Month: January 2012

A Very Funny Search

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

A hilarious exchange between two of the funniest readers of this blog (you can find it here at the end of this thread) made me realize that people feel like being entertained at the moment. This makes sense since in the first week of the year nobody can be expected to be interested in heavy topics.

I, however, have no sense of humor left after spending all day long struggling first with my mid-point tenure dossier and then with my Canadian bank account. And unless you have a Canadian bank account, you cannot imagine the degree of aggravation it can produce. I’ve been swearing so much that I now completely lost my voice and can only croak like a sad, old crow.

So in order to come up with something funny for my readers, I had to turn to the search lines that bring people to my blog. This is a strategy that always delivers and it didn’t disappoint me this time. Here is what two individuals were searching for today:

I hope they found what they were looking for.

Does Beauty Help You Get Hired?

~ Clarissa ~ 24 Comments

I think I need to start a new series titled “The Stupid Study of the Week.” There are so many pseudo-scientists engaged in fake research whose only goal is to get into the media that I will never run out of blogging topics. Consider the following study, for example:

A team at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in northern Germany questioned more than 3,000 people about their career, and compared this with rankings of how attractive they were. The results suggest that being one point more attractive was worth a three percent wage hike, while being five points more attractive boosted a career by the same amount as having a university degree.

Professor Christian Pfeifer said his study, published this week in the Applied Economics Letters journal, also showed that the importance of looks in the workplace was even more important for men than it was for women. . . “Five points more – that is about the difference between an ordinary face and downright beauty – helps in getting a job as much as a university degree,” he said.

Let’s leave aside the question of who composed the rankings of attractiveness and why we are supposed to take that person’s idea of beauty as a universal yard-stick. Who’s to say that the creator of this ranking system doesn’t have a really horrible taste?

Never mind that, however. Let’s look at the last statement of the passage I quoted. Is this weird researcher at all familiar with how the hiring process is organized nowadays? Does he think that people just show up at the place where they hope to be employed to demonstrate their beauty? Did anybody find their job, a job that required a university degree, in this strange manner?

When I was on the job market, I never got a chance to impress anybody with my “downright beauty” before proving I had the necessary college degrees. Nobody would have discovered how I looked at all if I hadn’t had the required diplomas. My CV would have ended up in the trash can in a matter of seconds. I cannot imagine a situation where a search committee would have looked at my CV and said, “Well, she never went to college at all but let’s meet her anyways. Maybe she’s pretty. Then, we might still consider hiring her for a professorial position.” I also don’t recall any discussion of the candidates’ beauty or lack thereof at the (often very heated) meetings of the search committees where I participated.

I actually got my very first academic position as a Visiting Professor at an Ivy League university without ever meeting anybody from that school face to face. They hired me sight unseen on the basis of my CV and portfolio. Probably if they had gotten an opportunity to see me before hiring me, I’d be the university’s president instead of just a junior faculty member.

My sister is a professional recruiter, so we discuss the job market and successful recruitment strategies all the time. From what she tells me, a recruiter first reads a cover letter, then a CV, and then decides whether it makes sense to meet the candidate in person. She tells me that a college degree is crucial in the job mandates she handles. The question of a candidate’s beauty came up a single time in her career. That was when she was looking for a receptionist for a plastic surgeon’s practice.

I do believe, however, that Professor Christian Pfeifer had to be hired for his beauty. Based on the kind of study that occupies his time, I find it hard to believe he was hired because of his intellect.

Why I Like the Russian Protests More Than the #OWS

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

I don’t think that the protests in Russia are going to achieve anything major in the nearest future. Putin is still going to win the next Presidential “elections” in Russia. Even if the elections are not falsified (which, as we all realize, is not likely), he will still win. Most people still like him (these are the folks who don’t read newspapers or blogs and only watch official pro-Putin channels on television). Besides, there is no opposition to speak of at the moment.

If we are to see any tangible results of the Russian protests, we will have to wait for a few years. It will take a while for viable opposition forces to emerge and produce their own leaders.

Still, I am a lot more enthusiastic about the Russian protests than I am about the #OWS. These are both middle-class movements. However, the peaceful Russian revolution of 2011 never pretended to be what it wasn’t. Its participants calmly explain in interviews, on their blogs and social networks that they are comfortably off, well-to-do, middle-class folks who are fed up with how their country is run. They don’t beg anybody for compassion. And they don’t regale us with stories of how they have wonderful, comfortable, debt-free lives but still “live in bated breath” because of some imaginary disasters. Most importantly, there is no swapping of tales of personal woe and misery that the #OWS protesters enjoy so much and that, more often than not, are inflated dramatically. For obvious reasons, the religious vocabulary that bothers me so much at the #OWS is also absent among Russian political agitators of the moment.

The Russian protesters say that they want to be in charge of their country’s politics. They talk about democracy, the voting system, the ways in which the currently existing parties are flawed, the way the budget is structured, the reasons why they are disappointed with Putin, the ways they evaluate the history of their country over the past 20 years. I have not read a single account, blog post, newspaper article, interview, etc. where a protester would plunge into a tale of his or her debts, employment history, educational achievements, sickness, marriages, etc. as part of his or her analysis of the political situation.

