
Pseudonymous kid: What would a dinosaur say if you shot it into space?
Me: .... Um, it would say, "what am I doing in space?"
Pseudonymous kid (laughing): And what would it say if it was a t-rex?
Me: It would say, "ROWR! I AM HUNGRY! WHAT AM I DOING IN SPACE?"
Pseudonymous kid: What would a kitty say if you sent it into space?
Me: It would say, meow meow meow, what am I doing in space? I am scared. Bring me back home.
Pseudonymous kid: What would happen to it?
Me: Well, if it had a space suit, it would be okay. But if it didn't, it would die.
Pseudonymous kid: How would it come home?
Me: The people who made the rocket ship would make it come home with computers.
Pseudonymous kid: What if the kitty had glasses?
Me: .... um . . .
Pseudonymous kid: What would the glasses say?
Me: They wouldn't say anything, because they are not alive.
Pseudonymous kid: What if it were a cartoon?
Mr. B.: I think we're already there.

Funny, and I get the reference

Since I'm zero for two today on actually knowing things, I have an excuse for posting a link to this hilarious site mocking David Horowitz: Discover the Nutwork. My favorite right-wing idealogue on the site? Woundwort. From Watership Down. Which is actually one of my favorite books to return to when I'm feeling down and or brainiacked out.

Dig today's feminist of the day!

Never heard of her before, but I love the quote. Rock the fuck on.

Addendum: Ok, if I weren't so lazy I'd have googled her before posting. Here's a nice little bio, by one Trish Wilson. Same as our Trish Wilson? Not sure. Trish, if you deserve credit, let me know!

Funny

From Lawyers, Guns and Money (awesome blog subtitle: "The Shit has Hit the Fan"):

"It's not often that a single sentence can capture most all of what's wrong with American journalism."

The sentence in question:

"But a wave of developments since the better-than-expected Iraqi elections in January - some perhaps related and others probably not - have brought Mr. Bush a measure of vindication, which may or may not be sustained by events and his own actions in the months to come."

Someone offer me a better job

A comment I just posted over here has prompted me to write a post I've been meaning to compose for a long time now: descibing what kind of job I really want to have.

Here, to start off with, is what I said in my comment:

I've taught classes that were specifically set aside for special admit students--which at the institution I was teaching, included not only ethnic minorities, but also first-generation college students and students from "bad" high schools (I don't remember what the criteria was for that, but you can probably infer). Sample size: I taught classes of this nature three times over seven years of teaching there.

I found, and I shit you not, that those students were *far better* than the students I taught in my "regular" classes. Some of them had more grammar problems. But some of them were among the best students I ever had, period. The vast majority were indistinguishable in terms of fundamental skills, but much better in terms of critical thinking, work habits, and learning curves. All my fellow grad students who taught in that program agreed. It was an immensely popular teaching assignment; we competed to teach those students.

And, of course, the students felt ashamed of being in that class, because they knew that it was considered "remedial." So you would have to tell them that it was *exactly the same* as the other classes you taught, if anything even more demanding because the students were more capable. The challenge in teaching them, then, was not in conveying knowledge or skills; it was in dealing with their inferiority complex.

I loved those students so damn much that thinking about them makes me want to cry.

These are the things I miss in my current job:

1. Non-traditional students
2. Non-major and/or intro-level courses
3. Decent-size classes where you can really give students individualized attention.
4. An institution that provides support and assistance for these students, that is dedicated to helping them succeed.

These are the things that I think are my greatest strengths as a teacher:

1. Acknowledging academic anxiety and putting it in context
2. Real enjoyment and appreciation of students from varied backgrounds: I like farm kids, I like cholos, I like junior Republicans, I like sorority girls, I like baby dykes, I like well-intentioned suburban kids. I love transfer students from community college.
3. An ability to design courses and assignments that students can individualize, so that students with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds are all challenged but can all succeed
4. An ability to teach courses where there is conflict between students and keep it from getting personal, refocus the argument so that everyone learns something. Of course, sometimes I fuck this up; but it's something I would really like to get better at
5. Making "useless" knowledge relevant (believe me, my field is one undergrads think of as incredibly arcane)
6. Breaking down complicated tasks into their component parts; making challenging assignments feel doable

Non-teaching things I want:
1. Time to write--not necessarily academic writing, either. I really want to write for a general audience
2. Permission and support to tackle problems I perceive in the institution--rather than being told there's nothing we can do, or that these things aren't really problems
3. A certain flexibility; the ability to work from home sometimes, to bring pseudonymous kid into the office
4. (Greedy): summers would be nice. This is one of the biggest reasons for staying in academe. Summers would give me time with the long-distance boyfriend, and time with pseudonymous kid.

I am thinking, maybe non-profit work; maybe university admin (student support, student programs, undergrad education, etc.); maybe community college. I like the academic atmosphere. I definitely don't want to give up all teaching, but I can imagine teaching the occasional c-c/continuing ed. class on the side if I were, say, doing an admin/non-profit job that didn't fill that particular jones but was interesting and let me feel I was moving forward. I am wondering about high school teaching: my fear is that I wouldn't have enough flexibility to design my own courses (this is important to me) or that I would have so many classes/students that I'd end up on autopilot a lot (like I do now. This is a major reason for my unhappiness, I think). I really want to start doing some freelance writing.

The major reason I'm tempted to leave academia, I think, is that I'm impatient (I want to move now) and, more importantly, I'm really frustrated by not being able to just find another job if I decide I'm unhappy with the present one. The idea of being in a job where my essential duties don't change at all for years at a time is absolutely horrible; I do not want to be teaching the same damn classes in ten years. Maybe my problem is that, having been in the university system for ten years already, I'm just ready to move the fuck on--not sure. But in any case, I definitely want the option to move the fuck on when and if I'm ready: not to some new arcane subject, but to different responsibilities and tasks. That is, new forms, not just new content.

I want to live in a city. I want to feel connected to the community around me (there's a real town/gown problem in Smalltown). I want to feel like doing my job now is good, and what I should be doing, rather than that I should always be looking down the path to some future goal (tenure, a deanship, whatever) (though maybe this is my problem and not academe's: I'm not sure), even though yes, I do want the ability to plan. I would like the ability to leave my work at the office most of the time, or rather to be so interested in my work that bringing it home is just a question of continuing to think about things that are important to me.

