OK, on my way to work I just saw something disturbing. A group of very young women in bikinis stood alongside the highway waving at cars. Not since I left Ukraine have I witnessed a scene like that.

And then I noticed they were holding promotional signs for the new car wash that opened nearby.

I’m old, so my first thought was, “I hope they are using a lot of sunscreen.”

My second thought was, “The poor kids are breathing in exhaust fumes all day long.”

My third thought was, “I can’t believe there are people who want to recreate the idiotic car wash commercials that feature half-naked women in real life.”

My fourth thought was that I needed to blog about it so I did.

Our discussion about the “discriminated” male WASPS continues. One colleague stated that

Research shows that Whites, as a group, do feel discriminated against

which is something that started in the 1980s.

Is that true? Because that sounds very insane. I mean, who would be discriminating against them? Other white people? Racial minorities?

We have a Sam’s Club opening in our town next week, and there are little tables with people selling membership everywhere. Yesterday at the hospital I discovered such a table in the midst of the cafeteria. I thought this was obnoxious because hospitals are supposed to be about something other than peddling extraneous services, but I was the only Grinch who didn’t love the tables and the advertisement.

People would enter the cafeteria and practically whelp with joy when they saw the promotional table. They greeted the promoters like they were B-list movie stars.

I’m not being in any way judgmental of them because I know that most of the town didn’t even exit 10 years ago. There was wilderness where today we have Walmart, Best Buy, Office Depot, etc. People needed long drives to get anywhere where they could eat or shop. And then the university began to expand and the area started building up. For people who have spent their entire lives in the area, this is a pretty major development. Of course, it would be better if individuals and families started their own businesses here instead but it never happened. Only enormous chains have the resources to develop this kind of land. As a result, our Walmart is growing like a huge, ugly mushroom after the rain and transforming into Walmart SuperCenter.

Among all of the saccharine and useless articles on breastfeeding, it is next to impossible to find a rare gem that makes a useful point. Reader Evelina Anville, however, managed to alight on just such an elusive piece on the subject. Here is the important point that Karla A. Erickson, the article’s author, is making:

Next time I won’t breastfeed because it sets up a gendered division of who does what early into parenting. It provides an infrastructure for an unequal distribution of the work (and rewards) of parenting.

The burdens of breastfeeding are real and considerable including the restraints to women’s spatial mobility and time. But the other part no one every talks about is that breastfeeding also consolidates pre-existing biological tendencies that privilege the breastfeeding parent.

Breastfeeding does, indeed, function in a way that pushes the father away from the child and creates a barrier between them that it becomes very hard to break afterwards. Many women are more than happy to let this happen for the following reasons:

Breastfeeding is a burden, but it’s also a power trip. Breastfeeding sets up the breastfeeder as the expert, the authority and the primary parent in the life of the breastfed baby.

Women who are used to feeling less important, less competent, less intelligent, and less valuable than their husbands appreciate having one area in which they have supreme authority and can feel that nothing worthwhile will happen without their contribution and expertise.

Imagine a woman who has subsumed her entire identity in a relationship with a man. She has no money or profession of her own and has even abandoned her own name to mark herself as the man’s appendage. If she suddenly finds herself in possession of a skill that makes her more important than said man, she will hold on to the skill for as long and as hard as she can. This is what brings into existence all of those breastfeeding pride movements and attempts to prolong breastfeeding until a child is way too old to be sucking on Mommy’s body parts.

Of course, women who don’t need to prove their worth as human beings in such Byzantine ways can look for ways of letting fathers become as central in the children’s lives as mothers are:

I teach a college course on Gender and Society. One year I invited three dads to come and talk about parenting. The college students adored the hour and a half session. It was such a rare treat to hear dads talking about being dads. One of the fathers said that after their first child they bottle-fed their children because it was the only way to work against the gender disparities in the parenting process.

This is a brilliant article by a brilliant person and I encourage everybody to read it in full.

Thank you, Evelina Anville, for sharing it!

Several times this year I have heard about people who got good tenure-track jobs after being on the market 4+ years. Today I heard one more such story about somebody I know.

The suggestion that people who have been on the job market for several years after getting their PhDs cannot get TT jobs seems to have been nothing but a myth.