As we all know, personal is political. The way we live our lives is intimately connected to our politics. However, it would be a mistake to turn this statement around and say that political is personal. When politics becomes nothing but a bunch of personal narratives, we end up with a political reality where people elect presidents on the basis of their attractions as beer-drinking buddies, politicians’ personal lives matter a lot more than their policies, and a candidate’s success is defined by whether she can cry on cue or whether he bowls well. Only too often, the #OWS protesters approach the political arena as if it were a stage for a reality TV show, a place where personal dramas are to be aired for no other purpose than to allow an Oprahesque unburdening of emotions to occur.

Another reason why I prefer Russian protests to the #OSW is that the Russian protesters do not attempt to pretend they are proletarians when, in reality, they are middle-class folks. The vogue of brandishing fake working-class credentials is associated in Russia with the decades of the Communist regime. This is why nowadays people see nothing shameful in being financially comfortable.

The #OWS protesters, however, are tortured with middle-class guilt. This is why their “we are all in the same boat” slogans sound so hollow. I remember how my union organizer tried to convince me that he and I did not differ in any way from a truck-driver. At that time, he and I were students at one of the most prestigious grad schools in the world. We had great medical insurance, only had to teach for 50 minutes a day, and rarely woke up before noon. Unlike my union organizer, I hadn’t been born rich, so I didn’t feel any need to mask the silver spoon in my mouth by claiming I knew anything about the reality of truck-drivers.

This is, however, precisely what the #OWS does. Its middle-class participants mask their middle-class concerns behind the rhetoric of fake solidarity with the dispossessed. They self-righteously compete in producing stories of misery because they seem to believe that only misery entitles you to an opinion and to activism.

When the Russian protesters talk about their participation in the revolutionary movement, they always begin by explaining how they are entitled to be in charge of their country because of their success in running their lives, careers, companies, blogs, bank accounts, etc. The #OWS protesters, on the other hand, proudly claim failure as their chief qualification for the role of political activists.

Should You Be Able to Keep a Person’s Name After a Divorce?

~ Clarissa ~ 28 Comments

I think we should try to enliven the first week of the new year with a debate. Here is a fascinating question I found:

Women often debate whether to take their husband’s last name upon marriage.

Shouldn’t men have a right to ask for it back upon divorce?

I’m serious. If a woman doesn’t want to be married to a guy anymore, why should she be allowed to keep his last name? It wasn’t hers before they married.

I’m sure everybody knows what my opinion is, right? 🙂 For me, both people who relinquish their names upon marriage to mark themselves as some sort of an object belonging to their new lord and master and people who want to bear the last name of somebody who is out of their life are incomprehensible, weird creatures.

Come to think of it, the situation of these name-changers is especially ridiculous upon divorce. I’m a divorced person myself and I can’t really imagine wanting to introduce myself with my ex-husband’s last name to people. It would be the same as saying, “This man wants nothing to do with me but I’m still his possession. I won’t let him shake me off until some new guy picks me up and brands me as his acquisition.” Bleh.

Of course, having my ex-husband strut around with my last name would be even more bizarre. If I divorced him, it means I had become disappointed in his personal qualities and arrived at a conclusion that he is a shitty human being. I wouldn’t want to entrust said shitty human being with my name. God knows what weird things he might undertake while hiding under it. Then he moves on to the next owner, and I’m stuck with a last name he’s tarnished.

I think the best solution to the entire issue would be to have the courts decide which of the ex-spouses gets to keep the custody of their formerly shared last name. This would make both participants in the weird name-shedding ritual think twice before they choose to reaffirm patriarchal values in this bizarre way.

What do you think?

Experiment “Freedom from the Computer”

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I challenged myself to spend 48 hours without a computer (hence no comments in the past two days.) Of course, I didn’t want to leave readers without intellectual nourishment, so I scheduled some posts in advance.

The only serious hardship I experienced was the state of anxiety that something might be happening in the world that I need to know about urgently and I’m missing it. I don’t have television, so that source of information was out. I could have accessed the Internet on my Kindle, of course, but that would be cheating.

The world without a computer feels very quiet. I very rarely listen to anything on the computer but it brings so many voices into one’s life that it feels like there is constant chatter coming out of it.

Have you tried going computer-free lately?

A Meeting of Two Autistics

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

I go outside to take out the garbage and meet my autistic neighbor.

“Thank you!” I blurt out.

“Merry Christmas!” he echoes.

We exchange a knowing stare and continue on our respective ways.

Who Is Hurt More By This, Men or Women?

~ Clarissa ~ 47 Comments

When only mothers get tested to see if they have an impact on their children’s obesity, whom does this hurt more (besides the children, of course), men or women? Who is insulted more by this kind of study, men or women?

This is obviously insanely offensive to both men and women. This is why I keep repeating like a broken record that gender stereotypes and the entire stupid gender binary hurts both men and women. And instead of getting together and trying to figure out how we can break down this system, we engage in creating endless check-lists of who has been victimized more by this system. As evidenced by the recent thread on gender discriminating feminists.

