Seriously, what is wrong with this guy, Part 2

I was at the Jiffy Lube this morning, getting an oil change. W's press conference this morning was on TV. Six people were in the waiting room, and I swear no one looked up at the TV once, they were all so engrosed in their People magazines. But my ears perked up when I heard this question:

Mr. President, recently Amnesty International said you have established, quote, a new gulag of prisons around the world beyond the reach of the law and decency.

I'd like your reaction to that, and also your assessment of how it came to this -- that that is a view not just held by extremists and anti-Americans, but by groups that have allied themselves with the United States government in the past, and what the strategic impact is that in many places in the world the United States these days under your leadership is no longer seen as the good guy.

Oh, this oughta be good.

Mr. Bush (smirking): I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. It's an absurd allegation.

The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world. When there's accusations made about certain actions by our people, they're fully investigated in a transparent way.

It's just an absurd allegation.

In terms of, you know, the detainees, we've had thousands of people detained. We've investigated every single complaint against the detainees.

It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of and the allegations by people that were held in detention, people who hate America, people that have been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic], that means not tell the truth.

And so it was an absurd report. It just is.

No, Mr. President. What is absurd is that we have a president who is disassembling American credibility. Who is disassembling the rule of law in America. Who is disassembling America's complience with the UN Convention on Torture. Who is disassembling accountability in the government and the military. Who is disassembling any shred of respect America had in the world as a beacon of freedom. Who has been dissembling all along about our reasons for going to war. Who has been dissembling about what has been going on in Guantanamo Bay and in prisons in Iraq and Afganistan. Who has, in fact, disassembled the transparency of which he speaks and engendered a whole culture of dissembling under his civilian and military chains of command.

Or, as Amnesty's Executive director William Schulz said:

What is 'absurd' is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration.

What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the Bush administration's failure to undertake a full independent investigation.

If you haven't heard anything about Amnesty's report, it makes for some sobering reading. Here it is: href="http://web.amnesty.org/report2005/usa-summary-eng">Amnesty International's Report on Human Rights in the USA, 2004

There was no follow-up question, by the way.

NeuroScience Sells Out?

Deep Throat outed himself, proving that Nixon's downfall had the additional element of an unofficial FBI coup (as Nixon himself suspected. But he suspected everyone. Perhaps this goes in the "even paranoids have enemies" file?). Lots of other news today, too.

But I'm going to blog on a topic I find more fascinating - and appropriate for this particular weblog. The NYTimes reports that, "romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal."

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

The report concerns a forthcoming report in the The Journal of Neurophysiology. But the kicker here is important: "Brain imaging technology cannot read people's minds, experts caution, and a phenomenon as many sided and socially influenced as love transcends simple computer graphics, like those produced by the technique used in the study, called functional M.R.I. "

Anyway, reading this made me think of Dr. B, her boyfriend, and Mr. B. Perhaps some of the confusion/frustration of this earlier post is due more to her neural circuitry than anything else.

Now, for academic purposes, I've been looking into the application of brain imaging technology in advertising (known as "Neuromarketing"). This is extremely controversial - and flying under everyone's radar right now. Based in Atlanta, a new organization called BrightHouse is pioneering the application of fMRI for consumer research. Here is how they sell Neuromarketing:

Neurostrategies - Dr. Justine Meaux and her team have been at the intersection of neuroscience and business since the idea for the world's first neeroscience practice was birthed at BrightHouse. Today, this cutting edge group is carving out a whole new place in research. Tasked with a better understanding of how human beings think and buy, Dr.Meaux is discovering unprecedented insights into the emotional connections to brands and the businesses that spawn them. The group has conducted studies for Fortune 500 companies resulting in ground shifting insights. Presently, Dr. Meaux and her colleagues are lecturing around the globe. A worldwide conference is being schedules at BrightHouse for March 2006.

BrightHouse is the brainchild of one of Atlanta's top advertisers and Emory University. Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but all this mucking around in our brains cannot be very good for Joe and Jane Doe. As a society, we cannot find a cure for cancer, but we can discover that Pepsi and Coke stimulate different parts of the brain?

Now I know what to call him!

From November, 2004Speaking of Weird Names:

Pseudonymous kid, who is incredibly cranky with this sick thing (but not puking any more, thankfully), says:

"You are a stupid! Idiot! Potato chip!"

Which would be a great blog name, if I didn't already have one.

There is a stupid. Idiot. Potato Chip in my life. I will call him that. Thank you, PK.

The white (wo)man's burden

I wanted to link to the comments about school systems and white flight in PoJ's recent post up to the main page, because it's a great topic, because the discussion is really good, and in order to provide a fresh new thread for it to continue. (There are a couple of comments before the one I linked to, but it was here that the discussion really got going.)

And then, when John Emerson sent me an email noting that my embarrassing gaffe of confusing Dominica with the Dominican Republic had been reproduced by "Clifford Fucking Geertz" in the NYRB, I couldn't help laughing. I mean, of all people.

So, thanks to Dr. Geertz for providing a nice introduction to a discussion of institutionalized racism, ignorance, and education. The fact of the matter is, as Peggy McIntosh's well-known article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack points out, in this country, at this time, it's really impossible not to operate within a racist nexus, and therefore to perpetuate racism. And, imho as a white liberal (more or less), one of my pet peeves is that pesky problem of white liberal guilt. The problem with feeling guilty is that one wants, naturally, reassurance (guilt is so terribly uncomfortable), which can end up taking different forms: defensiveness and denial mostly. "My decision to do X has nothing to do with racism, because I'm not racist" or "people are way too sensitive about racial slurs, c'mon, get over it already" or "well, most of the people I know aren't racist (in the actively, consciously bigoted sense), so the problems you're pointing to probably have nothing to do with racism." And so on.

Now, I truly think that one of the best ways to get past that paralyzing and annoying and counter-productive guilt bullshit is just to learn to recognize onself as part of a larger whole; and, in my own education, learning to think past guilt (not, of course, always successfully) was probably one of the best things I ever learned how to do.

A vivid memory. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I was in a bilingual program, Spanish/English. This was in lieu of putting me in honors, which my parents saw as a covert way of perpetuating segregation in a "desegregated" school--they also refused to let me advance a grade, so I was often fairly bored in school, and they compromised by putting me in the bilingual program, figuring that even if the math I learned wasn't new to me, the language would be. As the only native English speaker in my classes, then, I was often tapped to help tutor (the teachers had a pretty progressive pedagogy, where students would work together and help teach each other things--it wasn't all top-down education). One day, I was set up with a boy, whose name I don't remember, who was new to the classroom and who had very little English. And we were told to talk for the next ten minutes about anything we liked, but to do so only in English, so that he could practice. So, we talked a bit, and then I ran into something that he didn't understand, and I tried saying it in different words, but he still wasn't getting it--there was some key word, I don't remember what, that was a stumper. So I switched over and gave the Spanish translation of the key word, and continued, in Spanish, by asking if that was enough and he understood what I had been saying now? And he, relieved, replied in Spanish, yeah, that helps, thanks. Anyone who's ever had to learn a second language knows how much work it is to talk in a language you don't know well even for just ten minutes, and what an enormous relief it is to be able to switch back into a language where you can actually express yourself.

And the teacher heard us, and came over, and said, "hey, I asked you two not to speak Spanish!" And my conversation partner said, "well, she did it first!" And I, being about nine years old, got scared and said, "no I didn't!"

And the teacher, who was himself Latino, said to my partner without any further enquiry, "don't lie." I can still remember the look of anger and betrayal that kid gave me. And I realized, suddenly, that the teacher had believed me, and not this other kid, because I was a "good student"--and that a lot of my "good student" status in this class had to do with the fact that I was the brainiac white kid, who'd been deliberately put in this classroom, and that the teachers thought my presence there was terribly progressive (while the other kids were there because they "had" to be), and, well, all those things made me something of the teacher's pet. And that this wasn't my fault, and that the teacher--who was a really good teacher, actually, very fair-minded--wasn't being unfair on purpose; it was just the way things are. And that my conversation partner knew that too, and was really pissed off at me because I could get away with speaking Spanish and he couldn't, precisely because it wasn't my first language.

This is one of my most vivid memories from elementary school. There are others, very similar--the fact that I won class president in the sixth grade because I delivered my speech and put up posters in both English and Spanish--all the candidates were white, though the school was pretty mixed, and I was the only person who campaigned to the brown kids as well as the white ones. Or the time my best girlfriend and I were walking down the hall, and she suddenly veered away as a boy, walking the other direction, reached out and grabbed my crotch--and afterwards, pissed off, I said to her, "how did you know he was going to do that?" and she said, "oh, him? Everybody in the neighborhood knows he's like that" and I realized that I wasn't in that particular neighborhood, and so I didn't know. Or the time, the same year, that the seventh-grade pot dealer, teasing me, told me that he'd give me whatever I wanted "on the house," because unlike the other white kids I was "cool." And when I said hell no, I don't smoke pot, he laughed and said, of course you don't, because you're a schoolgirl, and I realized that I had this weird kind of insider status on both sides of the fence.

And I wouldn't have learned those things if I'd been in honors math class instead of the bilingual classes, or if I'd been in the "safe" schools on the other side of town. In high school, my parents broke down a bit and sent me to the Catholic school a few blocks from my house, which was much whiter--and most of my friends were the few students of color, and most of the guys I dated lived on the "bad" side of town, and the white kids were always amazed that I felt comfortable driving over there to see my boyfriends. My best friend, who is currently teaching at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, went to a "better" college than I did, and we both waited tables over the summers, and when customers would chit-chat with us and I said I was in college, they believed me, but they said to her, "oh come on, you *wish* you went to Big Ivy." A lot of that shit is invisible to most middle-class white kids--through no fault of their own--and when I used to tell those stories in some of the classes I taught, the white kids would start out saying, "oh, I'm sure that the teacher wasn't being racist, he just didn't hear you speaking Spanish but he heard the other kid"--until I said, "and what about this story? And this one? And this one?" And the students of color would say, "I was that brown kid, and the teachers *never* believed me," and then the white kids would say, "really? wow," and get kind of quiet and say, well, maybe yeah, after all. And then sometimes they'd start to see that there were things they just *did not know* that the brown kids did, and that not knowing was not their fault, but that nonetheless, it was a kind of ignorance, a kind of racism.

So I'm really glad, actually, that my parents had the guts not to protect me from the "bad" kids, or the drug dealers, or the boys who would grab my crotch in the halls (and yes, white students also deal drugs--the coke dealer in my high school was a white boy--and they also sexually harass girls, but it would have been very easy for my parents to hear those stories when I was in middle school and react by wanting me to be in a "safer" school). Because, really, when I was academically bored, I would just pull out a book and read after I'd finished the class work, and with two parents who were teachers, we did a lot of stuff at home that made up for the academic failings of my schools, but I would not have learned some of the things I learned at a "better" school. I wouldn't have seen my parents working with black and Latino parents to improve the schools I was in, and I wouldn't have seen how much easier it was for my parents to get teachers and principals to make exceptions for me (like putting me in the bilingual program, or letting me read my own books during class) when similar exceptions weren't made for other kids.

And those things were a pretty damn important part of my education.

Update: a couple of links.

1. Landismom's story of her decisions about where to put her kid in daycare--noting that nowadays, it is often the suburbs that are more integrated than the cities, what with the cost of housing.

2. An article from last May, that still stays with me, about one woman's experience integrating white schools after Brown v. Board:

Josephine's relatives worried for her safety. "She is going to get killed, that was my first thought," said Spencer Dungee, a cousin. He organized carloads of friends to patrol the school the first few mornings, just in case.

But Josephine and her parents apparently did not fully appreciate the danger.

"I thought the school would be able to take care of one child," Boyd said. "But we found out differently, in a hurry."

Any outburst, even tears, her parents had told her, would hand her tormentors a psychological advantage. Only once did she allow herself to be provoked. On that day, a white boy pushed her into a locker and passed along a crude message from his father, saying he had had sex with her mother the previous night. Josephine pushed back; a teacher broke up the scuffle.

The teacher did not want to hear about who had started it, Bradley said. "If you pass another lick," she warned Josephine, "you will be sent home."

"Why wouldn't he be sent home? " Josephine asked.

"Because you're the perpetrator," the teacher answered.

There were times she wanted to quit, like the days she had to go home to change her food-splattered clothes. Down the road in Charlotte, Dorothy Counts, the first black student at Harding High, had been pulled out by her parents the first week, after white students pelted her with rocks and shattered the rear window of the family car.

But Josephine persisted, feeling the weight of obligation. She learned that Greensboro High, with its expansive campus and big gymnasium, was nothing like Dudley. The books she received were new, while the worn texts at Dudley typically bore six or seven signatures. The science lab, she noticed, was fully equipped with microscopes. Dudley's had three.

Josephine was an outcast in two worlds. She began the year eating lunch alone in the library, and put aside any interest in school clubs and activities. Meanwhile, many of her black friends kept their distance. The boys she had dated her junior year no longer seemed interested. Her cousin, Spencer, escorted her to the Dudley prom.

"It was hard to understand then," Bradley said. "But I understand now that jobs of parents could have been in jeopardy had their children been noted to be friends of mine."

Bradley doesn't remember a thing about June 4, 1958, the day she became the first black student to graduate from a previously all-white public school in North Carolina. A telephone caller had warned there would be a coffin waiting for her at Brown's Funeral Home if she attended the ceremony. She went anyway.

No kid should have to go through that--and the woman profiled chose not to send her daughter to a school where she would be the only black child, not wanting her to have to repreat her mother's experience. But it's worth keeping this sort of thing in mind when we talk about not wanting to put our kids in any but the best, safest schools--the cost that black parents and their children were willing to pay to try to change things.

Memorial Day Thoughts

While you feast upon the charred, rendered flesh of one of God's beloved creatures, take a moment to remember.....

... All those who died to keep China British.

In all seriousness, I noticed a commentator on an earlier thread signed off "libertarian soldier." I suspect this blog, with its huge readership, has both active-duty personnel and the spouses/relatives of active duty or reserve personnel among its readership. And that got me thinking...

It seems that to many of us the last acceptable stereotype is that of the American soldier/sailor/marine as a deeply conservative, misguided, ignorant, impoverished redneck. Some might pity the person that is this caricature - and others might despise them. But we should remember that right now there are plenty of enlightened people in the military who are liberal, conscientious, and intelligent. Some are gay. I'd be willing to bet that there are plenty of soldiers who understand why the policies of the current administration are misguided and troubling. I know veterans (no active duty personnel, to be honest) who have told me that I'd be surprised at just how reflective the military is of the society. Both Democrats and Republicans serve. There are probably some libertarians, and even Greens, too.

These are the soldiers I'll be thinking about and honoring this weekend.

One superstar not leaving the "leaky pipeline"

News from a good friend or mine, who I've known since college -- more specifically, since her first day of college (my sophomore year), when she was just a babe of 17, full of brillance and potential but also just a bundle of insecurity (or, more likely, just a normal amount of insecurity for a 17- year old girl who already knows some group theory, which is a lot). Anyways, I just talked to her last night, and she's just accepted a faculty job in an engineering department at a great university (which happens to be in my hometown). She's in a field that hires people just out of, or a year or two out of, grad school, as opposed to mine, where we languish in postdoctitude forever, which is how she caught up to me (well, of course that and the fact that she's a superstar).

She holds a special place in my heart, because in a way she was the first person younger than me (just one year but these things matter when you're 17) that I feel that I mentored in some way. Though, all along I have to say that I always felt I would make it though sheer willpower, where it was clear to me that her brilliance was going to get her through. And, although I know a lot of very educated people, I just realized that she's actually my only good friend that I knew before graduate school that went on to get a PhD. She's also just about the only friend I can think of (excluding people in my field, which is full of people who think they are smarter than everyone else), that when I first met her it was just crystal clear to me that she was much, much, smarter than me -- but in college (which was full of mostly male smart geeky people) she certainly didn't believe this or believe in herself as much as it was clear to me that she should. And I feel like I played at least some tiny part in upping that confidence at a critical juncture when we were both a lot younger.

She had every reason to leave academia: she's in a field where there are plenty of other options, and more money to be made, outside of it; she is married to a great, accomplished, slightly older man who is more well established in his career and is not very movable (PhD but not in academics), they love where they live now, and they want to have kids very soon. She applied to faculty jobs this year fully expecting that she might not take one even if it was offered. When we last talked a couple of months ago, she had several offers in hand but it seemed that she was leaning towards staying where she is and taking a job in industry. Which might have been just great for her, but from my clearly myopic position in the academy it sure as hell seemed like it would have been a loss for her field and for all of her future students, and for all the rest of us women trying to make it in science and engineering departments in major universities. Me, I love my science, but my stubbornness (which is just as essential as any talent or love of my field I might have) comes in large part because I feel like it's important that *I* be doing what I'm doing, as opposed to just another guy who looks like your average 5th grader's drawing
of a scientist. I never got the sense that she felt that way about herself, which is completely respectable, but does make it easier to make different choices.

