Mad Melancholic Feminista

How about Living the Off the Grid Life

2008-12-29T14:23:00.003-05:00

I just returned from a very hectic travel schedule for Christmas. Living up here in the hinterlands makes it difficult to get out of town. Add, on top of that, storms all over the country and you have a nightmare on your hands. I have never been so happy to return home after travel this Christmas.

While traveling, I had little access to the internet and, surprisingly, found that to be renewing. In many ways, moving up to a remote town, coupled with chasing after a toddler, has made me more Luddite than usual. I am enjoying slowing down and this change in my personality had me reflecting quite a bit on Judith Warner's "Living the Off-Label Life," which *I* sent to me (with exhortations to finish my book!). First of all, readers who know me well, already know that I am no Psychopharmacological Calvinist. I think that Henry Greely's arguments concerning enhancement technologies are fine. I do think it is problematic to make bright lines on the continuum that distinguishes morally permissible from morally impermissible enhancement.

I just spent several days with lots of children and family--negotiating airplane problems and customer service nightmares. The idea that enhancement therapies could help a frazzled person better cope with all of these demands and stresses is appealing. It really is. Self-medication is not only morally permissible in my book, but it is necessary.

But, for me, the the real problem with the "Off-Label Life," as Warner cleverly calls it, is not the individual choices of whether or not to take ritalin or ambien to get through one's multi-tasked, fast-paced day. Rather, the problem manifests as political. The technologies that we use to manage the lifestyle we have created here in the U.S. (and increasingly elsewhere) only reifies and thereby legitimates it. We don't ever step back and ask: "Really, is this what life is about?"

No American holiday brings this home for me more than Christmas. We raise children now to expect to wake up on Christmas morning with dozens of "box store" gifts that take a paycheck bonus (if families are lucky to have employed parents) and more food than anyone can eat. This past Christmas, I found myself totally alienated and downright disgusted by this behavior. I thought about how shitty the whole economy is, how many people are struggling to get food and shelter, and then when I saw how much food that me and others made that got thrown away, and how many gifts were wrapped up that cost money that people could've really used for more elemental things, I was bummed.

Now, try to change the rules on kids at this point. You can't. They have been raised to expect this. The entire culture rewards this sort of gluttony. My dad even pointed that if you don't have gifts that children like, then they will start to cry. Gratitude doesn't seem to be part of the picture. But, you can't change the rules on kids who have grown up expecting this (I can however, never have Maddie grow up this way!).

Anyway, my reflections on the waste of Christmas--and how much the consumerism detracts from the real gifts of Christmas, such as spending time together away from work--come from the same intuition I have about enhancement medications.

We build them to persist in a gluttonous, wasteful, hectic and self-indulgent life. Why do moms take Ritalin or drink lots of coffee? To have enough energy to get their children from one structured activity to the next and their equipment and snacks and change of clothes, etc. Parenting=multi-tasking par excellence.

My former colleague Kerry has a great insight about how our consumerist culture expects utter perfection from everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious to me than in the behavior of uber-mothers. And, they transmit this to their children who grow up with anxiety fits about all the variety of ways to fail or to get hurt or make mistakes. No wonder my students are so damn medicated! So, we have hockey moms souping up on enhancement drugs to get through their structured children play/practice/tutoring/extra-curricular-activities-that-look-good-on-college-applications days. Then, we have their children growing up with unrealistic, and soul crushing, expectations for what counts as success.

Let's face it. This is fucked up. And, to get through our expensive and hectic lives we take enhancement medications, which keep us going and cranking out that American work ethic.

More than ever I count myself lucky to live in this tiny town. My daughter won't grow up around ostentatious displays of wealth or "keeping up with the Jones" Wii games and Barbie Palaces. She will grow up learning how to chop wood, clear trails in the wood, fish (hunt?), cross-country ski, read, build warm fires, make homemade pumpkin pies . . .So, am I a Luddite?

Maybe. But, the alternative really sucks.

Tim Wise

2008-12-17T14:14:00.002-05:00

My student, who I discussed in the last post, was highly influenced by Tim Wise:

I updated this and added more Tim Wise videos.

Race: The Hardest Pill to Swallow

2008-12-16T10:50:00.003-05:00

I teach many many courses that turn to the question of race and how it cripples some people, empowers others, and generally rents the fabric of our cultural quilt. I usually need a lot of downtime when I embark on readings and class discussions that have to do with race. It is the concept that causes me the most stress in discussions. I also find myself having to keep in check my disgust at some of the comments students and other faculty make. But, I am equally able to tap into the frustrations on white students. I am white. I benefit from this aspect of my identity everyday.

Anyway, I just can't help being surprised at how unwilling students are to recognize that racism still exists today. They just don't believe the first-hand testimonies of people of color. They don't believe statistics--and look for some other explanation. For them, the only sure sign of racism would be violence on the order of the KKK. Otherwise, it is not there.

Students will, however, grant that sexism exists, that discrimination based on age, class, nationality, and religion all exist. But that is it. Race is passé.

This is only going to get worse with Obama's election. I have noted that many a blog discusses this. But, my specific contribution to this discussion is how Obama's election is allowing white students to once again avoid the uncomfortable realization that non-white people don't experience the world in the same way.

One of my most thoughtful students this semester--a young, white man--pointed out that being White is a psychologically crippling identity. There is nothing one can take pride in--at least in a way that isn't disturbing--about being White. I guess this is it. But, why doesn't it hit students as hard in their identities as Americans? Or women? What is it about being White that is so profoundly psychologically crippling?

Matronizing

2008-12-15T14:32:00.002-05:00

I have been musing on a very touchy subject and I predict that my comments will be either misunderstood or cause offense. But, here goes. I have been thinking about how many of the older academic women I know can be matronizing. In my most charitable moments, I see the overbearing advice of my fore mothers oriented at protecting me from outright and institutional sexism. I am talking about the advice, wherein I am warned about the "patriarchal" style of certain male colleagues--ones I barely know--or administrators. I am exhorted to stand up for myself, to protect myself with mounds of documentation of my excellence, and, this one always gets me, told to constantly set up boundaries with my students (or else I will be seen as their mother).

What usually irks me about this matronizing stuff is how negative it is. (Here is where I am going to be misunderstood). But, it is true. The vibe I get from matronizers is negativity and anger. Men are either sexist pigs or lecherous. In this worldview, no woman is capable of being warm, nurturing toward students and colleagues, cheerful and congenial WITHOUT it being read as unprofessional or unserious. Moreover, in this worldview, sexist pricks are out with their fangs at every turn. No man is to ever be trusted completely. Even the good guys are deficient, insofar as they are insensitive to the sexism out there.

I find this worldview oppressive. I don't see the world this way. I don't experience the world this way. And yet, I am a overt, proud, and outspoken feminist. I am passionate about the ways gender stereotypes harm women. I am concerned about female poverty rates. I LIVE the difficult balance of work and family. I have dedicated my life to fighting all of these.

But, I just cannot live in a world where I see everyone--especially men--as always out to get me. I cannot live in a world where I am to suppress my natural affection for people, in particular students, in order to be "taken seriously." I am unwilling to be grumpy. I don't see where it gets me.

So, what I am left wondering about matronizers, is: does their behavior reflect a trauma, an injury, a pattern of injuries that have made them profoundly self-protective and cynical? Am I one of those happily delusional types (some research suggests that cheerful people are more delusional about reality than depressed types)?

Or, is feminism the vehicle by which they express a kind of temperamental grumpiness?

Deficit Model of Schooling

2008-12-04T09:32:00.005-05:00

I just read a truly fascinating article by Kyunghwa Lee, entitled "ADHD in American Early Schooling: From a Cultural Psychological Perspective." There is a lot to think about in this essay, including the relationship between No Child Left Behind policies and the unbelievably high rates of ADHD diagnoses and consequent Ritalin use among young school children, specifically in the United States. Lee discusses the role that teachers play in prompting parents to think about bringing their disruptive, distractable, or boisterous child to a physician for a diagnosis. Lee points out that what leads teachers, albeit ambivalently, to consider a child ADHD is how often the child distracts the teacher from the rest of the class. And, the most important insight, to me, that Lee has is that this model of distraction only makes sense in a larger model of early child schooling where the goal is to emphasize word use over bodily motion. Our schools, especially if they are overcrowded, rely on children sitting quietly, listening to the teacher and completing their tasks. Lee quotes L. Bresler ("Dancing the Curriculum"): "a moving body in school is typically regarded as disruptive."

What I want to focus this post on, following on the heels of yesterday's post, is the other valuable insight that American schools operate on a "deficit model." Quoting Bill Ayers (To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher): "We start with what kids can't do and don't know. It's as if we brainstormed a list of each of them . . . that we figured out hat they don't understand or value, what they feel incompetent or insecure about, and we then developed a curriculum to remediate each deficiency. The curriculum is built on a deficit model; it is built on repairing weakness. And it simply doesn't work."

Wow, that really grabbed my attention. While the focus of this article is on very young children, I can't help but note how often I hear colleagues frame their exprience with college students this way. The whole process seems like one of punishment and submission. Education is about smacking around young people who don't want to work hard and buckle down (like we did). No wonder students groan and panic when we mark up their papers and find not one shred of something positive to say. Who would be enticed to go on.

And, we also have a whole lot of college students turning to amphetamines, such as Ritalin, to buckle down the way we want them to and get properly disciplined.

What do you think?

P.S. I realize, by the way, that my excited endorsement of Bill Ayers' view of the deficit model is likely to elict all sorts of ire from the wingnuts out there. But, fuck 'em.

Pay Them for Their As?

2008-12-03T09:42:00.007-05:00

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Roland Fryer

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

My hip former-undergrad-and now-current-grad-school student sent me this link from the Colbert Report. Roland Fryer's "incentive" to get black students to perform better is to pay them for A's. I am both intrigued and repulsed by this idea.

First, full disclosure: my libertarian father used this model with me in High School and it worked like a charm. He used it with my brother and it failed. But, in my brother's case it failed because my Dad usually gave him access to money anyway for his excellent athletic achievements. So, the incentive model is not inherently flawed if properly administered. Who doesn't like money?

Here are my concerns and questions about this model.

(1) Cheating. Where there is money, there are always people trying to game the system and get their cut with minimal effort. Or at least, minimal intellectual effort. What might be the relationship between this program and the rise of bullying?

(2) Reification of a commodity view of education. Ok, I am a "pie in the sky" LAC professor who loves to learn for the sake of learning. Yes, this is probably an effect of my class and thereby relative economic security. But, I spend a great deal of time combatting the rich and middle class students' views of education as a commodity-they-are-paying-for on a regular basis. So, what sort of standing will I have in this debate if the our government starts paying students in middle and high school. What happens to the intrinsic drive to learn?

(3) Should education be vocationally focused? Certainly my former brilliant student (you know who you are!), argued that they are. She too is an economist (thankfully with some Philosophy training for good measure). But, really?

(4) What really intrigues me is that paying for grades somehow resolves all the other profound problems plaguing students in bad school districts or coming from poverty stricken and/or poorly educated families. Which students succeed in this model? Does a cash incentive really give the needed push to transcend these circumstances?

What do the rest of you think?

Personal Credit Crunch Woes

2008-11-25T13:04:00.003-05:00

I am "on hold" right now waiting for a "credit decision," so I can buy a used Subaru to brave the bitter winters up here. I find this whole credit process so damn demoralizing these days. I am asking for a relatively small loan, but because I pay my student loan each month ($580 a month!) and I make less salary, they are questioning my ability to make payments.

The loan servicer came back and asked if I would like to include my husband's salary OR would I like to just put the whole loan on my very high credit card balances that I have at the bank? WTF? Do you understand this logic? I surely don't. Why would the bank prefer that I put the car on a credit card rather than underwrite the loan? I am sure they are going to approve it. But, I am surely not alone in bemusement and confusion over the recent freezing of credit and the decision making process of banks.

Does anyone out there understand?

Oh, and I forgot to add, that one option for me to ensure the loan was to defer payment on my student loans. Huh? If I stop paying my student loans and let it rack up interest (a fixed interest rate since you cannot renegotiate that shit), I can get a car loan.

Oh, and another thing. The only reason I am going through this is because I was approved at an amount and then asked to increase it by $500 so that I could roll the transfer of title and tax fees into the loan.

I am just trying to be a good consumer. Apparently, I would be a great consumer if I screwed the government their money for the loan they gave me for my PhD and just gave that money to the bank.

The Only Thing Keeping You Unhappy is the Belief You Are Alone

2008-11-20T15:14:00.003-05:00

This is what Don's "ex"-wife tells him in the penultimate episode of Mad Men. I love thinking through these sort of statements. What sense of "alone" is meant? Is she saying the Don is alone because he fails to see that he has people in his life that love him? Is he alone because he doesn't allow for the possibility of mystery--of something unexpected and unpredictable to happen that can improve one's life?

Surely there are moments when all of us feel "alone." They hit me when the person or people I am closest too cannot seem to grasp what I am feeling or when I cannot find words to express what I think. Some people feel alone when they contemplate death--the idea that in the end you are on your own in that moment.

But, for people to feel alone, while they are surrounded and loved by others seems almost like an illness, and yet it is all too common.

What I am wondering about is what is the opposite of believing you are alone?

Got Nothin, Not Really

2008-11-19T15:14:00.002-05:00

I went back to the Gender and Sexuality Studies course again today and because we had lost so much time with the technology problem on Monday, the whole class period was taken up with screening the rest of Boys Don't Cry.

Honestly, it was a real shame that we didn't have more than 5 minutes to discuss the movie since it is incredibly powerful and intense. I gave them the last 5 minutes to write their reflections, ask some questions, and digest.

I read the reflection from "pen chewer." He wrote that he was surprised by how powerful the film was and how glad he was to have seen it as it illustrated well the concepts that the class had discussed all semester.

Fragile Female Egos, Fragile Pomo Slacker Egos, and Questions

2008-11-18T09:00:00.008-05:00

My musings in the post Fragile Male Egos yesterday got me thinking more about reactions to my teaching style in Gender Studies than the reaction of female students to disengaged male students in Gender Studies courses. I decided to rethink the same scenario changing some details to get at the assumptions of critics of my teaching style.

