This is what the people at the University of Virginia should have been protesting this entire time:

First let me outline a startling absence in the career backgrounds of the 16 members of the Board of Visitors at UVA.  Not one board member is employed, or has ever been employed, in the higher education sector. . .

The Rector, Helen Dragas, appointed buy Kaine in 2008, is a realter and Virginia Beach developer.  She comes from a family of successful real estate developers and is CEO of a successful Virginia Beach development company founded by her father. So she does not even earn the kudos of establishing her own company.  However, she surely has plenty of dollars to throw around on gubernatorial elections. . .

The remainder of the board, evidently, are spineless creatures – elsewise they would never have tolerated such a campaign of secrecy, without opening up board deliberations to the public arena. Their backgrounds are far removed from academia. . .

Not a single member of the board holds a doctoral degree in any discipline.

What a disgrace. And this is a well-known, prestigious university. Just think about it. A university is governed by people who have no inside knowledge of academia and who don’t even have a PhD. We, the academics, only have ourselves to blame if we allow this.

I was asked by a reader to comment on the article that starts as follows:

When the government gathers or analyzes personal information, many people say they’re not worried. “I’ve got nothing to hide,” they declare. “Only if you’re doing something wrong should you worry, and then you don’t deserve to keep it private.”

I have a very protective attitude towards my privacy. It matters so much to me that I guard it like a rabid dog. When people ask me where I’ve been and what I’ve done, I sometimes lie. Not because I’ve done anything I’m ashamed of, but simply because I don’t feel like sharing this information about myself. As much as I love my husband, if he went through my pockets, rummaged in my papers or read my emails, I would end the relationship immediately, no questions asked. The same goes for all of my friends, relatives and colleagues. Invade my privacy, and we are done for good. And it isn’t because I have anything to hide from my husband or anybody else. It’s because if people invade my private space, this means they disrespect me completely as a human being.

At the same time, in spite of this exaggerated need to protect my privacy, I have absolutely no problem with having a gazillion surveillance cameras record what I do or satellites observing me inside my house (I have no idea if that’s done or possible, mind you). It matters absolutely nothing to me if all my purchases are listed and stored in some database and some governmental officials or corporate employees have a record of every drink of alcohol I ever had and every condom I ever purchased.  I don’t even care if some governmental official records every session with my analyst and listens to it at leisure.

The reason why I guard my privacy so fiercely from people I know and don’t care in the least about what some strangers know about me is that I have no relationship with strangers. They can’t disrespect me as a human being because they don’t know me as a human being. To them, I’m just a number among millions. They don’t know what I eat, drink or read. They know what number 73625268V03030L3-3-7 eats, drinks and reads.

It’s a little like what happens in a hospital. Many women would have a problem with spreading their legs and demonstrating their vaginas to a group of coworkers and friends, right? However, women who give birth at a hospital do just that, even if they are giving birth though an elective C-section, and suffer no emotional trauma as a result. Many people would never walk naked in front of their neighbors and friends, yet those same people do that very easily at a hospital. Medical personnel has no relationship with me as a human being, so there is no shame or reticence between us. This is precisely the reason why people so often share secrets with  strangers they meet on a bus or anonymous online interlocutors.

Privacy as a concept only makes sense when you are interacting with somebody as a private individual. My personal space can only be invaded by a person who knows me as a person.

The belief that somebody somewhere cares enough about you to collect and analyze every bit of data about you and that somebody constantly pays attention to every aspect of your existence is an effective cure for loneliness. It’s easy to feel lost and insignificant in an enormous universe and these paranoid fantasies of how somebody will analyze your purchases and notice that you are sick (one of the examples from the quoted article) must be comforting. “Somebody has got to be paying attention to what I read, eat, drink and worry about,” people like the author of the article seem to say. “There’s got to be somebody out there who actually gives a fuck.”

As we all know, life only has meaning if there are witnesses to it. How do we even know if we exist when nobody pays any attention to us? In the absence of actual human beings who are interested in our reading choices, purchases and the state of our health, we might generate fantasies about the “Big Brother” who actually does care.

What I do find curious is how easy some people find it to sell their “life is so scaaaaaary” worldview of abandoned, terrified little kids.

Here is the list of topics people have asked me to blog about. I have crossed out the ones I already covered. Feel free to add anything else.

– American Senator review.

–  about Don Quixote by Cervantes (for Dummies version – can one without any knowledge about Spain & its’ history understand it, at least on some level?)

– How do *you* feel RE Obama’s kill list and steps against Iran he supposedly takes?

– anything about language learning;

– Where do you draw the line between “culture” and “trash?” What attributes does a movie or book have to have in order to fit your definition of culture?

– Is closure an American phenomenon? Do other cultures just say “piss off” and go on their merry ways?