But gosh darn it if this university didn't just do everything right in recruiting her! First of all, they have clearly been doing something right already, since they already have 20% women faculty in this depatment (where I'm sure the national average is less than 10%) -- but they also made her a fantastic offer, including doing specific things that seem likely to help her suceed and a great start-up package and regular flights for the husband for a while so that he has time to figure out a more permanent solution. Kudos to him, by the way, for encouraging her to do this, when there were clearly easier options for the two of them that put her career at just a bit of a lesser priority than his. Anyways, congrats to her, on the job, and for everything she has accomplished since the day we met almost half our lives ago. I couldn't be prouder, and I couldn't be more delighted that she has decided to take a job in academia at a place that seems as likely as any to truly help her succeed. And congrats to the department and the institution for doing all these things right -- they are going to be very lucky to have her. If they continue to do things right she might even find that this choice makes her both happy *and* successful. Here's hoping.

It's been a while

since I bitched about my health care, so obviously I was overdue for some frustrating news.

I had an abnormal pap about two months ago. The doc called with the results and suggested we follow up with another in six months (rather than the standard year). I said, uhm, no, given my sex life and the fact that I don't feel comfortable wandering around for six months knowing that something is "abnormal" about my cervix, I'd like to do a follow-up pap now, if that's quite all right with you. So I had the second pap in April. The doc promised to call with the results, good or bad, but then they didn't call and I got busy with work and assumed that meant it was normal but I was going to call at some point, and then I went on vacation and had forgotten about it.

Of course, this means that I got a call today saying they want to give me a referral because the second test also had abnormal results. Also of course, the person calling was the receptionist, calling to schedule the referral, and she couldn't tell me anything about the results or what we're going to do next. So I said, well, look, I'm out of town and we can't schedule anything until I get back, but let's do that and will you please have the nurse call me and explain the results and what happens next? Grr.

Luckily, since I am at the boyfriend's, I have a huge box of books thanks to y'all, including the new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves to refer to and get some information, since my doc apparently doesn't feel it's his job to give me any. Yesterday I finished reading The Story of Jane, which is fantastic and eye-opening and empowering and makes a very strong case that not just abortion, but all women's health care (and men's, for that matter) should be collaborative, informed, and respectful, so I'm feeling pretty pro-active on the health front right now. And, of course, it is probably nothing, these two abnormal paps. But even so.

A few years ago, before Pseudonymous Kid, I had a cyst in my left breast. Mr. B. was the one who discovered it, one morning, when he woke up and said, "what is that blood coming from your nipple?" Freaky. I had to have a mammogram (my first, and for the record, not bad at all) and some weird procedure where they snaked a wire into my nipple to draw out some tissue or discharge or something and find out what was going on, and I fainted (also for the first and only time in my life) because, damn, a wire in your nipple? Yikes. But in the end it was fine, just a little cyst, and it went away on its own. It wasn't until I got the results, though, that I realized how worried I'd been. I knew, of course, that at my age and with my health history the probability that it was the big C was extremely low, and so I had thought I wasn't terribly worried about it, just a little annoyed by the inconvenience and uncertainty. But when I got the "everything's okay" call, I felt this enormous wave of relief wash over me and realized I'd been carrying around a little unconscious worry for about a month while we went through all the testing.

So now I guess I can admit that I'm worried about this stupid pap thing. There'd better not be anything wrong with my cervix--I like it, and I have plans for it. But I have to sit around now wondering if everything's okay inside the famous Bitch reproductive tract until July, and I'm willing to bet the doc's office won't call back today and I'll end up calling them and having to hassle them into telling me what little they know.

Frustrating shit. Thank god I insisted on doing the follow-up pap right away. Feel free to offer reassurance, empathy, acknowledgment of the irony that I got this call while I'm visiting C., or actual information about abnormal paps, please.

Also, should I start using the stupid condoms again just in case?

"Affordable Family Formation" in the USA

Via Kausfiles this morning: an interesting theory. Conservative Steve Sailer makes a very persuasive case that "affordable family formation" has been the key to Republican success. And it will continue to be.

I cannot claim to have any kind of expertise to assess the support for his argument. But anecdotally ("what's the plural of anecdote? Data!") it seems to make sense. Take Dr. B as an instructive example. She and Mr. B. took a job in nowheresville - Red State central - in order to further her career, purchase a home that Mr. B. could work on, and live somewhere where one salary would make this life possible. She seems to be rueing that choice, but we'll see how that turns out.

I know plenty of academics who are having trouble cutting it in San Francisco, Boston, and DC on $40 or even $50 grand a year. Decent homes within a 30-minute commute are moving north of $400K in these citites. Add in a second child, and look out! The second full-time salary becomes a necessity. And what makes it even more annoying - as one grad school friend of mine told me - she looks over at the Chair of her Department and sees somebody who owns a house worth over $1 million, with three children put through college tuition-free, who stopped serious scholarship about fifteen years ago. In the meantime, her school no longer provides a substantial tuition discount (unless her son goes to the huge state university that employs her) and no professor is going to land a mortgage to live in the Chair's neighborhood without substantial family subsidy ("Mommy? Daddy? We need to talk...."). And the Chair - who she is friendly with - pulled her aside last year and asked why she applied for other jobs! (she's t-t and doing quite well).

Frankly, I think many of our senior colleagues have no idea of what is going on. But at least one does. When my wife and I had dinner with her, she estimated that in the 25 years since she arrived at the University salaries have gone from about 20K to about 50k (this is a major urban area we are talking about). But in the same time the cost of a house has risen more than 20 times (the same $100K house in 1977 is a $2 million house today).

O.K., I'll stop bitching. That's Dr. B's perogative. But I'll also note that the people really being screwed in this system - essentially for the rest of their lives - are the childless by choice types and those not permitted to marry and raise kids by the state. Not only do they pay more in taxes and housing, but their political representation gets diluted because they are concentrated in fewer geographic areas.

Propaganda & Our President

Via Fark, the President of the USA:

If you've retired, you don't have anything to worry about -- third time I've said that. (Laughter.) I'll probably say it three more times. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. (Applause.)

Here is the White House's transcript of the speech.

Seriously, what is wrong with this guy?

From NPR this morning, quotes from a stop on the President's bamboozlepalooza social security tour, talking with the regular folks:

GWB: "I like explaining the situation"....

GWB: "You are Audrey Ciblensky."

AC: "That's right. I'm a 70 year old widow."

GWB: "Don't ever say your age."

AC: "Oh, I have no problem. Don't ask me my weight."

GWB: "he he"

GWB: "You look great. You look like 100 to me."

GWB: "That's where you are going to be. 30 more years."

Oh boy.

a proper hello

pseudonymous guest blogger #3 here. been a bit slow to take up the blogging duties the past few days, super busy at work catching up from travel and then actually took the weekend off since my boyfriend who lives across the country was in town and i won't see him again for more than a month. (ah, the joys of academic coupledom, which i see many of you readers are all too familiar with). and yesterday and today the insightful musings of bitch herself and the bitch of christmas past have been a tough act to follow! (plus, excuses excuses, i installed tiger
on my G5 on monday, and of course got distracted by getting everything up and running. more on that later). but i figured i should say a proper hello anyways.

first, i wanted to let you all know that i was supremely flattered to be asked to guest blog in this space for a few weeks, cause it has recently become just about my favorite blog to read, full super smart comment (from both host and commenters!) on lots of great wide-ranging topics that i find pretty relevant. although i have only been an infrequent commenter here (life's been a bit busy lately...), i admitted to bphd a short while ago that the urge to blog has been hitting me strongly lately. i've been putting it off, since i'm trying to get a tenure-track job in the next year and stuff, and i should probably be writing papers instead of blog posts. but bphd is just so sweet that she's given me (and PorJ and pseudonymous colleage, of
course) a ready-made audience, which is hard to refuse.

anyways, i'll never live up to bitchphd's wit, nor to her prolificness, but i'm already having fun, since you are all just a
great and lively and intelligent crowd. (i think i'm even tough enough to deal with people calling my first post "more than a little stupid" -- i'm a women in an extremely male-dominated subfield of science, so i've learned not to faze too easily ;)

given my short warning for the gig, i still haven't come up with a super snappy name to go by (which will at present not be my own, since i'm not sure what i will decide to write about and i'd like to see how that goes before self-censoring). i thought very briefly about going as dr. science, just to help dispell the still very prevalant myth that all scientists look like this guy -- occasionally, some of them even wear red high heels! -- but really, that one's taken. so for now, i think i'll just sign off as

-- pseudonymous rocket scientist

and say thanks for reading whatever nonsense i end up putting forth.

Feminism, (open) marriage, and fucking around: some preliminary thoughts

This is one of the the first-ever Bitch, PhD posts I read. Although I didn't know it at the time, it prepared me for things I would not have imagined and what looks to be a very happy stage in my life. So for curiousgirl and as a thank-you, I re-give you this post from August 2004.

Stimulated by the most recent issue of Scholar & Feminist Online - Young Feminists Take on the Family, which includes an (iffy) article about adultery: while I agree with the essay's main point, that adultery can be seen as a form of resistance against marriage, I think Kipnis (cited in the article, and also, before, by me on this blog) said it much better. Largely because Johnson, in this article, seems to be arguing against marriage but for monogamy (of a sort): her betrayal comes when her married lover promises not to sleep with his wife any more and then, of course, does. Also there's a weird bit in there about wearing his wedding ring, which she speculates makes her somehow queerly married to his wife: this is actually an interesting idea, that I'll try to address either here or at a later point, but she doesn't explore it and just kind of leaves it sitting there, seeming a kind of outrageous wishful thinking.

Anyway, other than that article, I have just started glancing through the essays on the site, but the subjects of them alone--the myth of "Doing It All," "The Myth of Balance," the "Privilege and Emotional Energy" of motherhood--are tapping into stuff that has been going on for me the last couple of days, so I will use them as a jumping off point. This may be a rather kaleidoscopic entry; I hope to return to some of the issues I'll probably just gloss here, maybe develop them at another point. (Would that this were the material of my primary research field; alas, it is not.)

The pieces:

1. Fighting with Mr. B. the last couple of days about how he runs (or, as I am arguing, fails to run) the house. Blog not called "bitch" for nothing: I can be demanding and unforgiving. In my defense, however, Mr. B. was adamant that being the primary house person was what he really wanted to do, even though I initiated several conversations before our move about whether or not he really meant it, how much work it was, how it seemed to me that his free time was not spent futzing with the house but instead doing other hobbies, etc. So part of my current anger is the intellectual dishonesty and lack of self-awareness thing.

2. Fucking around: though I fear my "queen of het open marriage" crown may slip a bit on admitting this, in fact our open relationship has been largely theoretical since we tied the knot lo these many years ago. While we were dating and living together, I did indeed fuck other people. Once we got married, I didn't; the openness up to this point has consisted of Mr. B. fooling around on a few occasions with two different women, and me getting highschool hot n' heavy with a guy at my 10-year hs reunion (no penetration, b/c no condoms), trying to seduce someone (unsuccessfully) last year, and a very drunken attempt on both our parts to initate a 4some with some friends of ours that resulted in me making out with my girlfriend, showing off for her sexy boyfriend, and that was about it.

3. Affairs: married men looking to cheat. Man, these guys are easy to meet, especially online where my profile says up front that I, too, am married and want "discretion" (not b/c of Mr. B., though, but b/c of my job, which is always misunderstood initially). What fascinates me about all these married guys is that they love their wives. Now, mine isn't a scientific sample because if a man starts to run his wife down to me, I wind up the conversation (polite to the end) and then block his ass; but I would say that the ratio of loving (cheating) husbands to men who think that the way to court another woman is to tell her all the bad things about your wife is, ime, about 4:1.

4. Talking to Mr. B. about all this. This might sound strange, but it makes perfect sense: ever since we have known one another, Mr. B. and I have agreed that the biggest problem with monogamy is that it preemptively cuts off one possible avenue of growth. You are not allowed to explore this set of feelings, this person, what you can learn here, because it is "wrong." To me, that seems deeply fucked up and inimical to love. I love Mr. B. (even though he is pissing me off this weekend), and he loves me, and therefore why in the earth would we want to put limits on each other? Fooling around, getting crushes on others, or (as I'm doing now) really pursuing relationships and/or fucking other people is a pretty profound learning experience.

I would say this is so even if you don't think much about what you're doing: one of my closest friends has twice had affairs. The first time was as she was getting ready to leave her husband, and she married the guy she was fooling around with; the second time was a year after the second marriage. It was, of course, very risky--but I think it taught both her and her husband a lot about themselves individually and as a couple. I offer her as an example because she is very instinctive and impulsive: when these things happened, I tried to ask her what she thought they "meant," and her response was, basically, "huh?" And yet, from the outside, and watching her work through these things with the men involved, it is clear to me that they were a (dangerous, risky) learning experience, a way of testing the relationships. Though she and I are very different, we share this important quality: we need to know that when push comes to shove, our friends and partners will stick it out, argue it through, rather than impose arbitrary boundaries and limits. (This is a theme; see (1) above, and I shall return to it at the end, I think.)

Back to (4): one thing my recent adventures have really taught me is that there are different aspects to this open marriage thing. One is that the extracurricular activities really have nothing to do with the main event: other than a little "hehe, good for you!" kind of thing, most of our fucking around up to this point has been pretty meaningless. I know that people don't always get this "how are you not jealous?" thing, but it just has always felt like how you are about your friends' sexual adventures: giddy, maybe titillating, amusing, entertaining, and largely having little or nothing to do with the friendship itself.

But there's apparently this other side, too, where it does have to do with the marriage. More backstory (I analyze anecdotally and digressively; this explains both why I chose my job, and why I worry that I'm not as good a critic as I think I "should" be, but that is a topic for another day). A year or two ago (big scary revelation here! blogfodder for many years to come! another reason for anonymity!) I made a pass at--gasp--a student. Well, I waited 'til he was not my student any more, because I am neither stupid nor mean, but once that grade was in, I propositioned him. I feel the need to explain that I was very principled about it: I was on my way to another job, so I knew I would never have him in a class again; during class, despite his obvious flirting with me, I stayed friendly but professional; I never ever touched him, though we met a couple of times (I have touched him since those initial moments, after we became friends); and, in the end, he couldn't get his head 'round my marriage, so I settled into being the friendly older woman mentor figure I am, for him, to this day. Anyway. An old friend, who I talked to about this, asked: "what is it you are getting out of this boy that you are not getting from Mr. B.?" At the time I thought that was the wrong question to ask. But it stuck with me, and I am starting to realize what it means.

The truth, I think, is that it is impossible for one person to be "everything" to someone else. Impossible and, I think, cruel: setting the other person (and, incidentally, yourself) up to fail. In part, this is the answer to the "why open marriage?" question in a nutshell: because I think it is loving to deal with your fear in order not to limit the other person's growth. Yes, my standards are high (which is why you do not want to be keeping my house), but at least I try to avoid a double standard. Now, surely there are people who have such issues with jealousy and fears of betrayal that it is best for them and their partners to agree that there are limits: here, monogamy has its uses. But I think that for most people, garden-variety jealousy and fear is, or can be, or should be, a way to learn: what is it you are afraid of? What is it that you are not getting (or giving)? What does your crush on this other person, or your partner's crush, say about who they are that they didn't know before? In other words, as my friend asked: "what do you get out of 'cheating' that you don't get at home?"

Now, a lot of these married men, it seems to me, get something very simple, something that I get too, and empathize with. This is partly my response to the Johnson article I linked at the top, my sense that my feminism means that learning what "cheating" means to me means beginning to recognize, and empathize with, what it means to married men. Fucking someone you love is terrifying, requiring enormous vulnerability; to try to manage the fear, probably a lot of people have pretty bad sex, b/c while you need to get off, you are not going to take the risks involved in opening up and really communicating much, sexually. A lot of these married guys seem caught in this trap: their wives put them off, they don't know how to get around it, they are horny, they look around a bit, but they end up just feeilng guilty and sad because what they really want, hand to god, is to fuck--to communicate with--their wives.

I said to someone recently that I want to give all these men feminist cards to sign, because if they only realized it, the feminist project is their best friend: get women to feel entitled (to sex, to autonomy, to money) and they will find it less threatening to admit what they want, and they will be able to have better sex, more often, if their husbands love them and are also willing to take those risks; or, to decide that this is not the marriage for them, if not. (This is part of the way that I think the "married to his wife" thing in the Johnson article might make sense, and part of why I won't listen to men complain about their wives: it is obvious to me that if your sex life is unsatisfying, it ain't entirely her fault, and so I tell the unhappy, sweet, thinking-of-cheating men that they need to tell their wives what they are telling me.) Yes, it's a risk. But the alternative, it seems to me, is to live in a tiny box for the rest of your life.

So, better sex and better relationships through entitlement: this, at least, is true for me, and it is what I'm exploring right now with by fucking around. With someone who I am not married to, who I do not have to deal with next week, next month, next year, I can feel free to try something embarrassing; I can feel free to be, frankly, as whorish as I like; I can feel free to be entitled, goddamnit. This includes entitled to say no: no, I won't do that, no, I won't pretend to believe that your wife is just frigid. With my partner, I am afraid--not to say no, I am halfway to feminist perfection--but to say yes. What if I do something that he thinks is freaky, or that he finds so very titillating and erotic that I have to do it from here on out, forever? So, sticking strictly to sex, what one gets out of it is a chance to explore things in a less-fraught environment; ideally, one then processes that shit and brings it home and expands one's sex life with one's partner.

