Month: February 2012

Girl Scouts

~ Clarissa ~ 15 Comments

All of this outrage that religious organizations and Catholic churches are banning Girl Scouts from participating in their meetings is completely misplaced. If you don’t want the church to mess with your life, you should respect the church’s right to do the same. If religious people don’t want anybody inside their house of worship for whatever reason, that’s their right.

Separation between church and state goes both ways, people. As barbaric as you might find anybody’s beliefs, they are free to practice them inside their religious facilities. And you can always start your own prayer group and keep Girl Scout haters out of it.

Psychoanalysis

~ Clarissa ~ 102 Comments

Psychoanalysis has become a bad word in the US as a result of a massive negative PR campaign by pharmaceutical companies that want people to be hooked on medication and, consequently, abhor any method that can help people get better (actually, get amazingly, ecstatically well) drug-free. I’m not talking only about psychotropic medication, of course. I’m talking about all forms of physical and psychological ailments that most people address with drugs.

This is why I’m very happy to see that psychoanalysis is finally getting out of the dungeon where it had been driven by the pharmaceutical companies and becoming more mainstream.

Feministe, for example, has just started a series of guest posts by a psychoanalist who has the following to say:

We can, like the psychoanalysts, understand madness as an experience of personal history, with symptoms being the expressions of things otherwise incommunicable. Each of these understandings come with values and dictate very different forms of treatment.

Personally, I stand with psychoanalysis. My own view of symptoms is that they are a complicated interaction between the things someone had to do to survive trauma, the ways they have found to communicate these experiences which are not readily spoken, and the taboos which rob patients of their voice. Because of this, I don’t really treat symptoms. I avoid telling patients to stop doing this or start doing that and engage with the symptoms as if they were a part of the conversation in the same way that body language or metaphor might be worth observing.

Great job, Feministe!

I can only discuss psychoanalysis as an analysand, so my perspective is obviously much less useful than that of Feministe’s guest speaker. I just want to mention the following things in order to help clarify some misconceptions about psychoanalysis:

1. A psychoanalyst does not diagnose or tell people what to do. The very concept of a diagnosis is alien to psychoanalysis. Many people say that they are afraid to go to a psychoanalyst because they don’t want to be assigned a bunch of diagnoses. This is ridiculous because a psychoanalyst is pretty much the only kind of a specialist who will not do anything of the kind.

And if you fear that the analyst will tell you something like “you suffer from a heightened degree of immaturity due to the fact that your parents were overprotective and you are in love with your father”, then get over that silly myth already. In analysis, you will claw the walls and hang from the chandelier, begging the analyst to tell you what to think, but the son of a gun never will. Because answers only work if you arrive at them on your own.

2. Bluntly put, a psychotherapist charges you to tell you what you want to hear, while a psychoanalyst charges you for getting you to say what you don’t want to hear. People go to therapists for years and decades because all a therapist does is make you feel good by temporarily relieving your anxieties. Until you need the next fix.

3. If you want regular psychological support that involves no major transformation of your personality, go to a therapist. If you want to work like a dog, sweat and cry but achieve dramatic breakthroughs, go to an analyst.

4. As the analyst I quoted says, a symptom (of any illness, not just mental disease) is a way that your body has to communicate that something wrong is happening. You can dismiss this signal by getting rid of the symptom by taking medication, which, of course, does nothing to remove the original problem. Or you can work with an analyst to remove the underlying cause.

5. Yes, it really works.

Different

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

A colleague stops me in the hallway.

“Something is very different about you today,” he says.

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know, you just look different. Oh, I got it! You are walking around without looking at your phone.”

So I took care of that oversight.

Divorce

~ Clarissa ~ 43 Comments

When I was considering getting a divorce, I had an endless list of arguments against this decision. I was in a new country, and it was terrifying to be alone in a very strange new reality. Financially, it would be ruinous. I had grown up in a relationship with this guy (I was 16 when we met) and I had no identity outside of our relationship. I’d learned to think of myself in terms of “we” and the idea of becoming simply an “I” was terrifying. I felt ashamed of becoming a divorcee at the age of 22. Emotionally, I knew that it would be devastating.

There was, however, one very strong argument in favor of getting divorced. Every person deserves to be in a relationship where they feel joyously, ecstatically, overpoweringly happy, I thought. You never know whether you will find that relationship after you get divorced, of course. But at the very least, we all deserve the right, the chance and the freedom to look for it.

Life without love or the possibility of looking for love is a sad life, indeed.

