My Students Rise In Protest
Yesterday, I started the class by telling my students the following:
“The mini-quiz we are writing today will be very hard. But the good news is that, to reward ourselves for the hard work we have been doing, we will spend next week watching a movie.”
The reaction of the students can best be described as a mini-riot. I never have any problems establishing and maintaining discipline but this time I just couldn’t get them to calm down and start preparing for the quiz.
For almost 15 minutes, we maintained the following conversation.
“Will there be nudity in the movie?”
“No.”
“Because I had a prof who showed us a movie with nudity.”
“And my prof showed us a movie with full frontal nudity.”
“And I had the worst prof ever! She showed us a movie with full frontal male nudity.”
“Guys, there is no nudity in the movie we will see next week. I promise. None whatsoever. So let’s just settle down and start preparing for the mini-quiz.”
“Are you sure there is no nudity? Or sexual scenes?”
“Yes, I’m very sure. Now let’s go over the conjugations of. . .”
“Because it is stressful to sit there in class and watch sex flicks!”
“Yes! I’m so over that, too!”
“Guys, I promise, no sex flicks are scheduled in this course. Now, back to the conjugations. . .”
“I just think it’s wrong to make people see nudity for a grade!”
And thus it went on.
As an example of a sex flick they saw in class, students named Motorcycle Diaries. I watched this film several years ago and it struck me as anything but erotic. I don’t even remember if there was any nudity there.
This wasn’t a regular discussion of the kind that I always have with students. I described it as a mini-riot at the beginning of the post because it was loud and very highly charged emotionally.
As a result, I have had the very first old-age discussion of the “Kids today!” variety. When I told N. about this, we spent a while talking about how “in our times, kids this age wanted nothing more than look at some nudity for a grade.”
And this is how I became a “when I was your age, things were different” person.
Why Are They So Rabid?
Reader Evelina Anville says a propos of my post on Girl Scouts and their vilification by the Catholic Church:
On the one hand, the Catholic Church is one of the major churches in the US (and the world); and, on the other hand, Girl Scouts is so wholesome and so very “establishment.” So it’s not like some fringe church is rejecting a group of radical feminists. It’s a major church with a great deal of clout rejecting a mainstream group (and, from what I understand,continuing to support the Boy Scouts.) So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am worried what this means in terms of gender and sexual politics when a major Church brands a group that encourages cookie-selling, arts and crafts and camping, as radical or extreme. I agree that it’s the Catholic Church’s right and that the Church shouldn’t be forced to recognize the Girl Scouts or anything. Still, I find the entire thing disturbing.
I agree completely that the Church’s attack on the Girl Scouts is completely out of proportion but I have a different view of what this means. I find that the rejection of such an – as Evelina says – wholesome group and such a vicious backlash against a very non-threatening organization for children signals complete and utter desperation on the Church’s side. They are losing parishioners left and right. There is one scandal after another, they are being slowly squeezed out of contemporary reality, so they flail around like a drowning person.
This is precisely why the Fundamentalists are trying to pass all of these outrageously barbaric measures against contraception and abortion. This is why the Republican primaries have been so bizarre. The Fundamentalist, ultra-religious brand of Conservatism is dying out. These are their final moments, and they know it extremely well. This is the very last opportunity they have to signal their presence. They are so rabid because they are scared. I have a feeling that even among Conservatives there is a growing dissatisfaction with how the Conservative movement has been overrun with shrill religious fanatics, which does great damage to the rational, intelligent Conservatism.
I believe that soon the prolonged agony of fanatisicm will be over. Religious people will give up on trying to make the secular society follow their rules and bow down to their beliefs because very very soon this will become completely untenable. And then, finally, the reasonable, non-fanatical representatives of Conservatism will recover their movement and we will start seeing productive interactions between Liberals and Conservatives.
As stressful and depressing as it is to observe the current developments in the war against secularism, feminism, human rights and choice, the reality that they obscure is very hopeful and positive. The more rabid the fanatics get, the greater is the desperation that they are communicating by their acts.
My Scales Mock Me
So I stepped on the scales this morning and instead of giving me a number, the scales showed a word.
“Low,” they said.
Eventually I realized, of course, that the word referred to the low battery charge. At first, however, I felt like the scales were trying to make fun of me by providing a sarcastic response.
Smartest
A senior colleague told me that I’m the smartest person she knows. This made me wonder what kind of people she hangs out with.
Student Activism
I always promise myself that I will stop firing off posts by the dozen but then something happens that I really want to share. So the resolution to post less always fails.
Here is the most recent piece of news: our students have organized their own little political protest. It is a very tiny protest with only about 10 people participating but, given our apolitical student body, this is a lot.
I’ve photographed some of their slogans.
The students invited me to join but I’m not allowed to make my political opinions known, of course.
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Look, I managed to create a slideshow!!!