But obviously there is more to it than just sex. There is the little domestic, date-like stuff: enjoying knowing that someone has made an effort to impress you, enjoying making an effort to impress someone else, being kind, being considerate, being on your best behavior. You know you should do that--all the preachy marriage manuals tell you to--but there is a huge difference between knowing it intellectually and knowing it by feeling it. Date-boy cleaned the hell out of his apartment just in case I showed up; I groomed the hell out of my body and took him to a very nice restaurant for dinner, one I could barely afford. And I found myself thinking, over dinner: "wow. I really should take Mr. B. out to a nice dinner like this some time, leave pseudonymous kid at home with a sitter, we should have an evening like this, we always say we can't afford it but fuck that shit, when you're dating spending money on your partner is a priority." And Mr. B. told me later that he was thinking, while I was gone, "gee, I really should probably make more of an effort not to always look so frumpy, I should shave more, I should take my bitchy wife less for granted." And, since I started this whole sex-chat leading to dating thing, we have been much more courtly of one another, and it's been great, I'm telling you, though it's embarrassing for both of us, and hard, because my god! who is going to notice these changes more than the person who lives with you? And then they'll know that this isn't, actually, the way you "really" live, and the illusion will be blown, and oh no, they'll know that you are actually trying and ahhhh! what if they reject me?

But you know, if you love someone or you want to have decent sex, you need to stick your neck out. I've talked to Mr. B. about what I'm enjoying about these sex chats, aspects of my (sexual) personality that I haven't found a way to talk about before, and that, too, is cool. So yes, there is actually a little bit of jealousy, a little bit of a threat there, in the sense of a challenge to integrate this new stuff into the old relationship. But isn't that the challenge of marriage? Isn't marriage, by definition, threatening in that way? Here we have two people who have promised to spend the rest of their lives together, or to try. Shit. Presumably you want growth, you want to grow as a person over your life. That means change. How is that going to fit into the promise? How are you going to handle it when your partner makes you a promise ("I want to keep house") or takes a new job, and you have your doubts, but you go along with it, and then it doesn't work out? How are you going to handle that learning in a way that holds them to a standard without tearing into them for failing?

Somehow, compared to housekeeping, sex seems like a very safe place for finding out some of that stuff.

What we talk about when we talk about love

Notes towards something. There are things trying to be said here that are buried or obscured, sleights of hand that intentionally divert attention from what I'm really thinking, ideas that I feel are only half-true (or less), clumsiness and incoherence. None of this matters so much; take what has meaning for you, and I'll do the same.

Seeing the boyfriend always makes me very happy, but it also makes me a little sad, too. I can't spend as much time with him as I'd like, and lately he seems unhappy, which I think is about work/money shit. But he doesn't really share those worries with me, so sometimes I feel a little distanced by that, and I react to that by trying, in probably really clumsy and stupid ways, to reassure him or to reassure myself, and yet all that seems to do is make me feel stupidly insecure, and make him (probably) feel like a fuckup because I'm feeling insecure and that's the last thing he wants me to feel, and so it ends up being a goddamn vicious cycle.

And Mr. B., same thing. I haven't blogged about this much, on privacy grounds, but fuck it, I'm thinking out loud here. He left a career about seven or more years ago, a career he really loved and excelled at. And then he worked for a few years at jobs that ranged from "eh, okay" to "I hate this job," primarily to keep me in grad school. And now he's stayed home for a few years, which is what we both wanted years ago, but it's not working out like we thought--I haven't settled into the professorial role in a satisfied way, and I think he needs something more challenging, more about making things work, than housekeeping--he's a great dad, but he likes projects and a lot of kid-work isn't "project" oriented. So he, too, is sort of in a transitional phase career-wise, and I think it makes him feel kind of insecure and unsure about stuff.

And I'm in the same boat, trying to figure out career issues, and I've been getting a lot of help and advice. And interestingly, a lot of it is from my men friends--my women friends are supportive and empathetic, but less apt to do the concrete stuff like say, "let me see your resume" or "let me arrange for you to meet so-and-so." Or maybe I'm less likely to ask them to do that, which could be me, or it could just be something about the relationships between women and other women vs. women and other men. Who knows. Anyway, that's not the focus of analysis here.

So I have these two men in my life, both of whom I love dearly (and a lot of great men friends--women too, but this is about men). And they're both kind of feeling crappy for different ways--ways I empathize with for reasons of my own right now. But while Mr. B. wants reassurance and help figuring his stuff out, the Connoisseur (boyfriend) doesn't. And I'm not sure what all the factors there are--partly just personality, I'm sure; partly probably the fact that the relationships are qualitatively (and quantiatively, which pains me but it's unavoidable) different. The Connoisseur's work problems have a lot to do with a fairly catastrophic business failure (fire, not fuckup) that means he's fallen pretty far and is coasting, for now, on a lot of accumulated cultural capital (connections and so forth). But he's lost a lot of the actual real money capital that used to sort of underlie that standing, which is probably a really insecure place to be. I empathize with this, b/c I'm sort of in the same boat income-wise--but I kind of have a sense of what to do next and I don't think he does yet, plus business ownership is necessarily (I think) way more unstable, income-wise, than employeeship. And I'm a woman, so despite the fact that I'm a woman whose sense of identity is extremely bound up with my job and who really likes being able to afford things, my feelings of job-related personal inadequacy might be less overwhelming than his are. Or maybe just different. I think this is true for Mr. B. as well, though interestingly in a different way; he tends not to wrap his identity as much up in his job title, but he does need a sense that he's doing something that's goal-related. And finally, I think I tend to look for structural reasons why individuals "fail," including my own failures, rather than placing them all on my (or other people's) shoulders--whereas both the Connoissuer and Mr. B. (and probably this is broadly more true of men than women) tends to view failure and success as primarily within their own control.

Which is a great advantage--it means men can be really helpful career counsellors and mentors, because they basically assume that it's mostly a question of knowing what to do and doing it, and that tendency to just kick butt and say "well, ask so-and-so for what you want" often serves as a needed kick in the pants--and the fact is, when you ask, people are often really happy to help. It also means that men are not afraid to take credit for their successes (which is personally advantageous, a good model to follow, and sometimes can also be a real pain in the ass, politically speaking--the "I pulled myself up by my boot straps, so can you" thing when we all know that Mr. Horatio Alger had connections and help every step of the way). But the downside is that when men feel like they've failed, or like they don't have much to offer, or like they can't help, they take it very personally. Which is horrible for them individually and for us politically as well (resentful men make shitty political decisions).

What this is really about, though, isn't work, but the impact of work on relationships. Specifically, men's desire to nurture. Most of the men I know seem to feel happiest when they are helping others--and many, if not most of the good ones, perhaps feel happiest of all when they're helping women. They can accept help, too, but it's easiest for them when they feel like they're not completely down and out. So Mr. B., I think, is worried about what he brings to the relationship now. He's worried--a feeling he knows is not based in reality, but a real feeling nonetheless--that I might leave, or that I could leave, because I don't "need" him any more. (And no, the boyfriend has nothing to do with that, so fuck the fuck off with that line of thinking; do me a favor and take my word for it that I know my husband better than you do.) It's hard when you feel like that about a relationship, and all the reassurance in the world won't make it go away; he has to figure out who he is, apart from Mr. B./PK's dad, before he'll feel better about that, I think.

The boyfriend relationship is scarier, for me, because as I've said before, there is nothing outside of our will and desire that keeps us together. And we don't see each other very often, so my visits always feel, to me, like relationship concentrate--the elation and desire and happiness are really pronounced, but the worries and anxieties also come to the fore, and I find myself really struggling not to constantly want to "talk" about those things. What I really want is to relax and enjoy being together, but I'm bedevilled by this perverse desire to make our meetings like some kind of fucked-up relationship therapy where we need to talk and have breakthroughs and understanding, all so exhausting. And, ironically, inimical to the Connoissseur's very nature, which is to be quiet and experiential--one of the qualities I most love about him. Even more ironic is the fact that my whirring brain, constantly forming theories and explanations, is one of the things he loves most about me.

So yesterday I was theorizing that for the Connoisseur, one of the challenges of our relationship right this minute is that the usual ways he has helped women and friends in the past aren't available to him with me. My work is really different than his, so the ways he can be a resource to me there aren't obvious; he's as broke as I am; he lives in a different area than I am planning to move to, so his connections can't really help me much, nor help hold us together--though I think we both really prize my meetings with his friends and family, and my having converted him to the Cult of Buffy, because those things are little ways we're building common experiences. We don't live together, so he doesn't get a lot of chance to help me with day-to-day things, so those day-to-day things we do share matter so much.

And I think it makes him feel bad, maybe, and I know it makes me feel bad, this complicated desire to make things special but also to enjoy normalcy, these longings to give to one another, to take things for granted and to savor every moment. And I suddenly realized yesterday morning, as I was fretting in the shower over my own worries about whether this bad feeling is about *me* or something else entirely, that in a strange, subtle, unexpected way, probably the best evidence right now that he absolutely fucking adores me is that he sits there with that feeling of not being able to do a goddamn thing for me, or with his worries or anxieties about this relationship, and keeps his mouth shut about it. He doesn't do that guy thing of getting pissy, or whiny, or wanting me to make myself less than I am in order to make him feel bigger. It's like the biggest gift he's giving me right now is, paradoxically, the gift of not being able to give me much or promise me anything--but loving me anyway.

We all think we want someone who will love us no matter what--but the fact is, we also really want to be able to give to those we love. And I think maybe this is truer of men than it is of women, for lots of fairly complicated socio-cultural reasons which most people reading this already know about. And that makes it hard, damn hard, for men at this moment in time, to love successful ambitious women--because what can you give the woman who has everything, and who is determined to get whatever she wants on her own terms, with her own money, in her own good time? Nothing other than loving them, and a good fuck once in a while? But no one wants to just be a sex object (ha ha, smartass, no you don't, really). How are we all going to figure this crap out, to distinguish between loving people and knowing they love us, and thinking of relationships as a kind of currency? "I can't give you anything but love" is a lovely sentiment in songs; but in real life, it feels like a really weak position to be in. We don't want to be loved for what we give; but we want to be able to give to those we love. Mostly, I think, we want to give ourselves. The trick is figuring out what that means.

The Murder of Shaima Rezayee

Shaima Rezayee will, I assume, never be nominated for Feminist of the Day. Yet she deserves that accolade - and much more. Her murder and its subtext speak so clearly to the world we live in - where human rights, patriarchy, cultural preservation, globalization, and religious extremism violently collide on a daily basis - that I'd like to introduce her to you (via The Times of London):

SHAIMA REZAYEE was the face of a new generation of young Afghan women: she discarded her shalwar kameez and burkha for Western clothes and a glamorous job as a television presenter on Kabul’s answer to MTV.
But two months ago her bosses were forced to dismiss Ms Rezayee, 24, under pressure from conservative mullahs who were disgusted by the “unIslamic values” of her music show.
This week she paid for her unconventional choices with her life: she was shot dead in her home by an unknown assailant.
Police said that they believed the killing was linked to her former job as a “veejay” — video journalist — on Hop, which was broadcast by Tolo TV, one of a number of private stations set up since the fall of the Taleban.
Ms Rezayee was the only female presenter on the show.

In February, Rezayee told Reuters, ""Whenever I go out, some people say some [bad] things... But there are more who praise me. Especially my family -- and a lot of young people in this country encourage me." Shaima Rezayee is the 27th journalist murdered so far this year for doing her job.

From AAUW

It's a bit late, but I found this in my e-mail (click on the e-card), and thought it worth sharing, in honor of Prof. B. Apropos of my last post, it is important to call these people on their bullshit. Basically, AAUW reminds us that:

Girls can do the math when it comes to judicial nominations. Can the Senate?

218 - The number of judicial nominations made by President George W. Bush

208 -The number of Bush nominees that have been confirmed.

95% - The percentage Bush’s judicial nominees have been confirmed.

24% - The percentage of the federal judiciary appointed by President George W. Bush (208 of 862 judges).

There are also some nice links to the nominees who have been the focus of controversy.

Just last night, I was reminded...

of just how bad,
it had gotten-
And just how sick,
I had become....

The night before she left us alone, Dr. B posted at 2:30am. I remember reading somewhere in the archives about some crazy psycho-drama Dr. B's Mother put her through the night before her qualifying exams. And it got me thinking.

When the fetching Ms. PorJ and I are scheduled to go somewhere - anywhere - we always remind ourselves that we need to get to bed early the night before. We tell ourselves that we'll have everything packed, and ready to go, and double-checked, before we tuck ourselves in for a good eight hours. We've tried this for, I dunno, about a decade. Long before little Sprout came on the scene.

And yet, it never fails: we find ourselves awake, doing nothing of importance, late the night before. I don't get it. I wonder if its some subconscious anxiety that we refuse to address (what if tomorrow's plane doesn't make it?) . We both really, really want that sleep. But there we are - both surprised and disappointed that we remain awake.

So what's the deal with anxiety and the night before travel, or an exam, or something big? What's the solution? (Remember the "no sex before a fight" canard for boxers?) Any ideas? (we'll pass on pharmaceutical solutions, thank you very much).

The next time we're scheduled to go somewhere, as soon as Sprout is asleep, I am going to ask the comely Ms. PorJ if I may give her a jolly rogering (or several) until we are passed out, collapsed on the bed, with none of our suitcases packed and the TV still on. Then, the next morning, we'll re-commence and miss the airplane entirely. Problem solved!

If you've got a good, juicy, "night before" story, share it. I think we could put together a good book proposal here, or at least some interesting reading. Perhaps a new literary trope.

Dr. B's attic...

Since Dr. B. left her keys to the Castle with me, I'd like to make sure you all rummage through her attic and dirty laundry. You can find it over there - yeah, to the right, down below the vast blogroll - watch your step. Lots of great stuff.

I'm a little worried. As you can tell, her replacements so far have yet to capture that blogging essence- the combination of political thought, personal revelation, and sexy goodness - that Dr. B has mastered so well. And there's the kid, too. I don't want her numbers to go down, but I know reading about the vigorous sexual gymnastics enjoyed by my lovely wife and I wont garner the same kind of enthusiasm. Plus, I'm a guy, so you will assume its all fiction anyway. And it probably would be.

So, I walked over there, and I found a good one. This post contains Bras, Boobs, Boyfriend, Mr. B, a corset, and consumer desire. Not the sexiest one around, but I didn't have much time. (I decided on this one because I noticed Dr. B. didn't include any saucy stuff in her "best of Bitch" over there above the blogroll).

Thoughts for the Day

First, a sad one: Kylie has breast cancer. Why is this sad? Other than the fact that I have a soft spot for Kylie and that she has breast cancer? Other than the fact that she's young and this very fact makes the spectre of breast cancer loom larger for women like me? All those things are true, but here's something else. Kylie is white and well-off. If she were black and lived in the US and had breast cancer, she would be 1.3 times more likely to die, according to
American Cancer Society statistics. I am not confusing causality and correlation, by the way. We have to figure in the fact that black women tend to receive less in the way of medical treatment than do their white contemporaries. But then that's another can of worms.

Second, about those judicial nominees: OK. I was going to ask why it is that we are playing into the Republican agenda by allowing them to put up the two problematic female candidates (out of 8 who have been found wanting) as poster children against the filibuster. I ask because I think there are a lot of valid issues we don't address. For example, they are women, and they seem pretty intelligent, if morally and ethically opposed to most of the things Prof. B's readers hold dear. And yet, even those of us admittedly on the left seem to want to deny them any kind of personal responsibility or agency when we look at their politics. Why is it that it is so difficult to accept the idea of conservative women living what are essentially feminist lives? I have a hard tiome reconciling the two, myself, but I'm just sayin' ... And sure enough, much of the brouhaha over these announcements has been built up as the Left hating their (the judges') Freedom. I was going to ask if any of us had done any serious digging on these women ... but then I saw this: "Rove Guided Career of Judicial Nominee in Filibuster Fight."

Justice Owen was, by all accounts, a respected but little-known lawyer in Houston in 1994 when she was first elected to the State Supreme Court with Mr. Rove's support and tutelage. Her experience up to then largely involved obscure legal cases involving pipelines and federal energy regulations.

At the time, Mr. Rove was helping to make over the Texas Supreme Court from a bench populated by Democrats widely viewed as favorable to the plaintiffs' bar - the lawyers who sue companies - to the business-friendly Republican stronghold it is today.

Ms. Owen would probably never have had a chance to run for the Supreme Court, because everyone considered it a hopeless task to oppose the enormously popular incumbent, Justice Lloyd Doggett. But when a Congressional seat opened up suddenly, Justice Doggett, a Democrat, decided to leave the court and run for the House. Ms. Owen found herself the Republican nominee in a state turning increasingly Republican.

Mr. Rove, who had helped select her as the Republican candidate, helped raise more than $926,000 for her campaign, almost half from lawyers and others who had business before the court, according to Texans for Public Justice, a liberal group in Austin that tracks Texas campaign donations. Mr. Rove's firm was paid some $247,000 in fees.

Takes the wind out of my sails a bit, that does.

