My parents sometimes allow the pro-Russian media influence them way too much.

“What is happening? What is going on in the US?” my father asks me over the phone in a very alarmed voice as he calls me from Montreal.

“Huh?” I ask, trying to wake up.

“We just read this article by a Russian journalist who lives in the US. He says everything is horrible! The country is on the verge of a war! People are buying enormous amounts of food because they fear that food supplies will run out! Are you OK? How are you doing???”

(We speak on the phone every day, mind you.)

“I’m fine,” I says. “Everything is great.”

“But is it true that people are stocking up on food in case of war?”

“Well,” I say, “N. and I went to the supermarket the other day and people were buying quite a lot of food. And we did buy a bunch of stuff as well. But that isn’t because we expect a civil war but because we like food. And so do most Americans.”

“Ah, so things are not horrible? You are OK? Here, I will give the phone to your mother,” he says. “You need to reassure her.”

“What is happening? What is going on in the US?” my mother asks, sounding even more alarmed than my father.

And the whole dialogue repeats itself.

The Russian media are selling this spiel about the horrible, mean and miserable Americans who are about to die out massively (and good riddance, too!) like there is no tomorrow. This is understandable because Putin needs to present himself as the savior of Russians from the nasty US.

I find the whole thing hilarious.

This brilliant article is the perfect response to those who believe that anti-choicers are not misogynists but simply people who care about babies:

Fundamentally, the debate over abortion is a debate over what we make of the fact that some of us in this world can have babies. For pro-choicers, “being able to make babies” is a nifty thing to be able to do, like being able to play the piano or being able to bake pies. It’s your skill, your ability. You should use it how you like. We would no more force a woman to make a baby because she can than insist that someone who can play the piano drop everything they’re doing at a moment’s notice to play because we want them to.

For anti-choicers, the fact that someone can make a baby means that making babies is what she is for. People mistake the term “objectification” to mean “looking at with lust,” but what it actually means is “reducing someone to an object to be used.” Sexual objectification is assuming that because women turn you on, they are for sex, instead of a person whose sexuality should be an expression of their agency. What anti-choicers engage in is reproductive objectification. Women are among an array of objects to be used. The refrigerator is for storing food. The bookshelf is for holding books. The woman is for making babies. You no more give her a choice in the matter than you would give your refrigerator veto power over what food it holds because it didn’t like your method of shopping.

Do read the entire article. It’s the most brilliant piece of writing I have read in a while. We will not defeat this mentality until we understand as clearly as possible where it comes from.

Reader CK left the following important comment I want to address in a separate post:

I think your post misses the mark. IMO insecure behavior is a turn-off primarily because it is like a big and negative anchor. People who are always obsessing over their looks, weight, or WHATEVER can’t just relax and be happy with themselves; rather they often comment on and focus on the things they don’t like about themselves. Having to say “you look great” all the time or constantly coax them into doing things they’re resistant to doing (because of their insecurities) is draining; it’s almost like babysitting and consoling a weak little kid. To most people, this is not attractive.

What CK is describing is not an insecure person. CK is describing a narcissist. The manifestations of a narcissistic trauma do look like insecurity. But not all insecure people are narcissists.

Of course, I agree that a narcissist should be avoided like the plague. These people will devour you irrespective of whether they are insecure or not.

However, what we see in a comment is a description of a person who plays into the narcissist’s game because it fulfills his or her own needs (“constantly coax them into doing things they’re resistant to doing”). Remember, narcissists thrive on audience. When you become a spectator in a narcissistic performance, you are playing a very unhealthy game because of your own need to see yourself as a savior. Note the paternalistic desire to see the narcissist as a small and weak child.

This comment is the perfect illustration of two psychological types: the narcissist and the savior. They often form relationships because each fulfills the unhealthy needs of the other. Obviously, as long as they don’t bring any other people (say, children) into their folie à deux, it’s their business if they want to live this way.

I need to stop watching these silly Russian dating shows but they are so hilarious that I need them to help me grade.

A 75-year-old man is looking “for a woman between the ages of 25 and 35 who is interested in having a lot of sex.”

“With whom?” I ask the second I hear this.

It turns out that the gentleman is looking for a rich 25-year-old because he has no money.

I will let you figure out why he came to this show on your own.

