Month: October 2011

Zizek and the Occupy Movement, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 52 Comments

I’m incredibly busy this week (more on that later) but people keep clamoring for a post on Slavoj Zizek and his attitude towards the #Occupy movement. I can never deny anything to my readers, so I decided to read and analyze Zizek’s most recent article in the Guardian titled “Occupy First. Demands Come Later.”

Zizek’s article is, in my opinion, very symbolic of the entirety of his work. He offers a sentence or a paragraph that starts well but then fizzles out on a tremendous platitude. The article in the Guardian is full of  this kind of sentences. Here are a few examples:

So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed

I was very glad to see this statement. Every time, I see protesters hold placards denouncing greed I feel vicarious shame for people who don’t manage to realize that protesting a character flaw is not a legitimate political act. Then, however, Zizek continues this sentence:

the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt.

Even though the philosopher begins the article by being somewhat critical of the hippyish tint of the protests, he slips into the fully 60ies rhetoric of the bad system that causes all ills. The statement that “the” system pushed people into corruption is probably the most inane thing I have read for a while. Is anybody aware of any system that existed at any point in the history of humanity where corruption did not exist? Isn’t that proof that people don’t need to be pushed into being corrupt by systems?

A little later in the article, Zizek says the following:

 The solution is not “Main Street, not Wall Street”, but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

I agree wholeheartedly that the Main St. vs Wall Street binary is simplistic and useless. However, the problem is not that Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. The real issue is that the White House cannot. In their zeal to blame the greedy banksters, protesters are forgetting to mention the real culprit: the politicians who have sold us all down the river. This is where real corruption is located. This is the true problem that needs to be addressed.

Zizek slips into sheer ridiculousness when he attempts to mimic the Christian rhetoric in order to make the #Occupy cause more attractive to the conservatives:

When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Zizek is forgetting that it is always a mistake to adopt a language of which you only have a smattering and hope to be convincing to the native speakers. A Christian can only feel compassion towards the ultra-rich who have even less chance of getting into heaven than. . .  well, I’m sure that even Zizek has to be aware of this. In his attempt to employ Christian terminology, Zizek sounds as silly as a Christian would who’d try to tell a Marxist that the fair distribution of the means of production awaits us all in the Kingdom of God.

(To be continued. . .)

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

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

Beware of the disillusioned colleague, a type of colleague who can become a scourge for a young professional.

This is a post where I expressed my profound disappointment with the political convictions of my students.

I feel really annoyed by a random person who recently wrote that I can’t possibly have anything of value to say about autism because I enjoy Ayn Rand’s novels. So here you go, random person, my post about Ayn Rand.

And this is a very touching (to me) post because I wrote it on the day I got married. This a a post I published two minutes before getting married. Yes, I am a very dedicated blogger.

Preparing to get married involves all kinds of humiliations for a woman. Here and here are two examples.

Right after I published this post, I got an email from Google AdSense informing them that their advertisers found my content to be offensive and they were closing down my account. (And keeping the $132 I had earned with them.) I wonder who the client that complained about me might be. Hmmm. . . Actually, I got several visits from that company to my blog.

I described the culture shock I experienced when perusing our local newspaper. I make really funny jokes when I get angry, so I highly recommend this post. My computer also had a funny Estonian accent at that time, and I decided not to correct it because it’s a nice memory.

This is why Wall Street banksters should be pitied rather than begged for compassion.

Why we need to believe that men are inept. It’s a great post and I’m very proud of it but it didn’t get a single comment when it was published. Maybe somebody would like to rescue it from commentless loneliness today?

I made a fool out of myself in front of a student. I’m still kind of embarrassed about that.

A response to a comment from A Real American Woman. Oh, this was fun.

My students try to figure out what machismo is.

(To be continued. . .)

Are Good Men Scarce?

