For a while, I had no idea what my new article should be about. It has to be part of my new project, so I’m kind of limited in terms of the possible primary sources. There was this novel that I read a couple of months ago that I really loved. I loved it to the point where I wouldn’t let it out of my hands wherever I went. Even if I wasn’t going to read it, I wanted to keep it close.

Still, even though I liked it so much, I wasn’t going to write about it. I had no interesting ideas about this novel. Everything seemed very self-explanatory.

And then today I was listening to a colleague’s sabbatical presentation on abortion in the Weimar Republic and I suddenly had a lightbulb moment. The novel opened itself to me, and I realized that it contained a wealth of material for me to write about. The funny thing is that the novel has nothing in it about either abortion or the Weimar Republic but for some mysterious reason hearing that sabbatical presentation really pushed me to develop ideas on the novel.

I almost hadn’t gone to this presentation because I was very tired and still had many things ahead of me but I was curious about it so I went. This just goes to show that intellectual curiosity does pay off.

Here is a really cool video of utopia.edu for your viewing pleasure. It really transmits the feel and the rhythm of the place:

As a teacher, I love answering questions even when they are not addressed to me. A blogger asks:

However, I’ve given it a lot of consideration over the past few days. Knowing CAT is a “cheap” therapy is a concern; does that make me a snob?

No, it doesn’t make you a snob. It makes you a very intelligent person who has great insight into the nature of psychological help.

Psychotherapy that costs nothing produces very little, if any, positive results. People tend to resist any profound changes in their psychological make up. The psyche perceives change as threatening, even of it is a change for the better. One of the ways to diminish this resistance is to make it unprofitable for a person to keep resisting. When during a session you can feel your own hard-earned money dripping away in a steady stream while you keep silent, avoid answering questions and engage in a variety of avoidance techniques, resisting therapy becomes harder.

The thermometer is showing 68F today. It’s December 3, people. WTF?

The worst part is that the air conditioning is off on campus and it’s impossible to teach. The students are visibly distressed, some find it hard to breathe, and I’m sweating like a stuck pig. Today is the day for student evaluations in 3 of my courses, and I want the students to take their time filling them out. But that won’t happen because all they want to do is leave the stuffy classroom. And I can’t say I blame them.

I also have the oral presentations by my independent researchers to attend today, and I had prepared a killer outfit, the centerpiece of which were my red boots. Of course, the outfit had to be shelved because nobody can wear boots in this weather.

In the meanwhile, some lucky bastards in Montreal have already had snow.

After a long and patient search, I think I finally located the very first comment Stringer Bell left on my blog. I think it was here but if I’m wrong, Stringer Bell will correct me. If I’m right about this, he has been reading the blog for pretty much as long as it existed. I feel very happy that I haven’t started to bore him yet.

Stringer Bell is a long-time reader whom I absolutely adore. I hope he doesn’t decide to abandon the blog because that would be very sad for me. He is incredibly brilliant, and after leaving comments for years, he still manages to surprise me with his insights. Stringer Bell is passionate, opinionated, and has a great sense of humor. He is an intellectual with a wide range of interests who seems to know everything that deserves to be known.

Stringer Bell is also a very kind and thoughtful person but this is something that will remain between him and me. 🙂

A therapist I know treats people who are addicted to shopping. The advice he gives them is to put their credit cards into a big bucket and freeze them. Then the chunk of ice that contains the cards is stored in the freezer. Whenever patients are tempted to make a spontaneous purchase, they are forced to invest a lot of time and effort into unfreezing the cards. While they do that, the urgent desire to make a purchase might subside.

This technique worked very well until a patient of his told him the following story. She experienced a profound desire to shop, took the chunk of ice with the cards from the freezer, ran into the garage, grabbed a wrench, ran back into the house, and demolished the piece of ice. Just smashed it to smithereens.

The patient was a small, skinny woman, yet her desire to shop was so powerful that she destroyed a huge piece of ice within a minute.

