Month: January 2012

Blog Searches

~ Clarissa ~ 10 Comments

I haven’t done this for a while, so a new collection of funny searches that have brought people to this blog has accumulated. here are the best ones:

what is poverty like – Good for you that you have to ask. I can just imagine that sheltered lifestyle.

I kept my husband last name when he divorce me now he is collecting some my social security if i change my name can i stop him from collecting my money. – I have no idea. Can anybody help? To me, it sounds like if somebody is stealing your money, the best way to go is to contact the police. This cannot possibly have anything to do with the shared last name, can it?

is vulva nice – Yes, it is. If only they were all so easy.

gaystyle enterprises cock whistle – I’m clueless. Anybody?

how to understand men – Start by understanding that all men are different and there is no algorithm that you can follow to interact successfully with all of them.

why are russians so different – From what? I hope the question is why they are all so different from each other. The answer is: because they are human.

why women worked in the 70s – Just note how many searches are based on mindless generalizations. Is it not obvious that the reasons why women worked in any decade would be influenced by their social class, financial status, family situation, etc.?

how to enjoy giving oral sex to a woman – You want instruction on how to enjoy something? Enjoyment is not a learned skill, buddy. If you have to seek instructions on how to enjoy a certain sexual activity, that probably means this activity is not for you.

has the good men project become anti feminist – Yes, it has. Its founder is heavily into tired old gender stereotypes that he delivers with the glee of a 3-year-old who has just learned to turn on an iPad.

childfree why do people care – They don’t. Until the child-free start descending on their blogs in droves throwing infantile tantrums.

do you like san francisco – Love it. But only for the purposes of tourism. I wouldn;t want to live in a city where housing prices are so inflated. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.

greatest achievement of civilisation – You are online and you have to ask?

anti gender stereotype blog – And you, my friend, are in the right place. We do this a lot  around here.

klubnikis technology site – “Klubnikis” is a name I invented for my little niece. And no, you can’t have it for your technology site or whatever.

kindle+fire+useless – And you, Kindle-hater, should stay away from my blog. You will find no sympathy here.

murakami 1q84 feminism – There is no feminism in this novel. However, it is the first book by Murakami that I have read that is not actively anti-feminist.

“david bellamy” atheist – If this is about the David Bellamy we all know and love on this blog, he isn’t an atheist.

how often do teachers think about sex with students – Teachers don’t. Quacks who went into teaching in spite of being signally unsuited to it do.

why do men like to chase – And this is somebody whose personal life is hopeless.

oral sex feminism – Oral sex and feminism are not related. Just like oral sex and pizza. Or feminism and pizza.

clarissa’s blog not autistic – Very true. Clarissa’s Blog is not autistic. Clarissa is.

professor montreal spanish peninsular literature clarissa – Yes. All true.

An Anti-Networker’s Manifesto

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

Every year, I visit a conference organized by my professional association in Canada. Once, I met a colleague, let’s call her Claudia, who went out of her way to be nice to me and kept suggesting we hang out together and keep in touch afterwards. We did, and during the next year’s conference, Claudia was even nicer to me. The year after that, however, Claudia saw me at the conference again and pretended that I didn’t exist. Gone was her interest in my research and her liking for me. When I approached her, she looked bored and used the first possible pretext to run away.

“What’s happening?” I wondered. “Why is she behaving so strangely?”

And then I realized that Claudia had no interest in me any longer because, instead of a tag saying “Cornell University”, I now wore a tag with a much more modest name of my current state school. On the next day, when she saw me having drinks at the bar with the leaders of our association, however, Claudia’s affection for me skyrocketed yet again.

“Oh, it’s my friend Clarissa!” she announced, approaching us. “Clarissa, please introduce me to these people. I always wanted to meet the leaders of our association!”

And then I finally got it. Claudia never had any genuine interest in me. She was simply networking. My relevance to her depended completely on whether she found me useful.

I was flooded with intolerable vicarious shame. My colleague’s behavior was so blatant, so obviously insincere that I was ashamed on her behalf. At that moment, I decided once and for all that, come what may, I would never network. Here is the result of my musings on networking, my Anti-Networker’s Manifesto:

1. I will never network. I will only meet, talk to and keep in touch with people who genuinely interest me.

2. If my professional success depends on networking, then I don’t need this kind of success and this kind of profession.

3. I will avoid people who treat others on the basis of their usefulness.

4. Seeing people as professional assets is for those who have no other assets to speak of.

5. Networking entails blurring the line between the public and the private, which is always fraught with danger.

6. We spend a lot of time working as it is. Letting work invade my personal life is more than I get paid for.

7. Networking entails calculating people’s value as if they were objects. But if you trade in people as if they were objects, what does that make you?