It makes me very, very happy to see people who didn’t believe all the fear-mongering fairy tales about the doom and gloom that supposedly awaited them and who got great jobs as a result. The people I’m talking about are great teachers and promising scholars who will do credit to their field.

Nova Scotia is a province in Canada that is plagued by very serious problems. The economy is barely functioning, and the standard of living is nothing like what you see in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. The formerly great universities of the province are in decline, and the young people find that fleeing Nova Scotia for less problematic areas of Canada or the US makes a lot of sense. I have relatives living there, so I’m very familiar with the challenges the province is facing.

Of course, whenever a region starts to suffer economically, academically, culturally, and politically, its authorities begin to take measures to prevent people from noticing that the region sucks. This is precisely what is happening in Nova Scotia. The province has introduced a new bill aimed at fighting cyber-bullying that is worded in a way which makes anybody who ever wrote absolutely anything online a potential criminal:

The definition of cyberbullying, in this particular bill, includes “any electronic communication” that ”ought reasonably be expected” to “humiliate” another person, or harm their “emotional well-being, self-esteem or reputation.”

So many people feel abused and traumatized by people having opinions that differ from theirs that nobody will be immune from such accusations by those who troll the Internet looking for reasons to feel aggravated.

As the article’s author points out, the bill is doomed from the start:

Nova Scotia’s Cyber Safety Act is in clear conflict with our Charter rights to free expression, and I can’t imagine it withstanding a legal challenge on those grounds.

In the meanwhile, however, it will do what it was supposed to do from the start: distract everybody from the real issues that the province is facing.

Thank you, Titfortat, for bringing here this link.

The Film Series for Promotion of Diversity at our university has been criticized for not being diverse enough. Some people have expressed resentment that the film series does not reflect the discrimination WASP men are experiencing in the US and instead concentrates on blacks and Hispanics.

Here is a fresh example of why superficial comparisons between different countries conducted by people who have no understanding of the cultural realities they are discussing are useless.

“Is it true that the maternity leave in your country is 3 years? Wow, that is so enlightened! Why can’t we be as civilized in this country?” a colleague exclaimed.

So I had to explain that our “enlightened and civilized” maternity leave was only paid for 1/2 of its duration and the payments were so tiny that nobody could really live on them. Let alone live on them with dignity. Anybody in the US can easily have this kind of maternity leave. All you need to do is quit your job and go on food stamps.

In the course evaluations, two out of 13 students complained that instead of multiple choice tests I assign essays. The self-defeating stupidity of such complaints literally nauseates me.

I am absolutely convinced that an instructor who assigns multiple choice in limited-enrollment seminars in the Humanities is defrauding the students. The only benefit of such assignments is that they are super-easy to grade. Other than that, they accomplish absolutely nothing and have no pedagogical or educational value.

Multiple choice doesn’t teach any marketable skill, doesn’t prepare for the workplace, does not promote thinking and analysis. They are based on stupid, mechanical memorization at best and guesswork at worst.

Instead of this fraudulent practice, I offer students an opportunity to work with me in a one-on-one format to improve their writing and their logical reasoning skills. I give very extensive comments on each essay that are individually tailored to each student. While multiple choice assignments can be graded by a five-year-old and offer zero useful feedback (unless you believe that “16 out of 20” us very useful), my assignments show that I invest a lot of my own time and effort into helping students learn.

Still, in every group there is a couple of students who prefer to be dismissed with an MC assignment. It boggles the mind that anybody could be so into instant gratification that they prefer to get some meaningless grade (that will in no way affect their chances of employment) than acquire useful knowledge.

We keep feeling sorry for the students who have to take out loans to get higher education. But I can’t find a whole lot of compassion in me for people who get into debt and then piss away the very opportunity they are mortgaging their future to get. I was a student in dire financial straits, too, when I was their age. Thankfully, none of my professors ever dismissed me with some stupid MC assignment. If they had, however, that is what I would be complaining about. It would have never occurred to me to complain about people who actually engaged with me and tried to help me learn.

My sister wanted to discuss the issue of when it makes sense to give a child a cell phone. I passed on the question to N.

“Not before he learns to talk,” N said reasonably. “It wouldn’t make sense to give it to him before.”

Scientists are special.