Futures Past (Quick Quiz)

O.K., no cheating. Extra credit for anyone who can name (without looking at the link) the speaker of the following passage, and the year in which the speech was made:

When the germ theory finally came in and people learned how to arrange it so that women could have babies in reasonable safety, the world discovered to their surprise that women had a longer life expectancy than men. This had never been understood before, because throughout history women had, on the average, lived years and years less than men had. With all the dangers men faced, the hard work in the fields, the hunting accidents, the killings in war, everything else, women died faster for one reason and one reason only: childbirth. Every woman had one baby after another until one of them killed her. Usually, it didn't take long.
Well then, why do women do this? Because they are carefully told that being a wife and mother is the most glorious thing in the world, the one thing they're fit for, the most noble activity they can possibly have, and...and this is told to them until they believe it. And if they don't believe it, there's a lot of trouble made for them.
Well, I won't go into the whole thing. I suspect that you women know all about this already, and you men would rather not listen.
[group laughs mildly]
But notice the difference: once you want women not to have children, you're going to have to give them something else to do! It is absolutely impossible to tell a woman that she can't have children, and at the same time that she can't do anything else either except maybe wash an occasional dish.
[mild laugh from a few of the women in the group]
Because if you tell a woman that, she'll figure out some way to have a baby.
[swelling mild laughter from group]
I think I know the way, too!
[mild laughter from the group]
Well then, in the world of the 21st century in order to keep the birth rate down, we're going to have to give women interesting things to do that'll make them glad to stay out of the nursery. And the interesting things that I can think of that we give women to do are essentially the same as the interesting things that we give men to do. I mean we're going to have women help in running the government, and science, and industry...whatever there is to run in the 21st century. And what it amounts to is we're going to have to pretend...when I say "we", I mean men...we're going to have to pretend that women are people.
[group laughs]
And you know, pretending is a good thing because if you pretend long enough, you'll forget you're pretending and you'll begin to believe it.
[mild laugh from group]
In short, the 21st century, if we survive, will be a kind of women's lib world. And as a matter of fact, it will be a kind of people's lib world because, you know, sexism works bad both ways. If the women have some role which they must constantly fulfill whether they like it or not, men have some role which they would have to constantly fulfill whether they like it or not. And if you fix it so that women can do what suits them best, you can fix it so that men can do what suits them best too. And we'll have a world of people. And only incidentally will they be of opposite sexes instead of in every aspect of their life.

This should take the techno-geek readership all of twenty seconds.

I Slept With Washingtonienne. Wah!

Dr. B recently posted about the anonymous blogger who got busted by her University (S.M.U.) for her blog postings (see Inside Higher Ed article here) . In the comments section a lively debate ensued concerning freedom of speech for adjunct teachers, the role of the University in employing (and protecting) its adjunct-scholars-teachers, and other issues. Including the legal liability of the University and defamation. Which is a tricky thing.

Now comes one Roger Steinbuch. Who is this jolly Roger? He is a lawyer on Capital Hill who is suing the blogger known as Washingtonienne for a "gross invasion of his privacy." Seems Roger is a bit anxious that his proclivity for spanking was made public last year. But if you read the lawsuit, I think Roger's really angry that he was unaware that Washingtonienne was sleeping with another man, "let alone five other men, let alone that she was prostituting herself to some of them," &tc. (see count 11).

All this is to say: the blogger never named him in the blog, but his identity was easily deducible. Personally, I think the suit is beyond ridiculous. But I'll defer on its merits to lawyers, as well as whether a "gross invasion of privacy" via a blog is actionable. If it is, then my original thought that SMU was acting prudently is confirmed.

Speaking of Red and Blue

Ever since the red-blue meme took hold across the land, I've been sad that Republicans appropriated the good color. I mean, you have to admit that red is hotter than blue. No one ever talks about blue fuck-me pumps. But now this!

"Across a range of sports, we find that wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning," Dr. Russell Hill and Dr. Robert Barton, researchers in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Durham, wrote in a paper that appears today in the journal Nature.

The research began a year ago with a hunch based on observations in the animal kingdom, where red coloration is often associated with male dominance, Dr. Barton said in an interview. Zebra finches fitted with red leg bands tend to become dominant, while those given blue bands are more submissive.

(Emphasis mine). So, apparently it's not just that the more aggressive players choose red instead of blue, but that when these colors are externally applied, it changes behavior! Could it be that they not only got the cooler color, but also that their color is helping them win elections? Or helping to provide them with the balls to make up intelligence to justify a war, nominate Bolton to the UN, renominate 7 previously rejected judges, and change the rules of the Senate on a whim? Could it be that the fact that Dems got stuck with blue is partially responsible for what shrinking violets they have been for the past 5 years?

-- Psuedonymous Guest Blogger #3, who will properly introduce herself later

Hello, Everybody!

Hello, Everybody: it's Dr. Nick! Actually, I'm the guest blogger to-be-named later. I frequent the comment boards here - you know me as PorJ - and I was chosen primarily because I do not have my own blog (poor Dr. B had to go to the D-list to ask me). In terms of an introduction, all you really need to know is that Dr. B has called me a "cynical bastard," John Emerson thinks most of my comments are "inane," and I nearly started a U.S.-Canada border war over definitions of a "free press." In short: I love this place!

Seriously: this is one of the great blogs, and its not just because of Dr. B. In fact, I often run straight to the comment boards because I dig what the Misanthrope, Trish Wilson, Orange, or Sergei or Ash have to say (I'm leaving out tons of others, but you get the drift). I'm particular fond of Erudite Redneck and Amy because they (like me) stick around to argue the finer points with Dr. B. Its a real salon (dare I say: Public Sphere ?) around here.

My first post concerns an old chestnut, but I don't think I've seen it addressed. Down the street from where I live there is a Curves. You've seen them. They're the gyms marketed to women. The slogan is: Only one place can give you the strength of over 4 million women. They've just opened a new one on the way to my work. That's two within 3.5 miles of each other. This wouldn't be so surprising - afterall, Curves is one of America's top franchise businesses right now - except that I live in a "blue state." The absolute bluest of states possible. And Curves gives 10% of its profits to such pro-life groups as Operation Save America (more radical than even Randall Terry's Operation Rescue). Turns out Gary Heavin, the founder of the chain, is a "committed Pro-Life Christian." But you wont read this in his biography at the Curves site, nor in any of their promotional materials.

I was stunned to find this out last year. Its probably well-known amongst the feminists who read this blog. But as long as I've got Dr. B's microphone, I'd like to remind everyone. And I'm sure - if they are doing so well here in blue America - that several (most?) of their patrons are unaware of the causes they are (in)directly supporting.

Favorite bitching?

Jo(e) asked for some archive hits in my absence, and how can I turn my readers down? Especially when it's 2:30 am and I'm still up? So I finally started doing a little "greatest hits" linkage over there on the sidebar, below the social conscience linkage and above the shameless begging. For now, it's some of the better abortion and motherhood essays; there have been previous requests for Pseudonymous Kid's best bits, so I'll do some of that; I might, just to spare people having to search through the archives, do some posts explaining this whole boyfriend/husband setup; and...?

Let me know if you have any favs, and I'll maybe put 'em up. Just a general subject description is fine, although actual names of posts or even links are much appreciated.

And yes, I know I need a new template. That, too, is on the list.

Vacation!

I am leaving town tomorrow and will be back mid-Juneish. As I travel this great and wide land of ours, I'll be meeting up with a few of you--feel free to blog about how lovely and wonderful I am, as long as you don't post any pics or tell people my real name. I'll still post occasionally, but I fully intend to actually do Real Things with Real People in the Real World. Plus, vacation! I plan on having less to bitch about.

But of course I would feel just terrible about not providing you, my dear readers, with regular and thought-provoking brilliant insights, or maybe just some silly crap to kill time with while you're avoiding those final grades (or whatever it is you're avoiding). Plus if my rankings slip even an inch, I will lose my will to live and have to pick a fight with someone Big, Male and Important immediately upon my return. And no one wants that.

So. I've done the thing to do, and invited a couple of three exciting guest bloggers to help me out for the next three weeks! It'll be very lively, I promise you. Pseudonymous Colleague is, well, a pseudonymous colleague; the other second guest blogger will have to introduce himself, as he hasn't yet had a chance to tell me what his gripping pseudonym will be; and guest blogger number three will introduce herself, as well. I'll let them pick their own topics and tone, reveal as much or as little as they want, and it'll be fun to see what they do with it.

So be nice, have fun, and don't do anything I wouldn't do.

Fly me, I'm fucked

Via After School Snack and Echidne, this clever, bitter, significant protest of United's termination of employee pensions.

Remember that bankruptcy bill? The one that meant you can't hang onto your house if you're forced into bankruptcy? You still gotta pay back your credit cards? Well, if your a corporation, your debts are forgiven, apparently. I used to fly United preferentially, a long time ago, b/c they were employee-owned. I wish I could get every penny of that money back.

And it's larger than United, you know. If Social Security isn't secure; if your company pension isn't secure; if you've got no protection if you get sick or laid off, if you can't plan the size of your family, well.... maybe if you look that good in your 50s and 60s you an always try to raise enough money to put food on the table by selling cheesecake photos of yourself.

The woman whose idea it was started working for United before I was born.

The lovely thing about being too busy to blog

Is that people send you links and basically do it for you. So, whaddya want first? The good news, or the bad news?

Good it is. Ok, the good news is from Clancy at CultureCat, about a group of award-winning eighth grade girls in Minneapolis who won a women's history contest National History Day* and now get to go to Washington D.C. for a national competition. They're from the Harry Davis Academy in Minneapolis, a public school that seems to be dedicated to doing it right: small, apparently demanding, primarily low-income, almost 100% students of color.

The one catch is that, being a school that serves poor kids, the kids can't afford to pay to go to D.C. So their teacher picked up the tab, which was $2400. The kids are having bake sales to try to reimburse him, but that's a lot of cookies--so if you want to help out, you can send checks to the school. Given how many readers this blog has, if everyone sent $1, the tab would be covered.

Now, the bad news. In another Great Lake state, Michigan, we're looking at HB 4446 and SB 307. The idea here is that a 24-hour waiting period for an abortion isn't enough of a hurdle, so let's mandate ultrasounds (which are not medically necessary) and give women pictures of their fetuses. Just a little bit of emotional manipulation there, ladies. You know, just in case you're not capable of realizing that the fetus is alive, and inside you. Oh, we already have a law requiring that you be shown a picture of *a* fetus, but not *your* fetus. And that's just not enough of a personal accusation. Just in case you wandered in off the street for a spur-of-the-moment abortion without, you know, really thinking about it. You can have your abortion, but we want to try to make you feel really, really guilty over it. And also, it's important to make it cost as much as possible. Even though there's absolutely no medical justification for any of this.

So if, like me, you think that's a crock of shit, feel free to write a more politely-worded letter of dissent to Representatives Gaffney, Newell, Robertson, Vander Veen, Hune, Nofs, Ward, Ball, Green, Kahn, Mortimer, Adamini, Murphy, Gleason, Wojno, Angerer, and McDowell, or Senators Hammerstrom, Patterson, George, Bernero, and Jacobs.

*Thanks to Ann Bartow of Sivacracy for the correction.

Women in higher ed--links

Quick morning post--I'll be busy all day so not much of substance from me today, I'm afraid. But yesterday Harvard Announced a new Faculty Diversity Initiative. The important news here is that it's not just lip service--the university is going to put $50 million behind this. I don't know enough about university budgets yet to say if this is actually substantive or not (it's spread out over ten years), but I do know that if you just *say* you want more diversity, but don't actually devote resources to it, you won't get it. I recently heard some interesting work on hiring and retaining women and minority faculty, and I hope to blog it soon--but for now the key points are, you need money, you need a reward structure for departments who hire and retain the faculty you want (e.g., a directed grant program for, say, multicultural research), you need to recruit women and minorities actively (not just passively hope they'll apply), you need to provide targeted mentoring, and so on. All that costs money. Lip service isn't enough--and I'm cautiously hopeful that Summers's public smackdown might result in some actual improvement. At least it's raised awareness of the problem.

And a problem it is. Here is yesterday's Chronicle article and data about Women in Higher Education. Pay particular attention to where the women are--disproportionately in the adjunct positions or at lower-ranked colleges, and in the humanities--the area where reliance on adjuncts is heaviest (I don't think this is a coincidence). Women simply aren't getting hired in proportion to how many of us are graduating with PhDs, and we don't gain tenure in proportion to how many of us are hired, either. I will say that one of the annoying things about the Chronicle article is how much evidence it presents that faculty life for women is full of hurdles and unconscious hostility (or at best indifference), and yet it keeps returning to the idea that women "choose" not to pursue these jobs, and saying that that's part of the problem too. Well, no duh: smart women (the kind who get PhDs) are smart enough to be suspicious of jobs at places that they don't think will support their work. The problem isn't "choice"; it's the factors that force that decision.

So, when did you stop raping your wife?

Spousal rape is still legal in Tennesee. Apparently State Representative Frank Buck thinks this is okay, since otherwise, you know, women could lie "to "get a leg up" in a divorce or custody case. "[I]f there's only two witnesses without physical evidence, it's so easy to lie.''" So, you know, in order to protect men, we have to allow rape.

Link via Tennesee Guerilla Women, who has more links over at her place.

Cheesecake for breakfast

This was inspired by a comment Rana left on the last post.

Like Rana, two of my favorite foods as a kid were cheesecake and fried shrimp. Not that I ever got those at home, but when we would go visit Grandma, or when she would take us on trips, we would eat in restaurants and that would be what I would order: fried shrimp for dinner, cheesecake for dessert. I remember once asking if I could order cheesecake for breakfast, and Grandma or Grandpa saying, "sure, why not? It's got dairy in it." Grandpa was a G.P. by the way, and when we ate breakfast at their house, Grandma would set the table with a vitamin pill in the bowl of the spoon, and there was always fresh-squeezed orange juice, and we would watch the hummingbirds outside the breakfast window.

But restaurants were restaurants, and we could order whatever we wanted. So, in memory, there was often cheesecake for breakfast. And then in the afternoon there would be swimming and quesadillas by the pool, or walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland.

Dad called yesterday, and he finally had a talk with Grandma where he said to her, point-blank, do you want the feeding tube removed? And she said yes, it irritates me (which she's said before). And he said, I know it's annoying, but it's there to provide supplementary nutrition at night, Mom, because the nurses say you don't eat enough during the day. If they remove the tube, you will probably get sick eventually, and then you will die. And she said, yes, I know. That's what I want.

And then she yelled at him, apparently, that this situation was his fault, that the last time she had pneumonia she didn't want a feeding tube put in but they did it anyway, that she's really pissed off about everything and she wishes everyone would just let her make her own decisions. And then she apologized for yelling at my dad. And then they talked a little bit more, and it was fine. And then Dad called to tell me what she'd said, and I said, well, that sounds pretty clear to me. I think we should tell the nursing home that yes, we support her wanting to have the thing removed.

This morning, my sister called. She lives near Grandma, and has seen her a lot more often than I can, and she says, yeah, Grandma's been saying that for a while, but Dad needed some time to come around to it. And I said, it's been hard for me to know, because when I call and talk to her she tends to change the subject away from those things, and she's often tired and doesn't really like talking on the phone much. And I saw her last summer, and it's clear to me that she's really unhappy, and she talked about wishing she were dead then, but I couldn't tell if she meant that or if she was just unhappy and depressed. And my sister said, honestly, Bitch, she doesn't seem depressed to me at all--unhappy, yes, but she is always glad for the company, she enjoys it when we take her out, she doesn't seem dampened the way depressed people do. I think that she's just tired of living. And I said yeah, I agree, and I can understand that. And I keep having these "what ifs," like maybe if I lived nearby and we could find a nursing home near us and I could visit her every day, maybe that would be enough. But I talked to a friend the other day about this, and he helped me realize two things. One, my concern is important; but when it comes down to it, I'm her granddaughter, and she has a son (two really) and daughter living, and they are the ones who need to handle this, not me. And because I'm her granddaughter, she is going to worry more about upsetting me than about being honest, maybe. And two, that her life is her own, and no matter how much she enjoys visits from others, it's not enough to live for those moments alone, even if those moments come every day--if she is ready to die, then she is, visits or no. And my sister said yeah, exactly. Oh, she said, and I pointed out something to our cousin, like what you're saying about the difference between kids and grandkids. I told him that, in twenty or thirty years, when Dad is old and sick, if Pseudonymous Kid tries to push for what he thinks is best for dad the way our cousin is doing, that I am going to get really mad and resent it, the way Dad resents cousin, because Dad is my dad, and no matter how much Pseudonymous Kid loves him, it's still going to be my job to make those decisions. And I said yeah, you're right.

But, I said, the only thing that worries me, personally, is that in a couple of days we're leaving for a vacation, and I'll spend a week with my boyfriend while Mr. B., goes to visit his mom and all the aunts and uncles with Pseudonymous Kid. They're going to have a family reunion of sorts, and it'll be Omi's chance to be Grandma, and serve the kids breakfast. And then we're going to Graduate School City for a friend's graduation, all of us, and I'm going to line up some interviews before I go, I hope, and PK is really looking forward to that, and we already bought plane tickets we can't afford, and our credit card is maxed out, but now I feel like I should go see Grandma but I don't know how I can do that soon. It would be okay if I can wait for July, but maybe it can't wait that long, I don't know. And my sis said, well, it's not like she's in a state of crisis now; this may take a while. And I said yeah, but it might not, I don't know, I would feel kind of weird waiting. And sis said, well, how much is a plane ticket? Well, I said, it depends. If I have to buy it in a rush, obviously, it costs more, but I might be able to get something for as low as two or three hundred bucks if I plan ahead, but since I dont' know how she's going to do, or what we'll be doing in a couple of months because of the job search, that's hard to do. And sis said, well, can you fly down from Grad School City? It's a lot closer. Yeah, I said, I've been thinking about that. I'll be there for a couple of weeks, I can probably fly down for a couple of days. It's just, the money.