So I got divorced and it was even more painful, ruinous, traumatic and devastating than I’d thought. If you haven’t been through a divorce, then you are not likely to understand how difficult it is. Even if the relationship was completely dead, even if you couldn’t wait to be out of it, even if it was 100% your choice to get divorced, even if there are no children involved, a divorce is always tragic.

I never regretted it, however. Even at the lowest points when it seemed that I was scarred for life and would never get over it, I felt extremely grateful to myself for having found the strength and the courage to leave. As painful as a divorce is, it is always better than the realization that you are doomed to spend the rest of your life – your one and only life! – in a relationship that brings you no joy.

Welcome to Illinois Where Women Are Livestock

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

And here I’ve been kidding myself that I live in a civilized state. Stupid, stupid Clarissa. Mississippi, South Dakota and our friends from across the river have nothing on us in terms of barbarity. Yippee. (Emphasis in the article is mine).

An Illinois House committee that normally deals with farm and wildlife issues passed two controversial anti-abortion measures this afternoon, before a packed room that included opponents wearing t-shirts that stated: “Women are NOT livestock” . . .

The House Agriculture & Conservation Committee overwhelmingly passed both bills, after emotional testimony from both sides.

That particular committee often gets assigned legislation dealing not just with hog farms and irrigation issues, but also gun-owner rights, abortion restrictions and other hot-button conservative causes that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the committee. Sponsors of those bills often request that committee because it’s made up primarily of lawmakers from rural agricultural regions of the state, which also tend to be among the more socially conservative members of the Legislature.

I think that the message “You, women, are all just brainless cows who are good only for breeding” could not have been delivered any clearer.

Read more:

A Funny Teaching Story

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

I know you like them. 🙂

We are practicing irregular verbs in the Preterite (those who have taken Spanish know what a pain in the behind those verbs are) when a student suddenly explodes.

Student: I don’t understand how everybody else is just guessing these conjugations!

Clarissa: They aren’t guessing, Andrew. They are consulting pages 267-8.

Student: Pages 267-8 where?

Clarissa: In the textbook.

Student: How did everybody just know that they had to look at pages 267-8?

Clarissa: It was our homework for today.

Student: Our homework? Where do I find the homework? Do you post it online somewhere?

Clarissa: It’s in the syllabus.

Student: Oh, the syllabus. . . I had no idea I was supposed to keep it. Do you have an extra copy?

Why Do They Just Give Up?

~ Clarissa ~ 40 Comments

There is a new and disturbing trend that I’m seeing among students. They sometimes give up before even trying. I didn’t see anything like this before but in the last couple of years this started to happen.

Last semester, for example, my most brilliant student – really, an extremely bright guy who obviously enjoyed the course and was very much into learning – didn’t hand in one of the essays.

“Where is your essay?” I asked.

“Nah, I decided to sit this one out,” he said.

I thought that he might have been busy or overwhelmed with other assignments, so I suggested he take more time. Then, I suggested he come to my office and we work on the essay together. Then, I told him he could have until the end of the semester to do it. (I’m always very accommodating this way.) But he refused even to try. This was not a doctoral dissertation, people. It was a 2 page essay analyzing a text we read and discussed in class.

All the student had to say, though, was, “I don’t think I will have much to say about the topic, so I’m just letting this one go.”

Or take yesterday, for example. We are preparing for the mini-quiz, and I handed out activities to help students prepare because, as I’d warned them, this will be a tough mini-quiz. One of the students looked at the exercise, pushed it away and just sat there.

“Why are you not doing the exercise?” I asked.

“It looks too hard,” the student said. “I’ll just wait for the answers.”

This is a language class, so knowing the answers that other people came up with is of zero help.

I’m extremely baffled by this phenomenon. You are sitting in class, anyways, so why not at least try to do the exercise? It surely is more fun than just sitting there, staring into space. How can anybody give up without even trying? And I know these students. There is absolutely nothing preventing them from doing the assignments quite well if they, at least, tried.

These are not rich kids. The absolute majority is paying for their own education, and life will not be easy for them after they graduate. So this tendency to not even try makes absolutely no sense.

Does anybody have an explanation? When this happens, I don’t even do anything because it is so strange to me that I have no idea how to address it. Maybe if I understood the reasons for this, I could find a way to deal with it.

Want to Self-Promote? Call Yourself a Feminist!

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

It is now so prestigious to call oneself a feminist that people do it simply to self-promote. Remember how all of those spurious feminists who supported Sarah Palin suddenly cropped up? And then there were those weird Ukrainian “feminists” who ran around naked because, according to them, feminism is all about women having the right to get their naked bodies ogled in public spaces.