Perhaps this is utopian. And it's not quite a complete description of the job I'm looking for, because I'm not entirely sure what that is yet. But I'm seriously asking for comments and suggestions here: what kind of job should I be doing? If teaching, what kind of institution? How does one get that job?

And, importantly, do you know anyone who's hiring?

Bankruptcy, debt, and blame

Crooked Timber has a good post (followed by a lot of silly comments and a few good ones--what is with the commenters over there?) on the bankruptcy law. In passing, they refer to the Krugman editorial, and part of the comment thread gets involved with the question that Krugman also drags in, of whether or not people should be blamed for their debt.

Ok, let me offer myself as an example. I'm carrying about $10,000 in credit card debt (a little under, not much). Plus student loan debt (from undergraduate), the amount of which I don't even know because it's just part of the wallpaper of my life (although it's fixed at 8%, which was low at the time, but ain't any more, grrr... and yes, I've looked into refinancing it). Now, when I graduated, I actually had less than $2000 in credit card debt, so it wasn't graduate school that did it. Ironically, it was my first "real" job (and I know I'm not alone in this). Moving, even when your employer picks up the tab, is expensive. By the time you liquidate your savings to pay for subletting over the summer while you look for a new house, liquidate your IRAs to come up with a down payment for said house, pay cash up front to hook up utilities and a phone, pay assorted nickel-and-dime fees like relicensing your car, it adds up. Throw in purchasing new clothes because now, with a "real" job, one wants to be a "real" professional (and don't even tell me that shit doesn't matter)--in my case, I had some nice clothes from before, so I didn't have to spend much on that, although I did need some warmer clothes than I owned from before. There's a couple grand right there, with all those little things.

Then, say, you decide that--not having had a vacation in ten years--you are going to take one. You can't afford it, b/c your starting salary is small (as are all starting salaries) so you put it on the credit card. You think, "my raise will pay off that debt over the next year." But then you forgot to take into account that the house needs renovation (which you're doing yourself, so as not to take on more debt), and the raise goes towards that, so you start carrying the credit card debt.

Now, we have made "choices." Mr. B. doesn't work: if he did, we'd have no debt problem. Then again, we figured, moving to a new place will be difficult for pseudonymous kid, Mr. B. has spent very little time with him in his infancy b/c he (Mr. B.) was working 80 hours/week to support my doctoral dissertation, the family thing is important and we won't get these years back. That's family values, by the way. Plus Mr. B. is renovating the house--which will result in income in the long run, when we sell, but means we're cash-strapped for now. Both of those mean it makes sense for him not to work. The result, however, is that I'm supporting a family on a junior professor's salary--which as we all know, is really not enough to do that. Try doing this on, say, the salary of an executive assistant or a high-school teacher. Impossible.

So, you start to accumulate a little bit of debt. Again, "choices": yeah, I didn't need to spend a few hundred on lingerie. No, I didn't need to buy Xmas presents a couple years ago (this year, I learned my lesson, and didn't buy Xmas presents at all). No, I guess we shouldn't have taken that vacation (but I'm glad we did). But every little bit of debt gets accumulated against an informed risk assessment: when Mr. B. gets a job, he'll be back in the high five figures again, the problem will evaporate. The interest rate on this debt is extremely low. Blah blah blah.

Then, of course, the interest rates start sneaking up, the job market contracts a bit, and suddenly, ooops. Or, say, one of us gets sick (SSRIs, anyone?) and our health coverage is inadequate (why am I not seeing a psychiatrist until I get a referral? That's why). Or say (god forbid) the plumbing in the house goes kaplooey (so far, all plumbing problems have been tackled handily by Mr. B.). Or I lose my job (I won't, but someone else who wasn't in academia, with a contract, might), and it takes a couple of months (more debt!) for one of us to find a new one. We're gambling on Mr. B.'s earning potential being a great untapped resource: if he drops dead (god forbid), I am fucked. How would I afford daycare? (No, we don't have insurance on him right now. Can't afford it. Yes, we had insurance on me when he was the primary earner, so yes, I do understand the importance of insuring the non-earning partner.) I have no doubt that our current cash crunch will right itself in a year or so, but I would be stupid if I didn't acknowledge that there is a risk it won't.

We're not going to declare bankruptcy; this really isn't about me. But it does make me realize how easy it is for people who are making "choices" that the rest of us make every single day to end up with their backs against the wall. And that, really, is the point. Who among us doesn't buy shit we don't "really need"? Anyone? Anyone? No, I thought not. The thing--one of the things--that supposedly makes us "proud to be [middle class] Americans" is that we can take for granted, more or less, that carrying some debt isn't going to send us into the poorhouse--because we'll get a raise, because if we lose one job there will be another, because if we get sick we'll go to the doctor and get better.

I, for one, think that this is a goddamn good state of affairs; I realize that a lot of people in the world (and even here) can't take this shit for granted, but basically I think being able to do so is a good thing. (Whether or not it's fair or sustainable to maintain middle class standards is a separate question, but the credit-card companies and congresspeople voting for this bill aren't doing so out of some radical desire to create a more sustainable global lifestyle.) Without these calculated risks, no one would buy a house, or a car, or a computer, or nice shoes. I like those things. I like that we can buy them.

If you want to argue that we shouldn't, because we should all be responsible for our own financial security and save every penny we don't spend on food, minimal clothing, and shelter, then fine. But be honest about it--I see no one making that argument who is not, themselves, spending a lot of money on stuff they don't "need." What I see instead is a lot of people who feel comfortable in their own middle class (or upper-middle, or flat-out rich as shit) situation, saying that everyone else should never buy anything they don't need, should never spend a penny they don't earn. Well, watch out: because after we start seeing people driven into the streets, and we all freak the fuck out and stop buying anything but food, and stop borrowing money because (like my former student), we are too afraid of what might happen to us if we do, that comfy little situation isn't going to work for you, either. Because we do damn well feel entitled to our clothes, and our cars, and our ability to plan for the future, and giving those things up is gonna feel like some severe-ass deprivation no matter how fucking moralistic you get over it. People are gonna be pissed when they realize they've been fucked over. There's gonna be hell to pay. At least, I devoutly hope so.