– you list “voting is useless because all politicians lie anyway”. I’d be interested to see a post explaining why this is a misconception.

– book called Truth, Reality, and the Psychoanalyst: Latin American Contributions to Psychoanalysis;

– What to you think about 50 Shades of Grey. Doesn’t matter if you’ve read the book. What are your thoughts on all the fuss about it?

– thoughts on it and on the larger regulation/personal responsibility theme;

– thoughts on the privacy article;

– more about the Ukraine, especially regarding the current political situation, Timoschenko etc.;

– I’m curious as to how you learned about Asperger’s and how you learned you are autistic;

– In the archive, you have advice for parents of autistic children. What advice do you have for next-degree relatives (aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, etc.)? What would you advise these relatives if the parents are going bankrupt trying to cure the child’s autism?

– I’d like to know more about what made you want to study and teach Spanish.

– opinion on the “killing feminism” article.

–  I find some parts of US history fascinating, and wondered if you have any opinions about US history? Either the facts themselves or how you see us thinking about our own history.

– “PRINCETON, NJ — Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. ”
Is that a problem?

– What are you language personas? Of the languages you are fluent in, what are the beauties/limitations of each? I know people have asked you to blog about language/language acquisition. Maybe this can be the subject of a future post.

– What is the meaning of life?

These are great, people. Thank you, everybody, for contributing. I promise to cover all of them gradually.

Do you know what I’ve been doing since morning? Explaining to my students why “Communism” and “Fascism” are not interchangeable terms. The stupid mass media throw around words like “fascism,” “Communism” and “socialism” all over the place to the point where they become emptied of all meaning. I keep explaining and explaining, yet the students keep saying, “But Communism and fascism are both against free enterprise, so they’ve got to be the same” and “fascists and communists are all leftists.”

Reader H.A.S. left a link to a really great article and asked me to comment on it. The article condemns the lazy and pathetic “choice feminism” and explains why taking feminism in the direction of “all choices are sacred” will kill the movement:

I am going to smack the next idiot who tells me that raising her children full time — by which she really means going to Jivamukti classes and pedicure appointments while the nanny babysits — is her feminist choice. Who can possibly take feminism seriously when it allows everything, as long as women choose it?

What can I say to this other than, “Hear, hear!” Like the article’s author, I’m beyond tired of hearing the pompous “Respect the woman’s CHOICE!” whenever I offer an opinion about something done by a woman. How would you qualify a philosophy that insisted on the impossibility of ever judging or criticizing any choice made by a man? If I accompanied any suggestion that a man might be an idiot who makes ridiculous choices with an outraged, “But he  is a MAN! Respect his choices!”, what would that make me? Wouldn’t the word be “sexist”?

If we are in favor of equality, we have got to treat everybody’s choices equally. Women are as capable as men. Capable of greatness and stupidity, genius and silliness. Capable of making great choices and idiotic ones, too.

Let’s please be serious grown-ups: real feminists don’t depend on men. Real feminists earn a living, have money and means of their own.

If the movement had been serious about being serious then the idea could not have caught on that equal is how you feel. Or that how anyone feels about anything matters at all.

Again, I could not agree more. You can’t be a feminist – that is, a person who believes that women are valid and complete human beings – and not be, or at least try to be, financially, intellectually, socially and personally self-sufficient. You can still be a great person and feel good about your choices. But you are not a feminist. The word needs to mean something. Some limited range of very basic actions should come attached to it. This is why I agree completely with the following:

And there really is only one kind of equality — it precedes all the emotional hullabaloo — and it’s economic. If you can’t pay your own rent, you are not an adult. You are a dependent.

Of course, we all have difficult moments in life. We lose jobs, suffer economic hardship, get into debt. Everybody finds themselves in a position to ask others for help. That is normal and good. However, if a healthy adult hands over all financial responsibility for her or his life to another adult, there are no other words to call this but a complete and utter dependence. And people who are really secure and happy about their choices, would not need to mask this simple reality behind the pretty verbiage of feminist choices. They would just accept it.

The part of the article I disagree with is the author’s claim that only rich women are housewives nowadays. That is absolutely not true since this is a format of existence that people choose for reasons completely different from whether they can afford it. I know several brilliant young women who chose not to work and who now live extremely modest, not to say piss-poor, lives. These are women who could have made really good money based on their skills and education. I also want to dispel the myth that housewifery is necessarily linked to taking care of children. Once again, this is a choice that is made for reasons that are not really related to practicalities and conveniences. Childless and passionately anti-children housewives are in no way different from the ones who have children.

This is not a class issue. This is an issue of a personal choice. And that choice has nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.

The article ends with a very important thought:

Something becomes a job when you are paid for it — and until then, it’s just a part of life.