Case One: Fragile Female Egos

My new colleague asked me to take her Introduction to Under Siege* European Male Hegemony course this morning at 8 am! I am amazed that the students make it for that hour. I have to be up; Maddie makes sure of that.

Anyway, my colleague asked me to show Girls Shouldn't Cry Wolf and then get the students in small groups for discussion. I had some trouble getting the film started, so I threw out her plan. Showed part of the film, then had them put questions on the board and we started a discussion.

I was my usual, in-your-face-let's-talk-about-false accusations of rape-and-feminazi-revelry in victimhood self. I mostly pushed the group of women huddled together in the back of the room clinging for dear life. (They may have been perfectly at home--this was my perception based on past experience).

I wanted the students to think about the relationship of female coquettishness and false rape accusations. Why do women continually say “no” to their boyfriends sexual advances even though their eyes say “yes”? (In the back of my mind I had Kerry's observation about the normality of false rape accusations among our students).

Jane, played brilliantly by Melanie Griff, continually seduces men, winds back at their place after a few drinks, and then cuts the sexual act off. . At one point, Dirk (John Makeovich) asks her why she wears such seductive clothing and makes eyes at men in bars and then dares to accuse men of hurting her—raping her in fact—when she agreed to sex by the way she dressed and acted. Jane's response: "it just seemed like what feminists do here."

The film gets to the heart the rituals--painful ones at that--women go through to prove they are feminists. Proving you are a feminist, means proving you are frigid. That is why you have to dress sexy, then protest the sexual act, and then call rape.

In any case, I started directing some of my, admittedly, pointed questions to the women huddled together in the back row. One woman was doodling, and so I dubbed her "doodler." She didn't want to answer my question so threw it to her side kick. She lowered his eyes, hoping I wouldn't see her text messaging. Didn't work. Then a third woman said: "look, men cry rape as much as women do."

I turned back to others in the class. But, I returned to huddlers again and finally the men started "protecting" them. One man said: "they think you are picking on feminists." Another: "they feel attacked."

I found this phenomena fascinating. The men were rushing to protect the "fragile" egos of these women, because I was asking them the same questions I was asking everyone else? Sure, I was mocking doodler a little bit to get her to lighten up and answer the question. But, she further retreated into himself.

Clearly, these three women don't analyze feminazis and false rape accusations much. That's the point of the film. They get punished—violently by other feminists--if they do. But, I am still bemused by the mens' reaction to my attempt to get these women to think about these connections.

I have to go back on Wednesday. Any ideas what I could do to make this observation worthy of discussion in relation to the film?

Case Two: Fragile Pomo Slacker Egos

My new colleague asked me to take her Introduction to Epistemology course this morning at 8 am! I am amazed that the students make it for that hour. I have to be up; Maddie makes sure of that.

Anyway, my colleague asked me to discuss Searle’s account of the social construction of reality and social facts and then put students in small groups for discussion. I had some trouble finding the classroom, which cut into our time, so I threw out her plan. I gave a quick summary of Searle’s point, then had them put questions on the board and we started a discussion.

I was my usual, in-your-face-let's-talk-social facts-ultimately-referring-to-physical-facts-anti-french-pomo-social construction self. I mostly pushed the group of slackers huddled together in the back of the room clinging for dear life. (They may have been perfectly at home--this was my perception based on past experience).

I wanted the students to think about Searles’ claim that X counts as Y in C, using his example of money. Why do pomo thinkers miss the point that the value of money ultimately refers to precious objects? There is, duh, some physical fact that we then interpret socially. Ideas don’t make reality! (In the back of my mind I had Kerry's observation about the normality of Lyotard worship among our students).

I showed a tiny clip of the Derrida film to give students a flavor of the incoherence of French pomo claims about reality. At one point a young student studying under Derrida at Irvine is asked: “why do you continually subject yourself to this unintelligible drivel.” He responds: “It seems like what grad students do here!”

Searle gets to the heart of postmodern vapidity—which involves painful rituals of reality denying and extreme relativism.

In any case, I started directing some of my, admittedly, pointed questions to the slackers huddled together in the back row. One ambiguously gendered emo student was rolling his/her eyes, and so I dubbed him/her "eye roller." She/he didn't want to answer my question so threw it to his/her side kick. He lowered his eyes, hoping I wouldn't see him under his beanie* . Didn't work. Then a third woman said: "look, Searle is a right wing lunatic."

I turned back to others in the class. But, I returned to huddlers again and finally the other students started "protecting" them. One man said: "they think you are picking on post-modernists." Another: "they feel attacked."

I found this phenomena fascinating. The students were rushing to protect the "fragile" egos of these French theorists, because I was asking them the same questions I was asking everyone else? Sure, I was mocking eye roller a little bit to get him/her to lighten up and answer the question. But, she/he further retreated into himself/herself.

Clearly, these three slackers don't analyze the epistemological incoherence of their social construction theories. That’s the point of the film. They get punished—violently by other pomos--if they do. But, I am still bemused by the class reaction to my attempt to get these slackers to think about these connections.

I have to go back on Wednesday. Any ideas what I could do to make this observation worthy of discussion in relation to the film?

SOME QUESTIONS:

(1) Is the Case One ("fragile female egos") structurally equivalent to my "fragile male egos" post?

(2) Is Gender and Sexuality studies equivalent to European Male Hegemony studies?

(3) Does Gender and Sexuality studies strive to demean men as group or dehumanize them?

(4) Was asking pointed questions of the male students, who seemed unengaged, equivalent to pushing female students to recognize that feminism forces them to make false rape accusations? [For the record, in the class I taught yesterday, I didn't use the men as foils for any argument, I just pushed them to consider the content to the same degree that the women were.]

(5) In Case Two ("fragile pomo slacker egos"), does the in-your-face Socratic style unfairly beat up on 18-22 year olds?

(6) What makes Case Two different from my discussion from yesterday? I am willing to see the important differences that implies different pedagogical techniques, but let's spell them out.

(7) Does asking pointed questions to students who are unwilling to defend their viewpoint, picking on them? It might very well be.

**P.S. I think the best observation of the dynamics in my class yesterday come from Lesboprof who points out that I haven't yet earned the trust of the unengaged students in the class I was visiting. Having reflected a lot more on this, I think that is why my style could've come off as unfairly picking on the male students--given the pervasive stereotypes of angry feminists at work. This style doesn't seem to cause as much friction if the content is abstract and conceptual, e.g. what Linda Alcoff calls a "normative, familiar, trustworthy" "postural body image." ("The Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment," in Visible Identities.

*These changes are made thanks to *I*'s comment.

Fragile Male Egos

2008-11-17T11:12:00.006-05:00

My new colleague asked me to take her Introduction to Gender and Sexuality course this morning at 8 am! I am amazed that the students make it for that hour. I have to be up; Maddie makes sure of that.

Anyway, my colleague asked me to show Boys Don't Cry and then get the students in small groups for discussion. I had some trouble getting the film started, so I threw out her plan. Showed part of the film, then had them put questions on the board and we started a discussion.

I was my usual, in-your-face-let's-talk-about-sex-masculinity-homophobia self. I mostly pushed the group of men huddled together in the back of the room clinging for dear life. (They may have been perfectly at home--this was my perception based on past experience).

I wanted the students to think about the relationship of masculinity to violence. Why do men continually have to prove their masculinity through violence? (In the back of my mind I had Kerry's observation about the normality of drunken fights and brawls among our students).

Brandon, played brilliantly by Hillary Swank, continually puts himself in risky and violent situations. At one point, Lana (Chloe Sevigny) asks him why he was willing to be tied like a dog to the back of truck (referring to "bumper skiing," wherein drunken guys hang onto the back of truck bed with a rope, while the driver twirls in circles). Brandon's response: "it just seemed like what guys do here."

The film gets to the heart the rituals--painful ones at that--men go through to prove they are men. Proving you are a man, means proving you aren't gay. That is why you have to talk a lot about fucking and get into fights and engage in risky behavior.

In any case, I started directing some of my, admittedly, pointed questions to the men huddled together in the back row. One kid was chewing his pen, and so I dubbed him "pen chewer." He didn't want to answer my question so threw it to his buddy. His buddy lowered his eyes, hoping I wouldn't call on him. Didn't work. Then a third guy said: "look, women haze as much as men."

I turned back to others in the class. But, I returned to huddlers again and finally the women started "protecting" them. One woman said: "they think you are picking on men." Another: "they feel attacked."

I found this phenomena fascinating. The women were rushing to protect the "fragile" egos of these men, because I was asking them the same questions I was asking everyone else? Sure, I was mocking pen chewer a little bit to get him to lighten up and answer the question. But, he further retreated into himself.

Clearly, these three guys don't analyze homophobia or masculinity much. That's the point of the film. They get punished--violently--if they do. But, I am still bemused by the womens' reaction to my attempt to get these guys to think about these connections.

I have to go back on Wednesday. Any ideas what I could do to make this observation worthy of discussion in relation to the film?

The Fragility of Commitment

2008-11-14T10:24:00.004-05:00

My new Thursday night ritual--once the little one is snuggly in her crib--is to watch a movie. I don't have to prepare for class. I give myself a break from grading. And, I don't have cable TV to distract me with tons of superfluous channels. Because we are so isolated up here in the way Northern part of the country, Netflix is the only way to survive. (There isn't even a video rental joint!)

Last night I watched a relatively recent film, directed by Helen Hunt entitled Then She Found Me. I chose the film because it had Colin Firth as one the main characters and looked like a nice melodrama. I can't help it. I like girlie films sometimes when I am burned out from lots of abstract thinking and arguing.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by this gem of a film. What I loved most about was its realism in the case of human relationships. It did a great job depicting not only the giddiness of new love, the pull and attraction of the wrong lovers, the selfishness of our desires, and the fragility of commitments.

Having just written that list above, I guess other films touch on this. But, the moral of this film is that commitment is a sort of leap of faith. Here is some dialogue from the end of the film, when April (Helen Hunt) tries to get Frank back"

“I miss you, do you?”
“What do you want, April?”
“I want to look at you, for a long long time.”
“What else?”
“There’s a chance that my life may change in a few hours or may not. But it may. And before it does, I wanna say two things. I know what I did to you, to you in particular, was a nightmare kind of thing, right?…I knew that. Even at that time, I knew that.”
“What else?”
“I would do it again. I will. I will hurt you again and again. Not like that. You would have to leave me if I would hurt you like that. Even if we were together, you would leave me if I would hurt you like that again and wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes. I would.”
“Good. But I would hurt you in other ways, little ways. I wouldn’t mean to. But I will. And sometimes I will mean to.”

“You would hurt me too, you know? You would hurt me and change on me. You might even leave me after you promise you won’t. How about that?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“But you might.”
“But I wouldn’t.”
“But…You might.”
“Yeah…I guess I might.”
“So?”
“Oh, god.”
“I know. I am sorry.”
“So?”

I guess I don't have a lot of smart things to say after that dialogue. For me, this is commitment.

How do the rest of you see it?

You can watch the trailer to the film with the link above.

Existentialists Get Laid More, That's Why

2008-11-13T14:25:00.007-05:00

S teve G asks today why existentialism is so attractive to young intellectuals. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this question myself and I have a few guesses. This year, at my new job, I am teaching Existential Philosophy. I was always welcome to teach it at Gettysburg, but I chose not to do so because I don't tend to like the kind of student it attracts. Yes, I am going to be crass, but what I think it attracts is: an alienated, white boy, who feels compelled by family to live a sort of proper bourgeois life, but wants to rebel, smoke gauloise, watch black and white french films, drink a lot of wine, and womanize.

In fact, let's take Camus.

He just oozes a certain kind of bad ass masculinity. My current student says: "He is so cool." What do these male existentialist writers write about? Do they take on racism (no, with the exception of Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew). Do they tackle poverty? (n0) Do they tackle sexism or homophobia? (no). What do they write about? Individualism, Self-expression, freedom, atheism and authenticity. What does this translate into?

That I don't have to live up to my parents bourgeois expectations of my life. I don't have to grow up, get a job, pay a mortgage, get married, and pay taxes. That I can be a sort of free spirit (think Michel Poiccard and Breathless). [No one really wants to look like Sartre, but they wouldn't mind getting laid as often as he did!]

The other focus of white male existentialism (you could read Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, Aimee Cesaire, Steve Biko, Lewis Gordon, Cornel West) is liberty. And, the way these writings, particularly Sartre, get translated into the American idiom is a "pull yourself up from your bootstraps" and stop whining way. My father loves existentialism. He also loves Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. What appeals to my dad and the libertarians who love existentialism is a romantic view of the self: the idea that anyone can transcend their dire circumstances and become great.

This sort of narrative appeals, in my view, more often to white boys of a certain class. Maybe it says: look you don't just have to be a provider or a cog in the machine (think Office Space). You can be great. Really great. You can change the rules. Hell, the rules don't even apply to you. What matters is that you are true to yourself, your desires, and your vision.

This, I think, is why existentialism appeals to young intellectuals. I think it appeals to a certain level of cognitive development, i.e. when students stop believing that anyone has the answers and therefore think that there are not answers. In other words, relativism. It also encourages narcissism and egoism.

And, as Steve G has often theorized. Existentialist boys get laid more than the pocket protector analytic types (with comfortable shoes).

Resist the Storm

2008-11-12T10:29:00.004-05:00

A wise friend of mine wrote to me yesterday and said that a valuable way to think of relationships with others is to think of them as relationships with yourself. I have been mulling this over quite a bit and thought I would put it out there to see what the rest of you think.

I take her to be saying--and this follows on the discussions we have been having about teaching and the logic of victimization--that if one always looks to the other's behavior, actions, and words as signs of the health of the relationship--the betweenness--then one will inevitably find him or herself regularly unfulfilled. The idea here, again, is that happiness is not to be found in Others. In fact, happiness is not to be found in other things.