'Course, that isn't gonna help the people who are going to have to serve as the examples to the rest of us. They're just screwed. Oh well. Guess they shouldn't have bought into the American dream. Suckers.

(See this post at unfogged for a similar, briefer anecdote.)

Bookmark today

Happy International Women's Day, everyone.

Lots of people are using the opportunity to link new (to them) women's blogs. Since my entire goddamn blogroll is about 80% women's blogs, including fairly obscure ones, I'll just direct you there. Let me point out a particular blog that's been on my blogroll from the beginning (and isn't completely obscure, although little-noted, I think, in our corner of the blogosphere) that is wonderfully snarky, bitchy, and feminist in the subtly "not-political" way that I, for one, like best. See, for example, today's entry. Also, she writes beautifully.

Addendum: I take it back. I direct you also to Now What, "A daily blog on choice issues," which I found over at The Well-Timed Period. Ema's post for today is fucking awesome, providing a summation, with links, of the abortion-related legislation going on around the country right now. My Women's Day plans just got updated: fix myself something nice to eat, settle down comfortably, and write letters to some of the folks on that list who haven't yet heard from me.

I was going to blog about

How boys as well as girls can enjoy the love of beautiful things (link via Dr. Pretorious), but I just can't get it up for bourgeois pursuits today. All I can say is

Social Security "reform" + bankruptcy legislation = the end of the world as we know it.

One woman who is no longer scared

I'll be keeping this post up top until Monday.

I just got this comment on this post. It's worth moving up to the main page.

"I had an abortion when I was 27 weeks pregnant that was performed by Dr. Tiller. I had been raped and I was a scared 16 year old.I am now 26 years old and I am no longer scared. It infuriates me that women and girls like me are about to have every detail of their personal life dissected and picked apart by someone like Phil Kline. Another former Tiller patient and I have started our own web page supporting Dr. Tiller & the women who seek his services. The address is Tiller Patients Speak

thank you, teri
Former Tiller Patient Teri"

Here is another really useful site to a Kansas PAC, ProKanDo, whose purpose is to elect pro-choice politicians to state office. Ironically I found it through some bullshit anti-abortion site that claims that the organization is founded and funded by George Tiller which, if true, makes him even more heroic: not only putting his life on the line to provide women with necessary health care, but also personally bankrolling pro-choice politics in Kansas. But whether or not Tiller's behind it, do check out the site. It's excellent:

Why is Reproductive Choice in Kansas So Important to the
Rest of the United States?

Wichita, Kansas is home to one of few clinics in the United States that specializes in late termination of pregnancy for fetal abnormalities and maternal health risk. In addition to providing a rare and vital service, Women’s Health Care Services is also at the forefront in assisting low-income women to obtain services. Each year, on the Saturday prior to the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion, Women’s Health Care Services offers free services for Medicaid patients who otherwise would have no means of obtaining services. What makes this clinic so special is that is that it not only serves patients within the Kansas, but assists women from all over the United States and beyond.

Spread the word, write your letters, and consider putting your money towards this kind of thing rather than oh, say, buying me shoes I don't really need. In fact, if someone with tech savvy wants to design a button for ProKanDo's site, I'll put it on my blog--and we can contribute it to them and hopefully other bloggers will pick it up, too.

Update: Teri tells me that ProKanDo is, in fact, Dr. Tiller's PAC. She also says that ProKanDo will be linking to Tiller Patients Speak soon, and that they "appreciate all the help they can get." In other words, pass the link on and toss some money their way if you can.

Planned Parenthood

Kameron at Brutal Women has a good post up about her experience of Planned Parenthood. I'm inspired to do a post of my own on the subject.

I've used Planned Parenthood once, when I was 17. Despite the fact that my mom was pretty open about birth control issues, pretty accepting, I still didn't want to tell her that I was planning on sleeping with my boyfriend. So I went to PP rather than asking her to make an appointment for me with her ob/gyn. (Many years later I discovered this was a good thing; this is the ob/gyn who tried to shame my sister for having untreated chlamydia. Which she'd had for four years. Because she was raped at 14, and was too ashamed to tell anyone. For four years. But hey, that's a different story.)

In contrast to my mom's asshole ob/gyn, everyone at PP was lovely. This was, I guess, before the anti-abortion forces started picketing clinics, and we just walked in, no problem. My boyfriend went with me (I insisted) and they said how impressive, and rare that was. They signed me in. I asked how much. They said, "free, but if you can make a contribution, please do." I couldn't, so I didn't, but years afterwards--when I was older and had money of my own--I sent them a check. The doc asked if this was my first ever pelvic, I said yes. She told me everything she was doing before she did it, was very gentle, asked me if things were ok, did this hurt, talked me through the process. I felt treated with dignity and concern. She made quite a point of asking me more than once if I had questions, making sure that I understood my b.c. options, telling me what side effects I might expect and what to do if I had them, talked to me about STDs and condom use, asked if I'd had sex yet, commended me for coming in for birth control and bringing my boyfriend ("good for you! And good for him!"), and sent me on my way.

Later, when I got the first migraine, I knew what it was, called PP, stopped taking the pill, got a new prescription, everything very smooth and easy because I knew what was up. Need I point out that they provided better health care than my current doc does?

After that I went off to college and mostly used student health services, which were usually pretty good (I had an excellent nurse practicioner in graduate school, who disappointed me terribly because she couldn't be my care provider once I got pregnant--although the ob/gyn I found ended up being quite good). Perhaps because my first visit to PP was so good, I've always had a very high expectation of my health care providers, and I've always felt entitled to ask questions and take up their time if I don't understand something.

My other revelation about PP came many years later, in a casual conversation with my sister-in-law. She mentioned going to PP and I was a bit surprised, because in my mind PP was something I'd used as a teenager, not an adult. SIL pointed out that she didn't have health insurance and that, because of that PP was the only health care she received, period. When she went in for her bcp, they also asked her about her general health, gave her physicals, and provided prescriptions she needed for other issues. Suddenly I realized that those who attack PP, who picket it, who make it difficult for women to go there, are not only hindering women receiving gynecological care; they're also standing in the way of many, many women for whom PP is the only affordable, respectful, thorough health care they get. At all.