Well, sis said, I don't want you to not see Grandma again just because of that. But Grandma wouldn't want you to go further into debt for that either, not right now when you have all this moving and possible long-distance interviews and everything to worry about. Look, we just sold the house, and we're moving in three weeks, and really, we have some money right now. I can loan you the price of a plane ticket, if it's not too expensive.

Ok, I said, thanks. I'll look into it.

So that's the plan, I guess.

Hey everyone

Check out the new little link over on the sidebar, under the ProKanDo button and above the comments policy. Feel free, of course, to pass it along.

Mmm, bacon

Mr. B. (coming downstairs from painting): Is there any food left for me?
Me: Yeah, it's in the kitchen. Sorry, I didn't make enough bacon.
Pseudonymous Kid: I want more bacon!
Me: Honey, there's only one piece left and I think papa's going to eat it.
Pseudonymous Kid (jumping out of his chair, crossing to the kitchen): I want it!
Mr. B.: You want this piece of bacon? Sure.
Me (following PK into the kitchen): That's very nice of you.
Pseudonymous Kid: Bacon!
Me (to Mr. B.): Sometimes I think he eats too much bacon.
Pseudonymous Kid: Why?
Me (to PK): Well, that's 2 1/2 pieces of bacon. That's a lot of bacon for a little kid.
Pseudonymous Kid (mouth full of bacon, hands on hips): Lithen, mama. I am five and a half. That'th a big number.

Teenage pregnancy

Just to follow up on some of the recent comment threads on this subject, here are two posts that do a far better job than I did in explaining why I think parents who force their teenage daughters to have abortions--or, conversely, not to--are just flat-out wrong.

When she called me up and told me she was marrying her boyfriend in the judge's office because that was the only way they could have conjugal visits once he was sentenced and went to prison, I tried my damndest to talk her out of it. I called her mother, even though I'd promised not to. I desperately researched prison policies. But then, when she refused to budge, I put on a nice dress, bought her a bouquet of flowers, drove her to court, met the boyfriend in his orange jumpsuit, watched the guard take off the handcuffs, witnessed the marriage, and took her out to lunch, while he went back to his cell.

That's the attitude that children need to know their parents have towards them. (Even more moving is the fact that the person telling this story isn't the parent of the relative.) And it seems to me that the only way you can "force" or "pressure" someone into doing something they truly do not want to do is if they don't know, deep down, that you will support them no matter what. Because if they know that, then they will have the courage to do the thing that they really believe in. And if it turns out that they made a mistake, they will have the courage to come to you and admit it and ask for help, because they will know you accept them even after they make a mistake. And without that inner certainty, kids will lie when they are in trouble, because their parents' good opinion of them is too important to risk.

So if you think you can force, coerce, or legislate your kids into doing something because you won't support them if they make the wrong decision, then god help you. And god help them.

Class

Partly as a follow-up to the comments on the last post, and partly just because I thought it was interesting, a link to the NYT series on social class. The interactive graphic isn't consistently well-designed--like a fair number of NYT graphics, there's a certain amount of chart junk and too much information being conveyed in non-intuitive ways--but it's kind of interesting to play with anyway.

And, for me, it generated a little bit of anxiety. I played around with the different ways they ranked the class status of different professions, and the kinds of jobs I'm looking at now all rank "lower," according to the NYT, than the one I currently have.

Now, I'll admit right off the bat that this is completely ridiculous of me. And sort of ironic, given that one of my great skills as a teacher is to bluntly say--and truly believe--that class identification of that sort is offensive, silly, and baseless. When other people demonstrate class anxiety, I'm great at making them see how damaging and bullshitty that kind of thing is, and I don't give a rat's ass about the education, class standing, income, or profession of my friends.

And yet--maybe this is a case of "those who can't do, teach," or maybe it's a case of my being so reliable on this issue precisely *because* I'm so hyper-conscious of my own failings on it--when it comes to my own life, this question of social class generates enormous anxiety. Money, not so much; it would be nice to have more than $15 to get the family through the next week, but hey, whatever, the bills are paid. This is weird, because Americans so often associate social class exclusively with income or wealth, but for whatever reason, that isn't the class anxiety that I've internalized. Instead, it's my stupid job title that freaks me out.

I wish I understood this. I know I get part of it from my mother and her family--classic "disaffecteds," according to the PEW classifications linked in the earlier post. The kind of rural people who are absolutely, arrogantly certain that they're smart as hell, and equally certain that the big city folks look down on them. Ironically, all the kids moved the hell off the farm--partly, of course, in reaction to that internalized belief that farm life is low class--but they all continue to carry with them that defensive feeling of superority, coupled with something of an inferiority complex about how the rest of the world views them. My dad's family is almost the opposite--better educated and more securely middle- to upper-middle class, they tended to consciously identify with the rural aspects of the place I grew up, including the immigrants they had come from a few generations back. So paradoxically, I got from my mom a great deal of anxiety about class identification, whereas I got from my dad a real sense of relaxation about it--and while I can project the latter, I ended up internalizing the former.

All of which means I am constantly second-guessing this freaking job search. When I think about place, I want to move. When I think about job duties for the kinds of positions I'm applying for, I'm excited (if a bit apprehensive, simply at the idea of having new job duties, even though I feel sure I'm up to them). Even when I think about the dreaded feeling of "once you leave, you can never go back," I feel reassured that that's not entirely true--that if I write the things I want to write in the next few years, they'll improve my chances for the kind of academic job I'd really like to have, if anything, rather than destroy them; and the things I'd have to write to keep the kind of job I have now frankly don't interest me as much any more.

At least, I think that's the case. As soon as I start saying that, I start doubting it. Well, I think, my subject area really *is* kind of interesting. I'm glad people are doing work in this field. Though of course I have to admit that I am not reading a lot of that work--I see the titles, and they intrigue me, but I buy the books and they sit on the shelves. Meanwhile, I devour social policy type work, education-related stuff, and feminist politics. And I have more energy for this damn job search than I have had for anything related to my work in the last two years.

It's a lot like the class thing. When I step back and look, I know this is the right move for me. If I were advising a friend in my position, I would tell her yes, you are doing the right thing. But nonetheless, internally, I just feel like I cannot be sure. Sometimes it feels absolutely right. But when good work-related things happen--I get solicited for a conference; senior women in my field ask me to chair something; Dr. Mentor praises me for arranging something else and says that if I were staying, she'd see if she could get me to head a program doing more of it; and so on--then the self-doubt really starts creeping back. Why am I moving jobs just when I'm starting to get my feet? (Ignoring the clarity with which I know that tenure here is not something I want.) Obviously, a big part of that doubt has to do with getting praised for doing the job well--even if the job itself doesn't drive me, the praise sure does. And then I think, oh shit, maybe the only reason I'm thinking of changing careers is because of this stupid blog, which has gotten all this praise for my writing about these things, and now I think I should go do this instead just because total strangers think I'm good at it. Which is of course insane, since just as many readers have cautioned me about leaving the tenure-track, and because the readership of this thing has grown precisely *because* I'm writing about the things I'm interested in--which is the only reason I do it.

I wish I could get to the point where the whole concept of "lifelong learning" would sink in, instead of just being silly academic jargon. Where the idea that yeah, I did this for a long time, and now I am ready to move onto something else, and I will do that until I am ready to do yet something else, and then I will move again, would just feel okay. Where I could get rid of my mom's voice in my head saying that the only way to be secure is to climb on top of some immobile pillar and stand there, poised above the crowd. Where instead, I could just let myself enjoy the things I really do enjoy, which is being part of the crowd, moving along, rushing through the streets, taking detours or pausing to peer into windows or rambling into a park so Pseudonymous Kid can play on the slides for a while before we head back out, into the streets, to grab dinner and head home.

A political quiz with actual information!

Via Preemptive Karma's trackback, a political quiz run by the Pew Research Center. The real interest here isn't the quiz, though; it's all the supplementary information interpreting the results, like the summary of the findings and the profiles of the groups. Interestingly, Pew finds that liberals are the largest group in America--but also the most satisfied and optimistic of groups that vote Democratic. They (we) also tend to feel most dissatisifed with the Democratic party's articulation of its core values, though, which presents an interesting problem: I can see, with these results, why there's a good case to be made that solidifying the base is a losing electoral proposition--or, at least, why better articulating *our* core values in an optimistic, "moving forward" kinda way might not appeal to leftists who are less affluent or secure. On the other hand, Pew's two swing groups are fascinatingly different--one is "upbeat," basically optimistic about their own prospects and autonomy, and the other is "disaffected," mostly working-class men who feel deeply pessimistic.

It's also very interetsing to see how the groups differ in terms of whether they follow the news, and where they get it. Disaffected leftists read more newspapers than anyone else; liberals use the internet (duh); conservatives watch Fox news (even the well-off, educated, free-market types).

Darn you, mickey mouse

Tonight I was doing a web search to see if I could find an online source to buy Dominincan vanilla (so, so good--a student brought me some back as a gift, from a family trip). I found an interesting site, buy dominica.com, which promotes Dominican products. Being completely ignorant about that part of the world, I confused Dominica with the DR--my bad. Interestingly, the DR is part of Hispanola--one of the places Columbus "claimed" in 1492--whereas Dominica was the last Caribbean island conquered by Europeans--in part, because of the Caribs mentioned below. So kind of a major blunder, there.

Apparently, they're advocating for the Dominican Republilc Dominica to start cultivating vanilla again--it used to be a big producer, but not so much any more. Which is a pity, as this vanilla my student brought me* is the best damn vanilla I have ever tasted. It is so good that it is like an entirely different level of flavor than regular vanilla (and I've bought expensive vanilla before). I highly recommend getting your hands on it, if you can. Interestingly, it's white rather than black; dunno how that works, since vanilla beans are black. But anyway, yum.

The point though is that the site also talked about plans to film Pirates of the Caribbean 2 in the DR Dominica. Now, I'm a big fan of the first movie. Yeah, it's cheesy and dorky, but it's fun dorky cheese. Pseudonymous Kid likes it too (direct quote, "it's really good, even though it's a grownup movie")--no, I probably wouldn't have shown it to a kid that young, but his papa suggeted it, and PK is into pirates, and it turned out his papa was right; not scary, and lots of fun for him. So, okay. PoC 2, excellent! We can all enjoy it.

Only, turns out (as the link above suggests) that the movie plans to portray Carib Indians as cannibals. And the Carib Indians are none too happy about this. And this mama isn't real happy about it either, strictly on mama grounds. PK is already a big fan of that damn Disney Peter Pan movie--the one he calls the "green Peter Pan"--and despite our attempts to substitute the live-action movie ("the brown Peter Pan"), both b/c it's better and b/c it makes a point of portraying Tiger Lily and the Indians with a certain dignity that's markedly lacking in the Disney version. When PK was smaller, I used to fast-forward through the awful song, "What Makes the Red Man Red?" but now that he's older, he won't let me. So he wants to know why the song bugs me, and what does make the red man red, and all that crap, so great, suddenly Disney has offered me this "teaching moment" of explaining racism to my kid, and how it works, and how people used to think it's okay but we don't think that any more, most of us, but it's not entirely gone but things are better than they used to be and Indians are real people, and our friend so-and-so is an Indian, and he isn't red, is he? And then we talk about skin color and such, sometimes, and other times he just goes, "oh," and then watches the rest of the movie. So yeah, thanks Disney, for introducing my kid to racist imagery and ideas at an impressionable age, and yeah, I know I could have decided to not let him watch the movie, but the first time I popped it in I had forgotten, frankly, and then it was too late b/c he liked it.

And now I guess we're gonna have Indian cannibals in PoC 2. Which I was kind of looking forward to seeing and liking and screening for how much violence and deciding if it's PK-appropriate. And instead I'm going to have to wrestle with this crap about racism and whether I have the strength of will not to see the thing myself (Johnny Depp! Pirates! Do I have to sacrifice?), whether a boycott of the thing makes any goddamn difference anyway, political action vs. moral purity, liberal guilt vs. guilty pleasures, blah blah blah.

And the thing is, we all thought Lilo and Stich was such a great step forward.



* The vanilla is from the DR--I checked the label. But at least I learned something from my foolish mistake. Thanks to whoever anonymously commented about my embarrassing mistake...

Brain dead

Well, I did a job application today after all. And made some phone calls that needed making. And I'm sure I did some other stuff. The study is about 1/3rd painted a nice honeydew green that is probably too intense for all four walls, even with the white trim, but fuck it, that's the plan. Maybe I'll put up billowy white curtains or something.

Anyway, I also putzed around. Here are the results of my grand putzing:

Materialist 69% Postmodernist 63% Cultural Creative 56% Existentialist 50% Modernist 38% Idealist 38% Romanticist 31% Fundamentalist 19% What is Your World View? created with QuizFarm.com

Exciting stuff, huh? I'm on record as objecting that "feminist" isn't a possibility, and that for "romanticist" they actually should have said "romantic"--a romanticist is something quite different. Also, no real clue what "cultural creative" means. But, hey. It's an internet quiz.

Follow up on the Genia Shockome case

Over at Trish Wilson's.

What are you procrastinating on?

Me, I have a job application I'm writing. It's an application for a type of job I've already applied for more than once, but this one wants a slightly different angle (one that's actually slightly less interesting to me, but I'm applying anyway). I also have a conference presentation next week, and I really have to call my grant management person this afternoon to try to set up a meeting with her so I can tell my poor research assistants how much longer I can employ them before I run out of money. Instead, I've spent the last hour or so futzing around and reading this very nice piece about leaving academia. I have rationalized this by telling myself it confirms my desire to bail. Which I had a crisis about yesterday, following excellent Wednesday discussions with my excellent mentor and two of my excellent colleagues, all of which made me feel that there are folks here who do, after all, understand me. Also, Dr. Mentor said that if I were sticking around she has a couple of great programs in mind that she thinks I'd be a good pick to lead; ironically, these are programs doing precisely the kind of work I'm applying outside to do. Tempting. The only sticking point would be staying here--but if I don't land a job, I'm going to buy her drinks at the end of the summer and say, "ok, let's get started on those." Maybe having a good project or two will keep me from offing myself next winter. I have also been replying to people soliciting my participation on panels for next year's Big Conference, and so forth. It's all very frustrating, this feeling that things are coming together, damnit, just as I am thinking of running off. I hate second-guessing myself. Even though I do it constantly.

Joe Drymala is procrastinating on writing, and is apparently rationalizing doing so by trying to pick fights in my comment threads.

So yeah, it's Friday afternoon. What are you fretting about / procrastinating over? Dump your angst in the comments. Then maybe you can leave it there, salvage your afternoon, and have a nice weekend.

And now for something completely different

I, in conjunction with Kotsko, propose that we introduce the new internet abbreviation "j/o." As in "jack off." To be used as an away message (= I am away masturbating), or perhaps a jovial insult. Plus it has interesting possiblities in conjunction with j/k. Hence, we could have exchanges like the following:

Kotsko: [stupid joke]
Gullible me: What? Really?!?
Kotsko: j/k
Me: j/o
Kotsko: lol
Me: away message: j/o

See how fun that is? G'wan, you know you wanna.

While I've got you here, though, I have a question. Is there a specific term for internet abbreviations of this sort: lol, rotflmao, j/k, ymmv, aotw, and so on?

And if there's not, let's see if we can come up with one. Leave your suggestion in the comments!

Clarification

The point of the previous post was less to condemn Hagar as an abusive rapist--although if what his wife is saying is true, and I see no reason to doubt that, he certainly is--than it was to put into context the conservative fight against birth control. (And don't anyone even bother to try the "emergency contraception isn't birth control" argument, because, well, yes it is. Do some research into how it works.) I don't see how much clearer it could be that for Hager, at least, being anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-choice is fully and completely consistent with controlling women. And, inasmuch as this man has a great deal of political power and influence, I think it is completely fair to point out that this is also true for those who support him. Especially if they continue to do so now that this story is out.

It also links into Hager's own attempt to distinguish between his "scientific record" and his "faith" in condemning those who oppose his role on the advisory committee to the FDA. This argument--which is of course also being used about the nuclear option w/r/t judicial appointments right now--relies on our belief that faith, as a matter of private conscience, ought not to be a reason for opposing someone's right to hold public office. Well and good. But notice that those making this argument are, in fact, *also* arguing that their faith is *not* private--that they should use it to shape, defend, and exercise their public political power. In other words, they are trying to have it both ways. It is worth pointing this out.

And the Hager case highlights this hypocrisy and double-speak. I think the instinct, while condemning Hager's raping his wife, is to view this criminal act as "private"--damning, certainly, in terms of his public character, and probably (if enough noise is made about it), the end of his political career. But unless she files charges, he will not be tried or convicted; so it remains in the realm of the private, rather than the public. So, the argument is going to be that this is slandering the man's private character, or it is a private matter. Or that in pointing to the rape, those who oppose his nomination are somehow being unfair, using private acts to make a public policy argument. But again: this is a man whose private character--as a man of faith--is one of his major claims to the public position he now holds.