~ Clarissa ~ 32 Comments

I have just encountered yet another in a long series of articles that bemoan the scarcity of good men in our society:

The fewer genuinely good men there are, the greater the bargaining power they have in relationship — and the more concessions women (at least those who are eager for marriage) are told they must make. Since so many successful women want to draw from the ever-shrinking pool of genuinely attractive and functional dudes, rivalry (or so we’re reminded) must be inevitable.

Initially it seems like the author of the article (in spite of the completely baseless suggestion that eagerness for marriage is all on women’s side when we’ve known for almost 30 years that it’s actually the opposite) wants to subvert the myth of male scarcity. However, it soon becomes obvious that he is eager to contribute to the myth that good men are hard to find:

A society that coddles young men by allowing them to remain emotionally obtuse adolescents for a quarter century (and that admits them to college with lower grades than their sisters’) makes mature, responsible men scarce.

And then I scrolled to the end of the article and realized that the author of this most recent contribution to the “there aren’t enough good men available for all the good women” is, of course, none other than Hugo Schwyzer. The same passionate feminist who keeps warning women that if we are too fat or too old (over 35, that is) the bad, horrible men will necessarily reject us. I start to get a feeling that Hugo Schwyzer needs to promote the idea that good men are scarce to draw attention to his own exceptional goodness.

The myth of male scarcity is always part of an anti-feminist backlash. In the Soviet Union, where women reached the heights that their American sisters couldn’t even begin to imagine in the period from the 1920ies until the 1970ies, the same boring story of how women pined in loneliness because there were no men around surfaced in the decade of the seventies. Mind you, this myth did not arise in the aftermath of World War II when men were genuinely not there as a result of the huge losses of life during the war. This myth appeared after the demographic imbalance of the post-war era had been corrected in the following generation.

Of course, the belief that it’s hard to find a good man among the overwhelming majority of immature losers is as baseless in the US as it was in the Soviet Union. Women’s rights are being slowly eroded in this country. Just look at the war on birth control if you need proof. However, an oppressive system needs to offer women a reward for taking away their opportunities in the public sphere. The myth of male scarcity is one of such rewards.

This might sound paradoxical to you at first but just think about it. If a woman is not successful in her personal life, she doesn’t need to look to herself for reasons why this happens. It’s the fault of those bad, immature men. And how enjoyable is it to get together with one’s girl-friends and make fun of the immaturity and the uselessness of men in our lives! I played this unhealthy game for years and let me tell you, it rocks. Who cares if men find it easier to succeed financially and professionally if one can just dismiss all that by ridiculing their imaginary incompetence in the private sphere?

In reality, there is no shortage of good men or good women. Jerks of both genders equal themselves out. What is really scarce, though, is insightful feminist analysis that avoids reiterating tired anti-feminist stereotypes about both women and men.

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

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Since we’ve been talking about mothers-in-law recently, I thought people might enjoy this old post about the phenomenon of the obsessive mother-in-law.

Talking about mothers, this is a hilarious true story that happened to me.

This is the first post I ever wrote about the mail-order-bride business, and irate consumers of mail-order brides persecuted me for a long time for it.

This stupid book almost ruined my personal life, and when I wrote a post criticizing it, its author had the gall of coming to my blog to defend it. That jerk.

And this post angered organizers of a certain conference so much that they offered to pay for me to travel to their event and see for myself that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Of course, I didn’t take them up on the offer.

And this is my very first post on the silliness inherent in the word “privilege.” Since then, I have had to elaborate on this topic dozens of time because people don’t want to give up on their favorite pastime of privilege-scratching.

I try not to discriminate against groups of people. This, however, is one group that I dislike vehemently and profoundly. Oh, I can’t wait for my Fire to arrive. 🙂

Horrible events at Yale University prompted me to write the truth about the place.

This was a very popular and controversial early post where I ridiculed a column on a famous feminist blog that dispensed really idiotic advice about sex. I still love this post. This is the kind of post that makes me feel sorry that I have already written it and can’t write it again.

Hilarious stories from my first semester of teaching at my current school.

This post on mothers and weddings includes a funny story about my mother and my own wedding (the first one.)