And who knows. At 17, unwilling to tell my mother I needed bcp, if PP hadn't been there--or if I'd had to cross a picket line to get to it--I might not have gotten bcp. I might not have had a good experience, and I might not have succeeded, my entire adult life, in preventing unwanted pregnancy until I was ready for pseudonymous kid. My sister-in-law, and many other women who lack health insurance (or whose health insurance doesn't cover birth control), would be unable to see doctors, would be unable to get birth control. This, of course, is the real point: abortion is only a small (but necessary) part of what women's health clinics provide. The attack on women's health clinics is, effectively, an attack on women's health; when and if anti-abortion crusaders shut down clinics, all they do is promote more, not fewer, unwanted pregnancies--by removing access to birth control, by removing respectful, affordable health care, by removing the education and support women need to learn how to take care of themselves, including planning pregnancies when and if they want them.

So anyway. That's my story about why women's health clinics like PP and Women's Health Care Services in Wichita matter so much.

Updates

Ok! I have finally finished updating the blogroll: if I somehow missed you, leave a comment. Deleted a few links that hadn't posted in ages, so if you're just on hiatus, also leave a comment and I'll put you back up (here I pour out a li'l beer for my homegirl Professor Dyke). The link for Justified Left didn't work, so if you're still around, loganarthur, leave me a comment with a link that does!

Also, I added an Amazon wish list. Because I just know that everyone out there is simply dying to buy shit for me. Or at least you all want desperately to know what my taste in music and books is like. On that note, btw, many thanks to those of you who've been clicking through the Amazon link!

(God, I'm so embarrassed.)

Update: Thank you to whoever it was that bought me the Writer's Market. All the other stuff on that list is just frivolous materialism; that book, I really need, and am hoping it'll help me with the relocation plan. Dunno who you are, but I am seriously grateful. Thank you.

Now, I hope everyone else will donate money to ProKanDo instead.

Get rich quick, in the privacy of your own home! (Websurfing on a Saturday afternoon)

The following dialogues have to be imagined as a kind of split screen:

Left hand side of the screen
Scene: me, chatting with a friend.

Friend: Link
Me: Oh jesus fucking christ.
Friend: hahahahaha. Look at the pictures!
Me: Ok, ok, but is this news??? (Looking at pictures) I can kind of see their point, it does have a Madonnaesque thing going on. But it could as easily be the primitive fat Venus statue. Or a treble clef.
Friend: Or the Good Vibrations logo.
Me: "Chrysta is hoping the bids will reach $1000 so she can buy a horse." Jesus wants her to have a horse.
Friend: A pony!
Me: Well, good luck to her in getting a horse out of it. Maybe if I make a sugar cookie in the shape of the Guadaloupe, I can raise $1000? You think?
Friend: Link. Sixty-six bids so far. You should do it before this gets stale.

Right hand side of the screen
Scene: me typing, and talking to Mr. B. Pseudonymous kid is playing with legos.

Me: So someone's selling a pretzel on ebay? That looks like the madonna and child?
Pseudonymous kid (interrupting): Selling what?
Me: A pretzel.
Pseudonymous kid: That looks like what?
Me: You know, the baby Jesus. You know who Jesus is. The mama Mary and Jesus. (Speaking to Mr. B. again) So anyway, the bids are up to $500.
Mr. B: (chuckles)
Me: So I'm thinking, maybe i should bake some cookies.
Mr. B. starts giggling uncontrollably.
Me: Look! I was baking some cookies for my kid this afternoon, and I cut them all out in the shape of a star, but somehow when I pulled them out of the oven, one had miraculously transformed itself into the Madonna! And it was pre-frosted and everything! Here are the pictures to prove it!
Mr. B. Better get baking, bitch.

"Dear Adjunct Faculty Member"

Via Clancy, a little bit of snark for those on (or contemplating) the adjunct track.

even though many of you have taught more classes than some of the rest of us will teach in our lifetimes, we prefer to pour all of our money and support into people who will complete a book and then leave us for someplace "better" or "warmer."

Guilty as charged. I also like this: We trust that with your education you will be able to understand the complexities of our sentiments--so perfectly capturing, not only the tenure situation, but every other situation (::cough::Summers::cough::) in which pissed off people are told to be calm and rational and understanding of those who piss them off...

More ranting about my physician

1. Who, when I asked her for a refill on b.c.p. and specifically mentioned that I can't tolerate estrogen (which gives me migraines), wrote me a scrip for the wrong goddamn pill. Which, yes, containes estrogen.

2. Who is going on vacation (and it's a Saturday) so I'm taking the pills (which I only just now took out of the pharmacy bag, b/c it's not like new b.c.p. are an exciting purchase one wants to unpack immediately), and hoping that the office or pharmacist will agree to renew my old prescription on Monday.

3. Who, because she is going on vacation, can't schedule a follow-up about my goddamn Wellbutrin for a month. Which means I can't get a referral to a psychiatrist who might actually know what the hell they're doing with these drugs.

Call for Papers

I just got this email, which I'm passing on (and yes, I'm going to submit a proposal--what a great panel this would be!)

Hi: I'm currently looking for submissions for an MLA panel on women
writing on/in academe. Originally I was looking for analytical papers on
memoir and memoir-writing, but I think the most interesting writing
on/by women in academe is being done on blogs. Would you be interested
either in submitting something to be considered for this panel, or
perhaps mentioning something about it on your blog so other interested
parties might send something? Feel free to use my name and e-mail address.
Thanks for your time.

Janine M. Utell, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Widener University
Humanities Division
One University Place
Chester, PA 19013
610-499-4527
jmutell@mail.widener.edu

Spoiled students, part 3; or, what kind of student was I?

Ages ago, Tim Burke (sorry, I can't find the exact entry) wrote a post talking about how we need to talk about our own educational experiences. Later, Scrivener posted a really heartfelt entry (again, sorry no direct link) about his childhood, which I commented on at the time by saying that it's important, I think, to talk about our own coming up, because there are a lot of presumptions out there about how we, the professoriate, ourselves come from upper-middle class backgrounds, don't understand the realities of working-class students, whatever. I've been meaning to talk about this a bit for a while, and the discussion about social class and students seems as good a time as any.