Linda Davis, of course, gets this: which is why she decided, according to the Nation, to speak out about the rape in direct response to his telling the story of his divorce (private) in a public venue as a way of implicitly making the case for his moral claim on public power.

And I think that's the whole problem with this whole argument over pharmacist's rights. The argument hinges on their "right" to hold private opinions--a right which we all surely agree they have--and to make those private opinions have public weight, even to the point of usurping the private opinions of other people. People who, not coincidentally, happen to be women. And the flip side is that our private opinions, unlike theirs, are supposed to remain private, not to have public weight. We can think, but we cannot act: the exercise of our private opinions (about sex, about birth control, about abortion) is a matter of public concern, and therefore our own private consciences must succumb to the private consciences of pharmacists, of politicians, of powerful men.

Update: Check out Lawyers, Guns and Money, which posts the full text of a letter by Clinton and Murray about this. The women's caucus in congress is kicking some ass lately.

Links via Bush v. Choice and feministing.

David Hager: ob-gyn, advisor to the FDA, Christian, and . . . rapist?

The feminist bloggers are starting to notice this article in the Nation, about David Hager. He is on the advisory committee to the FDA, the faculty of the University of Kentucky's medical college, and Focus on the Family's Physician Resource Council. He is "a leading Ob-Gyn at Lexington's Central Baptist Hospital." This is a man whose political influence is growing among Christian conservatives and, as a result, in the Republican party. Good Housekeeping has named him "among the best doctors for women in the nation."

The Nation article reports that he also repeatedly raped and sodomized his wife for seven years, until she finally filed for divorce. Apparently he also paid her for sex.

Until 2000 the Kentucky Penal Code still contained . . . a requirement that [marital rape] be reported within one year of the offense. Their divorce, however, happened in 2002, so it is possible that he could be prosecuted for the rape--apparently a number of his wife's friends knew what was happening. But Linda Carruth Davis (now remarried) "chose not to bring allegations of marital rape into her divorce proceedings" because she did not want to upset her sons. Ironically, and tellingly, her sons were "very angry about the fact that she was insisting on the divorce." Also, "nearly everyone in the Hagers' Christian and medical circles in Lexington had sided with Hager."

Nearly every Christian friend they had, and nearly every doctor friend, sided with a man who had raped his wife. It will be interesting to see if, now that the story is out, those same Christians and medical experts continue to do so. If I were a woman in Lexington, KY, I would be feeling very uncomfortable with my obstetrician and my pastor right about now.

Now, some people will ask, "why did she put up with it?" Some will see the fact that this went on for seven years, that no charges were filed, that it took that long for her to fiile for divorce, as evidence for at least the "possibility" that she is lying. After all, some will say, "women do lie sometimes, you know."

Yeah. Women do sometimes lie. Linda Davis "lied," or at least supported her husband's lies, for years--including during the divorce proceedings. Why did she do so? Well, let's try to bracket off our automatic tendency to be suspicious of women, especially when they are critical of men, and listen to what she says now.

"I would be asleep, and since [the sodomy was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off. . . . I would [confront] David later, and he would say, "you asked me to do that," and I would say, "No, I never asked for it."

"I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser."

"Sex was coinage; it was a commodity. . . . Finally . . . I said, "you know, David, this is like being a prostitute."

"My sense is that he saw [my narcolepsy] as an opportunity."

"The most expedient thing was to try and somehow get it [over with]. In order to keep any peace, I had to maintain the illusion of being available to him."

According to the Nation, "fears of poverty, isolation and damnation were enough to keep Davis from seeking a divorce." "She had no money of her own and few marketable skills."

That's why women "put up with" abuse. That's why the "lie." Because they love their children--even when the children judge them harshly. Because they are economically vulnerable. Because their friends and families tell them, "well, you've made your bed, anad now you have to lie in it." Because strangers read what they say and don't believe them. Because they believe that divorce is a sin. Because they don't know that marital rape is rape.

Because men like Hager have power, a lot of it, and use that power to discredit women under the guise of protecting us, and under the guise of religion. Here are some of the things Hager has said:

"there is a war going on in this country. . . . And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians. . . . It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith."

"It wasn't until I began to see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor, should treat them."

There is a war going on. It's not being waged against Christians; it's being waged against women, using Christianity as a weapon. Jesus defended prostitutes; he defended women's right to think over their responsibility to serve. To say that ignoring what women want and need is following in Jesus's steps is blasphemy, and any Christian who believes in Christianity as anything other than a political tool should shun this man and everything he stands for.

Linda Davis again:

He had the gall to stand under the banner of holiness of the Lord and lie, by the sin of omission. It's what he didn't say--it's the impression he left."

Men lie too. What Hager has to gain by lying is clear. What Davis has to gain, isn't. Who do you believe?

And don't you think that the people who give him power--explicitly, power over women--should have to answer that question, too?

Media snark du jour

I forget where I found this link, but dig this hilarious interview between Brooke Gladstone and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN:

If you were listening to me, Brooke, you would have heard me say that on some days, that story that we decide to focus on will be the runaway bride. On other days, the story will be the spread of democracy in Lebanon.

Hmmmm. Runaway bride, democacy in Lebanon. Democracy in Lebanon, runaway bride. Yup. I'd say that those two stories are about equally important, wouldn't you?

Klein's lame-ass defense is that it's elitist to expect a news network to cover actual news. Ow. I hurt my eyes from rolling them so hard.

Linkage

1. Nice post, I think, about l'ecriture feminine and blogs. I'm not an essentialist about gender and writing (nor am I really sure Cixous was--I'm actually kind of crap on feminist theory, believe it or don't). And I don't think the post here is being really essentialist, but b/c I know some people might read it as such, I feel the need to say that up front. Anyway, with that caveat duly noted, check it out, it's a thought provoking idea about what we do when we talk on blogs.

2. Along the same lines, this. No I'm not linking these posts just b/c they linked me (although I did find 'em through my sitemeter stats, so I guess I am, but not intentionally). On the Technorati 100:

Why "politics, business, technology and media"? Why not arts, activism, academia, unsung heroes . . .

3. Via feministing, a survey that shows that, in fact, 88% of Catholic doctors would prescribe bc for adult patients. 90% of Catholic docs support condom use against HIV. Like feministing says, let's leave aside the "adult" caveat, but let's also note that, whatever asinine hospital policies may exist, most if not (unfortunately) all Catholic *docs* do think that treating their patients is more important than judging them. Parallels to the Phantom Prof firing issue, w/r/t institutional judgment vs. individual judgment, are left to the reader's. . . judgment. Sue me, I'm tired.

4. Via Third Wave Agenda, a NYT article on some new research that suggests that motherhood (parenthood?) is good for your brain.

5. Via Emma Jane, another good post about class mobility; in the comments someone left a link to this amazing site calledClass Action.

A cautionary tale

Via Mr. Kotsko, a story from IHE about an anonymous academic adjunct blogger who got found out and got dooced.

It's interesting that the link is to IHE, given profgrrrrl's recent thoughts about their linking policy. For the record, I don't have a problem with IHE linking academic blogs w/out permission, though I know some do. But I do think this whole question of academic blogging and the private / public divide is really interesting. I'm uncomfortable with the statements in the article that there's a problem with what the Phantom Professor blogged was that it hurt students' feelings. It seems somewhat Horowitzian, this idea that as professors we have a responsibility not to say things that will make our students uncomfortable. Malicious slander is one thing; but satire and social commentary surely ought to be allowable intellectual endeavors.

And then, of course, there's the whole issue of one's status within the university. Adjuncts and the like are so vulnerable to precisely this kind of bullshit firing: "oh, we're not punishing you, we just are . . . realigning the curriculum." It's a little tougher to can the pre-tenure tenure-track folks, but there's always the vague safety of their not being "collegial," which covers a multitude of sins.

It's a frustrating, frustrating problem for me, because I think a lot of that academic conservatism and timidity comes from what would in other circumstances be laudable instincts: trying to be student-centered (not wanting to get sued by undergrads' parents; worrying about making students feel that the faculty judges them harshly), or wanting the university to have a congenial relationship with the wider public. But of course, on the other hand, there's that pesky ideal of intellectual truth and the ideal of intellectuals as thinkers and leaders--an ideal that admittedly leads to some of the grossest snobbery, neurosis, and hierarchical bullshit, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

It seems to me that this kind of thing is a "teaching moment," one that SMU flubbed. Most students really are pretty idealistic, and more thick-skinned than we often give them credit for; they can handle a challenge, they can handle being told that there are things they don't know (but should), they can handle uncomfortable truths. "Protecting" them from ideas isn't really what they want. They do value fairness; but they also value, and believe in truth.

Good teachers know this, and trust in it. Just like good thinkers.

'Course, that's easy for me to say, because I haven't been found out yet.

Bad stuff

Orange sent me the following news story:

Hospitals Ignore Rape Victim Law

Only 60 percent of 156 hospitals surveyed "always" provide emergency contraception to women who want to terminate possible pregnancies after a sexual assault, the study found. Another 31 percent of hospitals "sometimes" supply the contraception.

And although Illinois law requires hospitals to educate rape victims about emergency contraception, more than 25 percent of the hospitals said they "never" or only "sometimes" offered counseling or didn't know what hospital practices were. . . .

A separate national survey of 1,202 hospitals released last week found that, according to staffers answering emergency room phones, 42 percent of non-Catholic hospitals and 55 percent of Catholic hospitals never supply the morning-after pill, even to women who have been assaulted.

That study was conducted by Ibis Reproductive Health, an advocacy organization based in Massachusetts.

Good stuff

From the Feminist Majority Foundation: (for the life of me, I don't think they have permalinks, so this story will probably scroll down their page and disappear in a few days)

Record High of 19 Women Elected to the National Academy of Sciences

5/10/2005 - The National Academy of Sciences, chartered by Congress as an advisor to the federal government on science and technology issues, elected a record high of 19 women (26 percent) out of the 72 new inductees for 2005. The number of women elected rose to 24 percent in both 2003 and 2004 after hovering around 10 percent in past year, according to the New York Times.

Dr. John I. Brauman of Stanford University, who oversaw the election process, denies any relationship between the record high and Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers's sexist comments about women in the sciences, according to the Times. New member and Harvard Medical School professor Christine Seidmen agrees, telling the Harvard Crimson that while Summers's comments may have had "ripple effects," she does not think this election was one of them. Brauman suggests in the Times that the increasing number of women in the sciences are just beginning to be felt at this level, as most inductees are in their 50s at the time of election.

This was not the case for 2005 inductee Deborah Jin, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Rocky Mountain News reports that her election this year, at age 36, makes her one of the youngest women ever elected, an honor shared with Susan Solomon, elected in 1992. According to the Harvard Crimson, fellow inductee Seidman suggests that the election of more women, and younger women, represents a greater acknowledgement of skilled women scientists by their male counterparts, saying "this is great news, and I hope it's sung from the highest rooftops."

Just read this

Like flea says, you have to read what Nyarly wrote. I'd excerpt it, but no--you have to read the whole thing.

I'm a summer kind of girl

And Jo(e) always writes the best blog memes.

Favorite summer flower: Roses. Jasmine. Honeysuckle. Right now I want orange blossoms, which are a spring flower.
Flavor of ice cream: Sweet cream. Which is to say, unflavored.
Mode of transportation: A good pair of sandals or my own bare feet. But I'm not gonna say no to a sweet convertible.
Music: Ok, I am a sucker for summer music. "Summertime" (Gershwin); "Summertime" (DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince); and "Low Rider" (War) are three of my favs.
Food: If it'll pack as a picnic, that's all right with me.
Favorite game to play: Sitting on a porch, beach, or lawn.
Earliest childhood summer memory: The back porch of the house we had until I was six. It had colored tiles, blue and maroon in my memory, that were about a foot square, dull and thick. The heat would soak into your feet.
Favorite Drink: Ah, summer drinks. G&Ts; Berliner Weisse (with raspberry syrup, for god's sake, not that green stuff); Pimm's cup; Pimm's and lemonade; sangria; champagne.
Favorite Snack: Cold watermelon, especially in pico de gallo.* Ceviche. Fish tacos. Fresh tomatoes. Blackberries freshly picked. The salt water that you collect by sticking your finger through the hole in the side of the ice cream maker.
Place to read: I love reading outside, even though it just kills your eyes.
Most annoying: Not a fan of the mosquito. But really, it's a small price to pay.
How I handle the heat: Air conditioning is for losers. Hell, being inside is for losers. Summer means spending as much time outside as possible. Fun fact: I once spent a summer in Vegas with no a/c in the car, and I loved every goddamn minute of it.
Pet Peeve: People who bitch about the heat.
All-time favorite bathing suit: Probably the racing suit I had when I was about twelve. I am still in search of a decent goddamn grownup woman's suit that's not short-waisted, has an underwire, and doesn't operate on the presumption that anyone over the age of eighteen wants to hide one's body. I long for a good bombshelly-type 50's style suit. Red would be nice.
Best Time of Day: All of it. But if forced to choose, I'd say, a long, hot summer evening.
Most romantic: The sound of cicadas.
Summer movie: Anything that can be shown outside.
Best for sex: I have a weakness for thunderstorms.

*Pico de gallo, in Mexico, isn't salsa fresca (tomatoes, cilantro, onions)--it's watermelon, pineapple, maybe some other melon, preferably in big hand-held chunks, sprinkled with chili powder. Mmmmm.

Children and war

Really lovely post over at XX about Kim Phuc (who is that? You know). She has lent her name to a foundation to help children in and after war. Ophelia at XX also links to an editorial Kim wrote about her life, and an interview with her. Here, too, is a book excerpt about her. You can read the whole book online if you follow the link.

Cool new (to me) blog

Via Hungry Blues, Coming Out Colored. A researchy, smart, linky kind of blog about blogging, social software, etc. Neato. Plus, today's top post has a link to the Implicit Association Test, which, if you've never done any of those, you really should. I first did a few of those years ago, and was perversely proud that I scored as more ageist than racist. Always lovely to rank one's prejudices, huh? It looks like there are a *lot* more tests up than there used to be, including tests on gender & career, weight, sexuality, arab-muslim. . . Neat stuff. And, btw, worth bookmarking for the next time you get into a discussion with someone who totally insists that there's no such thing as unconscious prejudice.

Domestic bliss; or, why I am cranky

The other day:

Me: Honey, I know it's self-indulgent, but I'm going to schedule myself for a haircut and a massage, ok?
Mr. B: Sure. Oh by the way, I lowered the minutes on our cell plan, so our bill was $100 less this month, that'll pay for your massage and cut, right?
Me: Well, not entirely, but it'll sure make me feel better about spending the money, thanks.

Today:

Me (heading out the door): Hey, is the money for this in my account?
Mr. B.: How much will it be?
Me: Well, the cut is about $40, and the massage $65, plus tip, so maybe $150?
Mr. B.: !!! What? No, there's not that much money in your account. You have $95, I have $45. Until next payday.
Me: What? I told you... oh, never mind. Fine. I'll put it on the damn credit card.

At the spa (as distinct from the salon, which is a perfectly fine salon):

1. Receptionist surly, giving off that "you don't belong here" vibe associated with snooty ladies' shops and spas that cater to overprocessed middle-aged women (which I am not, thank you).
2. Overhead lights glaring into eyes.
3. Massage therapist had cold hands.
4. Fakey orientalist new-agey music in room clashing with smooth jazz in lobby (coming through the walls) until I asked massage therapist to please turn one or the other off.
5. "Leave your underwear on." ?!?!? God this town is provincial.
6. Irritating feeling of cotton being rubbed over my hips during the relevant part of the massage.
7. Massage didn't actually cover neck / jaw area, which I really need.
8. I didn't leave a tip. I'm not going back.

This afternoon:

Bitch, coming through door, very hungry (having skipped lunch), goes immediately to kitchen to fix a sandwich. Feeling stressed b/c it's 2:00 already and I have calls to make, job-wise, to the west coast (so I couldn't do it this morning). But first, must. Get. Food.

Pseudoynmous Kid: Mama! Come see what I did!
Me: In a minute, ok? I'm fixing myself lunch.
Pseudoynmous Kid (grabbing my legs): Come! It's very exciting!
Me: In. A. Minute. I'm. Fixing. Lunch.
Pseudoynmous Kid: Please?
Me (snappy): I will be there in a minute. I am fixing lunch.
Pseudoynmous Kid: In one second?
Me: Yeah, something like that.
.
.
Pseudoynmous Kid: It's been more than a second.

A few minutes later:

Bitch, sitting at the table with a sandwich. I have taken one bite. Enter Mr. B.

Mr B.: Hi, how long have you been home?
Me (impatient): About ten minutes.
Mr. B.: Oh. Are you angry?
Me (angry): Look. I just got home. I am eating. Please leave me alone.
Mr. B.: I think you are really out of control.
Me (out of control): Jesus! Can't you just say, "ok, fine" and leave it at that?
Mr. B.: I don't think you know how you sound.
Me (sounding shrill and bitchy): Look! I'm eating! Why do you have to criticize me? I asked you to leave me alone. Just fucking say okay without putting me down, all right?
Mr. B.: Fine.

Pseudonymous Kid, undergraduate

So I was reading this post of New Kid's out loud to Mr. B., and Pseudonymous Kid overheard.

