The content of the essays, however, is a different thing altogether. In the very first essay, a student, a 20-year-old woman, refers to a character, a 20-year-old woman, as “promiscuous.” The character in question has a boyfriend. There is absolutely nothing else that might qualify her as promiscuous. If having a boyfriend at the age of 20 makes one promiscuous then I’m kind of scared. What is one supposed to do at this age not to be called a slut? Not have a boyfriend? Get married to a guy the second you meet him?

Jeez, women, when will you stop interiorizing these idiotic messages?

Not a single one of my 56 students in the Culture of Spain course asked for an extension for the final essay. This is a very unexpected development. I was so sure that grandmas were going to die and legs were going to break that I set the due date today instead of Friday to have two extra days for urgent requests for extensions.

“Are you sure you don’t need an extension?” I asked students who came by my office to verify the citation format.

“No,” they responded proudly. “We have finished on time.”

You see what things have come to? I hunt people down trying to get them to accept extensions but they refuse with pride and a sense of self-sufficiency.

The students are scaring me with how responsible they are this year. I guess all my speechifying about the importance of creating a professional persona that commands respect did make an impression.

The idiot who has spent the last three days searching this blog for posts of mine containing words “man-hater” and “I hate men”, you can stop wasting your time already. Those posts don’t exist. Well, now this one does because I had to write it to put you out of your misery.

It isn’t surprising to see posts by conservative bloggers that go, “OMG, Obama won the election, this is the end of the world.” This is a normal reaction to losing an election, so nobody is surprised. What is a lot more curious is to see Liberal analysts break down hysterically for the same reason. Here is Ian Welsh throwing a hissy fit over Obama’s win:

The people who sadden me are left-wingers who carried Obama’s water, who I know know better.  I know they know his record.  I know they know where this is all leading.  I know because I was a professional blogger for years.  I’ve met these people in person, I have corresponded with them, and I have talked to many of them.  I have worked with many of them.

They know what Obama is, and they lied about him.

Whenever I see such outbursts, I always know what is about to come. Scroll down Welsh’s long and boring post and you will see the following line (the emphasis is mine):

If society is to function again for the benefit of all a lot of things need to be done.

I really love this “again” bit. These over-entitled white boys are so predictable. It doesn’t matter whether they place themselves to the left or to the right of the political spectrum. Sooner or later their yearning for the good ole times when things were so much better, sugar so much sweeter and women so much more subservient will burst through. These mythical “all” for whose benefit society functioned so well in the past obviously do not include women, gay folks, or racial and ethnic minorities.

But what does the ultra-progressive Mr. Walsh care about these unimportant little categories of people? What does he care about the visible and dramatic improvements people who are not white and male might experience? He wants to go back to the past where things were good for him. And in his reality, his interests are the interests of all.

Now that I’m on this topic anyways, I wanted to mention that we should all just thank Petraeus. This presidential election was so emotionally charged, tense and aggressive that we all needed a good spot of soap-operish comedy to alleviate the tension.

The great Spanish playwright Lope de Vega said in 1609 that it was crucial to provide regular comic relief to an audience if you wanted it to enjoy a good tragedy. Thanks to Petraeus’s ultra-funny affair, we now feel refreshed, invigorated, and ready to plunge into the new electoral cycle.

It is extraordinarily funny to see people born and raised in a prissy, prudish, sexually thwarted culture try to explain sexuality to themselves. I just found this very cute article that tries to analyze human sexuality using poor beleaguered General Petraeus as an example. The title of the article is already highly entertaining: “Why Men Like Petraeus Risk It All to Cheat.” From the title, you’d assume that Petraeus either cheated with a cardboard object or with another man who is just like him. The last thing you’d gather from it is that there was a female partner involved in the cheating who also risked her career and family in the process of cheating.

Here is how the silly piece starts:

An admitted affair has crumbled the career of CIA Director David Petraeus, prompting the evergreen question: Why do people with so much to lose risk it all for sex?

Apparently, the answer “Because they want to have sex” is not enough to satisfy the article’s priggish author. For her, people have to be motivated by something other than actual sexual gratification to enjoy sex. I just barely started reading the article and already I feel a lot of sympathy for this journalist’s miserable sex partner(s). The article continues by presenting a series of very idiotic claims advanced by Dr.Phil-quality “psychologists”:

In the last few years alone, several public figures, from former Rep. Anthony Weinerto action star and former California Gov.Arnold Schwarzenegger, have admitted to straying from their marital vows. In Petraeus’ case, a miscalculation of risk may have contributed to the decision to cheat, psychologists say. . . Men can become blind to risk at the sight of an attractive woman, and from an evolutionary perspective, cheating can be a positive mechanism for ensuring gene survival, regardless of risk, scientists say.

As we all know, Petraeus has dedicated his life to taking pretty major risks in the field of combat. He placed his own survival at risk many times, so this idiotic “evolutionary” explanation makes zero sense.