8. Selling friendship for possible financial benefits is in no way different than selling sex.

I’ve seen people who are obsessed with “making useful connections.” It’s never a pretty picture, which is why I refuse to join their ranks. And the funny thing is that I have never seen anybody who uses others in this way achieve any kind of professional success. They hustle and bustle, making themselves look ridiculous to everybody else by their boundless desire to accumulate potentially usable people. Yet, the results of all this industriousness are usually quite pathetic.

P.S. By networking I don’t mean, of course, things like creating a database of companies that are hiring in your area. I mean very specifically engaging is friendly interactions with people with the sole purpose of using them for professional and financial advancement.

Meme: Easy and Hard Things to Learn

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

I love memes but I never seem to find good ones that I want to participate in. Finally, however, I found a really cool meme created by blogger n8chz:

The gist of the meme is to list three things in the course of your lifelong learning that came as natural as falling off a log, especially if they strike you as possessing elegance, expository power, arousal of curiosity, or best of all, a lot of formerly disparate concepts somehow “fall into place.” The other list is three things that are utterly opaque to your mind, that you have made repeated attempts to learn, but for some reason or other, you just don’t seem to be meant to learn these things.

Three things that make sense to me:

1. Spanish grammar. When I explain Spanish grammar to my students, I always tell them that we are not going to memorize pages of rules and exceptions. Instead, we will discuss the philosophy of the language and discover the internal logic that organizes its grammar. The Spanish language makes so much sense to me that just staring at a long and beautiful sentence in it makes me feel like everything is right in the world.

2. Cooking. It’s the only creative thing I do, but I do it very well. I never had to learn to cook. It just happened for me, somehow. Just like blogging. Less people enjoy the fruits of my cooking than those of my blogging, however.

3. Blogging. People say they never know what to write about, but I just don’t get it. I have so many ideas for posts that I could just keep publishing them for weeks and never run out.

Three things that make no sense to me:

1. Social chit-chat. When I see people gather and chat about nothing for hours, I feel like a creature from another planet. I can see they are enjoying it but their enjoyment is alien to me. Within 5 minutes, my jaw begins to ache because I try hard to stifle yawns. If anybody can explain to me what it is that people gain from discussing absolutely nothing during all those social gatherings, I will be grateful.

2. Networking. I know it has its uses and that people have found jobs and advanced in their careers through networking. I, however, view it with horror. I mean, don’t people know that one only pursues them, chats them up and keeps in touch because one hopes to use them for personal advancement? Isn’t that kind of blatant?

3. Fashion. I love beautiful clothes and shoes. However, I don’t see the point of abandoning my personal style that I worked hard on figuring out in favor of something that will look atrocious on me just because everybody is wearing it at the moment. I realize that the idea of fashion is to show that you have enough money to buy new clothes every season. I, however, don’t have enough money for that and don’t feel it makes me a lesser human being. If I can look fantastic in a dress that I bought for $28 seven years ago, then who cares that it is completely out of style and nobody wears anything like this right now? Better for me because I will look completely original.

I realize that I kind of transformed the idea of the original meme here but I enjoyed it and I hope my readers will, too.

What are your 3 things?

Blog for Choice 2012

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

I’ve never had an abortion. I don’t think I would have one, although this kind of a hypothetical is always useless. However, I’m lucid enough to realize that I can say such things because I have the incredible good fortune of having a great support system, a stable income, a wonderful partner, an amazing profession, and access to the best medical services one can imagine. Because of these things I know that an unintended pregnancy will not devastate me emotionally, psychologically, economically, professionally, and health-wise.

I belong to a very tiny minority of women in the world who have the luxury of not needing to consider abortion. It would never occur to me to judge other people from my position of good fortune.

People who want to make abortion illegal or hard to obtain terrify me. I cannot even begin to imagine what kind of hubris, what kind of contempt and deep-seated hatred for actual living, breathing, thinking human beings one needs to have to believe that one has the right to make such a decision for them. If you have principles, beliefs or religious convictions that make you find abortion unacceptable, then don’t have one. But don’t you dare try to impose your religion and your beliefs on others. Trying to inscribe your views on the bodies of other people is one of the most immoral, disgusting, vile things anybody could ever come up with.

