I tend to be way too literal for my own good. To give a recent example, when I registered for a feminist conference, it never occurred to me that “feminist” would translate into “all-female.” Now I have received the program and was shocked to discover that, save for two token males, there will only be female scholars at the conference.

Because of my literal thinking, I will now end up spending three days in a gender ghetto.

Here is a statement I found on a blog I follow:

 BuzzFeed found that mothers were almost 6 times more likely to be described as bad than fathers, further lending proof to my rants over the way mainstream media keeps stoking the “mommy war” fires.

While BuzzFeed analyzed a good number of sources, this is still only a small sampling. My own absolutely non-scientific Googling of “bad mother” netted 1,980,000 results in .33 seconds, while “bad father” only snagged 370,000 results in .32 seconds. Not conclusive in any way, yet still steeped in meaning.

What the meaning in question is the post never explains. It hints at the bad, mean media, as the easiest culprit whenever one discovers a phenomenon one cannot explain.

I can easily explain it, however.

How many men – let’s just take this country for now – state that fatherhood is their only job and that being a Dad is the only identity they need? Five? Twenty? A hundred? And how many women do that? Millions?

Well, here is your answer. Everybody gets scrutinized, examined, and judged at their job. If motherhood is yours, then you will be evaluated on it just like everybody else.

Now, a country where the reality of a “stay-at-home mother” is historically non-existent, the phenomenon described by the OP will not be found. I know that for a fact because I grew up in such a culture. To prove my point, I have Googled “bad mother” and “bad father” in Russian. Here are the results:

bad mother (плохая мать) 3,730,000 results
bad father (плохой отец) 5,320,000 results

Unfortunately, we have had housewifery imported from the US back in the 1990s, and as a result, these numbers are likely to change with time. I have no doubt that they will look exactly like the American numbers the moment when we reach the same percentage of women who define motherhood as their job.

Some idiot told me a long time ago that Ford Maddox Ford never published any novel other than his (amazing, fantastic, phenomenal) The Good Soldier.

And then Amazon sent me a list of recently released new editions which contained Ford Maddox Ford’s novel titled The Parade’s End. Not only does this novel exist, it is also 900+ pages long! I have been deprived of this novel because I chose to trust some ignoramus who duped me into believing that Ford only wrote one novel.

Nobody can be trusted.

When I go to my conference in November, I hope somebody will say, “This is such an interesting topic! Are you planning to publish an article on this subject?”

“Well, you know,” I will respond, “so much time has passed between the moment when I applied for the conference and the conference itself that I already wrote the article and got it published.”

There is an enormous difference between delivering a talk that you hope to publish in the future and delivering a talk that is part of an already accepted article.

Yes, I’m vain.

A student approaches me and says in a very apologetic tone of voice, “Professor Clarissa, I like reading.”

Then she seems very scared of what she said and proceeds to explain this strange preference, “I just do. I don’t know why but I simply enjoy reading.”

“This is good,” I say, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. “I like reading, too.”

“So I was thinking,” the student says, “would you be able to recommend any books in Spanish that I could read?”

I’ve been hoping for years to hear this question. Oh joy, oh happiness! A student in a literature course actually likes to read.

I will now recommend the books I have read in Spanish this month and really enjoyed. Since many people who read this blog are not Spanish-speakers, I will put the recommendations under the fold.

Continue reading “Spanish Reading Recommendations” →

I didn’t have time to blog about this discussion when it first happened but I figure that it’s better to do it late than never.

A debate – an actual long and intense debate – raged at Feministe website aimed at answering the question “Is it rape if you don’t mean for it to be rape?”

I was quite surprised that anybody still needed to argue about this issue, especially on a feminist website. I thought we all knew that the concept of statutory rape arose precisely in response to the oft-repeated claims by pedophiles that a child consented to a sex act of his or her own free will. Try telling a pedophile that s/he rapes children and see the outrage of an offended innocence.

And then there is the concept of spousal rape. Which also came to existence as a result of people believing that sexual violence within a marriage does not constitute rape and is generally not a big deal. I personally know two men who raped their wives. One did it once and the other one did it repeatedly over the course of twenty years. Do you think either of them intended to commit rape or sees himself as a rapist? Of course, not. I told one of them he was a rapist to his face and he had this look of complete confusion on his face. I think the guy’s shock at being called a rapist was completely genuine. He really had no idea that there was anything even remotely wrong about what he did to his wife. He actually hates rapists passionately and thinks they should all be castrated.

