A Short Illustrated History of Clarissa’s Blog, Part IV

~ Clarissa

Hilarious conversations with an OB-GYN.

Why the commenters on my blog are much much much better than the commenters many other bloggers get.

Students exhibit gender bias while doing a grammar exercise.

Whining as a way of life for academics.

And this is a humorous post on the hypocrisy of the liberal treatment of Israel.

On my search for intelligent conservatives. Of course, now that my blog is popular, I’ve had some intelligent conservatives come over here and comment of their own free will. At that stage, however, I was searching for them desperately and not finding them.

And this is when I first discovered the insane Babygate conspiracy theorists who investigate Sarah Palin’s reproductive processes. Some of the conspiracy theorists joined the discussion and left some pretty wackazoo comments.

Here I reminisce about my very first day as a student at a North American university and make fun of the silly preconceived notions I had brought with me from Ukraine.

This is a very good post about the reasons why people enjoy to engage in conjuring doom-and-gloom scenarios that, sadly, went unnoticed at the time it was written.

As a hopeless old fogey, I was shocked to see what my students had to say about money. Bible Belt, huh? You don’t say.

Why do people try so hard to get me to meet Ukrainians?

After I wrote this highly personal and extremely cathartic post, I was immediately ridiculed by some idiot for writing “confessional tear-jerking crap.” Still, I enjoyed the experience and continued writing in a more personal way after that.

P.S. Everybody who feels like leaving comments on the old threads is welcome to do so.

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4 thoughts on “A Short Illustrated History of Clarissa’s Blog, Part IV”

  1. Clarissa, have you ever writen what you think on statistics that marriage rates’ve fallen?
    Here
    http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/10/28/marriage-singledom-social-evolution-and-that-kate-bolick-piece-in-the-atlantic/#comments
    I went to and read Kate Bolick’s article, which is imho much better than usual articles of the sort, giving interesting statistics and quoting Coontz, whose book I loved. In case you’re interested in quite good articles on single women in “The Atlantic”, not feminist, but usual press.

    Liked AM article (linked to in KT post) too:

    If you stop framing dating as some sort of competition between men and women and instead see it as a collaborative enterprise, another theory for the decline of marriage comes into view: Maybe marriage just isn’t working for people anymore. Just because someone isn’t married doesn’t mean they’re alone, after all. Maybe we don’t need to come up with replacements for marriage, because it’s possible that marriage is declining because people have already started to turn to replacements such as cohabitation, serial monogamy, and having a friend-family instead of a traditional nuclear family. I imagine the soaring gaps in wealth between the haves and have-nots are probably the primary reason for the decline of marriage; since marriage is primarily about allocating resources in a family, people who live paycheck to paycheck have no real need for it. If I died today, the only thing I’d leave behind for a legally bound husband to inherit would be my two cats, and frankly, I think my family would not interfere with his taking possession of them.

    Do you agree with “not working anymore” theory? I find it hard to believe that lots of women don’t want to get married.

    Something from AM article I think you’ll like too:
    My favorite statistic regarding this surge of women being able to ask more of men and of life: the rate of women murdering their husbands has declined dramatically in the past 30 years, which is largely a direct result of women leaving men who beat them earlier in the relationship, long before the abuse reaches the point where they feel their only escape is to kill their abuser.

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    1. I think the decline in marriage rates is a non-issue, to be honest. What does it matter if people simply don’t feel like signing the paperwork for whatever reason? It tells us nothing about the quality of their relationships.

      My sister will celebrate her 10-year anniversary with the father of her child on Tuesday. They adore each other and haven’t looked at anybody else since the day they met. But they never seem to find the time actually to go to the courthouse and sign the papers. For the most part, the actual legal paper-signing is mostly a symbolic act that might or might not have meaning to people. Gradually, cohabitation is gaining the same rights as the actual marriage, so signing papers changes nothing.

      I don’t think, therefore, that any interesting conclusions can be drawn on the basis of how many people actually contracted legal marriage.

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