My folks, when I was born, were really young. Neither had a college education. My mom had dropped out after her freshman year when she married my dad at 18, and I'm not sure if my father had been yet, although when I was in elementary school they both commuted to the nearest state university and did their BAs and became teachers (dad, elementary; mom, high school). When I was little, we lived on the poor and shitty side of town in a small city that is understood regionally as a rough town. Once I had a student from a nearby city in a class and when I said, "hey, you're from Capitol City? I'm from Smaller City!" his response was "whoa, you grew up there?" So, streed cred, baby.

Anyway, my folks were civil rights activists of a sort, pretty involved with the local political scene, and as my sister and I started school, especially with public education. We were sent to the first integrated school in the state--a deliberately integrated school, with a strong progressive and deliberately non-Eurocentric curriculum, established just a few years before mandatory busing came around. It was a great school. A few years later, mandatory busing came in, and white flight started. My parents, by now teachers themselves, made a conscious decision to keep my sister and I in the increasingly brown and underfunded school district (if you hadn't already guessed, I'm pretty anglo--though not entirely). They also decided to keep us out of the honors program that was developed in part to segregate the few remaining white/middle-class students from the rest of the school.

So, after my start in a really fantastic progressive, academically rigorous school, I (and to a greater extent my younger sister) ended up in what we now call inner-city schools. Really undemanding curriculum, lots of drugs, little bit of gang activity, pretty big classes. My folks tried to give me some kind of challenge by getting me into the bilingual program, designed for the kids of Spanish-speaking immigrants and the local migrant workers, on the grounds that I'd at least learn Spanish even if I was repeating math I'd learned in first grade. So, I read my own books, quietly, when I got bored, was a little separated from most of my peers by virtue of being the "brainy" one and also, of course, being white and middle-class, but mostly I got along and was pretty well-liked and reasonably socially happy, if bored.

Then seventh and eighth grade came along, a new school, and really, really dire academic situation. Teachers with no control of the classroom, students getting beaten up or locked in storage cupboards during class time, sexual harassment in the halls, open drug dealing, that kind of crap. More and more my friends and I tried to keep very low profiles and I started having anxiety problems about school. So my parents caved a bit and put me in the honors program.

What happened next was really very interesting and probably the most important thing I learned in elementary school. Some of the honors kids had been good friends to me back at progressive kindergarten, and like mine, their parents (also working in the public schools) had kept their kids in, but they had put them in honors classes all along. These former friends wanted nothing to do with me, and by and large I became a total social pariah. These white, middlle-class kids were much, much meaner (and more dangerous) to me than the regular kids had ever been, and it was clear that the reason was that I was tainted because I hadn't been part of their privileged little clique all along and I had friends from the "wrong" classes (literally). Moreover, the honors kids were lazy as shit: at one point, when both the social studies teacher and the English teacher assigned us books to read in the same week, the students staged a walkout and refused to attend class until one of the teachers agreed to assign us the required book later, when we weren't reading a book in the other class. The only students who broke the picket line, so to speak, were me and a quiet Filipino boy whose name I don't remember. Once the "strike" was over and everyone was back in class, our hippie social studies teacher praised the strikers for their "courage" and standing up for their beliefs. I can't tell you how stunned I was at his complete ignorance of the fact that the truly brave students were me and the boy who'd defied, not our wimpy good guy social studies teacher, but the wrath of our peers (and believe me, we paid for it), because we thought that it was fucking ridiculous for them to be so damn lazy about their own educations--this was honors after all. At the end of the semester, the social studies teacher told me in confidence that although I'd only earned a B+, he was giving me the A because he knew I was "capable" of having earned it. I'm sure he graded all the other little bastard honors kids the same way. What a crappy teacher he was.

Anyway, blah blah blah many years later here I am. The point is that what I learned in elementary school wasn't academics. I think I can honestly say I learned nothing after my first great years, except possibly in eighth grade algebra (when me and, again, the quiet Filipino boy won the math awards, making our honors peers hate us even more). What I learned, however, was far, far more important than academic bullshit (which I got from reading on my own anyway, plus my parents doing things like bringing home cow's eyes from the slaughterhouse for us to dissect on the kitchen table). I learned how to be comfortable with people from the wrong side of the tracks, to think critically about race and class and how they play out in subtle ways, and that there is a really major difference between intelligence and privilege, though the two are usually confused.

This is one reason I want to get pseudonymous kid the hell away from whitebread smalltownia: his mom is a college professor, he's not going to have to worry about academics. What is going to be hard for him if we don't get out of here is to expand his brain beyond middle-class suburbanism. But the point isn't, "god I hate the suburbs" (though I do): the point, educationally speaking, is that in some ways one of the things I took away from my elementary ed. was that, in the name of protecting their kids, middle-class parents seriously limit their childrens' education. The education I got was far superior to the education the honors kids--or the white flight kids whose parents moved to a different school district--received. What those kids learned, I got from books and at home. What I learned, they couldn't learn from books, or at home in their safe suburban families. Maybe some of them learned a bit of it later; I hope so. The problem, of course, is that when those kids don't learn those things, they grow up to weild power and miseducate their own children and continue to shit on the children of the underclasses. I don't want my kid to grow up to think like that, nor do I want him to grow up with the equally horrible (maybe in some ways even worse) sense of safe middle-class liberalism that the honors kids whose parents kept them in public school had, a liberalism that operates without a real understanding of the issues at hand and is still, underneath, scared and scornful of the people it tries to "help" without in any way actually thinking about the power structure.