An example of how an angry exchange between bloggers can lead to something great. It also demonstrates that even if I go off at you aggressively the first time I discover your existence, we can get to like each other eventually.

(To be continued. . . )

Funny Stories About Alcohol

~ Clarissa ~ 44 Comments

I just discovered an interesting new drink called Southern Comfort. This is a very busy week for me, so this new drink is a timely find. It tastes a bit like cough syrup but not even close to how much the Argentinean Fernet tastes of it. This reminds me of three funny alcohol-related stories I wanted to share with you.

Story 1.

My friend from Argentina always wanted to introduce me to her favorite Argentinean beverage. “Just wait till I bring real Fernet for you from Argentina!” she kept saying. “Then you will realize what good alcohol tastes like.”

After her trip back to Lujan, she asked me to her house and presented me with a bottle of Fernet.

“Oh, I’m so envious right now!” she said. “The experience of tasting Fernet for the very first time in one’s life is priceless.”

She opened the bottle and poured me a drink. I tasted it and gagged. It was the nastiest beverage I could have ever imagined.

“I’m sorry,” I told my friend. “I think they sold you a fake Fernet. Did you go to a licensed store to get it?”

“Really?” she asked. “This never happened to me before. Let me try it.”

My friend tasted the Fernet and gave me a look of a person whose most tender sentiments had been horribly insulted. “This is how real Fernet tastes. And it’s delicious.”

Nine years have passed since then, and I have a feeling she has almost forgiven me for that horrible faux pas. Almost.

Story 2.

In grad school, we were the hardest partying department in all of the Humanities. Our parties were legendary. Once, I arrived at one of our parties and discovered my male colleagues in a state of happy commotion. “We’ve been really lucky!” they announced. “We found some real aguardiente for our party. Aguardiente is so strong that very few people can drink it without dropping unconscious!”

As I observed my colleagues take small shots of this beverage, I realized it must have truly been a strong drink. After just one shot, each of my male colleagues would drop onto the floor and yell, “Oh my God! This is the strongest drink ever!” Within five minutes, they were acting extremely drunk. So, obviously, I also decided that I needed to try the aguardiente.

“Just take very small sips and breathe in before you do that,” warned me my colleagues who knew that I can’t drink undiluted hard liquor.

So I took a small sip of the aguardiente and felt nothing. Then I took a bigger sip and felt even less. I downed the entire shot glass of the beverage. It had a faint alcoholic taste but nothing more.

My colleagues were dumbfounded. They looked at me in horror.

“Wow,” one of them said. “These Russians really can drink. I’ve seen Latino peasants fall under the table after drinking this, and you seem completely sober.”

“Hey, everybody!” another colleague called out. “Come here! Clarissa will show you something amazing.”

Everybody gathered around me. I downed another shot and again felt very little.

“OK, give us back the bottle,” one of my colleagues said. “This aguardiente is wasted on you, Russians.”

After the bottle was finished, a quiet sober colleague picked it up and looked carefully at the label.

“Hey guys,” he said. “It says here that this isn’t real aguardiente. This is an aguardiente-based drink and its alcohol content is 5,5%.”

I’d never seen my macho colleagues look this embarrassed.

Story 3.

This story happened to my father when he was working on his dissertation. His thesis adviser lived in Russia, so my father had to travel to meet him. Once, when my father arrived at his adviser’s university, this kind old scholar took him to the university cafeteria for breakfast.

“So Michael,” the professor said. “How much should I order for you, 150 grams? Or let’s go all out and get 200 grams?”

My father was petrified. “I’m sorry, professor,” he said. “I don’t want to be bad company but I don’t drink alcohol for breakfast.”

“Good for you,” the professor responded. “I was just wondering how much sour-cream you wanted for your pancakes, but never mind.”

And which alcoholic beverages do you enjoy?

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

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

I have been getting many great new readers recently, so I thought it would be a good idea to acquaint them with some of the important posts that marked this blog’s glorious journey.