P.S. It took me a while to figure out how to understand these Russian shows until I realized that you need to add 15 years to everybody’s age to understand what the hell people are on about. So this rich gentleman is about 90 years old in terms of our North American vision of age. For instance, when you see a 25-year-old say, “I need to get married and start having children now because my time is running out” and everybody nods, just imagine that this person is 40 and things become at least somewhat more understandable.

P.P.S. There is a lot of grading that awaits me this semester, people, so prepare yourselves for many cross-cultural posts. I apologize in advance to everybody who hates such posts. My teaching duties are sacred.

It hasn’t happened yet this year, but it will. It’s inevitable. One day, the call will come, and anyone who has ever sent a kid to school dreads it. 

“Mom! I forgot my lunch!”

American parents never cease to amaze me. Believe me, I’m saying this with the kindest feelings possible towards them. I tried imagining giving that call to my mother when I was 10 (the age of the blogger’s younger child) and started beating my forehead against the keyboard in laughter. And then I imagined doing that at 15 (the age of the blogger’s older child) and the story stopped even being funny.

Yeah. . .

Who needs sci-fi when you can just scroll down your blogroll for stories from different planets?

With this kind of father, who needs to have enemies?

MARK SCOLFORO, ASSOCIATED PRESS: How would you tell a daughter or a granddaughter who, God forbid, would be the victim of a rape, to keep the child against her own will? Do you have a way to explain that?

SMITH: I lived something similar to that with my own family. She chose life, and I commend her for that. She knew my views. But, fortunately for me, I didn’t have to.. she chose they way I thought. No don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t rape.

SCOLFORO: Similar how?

SMITH: Uh, having a baby out of wedlock.

SCOLFORO: That’s similar to rape?

SMITH: No, no, no, but… put yourself in a father’s situation, yes. It is similar. But, back to the original, I’m pro-life, period.

My father’s only granddaughter was born to unmarried parents. Since he is a normal father and not a vicious idiot like Tom Smith, a guy who runs for political office in this country, my father celebrates the birth of his granddaughter as a result of a consensual and happy relationship between his daughter and her fiance. Of course, my father would have respected and supported any reproductive choice his daughters would have made. That’s because he sees us as human beings, not as property.

Todd Akin’s comments on rape have become a really good litmus test for jerkdom and many politicians are failing it every day. Let’s keep listening to them reveal their true colors.

People keep coming up with more and more intricate ways to dump on the women’s liberation movement:

Ultimately the question is, does “mankind” really need men? With human cloning technology just around the corner and enough frozen sperm in the world to already populate many generations, perhaps we should perform a cost-benefit analysis. It’s true that men have traditionally been the breadwinners. But women have been a majority of college graduates since the 1980s, and their numbers are growing. It’s also true that men have, on average, a bit more muscle mass than women. But in the age of ubiquitous weapons, the one with the better firepower (and knowledge of the law) triumphs.

Meanwhile women live longer, are healthier and are far less likely to commit a violent offense. If men were cars, who would buy the model that doesn’t last as long, is given to lethal incidents and ends up impounded more often?

This is the kind of crap the New York Times publishes, folks. Before you fall into the trap the author of the quoted piece has prepared for you and start defending the “need” for men to exist, let’s look at what the article is really trying to accomplish. This is nothing but a blatant attempt to make people angry with an obviously offensive question. After they do get angry, it will be easy to smuggle any ideological manipulation past them.

The main idea of the article is the age-old myth that whenever women gain rights, men lose out. This battle-between-the-sexes mentality is one of the favorite weapons of the patriarchy. Any reasonable person who is not deeply invested into the preservation of the strict gender binary, however, realizes that this is not how things work. The destruction of strict gender divisions benefits both men and women because different kinds of masculinity, femininity and intersexuality become legitimate. For instance, if women can work and make their own money, this not only benefits women but also men who don’t have to carry the burden of “providing” for a group of dependents on their own. And I cannot believe I have to explain something this basic in year 2012.

The article’s author ends his piece with the following inanity:

When I explained this to a female colleague and asked her if she thought that there was yet anything irreplaceable about men, she answered, “They’re entertaining.”

Gentlemen, let’s hope that’s enough.

This is a favorite trick of all anti-feminists. A spurious anecdote about some ridiculous and offensive pronouncement from a man-eating, ball-busting “feminazi” is offered and then followed immediately with a rallying call to the poor, persecuted men. “Beware, fellow men,” the author is saying. “Or the vile female-lib creatures will get rid of you altogether.” As a result, many feminists will become bogged down in explanations of how we are not opposed to the existence of men. In the meanwhile, the very real assault on reproductive rights can continue unchecked. Come on, who cares about rape victims, unintended pregnancies and healthcare provided by Planned Parenthood when we live in a world where women have gotten so much power that they are seriously thinking of getting rid of men. It has to be true because the New York Times said so.