So, I figure, as a teacher, my job is twofold. First, to advocate for the non-traditional students who, despite all the hurdles that get thrown in their way--including, most corrosively I think, enormous anxiety when they "make it" because they, like me in my 8th grade honors class, are still "outsiders" (and unlike me, many of them won't be able to "pass" once they move on to high school. Plus passing sucks)--who are going to college despite those hurdles. They don't need more shit, they're usually much smarter than the privileged kids who think their rightful places are being "taken" by "affirmative action admits," and, frankly, because of my background, I like them better and am often more comfortable with them. But on the other hand, I have a really strong responsibility to educate the narrow kids whose parents and teachers, with all the best intentions in the world, have tied their brains behind their backs in order to keep them "safe." Because of their ignorance, they say the most offensive and obnoxious things imaginable (and I reserve the right to rant about it when I'm not in the classroom, thank you very much); they think their teachers owe it to them to make education easy; and they treat their fellow students like crap a lot of the time. But yes. My job is to teach them too, and just as being femmey helps me with being a feminist in the classroom, looking white and middle class helps me teach those kids, because they don't automatically resent/dismiss me the second I walk in the room. (Passing also, I think, makes it more incumbent on me to do that kind of teaching, precisely because I have the advantage of being able to do it without scaring the students.) And you know, there but for the grace of god go I, or goes pseudonymous kid if I don't get his ass out of here, so no, I don't hate those students.

But I'm not gonna let them walk out of my class when I ask them to do some reading.

More on students and the teachers who resent them

My boyfriend sent me this essay, by a writer who visits a "rich and suburban" high school classroom where his "creeping class and education insecurity" get fed, apparently, by a student who submits a story about hating the poor. The writer's reaction is interesting:

I took a breath. I told the kid it was a good piece of writing insofar as it managed to be honest, but that he should take it further. I told him to think about why he felt the way he did, and mentioned that the church setting was an ironic frame for his own cynicism. I told him a lot of good writing exposes the writer, warts and all, and I told him that even though I didn't know anything about him, I was pretty sure from what he wrote that he came from money and that he didn't give a shit about people who weren't like him.

At this point in the essay, I was surprised by how balanced this response is. The writer has made it clear that he resents the students tremendously, and, speaking as a teacher, I think that he does a pretty good job of focusing on the writing and not the student.

But. The writer's class resentment, directed at a high school kid, bothers me. I've dealt with this kind of thing in the classroom, of course--we all have. It's tricky. A major reason why it's tricky is that you never know who's in the room (and you can't tell by looking). Once I was teaching Bastard out of Carolina, in conjunction with a unit on some of the issues in that book. One student in the class started crying, and said that the book reminded her of the years she and her family had lived in a car. She was one of the best students I ever had, and the poor kid couldn't pull better than a B average because she was working her way through college and commuting two hours each way to class. She couldn't afford not to live at home. I suggeted she look into financial aid, she said, "I did, but they offered me student loans." I suggested she take them. She said, "I learned a long time ago never to borrow money, because if you can't pay it back you can lose everything." Think about that the next time you're debating with some asshole over affirmative action, grants vs. loans, and whether or not it's really an even playing field.

On the other hand, another of my favorite former students is the most spoiled rich kid you ever saw. My initial impression of him was, "oh no, frat boy from hell," as he sat there, legs splayed, arms crossed, smirking at me. Then he started to open his mouth and I realized, this kid is smart as shit. Yes, as it turned out, he was quite the little junior Republican, and we got into many an argument during my office hours over whether or not women experienced systemic discrimination, whether or not racism existed, the virtues and failures of the free market, various news stories, abortion, etc. But as I said recently in a rec letter I wrote for him, he argues on the up-and-up. Honest rigorous disagreement.

Anyway, back to my real point. My real point is that, yes, as a teacher, you do not tear into your students, no matter how much you hate their opinions, because they do not learn anything that way. With the kid in the essay I linked, I'd have focused on the essay, not (as the author of the piece does) on the student: "Well, the church setting is ironic, given how much the narrator resents and hates the poor. You might want to develop that a bit. You might also think about audience: who is reading this? What effect are you going for? Is the reader intended to agree with or be offended by the speaker's prejudice?" Things like that. Because the fact of the matter is, these high school kids this guy is speaking to are, in the end, kids. Their worlds are narrow, but that's not their fault, and being angered by it reinforces it.

On the other hand. All young people want to be treated as adults, and rigorously challenging their opinions is often good for them. So maybe this guy's approach was the right one--especially as he isn't their teacher. Maybe it's a learning experience to have a guest speaker come in for a day and say to this high school kid, straight up, that he's coming across as an asshole. I think that the regular classroom teacher shouldn't do that, because real learning is (and, should be) discomfiting, and to help students deal with that you have to make them trust you (though that needn't mean they have to like you). It's a real balancing act, and college kids do not want to be seen as children, even though in many ways they still are. So sometimes you have to take the gloves off.

In conclusion. The essay I linked is better than it appears at first glance: just as the student comes across as an asshole in the short story he reads, the essayist comes across as an asshole in judging his students. As he says, "good writing exposes the writer, warts and all," and I have a sneaking suspicion that he knows what he's doing with this essay. As a teacher, I am uncomfortable with his initial resentment of the students. But, as a teacher, I don't know that I fault his handling of the situation (even though I would handle it somewhat differently). Maybe the point is that in the end, what he says to the student is more important than what he privately thinks; maybe the point is that as his readers, we should extend him the same generosity of spirit we want him to extend to the student whose story he's reading; maybe the point is that in the end, the teacher isn't that different from the student and they're both assholes. Or maybe the point is in his conclusion, where the kid's full-time teacher warns the author that these kids, too, have their problems. Maybe the point is that she's a better teacher than he is because she recognizes that. Or that the students need both understanding and a sense of what's not acceptable, so that the approaches compliment each other. Or that he learns something from the student, just as the student (hopefully, but we can't know, since the student isn't writing the essay) learned something from him.

Or maybe the point is just to think about this stuff.

Why am I the last to know?

That profgrrrrl's hedgie has a blog???

This is right up there with Abbie the Cat.

(By the way, those of you who asked to be linked, I haven't forgotten. I've just been actually doing my job--shocker, I know--so haven't gotten around to it. I will, I promise. And please don't be offended that I clicked the blogspot button and added trevor just now.)

See that little white dot, waving around up there ahead?

I think that's the end of my rope.

Am wiped. Exhausted. Dunno if it's clear to you, but it's clear to me that the blog is reflecting a kind of controlled panic for about a couple of weeks now. Wonder what will happen if I crack up before the semester's over? Do I get paid or unpaid leave? Should probably find out, just in case. Today I met with my research assistants and was making plans with them for the summer and then suddenly felt terrible that I'm talking as if they can count on me when I'm thinking I might leave. But then again, since I haven't given notice and might end up staying next year, depending on how things are looking, it would be stupid and self-sabotaging to burn bridges now; if I am here, the project will be a good one for them to continue working on, and I don't want to yank the rug out.