Happiness is a more mysterious process. Perhaps happiness is a by-product of engaging in activities that justify your life, that bring you health, and that make the world a bit better. Happiness, therefore, comes to us when we stop demanding it. This theme was explored well in a film by former philosophy major, Jill Sprecher, 13 Conversations about One Thing. In this film, Sprecher borrows quite a bit from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness.

Back to my wise friend's view about relationships--that one should view a relationship with another as ultimately a relationship with oneself--I cannot help but think that she is right about this. We have so little control over the lives of others. This is abundantly clear in my attempts to mold my daughter's life. Already her personality is emerging with its own ideas, preferences, and attitudes towards things. We have more control over our own ideas, attitudes, and actions.

I do not mean to endorse an overly stoic view of relationships. I am not really a very good stoic. I am too passionate about life. But, I think that the challenges that arise in all relationships, particularly in the student-teacher relationship, invites us to reflect not on how to exhort the needy other to pull his or her own weight, but rather on what is required to sustain us and weather us through the storms of others.

The attraction to be drawn into the dance of anger and the logic of victimization is too great. It requires constant vigilance to ward off this temptation. The student who wants to pick a fight with us because she overwhelmed or frightened is better served by our resolve to "will cheerfulness" in the face of her storming. If we don't get pulled into her drama, if we stand firm and perhaps offer a model of weathering a storm, she is ultimately better served. But to be able to do this is to give up a need or expectation that others need to be someone else to warrant our concern.

Others are who they are. They are on their own paths of becoming and their own rates. Our job is to perhaps be the "resistance" to their more destructive acts. I am borrowing this notion of resistance from both Sartre and De Beauvoir, who argue that our nature, as humans, is to negate what is given and move beyond. In this act of negation, we inevitably run up against resistances--either people, events, or things. And, some resistances might present us with a helpful invitation to reorient our direction.

I wonder if in relating to others by relating to ourselves, we are posing ourselves as a kind of important resistance to threatening projects.

What do the rest of you think?

Victimization and Anger

2008-11-11T09:06:00.002-05:00

71 encouraged me to keep on this line of thought by asking me why I would frame the reaction of professors who feel exhausted by needy students as adopting the "victim" narrative. I am not sure I have a good answer to 71's question, so instead of answering his question, I will think out loud a bit more about the relationship of the logic of victimization to anger.

Part of what I would need to better work out is what the logic of victimization is. In part, I see victimization as a particular expression of anger. For those who are physically overpowered by others or who are politically oppressed in various ways, feeling a victim is a wholly "natural" and comprehensible response. One feels without power in the face of their oppressor. Victimization is an expression of powerless. But, victimization is also an expression of anger, e.g. one is angry precisely because one is powerless to change his or her circumstances.

The particular way that anger can express itself is either in a self-injury or self-hatred or in hatred toward the other. The hatred toward the other, it seems to me, can be expressed in a variety of ways. The particular expression of anger that interests me lies in how victims come to characterize those who they perceive to be injuring them.

At this point, I want to move away from discussing victims of physical violence of political oppression, and back to discussing people who perceive themselves as being injured by another party. The precise nature of this injury is to rob the victim of his or her "happiness" (or pursuit of happiness?)

These sorts of "victims" are what I have in mind in my notion of a "logic of victimization." The idea here seems to be that one can adopt a view of oneself as a victim as an expression of anger toward someone who seems to be robbing one of his or her happiness. The teacher who has to slave away at bringing students up to a certain skill level and thereby spend so much time that he or she feels exhausted (perhaps guilty as Laura in the comments said to yesterday's post) and thereby unhappy because his or her labor, as teacher, is not turning out the desired product.

We see this unhappiness in personal relationships or in our attitudes toward drug addicts or the poor. We see many people as undeserving of our love, our respect, and our help because "they are not taking responsibility." What I am suggesting is that the logic of victimization adopts that particular rhetoric as an expression of anger. The anger follows from the frustration in not being able to change someone into an idea of what would make me happy.

I dunno. What do you think? I just wrote this up . . .

The Dance of Victimization and the Demand to Take Responsibility

2008-11-10T08:53:00.006-05:00

I am someone perpetually fascinated by the labor of teaching--the psychological and emotional toll of teaching as well as the absolute joy and life affirmation that follows from a good class or a great student. Lately, in my new teaching post, I have been reflecting quite a bit on the "individual responsibility" attitudes that some colleagues have toward their students. What always fascinates me is that many of my ultra ultra left wingers take this attitude toward students and these are folks who may very well be sociologists. They find themselves exhausted by the endless labor of teaching--labor that is not unlike a long term relationship or raising children--and they decide that the students need to start stepping up to the plate and "take responsibility" for their learning.

Such faculty will often cite the "millennial kids" mantra and then argue that we need to stop coddling these students and begin to teach them to be "responsible" adults. Now look, I am a fan of taking responsiblity and for being accountable to others. But, where I differ from the groans of my colleagues is this view that "failure to take responsibility" is what at the root of our students' learning problems. No doubt this is true for many slacker types, but in my experience, the slacker types don't really complain when you give them bad grades. They get it. They don't have any interest to do better.

The students that complain a good deal about their grades are often neurotic and panicked. They probably haven't obtained to what William Perry calls the skill of "procedural knowledge." These students believe either that all knowledge is true or false facts that authorities teach us or that there is no truth. The latter are a real bitch to teach. The former, I believe, are the neurotic students that drain us and send many of my colleagues into the "they need to take individual responsibility" mantra.

So, what I started thinking about in relation to this dance between the burned out professor and the needy student is how it echoes another discourse in American culture: the "individual responsibility" discourse of cultural conservatives. What hit me like a train wreck was that those who decry that their students, or their partners, or their children, or their co-workers, or poor people, or drug addicts (you get the point, right?) aren't "taking responsibility" for their lives are most often people who feel "victmized."

That's right. The discourse of individual responsibility flows from the sense of victimization. And, it is the latter that interests me the most. The assumptions that victimized folks make about the world and relationships. I am interested in working those out and so I am very keen to hear what the rest of you think of my partial list:

All relationships depend on each person "holding her own"

Relationships should not involve a lopsided caring for others when others are sick, hurt, or in need of help

Human happiness is a right

My time and freedom to control my time is paramount

If individuals that I am in relationships with are making mistakes, bad choices, or sick and they do not seek help, then I can cut them out.

My sense of well being comes from relationships with individuals who never make mistakes, act badly, or demand too many of my emotional or financial resources

If I am feeling hurt or drained by another person who is in some way needy, I will be better off breaking off the relationship and surrounding myself with people who are more self sufficient

So, these are just what came off the top of my head. I am still interested in working this idea out, because if I am right, this means that the disintegration of families and communities are more likely the result of a hard line ideology of "individual responsibility" that emanates from conservative pundits (i.e. Dr. Laura), than "liberals." Moreover, if I am right, this means that the rhetoric of "individual responsiblity" flows from folks who continually feel victimized by others and thereby do not recognize their own resources for finding happiness despite the fact that relationships with others are fraught with inescapable tragedy.

Thoughts?

Can One Hope Without Anxiety?

2008-08-11T10:34:00.003-04:00

There is nothing like uprooting yourself, putting all of your crap in boxes, moving to a very isolated place in the way North to put you into the introspective mood. While I am walking around the streets and alleys of my new village, my mind seems to be circling around moments from my past or fixating on undone things or obsessions. It seems that uprooting oneself is not so good for escaping what ails you, but rather ties you to the past in a way that is overbearing.

I find myself coping with my new move by making the most comfort of all comfort food. I made homemade Chicken Noodle Soup this weekend. My god. What have I done?

On one of my interminably long walks this weekend (hey, I think the final baby weight is totally gone!), I started thinking about hope and anticipation. Both of these concepts are ripe for an inquiring phenomenological mind. I have been thinking of 'hope' lately because I am planning to write a conference paper on the way in which enhancement technologies, such as taking Prozac or Ritalin to boost performance marks the end of an era of hope. (I am fully aware that my preoccupation with hope is conditioned by the rhetoric of our current political candidate).

I wanted to work out in my mind what was different about hope from general anticipation or future planning. The latter seems to cause me neurotic, anxious fits that keep me up at night. I think about what my classes will be like at my new job, I wonder how much research I can get done, I wonder if I can afford to buy another house with mortgage rules so tight, I wonder if I will ever pay of my student loan debts, I wonder if Maddie will be happy here . . . you get the picture. And, as long as my mind is future-oriented--caught up with making plans for the future--I am a wreck.

My question--during the walk--was: does the anxiety that crops up when I start thinking about the future a product of future-oriented thinking? Meditation, for example, is aimed at getting us to live in the present and stop worrying so damn much about the future.

But, to have hope is to think about the future--to project into the future (to sound like an existentialist). Is having hope somehow a kind of future-orientation that is free from anxiety and worry?

I just don't know and I want to know. Thoughts?

Moving Hell

2008-07-21T14:15:00.002-04:00

I hate packing. I hate moving. I don't want to ever do it again. I wish I could say that I will never have to do this again, but . . .

I am in the middle of travels. Half of my stuff is in route up north. Some is still in my soon-to-be-sold house. And, some with me.

I hate stuff.

And, no matter how much stuff I tried to get rid of for this move, I still have too much stuff.

What kills me is that half--literally half- of our Pod was books. WTF? Who needs that many books?

Ok, so to cheer me up. Tell me some funny moving stories.

The Inevitability of the Male Ego?

2008-07-10T08:55:00.004-04:00

I started watching Denis Leary's show, Rescue Me, the other day after hearing an interview he did with Terry Gross. I remember he addressed the male ego as one of the motivations for the plot--that is the difficulties men find themselves in because of their male ego. Because I am fascinated with all things gender, I had to rent this show and take a look. I can honestly say that I am glad that I did, but what I have discovered has left me in a sort of quandary.

What I think the show does well is explain why men--especially men in very stressful lines of work such as firemen--don't have much capacity for intimacy. We follow the life of Tommy--as played by Leary--and thereby learn that he is haunted by the friends he lost in September 11th and by several children who died while he was trying to save them. He actually sees their ghosts, which is not as cheesy as it sounds, since it works well to demonstrate how ever present these losses are to Tommy. We begin to understand why Tommy wants to end his sobriety and drink again--to cope with all of these ghosts. We get a better understanding why his marriage is failing.

Overall, I think the show does a pretty good job making the male ego sympathetic, even though in real life my experiences with the male ego have made me unsympathetic and angry with men. Even when I am able to understand why some men withdraw, why they find intimacy so impossible, why they drink to cope . . . I have been unwilling to forgive them their flaws. But, the gender studies prof in me wants to get a better handle on the forces shaping men--at least the general dude on the street--so I can see it as part and parcel of all gender relationships.

But, here is my quandary. Much of the literature in gender studies comes from sociologists. And, for most sociologists, human behavior and human identity are a product of institutions. If men are sexist, it is because of sexist institutions. If we want to liberate women, we focus on changing those institutions and then men and women's attitudes will follow.

This sort of analysis can both be devastating and hopeful. The devastation follows from the realization of how pervasive gender roles are in all our institutions; the work of reforming those institutions seems overwhelming. The optimism comes from a worldview that gender roles are malleable and thereby we are not inevitably locked into harmful gender roles, such as the average heterosexual male in the U.S.

And, yet, I watch Rescue Me and I think: wow, this is the way it is with men and women. Sure, I am being uncritical here. And, sure, this is largely about straight, white, men and women--working class and professional class. But, I cannot help but watch this show and think--is the lesson of this show that sociology is not what will liberate us? Perhaps, what will liberate us is that we all get a bit more compassionate and understanding of the inevitable stresses and forces acting on men and women--quite differently--which lead to the end of relationships, male violence, and self-destruction?

Do we get better?

Pro-Choice is a Moral Position

2008-07-07T12:32:00.003-04:00

Kate Michelman (former Presdient of NARAL) and Frances Kissling (President of Catholics for Free Choice)--both Obama supporters--co-wrote the following piece, "Are Democrats Backpedaling on Abortion Rights," in Salon, published yesterday. I am not yet sure what their response is to Obama's recent interview with Relevant Magazine. But, what they do write here is worth quoting:

What then should Democrats and Sen. Obama do?

We need not wait for either the Democratic convention or the election to move forward on reducing the need for abortion. Two perfectly good bills are languishing in Congress. One, the Prevention First Act, was introduced by Sen. Clinton; the other, the Reducing the Need for Abortion Initiative by Rep. Rosa DeLauro and Rep. Tim Ryan, a pro-life Democrat. These bills need to move forward and perhaps be consolidated. (The Clinton bill does more for family planning, and the Ryan-DeLauro bill more for women who want to continue pregnancies.) Sen. Clinton is in a perfect position to make that happen, and we will work with her on that goal. Moving these bills before the election will give us a yardstick by which to measure members of Congress' commitments to meeting women's needs while recognizing their rights.

Sen. Obama will also have opportunities to show leadership. If and when Wallis approaches him to talk about abortion reduction, Obama should point him to the record of the Democratic Party on preventing pregnancy, honoring a woman's right to choose and supporting women who need economic help in raising children. That's worthy of praise, not criticism. He could call on Wallis to become a supporter of family planning for all women, and to defend the progress women have made on their journey to full and equal rights.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Wallis' self-described search for a moral statement on abortion is his apparent ignorance of the moral basis of a pro-choice position. Thirty-five years of safe and legal abortion, and solidarity with the millions of American women who have had abortions, have led to pro-choice values that are sweeping in their scope. Women of color, in particular, have had a profound impact in defining "choice" by insisting on situating reproductive choice within the much larger context of jobs, healthcare, human dignity, child care and educational opportunities for low-income women -- to make pregnancy and motherhood a real choice for everyone; to make sure abortion is a choice and never a grim default and, when it is a choice, is safe and legal and never stigmatized by Democrats. Obama's skills could be used to enlist Wallis and others to support this expansive vision of women's rights and well-being.