Roe vs Wade brought this country into the ranks of civilized places that don’t see women as inanimate objects whose destinies have to be decided and whose bodies need to be managed by politicians who never even saw them. If you do not support Row vs Wade, if you believe that you have the right to invade and manage other people’s uteri, then I have news for you: you are a horrible, disgusting individual. There is no excuse for you. You deserve to be shunned by every normal person with a shred of humanity.

Those of us who respect women enough to let them decide what to do with their own bodies seem to have some unhealthy fear of offending anti-abortionists. They scream “baby killer!” in front of clinics and we try to reason with them and treat them with respect while doing so. In the process, we betray all of those women who will die or be mutilated in back-alley abortions if abortion becomes illegal in this country.

I propose we stop coddling these hateful creeps. I propose we start telling them exactly what we think about them. I propose we stop trying to reason with them because they speak from a place of unbridled, unconstrained loathing for female bodies that they want to invade.

If you are anti-choice, shame on you.

If you support choice, you need to know that we will prevail. There are still many struggles ahead of us but, in the end, reason will overcome barbarity and we will find ourselves in a world where women will be considered by everybody to be valid human beings capable of making their own choices about their own bodies.

Believe in women. Support choice.

What Makes a Good Teacher?

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

“I loved Clarissa!”, “Clarissa is an awesome teacher!”, “She does not intimidate students and truly creates a good comfortable learning atmosphere”, “I did not even dread going to class, nor did I even desire to skip – loved Clarissa!”, “She’s obviously brilliant and teaches very effectively. She fosters a very supportive and reassuring environment”, “The instructor is amazing – I love Dr. Clarissa”, “She was very enthusiastic and made the class very fun. She’s an awesome teacher! Keep her around!”, “A fantastic professor!”

These are some of the things my students had to say about me at the end of just one semester in their anonymous evaluations. When I walk down the hallway at work and hear people whisper behind my back, “Oh, I love her. Don’t you just love her? She is so amazing”, I always smile because I know that, in all probability, they are talking about me.

People often think that being a brilliant scholar and knowing one’s subject extremely well somehow translates into being a good educator. That isn’t true, though. After you master your discipline, there is still a long and tortuous road you need to travel before you can transmit your knowledge to others and do it effectively.

In academia, we often see teaching as something we need to get through before we can proceed to do the really fun stuff: our research. Research is what brings one prestige, what the tenure committee looks at before considering anything else, what we contsantly work on improving. As a result, teaching is often seen as something that robs us of time and energy we could otherwise dedicate to doing our research. I, however, propose that we approach it from a different angle. If done right, teaching can be something that actually brings us that needed extra burst of energy that we require to produce inspired research.

Of course, when teaching is an endless struggle between a harried, bored and exhausted educator and recalcitrant, sulky and equally bored students, everybody ends up losing. So here are some of the suggestions as to how one can transform one’s teaching experience into a happy, energizing part of your day that gives you wings instead of hobbling you:

1. Leave your problems outside the classroom. We are all human and we all have issues. However, students are not there to serve as a dumping ground for your ill humor or a punching bag for your self-esteem issues. If you catch yourself rolling your eyes, scoffing, sighing contemptuously or snapping at students, then something is deeply wrong. It is very easy to slip into a mode of getting yourself rid of excessive aggression at the expense of students. That, however, is extremely unfair. The distribution of power between students and teachers is never equal. Even if you often feel powerless in the classroom, you are still always more powerful than the students.

2. Don’t be a push-over. I believe that maintaining a strict discipline in the classroom and insisting on constant accountability are marks of respect that teachers and students have for each other. Educators who let students walk all over them do that out of fear and insecurity and not out of love and concern for the students’ welfare. 

3. Don’t punish students for the sins of others. You will be hard pressed to find a teacher who is not unhappy with something his or her administrators, supervisors and colleagues are doing. However, if you feel overworked and underpaid, if you are forced to do things you don’t like, if you are assigned courses you detest and are given a schedule you hate, these are issues that are to be resolved with those who caused them. It’s easier, of course, to unleash your resentments onto the students than to confront the administrators. Punishing the students for the ills of the entire system of education in this country is unfair.

4. Listen. I always ask students at least twice every semester what I could change in the way I teach to make it easier for them to learn. Of course, there is always a couple of people who say, “Give us all As and let us go!” or “Change the format of all exams to multiple choice!” Most people, however, offer really eye-opening, extremely useful suggestions. Students want to learn. They really do. Even if it sometimes seems like all they care about is getting their grade and forgetting about the course entirely, they do want to learn. Why not let them help you figure out the best way to help them learn?