And I’m willing to bet that this thread will also be graced with comments as to how men (or women) are victimized more than women (or men).

A Soviet Woman and a Unicorn

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

One evening, I saw him put his coat and hat on and start marching out the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Oh, I just noticed we are out of bread,” he said, “so I’ll just go downstairs to the convenience store and buy some.”

I’d heard all of the mythology. I knew these men existed somewhere. Just like unicorns. You don’t expect to encounter a unicorn in your living room, though. They are stuff of legend, and fairy-tale land is where they belong.

“Ah, something must be going on,” I realized. “Something weird is happening and I’ll find out what it is soon.”

After he returned with the bread, however, no revelations awaited me.

A short while after that, I came home from work and he told me, “Honey, the toilet in the second floor bathroom is backed up. Just use the one on the first floor for now and I’ll try to repair it. If I can’t do it, I’ll call the plumber.”

This was when I got really scared. I hadn’t had any alcohol for over two weeks, so I knew I was sober. And there was the unicorn right in front of me, talking and breathing. I was terrified.

A while later, we were driving home from a restaurant when the car started behaving in a weird way.

“Shit!” he said. “The stupid wheel! OK, I’m going to pull over and change it. Give me half an hour.”

He changed the wheel, and we drove home. By that time, I was resigned to the idea that I had married an actual live unicorn.

If you are not a Soviet woman, you are probably completely confused by now and have no idea what I’m on about. If you are, though, you must be chuckling wistfully and saying, “You don’t know your luck, woman.”

I grew up among amazing, kind, gentle, super intellectual men who could explain Kant to you in a second, offer a profound analysis of the global geopolitical situation, recite poetry for hours, and quote Shakespeare for fun. These were men who’d never raise their voice to a woman, or say anything offensive or demeaning to her. They respected women’s choices and decisions to the point of complete self-effacement.

They were also schooled to defer to women in their lives for any decision whatsoever.

“Honey, I’ve suffered 2nd degree burns,” you’d say wringing in pain (real story, this one, just like all of them in this post).

“Oh, sweetie,” he’d respond, “that’s so horrible.”

And he’d tear up because he loves you and feels your pain.

“My love,” you’d say, “please please help me, I’m in pain.”

“What do you want me to do?” he’d ask eagerly.

“Please go to the pharmacy and bring me something to ease the pain!”

“But I don’t know what to get,” he’d say compassionately.

“Just anything, please. Ask the pharmacist, call a doctor, I beg you, I’m in horrible pain.”

So he’d leave and come back an hour later empty-handed.

“I asked the pharmacist,” he’d say, “but she suggested three different ointments. I had no idea which one to choose, so I just left. Are you feeling any better? Maybe you can go there and choose the ointment you prefer?”

He wasn’t being malicious or trying to torture me. I was the love of his life, the woman he’d worship forever. He honestly had no idea how to proceed without a woman’s guidance, though. A woman who was wringing in pain could offer no instructions, so he was lost.

We separated. I met many wonderful, gentle, amazing, ultra intellectual men. They could recite Heidegger, compose poetry, sing songs under my window. But they’d always call me at 8 am to say, “My love, I’m going to work and I have no idea what to wear. Should it be the gray suit? Or the brown suit? Or maybe the black pinstriped one?”

I’d sometimes tell them, “Angel, we are out of bread.”

“Oh,” they’d respond. “What should we do?”

“I’d go buy some at the convenience store,” I’d say wearily.

” Good!” they’d reply.

Great guys they were. But they were no unicorns.

So when this actual, real-life unicorn bought the bread, changed the wheel, and repaired the toilet without my guidance, I called my mother to share.

“You don’t say,” she answered. “Is it possible that we have finally got one in our own family? Hah! Is something seriously wrong with him, though?”

P.S. This is supposed to be a short story. Every word of it is true but it’s still a short story. People keep asking me why I don’t write fiction, so here it is, autobiographical fiction. Or rather, what I call “blogger-style fiction”, a new genre that I predict will gain more and more popularity with time.

Soliciting Assistance From Fellow Spanish-Speakers

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Folks, I urgently need to populate by blogroll with some good Spanish-language blogs. Right now, I’m so desperate that this is what I read. For those who don’t speak Spanish: in the space of a single post, this blogger

a) claimed that the CNN was Communist;

b) referred to the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party as “a Stalinist Sheep”;

c) talked of “the semi-civilized countries of Latin America that are drowning in debt and governed by grotesque people, except Colombia and Chile”.

And this is just the beginning of the post. This is what I have been reduced to because I have no idea where to find Spanish-language blogs.

So if you know any good blogs written in Spanish, please recommend.

The Best, the Happiest, the Most Inspiring Celebration of the Year!

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

Happy New Year, dear readers of Clarissa’s Blog!

 

I hope to see you all back here, reading, arguing, discussing in the year 2012. May this new year of our lives bring us as much happiness as we can possibly imagine and then some! Remember that there is a blogger out there who loves you all, you wonderful, brilliant, lovely and amazing people.