Opinions, art, debate
So a Ukrainian decided to join the #OWS protesters. They gave him a stack of informational leaflets to distribute among those who might potentially be interested in joining the protests.
On the next day, the Ukrainian comes back to the #OWS. He slaps a huge stack of banknotes on the table and sighs, “That’s the last time I let you guys give me such hard to sell stuff to peddle.”
I’ve tried this gender genie thing that is supposed to guess the gender of any text’s author, and it hasn’t guessed right even a single time. I’ve tried it both on my research and on my blog posts. Of course, I haven’t tried it on everything I ever wrote. I’m sure I must have produced something “female” at some point.
The weirdest thing is that while both my research and my blog are “male writing” (whatever the hell that means), my blog is significantly more male than my research. And these results are consistent, so there must be some principle behind this madness.
I guess all that the gender genie proves is that gender is a myth. Maybe soon somebody will prove that the Earth is round and – if we are really lucky – that it revolves around the Sun.
P.S. I just checked this post in the gender genie, and here is the result:
Female Score: 115
Male Score: 273
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
I’ve spent 6 hours at a spa today and my writing is still male? What else is a person supposed to do to start writing female?
A very convincing argument (albeit an unintended one) in favor of elective C-section:
I don’t think I adequately appreciated the ways that the juggernaut of childbirth could transform a woman’s relationship with her vagina, altering her entire body’s feelings about her pelvis and genitals.
See, by Sunday afternoon I was thinking clearly enough to notice a kind of “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” mental block around my entire pelvis. My brain was definitely in self-protection mode, after just the small, brief trauma of having the uterus penetrated with something less than half an inch in diameter.
With childbirth, the fundamental MEANING of those body parts would change, from sexual to… well, women with different cultural backgrounds/baggage would construct different narratives to account for it, but essentially, they’d be transformed into a lockbox.
For a sexually healthy woman who perceives her genitals as, first and foremost, a source of sexual fulfillment, the prospect of her vagina turning into a lockbox surrounded by a police line is horrifying.
Of course, the number of women who derive no enjoyment from sex and who will gladly offer up their vaginas to be shredded to bits in order to have some sensation in their genitals for once is huge. This means that vaginal childbirth will never go out of fashion.
Ozymandias42 at the great NSWATM blog has written a long post that attempts to answer this question. I usually like everything this talented blogger writes. In this post, however, nothing resonated with me as even remotely true or useful. The post offers a collection of extremely superficial explanations that people use to hide from the real reason why jerks attract them like a magnet.
The real answer – albeit one that many people try to avoid – is that some of us get attracted to jerks for exactly the same reason that some get attracted to adoring, caring, amazing partners.
As we grow up, we observe the couple that is the closest to us and learn what it means to be in a relationship from that couple. If what we see is a jerk who is abusing, insulting and victimizing the adult (parent, relative, grandparent, guardian, sibling) we identify with, we will spend our entire life enacting and reenacting this pattern with the jerk and abuser of our own (or, more likely, a string of jerks and abusers). If, however, we saw the adult we identify with being adored and worshiped by his or her partner, we will spend our entire life being idolized and loved by the partners we choose.
As a result, we often see two groups of people forming. One consists of firm believers in the “all men are jerks” or “all women are bitches” philosophy. And they are right in a way. The only kind of men (or women) their early experiences conditioned them to meet are, indeed, jerks (or bitches.) Members of the second group have only seen wonderful things from the men (women) in their lives and are spoiled enough to believe that their partner has victimized them by forgetting to bring them flowers one week.
There is, of course, an entire spectrum of possibilities between these two extremes. Each of these possibilities, however, relies on the relational model one absorbed while growing up.
Every statement of the “all men ( women) are / want / prefer/ believe XYZ” can be deciphered as “the significant adult I observed when I was growing up was / wanted / preferred XYZ, so now I have to believe all men (women) are this way because that is all I know.”
So if you are a “Nice Guy” who is constantly used and discarded by women (or the female equivalent thereof*), remember that analyzing the motives of the women (or men) who consistently mistreat you is a huge waste of time. Their motives for treating you badly are exactly the same as your motives for pursuing those people who are the most likely to treat you like garbage.
And I really hope that my readers are enlightened enough not to need a reminder that this is not a gender issue. Discussing it as if it were is an avoidance strategy. Such childish avoidance bores me, so I hope that people don’t bring it to my blog**.
* You can see that female equivalent rendered beautifully in Sex and City. Women who gather in groups to repeat like a mantra “we are so fantastic, smart, stunning and successful, so why does nobody want us?” are the equivalent of the proverbial Nice Guys. Both groups have absolutely no interest in being in a relationship. All they want is vent their grievances towards an offending parental figure through the medium of “all men” or “all women.” Both groups are heavily homosocial and have no use for the opposite gender (except as a pretext for bonding with their own gender group.)
** The reason why I put this disclaimer in the post is that I tried reading the comments to Ozymandias42’s post. Oy, people. And once again, oy.
You know what I hate? When I’m reading a book, enjoying it, and then the author comes out with a bit of some utter idiocy that I can’t get over. And when I try to get over it, the idiot of the author keeps repeating the idiocy because they probably see it as some crowning achievement.
Here is the most recent example. I started reading a biography of the great Brazilian writer of Jewish-Ukrainian origins, Clarice Lispector. The author of the biography is no genius, but the book was OK, as far as biographies go. And then, for some mysterious reason, the author starts harping on the idea of Lispector’s supposed “strident feminism.” There is not a single example of the “stridency” of Lispector’s feminism given in the book, but the author keeps harping about it.