Psychoanalysis, in the meanwhile, can help one address the root causes of shopaholism (alcoholism, workaholism, etc.) instead of dealing only with the symptoms.

I’m sure many of you remember my deconstruction of the ridiculous “male privilege list” (if not, see here and here). Now I want to do the same for the “female privilege list” I found here. Before we begin, please note how this list is as filled with passive voice statements as the male privilege one.

1. I am physically able to give birth to another human being, and then do my best to mold her or him into the kind of person I choose.

Women spend over 40 years of their lives – the most productive years for any human being – worrying about getting pregnant. Since most of the women in the world are not that eager to give birth every year, this “privilege” becomes a harsh burden. And then what about all those women who are not physically able to give birth to another human being. The infertile, the menopausal, the transgender women. What does this make them? Men? Or shall we invent a third gender for them?

2. I am not automatically expected to be the family breadwinner.

The passive voice will drive me bananas one day. But leaving that aside, it is true that it’s easier for women in a few very rich countries to avoid working based on the shape of their genitals. This “privilege”, however, only favors those women who don’t want to develop professionally, intellectually, personally, socially, etc. Every other kind of woman suffers because of this “privilege.” How come, then, the list assigns as a privilege to all of us something that only a few are capable of wanting or enjoying?

3. I feel free to wear a wide variety of clothes, from jeans to skimpy shorts to dresses as appropriate, without fear of ridicule.

OK, this is plain weird. Since when are men not allowed to wear jeans? As for short shorts, in a wide variety of professional settings, neither men nor women can wear them. Women get ridiculed and slut-shamed for their clothes very very VERY often, so I’m not really sure what the idiot creator of this idiotic piece of arrant idiocy was trying to say here.

4. I can choose to remain seated to meet most people.

When was this written? In 1812? The habit of men getting up whenever women entered a room has been dead and gone for such a long time that not even my grandparents would have witnessed it.

5. I am not ashamed to ask for others’ perspectives on an issue.

The Dean and the Chair at my university keep sending out endless emails beseeching us to offer our perspective on a huge quantity of issues. I’m now realizing that they are not men, as I always supposed, but women who just don’t perform femininity very well. Or something. I have no other way to interpret this bizarre statement.

6. I feel free to exhibit a wide range of emotions, from tears to genuine belly laughter, without being told to shut up.

It’s undeniable that men find it harder to express emotions publicly. But this idea is worded in such a clumsy way that this item on the list bothers me as much as all others. Who on earth tells men to shut up when they laugh?

7. My stereotypical excesses in shopping, clothes, jewelry, personal care and consumption of chocolate usually are expected, even the source of jokes.

So it’s a privilege to be the butt of a joke. How great! I’m now extending to the list’s author an invitation to come to my blog where I will subject her to the kind of ridicule that will make her feel like the most privileged creature on Earth. As for all those “stereotypical” excesses in clothing and jewelry, the spoiled brat who wrote this stupid list cannot even imagine how many women around the world don’t buy any jewelry at all because they have no money for it. And then there are all those women who hate chocolate and dislike shopping for clothes or jewelry. They must be joining the ranks of men, too.

8. Public policies generally offer me an opportunity to bond with my offspring.

A very mysterious statement, indeed. Which public policies would those be? The fact that the maternity leave is non-existent in this country?

9. I am among the first to get off a sinking ship.

Yes, we can finally figure out the actual age of the list’s author. She must have been one of the people who survived the Titanic sinking. The old lady must have gotten batty in her dotage. Well, that’s old-age privilege, I guess. You can always enjoy senility for all it’s worth.

10. I can usually find someone with superior strength to help me overcome physically challenging obstacles, such as changing a tire or cutting a huge Christmas tree.

It is sad that this person hasn’t found anybody to help her overcome the huge intellectual obstacles she is facing. Men and women can all usually find companies that provide tree-cutting and tire-changing services. Last week, I had two people deliver my new bed and install it. They didn’t do it because they were men or had superior strength. Actually, I could have easily lifted either of them off the ground. The reason why they performed this service for me was not that I’m a woman but that I’m a customer who paid them to do it.