The first thing I did as a blogger was to set down (in really horrible writing that was my defining characteristic at that time) my reasons for starting a blog. This was pretty much a conversation that I was having with myself in the absence of any readers.

Less than a month into blogging, I shared with my yet non-existent readers a secret that I’d been hiding even from my closest friends. I felt free to do that because I knew nobody was reading the blog anyways. 🙂

In the first months of blogging, I had a regular feature that ridiculed Ross Douthat’s weekly columns in the New York Times. I eventually abandoned that series because Douthat is supremely repetitive. It was fun to laugh at him at the time, though.

And this is a post that got me banned from several blogging directories for spreading pornography. This post brought many readers who search for porn to my blog.

This post made me very famous and brought crowds of very irate folks to my blog just two months into my blogging career. Little did I know at that time that having crowds of irate consumers of weird identities will become a regular occurrence of my blogging life. Now I’m used to it but then it was a revelation. Because of this post, my blog’s obscurity only lasted a little over two months.

This early post on how to survive grad school still brings me regular grateful emails.

Yes, my writing style was very clumsy when I was a beginning blogger. This post, for example, still makes my husband laugh whenever he remembers it. I didn’t change the clumsy bits because I find that retroactive editing would be dishonest. I like to make fun of myself, too.

And with this post I became quoted on many film review websites. Which I never wanted because I’m a lousy film critic.

(To be continued. . .)

Children Take You Back to Your Childhood

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

I don’t know why this happens but whenever I write a post on a subject, I start finding material for more posts on the same subject. Right after I finished writing my most recent post, I alighted on an article on parenthood that offered the following insight:

Children give the first four years of your life back to you.

This is a very important statement not only because it’s true but also because it explains very neatly why many people are terrified of having children. The first three years of our lives are crucial in that they lay the foundation of our personalities and of all the issues that will plague us in adulthood until we address them actively. Seeing a small child brings back to many of us the feelings that we had at that child’s age and that we have successfully repressed. The more we were traumatized by our earliest experiences, the more intolerable the sight of a small child will be. It’s one thing when the child in question is somebody else’s. Then, the anxiety can be dealt with, at least to a degree. However, seeing a child who is one’s own makes it difficult not to imagine it as a continuation of oneself, which makes one relive the traumatic early childhood experiences.

A Little More on Paternity and Child Support

~ Clarissa ~ 26 Comments

I just found the following on Danny’s blog:

Pedro Soto was paying support (and spending time with) for his son Aaron with no thought that the they were not biologically linked. It turned out that Aaron was actually biologically linked to Francisco Serrano, the man that the mother of the child, Maricela Guerrero, was partnered with. Now in a case like this one would think that if Pedro is not the biological father it would make sense to terminate the order for him to continue paying child support right? Wrong.

“[T]he Department concedes that Francisco Serrano, not Petitioner [Pedro Soto], is the real father of Aaron Soto, but insists that due to the passage of time the injustice of Petitioner paying child support for a child that is living with, and being supported by his real father, should be extended at least another five years until Aaron reaches eighteen and finishes high school.”

Such decisions not only undermine one’s faith in the capacity of the justice system to make fair rulings in child support cases, it also further erodes the value and prestige of fatherhood. I don’t think anybody will disagree that fatherhood is not valued as highly as motherhood in our society. Court rulings like this one perpetuate the notion that the father doesn’t matter and any male passerby can fulfill his role. As long as he is capable of paying money, of course. It is highly hypocritical to make or support such rulings and then act surprised that fathers abandon their children easily or don’t participate actively in their care.

I agree with most of what Danny has to say about the case in his post, except the following:

Why should the passage of time even matter in a situation where the wrong man is being held responsible for payments and the right man is actively in the child’s life (meaning that the “but its about making sure the child gets the support they need” excuse does not fly)? And even if that right man is not in the child’s life why not seek him out instead of sticking with the safe bet and holding up a man who is not the one that should be held responsible?