This is undoubtedly true, people. I speak foreign languages all day long. However, it only becomes a job several times a week when I walk into the classroom and get paid for speaking these languages to students. What would you think if I claimed that when I speak in Russian to my husband and in Spanish to my brother-in-law that was my “job” and my “career”?

I thank reader H.A.S. and hope s/he keeps coming by the blog with these great links.

P.S. Who wants to bet that I will receive at least 3 comments in this thread exhorting me to “respect women’s choices’?

Dear student,

I don’t care if every professor you’ve ever had told you that you are a brilliant writer. I also don’t care whether it’s true that you have received “statewide prizes” (sic!) for your writing. I don’t care in the least that, as you point out, you are a native speaker of English while I’m not. And I really don’t care that you always believed that your essays were great. Be that all as it may, nobody will convince me that the following sentences are not completely and utterly horrible:

It should be taken into consideration that the fact that Latin America is a big and important nation is a crucial fact that is perceived by everybody on a variety of occasions that are frequently discussed, however they might say that it is not true and deny everything. Which I find wrong. Completely.

Please understand that after I was forced to read 6 pages filled with this kind of nonsense, I have to conclude that your writing awards are either non-existent or are given out by idiots.

P.S. I will die a happy person if I don’t have to explain ever again that Latin America IS NOT A BLOODY NATION!!!

OK, people you need to read this great link to Cosmo’s sex advice that the Twisted Spinster left on my blog. I have been weeping with laughter for an hour. I can’t wait for my husband to come home. No, not to subject him to these horrible practices but to laugh together.

Here is just a small excerpt that includes a Cosmo advice and a blogger’s takedown:

 14. “It’s time to introduce your breasts to your favorite vibrator… (how rude of your vadge to have hogged it all these years).”
Your vadge is a hog, women. A hoggy, hoggy vadge. God, that’s sexy.

16. “Draw an attention-grabbing circle around your nipples using rhinestones and body glue for a special night in.”
Definitely wait for a special night. Nothing’s sadder than body-gluing rhinestones around your nipples on a Tuesday. What is this, the Midwest?

17. “Cook dinner topless, apply a little tomato sauce to your nipple,” and ask your man to lick it off.”
Just don’t attempt #16 and #17 on the same night — your man might choke on a rhinestone.

Do read the entire thing. It’s the best.

OK, just one more quote. I think this one wins the contest:

35. “As you’re eating dinner together, say something X-rated like, ‘See how I’m devouring this piece of meat? That’s how I’m going to devour you.'”
Then, later, during oral sex, pause and say, “OM NOM NOM NOM.”

I’d totally dump a person for doing this to me at dinner.

“Hitler had the capacity to be a wonderful, amazing leader for his country but he made some mistakes and ended up being not that good.”

I have no idea what I’m supposed to respond to this statement made by a student.

The good news is that other students started responding to this comment before I saw it.

The belief that all individuals – regardless of gender, sexual identity, race, age, ethnicity, and class – are to be valued, respected, and accorded the same rights.

You see what the problem here is, right? Who is this mysterious all-powerful entity that will accord the same rights? Who will do the valuing and respecting? Why is feminism reduced to “a belief” which puts it on a par with the belief that Eve was made out of Adam’s rib and the Earth rests on elephants and a turtle?

Feminism, according to this definition, is not a political agenda or a form of activism. Instead, all you need to do as a feminist is sit there passively believing that somebody unidentified will value, respect, and accord rights.

You’ll say I’m picking on words. But as a philologist I happen to know that words matter. If you slip into the passive voice and the language of “beliefs” the second you try to provide a definition of a philosophy and a political movement, this is very telling.

This is the main problem with feminism today. It’s all about believing that you can sit there doing nothing while rights, value and respect will somehow find you on their own.

Do you see these beautiful things? I have no idea what to call them in English but, for us, they are cutlets (kotlety). I understand that cutlets mean something different in English, so feel free to suggest the name for these. They are delicious, and all my English-speaking and Hispanic friends love them.

The way you make them is as follows:

Take ground meat (turkey, in this case), add an egg, some crushed garlic, some salt, a cup of cooked couscous, and 1-2 cups of milk. Mix it all up really well. Then create these meat thingies, cover them in bread crumbs and place on a very hot frying pan with some olive oil. Fry on high heat uncovered until they are golden brown. Turn over, lower the fire, and close the lid until they are done.

Every chef has a moment when s/he fails bitterly. As I was cooking the most recent batch of the meats, I noticed that the kitchen reeked of vanilla. As a total idiot, I had bought French vanilla milk instead of regular milk and added that to the ground meat!

Of course, as a very good cook I managed to mask the vanilla smell and taste almost completely. N never noticed anything.

I still feel embarrassed over this, though.