Lispector’s mother was gang-raped by a mob of soldiers, contracted syphilis during the rape, and died a horrible painful death as a result. The writer grew up in the supremely machista Brazil of the 30ies and the 40ies. She was a woman in a culture and a time that treated women as a heap of trash. Yes, Clarice Lispector was sensitive to violations of women’s rights. Does that give the right to some pathetic semi-literate biography-writer to dismiss her political convictions that he is not even capable of understanding?
In short, Benjamin Moser, the author of Lispector’s biography Why This World should be ashamed of himself. I’m never reading a single word by this silly hater of feminism ever again. And I suggest everybody do the same. A biographer who can’t respect the great writer he tries to discuss deserves to go broke.
I’m taking a huge number of books out of the library because I need to work on my research during the break.
“Damn, how many courses did you fail this semester to need all these books over the break?” a library worker asks as he checks out my books.
I point to my ID card that says “Faculty.”
“This is what I get for never failing any courses,” I explain.
“I’ll never feel jealous of straight-A students again,” the library worker says as he eyes my pile of books with terror.
Recently, I was talking to some of my colleagues about cultural differences (for the obvious reasons, most of my colleagues are foreigners), and we agreed that one of the things that really distinguish the English-speaking culture from our own cultures is the degree of politeness.
When I first moved to Canada, I remember feeling extremely suspicious whenever a cashier or a store assistant would greet me with, “Hi! How are you?”
“What do they want from me?” I’d immediately think. “Where is the trick? What are they trying to achieve here?”
In my country, you can enter even the most expensive, chic store you can find, spend a fortune there, and the shop assistants will treat you like garbage. (We have a long-standing tradition of salespeople being extremely rude and condescending that was inherited from the Soviet times and that shows no signs of abating.)
Or, say, you come to a party of Russian-speakers. Unless you are a foreigner*, you will be immediately greeted with (no “hello” or “good afternoon”, of course), “Oh my God, you look horrible. How did you manage to gain so much weight? Look how wonderful I look. Why can’t you look this way, too? This is a very old dress you are wearing, isn’t it? Why do you never buy any new clothes? Is it because you make no money? You are too old to make no money. How old are you, by the way? Did you say forty-five? No? You are just thirty-five? Wow, you’ve really let yourself go. Oh, the dress is new? Looks very worn and old, though. Are you sure it wasn’t a second-hand store where you bought it? Oh, wait, I will give you a great recipe to stop your hair falling out. Yes, believe me, you need it. Everybody, come here! Look at her hair. Tug at it. Tug harder! You see? I told you it was falling out!”**
Gradually, I came to recognize that politeness has its uses. Say, somebody pushes you accidentally on the bus. Instead of clawing at their face and screaming, “What the fuck did you just do, you creep?”*** you can simply say, “Oh, I’m sorry.” And the person who pushed you will respond, “Oh no, it was my fault. I apologize.” And that, for some reason, makes you feel much better than greeting every action by a stranger with invariable aggression.
Now I tend to scare people from my Russian-speaking community by greeting everybody whenever I walk into a room, saying “please,” “thank you”, and politely enquiring about their well-being. Whenever I say, “Could you please pass me the salt? Thank you!” people look at me with a heavy suspicion. I can see they are waiting for a punch line which never comes.
My colleagues from Spain and Mexico report similar experiences.
* If foreigners walk into a Russian-speaking party, they would have people grovel and fake extreme politeness while saying really horrible things about them behind their backs.
** This is a completely real conversation I have had quite recently with a compatriot.
*** Again, there is no exaggeration or fictional flight of fancy here.
My sister sent me the link to the funniest, creepiest and weirdest baby products that must have come from a completely diseased mind . Here are some of them:
1. A set of baby-holding pillows that look like scary giant hands. How would you feel waking up being held by these?
2. If your baby is the cutest one in the world, then why not put it up as a wall ornament?
I kind of feel sorry for this kid.
3. But I feel much sorrier for this one:
And if you think I selected the creepiest baby products there were, you are wrong. See the entire freaky collection right here.
A talented translator and linguist (whose name I cannot force myself to remember because I have already plunged into a holiday haze) once said, “Translating from one language to another is translating one universe to another.” Here is a little true story that illustrates this statement.
The Chair of my department is a polyglot who always addresses people in different languages.
One day, he came into my office and said to me in Ukrainian, “Harna divchyna!”
At that moment, an older female colleague walked in and asked, “So what did he say to you?”
I opened my mouth to respond and realized that what the Chair had said means “You are a beautiful girl!” And that sounds really bad in English when said by an older senior colleague to a female junior faculty member. In Ukrainian, however, this doesn’t sound creepy at all. It’s completely inoffensive.
This was one of those cases where a word-for-word translation would have perverted the original meaning of the utterance. So I looked for a statement in English that would be as neutral as the original.
“He said I’m a good person,” I translated.
A language is truly a universe, people.
People think that it is possible to feed the beast of low self-esteem by accomplishing enough, by stuffing some huge and impressive achievements down its throat.
It doesn’t work this way, though. No matter how much money you make, how popular you become, how many accolades you receive, your low self-esteem will devour all that in a moment. And you will be left feeling small, miserable and worthless, trying to figure out where its next meal will come from.
Low self-esteem does not in any way depend on any external circumstances. Rather, no matter how you organize your reality, it will chew everything that surrounds you down, spit it out, and growl for more.
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