Conference coming up soon, ugh. My own paper to write, two panels to manage. Have to pull it together somehow.

Just a few more weeks, right?

(And yes, I think some of this is the drugs, and I need to change or add something and I need to get a decent goddamn shrink. I see my EAP therapist tomorrow. Must do one work-related task I've been putting off. Then, hopefully, Friday, get on the pursuing a real shrink plan.)

Uprootedness; my version of the kids vs. academe "problem"

As profgrrrrl points out, making tenure more "family friendly" i.e. flexible time-wise is nice and all, but there are other reasons why people, perhaps especially women, leave academia. Speaking as the woman with a kid, it isn't the time crunch that's doing it. Instead, as profgrrrrl is saying, it is the uprootedness.

The role that pseudonymous kid plays in making academic life hard is that he makes the uprootedness more acute: when we moved, we left behind babysitters, friends who would come over and hang out, routines. Pseudonymous kid's daycare was at the house of a friend who had a couple of kids his age and who had worked as a nanny before marrying, and who was taking care of p.k. on the side for some extra money. She lived near campus, so after my day was done I'd walk to her house, pick him up, give him a snack out of my bag, walk him to the bus, ride the bus home, stop at the grocery store on the way up to the house, and cook dinner when we got back. 'Twas easy, and it provided time together, exercise, running necessary errands.

Here, when we moved, we had no daycare setup, and there was (of course) a waiting list to get into one. There's no public transportation to speak of, and the weather is dire half the year, so walking and bus-riding aren't options. Being a small town, grocery stores are out on the edges, not near residential areas. We only have the one car, which worked great in the city, but sucks here. So, Mr. B. spends a lot of his time running me back and forth to work, running pseudonymous kid to school, running out to do grocery shopping at the megamart once a week. We have a babysitting swap set up with another junior couple in the department, which helps once every two weeks, but isn't quite as flexible or useful as calling up any of a set of friends who think pseudonymous kid is cute and fun and asking for favors as needed.

So, despite being married, we miss having friends and a social life. If anything, being married maybe makes that harder; one has to arrange for babysitting, one has to coordinate social plans with one's partner (much harder to spontaneously go out for drinks after class with a friend on the hallway). And, oddly, one gets slotted into the "coupled" camp, and mostly invited out by other similarly non-social married folks with kids, which means dinner at someone's house once every few months rather than the more casual, loose socializing that happens around spontaneous coffee or bar dates.

The other big thing is the realization that time is fleeting. Kids, as they say, grow up quickly: thoughts like, "well, we can stay here a few years until something better comes along" seem much less palatable when one realizes that this means that pseudonymous kid's formative years will be spent someplace that I think sucks in terms of culture, diversity, and stimulation; that this will mean yanking him out of school once he's put down roots (so he'll feel uprooted and lonely just as I'm feeling now); that he's living with a kind of unhappy mama; that wonky teaching or research schedules that shift every semester are in conflict with the regular schedules kids in school need. There's also the more metaphysical issue, which is that, for me, having a kid has somehow made me have to learn to be more patient and in the moment, and that makes me less interested in living hectically for some ridiculous potential future gain where, you know, once I have tenure, I'll really start enjoying my job. Fuck that. Kids teach you that you need to enjoy them now; having learned that lesson, I want to enjoy my life now--not "in a few years." If anything, extending the length of time until tenure makes that particular issue more, not less easy to swallow.

None of this, of course, is meant to undersell the real problems that often do come up of timing children, being pregnant and/or nursing, caring for preschool age kids. In my case, we've "solved" some of those problems by having Mr. B. stay home, despite the financial hardship of supporting a family on an assistant professor's salary. But, for me, it isn't the supposed eighty-hour "work" week (although yes, it is hard to have time alone with your thoughts when there are children around who don't realize that mama sitting still means mama thinking); it's the ways that having a kid makes me less willing to settle for shitty work conditions now--including the need for constant mobility (even with a cooperative partner) to shift one's way into a "better" job--in the hopes that they'll magically improve later.

In which I issue a legal opinion

Looky here, I'm gonna blog about Politics with a capital "P." 'Course, it'll really be about abortion, so move right along--it's just girly shit. Plus I'm gonna get ad hominem and call Scalia "stupid."

So the Supremes have decided that executing minors is a bad idea. Yay for them! Scalia dissents, though, partly on the grounds that if young people are old enough to decide to have sex, they are damn well old enough to be killed by the state. His dissent mentions "abortion" three times. Let's look at it, shall we?

1. "the American Psychological Association (APA), which claims in this case that scientific evidence shows persons under 18 lack the ability to take moral responsibility for their decisions, has previously taken precisely the opposite position before this very Court. In its brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U. S. 417 (1990), the APA found a “rich body of research” showing that juveniles are mature enough to decide whether to obtain an abortion without parental involvement. . . . At most, these studies conclude that, on average, or in most cases, persons under 18 are unable to take moral responsibility for their actions. Not one of the cited studies opines that all individuals under 18 are unable to appreciate the nature of their crimes. "

2. "we have recognized that at least some minors will be mature enough to make difficult decisions that involve moral considerations. For instance, we have struck down abortion statutes that do not allow minors deemed mature by courts to bypass parental notification provisions. See, e.g., Bellotti v. Baird, 443 U. S. 622, 643–644 (1979) (opinion of Powell, J.); Planned Parenthood of Central Mo. v. Danforth, 428 U. S. 52, 74–75 (1976). It is hard to see why this context should be any different. Whether to obtain an abortion is surely a much more complex decision for a young person than whether to kill an innocent person in cold blood. "

3. "And let us not forget the Court’s abortion jurisprudence, which makes us one of only six countries that allow abortion on demand until the point of viability. . . . Though the Government and amici in cases following Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S. 113 (1973), urged the Court to follow the international community’s lead, these arguments fell on deaf ears."