Finally, Sen. Obama needs to set the tone within the Democratic National Committee as well as within his campaign and reach out to women. The development of a women's rights policy must be as high a priority as a plan for world peace and an economic agenda. While both men and women have a stake in women's well-being, women's preeminent role in developing policies that affect their lives must be a central commitment of the senator and the party.

As feminists who have proudly and enthusiastically supported Obama for some time, we are convinced that this is exactly the approach he will take. And while this approach is as old as feminism, it will be a breath of fresh air in the party.

I have highlighted the paragraphs that contain the most crucial point that needs to find its way to the Obama camp. Pro-choice is a moral position. Pro-choice is part of a larger reproductive rights movement that is wholly commensurate with the Democratic platform: better jobs, affordable health care, better and affordable education, safer communities, etc.

I think all of us are hoping that Obama will make good on his promise to change the way things are done in Washington. This DOES include changing the existing frames on the abortion debate. Not only do we need to make it clear--as Michelman and Kissling point out--that pro-choice is a moral position, but we also need to remember that there are folks who are anti-abortion-such as Wallis--who, nonetheless, are sympathetic to the work pro-choice activists are doing to promote human dignity and well-being for all people, especially low-income women.

Has anyone seen if Michelman and Kissling have responded to Obama's interview?

So Much for Obama Changing the Way Things are Done in Washington: Is Obama Anti-choice or Pandering?

2008-07-06T11:27:00.006-04:00

There is nothing like a candidate's comments on late-term abortion to compel me to post. Many of the readers of this blog have probably already been clued into the fact that Obama gave an online interview to Relevant Magazine about his views, including abortion. From what I gather from the website, Relevant is a progressive Christian magazine and hence not the favorite periodicals of the wingnuts and moral majority. I am genuinely sympathetic to these folks and so I am all the more disappointed by how Obama handled the question on late-term abortions.

Strang: Based on emails we received, another issue of deep importance to our readers is a candidate’s stance on abortion. We largely know your platform, but there seems to be some real confusion about your position on third-trimester and partial-birth abortions. Can you clarify your stance for us?

What Obama said to the question was:

Obama: I absolutely can, so please don’t believe the emails. I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late-term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that “mental distress” qualifies as the health of the mother. I think it has to be a serious physical issue that arises in pregnancy, where there are real, significant problems to the mother carrying that child to term. Otherwise, as long as there is such a medical exception in place, I think we can prohibit late-term abortions.

The other email rumor that’s been floating around is that somehow I’m unwilling to see doctors offer life-saving care to children who were born as a result of an induced abortion. That’s just false. There was a bill that came up in Illinois that was called the “Born Alive” bill that purported to require life-saving treatment to such infants. And I did vote against that bill. The reason was that there was already a law in place in Illinois that said that you always have to supply life-saving treatment to any infant under any circumstances, and this bill actually was designed to overturn Roe v. Wade, so I didn’t think it was going to pass constitutional muster.

Ever since that time, emails have been sent out suggesting that, somehow, I would be in favor of letting an infant die in a hospital because of this particular vote. That’s not a fair characterization, and that’s not an honest characterization. It defies common sense to think that a hospital wouldn't provide life-saving treatment to an infant that was alive and had a chance of survival.

There is a lot that I find disappointing in Obama's answer to this question. First of all, I think it is a shame that he didn't practice what his campaign preaches and "change the way politics is done." Secondly, I am disappointed that Obama didn't take the time to further educate the readers of this magazine about all of the real moral dilemmas involved in late-term abortions and the actual percentage of women who seek late-term abortions. Thirdly, I cannot believe that he is so unsophisticated as to offer up a rather Cartesian mind-body dualism--echoing such anti-psychiatrists as Thomas Szasz (who believe that there is no such thing as mental illness, that it is not as serious as physical illness, and thereby does not warrant our concern, interest, and medical attention (read Szasz's classic essay "The Myth of Mental Illness"). Let me tackle each one of these in turn.

Failed to Change the Way Things Work in Washington and Lost Chance to Educate Readers.

We all know that Obama, as a "pro-choice" candidate will get thumped by the religious right in the general election. There is no appeasing these folks. But, there is an opportunity for a real moral dialogue with progressive Christians. Sure, many will be unpersuaded by pro-choice stances and even the stances of pro-choice candidates on late-term abortions, but it is still worth being candid and open about why one holds the position he does. What I read in Obama's response, particularly the line that I highlighted is pandering. The complex decisions that mothers seeking late term abortions must wrestle with have been wholly eclipsed by the religious right's fanatical campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, using "partial birth abortion" bans as its strategy. The very name of the ban is problematic--invoking public disgust at the practice by consciously making a connection between abortion and infanticide. Rarely in the public debate about late term abortions have there been thoughtful considerations of the reasons why women seek these abortions.

To clarify this, let's take an example from my own life. Some of you may remember a post I wrote concerning my sister-in-law in October. I also wrote a post about my own difficulties with getting a timely genetic screening of my fetus. The point is this. Let's say that you are pregnant, you want the baby, you are dutifully getting pre-natal care, and yet, through no fault of your own, you discover late in your pregnancy, let's say 20 weeks that a test indicates your baby might have Tay-Sachs disease. You need to undergo more tests and those results will come after the cut-off point for late term abortions. You are in a tough situation. If you go for the tests and they conclude that indeed your child will be born with Tay-Sachs, you no longer have the option to abort due to the Supreme Court. If you abort before, you have to live with the decision that it may not have had Tay-Sachs. This dilemma is a product of bad legislation crafted by intolerant anti-choice folks who don't think that a woman (and her husband) are the ONLY people who should have had the right to make that decision. (see Reproductive Rights Prof Blog for more analysis of Obama's position).

Furthermore, late term abortion bans--and Obama seems to be wholly in agreement with them as long as they have a health exception for the woman--do not give a mother the right to terminate a pregnancy wherein the fetus has a horrible genetic disease. So many opponents to late term abortions think that the women seeking these procedures are "loose" and thereby need to be punished for their sinful behavior. They also paint these women as callous, murderous, and selfish. But, the real stories show that these women are anything but. They are facing real dilemmas and the last thing they need is a bunch of politicians who have no real connection to their lives and choices dictating what they should do.

Obama had this opportunity to explain this to Relevant Magazine. Sure, the readers might not have liked his answer, but he would have been changing the way things are done in Washington had he done so.

Either Obama is pandering, which is what I suspect, or he actually believes what he says. If it is the latter, then I am worried. I sincerely hope that he reads the criticism out there now of his recent interview and digests it. If he doesn't believe in late term abortions for mental distress, then as Jan Crawford Greenburg points out, he is expressing views only held by Thomas and Scalia. I doubt these are the justices that Obama really wants to identify with.

Before moving onto my third point, I want to direct you to the Bitch Ph.D.'s excellent argument for why pro-choice candidates should not qualify their support of abortion entitled, "Do You Trust Women?"

Unfortunate Mind-Body Dualism

I wonder if major organizations that advocate for the mentally ill, such as NAMI, will take issue with Obama's statement that "mental distress" doesn't count. One could be charitable and assume that Obama wanted to make a distinction between mental illness and mental distress, but if he did, I am not sure how useful that distinction is. My fear is that what he revealed in this answer is a sort of intolerance to mental illness defenses that many Americans unfortunately hold. Such intolerance is a consequence of our puritan heritage, which sees mental illness as weakness and malingering (acedia/sloth). It is a pervasive view. The upshot is that this view of mental distress turns those who are suffering into folks evading moral responsibility for their own lives. Mental illness becomes moral problems, pure and simple.

I alerted you above to Thomas Szasz, who took this view to a new height, and still inspires all sorts of anti-psychiatrists (including Scientologists like Tom Cruise). Such a view that mental illness is not real illness, and thereby not deserving of medical intervention (which was exactly Szasz' argument) is cruel.

I think it would be interesting to see how Obama reacts to further questions about his view of mental distress. Does rape or incest constitute a mental distress? What exactly does he have in mind when he dismisses mental distress as legitimate grounds for an exception to the late term abortion ban?

Mental illness is as real and devastating as physical illness. In fact, the very distinction between the two is untenable unless you have a very naive view of mind as some sort of ethereal God Stuff. The mind is part of the body and thereby is as prone to suffering and illness as the other organs and systems of our mortal coil.

In sum, if Obama believes what he wrote, then his pro-choice credentials are seriously suspect. What he is saying is that (a) we cannot trust women to make the difficult moral decisions before during their pregnancies and (b) that women with mental distress (mental illness) are not to be taken seriously.

If Obama doesn't believe what he is saying, then he is pandering. And, we can really question if he is going to change the way things are done in Washington.

UPDATE: Here is a partial list of other feminist blogs on Obama's interview: Melissa at Shakesville, Bitch Ph.D., Amanda at Pandagon, and Violet Socks at Reclusive Leftist.

What Would Oscar Wilde Think of Californication?

2008-07-05T09:37:00.004-04:00

My husband doesn't usually go for serial TV programs--with the exception of Joss Whedon's Firefly and more recently, though at first reluctantly, Angel. Recently we discovered Californication. Za is attracted to the main character Hank Moody for the same reasons that he revered Spike from Buffy and Angel and Jayne from Firefly. I won't say that there is an obvious connection between these three characters. But, what Za sees, I think, is the unrestrained id. These characters flout convention, act on their impulses, and all with a grumpy wit. I guess Za admires them because they reflect parts of himself--or anyone for that matter--that he is forbidden to be if he wants to be an upright, kind, moral citizen.

I am attracted to Hank Moody, however, for very different reasons and it has bugged me enough that I thought I would write about it here and see what others think. Moody strikes me as a classic Oscar Wilde character--someone like Lord Goring from An Ideal Husband. That is, Moody appears to be a rogue, a real scoundrel and yet, he turns out to be morally consistent and thereby admirable; Lord Goring and Moody have in common a distaste for behaving in accord with convention and good manners in favor of being authentic.

Moody seems like a drunken womanizing bastard from the outset, and yet the more you get to know this character, the more you admire his devotion to his daughter, his ex-girlfriend, his friends, and frankly, to women in general. I particularly liked the scene in episode two (Hell-A Woman) with "Sonja" (played by Paula Marshall from the beloved short-lived show, Cupid) where she asks him to evaluate her naked body. (Remember: this is in the land of fake boobs, vaginal rejuvenation, the worship of youth and particularly youthful bodies, and lots-o-plastic surgery). After making clear that Sonja has real boobs and none of the other marks of L.A. plastic, he says something like "you might be the most beautiful woman that I have seen in a long time." She follows up with something like, "I would really liked to be fucked stupid by a guy who actually loves women." This, then becomes his trademark: he loves women, all women.

*I* was over last night and watched a few episodes with us and she found Hank Moody and the entire show appalling. She asked: what possible redeeming qualities does this guy have? We all scrambled to come up with some: he is only an asshole to people who deserve it, he is devoted to his daugther, underneath it all he is a good guy . . . nothing convinced her. Not even my comparison between Moody and Lord Goring. I was at a loss to explain to *I* why I liked him and the show so much, and so I was inspired to write about it here.

I am curious if there are any other fans out there who either like or hate Hank Moody and why. My impression is still that Hank is not only a sort of existentialist hero, but that he is a feminist. I know. I said it. But, the show never portrays women as mere sex objects, as weak, as dependent on men. The women are all--for the most part--self-realized, complex, and interesting. If a woman appears to be slavish or objectified, it is usually to mock the L.A. fake world that manufactures them.

So what do you all think?

Bye Bye Hillary, Hello Sexism

2008-06-06T15:32:00.006-04:00

With Hillary Clinton out of the race, we can finally focus on Obama and winning the White House. I am thrilled to have Obama as the Democratic candidate for President, but I am still sore about the lessons I have learned from this primary season. What was made evident to me was how pervasive and appalling sexism is in this country. I have never felt an occasion as great as this past Democratic primary to renew my commitment to feminism and educating young women about the ill effects of sexism on their futures.

Sitting around the table with some good friends a few nights ago, I finally exploded with anger about how disgusting Clinton was treated--not only by the press--but by other women and feminists. There was never a moment during her entire campaign where gender was not an issue and used in some way to discredit her. Sure, the sexism brought out many female supporters, but the damage it did not only to her--but to all women--will linger for quite some time.

Gloria Steinem (in)famously asked why the sex barrier was not taken as seriously as the race barrier? I think perhaps she didn't push this point further. There is no way, for example, that you would've seen a political cartoon representing Obama with overt racist overtones the way Pat Oliphant painted Hillary Clinton in this cartoon:

Even if I concede that Hillary made some really bad moves during her campaigning or that her tactics were ugly, that would never justify sexism--EVER. And, the take away message I got from this campaign was that any woman seeking positions of power and authority can expect heaps and piles of unforgivable sexist treatment--references to feminine weakness or manipulative tactics, bitchiness, ball breaker, emotionalism . . . the script is there to turn not just men, but all sorts of women, against other women who wish to seek positions of power.

I remember vividly something my Political Science prof told me when I was an undergraduate. She was discussing what can often happen to women in politics--that they have to play like men to achieve powerful and prominent posts and that they either leave behind their feminist ambitions to change institutions or they alienate themselves from other women. I doubt that Hillary has given up her feminist ambitions. But, I do think that the kind of person she had to make herself into to compete with men in powerful positions ticked off more than one woman. She has been paying FOREVER for her "baking cookies" comment, for example. And, I have always found it interesting that she made the comment. Why? Because, well, let's face it, that is still what we expect a First Lady to do in 2008.

I have also been appalled by fellow feminists criticizing Hillary for "staying with Bill" or "being too masculine." Shame on you! When I hear these sorts of comments coming from other feminists, I can't help but shudder at the numbers of angry and moralistic types that fill the pews of feminism. I may be rare or a dying breed, but I still believe that feminism is aimed at fighting sexism in all of its forms and helping to promote a world where a woman is judged as a person. Hell, feminism should, in part, be aimed at making it possible for a woman to be mediocre at a job (just like many men are), to be allowed to make foolish decisions (just like men are), and to project herself in any manner without being penalized and punished for not being "feminine."