11. Changing my mind is seen as a birthright or prerogative.

OK, now this is getting really offensive. Has this loser ever heard words “date rape” and “spousal rape”? Is she aware of how phenomenally hard it is still to prosecute rape in court precisely because of the idea that women cannot change their mind and withdraw consent to sex? As for all other areas of life, I suggest she put her wallet where her dirty mouth is and announce at work, “I have changed my mind about performing this assignment because that is my birthright as a woman.” I will enjoy seeing how fast she will land in the street.

This is getting too long, so I will put the rest of the post under the fold. Make sure you read it because it’s very good.

Continue reading “Why “Female Privilege List” Is Garbage” →

The movie Lincoln has inspired me to read the most popular textbooks on the US history because there were things in the film I didn’t know and found hard to understand. For example, when Blair says, “I’m a founder of this conservative anti-slavery party”, I find that hard to comprehend. I know, of course, that the Democrats were pro-slavery in the XIXth century but I don’t get that.

I will have a lot of time for non-work-related reading during my semi-sabbatical that starts in 6 days, so I have decided to read A History of the American People by Paul Johnson and A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. The two authors belong to opposing ideological camps, which will help me see competing points of view. I will tell you what I discover as a result of my readings.

I have now watched the movie Lincoln and can tell you that every review I have read of it is stupid. Except Charles Rowley’s. I think that is a very good reading of the film.

There is this disturbing trend where people confuse the depiction of racism as it occurred throughout history with racism and the depiction of sexism with sexism. The other week, there was this huge scandal in Russia where a journalist was accused of anti-semitism because of saying that somebody was a Jew. Which he actually was.  It got to the point where people perceive the very word “Jew” as offensive. Before you laugh at the silly, confused Russians, read this story about my students who resist saying the word “black” because it scares them.

The movie Lincoln shows an unpleasant, tragic, painful reality and refuses to cutesify it as much as many people would like. The most poignant scene in the movie was, for me, when the black people are watching from the balcony while a bunch of white men decides whether they will be legally considered human. This is the most anti-racist thing the movie could have done because it shows you how horrible, unnatural, and disgusting racism is. What is happening on the screen is so obviously wrong that you have to be dead and buried not to feel it.

Another important aspect of the movie is how well it portrays the tragedy of women’s oppression. While Lincoln is changing history and accomplishing something incredibly important, his miserable wife goes nuts because of boredom, because there is no meaning to her life, because there is nothing whatsoever for her to do. She is descending into the abyss of hysteria, and who wouldn’t? Just like the film’s anti-racist message consists in the way it makes racism so palpable that you can barely breathe, the movie denounces the tragedy of oppressed women by showing what their stunted lives were like. In the movie, Lincoln actually spends time with his sons, playing with the youngest, arguing with the oldest. Mrs. Lincoln, however, is hardly ever around her children. Her growth as a human being has been frustrated to the degree where she has nothing to offer to them.

I liked the movie because it shows that progress comes at a great price and is achieved very slowly and painfully. Yet it does come. It might not be fast enough for our liking, it might not arrive in as uncomplicated way as we would like, but it does arrive, and that is what matters.

A quote from a review of Lincoln:

To those who insist that it would have required a PBS miniseries or a wholly different feature film to portray black characters with more complexity and to suggest that African-Americans played a role in their own liberation, I offer the following dreams and fantasies of my own. Thaddeus Stevens could have talked about politics at home with his common-law wife, Lydia Smith, who was African-American. They might have discussed the tension between Stevens’s idealism and the president’s pragmatism; Smith could have given Stevens advice about how to handle himself during the House debate over the 13th amendment.

Yeah, after which she went to her office on campus to prepare her tenure dossier while he did the dishes and drove the kids to soccer practice. Because that is totally how black women lived in the XIXth century.

People expect to be babied at every step of their lives, even at the movies. History is so upsetting that it needs to be cutesified for consumption by these overgrown infants.