Pseudonymous Kid: Why is the paragraph sad?
Me: Well, it needed to be rewritten.
Pseudonymous Kid: Can we rewrite it?
Me: Heh, no. It's not my paper, I don't know what it said.
Pseudonymous Kid (starting to look sad): Oh. It's not there any more?
Me: No, but don't worry, honey, it got rewritten.
Pseudonymous Kid: It did? How?
Me: Well, that comment was on someone's draft. So that means the paper got rewritten when they revised the draft.
Pseudonymous Kid: What does that mean?
Me: Well, people have to practice to get good at things, right?
Pseudonymous Kid: Yes.
Me: So, one of the jobs some teachers do with older kids is, they don't practice writing like making letters and words. But they practice writing like writing stories and essays and things.
Pseudonymous Kid: Why does that make the writing better?

Mama activism, please

If, like me, you are a little behind on your blog-reading and/or you don't regularly read Trish Wilson's blog, you may not have heard about the Genia Stockome case. In brief: a woman who is seven months pregnant was put in jail by a judge because she objected too vigorously in court to the judge's decision to allow her abusive ex-husband to move with her other children out of state, from New York to Texas.

I imagine that if my ex-husband had abused me, I'd object pretty damn vigorously to a judicial decision allowing him to move my children out of state, too. Sounds to me like the kind of thing a good mother does.

After you read Trish's description of the case (she has several blog entries on it), you can sign an online petition to stay the judge's decision (i.e., put a hold on the father's moving the children to Texas) and release the mother from jail while someone other than the judge--who sounds like he has not exactly been impartial on this case--reviews the case.

Update: the petition was turned in today (Monday 9 May), so is no longer available. Thanks to everyone who went and read / signed.

A slightly more edifying mother's day link

Mother's day always makes me feel guilty--like I should be out doing sunny fun things with Pseudonymous Kid. Which I really enjoy doing, actually, but today I have cover letters to write. So, of course, the boys have gone to buy cake (grocery store cake! Yay!) for me for breakfast (yes, it's 2 pm, shut up) and I'm therefore obviously web-surfing, b/c I'm responsible like that.

Anyway. Sitemeter led me to this pretty, bookish blog, which led me to this mother's day article about an artist's portrait of his mother. Click on the picture itself for a better image--it's a great photo.

Ooh, the boys are back, must be mama now...

Happy mother's day

A special li'l giftie for all the mamas and the not-mamas too: Magical Trevor is back!


The original, for the unintiated.

My own personal favorite, Kenya.

Clearly I am not alone in my preference: Kenya live: fan remix.

Park the kids in front of any of these (they loop!) and you can wander off and do something else for hours. Unless, of course, you get sucked into doing the Kenya dance....

Enjoy!

Followup on Muslim teenage girls held in detention

Apparently one of the girls has been released and the other is still in detention, but a judge has ordered that she will be released to return with her family to Bangladesh. Her family had applied for asylum, but it was denied; apparently when she was arrested, they decided against continuing to try to legalize their status, and decided that the most efficacious response was to apply to have her released so that they could all leave the country.

You're a parent, you do what you gotta do. I hope things turn out well for them all.

Here's my original post on the subject.

D'oh!

bitchphd: what is wrong with me? all i want to do is sleep and fuck.
Dr. Dave: in that order?
bitchphd: probably not.
Dr. Dave: All I ever want to do is sleep. Fucking occasionally makes an appearance, although lately it's losing out to EATING.
bitchphd: i could eat. i want some cake. crappy grocery store cake with white icing.
Dr. Dave: mmmmmmm.... cake.
bitchphd: i love grocery store cake.
bitchphd: I KNOW WHAT MY PROBLEM IS.
Dr. Dave: PMS
bitchphd: PMS
bitchphd: it all comes together
Dr. Dave: HA!
bitchphd: JINX
Dr. Dave: you women
bitchphd: wow, i'm impressed!
Dr. Dave: you mystify me.
bitchphd: why?
bitchphd: i have to blog this convo
Dr. Dave: once a month for 20 years.... and every month ITS A COMPLETE SURPRISE!!!!
bitchphd: it just isn't something i think about. lol. shut up.
....

bitchphd: do you want to be identified as the person i'm chatting with, or not?
Dr. Dave: i'll brace myself for the flood of traffic. crap. I should probably write something that doesn't suck.
....
Dr. Dave: anyway, that conversation is only half as funny as you realize... becuase my wife and i have had it a half-dozen times. "Hey I just realized why I came home from the grocery store with 4 different kinds of cookies." "Becuase your period is due tomorrow." "Yeah.... you knew that??" "..." "YOU NEED TO TELL ME THESE THINGS."
Dr. Dave: Honey, I've noticed a lot of chocolate and un-provoked hostility the past few days... is your period due? Like that would go over well.
Dr. Dave: And you wonder why we only pay you 75 cents.
bitchphd: I HATE YOU. i'm totally laughing.
bitchphd: ok, i'm going to go rummage for a tampon and some cookies. i'll wash my hands in between. i'll be right back.

In case y'all missed this

Butu especially for Cleis, do check out Michael Bérubé's response to Joseph Epstein's essay in A&L Daily.

Joseph Epstein has an essay in this week’s Weekly Standard, and it honestly isn’t very good. What do I mean by “not very good”? Do I say such a thing because I don’t like Epstein, or because I disagree with many of his remarks in the essay? Not at all. I say it because the essay isn’t very good as measured by the standards one applies to “essays” that are “good.”

I wish I could use scare quotes with such wit.

Mother's Day weekend

'Tis the weekend of brunches, cards, and floral bouquets. Now, I like flowers and brunch as much as anyone (not Mother's Day brunch--can't stand the lines). But, as with so many cultural myths about mothers, the truth is that Mother's Day is not all about shopping and lip-service. It's a political holiday, founded by political women, who viewed motherhood as a political institution. Specifically, Mother's Day was originally a pro life holiday in the true sense of the word: it claimed mothers as life-givers not in order to deny them rights over their own bodies, but to advocate against killing their sons in war. It's interesting to note that the fever pitch at which today's "pro-life" (anti-abortion) movement--mostly run by men, not mothers--is burning is happening at a time and in conjunction with a political party that is dedicated to the pursuit of war. (Do click through to the link, which is to Salon--yes, you have to watch the ad, but the picture at the top of the page is worth the proverbial thousand words about why mothers should, and mostly do, oppose war.)

So. In honors of Mother's Day, I offer you a few links:

1. Julia Ward Howe's Mother's Day Proclamation

2. A picture of Anne Jarvis, the woman behind Mother's Day as we know it.

3. A celebratory history of Anne Jarvis, focusing on her role in creating Mother's Day as a national holiday.

4. A briefer history, which notes that, by the end of her life, Jarvis was dismayed by what Mother's Day had become.

5. An anti-war Code Pink Mother's Day rally in Sacramento on Sunday afternoon.

6. A mother who is doing a walk to raise funds to fight ovarian cancer tomorrow--you can still sponsor her walk by leaving her a comment. Every little bit helps--I could only afford $10, and she says she's had pledges even lower than that, so go ahead and drop her a few dollars, if you can. And if you can't, click through to her site anyway and read the links she provides--they'll teach you something, which is another thing mothers are good at.

Mystery solved

Poor Pseudonymous Kid. I finally convinced him to tell me what was wrong at Spanish school. Apparently the teacher told the kids they were going to have a substitute, and Pseudonymous Kid got it into his head that the substitute is a "tough lady" and that she would "put us in time out if we made any mistakes." Now, I feel sure his teacher, who is really warm and sweet, did not say that. He had a substitute in his *other* (English-language) school, and maybe *she* said something about being a tough lady in order to warn the kids to behave. Which sucks ass, with kids his age, but what are you gonna do--his English school just isn't as good as the Spanish one (which, if it met more than once a week, I would put him in full time). So anyway, he is afraid of the substitute, and has occasionally made an error in his Spanish (many of the kids in his class speak it at home; unfortunately, my Spanish skills are pretty rusty--alas, my lost fluency!--and Mr. B. doesn't speak it at all, so we don't), and I guess he put two and two together and is terrified he'll get in trouble if he forgets how to count to ten or something.

So I reassured him that Mr. B. or I will take him to Spanish school, and if there is a substitute that day, we will stay all day to make sure everything is okay, for as long as he needs us. And that seemed to make him feel much better. And I put a bunch of Spanish-language leap pad books and real, regular books (truly, my accent is pretty damn good b/c I learned it young) on the wish list in case anyone wants to encourage his second-language skills. (God, I am awful.)

Pobrecito.

In defense of blogrolls

Apparently Shelley's post on Burningbird has inspired Lauren at Feministe to ditch her blogroll, and Roxanne's thinking of doing the same. I'm not on board. I'm not on board at all.

Shelley says:

Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things — but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?

So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.

I dont' think this is true, at all. Blogrolls, by their very nature, are not inflexible or immutable. And I've gotten comments from people saying that they've found new stuff from my blogroll. I've seen comments on other sites saying that my blogroll is a good resource for personal-type academic blogs; and for that reason, despite the length and how long the damn thing takes to load, I leave it up there, and I try to add every new, personal, small academic blog I come across. Because yes, for regular readers, y'all probably use the links in the main posts more than you do the blogroll; but for new readers and some of the regulars, I'm sure the blogroll does occasionally serve as a resource.

Now, I don't know about other people's blogrolls. Maybe they're more static, or maybe they make less of a point of linking to "little" blogs, or whatever. But it seems to me that the Big Boys are not gonna dump their blogrolls. And if the women and progressives and people who care about this shit dump theirs, it just makes the problem worse, not better. The solution is not to take away those links from the small, personal, feminist, progressive blogs--because the ranking system isn't going anywhere. Making ourselves and our allies invisible out of protest is self-defeating.

I think those of us whose blogs get a fair bit of traffic and who've started using RSS readers forget that there are new readers coming in all the time. When I first started reading blogs, I used blogrolls constantly. A lot of my initial blogroll came from other people's blogrolls, where I culled the sites I really liked and read regularly. A lot of my discoveries have been made from the blogrolls of people who write personal blogs and never link; their blogrolls are their only links. And let's all be honest: no matter how much we try to read new blogs, a lot of the stuff we list in main posts is linking other conversations already happening (like this one, for example). But there are some great things going on over in that blogroll, and while I do try to link things that pop out at me, I also often read things that I like but just can't think of anything much to say about. So I leave a comment, and leave it at that. But if the blogroll's there, someone else might happen on the site.

There was a meme going around not too long ago where people were saying "my biggest source of hits is Bitch" or "my second or third biggest source of hits is Bitch" and those are maybe 18 hits a week off my blogroll or something. But that's 18 people who wouldn't otherwise happen to find that site. A rare hit is better than no damn hit at all, especially for the smaller blogs.

So no, I am not taking down my blogroll.

Here's the comment I left at Roxanne's:

I tried shortening my blogroll once by having it display a random set of 20, and enough people said that, in fact, they use my blogroll that I reinstated it in all its lengthy, slow-loading glory. I've also seem my blogroll specificaly mentioned on other sites as a great resource for academic blogs that are a bit off the beaten path; I deliberately make a point of blogrolling almost every blog by an academic that I come across, especially if it's small and personal.

So I don't agree with burningbird, and I think that it's problematic, frankly, that people like you and Lauren are thinking of ditching your blogrolls. Because you guys are FAR more likely to link to sites that AREN'T the big boys, and by removing your blogrolls, you're removing links to those other sites, and just knocking 'em further down the technorati and TTLB rankings. Now, i agree that technorati and TTLB aren't great ways of ranking blogs; but the fact is, they exist. And *those guys* aren't going to stop doing what they're doing. And in fact, I think that the constant "where are the women" thing has actually raised a lot of people's consciousnesses. And now is not the time to give up.

I'm not a fan of refusing to play the game just b/c it's rigged. I'm a fan of playing, and shouting my ass off every time I see someone cheating. B/c I refuse to be made to sit on the sidelines, and the game is not gonna stop just b/c we walk away from it.

In other words, I object. I object.

It's America, learn some Spanish

Pseudonymous Kid: Mama, why am I an American?
Me: Because you were born in America.
Pseudonymous Kid: Then why don't I speak any Spanish?
Me: Well, you speak some. And you're learning more in Spanish language school.
Pseudonymous Kid: But I should have learned it when I was a baby! Before!
Me: Well, sweetie, your papa and I speak English. I didn't learn Spanish until I was six. You're learning it much younger than I did!
Pseudonymous Kid (getting really upset): No! I should already know it, because I am an American!
Me: Sweetie, people learn languages two ways. They either learn them at home, or they learn them at school. Your parents speak English at home, so you learned English as a baby. And now you are learning Spanish in school. That's okay!
Pseudonymous Kid (crying): No, it's not. The teacher told me I was wrong.
Me: She said what? Sweetie, your teacher really likes you. She thinks you are very smart. What happened?
Pseudonymous Kid: She said "vámonos" doesn't mean hurry up. And I couldn't remember how to say "jump" in Spanish.
Me: "Ándale" means hurry up. "Vámonos" means let's go. Jump is. . . I forget how to say jump.
Pseudonymous Kid: Salta.
Me: Salta! That's right. See? You're very smart. You remember Spanish words I can't remember.
Pseudonymous Kid: I should already know Spanish! I should have learned it before!
Me: Sweetie, everyone makes mistakes! It's okay!

Pseudonymous Kid breaks down sobbing.

Me: Honey, what happened? Can you tell me?
Pseudonymous Kid: No.... I am very tired. I need to sleep. I don't want to talk about it. Can we just leave it alone?
Me: Okay....


Of course, we'll take this up tomorrow. I don't know what it could possibly be--his teacher adores him, and he loves Spanish school (which meets just one morning a week). I suspect he made a mistake the other day and was overtired tonight and his mistake suddenly seemed overwhelming, but... god. Academic neurosis in pre-school. Great.

On the other hand, I TOTALLY LOVE that he thinks that, as an American, he should know Spanish.

Even better than "duck and cover"

Stroll away.

Shameless commerce

Ms. Musings alerts everyone to the publication of the new edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves--which now has a companion website, even. Make sure and check out that first link, though, which also links to an interview with the Women's Health Collective executive director, a calendar of book launch events, and information about the history of the organization and foreign editions of the book. (not providing the links so as to make y'all click through to Ms. Musings, nyah).

What a great book that is. I discovered it shockingly late--I think I was 30. Married already, knew quite a bit about sex and women's health care, thankyouverymuch, but even so: what a revelation that book was. I think I passed that copy on to my sister, who had also never read it (what were my feminist parents thinking?!?) and bought myself a new copy. If you haven't read it, you really should; if you have the old edition, you should upgrade; if you have a younger sister or niece or cousin or girl friend--or even an older sister, aunt, cousin, girl friend, hell, your mom, even (as a mother's day gift?)--it is so very worth owning. They don't call it "the bible" for nothing.

Enquiring minds want to know

An email enquirier asks: "how did you arrange the terms of your marriage?" Being a woman, the enquirer admits that she doesn't know me from Eve, nor I her, and apologizes for the personal nature of the enquiry, which no one else ever has. But in fact I don't mind this question, and I get it occasionally; it seems an obvious question to ask, and most people who ask it do so b/c they want to know how to do it themselves. I don't have the magic bullet, but I do have a good story, and everyone always wants to know more about Mr. B. and how it all works. So I will share it.

Scene: Mr. B. and I have been introduced by his sister, and are flirting long-distance. We meet a couple of times, enjoy each other. We have "the talk."

Me: Are we not dating other people?
Mr. B.: Well, I'm not. Are you?
Me: No. But is that, like, a rule?
Mr. B.: I dunno. Do you want it to be a rule?
Me: Not really. It seems like a stupid rule. I'm in college, and we live in different states. I don't want to be a nun. I like going out.
Mr. B.: Me too. Ok, it's not a rule.

Scene: Years later, we are engaged. Though I'm sure we talked about this periodicallly as we were dating, too.

Me: I can't believe we're getting married. Am I ready to get married?
Mr. B.: Yes.
Me: But what if it doesn't work out?
Mr. B.: I will never divorce you.
Me: Ok, seriously, though. Under what circumstances would we divorce each other?
Mr. B.: I find that hard to imagine.
Me: I'd divorce you if you hit me. Or if we had a kid, and you hit the kid.
Mr. B.: That's fair. I'd divorce you if you hit me or hit a kid, too.
Me: Ok, we're agreed on that. What about cheating?
Mr. B.: I don't think I'd divorce you *just* for cheating. Define "cheating."
Me: Well, let's say I got drunk and made out with someone.
HIm: No, not for that.
Me: Ok, me either. I don't think I'd divorce you for sleeping with someone, either. If you fell in love with someone else, my feelings might be hurt, and we'd have to talk about it, I guess.
Mr. B.: I agree. Hitting is not okay, but cheating in and of itself is not a good reason for a divorce.
Me: I'm glad we're on the same page.

Scene: Married couple, at dinner. This and the following scene are repeated a few times, with variations in who's speaking and the details, but the tone always remains the same.

Mr. B.: I have a confession.
Me: Oh?
Mr. B.: I have a terrible crush on Sarah. She's so preeeetty.
Me (laughing): Yes, she certainly is. And I don't think her husband sleeps with her, either.
Mr. B.: I know! It's so sad!
Me: It is, poor thing. She likes you.
Mr. B.: Ooh! You think so?
Me: Yeah she does. Why wouldn't she? You're good-looking, you're not an asshole (unlike her husband), you appreciate women. Poor woman, she needs to have some fun.