As I write this, I still feel angry and depressed about how shitty we are about gender in this country. I fully acknowledge that we have made a lot of progress. But, I am not at all optimistic that my daughter can avoid the bullshit that most women have to navigate daily to succeed. I don't want her to be considered a ball breaker or ruthless if she is ambitious. I don't want her to be seen as unfeminine if she doesn't delight in pink, stroking male egos, or typical feminine pursuits. And, PLEASE, I wish she didn't have to endure some young boy or man telling her one day that she is on the "rag" if she is upset. I know that I have my work cut out to not let her be crushed by the variety of messages out there designed to lower the self esteem of women and girls. I cannot protect her from it. And, no doubt she will have to struggle with self esteem issues like so many young girls and women do.

I will continue to admire Hillary for staying in this race, for making her case, for trying to achieve the highest office in this country--all against the back drop of crushing sexism that most women would refuse to face.

What's So Bad About Safety Nets?

2008-05-29T11:54:00.002-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about "safety nets," since I am spending time in a Scandanavian country that is clearly a welfare state. And, by the way, it is not a bad thing for these Norwegians to be citizens of a welfare state. We are in the midst of striking season. I joke not. Many different industries pick this time of year to give it to the man--whether the man is the government or capitalists. The day after we arrived, the airport went on strike (what timing, eh?). Right now many teachers are on strike and proudly wearing their !Streik! t-shirts.

In any case, I thought about the phrase "safety net" today--a phrase that many feminists have consciously adopted to explain why welfare reform has been bad or other erosions of human rights protections in our own government. The phrase popped into my mind as I was protecting Maddie from falling off the couch while she was playing this afternoon. At every moment of her play I was keep a "safety net" in place, knowing full well she was likely to fall off the couch and hurt herself.

When the inevitable happened, and she almost fell backward except for my intervention, she quickly turned her nervous expression into a relieved smile. And it occurred to me in that moment how problematic so much Republican anti-welfare state rhetoric is. I thought to myself --what if I didn't catch her and let her fall. Would I have been a better parent? Would I have shown her the consequences of her behavior and made sure that she would never again be so foolish as to put herself in a high risk situation with no safety net? You can see how the analogies were developing in my mind.

Why shouldn't we have national health care like the Scandanavians? Well, because people will take advantage of the entitlement and overuse the services and never learn to utilize only what they need. Republicans don't see state sponsored services as "safety nets," but as opportunities for citizens to abuse resources and drain the state. What if we took that attitude toward our young?

Maybe the analogy is imperfect, but I think there is something to it. If you start to think of a welfare state as a safety net akin to how you make sure children don't needlessly hurt themselves when they are taking new risks or hell, just plain growing up. Couldn't we see the state the same way? , i.e. nurturing and protecting us when we are young, caring for us when we are ill and elderly?

I dunno. I personally like this system regardless of the strikes here and there. You can't help but notice the attention to human welfare in this country and what a difference it makes.

Sanctimonious Fundies

2008-05-28T02:35:00.003-04:00

My power cord to my computer broke a few days ago, which is why I haven't been able to post. The cost of replacing the power cord here in Norway is ridiculous, so I can only post when I am borrowing Za's computer. Sorry for the brief posting again.

Anyway, I have been reading Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher while I am here. One of the best aspects of this novel is the way that Perrotta makes the fundamentalist evangelical character Tim so likable. In fact, I found myself--at one point--being more annoyed with the sex-ed teacher.

What I have been thinking about a lot in relation to this book is the most annoying contradiction of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity: sanctimoniousness. What Perrotta does well is show how attractive this kind of Christianity this is to ex-junkie's, alcoholics, of other stripes of fuck ups. These types of churches aggressively go after the "fuck ups" and tell them that no matter what harm or misery they have caused themselves or others--whether it be cheating on a wife or killing a child in a drunk driving accident--they are wholly forgiven once they accept Jesus into their hearts. This has got to be quite a balm for those ridden with a great deal of shame. Total forgiveness. This is surely not something that many humans will give them.

And so, part of the recruitment process is a non-judgmental acceptance of fuck ups. They are taken into a community that cares for them. But, what does this community demand in return? Well, in part, that you become a sanctimonious prick, who denounces other "fuck ups." Or, that you condemn homosexuals or non-Christians.

It is this contradiction that really bugs me. They take people at their lowest--wipe their slates clean so to speak--and then send them out there to rechannel their shame into condemnation of others.

I think this same phenomena often happens in twelve step progams as well--but I don't think it is encouraged in those programs. The fact that it happens is more an effect of the psychology of addicts. They like to shift the blame onto others. Everyone else is to blame for why they are fucked up and furthermore, many ex-addicts--early on--see addiction everywhere and try to 12 step everyone around them. They do so with the same kind of sanctimonious attitude that I am perplexed by in the fundamentalist evangelical churches.

Anyway, I am curious about your thoughts on this one.

What Were You For?

2008-05-23T07:09:00.002-04:00

This is the question that Nuala O'Faolain asks herself in reflecting on Terry Gross's question: how do you feel about the fact that you didn't have children? (Go listen to the interview immediately; I was mesmerized by her). O'Faolain suggests that it is much more difficult to work out the meaning of your life without children. I take her to be saying not that children automatically become the meaning of your life--that is, you haven't finally settled the question. I think that what she is saying is that the need to find the meaning of your life is less urgent if you have children.

One constructs a meaning of their life, regardless of whether or not they have children, and yet, for O'Faolain, you never answer the question, what was I for?

Is it true that having children and thereby entering into a new set of relationships to your partner, to your parents--who know become grandparents--and to your future self makes the existential need to ask "what was it all for?" less urgent?

I am dying to hear your thoughts. I haven't formulated my own yet.

Cool Factoids about Norway: 2

2008-05-22T10:46:00.004-04:00

Ramps for strollers everywhere!

Bergen is about the size of downtown Boston with the geography of San Francisco. Steep hills and old cobblestone roads wrapped around the wharf. Today the Queen Victoria is right outside my window in the bay and it is huge.

I walked around town today with Maddie because it is an absolutely gorgeous day here. It is about 66 degrees and so, of course, everyone is carrying an ice cream cone, sun tanning in the parks or just walking around the main square.

Bergen is a city where people walk or ride their bikes everywhere. They also are out with the strollers everywhere. And, strollers are allowed into any and every store. To help the stroller set, like myself, get into many places or up stairs, they lay down these stroller ramps. It is ingenious!

These ramps are another indication that Norway is all about "family values." You know, as I write these pro-Norway posts, I wonder if I am fawning too much over Norway and not enough over the US?

P.S. Of course these ramps accomodate those in wheel chairs as well!

Cool Factoids about Norway: 1

2008-05-20T13:02:00.002-04:00

I think it is only fitting that I keep track here of the many cool things about Norway. So, for observation number one: Lots and lots of men here are wheeling their children around in strollers--and not accompaning their wives. It really struck me yesterday how cool and odd that is. Sure, I have seen men strolling their toddlers before--maybe on a weekend outing with the family or at the park. But here you see as many men as women strolling their children every day.

Part of this phenomenon can surely be credited to the generous paternity leave policies here in Norway. But this is certainly not the whole explanation for the daddy strollers. You see all sorts of men out and about with their kids too. It's not just hipster alternadad, but blue collar worker dads, business dads, football lover dads, dock worker dads . . . you name it.

I was noting this to our friend here and she started telling me about her male coworker, who took his paternity leave in Barcelona and broke the hearts of all the Spanish ladies as he strolled his young son around town. Spain is still too macho to stomach the stroller dad.

Why is it that American dads are still unlikely to be out and about with their children? Or, am I just being unfair?

Why I Think Kevin James Should be Rated TV-MA

2008-05-19T06:24:00.004-04:00

I stumbled upon this entertaining Chris Matthews "interview" at Amanda's site. It illustrated something that I was already thinking a lot about in the last few days (especially after venturing in to watch some pundits and "talk shows" on the Democratic primary), namely, that the point of shows like Hardball or roundtable discussions on the Sunday News Programs is to provide a mouthpiece for committed, unwavering, ideologues to get their message out in the airwaves. When Chris Matthews invites both Kevin James (a typical wingnut shock jock) and Mark Green (a "liberal" talk radio person from Air America) to discuss or debate whether Bush's comments to the Knesset were a diss of Obama, he is not really creating the conditions for a give and take, civilized debate where the discussants may come to some agreement. No. Matthews and his ilk (even the Lehrer News Hour is guilty of this) are just giving equal time to opposing ideologues who want to talk louder or more offensively than the other guest in order to get their message heard. Sure. I am not saying anything really new here.

But, I was really thinking through this as I listened to a Tom Ashbrook show wherein he was discussing a book about internet security issues and brought on a policy dude from some think tank. I gave the policy dude the benefit of the doubt at first--thinking that he would offer some nice counterarguments or provide better context for the position. Essentially, what I expected from the policy dude was an analysis that I am used to hearing in Academia--wherein there is greater thoughtfulness about the issue (i.e. the history of the problem, why a single view of the issue misrepresents the phenomenon, what the effects of a policy are, what are the unintended consequences, what are alternative views, or how might we make friendly amendments to X view). This is the world I inhabit and I am grateful. I want to believe that the policy folks at most think tanks operate in the same paradigm as academics do. Some do.

But, by large, with the proliferation of right-of-center think tanks to counteract "academia," the news programs that should be a mode for helping the average informed citizen think better about a particular policy are really just winner-take-all-shout-down-the-opposition forums for commited ideologues. I know I keep using the word ideologue in this post, but that is really what is paraded in front of us these days on the boob tube. Hell, even in blogoland. Just once I would like to see a policy dude deviate from his or her talking points and actually dialogue.

Kevin James represents the worst of the ideologues out there: stupid and loud. But, there are far more nuanced and wonkier analysts at places like the Cato Institute or AEI. They sound utterly reasonable, subtle, intellectually honest--but if you listen to them long enough and watch how they function in debates, they never deviate from the core, founding principles of their Think Tank. Their only job is to get their particular ideological message out.

I watched this happen numerous times when I made the bad bad choice to date an analyst from the Cato Institute. Well, maybe it wasn't that bad since I learned a great deal about how this all works. But, what really freaked me out was that my policy dude boyfriend never turned off. Even in private conversations he would refuse to entertain a view that might threaten the core message of Cato: less government, free markets, maximal individualism. I spent months offering up counter arguments to his positions--some quite powerful--and never once did he say "you have a point there." Some of my positions he just dismissed outright. Others he would be a bit threatened by and then go to his boss who would find him some obscure article that would restore his worldview to him. My experience of arguing with policy dude was akin to arguing with the disciple maker dude on our campus turning our lost, smart, socially awkward undergraduates into mouthpieces for Intelligent Design: there is no counterargument that will lead him or his followers to revise their view. Rather, they marshal a bunch of arguments to either muddy the debate or obfuscate the counterargument.

I guess I don't see the point of this kind of public debate or discussion. I think it teaches really bad and uncivilized habits to our children: never consider revising your position when you encounter a powerful counterargument, never consider the possibility that your view or hypothesis is flawed, and, finally, never admit to what you don't know.

Relativism is the Stance of the Powerful

2008-05-16T11:34:00.003-04:00

Greetings from Norway!

Za, Maddie and I spent the last two days traveling to Norway so he could do some work with a Norwegian collaborator. I am here mostly to walk around with Maddie and take in the culture of my mother's family. I must look pretty Norwegian because the minute I was off the plane, everyone, including the taxi driver kept speaking Norwegian to me. After I told him (twice) that I was American, he slipped back into Norwegian and then apologized and said I just looked so Norske. :)

While I was on the plane over here, I started re-reading Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Women's Right: Birth Control in America and I was struck my a claim she makes in her introduction. I wish I could quote it directly, but I left the damn book on the plane. Anyway, after laying out the program of the book, she indirectly indicates that this book (especially since it was published in 1975) embraces the liberation politics of the women's movement. She also clarifies that she is a social historian and hence a class analysis is part of the methodology. Anyway, the line that made me stop and think was a claim that relativism and neutrality are luxuries of those in power.

I wanted to write about this here because I am curious what the rest of you think of this view. I took her to be describing the standpoint of the historian. I wonder if she would extend this view of neutrality to other investigations.

For years I have labored to convince students that relativism is a narcissistic stance. I basically stole that riff from SteveG In my experience, there are two camps of students who cling to relativism. The first camp defends relativism because they believe that it is the more inclusive and hence culturally sensitive stance to take as moral thinkers. I am not always sure where they develop this view? Is it in middle or high school when they have multi-cultural days? Is it something they pick up in social studies? Hard to say. But, what they do is make the move that the fact of cultural differences implies a normative stance: that we ought not judge others by our own moral principles or codes.

The second camp includes students who don't want to argue about morality or who don't want to have to defend their own moral views against others. If anyone ever tries to challenge them on a moral belief and they don't want to be morally judged or (more likely) develop a cogent defense of their views, they begin to embrace a moral view that "it's all relative." It is largely this camp of students that I believe Gordon is criticizing (although the first camp is not mutually exclusive from the latter).

In any case, the stolen speech I give on the harms of relativism is to show that embracing relativism is equivalent to saying that you don't have to take seriously another's view or bother to let your own view be challenged. SteveG's way of framing this problem is still largely in moral language: you are not treating the other as a "person" (the technical word for moral agent).

Linda Gordon, however, is making a political (more specifically, marxist) argument against relativism: those who adopt a relativistic moral stance are obviously those in power. They are the capitalists. They are the elite. They are those who do not need to worry that they will be mishandled by the police or justice system; they are those who do not need to worry about overt or covert discrimination for jobs; they are those with the means to be well educated; they are those with wealth.

I wonder if Gordon's analysis of relativism--as a moral stance adopted by the elite--makes sense of the worldview of my students at a SLAC? Or, might this be a common stance of Americans in general?

Thoughts?

What do you think

Meme: Passion Quilt

2008-05-09T11:22:00.004-04:00

I've been memed by SteveG! So soon after my reemergence into the blogosphere!

Here are the rules:

Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

Link back to this blog entry.