Girl Scouts
All of this outrage that religious organizations and Catholic churches are banning Girl Scouts from participating in their meetings is completely misplaced. If you don’t want the church to mess with your life, you should respect the church’s right to do the same. If religious people don’t want anybody inside their house of worship for whatever reason, that’s their right.
Separation between church and state goes both ways, people. As barbaric as you might find anybody’s beliefs, they are free to practice them inside their religious facilities. And you can always start your own prayer group and keep Girl Scout haters out of it.
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis has become a bad word in the US as a result of a massive negative PR campaign by pharmaceutical companies that want people to be hooked on medication and, consequently, abhor any method that can help people get better (actually, get amazingly, ecstatically well) drug-free. I’m not talking only about psychotropic medication, of course. I’m talking about all forms of physical and psychological ailments that most people address with drugs.
This is why I’m very happy to see that psychoanalysis is finally getting out of the dungeon where it had been driven by the pharmaceutical companies and becoming more mainstream.
Feministe, for example, has just started a series of guest posts by a psychoanalist who has the following to say:
We can, like the psychoanalysts, understand madness as an experience of personal history, with symptoms being the expressions of things otherwise incommunicable. Each of these understandings come with values and dictate very different forms of treatment.
Personally, I stand with psychoanalysis. My own view of symptoms is that they are a complicated interaction between the things someone had to do to survive trauma, the ways they have found to communicate these experiences which are not readily spoken, and the taboos which rob patients of their voice. Because of this, I don’t really treat symptoms. I avoid telling patients to stop doing this or start doing that and engage with the symptoms as if they were a part of the conversation in the same way that body language or metaphor might be worth observing.
Great job, Feministe!
I can only discuss psychoanalysis as an analysand, so my perspective is obviously much less useful than that of Feministe’s guest speaker. I just want to mention the following things in order to help clarify some misconceptions about psychoanalysis:
1. A psychoanalyst does not diagnose or tell people what to do. The very concept of a diagnosis is alien to psychoanalysis. Many people say that they are afraid to go to a psychoanalyst because they don’t want to be assigned a bunch of diagnoses. This is ridiculous because a psychoanalyst is pretty much the only kind of a specialist who will not do anything of the kind.
And if you fear that the analyst will tell you something like “you suffer from a heightened degree of immaturity due to the fact that your parents were overprotective and you are in love with your father”, then get over that silly myth already. In analysis, you will claw the walls and hang from the chandelier, begging the analyst to tell you what to think, but the son of a gun never will. Because answers only work if you arrive at them on your own.
2. Bluntly put, a psychotherapist charges you to tell you what you want to hear, while a psychoanalyst charges you for getting you to say what you don’t want to hear. People go to therapists for years and decades because all a therapist does is make you feel good by temporarily relieving your anxieties. Until you need the next fix.
3. If you want regular psychological support that involves no major transformation of your personality, go to a therapist. If you want to work like a dog, sweat and cry but achieve dramatic breakthroughs, go to an analyst.
4. As the analyst I quoted says, a symptom (of any illness, not just mental disease) is a way that your body has to communicate that something wrong is happening. You can dismiss this signal by getting rid of the symptom by taking medication, which, of course, does nothing to remove the original problem. Or you can work with an analyst to remove the underlying cause.
5. Yes, it really works.
Different
A colleague stops me in the hallway.
“Something is very different about you today,” he says.
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know, you just look different. Oh, I got it! You are walking around without looking at your phone.”
So I took care of that oversight.
Divorce
When I was considering getting a divorce, I had an endless list of arguments against this decision. I was in a new country, and it was terrifying to be alone in a very strange new reality. Financially, it would be ruinous. I had grown up in a relationship with this guy (I was 16 when we met) and I had no identity outside of our relationship. I’d learned to think of myself in terms of “we” and the idea of becoming simply an “I” was terrifying. I felt ashamed of becoming a divorcee at the age of 22. Emotionally, I knew that it would be devastating.
There was, however, one very strong argument in favor of getting divorced. Every person deserves to be in a relationship where they feel joyously, ecstatically, overpoweringly happy, I thought. You never know whether you will find that relationship after you get divorced, of course. But at the very least, we all deserve the right, the chance and the freedom to look for it.
Life without love or the possibility of looking for love is a sad life, indeed.
So I got divorced and it was even more painful, ruinous, traumatic and devastating than I’d thought. If you haven’t been through a divorce, then you are not likely to understand how difficult it is. Even if the relationship was completely dead, even if you couldn’t wait to be out of it, even if it was 100% your choice to get divorced, even if there are no children involved, a divorce is always tragic.
I never regretted it, however. Even at the lowest points when it seemed that I was scarred for life and would never get over it, I felt extremely grateful to myself for having found the strength and the courage to leave. As painful as a divorce is, it is always better than the realization that you are doomed to spend the rest of your life – your one and only life! – in a relationship that brings you no joy.
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