It’s mind-boggling that people would see a 60-year-old guy who spent decades in a miserable marriage where he and his wife didn’t even see each other for 18 months at a time and would immediately decide that he is driven to use one of the very last remaining opportunities to have a normal sex life by the need to take risks or a very weird (at his age) desire to procreate.

Jeez, folks, the dude just wanted to get laid. Why is this so hard to fathom?

I also want to take this opportunity to say that all those newscasters who express their fake sympathy for Petraeus’s wife are idiots, too. The woman is probably dancing for joy in the streets, yelling, “Bring me champagne! And boys! Or girls! Or maybe both!” In these miserable marriages where people have no relationship whatsoever and live separated, pretending to be married for the sake of children, property and career, both partners are just trying to wait each other out. The one who manages to sit out the partner ends up with all the marital property. Since male sexuality has an earlier expiration date than the female sexuality, the wives who manage to wait out the husbands end up winning financially.

Hollywood is too stupid. Now the phenomenally untalented Keira Knightley will get a chance to suck while trying to play Anna Karenina. It is as if she hadn’t made enough money slaughtering Pride & Prejudice and now has to supplement her income ridiculing a masterpiece of Russian literature. I have no idea what kind of an idiot makes these casting decisions. Not only is this woman an anorexic* (which makes her completely unsuited to playing this particular role) but she is also as non-Russian looking as one can get.

I believe that both Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina are pretty bad as works of literature go. But they are not as bad as to deserve Keira Knightley.

On Friday, I’m planning to drag myself to the movie theater for the first time in over a year and watch Cloud Atlas. Of course, it will mean that I’ll have to stare at the ugly and talentless Tom Hanks for almost 3 hours but I’m almost resigned to that. Good movies or even not completely horrible movies hardly ever come to our theater in Southern Illinois. We’ve had some idiotic anti-Obama documentary run here for months. And that was the only documentary our theater has offered in years. The only reason to watch Hollywood movies is for the special effects, and Cloud Atlas looks like it will have quite a few of them.

If you watched Cloud Atlas already and want to tell me it sucks, please don’t. I have very little motivation to go to the movies as it is. But if you want to tell me it is great, then please do. I don’t want this to become yet another failed plan to get myself to the movie theater.

* Anorexics were not considered beautiful in XIXth century Russia. This type of woman was:

I think the semester is getting to everybody. My colleagues have started a long email exchange on whether creationism is anti-scientific. The most recent contribution from a colleague at the Law School is that rejecting creationism is anti-scientific because the truly scientific method gives equal consideration to all theories. Another colleague agreed that creationism is “a strong competing theory” for evolution and has to be taught.

This entire debacle was started by somebody inviting us (college professors) to a talk on creationism by a homeschooled student where we would “defend our faith and glorify God in  the process.” Given that we are a state university and are not normally allowed even to mention our political preferences in personal emails sent out from the university server, people started to wonder why this kind of religious propaganda was suddenly allowed to be sent out to everybody through the university email.

Thanksgiving break can’t come soon enough.

I just found a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant post about bullying:

This is sort of a common cultural trope – kids are embarrassed by their parents, the parents see the kids’ embarrassment as foolish and invalid, and the parents therefore take a certain delight in embarrassing their kids.  And, as a cultural trope, it’s seen as all in good fun, at least by the parents.

But it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that could foster bullying attitudes.

A kid in a family like this will learn that feelings aren’t worth respecting. If someone finds something humiliating, taking advantage of that fact to make them feel humiliated is normal, valid, and entertaining.  Surely no good can come of taking that attitude into the schoolyard with them!  The kid will also learn (as I did) that baseline human reality is that people want to embarrass you, and develop self-worth and defense mechanisms accordingly.

In the midst of all the crap published nowadays on the subject of bullying, it is very refreshing to see a blogger offer an intelligent, insightful analysis that is not based on the same tired collection of platitudes one encounters everywhere.

If children learn to see the world as menacing, hostile, and out to hurt one in a variety of unpredictable ways, they will grow up to have every aspect of their lives infected by this worldview. I have no doubt that most parents have absolutely no idea what a powerful effect their ill-considered casual remarks and actions have. “Why is my daughter always so sad? Why does she have trouble falling asleep? Why is my son suffering from anxiety?” they ask, oblivious to how their own actions turned their children into perennially terrified, anxious creatures who see the world as a profoundly unsafe place.

In the aftermath of this election I’m hearing a lot of commentary on how the Republicans are doomed by demography.

I’m hearing this a lot, too. Of course, using the word “demography” in the context of the recent election  is just a way to avoid recognizing that the progress is unstoppable and that the sexual mores of unhinged fundamentalists are of no interest to the majority of this country’s population any longer.

If you are unhappy with today’s “demography” (a.k.a. the progressive secular turn this country has experienced), then brace yourself. In 10 years, today’s “demography” will look like a conservative’s dream come true.