The caption for my image is embedded in the image: "I Came to Live Out Loud." Years ago, when I was first year graduate student, I bought a card from a hip store that had a quotation from Emile Zola: "If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud." I had that card posted about my computer all through graduate school and now it lives on my bulletin board in my office.

The phrase is more important to me than the image, frankly. I am passionate about inspiring my students to become the most interesting, engaged, and brave students possible. I want them to see the amazing opportunities that life offers and to seize them. I want them to live boldly so that they inspire others to do the same.

Now to tag some others:

Dead Dad
dr
The History Enthusiast
Scott
Maynard
lesboprof

Disciplining Gender: The Pathology is not in Bradley

2008-05-08T14:00:00.006-04:00

The first part of a fascinating series on gender identity and young children aired yesterday on All Things Considered. I am always drawn to these stories and, more importantly, the analyses of what could possibly be at work in a young child's desire to live as a different gender than he or she was born. What struck me in this report was the way in which one Gender Identity Disorder specialist justified his recommendations for how to treat a young boy. First some back story, the young boy preferred playing with girls, dressing up like a girl and playing with toys designed for girls, such as Barbies. The parents began to really become concerned when their son was badly hurt at a playground by older boys (age 10), who wanted to "punish" him for playing with Barbie dolls. (This is exactly the kind of gender disciplining that Foucault-inspired scholars point out to illustrate their work).

The mother became understandably distressed by this and resolved to take her son to Dr. Ken Zucker.

Bradley's school referred her to a psychologist in Toronto named Dr. Ken Zucker, who is considered an expert in gender identity issues. After several months of evaluation, Zucker came back with a diagnosis. Bradley, he said, had what Zucker called gender identity disorder.
Gender identity disorder is a label given to children who believe themselves to be born into the wrong biological body. This diagnostic label encompases a range of behaviors — and the label itself is controversial. But, in general, what characterizes children like Bradley is that they are more than just effeminate boys, or masculine girls, who are gay. These are children who genuinely believe they are girls even though they have a male body — or boys, even though they have a female body.
Zucker, who has worked with this population for close to 30 years, has a very specific method for treating these children. Whenever Zucker encounters a child younger than 10 with gender identity disorder, he tries to make the child comfortable with the sex he or she was born with.
So, to treat Bradley, Zucker explained to Carol that she and her husband would have to radically change their parenting. Bradley would no longer be allowed to spend time with girls. He would no longer be allowed to play with girlish toys or pretend that he was a female character. Zucker said that all of these activities were dangerous to a kid with gender identity disorder. He explained that unless Carol and her husband helped the child to change his behavior, as Bradley grew older, he likely would be rejected by both peer groups. Boys would find his feminine interests unappealing. Girls would want more boyish boys. Bradley would be an outcast.
Carol resolved to do her best. Still, these were huge changes. By the time Bradley started therapy he was almost 6 years old, and Carol had a house full of Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets. She now had to remove them. To cushion the blow, she didn't take the toys away all at once; she told Bradley that he could choose one or two toys a day.
"In the beginning, he didn't really care, because he'd picked stuff he didn't play with," Carol says. "But then it really got down to the last few."
As his pile of toys dwindled, Carol realized Bradley was hoarding. She would find female action figures stashed between couch pillows. Rainbow unicorns were hidden in the back of Bradley's closet. Bradley seemed at a loss, she said. They gave him male toys, but he chose not to play at all.
"He turned to coloring and drawing, and he just simply wouldn't play with anything. And he would color and draw for hours and hours and hours. And that would be all he did in a day," Carol says. "I think he was really lost. ... The whole way that he knew and understood how to play was just sort of, you know, removed from his house."
His drawings, however, also proved problematic. Bradley would populate his pictures with the toys and interests he no longer had access to — princesses with long flowing hair, fairies in elaborate dresses, rainbows of pink and purple and pale yellow. So, under Zucker's direction, Carol and her husband sought to change this as well.
"We would ask him, 'Can you draw a boy for us? Can you draw a boy in that picture?' ... And then he didn't really want us to see his drawings or watch him drawing because we would always say 'Can you draw a boy?'" Carol says. "And then finally after, I don't know, a month or two, he just said, 'Momma, I don't know how. ... I don't know how to draw a boy.'"
Carol says she finally sat down and showed him. From then on, Bradley drew boys as directed. Male figures with anemic caps of hair on their heads filled the pages of his sketchbook.

What is so disturbing about this therapy is that it resembles the movements to cure gay people of their homosexual tendencies. Hence, the message of this therapy is overtly normative: young boys should not want to be young girls. If young boys are indulged to act like young girls, they will be harmed physically by other boys. Zucker's therapy is an ode to the old school "you must be cruel to be kind" therapeutic model--to say the least. When I heard about Bradley's story, I couldn't help but think of a lovely and heartbreaking film, entitled Ma Vie en Rose, which depicts a young boy in the suburbs of Paris beginning to act like a girl and the punishment visited upon not only him, but his family.

Now to the specific analogy that Zucker uses to justify his approach:

Because [Diane] Ehrensaft sees transgenderism as akin to homosexuality, she says, she thinks Zucker's therapy — which seeks to condition children out of a transgender identity — is unethical.
But that isn't how Zucker sees it. Zucker says the homosexuality metaphor is wrong. He proposes another metaphor: racial identity disorder.
"Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? ... I don't think we would," Zucker says.
If a black kid walked into a therapist's office saying he was really white, the goal of pretty much any therapist out there would be to make him try to feel more comfortable being black. They would assume his mistaken beliefs were the product of a dysfunctional environment — a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional cultural environment that led him or her to engage in this wrongheaded and dangerous fantasy. This is how Zucker sees gender-disordered kids. He sees these behaviors primarily as a product of dysfunction.
The mistake the other side makes, Zucker argues, is that it views gender identity disorder primarily as a product of biology. This, Zucker says, is, "astonishingly naive and simplistic."

This analogy is well chosen and is powerful in persuading people--who don't further consider this--that there is something legitimate about Dr. Zucker's approach. He is also right to counter critics that gender identity is not solely an event of biology. I agree with him on that score, and yet, I draw such wholly different conclusions than he does about how to think about transsexualism.

The problem with his analogy--if we look closely at it--is that it assumes that there is something fixed, pure, or natural about race. What the analogy invites us to do is imagine that an unproblematic "black" boy comes into the office of a psychologist and demands to be altered, biologically, into a "white" boy. We think of someone like Michael Jackson and then . . . .voilà, we think of this young boy as ill. He is suffering from a dysfunctional culture--as Zucker points out--and so his desire to become "white" is a dysfunctional reaction to a racist culture that prizes whiteness over blackness.

And yet, look at what Zucker is assuming here: that racial identity never involves choice. He is playing on a unsophisticated cultural understanding of race as "black" or "white," and therefore overlooking the reality of "mixed raced" people or the fact that one's racial identity can so often be ambiguous (is he middle eastern? Latino? Asian?). The fact that we call someone "black" is indeed reflective of our pathological need to put people in neat boxes. Racial identity is as thoroughly a product of culture--institutions, practices, and ideas--as gender identity or sexual identity is. There is a biological component of race, but where we draw the line between one race and another is totally artificial and culturally constructed. We don't look for an underlying genetic signature--expressed phylogenetically--to demarcate "black" from "Asian" or "middle-eastern." Racial labels do not solely point out biological features. Quite simply, race and racial identity are cultural constructs.

And, so because race is far from straightforward or natural, Zucker's analogy belies his deeper need to maintain these all-too-culturally-constructed labels, i.e. "black people" are black, "white" people are white, "boys" are boys and "girls" are girls. His analogy plays on our more liberal sympathies that we should create a culture that values "black" boys as much as "white" boys, but it then uses this liberal sympathy for ends quite opposed to the humanitarian ones in the racial identity analogy. When we carry over the reasoning here, we are to see that boys should not become girls [if they are traumatized by a dysfunctional family (an overbearing father? or overly liberal gender-bending parents?) or a dysfunctional cultural environment (an overly rigid understanding of masculine traits? or, more likely, a overly androgynous culture that blurs the boundaries between appropriate masculine and feminine behavior)]. So what are we to do if little boys want to be little girls because they like feminine things and feminine behaviors more? Train it out of them and force them to face up to their given and natural identity as boys. Likewise, we should help "black" boys deal with their given and natural identity as "black."

Zucker's view completely takes choice out of racial and gender identity and it ignores the fluid nature of these identities. When we start thinking more clearly about how complex race and gender are: these identities are interactions between biology and culture and these categories are fluid and not categorical, then his racial identity analogy falls apart. Why couldn't a young black woman say that she doesn't want to be "black"? That wouldn't necessarily mean she wants to bleach her skin or pass as white. It could mean that she was rejecting certain cultural practices that are deemed black. It could mean she didn't want to be rigidly defined as a member of the group "black people." A psychologist, it seems to me, would really need to listen more closely to what she was saying than assume she was looking for a pathological way to cope with racism. Or, what if a woman who has a Syrian father and a Mexican woman --and looks Latina and reflects the cultural practices and manners of speech of young women in Latino communities, shows up in Zucker's office and says, "I don't want to be a Latina?" Surely the right answer is not: you are just responding unhealthily to a culture that is oppressive to Latinos.

Gender and racial identities are fluid, complex, interactive. What inspires Bradley above to play with Polly Pockets or delight in Pink is not just a dysfunctional cultural milieu that is blurring the boundaries between masculine and feminine. Nor is it just hormonal abnormalities. What is going on here is a complex negotiation that only highlights how fluid and complex gender and race are. Bradley defies our categories. He threatens other boys and worries his parents. But, the pathology is not in Bradley.

Nothing Great in the World has been Accomplished without Passion

2008-05-07T11:37:00.005-04:00

So speaks Hegel in his Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History. For as long as I can remember, I have been stirred by this portrait of what moves humanity forward and what is the engine of history. For Hegel and then after him Heidegger, great prescient individuals who passionately dedicate themselves to a novel way of living, being, acting or thinking about the world change the world. This is a read of history as the provenance of great individuals and therefore a style of writing history that is at odds with social history. The latter--social history or the view of history from economics--is far more in vogue these days. As a feminist and a liberal, I am glad that social history is far more respected than it was in the past. Surely history is not simply a story about the great (male) individuals of a nation.

And yet, I have always been attracted to the idea of great individuals who accomplish things with passion. I guess I am just thoroughly American. I am inspired by stories of triumph against unbelievable odds. My first project in graduate school was to work through Heidegger's notion of history. This semester, I found students drawn to Hegel's work with the same interest that I once had. I pushed one student to tell me why she like this idea of world historical individuals and, not surprisingly, she told me that it gave her hope that she too could be such an individual.

Do we all need to believe we can make that kind of mark on the world when we are young? Does it ever go away? Is it wrong to aspire to that kind of greatness? And, more importantly, if we still find ourselves drawn to Hegel's Philosophy of History, does that call into question our politics (as feminists or lefties?)

I imagine that the valorization of passionate and prescient individuals can be read as a kind of megalomania. The need to believe that a lowly person could accomplish such greatness is the product of too much narcissism. And yet, isn't it just true that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion?

"Punishment Doesn't Work"

2008-05-06T10:08:00.003-04:00

That was a comment my friend made, who is currently earning a PhD in Psychology. She was specifically describing our prison system and explained that 50 years of research has demonstrated that punishment doesn't work. I don't know the literature that she is citing (I wish I did), but I want to use this claim as a departure for a meditation on how effective punishment is in our interpersonal relationships.

I am leaving to the side, for the moment, the parenting relationship. I think this is a far more complicated situation. But, I am going to assume, for the sake of this rant, that punishment is something different than teaching moral behavior through consequences. Maybe that is just a liberal repackaging of punishment, but whatever. There can be real substantive difference between punishment and making others aware of the consequences of their actions. If you think of the punishment entailed in imprisonment, then the difference between the two is clearer. Locking someone up--depriving them of their liberty--without any effort to rehabilitate is, according to my friend, totally ineffectual. The outcomes of this kind of prison system are not good.

Now I want to turn to interpersonal relationships. Does punishment ever work in our interpersonal relationships? If someone harms me and I punish them, does the punishment give me the outcome I am seeking? I don't know. I guess it depends on what we mean by punishment. What I have in mind is the following: the silent treatment, withdrawal of affection, ignoring, depriving of services/goods, guilt tripping, moralizing, yelling, and physical harm. This is not an exhaustive list, but what popped into my mind. Do any of these behaviors every result in a good outcome? If we punish others with these behaviors, does it change the dynamic of the relationship for the better? If not (which I suspect is the case), then why do we do it?

Part of the answer might lie in subterranean attitudes of American culture. We have high rhetoric of punishment of the wicked. Some of us were parented this way--most likely because our parents were reared by the punishment model. Punishment of criminals is an important political issue. Law and Order politicians are more successful than "touchy feely" rehabilitation politicians. And, then there is the animal satisfaction of lashing out, of "paying back," of causing misery to someone we perceive has harmed us.

The last motivation intrigues me. I think that when we punish others, we are acting more like my dog who tends to growl at me if I have accidentally stepped on him. He is hurt and he is going to growl as a means of letting me know that I have harmed him. He is not trying to change my behavior.

And yet, how many times do we justify our punishing behaviors as necessary means to improving our relationships. We want to make clear to the other they have "crossed a line" and so we smack them. But, it doesn't work, does it?

Gossipy Girls

2008-05-05T09:36:00.005-04:00

Cinco de Mayo seems as good a day as any day to start up my blog again. Since I am moving way way north and hence will be out of daily contact with so many of my friends here, I need to keep this blog alive. Moreover, this blog is an outlet for me to work out ideas that would otherwise pass through my consciousness into oblivion. The blog is like a cyber-bulletin board where I can post notes to myself and if these ideas have any merit, pursue them later.

So, onto one of those insights. I was digging in the dirt yesterday, which is just the kind of activity that frees up my mind to wander and reflect on interactions with people or pursue questions that interest me. What spontaneously entered into my consciousness was my interactions with those people who like to talk with others but only about the inane details of their day.