5. And most importantly: Remember that the main tool of trade for every teacher is her or his personality. It isn’t just your knowledge of Spanish literature, physics or philosophy that you bring into the classroom. It is, rather, everything that distinguishes you as a human being.

I have been teaching for 21 years. I have taught little kids, senior citizens, high school students, college students, adults, students with gang affiliations and a history of arrests. However, the teaching philosophy I have shared in this post helped me make these teaching experiences become enjoyable, fruitful, and often life-changing for me and for my students.

I was inspired to write this post by this article that offers a perfect example of the kind of educator one should try not to be. Feel free to share your teaching principles in the comment section.

Saturday Link Encyclopedia and Self-Promotion

~ Clarissa ~ 27 Comments

This post comes a little early this week. Enjoy and don’t forget to self-promote!

On contempt that Evangelicals have for women.

Tell me this isn’t true, please, please tell me: “Last week, the government of Sweden took the decision to retain a 1972 gender recognition law under which TS/TG and gender variant people who want to change their legal gender are required to be sterilised.” Talking about barbarity, this is definitely it, people. Shame on you, Sweden!

College freshmen need a class on mental health: “Our culture doesn’t emphasize mental health; it emphasizes productivity and perfection, so stress management isn’t something we learn unless we make the effort.” Hear, hear! And those who didn’t take this class in college would benefit from taking it later in life. If I had a company of my own, I’d offer such a class to my employees for free.

I’m not a fan of Mitt Romney but if he says that making $362,000 in speaking fees is not a lot of money, that’s a reason to admire him, not to dump on him. If there is evidence he coerced anybody into paying him to speak, then obviously we should condemn him. Otherwise, however, I don’t see the reason behind the outrage. What are we, against public speaking now?

So it’s not OK to stereotype “Arab girls” but it is perfectly fine to stereotype “white girls”? Some people think that these “things XYZ say to ZYX” videos are cute but I just find them beyond stupid and obnoxious.

Might Stephen Harper be somebody’s sex fetish?

On anti-smoker hiring policies. What do you think?

I was going to write a post on the topic of facials (in the sexual sense, not the cosmetic one) but then I discovered that Danny had already blogged about it and did it better than I ever could. So now I will just blog about the cosmetic kind of facials. 🙂

“Risperdal, an absolutely adorable anti-psychotic for the millions of American children who, thanks largely to Biederman’s research, have been diagnosed bipolar. What’s adorable about Risperdal is how it’s marketed. What child can resist free legos? Risperdal puts legos stamped with the word RISPERDAL in pediatricians offices.”

Teachers don’t fail you. Your failure is your own.

This contribution to the Blog for Choice Day is so good that it gives me goosebumps. I will write my contribution tomorrow but it will not be nearly as cool.

An explanation about the full coverage for birth control for those who are still pretending not to understand what it entails.

Building a fence around special needs students.

Skype

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

So I have let people talk me into installing Skype. On the positive side, I now know how I will look at age 100. On the negative side is everything else.

I don’t think I will enjoy this thing. Normally, I take walks when I talk on the phone, which is fun and it gives me exercise. With Skype, I will have to sit while talking (like I don’t do enough of that already) for the purpose of letting people see me look completely disfigured. Yay.

Something tells me I will be uninstalling it soon.

And now I need to go spend some time in front of a mirror to reassure myself that I don’t look like a creature from a different galaxy. You need to have a much greater psychological resilience than mine to use this thing on a regular basis.

Kicked Out of Feminism

~ Clarissa ~ 34 Comments

The recent hullabaloo that people with nothing better to do in their lives are creating about Hugo Schhwyzer has populated my blogroll with endless posts discussing who should or shouldn’t be “kicked out of feminism.” Here is a prime example of such post:

Is there any other social movement whose members regularly and publicly kick people and all of their ideas out for not being perfectly acceptable to all people all the time? And what about the voices of non-white men that are regularly kicked out of feminism. For instance, how does it help or hurt feminism to cite Mary Daly’s transbigotry, for instance, as a reason to reject her criticisms of the Catholic Church’s misogyny?

In spite of this blogger’s suggestion that Mary Daly was a non-white man and her extremely confusing writing style, she is echoing what seems to be a wide-spread sentiment. Namely, that feminism is some kind of a club where people come together to blab endlessly about whose privilege-itch is the itchiest and who can use more passive voice constructions per each short paragraph of writing. And you can be kicked out of this club if other members find you lacking in how abjectly apologetic you are about your numerous privileges.