First of all, there is a pretty big difference between the state deciding to impose death on someone, and a person making decisions about their own medical care. It behooves the state, I think, to hold a high standard when it comes to killing people. Let me explain why the context is different for Scalia, who is apparently kinda stupid: the issue at hand is not the moral agency of children; it is on the power of the state. Not whether children can or cannot make moral decisions, but whether or not the state should kill people who may not be capable of making informed moral decisions. Hence, as Kennedy writes, "When a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the state cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity." Hence, the decision is a conservative one: before the state can kill someone, it needs to be certain that the person is a mature moral agent. Since mature moral agency is hard to measure, let us err on the side of caution.

Second of all, the idea that we shouldn't care about world opinion since we have more liberal abortion laws than many other places is also foolish. Again, the comparison is invalid: w/r/t both abortion and the death penalty for children, it seems to me that the Supremes are taking an essentially conservative position, which is to restrain the power of the state. This is consistent, not inconsistent. Moreover, there is a major difference between protecting children from state power and "protecting" women from their own moral agency.

Third of all, I find the comparison rhetorically very interesting. It seems to me that in (1) above, Scalia is implying that there is some kind of parallel between punishing children for murder and "punishing" children for getting pregnant. This is not quite what he is saying, of course, but the anti-abortion canard of women taking "moral responsibility for their decisions" is clearly hovering in the background there; likewise, I am highly suspicious of the point about "individuals under 18 are unable to appreciate the nature of their crimes" in the context of comparing murder to abortion. Abortion is not the moral equivalent of murdering a stranger in cold blood. At best, it might be compared roughly to killing in self-defense: the victim in the Simmons case did not move into Simmon's house; he went to hers.

In reference to the rhetoric of (2): again, the phrase "killing an innocent person in cold blood," in the same sentence as "abortion is surely a . . . complex decision" is, ahem, somewhat problematic. Abortion need not, in fact, be a particularly complex decision, precisely because it is not killing an innocent person in cold blood. It is a medical procedure that, yes, ends a life--but not the life of a "person," because--as Scalia points out in (3), abortion is legal up to the point of viability. Personhood is a concept. We generally agree that someone walking around on the street is a person. We are fuzzier on whether the concept applies to someone who draws their sustenance from another's blood supply and cannot breathe or maintain body temperature. When it comes to people who we can sustain with machines, we generally err--conservatively--on the side of considering them "people." When it comes to embryos and fetuses, we are collectively unsure of that distinction, and as a result the question of whether or not abortion is a "moral" issue is, in fact, an open one. That's where the complexity lies, and that is why--again, conservatively--the state needs to stay out of it.

What's wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four

Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I'm talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it's true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are peers and superiors. In academia, the people who observe and evaluate you on a day-to-day basis are distracted 18-year olds who don't understand what your job actually is. Occasionally you go present a paper at a conference, but most of the people there are strangers; very rarely a colleage in your actual department will be aware of work you've done and compliment you on it; periodically an article or whatever comes out, which is nice, but very long-distance and the feedback you get from that is mostly also long-distance and comes from strangers or bare acquaintances. It's a weird gig, and I swear to god a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis.

So, along those lines, allow me to share a few gems from my student evals. Note that, in fact, I generally get good evals: I am entertaining, students think I'm funny and stylish, and my personal affect is a sort of weird combination of demanding and approachable. My weakness as an instructor is that I despise lecturing: I believe firmly in the research that shows that no one listens for more than twenty minutes and my own experience is that I often can't listen to someone nattering at me for more than ten. So I don't do formal lectures, even in big classes. Instead, I work hard to come up with creative ways to hold students accountable and generate a lot of the "lecture" from them: WebCT discussions, starting a lecture by asking questions and soliciting feedback and ideas before moving on to new points, having students do small group work and big group projects. I run lectures as much as possible as large discussions, and try to make students more responsible for their own learning than they often are in the passive read-listen-take-exam model.

Anyway, so blah blah I have a thoughtful informed pedagogy for these big lecture courses, I think. And of course many students say good things about the amount of involvement I expect in a lecture course, about the liveliness of the classroom, about their level of interest in the course material being higher than it usually is in lectures. But of course it's the negative comments we all love best:

"She expects us to be too mature"
"She expects us to actually be interested in the course material on our own" (this was listed as a "weakness" of mine)
"Professor Bitch doesn't know how to lecture"
"Too much work on WebCT! I signed up for a lecture course, not a distance learning course"
"I do not pay to hear what other students think. I pay to hear what the instructor thinks"
"Her regionalisms [from a different part of the country] bother me"
"By requiring us to post on WebCT before class, she forced us to do the reading ahead of time, which is very difficult and unfair for students with other obligations"

These. These are the people who we get the most feedback on our jobs from. No wonder we're depressed.

Update: Given how much exposure this post has gotten, and how commonly it's been misread, I want to clarify something. I am not saying that there is no place for student evaluations. I am saying that it bothers me that, at my university at least, student evaluations are (1) the only feedback we get on teaching; and (2) really, the only regular feedback we get on any aspect of our jobs. I think it is the latter that makes many of us exaggerate the negative comments in our minds and develop a somewhat oppositional attitude towards our students--a phenomenon that I do not, in fact, think is healthy or desireable. Moreover, the specific course that these evaluation comments refer to, as I said, was one in which I had tried to do something innovative with the lecture format. Most of the evaluations indicated that the experiment had been largely successful, and in fact I plan to do a paper on it, because I think it was rather clever of me and the students produced some very interesting work. What annoyed me was that the negative comments did not, in any way, address the strengths and weaknesses of the specific course or assignment; they merely expressed resistance to the fact that the course wasn't what the students thought they'd signed up for, a resistance I interpret as being laziness on the students' part ("I signed up for a lecture so I could sit back, take note, and spew the information back at you on the exam. How dare you ask me to think.") IMHO, while evaluations are important, one down side is that they can and do encourage this kind of "customer service" attitude towards the professoriate--an attitude that I think is inimical to really good teaching and learning. IMHO, reframing evaluations to encourage students to reflect on how and what they learned, and to offer feedback on how and what they might have learned better, would be truly valuable. Presenting them to students--as if often done--as evaluations, not of the course but of the instructor, fails to do that.