A literature professor (not me) was targeted by a “bias response team” at his college because of – and this is a literal quote – “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues.” Apparently, somebody didn’t like the professor’s face, and it’s gotten so, certain people have the right (khm, khm) not to look at displeasing faces.
How can I remedy this problem? the poor professor asked meekly.
The administrator considered this matter to be extremely serious, prompting his instructions to “work on my face.” When I asked how I ought to perform this labor, he replied, without a hint of irony in his voice: “I recommend spending ten minutes every morning looking at the mirror, working on your facial expressions.”
https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/facing-it
The professor in question recently had brain surgery, so he might have an out with the facial cues police. The question remains, though. What if there are people who are wounded, traumatized and dehumanized by the fact that you exist? Shouldn’t they have the right to be spared your genocidal presence?
It looks like we are close to finding out the answer.
Clarissa's Blog 
My family spent my entire childhood and adolescence patiently explaining to me that my facial expressions were disagreeable and they needed to be spared the pain of looking at me when I’m not looking agreeable.
They, being proper ex-soviets, are against wokeness, and would be outraged by this anecdote.
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“he might have an out with the facial cues police”
Why are you against the students’ right to self-defense? A displeasing face that looks at a student or students (either not enough or too much or at the wrong times or whatever) is literal violence!
And the idea of ‘brain surgery’ is rooted in white supremacy…. so students definitely have the right to not know about it.
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my brain surgeon does not check the”White” box in IS racial sorting. But he trained at my Alma mater, a place Itrust,an works there, for the institution that I trust most in this world
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It’s great that you are at such a serious, reputable place. And that your sense of humor is sharper than ever. I saw the Melania / Jill joke on FB. It’s a good one and so true. Unfortunately.
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(shudders)
They are working up to killing the Aspies.
Dunno if that was always the game plan, but every dang step of the way, we’re heading toward a world where the only people who can exist in public are those who are so exquisitely socially aware/responsive that they can pick up on the most minute social cues, keep up with who’s in and who’s out this week, and faithfully follow a set of rules-to-fit in so complicated and changeable even normies have trouble with it.
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…and heaven help anyone with any adjacent unpopular neuro disorder. Facial tic due to Tourette’s? Bell’s Palsy? Recovering from a stroke? Can’t make the appropriate facial expressions at the right time? Yeah, you can’t work here. Buh bye.
This is basically courtesan culture. How it ever came to dominate academic institutions is a puzzler. Is this what happens when you don’t have a royal family and an opulent court with tons of room for useless people to hang around scheming against each other all the time?
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The problem is that nobody knows their own facial expressions. We never see them, so we have no idea what we look like when we are sad, angry, annoyed, bored, etc. There might be an occasional weirdo who looks in the mirror in such situations but it’s a rare dysfunction. Our faces are a book that everybody but us gets to read and interpret. We cannot deny any interpretation of our facial expressions because we can’t possibly have our own.
The accusations leveled on the basis of facial expressions cannot possibly be disproved, and therein lies their strength.
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Yes, they have the un-provability thing going on for them, like so much of entitled whiny richkid cancel culture. Make so many picayune little rules that nobody could possibly follow them all, and that way you can conveniently overlook violations in people you like, and enforce them against anyone you feel like getting rid of, at any time.
At the same time, there’s a whole middle ground in that sort of culture where everybody has to be totally neurotic about not offending anyone, not being the first person to stop clapping, not being seen standing next to the about-to-get-canceled person, following the watercooler gossip closely enough to know who is about to get canceled so you can safely avoid them– because even though the rules are arbitrarily enforced, being seen to violate them too often and too publicly makes you a target for anybody who might advance his own career by torching yours.
This kind of Byzantine institutional intrigue isn’t something a lot of us could ever dream of navigating. I’d wager even now, the engineering, math, geology, entomology, agronomy, forestry, and chemistry programs at any school with a good reputation for those things… is chock full of people who don’t make entirely correct eye contact or correctly anticipate all the things that might offend you in conversation. They are thinking about rocks and numbers, and they are gonna lose their jobs because they didn’t think to minor in lace-fan-signalling, subtle winking forms, and coded symbolic velvet face-spots.
What happens when the courtesans have shoved everybody else out? Do we even bother with college anymore, or will we have to ship all our most promising kids to other countries to study civil engineering or metallurgy? Having a bit of tolerance for the weird smart kids has historically been a strength of universities. Part of what makes them fizz. It’s sad to think we’ve given up on that in favor of making it a jobs program for gifted suckups.
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my wife noticed a change in my facial expressionsand that was a key symptom of my brain tumor:(
WanWanyome who demands neurological facial expressions from me is ana carcinophobic bigot who hates glioma patients and wants to literally erase our existence
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I’m so sorry this is happening. I really am. This sucks bullets.
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“courtesan culture. How it ever came to dominate academic institutions is a puzzler”
Interesting take by Rob Henderson
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Well, it is what we are training the young to do/be now.
ref: every single dang “Percy Jackson and the (Focus-Group Tested Glurge)” series marketed to tweens in the last fifteen years or so. Let’s everybody fantasize about having godlike powers, so that in real life, we can assume that everything hard is just something we weren’t born to do. Because you were either born with extraordinary brains, talent, and superpowers, or you weren’t. And there’s nothing you can do about it so why bother trying?
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It’s funny that people can be born with a talent for languages or medicine but they can’t be born male or female. It’s just a little bit confusing but maybe I wasn’t born with the extraordinary intelligence needed to understand this.
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