Here you can see these idiots defiling which is probably the most important cathedral in all of Russia

Now, there is a group of stupid little fools in Russia who try to self-promote by claiming they are feminists:

Anti-government protests in Russia are taking many different forms, from mass rallies and marches to defiant street art and music.

Just recently, members of a feminist punk group were arrested in Moscow’s Red Square after they performed a song ridiculing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The group, which calls itself Pussy Riot, says it’s planning more stunts before March’s presidential elections.

What this gushing article (and the gushing posts in my blogroll) forget to mention is that these “feminists” have defiled a church and insulted the feelings of believers by offering an unsolicited performance of a song whose lyrics are extremely offensive to religious people. I have many very serious issues with the Russian Orthodox Church (to put it very, very mildly) but defiling places that people consider to be holy is just not on. And it definitely has nothing to do with feminism.

The only good news is that money-hungry self-promoters see the feminist label as something that can bring them popularity. Only 15 years ago, producers of a certain TV channel in Russia wondered if the word “feminist” was decent enough to be pronounced on screen during prime time. And now people are using it to self-promote.

Is Daddy a Princess?

~ Clarissa ~ 13 Comments

My sister is talking to her 2-year-old daughter Klubnikis.

“Is Klubnikis a princess?”

“Yes!”

“Is Mommy a princess?”

“Yes!”

“Is Daddy a princess?”

“No!”

“Why isn’t Daddy a princess?”

“Because he is a boy!”

Maybe I shouldn’t have children, after all, because my first automatic response is, “Well, Daddy can be a princess if that’s who he wants to be.” There is nothing worse than a preachy parent.

And This Is Yet Another Example of Feminist Writing That Annoys Me

~ Clarissa ~ 81 Comments

Imagine if I told you the following: “At my university, Jews are expected to fill out endless paperwork proving that they do their job right. They have to narrate in painstaking detail exactly how they implement the strategic goals of our institution in every aspect of their teaching. Every Jew has to calculate the number of hours he or she spends on each job-related assignment and submit the paperwork. Then, the Chair meets with every single Jew and discusses his or her progress. Jews are also required to take long ethics training because it is assumed that Jews don’t know how to behave ethically without such training. During college events, Jews have to wear a sign on their chests identifying them.”

Pretty offensive, eh? When I imagine that sort of a work environment, I want to go and destroy such a university immediately.

Everything I have written about the treatment of Jews at my university is absolutely true. I just forgot to mention that everybody else is treated exactly the same way. And that changes the picture somewhat, doesn’t it? We might be an overly bureaucratized place but we are not anti-Semitic.

Would you know that from my story, though?

Now, read the following excerpt from a feminist article:

Women exist in a legal state of permanent consent.  Consent is an automatic defense to a charge of rape and unless there is sound evidence that consent was withdrawn, it is frequently assumed that it was not.  If a woman did not actively withdraw her consent, there is no case to answer – the legal status of a woman is that of consent to sexual intercourse.  Furthermore, the presumption of innocence over guilt in effect means that it is insufficient for a conviction to be upheld purely on the basis that a woman asserts that she withdrew her consent in the absence of such evidence.

For some women, the withdrawal of consent becomes in effect a legal non-option.  Crimes of sexual violence against sex-workers are notoriously difficult to prosecute, as the assumption is that they payment has brought the agreement not to withdraw consent.  Any evidence that a woman may not have withdrawn consent, is evidence of the innocence of the accused. Such evidence may include payment; sexually arousing dress; prior sexual activity; drug or alcohol use; being asleep; being sexually unattractive, or being insufficiently aware of danger.  Up until 1991 the majority of women lived within a formal legal state which denied her the right to remove her consent: a woman could not withdraw consent to sexual intercourse from her husband; marriage was an automatic defense.*

This is all pretty incendiary. And it’s completely true, too. Except for one small detail. All of the above is just as true for a man as it is for a woman.

When we pretend that implied consent only has to do with women, we cannot even begin to address the real issue. This is not about women being singled out by unjust legislation and an anti-feminist culture. This is a problem that we all face. Men and women alike exist in a state of implied consent. Can anybody really claim that a male sex worker will find it easier than a female sex worker to bring a charge of rape in court? Does anybody really think that being sexually unpopular, having a rich sexual past, being inebriated, etc. do not make it as hard for men as it is for women to prove they have been raped? Really?

I think it would be a great idea to discuss the concept of implied consent because it’s a very complicated issue that needs to be explored. But we will never get to explore it if we get stuck on this one-sided approach to the subject.

* The rest of the article is even more egregiously stupid than this, if you can imagine that.