This attitude, of course, is completely ridiculous. Feminism is a philosophy that has existed for centuries. It cannot be appropriated by a bunch of self-righteous folks who have appointed themselves the guardians of its ideals on some website or other. One’s feminist worldview belongs to that person and to nobody else, no matter how much some community-worshipers want to transform a philosophy into a clique that grants and denies access at the will of its most vocal screechers.

This is precisely why I flee from any group that start envisioning itself in terms of a community. A collective identity always needs both an external and an internal Other against which those who want to belong can measure themselves. A community cannot exist without conducting such public spectacles of bashing and then banishing transgressors. It cannot exist without scapegoats. There cannot be any “us” unless there are those who are obviously and visibly “not-us.” And there cannot be a greater pleasure for a community than to find “a traitor in our midst” and reaffirm its own identity by persecuting this invented traitor for as long as possible.

Jill at Feministe says that:

There have been calls in the comments here and elsewhere for Feministe to preemptively ban Hugo, and for me to email my internet feminist friends and form a united front against Schwyzer to take him down, and to make sure that he never teaches or writes about feminism again.

This is, of course, a classic definition of bullying. The ideologically pure need to make a public spectacle of their purity because, otherwise, the tenuous fiction of their identity will fall apart. A collective identity is always a myth, an artificial construct with very little basis in reality. In order to convince themselves that their identity actually has some meaning, members of such an artificially created community (be it a nation, a gender, or a sports fan club) constantly need to stage the boringly repetitive spectacle of their identity.

This entire debacle has nothing to do with feminism, of course. I’ve been studying the mechanisms of identity-formation for many years and I can tell you that all collective identities work this way. All of these folks who are now writing passionate diatribes about whether Hugo Schwyzer needs to be “kicked out of feminism” or whether his privilege is too privileged for him to be included into their community have no interest whatsoever in feminism. They just want to belong. And in order to experience the sweet feeling of belonging, they need to protect the borders of their group form being crossed by foreign elements.

A Political Dilemma

~ Clarissa ~ 52 Comments

In this country, there is no political force that believes both in individual freedom and individual responsibility.

One party wants to police the choices you make in your personal life, while the other one wants to police your bank account and the way you do your work.

One wants to control what you do in bed, while another one wants to control what you do outside of it.

One condescends to you by dictating to you how you should conduct your personal life, the other one condescends to you by telling you how you should do everything else.

One wants to “protect” you from your personal choices because you are supposed to be too stupid to live with their consequences. The other one wants to do the same for your actions in the public sphere.

Both sides see us as victims and try to convince us of our victimhood so that we would embrace them as our saviors.

Psychological health entails a capacity to act independently and successfully in the private and in the public sphere, at home and at work. (“Loving and working without fear and expectation of fear.”) To offer full support to either party we have in the US, you have to relinquish control over one of these spheres to the all-powerful entity that will dictate your options to you.

I listen to reasonable, intelligent Conservatives, and what they are saying makes a lot of sense to me in many ways. But then they start on their “right religion / wrong religion, good sexual orientation / bad sexual orientation, good family structure / bad family structure, I-know-best-what-you-should-do-with-your-body” thing, and I lose all interest immediately.

So I go back to Liberals, and what they are saying makes a lot of sense. But then they start on their “we are all conditioned to be victims so check your privilege you overentitled elitist snob who thinks that we have some degree of control over our lives”, and I just wilt.

I don’t know about you, but I cannot decide whether “If you are unemployed, it’s always 100% your fault” is more offensive than “If you are miserable it’s always 100% somebody else’s fault.” I don’t know whether “If he’s got no insurance, then let him die” is more wrong than “She only managed to become so successful because of her white, hetero, male, Anglo privilege. Oh, she is a lesbian Latina? Then, surely she must have some other privileges by the bucketful.”

One of these political philosophies vilifies failure and worships success. The other one vilifies success and “privileges” failure. But what if you experience both on a regular basis? That is, what if you are human? What if you want to own both of your failures and your successes without being ashamed of them? Then who do you vote for? (And if somebody says Ron Paul, I will have to ridicule them in a very harsh way. Just a fair warning.)

Students Across the Street

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

A couple of kids from across the street knocked on my door yesterday.

“We will be having a party on Saturday,” they say, “so we wanted to give you our phone number to call in case you are bothered by the music or the noise.”

“Are you students at our university?” I asked.

“Yes,” the kids said.

“I teach there,” I shared.

“Oh,” one of them said in a small voice. “Will it still be OK for us to have our party?”

“Oh yes,” I responded. “I work at the Department of Foreign Languages and we are a very fun bunch. We love partying. What foreign language are you taking?”

Then we had a small advising session right on my doorstep.