Scene: Married couple, at dinner, a few weeks later.

Mr. B.: I did something bad.
Me: Oh?
Mr. B.: Sarah and I went out bike riding. And, um, she kissed me.
Me: Oh she did, did she? And did you kiss her back?
Mr. B.: Um, yes. Yes, I did.
Me (laughing): Well thank god, b/c if you hadn't the rejection would have killed her.

Scene: Last summer

Me: Um, I have a confession.
Mr. B.: Are you going to tell me what you've been doing online the last few days?
Me (embarrassed): Ok! Ok!
Mr. B. (laughing): Hehehe. What?
Me: Ok. You know those horrible adult sites? With chat rooms?
Mr. B.: Oh my god, you're doing adult chat rooms?
Me: Yes! I am! Shut up! It's kinda fun.
Mr. B.: Is it really? Do tell!

Scene: Married couple, in bed.

Me: I have tickets to a play in Big City. Do you wanna go?
Mr. B.: No, not really.
Me: Um, well then, do you mind if I invite this guy I've been sort of chatting with? He's an artsy type, I think he'd actually be interested.
Mr. B.: You're asking me if I mind if you take another guy on a date?
Me: Well, yeah.
Mr. B.: No, not really. Are you gonna sleep with him?
Me: I don't know! Should I? Would that be bad? I haven't had a date in years!
Mr. B. (laughing): Well, whatever you do, have fun.... And tell me all about it.
Me: Don't worry, I will.

Scene: Married couple, months later.

Me: Ok, this is crazy.
Mr. B.: What?
Me: Well, I met this new guy. And I really like him. And he's talking about flying out here to meet me.
Mr. B.: Good for him, I don't blame him.
Me: Is that nuts?
Mr. B.: Sure, but in a good way.

Scene: Married couple, weeks later.

Me: So this guy. We have a new plan.
Mr. B.: Shoot.
Me: Well, a three-day weekend is coming up. And if he flies out here to visit me, we would stay in Big City and it would cost a lot of money. And you wanna go out of town for the weekend anyway. Would you mind if I went and visited him, instead of him coming here?
Mr. B.: Do you feel safe doing that?
Me: Yeah, I really do.
Mr. B.: Then sure, I don't care.

Scene: Married couple, weeks later.

Me: So you know, I had a really good time on that trip.
Mr. B.: Yeah, you said. But you haven't said much about it, and I've been dying to hear how it went. What's up?
Me: Well, I really like this guy. Like, a lot. Like, a lot a lot.
Mr. B.: Oh. So that's why you're not talking about it.
Me: Yeah.
Mr. B.: Well, that's okay with me.
Me: Is it really?
Mr. B.: Do you still love me?
Me: Yes, of course. But I think, well, I kind of love this other guy too.
Mr. B.: Are you going to leave me?
Me: No, don't be silly.
Mr. B.: Well, I don't mind if you love other people. And I don't mind if other people love you. I don't blame them.
Me: Ok, good. Thanks.

You damn right

Pseudonymous Kid: Mama, you are the sweetest mama. (Climbs into my lap)
Me: Aww, thank you.
Pseudonymous Kid (deciding to be bratty): No! You're BAD.
Me (feigning anger): I'm WHAT?!?
Pseudonymous Kid: You're a BAD mama. You're the baddest mama ever.

Freedom of the press, dude

You'll have to picture me making the li'l peace sign with my fingers. B/c I am a pretty unreconstructed liberal idealist on the whole "freedom of the press" thing. So happy freedom of the press day, despite--or perhaps because--freedom of the press is in so much trouble here nowadays.

Some links, celebratory and sobering:

1. World Press Freedom Day
2. Rox Populi, highlighting two French reporters kidnapped in Bagdad
3. Toner Mishap, begging us all to subscribe to those old-fashioned things, newspapers
4. Discourse.net, doing a little rhetorical analysis of a NYT story about torture
5. Pharyngula, steaming a bit over press coverage of the false "debate" between truth and bullshit over the existence of evolution
6. Pandagon, with a little more on the Republican push to make PBS into a misinformation outlet
7. The Columbia Journalism Review asks what "objectivity" really means, and whether or not it's desireable

It's an interesting concept, this "freedom of the press" thing. What are the rights and responsibilities of a free press? Is freedom a passive or an active concept? The fight over media bias and "balance" matters because the concepts of a "public," and "electorate," and a "citizen," the concept of "rights" itself, rests on the belief in reason and knowledge. Law matters--which is why we are also currently fighting, as a nation, over judges and filibusters--but even the law rests on an idea of known truth and freedom of information. If a bad law is written, or a good law is misapplied, and we know about it, we can change that. But we have to know before we can act.

Academics believe in the truth, too--the lies of the right wing about postmodernity notwithstanding. That's why we do research and cite our sources. Even if the truth is that "the truth is unknowable" or, perhaps, "there is no one truth," that is a kind of truth; just as, ironically, even the most cynical person who argues that there is no such thing as media fairness or an informed public, argues this as a negative. What is so horrifying about the extreme elements of the right wing nowadays is that, when we see Attorneys General argue that torture is only a question of definitions, rather than a word that points to a material reality grounded in people's bodies; when we see liberals talk about compromising abortion rights as though those rights were only political theory, with no grounding in the bodies of women; when we see the president and vice-president deny, on the record, that they ever said things that we have seen and heard them say; what we are seeing is a denial that there is such a thing as truth or a public, in a sense that is not conceptual, but is actually material and real, and is supposed to be material and real. The point of deconstruction was that language, by its nature, escapes pure referentiality; it was never that the things language tries (imperfectly) to refer to do not exist.

And that's why some of us, even unreconstructed liberal idealists, are starting to occasionally raise the f-word, "fascism." Because when those in power use their power to start talking about materal realities as if they were only abstractions, and therefore unimportant or malleable; use language as if it has no referentiality in order to cover up, or distract attention from, the material realities of their actions; then we really, truly are approaching fascism--not in the rhetorical, sloppy way that Godwin's law is meant to poke fun of, but in a very real and true sense. We toss around references to 1984, but it is probably more useful to re-read Politics and the English Language, because--as the term "orwellian" is meant to convey--the way to successfully undermine a constitutional republic is not through force of arms, but through lies.

So. Happy World Press Freedom Day. Write something true.

State of Florida continues to rape 13-year old pregnant girl

Really. I know I sound like the Rude Pundit here, but the Florida DCF is fucking this poor girl so viciously (registration required; use "nomail@juno.com," password "bugmenot"). Judge Alvarez said, "ok, you can have your abortion," the DCF said, "we won't drive her to the clinic," the judge said, "fine, her attorneys can drive her," and they were on their way to pick her up when the DCF filed an appeal.

In other words, basically, the plan is to drag this out until the girl is forced to have the baby. I read, at some point, a horrific sci-fi short story told from the pov of a man whose mother was being held in prison, chained to the wall, in order to force her to carry a baby to term (he himself had been, if memory serves, an unwanted pregnancy and she had been forced to bear him; if the story rings a bell for anyone, let me know and I'll post a link or at least the title of the thing).** That's basically what's going on here, and Jeb Bush and the state of Florida have done it before. Last time was a mentally retarded rape victim. Nice, huh?

Ya gotta love this statement:

In a statement released at 8 p.m., the DCF's West Palm Beach spokeswoman, Marilyn Munoz, quoted from a state law: ''In no case shall the department consent to sterilization, abortion or termination of life support.'' Munoz added: ``The DCF has the custodial responsibility to do what is in the best interest of the child, as state law requires.''

Yes, the DCF damn well does have that custodial responsibility. And by jerking this girl around, they are snowing they do NOT have her best interests at stake. There is no way that forcing her to bear a child she does not want, at risk to her mental and physical health, is in her best interests.

This kind of shit is what the word "motherfucker" was invented for, just so you know. IMHO.

What is in the best interests of women, including young women like LG, is being listened to. Being taken seriously. Being treated with respect. Listen to this woman, for instance:

I am here today in my son’s honor to tell you that life doesn’t always follow an easy path. And that life is almost never a black and white issue to be governed by others. I am here to put a face on the issue of abortion for all the families that cannot be here today. And I am here to beg you to remember me and Thomas each and every time you contemplate legislation that would deteriorate our God-given parental rights to do what is moral and just for our children.

That is it. Whether you believe in god, that is what we are saying, screaming when we talk about this. That is what abortion "rights" are all about: not legal permission, but the human, animal right and responsibility that we have to care for the children we cannot have, as well as the ones we do--and to take care of ourselves, too. That's what this girl in Florida is trying to do, and everyone from the DCF down to the people hypothesizing about her maturity or what's in her best judgment are doing so by listening to themselves, not her. It isn't about the law, or "most" 13 year olds, or how we define childhood, or whether or not parental consent is required for medical procedures, or any of that crap. It's about this one, very real, girl, who happens to be young, and is also pregnant, and needs to do what she needs to do because she knows that she is too young, too poor, too unprotected to bear a child. That if she bears the child, it will be her child, and the DCF--the agency that is fucking her over to score political points for Jeb Bush and the Republican party with voters who (at best) do not give a rat's ass about people like her or the child she might have (or at worst, voters who actively hate her and any children she might have)--will take that child away, and fuck it, too.

And that's why we can't compromise on abortion rights. Because LG and people like her are not pawns or trading cards. That's what abortion rights is all about.

For more stories of and by women who know this firsthand, see here, here, and here. The first link is to a site I've long had on the blogroll, infrequently updated but very, very worth reading; the second, to a new magazine that will be published soon--bookmark it and consider subscribing or purchasing a subscription for your local library or something; and the third is to a really great blog, Third Wave Agenda, that's new to me. Make sure and check it out; the linked entry in particular has some fantastic links of its own, well worth following.

And please don't forget to write to your Senator about this bill, which did indeed pass the House on 27 April and will be up for a Senate vote. If it passes--and I believe it is expected to--Bush will certainly sign it. The Senate bill is S. 403, and it is sponsored by Senator Ensign (R-NV).

Update: Via Feministe, Jeb Bush has called off the DCF. Guess that "using women as political footballs" thing is starting to feel a little risky to the Bush boys. Let's hope it's a sign that holding the line on this stuff may be starting to work.

And on that hopeful thought, please do follow up on S.B. 403.

**Second update: the story I was referring to, about the woman jailed in order to force her to bear children, is called Miscarriage of Justice, and the author is Robert J. Howe. Thanks very much to alierakieron and Janet for the reminders!

Help me find a job

Smart, determined, bitchy academic with a Ph.D. in the humanities and a job at a second-tier research institution seeks new career direction. Teaching experience includes: community college; adult continuing education; a year teaching in an undergraduate equal opportunity program; and a summer "bridge" program for student athletes and first-generation college students. In the last three years I have primarily taught upper-division and graduate-level courses in my area of specialization. I have developed innovative assignments encouraging undergraduate research and writing in large lecture courses; I have also taught courses using technology in and outside the classroom. I prefer teaching first-year and non-major courses and have a real skill for developing assignments that challenge students with varied backgrounds and abilities.

Administrative experience includes work organizing graduate students that led to a successful unionization effort (completed by others); gathering data on graduate student qualifying exams, presenting it to the department, and pushing (successfully) for an exam restructuring process; and developing and managing a research program with a budget of $10,000 and three student employees.

I am working on a book about women's experiences in higher education, with a particular focus on obstacles to retaining and promoting women scholars. I will be chairing an upcoming panel on women and mentoring at a national conference, and I will be a featured presenter at a different upcoming conference on integrating writing throughout the curriculum.

Goal: I'm looking for a position in a think tank, non-profit, or educational institution oriented towards researching and developing educational opportunities for non-traditional students. My use of "non-traditional" includes students "at risk," high school dropouts, underrepresented minorities, women, veterans, first-generation college students, and mature students. I would also be interested in an administrative position in student services, undergraduate education, or outreach and retention of non-traditional students. A job that includes some public advocacy or classroom teaching would be ideal.

I am looking for work in a west-coast city or the New York metropolitan area, but I am willing to consider jobs in any large urban area.

Please email me with leads, suggestions, or contacts.

Thanks.

Ah, the Ministry of Truth

Via Toner Mishap, the Republicans are back on the trail Newt Gingrich blazed, trying to turn PBS into a right-wing propaganda vehicle.

Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson [the Republican Chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.

Mr. Tomlinson said that his comment was in jest and that he couldn't imagine how remarks at "a fun occasion" were taken the wrong way.

The CPB is a private non-profit organization, not a government agency. It does, however, receive most of its funding from the federal government. Here is the CPB statement about objectivity and balance. It has an email and snail mail address you can write to.

While we're at it, here is a link to The First Amendment Center, which is a pretty nifty site that provides news stories, commentary, and coverage of legal cases related to first amendment rights.

Why parental consent for abortion is bullshit

Scott Lemieux over at Lawyers, Guns and Money points to a sobering piece over at World O'Crap on Randall Terry's inevitable entry into L.G.'s legal battle to make her own goddamn decision about whether or not she's ready to have a baby. Terry's arguments are beneath despicable, though that doesn't mean that he and his puppet Jeb Bush won't succeed in dragging this fucking case out long enough to force L.G. to give birth, like they did a retarded woman who had been raped a couple of years ago. But even well-meaning lefty types are prone to get their heads turned by the argument that a 13yo girl should have a parent figure (or the state) looking out for her "best interest" because, as a child, she is unlikely to know it herself.*

Now, I think this is a ridiculous argument. First of all, I see no way in which a thirteen year old, in this country at this time, who wants not to have a child, can reasonably be said not to be demonstrating that she knows her own best interest. Hell, any minor child who wants an abortion, frankly: having a baby when you're under 18 is not an easy thing to do. So I don't really get why people think that deciding to have an abortion, if you are a minor, could possibly not be in a young woman's best interest. It seems very clear to me that this "the child's best interest" argument is a very weak rationalization for "I think abortion is bad."

On the other hand, I am not going to say that a young woman should be forced to have an abortion, because I do happen to know a lot of young women who decided to carry pregnancies to term, and I absolutely think that there is not a goddamn thing wrong with that, either. The main problems young single mothers run into have little to do with their own abilities, and a lot to do with running into prejudice and punishment at every turn. I think that the same prejudice that tsk tsks at young mothers, denies them financial support, kicks them out of school, thinks of them as whores and fools and "bad mothers" simply because they are poor and young, is behind the sitting in judgment over young women like LG, who want not to have babies yet. In other words, basically, we all think that "young girls shouldn't be having sex" and that therefore, if they do, they must be punished. If they decide to have abortions, we think that should be made as difficult as possible; if they decide not to have abortions, we think that should be made as difficult as possible.

Well, fuck all that bullshit. The fact of the matter is, young girls do sometimes get pregnant. It happens. Abortion is legal, having children is legal. Butt the fuck out and let these girls decide what to do for themselves, and if you're so goddamn concerned about it, offer to help. Advocate for providing financial support to single moms; advocate for young women's right to continue their education, even if they have children; argue with people who cluck cluck about young mothers; don't assume that every young woman you see with a little kid is a big sister or a nanny (and don't assume that, if she's the mama, that that's an awful pity); if you know a young woman who has a kid, offer to babysit once in a while. If she decides that adoption is the way she wants to go, support her in that (and don't pretend that it's an easy decision, going through forty weeks of pregnancy, with everyone treating you like a social pariah, risking your health and changing your body, only to give up the child you've borne at the end of the process, possibly never to see it again).

And for god's sake, if a thirteen-year old kid decides, "hey, I'm not up for all that," don't argue with her.

* Here, by the way, is another good piece Scott wrote about why our pie-in-the-sky idealism about parental notification laws doesn't actually work.

Update: Here's another piece by a formerly pro-life woman who carried a pregnancy to term and feels, well, a little justifiably angry at the Christian treatment she got for doing so. She also addresses that pesky distinction between "I'm not comfortable with abortion in X circumstance" and "mind your own goddamn business."

Teaching forum

Hey, y'all. What kinds of clever teaching ideas do you have for generating *inclusive* discussion in the classroom? In an earlielr thread, I said that I learned from a grad school friend to use stickies: you pass around a little pack of yellow ones and a little pack of, say, orange ones, and the students each take two yellows and an orange. When they answer a question or respond to something someone else has said, they can "spend" a yellow (e.g., by sticking it to the front of the desk/table). When they *ask* a question, they can spend an orange. When they've spent all the stickies, they have to shut up* until everyone else has spent all their stickies. I've found that, if you do this for the first two class meetings, it encourages the talkers to hold back a bit, and often they (and I) will find that someone else will say what they were going to say anyway. And it encourages the non-talkers to speak up, and also helps them (and the rest of the class) realize that they have contributions to make. One variation is to actually limit *yourself* to three stickies as well: set up the discussion, and then say, "ok, now it's discussion time" and you can't talk any more than anyone else. I've been pleasantly surprised to find that often students will hit the points I'd have hit myself, and then once the discussion is over, you can summarize and (if you've taken decent notes), acknowledge by name which students hit the key points. This also helps in the memorizing names thing, btw.

But I, and others, are always in search of clever teaching ideas. What kinds of transferable things have you done in a classroom that has helped generate discussion, or learning of some sort? Leave clever ideas in comments, please.

*Credit to Rana for pointing out that this part has to be made explicit.