And, of course, there are all these situation where a victim of rape is coerced, threatened, and badgered into having sex. Do you think perpetrators of those rapes actually see themselves as rapists? Obviously not. They are convinced they are simply being persuasive and helping their victims to make up their minds.

All of these varieties of rape have been discussed by feminists ad nauseam. The idea that you need to seek enthusiastic consent before engaging in sex arose precisely as a response to situations where rapists sincerely and passionately argued that they had no idea they were raping anybody. This is why I was stunned when I read Feministe’s answer to the question “Is it rape if you don’t mean for it to be rape?”:

Obviously the word “rape” has a lot of baggage and by definition requires a level of guilty-mindedness (“mens rea” or intention to harm or knowledge that you might be causing harm or whatever you want to call it).

We can now let all of the child rapists, date rapists, spousal rapists, etc. get out of jails and go rape some more. They will all claim that they had no idea they were causing harm. Many will claim they were doing the exact opposite and trying to give pleasure to the victim. Many will be completely sincere.

The human psyche has many mechanisms of protecting itself from harm. One of the most harmful things for the psyche is a belief that one is bad. A bad, horrible, nasty human being. In order to remain mentally healthy, we need to believe in our essential goodness. The myth of one’s essential goodness is one of the organizing principles of our existence. This is why when we do anything that is likely to shatter this belief, our subconscious comes to the rescue and creates a series of convenient fictions aimed at convincing us that, deep inside, we are good people who are not to blame for what happened.

According to numerous accounts of people who knew him in  person, even Stalin was completely convinced that he was a good, kind human being who never did any harm to anybody.

It’s been a while since this debate on Feministe took place but I’m still completely stunned that people discuss rape as if we were still living in the 1950s. I’m especially shocked that these people call themselves feminists.

The time is rapidly approaching when I will get an opportunity to pester my cell service provider into giving me a new phone for free. My favorite BlackBerry doesn’t seem to have released anything new since the BlackBerry Torch that I’m using, and I’m not very happy about it. So I don’t really want to spend 2 more years with it.

Are you aware of any other cell phone that has a full keyboard? I mean, one with actual keys you can press, not one of these anti-autistic iPhone-like horrors where you have to press buttons on a screen. I do almost all of my blogging from this phone, so I need to be able to type comfortably.

From the Shakesville Blog:

What’s your favorite swear word?

Fuck.

Seriously? That’s it? How impossibly boring.

Now here is we swear in Argentina:

¡La concha de la lora de la hija de la mil camionada de putas que te requeteparió¡

And yeah, the way it should be pronounced does sound like a single word.

 

My sister is too funny. She is traveling in Portugal, so she decided to share with me a piece of wisdom she just learned about port.

“You cannot leave a bottle of port open for longer than two weeks,” she communicated to me gravely.

I laughed so hard I almost choked. Port is the only alcohol I like and imagining me sitting over a bottle without finishing it for two whole weeks is hilarious.

This reminded me of our neighborhood butcher who tried to explain to me how to freeze sausages to prevent them from spoiling.

This is a trick I taught my students the other day and that I’m sharing with all of my fellow language learners.

When you encounter a new word – a noun or a verb – don’t use a dictionary to look it up. Translating is the worst thing you can do as a language learner who is not specifically preparing to work as a translator. There is absolutely no need to link a word to another word in a different language. Link it to an image instead. This will help you get to a point where you don’t construct English phrases in your head and then translate them into the target language but just speak.

This is why I suggest you use Google Images. Link the word to an image in your mind.

Of course, you have to do this intelligently. For instance, we did this exercise in class where we used Google images to decipher a complicated sentence in Spanish about a nineteenth-century shepherd. In the sentence, the shepherd took his bag and a series of objects that were going to be useful to him while tending to his sheep. One of the objects he used had the same name as a brand of vacuum cleaners.

“What a weird guy this shepherd is,” a student said. “Why on earth would he take a vacuum cleaner to the fields with him?”