You can see that by using the word "inane," I have already made clear that I am "uncomfortable" with those sorts of conversation. The discomfort manifests itself quite bodily. I get anxious when I think about social situations where I might be surrounded by heaps of people who might corner me and talk at me relentlessly about things that hold no interest for me. One of my worries is that I will start to yawn while they are speaking. Or that I will not find the right sort of phrases or responses to indicate that I am listening and interested. My mind will most likely wander onto other topics--errands I need to complete or work I need to finish.

When a topic such as this pops up it usually indicates to me that I need to reflect more on why I am so freaked out by being sucked into conversations with relentless talkers who engage in nothing but "idle talk." The phrase idle talk has many origins, but I am interested in two.

First, Martin Heidegger's criticism of a way of being with other people that is not authentic. What happens when we engage in idle talk with others is that we stop interpreting the world--which means laying bare the world in such a way that it reveals to us paths to pursue that coincide with our deepest creative impulses. For Heidegger, interpretation is an important faculty of human beings and is fundamentally connected to our "essence," which is to engage in projects (putting time and attention into turning a possibility into an actually). We are defined by our projects and those projects that reflect our own creative and thoughtful insights about the world are the preferable ones for Heidegger. Idle talk [Gerede] is a way of avoiding the more difficult labor of seeing into the world and its riches and choosing a path that allows us to bring into existence a way of life or artifacts that reflect our mindful reflection of the world and our capabilities.

I realize that everything I just wrote is incredibly abstract. It is hard to avoid abstract language when discussing philosophy, especially phenomenology. To make this thought less abstract: Heidegger is entreating us to be more thoughtful in our attitudes, projects, choices and relationships. When we speak with someone it should in some way be oriented toward helping us be more thoughtful about our lives. Our friendships with others are best knitted together by conversations that help us find what is most meaningful to pursue, what will help our communities thrive, what will help us care for the earth (which is the source of our inspiration and projects). In sum, to waste our conversations on idle talk is to avoid the more important work of living our life to fullest extent.

The second way in which I want to think about idle talk is in connection with gossip and slander (this is incipient in Heidegger's thought but never really developed). Idle talk is thoughtless conversation. It is conversation with no real objective, other than to disseminate gossip about other people. Idle talk easily devolves into mean spirited and moralizing conversations where we disapprove of other peoples' behavior. We mock how people raise their children, how they control their dogs, how they tend their yards, what they wear, what failings they have . . . you get the point. More often than not, this is the kind of conversation style associated with women.

And, while digging in the dirt and pulling out weeds yesterday, I started reflecting more on the kind of person I try to avoid socially--the relentless idle talker. It is a she. More specifically, it is a she who comes across as moralizing, bitter, or worse (for me) boring.

So what am I--the feminista--suppose to make of this attitude I hold toward gossipy women. Does it make me part of the cruel patriarchy that tends to prejudge most women as idle talkers, who have nothing of value to say other than to diminish others? Maybe. But, I like to think that my reaction to such people is more complicated.

While all of this was swirling in my mind, I went inside to watch a Masterpiece theater show. Of course it was a typical costume drama, set in the 19th Century in England. And, of course, there is a built in critique of gossipy women. And, during this show I thought back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She has an important insight into why so many women are idle gossipers--they aren't educated. But, this is less true now than it was in the late 18th Century. Something else is going on then that makes women (I know a lot of gossipy men too) fall prey to harmful gossip.

What is it? Education is obviously available to them. Women can study any subject their heart desires. Part of the answer must lie with the fact that women spend so much of their lives taking care of children and then their elderly parents. This kind of labor--if it is the sole labor one is engaged in--can take women so far out of the larger world. This is not necessarily true--since I did argue that being a mother can take you out into the world--but, nonetheless, it can happen. The intense work of caring for others--and especially little ones who are not yet engaged in the world in the way Heidegger exhorts us to be--can absorb all of one's thoughts and energy. One's identity can easily become inextricably bound up with their caring labor and so the need to maintain a sense that one is doing it well is profound.

That is the root of gossip--the need to assert one's importance in realms where labor is not rewarded or recognized. What is unfortunate, however, is gossip only leaves one feeling empty. When we gossip (and believe me--I am NO saint), we further wall ourselves up into a world where our sense of self is precariously dependent on the approval of others. When we gossip, we recognize how easily it is for others to do the same to us. When we gossip, we are really only highlighting our own deepest fears and failings. What we loathe in others is precisely what we loathe about ourselves.

So, the problem with idle talk and the fact that so many women seem to engage in it seems to be larger than individual failings (though that is at work too). It reveals to us that we are a community that does not value traditional women's labor in ways that provides for women to draw a real sense of self and accomplishment. It reveals that we continue to bifurcate our lives into the private and the public. And, finally it reveals to us that we all desperately need to be valued and loved.

I didn't actually mean to sum this up. I am probably wrong. I am probably missing important things here. Am I being too hard on women?

Mommyhood Makes Me a Better Philosopher

2008-04-02T10:12:00.002-04:00

I am sitting at my desk grading papers, so it seems a perfect time to write a blog post. It is downright pathetic how much I want to avoid grading papers. Someday I should write a blog post analyzing why faculty are so burdened, plagued, and depressed by the prospect of grading papers.

Today, I want to reflect on something that inspires me, rather than repels me: the way having a child and becoming a parent has opened me up to new people whom before I would've never had anything in common with. Yesterday I was invited to attend a meeting with a variety of people on my campus whom I have never met. Furthermore, very few of them were doing jobs that I knew anything about and so I wasn't sure how to jump start conversation around the table. I can usually find something to talk to strangers about when I need to, but lately, I am so damn tired and drained that it is easier to sit in silence than try.

And then it happened. A really nice woman across from me introduced herself and we immediately launched into talking about my baby. She worked in an office that knows if faculty have new children and so she used that as a way to draw me out and connect. Within minutes we were fast friends, sharing special moments about our children. I found myself truly captivated by her description of how her teenage children have such different attitudes toward driving and the factors in their lives that shaped these attitudes.

Halfway through the conversation I started analyzing how engrossed I was in this conversation--full of questions, eager to hear her answers, and wishing I could see pictures of her grown children. My reaction totally caught me off guard because my pre-mommyhood self would've been struggling to keep interest in this conversation. I realized how fantastically transformed I am now that Maddie is in my life.

Furthermore, I was delighted that I could find a way to connect with new people who had nothing in common with me professionally. It was refreshing. I have always longed to develop an identity outside of my academic world. The questions that haunt me in my work are drawn--I hope--from real lives and real stories. I am not so much interested in purely abstract or technical questions. I have always wanted my work to matter to real people.

The problem is, I always had a difficult time relating to a large segment of the population. I used to blame it on my overly developed analytical abilities and hence my inability to make small talk. But, I am starting to realize that what kept me from connecting with a great deal of people was my child-free status. Having a child certainly transforms your life in ways that you can never anticipate before it happens and it attunes you to other children and parents in ways that you were indifferent to before.

When I see young children in their mothers I am drawn to them. I want to drop everything I am doing and watch them interact, smile and waive at the little people. Who is this person I have become? Well, whoever she is, I like her a lot better and I think she will be a better philosopher for and feminist for it.

Anyone out there with similar experiences?

The Sin of Gluttony

2008-03-28T15:33:00.002-04:00

Boy, I am back, eh? I have had a lot on my mind and it seems more time to get it down. My newest fascination is with how much my students are unforgiving to people who eat too much and consequently put on weight. My colleague Kerry noticed the same phenomenon when he was teaching his seminar on the 7 deadly sins. Gluttony, he said, was the only sin that students were unwilling to attribute social forces as partially to blame. If you overindulge, especially in food, then you are weak-willed.
This conversation took place in my Philosophy of Psychiatry class where Dan Blazer, the author we are currently reading, made the observation that we have become a society more likely to attribute social origins to physical problems like obesity, rather than mental illnesses like depression. Blazer offers up a case study of a young woman who has sought treatment for depression and the physician notices she has gained weight. She has put on weight because she visits the hamburger stand across the street from her work daily. The patient attributed her depression to her weight gain and wanted to get a prescription for Prozac because she heard it would help her lose weight. At the end of this case study, Blazer points out that this patient was quite willing to consider the multiple ways in which social forces lead to obesity, but she couldn't see how her depression might be related to work stress.

I read this passage to my students to get their sense. Rather than deal with the observation, two very passionate students launched into an attack on the patient's willingness to attribute her weight gain to the over-marketing of fast food or the cheapness of fast food. "She should know better how to eat well. She is a computer engineer. If she wants to lose weight, she should just eat less."

I asked my students, however, if they believed that her depression was in part the result of work pressures, fear of losing her job, and stress over mortgage payments. They absolutely agreed that those were part of the problem. In fact, almost every student in the class believes that depression has social origins and they are deeply disturbed by a culture that wants to "pop pills" and "get a quick fix," rather than address the real underlying problems. They are Utopian in their thinking--wishing we could improve neighborhoods, provide better jobs, better education, universal health care, less stress in the workplace and schools. Many of them have downright indicted capitalism. I am, for once in my life, confronted with several Marxist students. Who would've guess? I am the one arguing for Prozac all class.

But, when I asked them why they were unwilling to attribute social origins to the obesity epidemic, they couldn't see the connection. Being overweight was a personal failing. Being depressed, however, was a sign that our culture is messed up. Why such a glaring inconsistency?

I have been trying to come up with some sort of helpful explanation for this. Part of it may stem from the fact that by and large my students are well off and have been socialized to be "healthy eaters" and thin. They are less able to make the connection to lower social class and higher rates of obesity. They don't know what it is like to manage a family, while having to work a lot, and therefore not having a whole lot of time to make "healthy food." Furthermore, healthy food is expensive, unless you grow a lot of it yourself. I think Michelle Obama actually has a great stump speech that addresses these stresses of "average families."

The other part of the sin of gluttony seems to be their buckling under to a culture obsessed with thin bodies--especially in the case of women. For the first time, I really saw the connection between anorexia and control. Being thin is not just about being beautiful, it is about having the ability to say "no" to all of the temptations that bombard us daily to eat food that is indulgent.

What do you all make of this?

Taking the Prof Personally

2008-03-27T17:57:00.003-04:00

I was teaching an excerpt from Soren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling today in my 19th Century class. In this passage, Kierkegaard masterfully discusses the absurdity of faith. An act of faith is by definition, for Kierkegaard, unintelligible. I love teaching this. But, today I started analyzing something in particular about how my class responded to Kierkegaard (and, frankly, to all the other thinkers we have read this semester). The students stopped me mid-Kierkegaard-rant to ask if he was suggesting that it is better to be a knight of faith? Is it better to be Abraham? Should one aim to be this isolated, unintelligible knight of faith? Their eyes were intent, concerned, eager.

One student threw his hands up and said "this is just insane." I had to step back from their intensity and reflect on what must be occurring when they read these dead, old thinkers from years gone bye. They turn to them as sources of wisdom. They read each of these texts as if the writer is speaking directly to them and telling them how they should act, live, and think.

I don't think this is necessarily the wrong way to read these texts, but I keep trying to point out to my students that not every one of these writers is telling you what to do or what to think. Some of them are just exposing the flawed assumptions of certain institutions, laws, and attempts to ground morality. For example, when I teach Kant's Groundwork, I have to constantly remind the students that Kant is not prescribing what they ought to do. He is not telling them that they are failures if they cannot always act from duty. He is describing what is necessary for a moral philosophy to be truly universally binding. And yet, the students can't help but read the Groundwork as admonishing them for failing to live up to Kant's ideal of the wholly rational, duty-bound subject. Today they were livid that Kierkegaard was (they thought) prescribing a way to being faithful to the divine that would practically make them appear crazy to others.

No matter how many times I tried to redirect them to seeing Kierkegaard as making a specific critique of the Lutheran Church in Denmark and Hegel, they couldn't get away from taking Kierkegaard personally.

When class was over and I headed over to the daycare to see Maddie, I started wondering if I had that kind of power over the students and didn't realize it? That is, if I made pronouncements about what I think is the proper way to act, would my word--as an authority figure--force them to be put into crisis in the same way that these texts do? That is how I see it, by the way. If they didn't see these thinkers as wise or worth listening to, they wouldn't keep asking me with such passion why Kant says X or Kierkegaard says y. They are looking for some guidance from these texts. I am not sure why, but they are.

So, are they looking for some guidance from me as well? Do I have this much power over them? There are probably plenty of professors who have realized they do have this power and abused it long before I managed to see it. And, now that I am fairly convinced that I have reached a point in my career where what I say, what I reveal about myself, what I share of my preferences carries a kind of weight that I didn't realize before that it did, I am sort of nervous.

I am nervous about how easily one could get giddy from this power. I see far to many junior faculty fail to see how much power they actually have over students. In fact, they might even misread student reactions to them. Perhaps when students challenge them, it is not because they don't respect their authority, but rather that they are far too overwhelmed and challenged by what they assume is the wisdom of the prof. They feel indicted at times for not being as wise or being a virtuous as they attribute to the prof.

I dunno. Maybe they are just being asses. But, I can't shake the feeling that they are taking me far too personally.

Adopted Family

2008-03-26T18:28:00.002-04:00

I am back. I don't know why. Maybe because Spring is in the air and I feel more hopeful and energetic. Maybe because I was nudged to return by others who keep checking my blog to see it stuck on the same old day in February. Whatever the reason, I decided it was time to make an appearance again. Maybe I waited so long that my audience will never return?

In any case, I was wondering if any of you out there have as strong of a need as I do to create their own family? That is, find people in your life that give you the sense of security and love that we hope to get from our biological families and bind yourselves together to get those goodies in a newly forged biological family. I do this. I don't necessarily have an awful "biological" family. I get along well with most of my family. But, I have always lived so far away from my family and I tend to get lonely without friendships that feel like family.

I guess I am thinking a lot about this because I am about to move away from the home I created here. I have colleagues in the department whom I think of as brothers. I have my senior colleagues that I feel like dear aunts and uncles. I have lots of women friends whom I have met that I rely on to get through many days. I share myself with these folks fully and I get so much from having all of them in my life, that I cannot bear to imagine what my life will look like in a few months when I pick up my stakes and move on.

