Do you agree that Kristen was kicked off the show on purpose because she is very obviously the best chef by far and the judges just can’t deal with the idea of a woman (especially a beautiful and young one) winning?

I’m torn between my love of watching exquisite recipes being made and hating the disgusting sexism of the show.

I think the pork-fryer from Oklahoma or wherever will win. Or maybe the Filipino guy with his ugly-looking food and boring grandfather.

Maybe I should just stop watching the stupid show because it ends up aggravating me by the season’s finale.

Are there any shows that repulse you and attract you at the same time?

It is sad to witness the death of one’s alma mater.  Could I ever think this tragic moment would arrive and one of the best universities in North America would die a swift but painful death?

Dean of Arts Christopher Manfredi announced last Wednesday at a Faculty of Arts Committee meeting that as many as 100 classes in the Faculty of Arts are set to be terminated for the 2013-2014 academic year. The number represents 8 per cent of Arts courses. The cuts have been under consideration since September of last year. According to Manfredi, smaller classes currently taught by full-time professors will be cut, and the professors moved to larger lectures at the expense of the temporary course lecturers currently teaching them. In an email to The Daily,  Manfredi wrote that that the objective was to “increase the proportion of Arts courses and students taught by permanent, full-time faculty members.”

Rest in peace, dear McGill. You will be sorely missed.

In the meanwhile, Canadians are standing silently by and letting this happen. Good job, fellow Canucks! Who needs that boring education anyway?

Hugo Schwyzer published a post titled “Should You Let Your Little Girl Embrace Princesshood?” It is an unexpectedly refreshing post that demonstrates the idiocy of banning princesses, color pink, and Disney movies from a child’s life as some sort of a feminist gesture.

Nothing stuns me more than earnest discussions of quasi-feminists about the horrors supposedly done to a child’s future role in life by color pink, Barbie dolls, and Disney movies. They publish endless reports detailing how they have protected their innocent toddler from the pernicious influence of this or that color. I have to ask, are they really so lacking in knowledge about the mechanisms of the formation of the human psyche, or is this obsession with trivial stuff their way to relinquish their responsibility for their child’s upbringing?

Even adolescents know these days that a child’s vision of gender roles is formed on the basis of the relationship the child observes between her or his parents. You can paper every surface of that child’s life with pink and play Disney videos at her all day long and that will change nothing in how she sees gender roles. Toys, colors, and videos do not bring children up. Parents do.

So when I see anti-pink and anti-Disney rants, I wonder if people are dense or irresponsible. I see no alternative possibility.

All of the men I know in RL (colleagues, friends, relatives) are phenomenal fathers. This is why it bothers me to see that the blogosphere is inundated with seemingly intelligent, progressive people who nevertheless seem to believe that parenting is something that does not concern fathers.

Now that I have read the following post, however, I feel better:

After almost four months of being a parent I am under the impression that any left-wing heterosexual man who is able to keep his involvement in political work the same as it was before becoming a father for the first year of his child’s existence is someone who is not approaching child-care in an equitable manner.  Those men who continue organizing in the same manner as they did before their child was born are those men whose parenthood is dependent on the gendered division of labour––fathers who assume that the mothers will do most of the work and can persist as political subjects while their counterparts are relegated to the private sphere. . .  I want my child to grow up with parents who provide her with a progressive model of gender dynamics and so I need to demonstrate this model in practice.  A dad who talks about gender equity should be a dad who spends as much time as possible sharing domestic work.

This is SO true. I have seen crowds of men who blab endlessly about gender equality at meetings without giving a second thought to their isolated and beaten-down female partners who are making this meeting-going possible for them by assuming every duty of parenting. It is very good to see a male blogger and a father who is not oblivious to the basic hypocrisy of such a position. Of course, a big part of the credit should go to his female partner who is not excluding him from child-care.

These folks will raise one happy, normal girl with a healthy vision of gender roles who will never allow anybody relegate her to the private sphere as if she were a servant.

The first day of class in my literature course didn’t go well, and that’s putting it mildly. Students looked uncomfortable and terrified, refused to answer even the simplest questions, offered no reaction to my jokes, and stayed on the edge of their seats prepared to take off at any moment.

We, the professors, are to blame for this sorry state of affairs. We are so scared of our own area of expertise, so embarrassed by it, so apologetic about having chosen it, that this attitude always contaminates our own students. We are on our way to becoming a glorified language school and all we do brings this prospect closer to us. Like a person who believes s/he is ugly or stupid and communicates this belief to others, we transmit our doubts over whether learning literature is a worthy pursuit to our students.