I keep hearing this story that there is supposedly a certain – and a quite significant – number of people in this country who cheat the government to get the food stamps they are not entitled to. Now, you need to remember that I’m not American and I only discovered the concept of food stamps fairly recently. I’m trying to understand the idea logically but I simply can’t get the concept of food stamp cheaters to make any sense to me.

If a person goes to the trouble of jumping through the bureaucratic hoops on the way to food stamps, resigns him or herself to living in fear of being found out, faces the humiliation of presenting these food stamps at the check-out counter, and agrees to have one’s food choices policed by the unwelcoming cashiers and other customers who hate seeing food stamps being used on food they don’t approve, then that has got to be a pretty desperate person. I can’t imagine anybody with a good income and a comfortable life going to all that trouble. Why would they? I mean, really? If there is, indeed, a significant group of people who cheat to get these food stamps, doesn’t it mean that there are categories of people in dire financial need who, for whatever reason, are not covered by the food-stamp provisions? In this situation, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to expand the category of people who need this assistance rather than suspect that somebody is trying to become a multi-millionaire by getting “undeserved” food stamps?

It makes me feel somewhat ashamed even to discuss food stamps in a country that has given out billions of taxpayers’ money to Goldman Sachs and Co in very recent history. Food stamps sound like such a miserable drop in the bucket compared to the enormous sums those corporate cheaters have been able to get out of us.

I pay my taxes honestly and I know I’d be much richer if I didn’t have to pay them. But I can’t bring myself to experience any outrage over somebody getting an extra loaf of pre-sliced bread out of that money. I do, however, mind it hugely that Mr. Blankfein will get yet another Porsche out of it.

A student writes in an online discussion: “I, for one, feel very happy that the barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire because it was a total welfare state!”

I never know what to respond to students who abhor the welfare state while attending a state university and receiving federal grants.

“If every university in America halved the size of its bureaucracy overnight, the result would be an enormous improvement in financial stability and a corresponding improvement in faculty productivity. For, as with every bureaucracy – public or private – the worst tend to get on top and to promulgate and police regulations and restrictions that severely damage the efficiency of the education process.” Just imagine, half of these overpaid useless paper-pushers with their community-building initiatives, their annoying double-speak, their unintelligent pronouncements just disappear from your university overnight and the money goes towards the library, the science labs, the infrastructure, the faculty salary raises. This would be a dream come true.

“When I was a kid growing up fundamentalist, I looked around at the mothers of many in my church and absorbed the very pointed message that women don’t get to have lives after childbearing. Their lives looked like an endless cycle of daughters bearing daughters bearing daughters, and only sons had the right to any other narrative. This feeling still dogs me, especially now that I have multiple friends with kids and am feeling the pressure to join them. But I reject that message intellectually, emotionally, and morally.”

“Ivy League job seekers (and of course this category could be stretched to include another four or five top private universities) do not have an inherent and indisputable advantage on the tenure-track job market. Many of them have a great deal of trouble finding tenure-track jobs, and a significant proportion of them fail, just as do Ph.D.s from other schools.” I can testify to the truth of this statement.

An instance of extreme lameness at a Swedish University.

“The city where I live isn’t really that small. I shouldn’t have to meet old lovers at the grocery. Yet I do. The conversation has been cordial; she’s married now… but her husband isn’t around much because he works construction and moves around. I know they spend time together and I assume their relationship is good, but her smile is too welcoming and genuinely pleasant considering how I treated her and how we left things. Either he’s an ass or she’s not so sure about pulling up stakes and moving twenty years after coming to town. I don’t do married women – it’s not worth the risk of bodily harm – but I’m wondering if I should tease out some info if I see her at the grocery again, then plan accordingly.” Or maybe she had a very rich personal life and didn’t have a clue who the hell you are. I always greet people with a smile that shines as brightly as the Sun to hide the fact that I have forgotten them completely.

