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.

“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.

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.
Click to view slideshow.

Look, I managed to create a slideshow!!!

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.

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.

“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.

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.

An Illinois House committee that normally deals with farm and wildlife issues passed two controversial anti-abortion measures this afternoon, before a packed room that included opponents wearing t-shirts that stated: “Women are NOT livestock” . . .

The House Agriculture & Conservation Committee overwhelmingly passed both bills, after emotional testimony from both sides.

That particular committee often gets assigned legislation dealing not just with hog farms and irrigation issues, but also gun-owner rights, abortion restrictions and other hot-button conservative causes that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the committee. Sponsors of those bills often request that committee because it’s made up primarily of lawmakers from rural agricultural regions of the state, which also tend to be among the more socially conservative members of the Legislature.

I think that the message “You, women, are all just brainless cows who are good only for breeding” could not have been delivered any clearer.

Read more:

We are practicing irregular verbs in the Preterite (those who have taken Spanish know what a pain in the behind those verbs are) when a student suddenly explodes.

Student: I don’t understand how everybody else is just guessing these conjugations!

Clarissa: They aren’t guessing, Andrew. They are consulting pages 267-8.

Student: Pages 267-8 where?

Clarissa: In the textbook.

Student: How did everybody just know that they had to look at pages 267-8?

Clarissa: It was our homework for today.

Student: Our homework? Where do I find the homework? Do you post it online somewhere?

Clarissa: It’s in the syllabus.

Student: Oh, the syllabus. . . I had no idea I was supposed to keep it. Do you have an extra copy?