And then we – the same people who dropped the word “literature” from the name of our department, who create one language course on top of another without having created a single new literature course for a decade, who “don’t have time” for research, who cringe with discomfort when assigning works of literature, who make endless excuses why students are still not ready to read a page in Spanish after taking language classes for 8 years – wonder hypocritically why on Earth the students are so reluctant to study literature. Yes, really, what a mystery.

It would be so easy to claim that big bad administration is to blame. That would not be true, though. None of the things I listed here were encouraged, proposed, or initiated by the Dean’s or the Provost’s office. We are doing this to ourselves.

I am done with this, people. I spent my childhood being embarrassed about loving books and hating athletics. I did not get 5 degrees in literary studies and publish 11 scholarly articles in respected, peer-reviewed literary journals only to find myself feeling embarrassed about loving to read once again. I am now declaring a battle against the belief that literature has no place at a university. I was part of the problem and now I will be part of the solution. If nobody wants to join me, I will be the solution.

And don’t think I’m just saying this. I have a top-secret plan that I have already started to put into effect whose goal is simply to teach literature and vindicate this pursuit. The plan is top secret because I don’t have the energy for yet another round of discussions (in person, by email, on Skype, on the phone) about how the students are not prepared and they will hate literature anyway so why undermine my career and spoil my life trying. My career is fine, my life is fine. Stop being so worried about the imaginary horrors that await me if I actually practice my profession.

To my colleagues everywhere I want to say this: stop feeling apologetic for what you do. Do whatever you need to convince yourself that you are not selfishly practicing a self-indulgent hobby but are doing something important. Do it now before you have apologized us all out of a field of learning and a career. You don’t need to prettify the teaching of literature or convince anybody it is useful. Just convince yourself already.

Why, oh why does a blogger who has quite a few interesting things to say feel driven to babble incoherently about one subject that betrays his sexual loneliness and relational misery?

I’m talking, of course, about the Last Psychiatrist and his strange obsession with regaling his readers with boring drivel about gender issues. This is one area where he has nothing of interest to say, yet he insists on trying. LP begins his most recent post on gender with a series of very bizarre opinions on why women wear make-up:

The only appropriate time to wear make up is to look attractive to men.   Or women, depending on which genitals you want to lick, hopefully it’s both.  “Ugh, women are not objects.”  Then why are you painting them?  I’m not saying you have to look good for men, I’m saying that if wearing makeup not for men makes you feel better about yourself, you don’t have a strong self, and no, yelling won’t change this.  Everyone knows you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, now you’re saying the cover of the book influences how the book feels about itself?

I warned you he was prone to babbling. Let’s leave aside the idiotic argument about a book whose feelings are not influenced by its cover (and probably by anything else as well), and observe how ridiculous people make themselves look when they make conjectures about the motivations of others instead of simply asking.

As a woman who loves make-up, let me tell you how I use it on a daily basis. Every week-day, after I get up and wash myself, I spent at least 15 minutes carefully applying my make-up. After that I stay at home working all day long. Alone. There are no men, women or children (or even house pets) to observe me in my make-up. The reason I wear it is simply that when you work from home, you need something to remind yourself that you are not on vacation, that this is a working day like any other. So I put on make-up and wear formal clothes during my work day at home. I know from experience that if I spend the day in pajamas, I will get no work done. Contrary to LP’s bizarre beliefs, this story demonstrates that my self is no way weak. His rhetorical question,

You are enhancing your outward appearance, which is great, but then you pretend it’s for internal reasons?

proves that his intellectual limitations make him incapable of recognizing that his understanding of other people’s way of being may not be as exhaustive as he believes. People do all kinds of things to their bodies for purely internal reasons. The reason why LP pretends he doesn’t know this is his contempt of women (Mommy surely did a number on this guy, let me tell you):

Ask it this way: how would you like to be in a world where men said,” oh, I feel so much better about myself when I’m wearing makeup.”  You’d run for the nearest totalitarian regime.

The poor guy would have a conniption if he knew how many men use things like a concealer on a regular basis. He also is faking ignorance of the many things men do daily to their appearance to achieve a variety of goals (including to feel good about themselves). Shaving is one such thing. Unlike make-up, shaving causes pain and discomfort to every single man I’ve ever known. Yet they keep doing that and nobody has ran away to a totalitarian regime as a result.

And this is just the beginning of an article that gets more and more incoherent and hysterical with every paragraph. LP regales us with the following bits of wisdom:

1. There are more women in Senate than ever before because Congress has lost all power and “is seen” (yeah, I know) as feminized and pathetic. Men are abandoning this useless organization to women and doing something more powerful. Like nursing. Seriously, go read the article. He actually says this stuff.

2. It should mean nothing to women to see other women succeed professionally. It should also mean nothing to racial and ethnic minorities to see people like them succeed professionally. And a white male LP will now explain to us all why we are all traitors to our gender and ethnicity if he have achieved something.