The Last Psychiatrist is as brilliant as ever: “Ryan listened to the Rage Against The Machine in the precise way it was produced to be heard: as soundtrack to your own movie, stripped of its intended meaning.  It is not an accident that it found its way as an actual soundtrack to an actual movie. I’m sure Rage is earnest in their core belief system, but you can’t argue that you’re part of the counterculture if you’ve been #8 on TRL in between Destiny’s Child and Lou Vega’s Mambo No. 5.  You aren’t the counterculture, you are the culture. The partisanship that everyone desperately clings to is a media construction serving the necessary function of letting you self-identify, in the absence of anything in your life more substantive.   In other words, Fox & Friends are doing you a favor.”

I know there is nothing funny about Todd Akin’s comments about rape but I think it’s very healthy to laugh at him and people like him. Do read this superbly well-written post on the subject. I was getting so traumatized by all this tactless and cruel discussions of rape that I started having horrible nightmares. This post is one of the things that helped me breathe deep and start getting over it.

“If you as a parent are actively teaching your children to believe INSTEAD of to think, to value superstition over science, than you are essentially committing child abuse in my opinion. You are not doing your duty as a parent to prepare your child for their future, and are instead committing them to a life of ridicule and shame. That is unless they refuse to expose themselves to the world around them and instead hide their heads in the bosom of their ignorant families while embracing the lies perpetrated by their fundamentalist church.”

“You just have to Google for “Pussy Riot” and “freedom of expression” or “freedom of speech” to see how widespread this was. The Western consensus, among politicians, the media, and celebrities, at least, is that Pussy Riot did nothing wrong, they were simply exercising their right to “freedom of expression”. And it’s all sanctimonious, hypocritical twaddle. The Western media would be better advised to be concerned with their own freedom of speech, because many of them were too chicken to even mention the name of the band. How’s that for freedom of expression?”

“I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering on that.” This was said by one Mitt Romney in 1994. Probably the relative has resuscitated since then.

“Even if you’ve had sex with someone five hundred times, you still need their consent before you have sex with them again. Even if they’ve had sex with half of New York City, you still need their consent before you have sex with them. Even if they’re your spouse, you still need their consent before you have sex with them. If you don’t obtain their consent and have sex with them anyway, you are raping them. Even if they choose not to accuse you of rape, you’re still raping them. This is not a difficult concept.” This is not supposed to be a difficult concept, I agree. Yet for some people it still is. I think the statement I quoted has to become part of  sex education everywhere.

“Latest research. . . showed that women who work steadily full-time after the birth of their first child report better physical health than women who don’t.” This is for people who insist that turning a woman into a housewife makes sense to them financially. As I always say, denying her dental care, visits to a doctor, clothes and food will also help save tons of money. Who cares if this insignificant creature gets sick, right? As long as her male owner finds the setup convenient, all is well.

How to make an ultra-Liberal professor vote Republican. Hilarious!

“Romney, if he is in any sense a statesman, should grasp the nettle that threatens to tear the GOP apart. He should clearly and unequivocally distance his campaign from the social positions held by the right-wing of his party including, to some extent, by his running-mate.  He should emphasize that a Romney presidency will not pursue any active role on such issues as gay marriage and abortion.  He should stress that his exclusive focus, following an election victory, will be on the economy and foreign affairs.”

“Evangelicals in a school district in Louisiana are objecting to a palm scanner that kids could use to pay for their lunches, thus eliminating the need for lunch money. Why? Because it sounds too similar to “the mark of the beast.” OK, “the mark of the beast” objection is weird, if it is true. But can anybody explain to me why there is such a burning need to get rid of lunch money? This is normally a blogger I like a lot but this specific post is stupid. There can be any number of reasons why people might be uncomfortable with getting their palm-prints taken and stored in a database. I only found out that Evangelicals existed a few years ago, so I’m definitely not one of them. Yet I can’t say I’m all that comfortable with palm-printing people who are not suspected of any crime just because somebody finds it more convenient. What next, a DNA database for every person in the country?

There is a beautiful series of auto-biographical posts written by a transgender woman called “The Secret History of Jaime.” Here is the first post in the series but there are six other posts in the series already published on that blog. The posts are so well-written that I read each one like an installment in a mystery novel, wondering what will happen next in the story.

Come join the discussion about a poster that I like and a fellow blogger dislikes.

And the post of the week: “The only coherent outcome of granting the fetus personhood is to deny the pregnant woman personhood. The fact that misogyny often accompanies pro-life positions is not an unfortunate accident — it isnecessarily entailed by the pro-life position. The pro-life position takes an autonomous adult human being and makes her into the unconditional servant of another (ostensible) human being.” The entire post is brilliant. Do read.