It should not matter in the least whether the biological parent can be located or is present in the child’s life. What matters is that a father is just as valuable and important for a child as a mother. A child is genetically 50% his or her mother and 50% his or her father. We can’t just catch some random schmuck, assign him to be the kid’s father by a court order, and expect fatherhood to retain even a shred of its meaning.

I think that most of my readers know that children’s rights are a very important topic for me. I have received a lot of criticism for my post about whether rape victims should pay child support because I believe that the interests and rights of children should always supersede those of adults. This is why I find this court ruling abhorrent. Its blatant disregard for the value of fatherhood contributes to the image of fathers as being dispensable and interchangeable. This will end up hurting a great number of children.

A Creepy Ad

~ Clarissa ~ 60 Comments

The following ad keeps popping up in my blogroll and it just bothers me to no end:

Do people find it as creepy as I do? Would you feel the same if it were a man kissing a child on the lips? The slogan on the right of the photo also resembles the pedophiles’ motto of “We really care about kids” way too much. Altogether, this just looks disturbing to me.

The ad is for a restaurant chain that feeds kids disgusting garbage, which is why I don’t want to name it.

P.S. Now that I placed this nasty ad here, I can’t even look at the homepage of my own blog without shuddering.

Are Euro-teens Better Than American Teens?

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

As a European, I totally love it when certain self-hating Americans otherize Europe to present it as some beautiful Mecca where the sugar is sweeter, teenagers are all uniformly polite, and everybody looks like a supermodel. Here is a prime example of such a completely hilarious portrayal of the polite, intelligent and self-sufficient “Euroteens”:

I first noticed it at the boarding gate area at JFK airport in New York, waiting for the flight to Berlin. For some reason there were a lot of teenagers on the flight. They were Euro teenagers. They were distinct from American teens. The Euro-teens acted like civilized people with what can only be called a sense of decorum. They were not costumed like clowns, criminals, sports stars, or zombies. Every day is not Halloween for them. Being a person seemed enough for them, as though the human condition were an honorable state-of-being. There were no obese Euro-teens. They were not stuffing their faces with pizza, French fries, and cinnabons. They were not obsessed with texting or other cell phone demonstrations of their social status. They waited patiently through the boarding delay and appeared to enjoy each other’s company without impulsive demonstrations, tantrums, tears, fights, or fits.

I’m guessing that the author of this passage wanted to say something nice (albeit completely invented) about “Euro-teens.” To me, however, they sounded like obedient, patient little zombies who are completely devoid of any personality. Honestly, I’d take a normal, happy, pizza-chewing, glued-to-the-phone teenager over this sad parody of a Stepford teen any time of the day.

The good news, though, is that this description of European teenagers has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. Every European teenager I have met as an educator, traveler and a European was just as much into pizza, texting, tantrums, social status and dressing outrageously as any regular American teenager. We all have heard of how these supposedly polite, non-impulsive and extremely mature young Brits raze the Spanish resorts to the ground whenever they descend on the coasts of Spain. We also have all heard about the ways in which German youths celebrate their country’s football wins. And many of us have observed the embarrassing tantrums the Spanish young people throw in hotels whenever they can’t get exactly what their fancy has suggested to them two seconds ago. I will also never forget a group of Dutch teenagers with whom I was unfortunate enough to share a hotel once.

The author of the post I linked to shares with the readers the following experience:

When I got to Europe seven hours later I found myself in a world of purposeful adults who take care of themselves and the place they live in.

I love Europe passionately but I keep finding myself living in a “world of purposeful adults who take care of themselves and the place they live in” right here in North America all the time. I wonder what the author of this weird piece is doing with his life to be constantly surrounded by mothers who call their small children “a motherfucker.”

The problem with generalizations is that they are offensive irrespective of whether you generalize negatively or positively. Europeans are not all supermodel-looking, invariably polite, smiling and responsible creatures. And it’s annoying to see one’s place of origin used by a disaffected American to project his unhealthy fantasies of what Europeans should be like. Europeans are human beings who have no interest in fulfilling self-hating dreams of every American tourist.