3. It also means nothing that women have won access to higher education because it really upsets LP to imagine any woman engaging in anything meaningful. Plus, male nurses have got all the power in the world anyways.

4. Women deserve to be paid less for the same work because we are weak, overly emotional, and pathetic. (Translation: LP’s Momma was ultra-powerful, cold, distant, and ate his balls for breakfast when he was five. Then she ate his Pappa’s balls when LP was 5 and a half).

5. Jessica Valenti is to blame for Sandy Hook killings. Ah, now you are agreeing with me about LP’s Momma, right?

6. Jessica Valenti and all feminists are evil because Huffington Post. Yeah, I know. Why not because ocean? Or because ice-cream?

7. Some TV show or movie called Girls is not feminist. I never even knew this work of Tv or movie genius existed but I could have told you it has nothing to do with feminism just based on the title.

8. If a skinny kid wearing eye-glasses is bullied at school by a gang of huge brawny jocks that’s not the fault of the jocks but of every other skinny kid in eye-glasses. Or, in LP’s words, when women are raped only women are to blame. (And when Jews are shepherded to the concentration camps. . . And when the Ukrainians are starved. . . And when children are molested. . . And when Africans are enslaved. . .). The argument is old and very well-known. One would have thought that a smart person like LP would recognize the good old victim-blaming, yet he is so blinded by his hatred of women that he presents it as some huge intellectual breakthrough of his own.

There is, however, I precious bit of wisdom among all this raving lunacy. One statement that I had to agree with in its entirety, namely:

Sites like Jezebel and Feministing are much, much worse than pornography.

Yes, this is true. For the purposes of achieving sexual arousal and release, these sites are completely and utterly useless. So much words wasted to tell us nothing but what we already knew: LP is one of those people whose intelligence crumbles to dust when a fresh attack of sexual resentment overcomes him.

Students have the most bizarre fear of literature.

A student is choosing her Senior project topic.

“I don’t want to do anything related to literature,” she says aggressively. “I’m interested in linguistics.”

“That’s fine,” I say. “Which linguistic phenomenon would you like to study?”

“I’m interested in analyzing how the patriarchy silences women in the novels by Luisa Valenzuela.”

“That’s a  great topic,” I say. “But what makes you think it belongs to the field of linguistics?”

“Because the patriarchy silences them, so they can’t express themselves. That’s language, so it’s linguistics,” the student explains.

Sometimes it feels like they are willing to do any kind of analysis as long as they manage to convince themselves it doesn’t have to do with literature.

Have you tried guessing my favorite novel in Spanish? If that proved a little too confusing, let’s try to guess my favorite novel in English based on its opening lines.

A. “Dusk–of a summer night. And the tall walls of the commercial heart of an American city of perhaps 400,000 inhabitants–such walls as in time may linger as a mere fable. And up the broad street, now comparatively hushed, a little band of six,–a man of about fifty, short, stout, with bushy hair protruding from under a round black felt hat, a most unimportant- looking person, who carried a small portable organ such as is customarily used by street preachers and singers. And with him a woman perhaps five years his junior, taller, not so broad, but solid of frame and vigorous, very plain in face and dress, and yet not homely, leading with one hand a small boy of seven and in the other carrying a Bible and several hymn books.”

B. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters. “My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?””

C. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.”

D.  “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning–fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!”

E. “To get there you follow Highway 58, going northeast out of the city, and it is a good highway and new. Or was new, that day we went up it. You look up the highway and it is straight for miles, coming at you, with the black line down the center coming at and at you, black and slick and tarry-shining against the white of the slab, and the heat dazzles up from the white slab so that only the black line is clear, coming at you with the whine of the tires, and if you don’t quit staring at that line and don’t take a few deep breaths and slap yourself hard on the back of the neck you’ll hypnotize yourself and you’ll come to just at the moment when the right front wheel hooks over into the black dirt shoulder off the slab, and you’ll try to jerk her back on but you can’t because the slab is high like a curb, and maybe you’ll try to reach to turn off the ignition just as she starts the dive.”

So – which is my favorite? And my second favorite? And my least favorite?

Every conversation with a doctor’s receptionist proceeds according to the same scenario.

With every question, the receptionist’s manner grows progressively frostier until she asks in a voice whose temperature could freeze the Black Sea, “What is your health insurance, Ma’am?”

“Healthlink,” I say.

This produces an instant and profound change.

“We are looking forward to seeing you, my dear,” the receptionist purrs in a warm and welcoming voice.

I’m writing a recommendation for a student who is applying for a job at a high school in Mexico and the recommendation form is asking me to rate how responsible, honorable, and healthy she is. I’m not sure how to respond to the health question. I’m not this student’s physician, and if I were, I wouldn’t be able to divulge this information either.