My thoughts turned to adopted families today when I started reflecting on one particular work relationship I have with a professor in Religious studies. I used to think our work relationship could be characterized as the Office Husband/Work Wives dynamic, but I don't think this anymore. I see my need to have him in my life stemming more from a profound need to have a big brother. We had a falling out and we have never talked about it. I was pushed by someone to reflect on why we never talked about it. I don't really have an answer, but I think it is because I just don't want to sort out anymore the complicated emotions that led to that freeze. I have just found myself falling back into a dynamic with him that I had before.

I couldn't help but analyze why I really needed this friendship. After all, I cut him out of my life for a long time. But, the only explanation that I can come up with is that I desperately need a brother. Someone you can tease, joke around with, confess the most embarrassing details about yourself too, count on to be a good uncle and to be there to back me up against bullies. I used to have this with my biological brother, but we moved apart so many years ago. Maybe when I left for college? Maybe when I left for graduate school? Who knows. But, there it is, and so I have adopted a brother to fill this deep need.

So, what I wonder is do any of you have this deep need to adopt family members? If so, where do you think it comes from and, more importantly, why does it seem to manifest in a way that makes up for the loss of an actual relationship? That is, why don't I want to adopt a sister as much as brother? I have dear friends who I love like sisters, but the need to have them in my life seems to fulfill a more general need to have an adopted family. In the case of my adopted brother, it is a very specific and urgent need. Do any of you have this sort of imperative as well?

What if Forgiving Someone only Fuels Their Hatred?

2008-02-18T10:45:00.003-05:00

When I don't post for this long, I seriously toy with the idea of "hanging it up." I no longer prioritize this blog and I certainly don't have the desire or time to update it as much as others. But, just when I am ready to say goodbye to blogging forever, it occurs to me that to give this up is to give up a powerful outlet for my more "philosophical" thoughts that I will never publish or work on in any serious way. I went into the philosophy because of my tendency to reflect quite a bit on the meaning of peoples' behavior or the struggle to make sense of difficult choices, but I learned quickly that these sort of musings aren't really appropriate for research and publishing. Nonetheless, I am still occupied by them and if I don't put them somewhere, I feel lonely--like I have something to share but no one to share it with.

So, I continue. Perhaps not at the pace I once did, but . . .

I spent a lot of time thinking about the theme of forgiveness again this past week. My colleague is flirting with the idea of teaching the Senior Seminar on the topic next year and this got me to thinking again about what I find so difficult and problematic about forgiveness.

To elaborate, let me think out loud about a conversation I had with *I* yesterday about our siblings. Both of us seem to be locked into serious sibling rivalries and yet neither of us perceives ourselves to be in competition with our sibling. Perhaps there are subtle ways in which we are or unconscious ways, but in our everyday mode, we don't think about how accomplishing X or getting recognition for Y will once again establish our superiority over our sibling. Nonetheless, both of our siblings respond to us as if we are trying to make them feel bad about themselves by rubbing our own accomplishments in their face.

In fact, we share this common experience of trying to sincerely compliment our siblings only to have them hear it as haughty and patronizing. And, once they hear it this way, then the attack mode goes in full effect and we find ourselves scrambling to defend ourselves against a portrait they have drawn that we in no way find ourselves captured by. We both do what we are trained to do--marshall good arguments, evidence and "facts" to demonstrate why we are not the people they think we are. But, those tools may work in a ideal world of philosophy argumentation (and let's face it they don't really fare that well there either), but they are no defense against perceptions.

The fact is that sometimes people have perceptions about you that no evidence seems to contradict. To put in the language of logical empiricism, there is no falsifiability principle at work in some peoples' perceptions of us and hence we are rather ineffectual in defending ourselves from them. And, being unable to defend yourself against what you take to be horribly unfair and insulting accusations of you is maddening---especially when the skills you have developed totally fail.

It is this kind of painful situation--magnified because it is in the context of familial ties--that calls for another analysis of forgiveness. What is really needed to ever repair a relationship beset by sibling rivalry is forgiveness on both sides. However, here is the quandary: if I choose to forgive my brother am I only fueling his anger? Damn my ego! I no longer care about defending myself or being right. What is to come of it? I just want peace and more particularly access to the parts of him that I love and miss. But, I can find no way in and nothing I have done ever seems to break his perception of me. He is locked into a narrative that he needs--at least from my standpoint--to fuel because it is doing work for him.

Moving away from my particular failed relationship to more general observations, it seems that when we confront people who need to maintain a certain perception of us, it is because to consider the alternative is way too difficult--it would require looking themselves and the need they have for certain narratives. And, I think we have to accept the probability that this will never occur. Given this state of events, what role does forgiveness play? Is forgiveness possible? Or, would forgiving them only fuel their animosity?

On Treating My Mother With Respect [GUEST POST]

2008-02-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

by Metapsychologist

On September 11, 2001, in the late morning, living on Long Island, I tried phoning my family back home in the UK to speak to them and let them know I was fine. For a while all international phone lines were busy, presumably because everyone else who was living in the USA and came from the UK had the same idea. Eventually I got through, and when my mother answered the phone, she was sobbing. I was surprised, and at first a little moved that she was so upset. Then she explained why she was sobbing: she had taken her cat to the vet that day and he was going to be put down to sleep. She said she couldn't speak any more and put down the phone. I shook my head, and took a deep breath.

My mother had loved that cat, in her own way. She would frequently buy it fresh meat or fish to eat and she would look forward to feeding it. But I never saw it sitting on her lap or spending time with her. I remember watching her playing with it: she had some knitting needles, and she would wave them around while it tried to grab them, which made her laugh a lot. I don't think she ever held the cat, although she may have touched it when it was feeding.

Watching her with the cat made me wonder how she nurtured my sister and me when we were young children. It's very hard to imagine her holding or hugging us, and there are no photographs of us in her arms. She says I used to love it when she read me stories, and that's plausible, although I don't remember it. Watching her with her one year old granddaughter was a little appalling; she would suggest putting the baby in another room if she was crying; and when outside in shopping areas, you couldn't leave her with the pram because she would just wander away from it.

When in my twenties I had the opportunity to leave the UK and pursue graduate work in the USA, it wasn't a difficult choice. Although my mother had been a single mother for a few years after her divorce from my father, she remarried as soon as she could. I wasn't close to her, and saw my visits to her more as a duty than a pleasure. I didn't feel there was much else in the UK to keep me there either. When I eventually spent a few years in psychotherapy, I saw more clearly how I had learned to deal with emotional problems by separating myself from other people, and how I had kept that as a coping mechanism.

My sister remained in the UK and sees my mother more frequently than I do, but for shorter periods. A single mother herself, she finds it difficult to cope with her young daughter and our mother at the same time for more than a few hours. She tends to have a stormier relationship with our mother, getting angry and disappointed by her actions, but she is also often warmer and more loving. When I'm with my mother, I try to close myself down emotionally, and focus on solutions to problems and practical issues.

When I was staying at my mother's most recently, I was talking to my sister on the phone. We were talking about why my mother gets so anxious and starts entertaining such ridiculous fears; that afternoon, because my sister hadn't answered the phone, my mother was worrying that she had got into a car accident, and she left message saying "please phone as soon as you get home, it's very important, I need to know you are safe." Often when my mother does this, my sister is just too busy to phone, or she just doesn't want to deal with it. "Why does she do it?" my sister asked me. I answered quickly, "she's mentally ill." "Can she hear you?" my sister asked, concerned. "I don't know," I replied, "maybe." I didn't really care whether my mother could hear me or not.

I've found myself talking about my mother in the third person more and more while in her presence. Because she has hearing problems, gets confused easily, and does not pay much attention, it's easy to slip into this. Sometimes she wants to be part of a conversation, but it is very difficult to include her. That's especially true for me since I intentionally tell her little about my life. For most of my life, she has had only mild interest. For a long time, she didn't really know what subject I was pursuing a PhD in. So I've long felt there wasn't much point telling my mother much about my life. Now I'm at the stage when I sit down for a meal with her and I find I have nothing to say to her; there's nothing I want to share with her.

In the last decade, my mother has become increasingly negative and anxious, and her attitude doesn't respond to reason. She has often said how awful the modern world is, far worse than ever before. I have tried pointing out that she grew up in Belgium when it was occupied by the Nazis, when they were carrying out persecution of the Jews and killing of millions of people in concentration camps, and she is complaining about how much litter there now is on the streets and how badly young women dress these days. It is like arguing with a person who is depressed: no amount of argument will convince them that things are not as bad as they seem. So after a while, I give up, and when she complains about the state of the world, I just say "oh really?" or "I don't think so."

My sister, because she sees our mother more often and maybe because of a different attitude, tends to share more about her life with her. My sister's a single mother, bring up a young child, and life is a struggle sometimes. This gives plenty of fuel for my mother's fire of worry. She drives herself into a frenzy of anxiety sometimes, but of course, she can be of virtually no practical help. Talking to her on the phone this week, I said, as I do most of the time these days, "It's none of your business, she is a grown woman, she can cope on her own, you are not helping her with your worry, focus on helping yourself." It doesn't do much good. Today she said to me, "I am so worried, and no one tells me why I should not worry. Nobody gives me that much courtesy." She's right in a sense; we all know that nothing we say will stop her worrying, so we stop trying to explain much, and just tell her not to worry, or try to change the subject.

In practical terms, I don't think there's much else we can do. It's not very clear why my mother is in the emotional state she is, and there's little to be done to change it, at this stage at least. My concern here is more about a point of principle. It's that it is impossible to respect my mother, at least in the way she wants. There's a lifetime of frustration behind this. Whatever the causes, for much our childhood, she wasn't nurturing, she didn't show much interest, she didn't create a secure attachment. When I read, for example, about Mary Ainsworth's "strange situation" experiments in the 1960s, I think of myself when I was a child as anxious-ambivalent or anxious-avoidant. Of course, I'm an adult now, and she turns to me for help and security. Several years of psychotherapy made me more able to put the past into perspective. Therapists have urged to see my issues with my mother as psychological and emotional, something for me to get past. Doubtless, psychological coping skills, such as taking a deep breath before reacting to her, are very useful.

Nevertheless, I also see an ethical problem. My mother certainly has emotional problems, and doctors have seen fit to put her on a mood stabilizer, indicating a diagnosis of chronic mental illness. But not everything she ever did was a symptom of a mental illness, and her emotional profile is very much part of her permanent personality. As she gets older and more confused, it feels as if the problems become worse, or less mitigated by her positive character traits, but there's a strong continuity between my mother now and how she has been her whole life. There's no simple separation between the healthy part of her and the mentally ill part. I'm not sure there's any separation to be made at all.

When I say "she has these worries because she is mentally ill," this is more a way of dealing with the situation, or putting it to one side, rather than a well-justified explanation. I treat my mother as emotionally disabled because that's what works for me and I don't have any better way of coping. It helps reduce my feelings of frustration and anger. But it also means giving up on the hope of better communication or a more authentic relationship.

I wonder sometimes whether there isn't some other way to conceptualize the past, to understand her life as a mother, and the role that mental illness has played in it. Reflecting on my relationship with my mother makes me acutely aware of the complexities and uncertainties of how we hold people with mental illnesses responsible for their actions, and the difficulties of establishing satisfactory relationships with them. Most people with mentally ill relatives grapple with these issues, yet there's not enough discussion of how they work them through.

Link to previous blog post: Let me tell you about my mother.

Super Tuesday Round-up

2008-02-05T09:22:00.000-05:00

A lot of interesting bits coming over the transom today from the many listservs to which I belong. First of all there is this endorsement of Barack Obama by Joan Baez in the SFChron:

Leader on a new journey

Editor - I have attempted throughout my life to give a voice to the voiceless, hope to the hopeless, encouragement to the discouraged, and options to the cynical and complacent. From Northern Ireland to Sarajevo to Latin America, I have sung and marched, engaged in civil disobedience, visited war zones, and broken bread with those who had little bread to break.

Through all those years, I chose not to engage in party politics. Though I was asked many times to endorse candidates at every level, I was never comfortable doing so. At this time, however, changing that posture feels like the responsible thing to do. If anyone can navigate the contaminated waters of Washington, lift up the poor, and appeal to the rich to share their wealth, it is Sen. Barack Obama. If anyone can bring light to the darkened corners of this nation and restore our positive influence in world affairs, it is Barack Obama. If anyone can begin the process of healing and bring unity to a country that has been divided for too long, it is Barack Obama. It is time to begin a new journey.

JOAN BAEZ

Menlo Park

I wonder how California will go today. My mom's wing of the SEIU union is endorsing Obama now that Edwards is out. I hear that Berkeley is awash in Obama flyers and posters. But, Sacramento and Berkeley do not represent the whole state and the prediction is CA will go to Hillary. But, who knows?

Also, Nancy Fraser, a well-known feminist philosopher wrote this for Tikkun:

Hillary or Barack?
Two Views of Feminism by Nancy Fraser

I was distressed to read that the President of NY State N.O.W. excoriated Ted Kennedy for "betraying women" by endorsing Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton (NYT, 2/1/08). But I was not entirely surprised. That view reflects what has by now become the mainstream self-understanding of American feminism as a political interest group. To the extent that feminists understand themselves in this way, as defending women's policy interests within the existing framework of politics-as-usual, they have found an excellent standard-bearer in Hillary Clinton. But that is not the only way to understand feminism. Not so long ago, many of us saw ourselves as participants in a transformative social movement, which aspired to remake the political landscape. Intent more on changing the rules of the game than on playing it as it lays, we mobilized energies from below to stretch the bounds of what was politically thinkable. Expanding public space and invigorating public debate, our movement projected, not a laundry list of demands, but the inspiriting vision of a non-hierarchical society that nurtured both human connections and individual freedom. Some feminists continue to cleave to that self-understanding. For us, Barack Obama represents a better vehicle for feminist aspirations than Hillary Clinton. The democratizing energies now converging on him promise to create the terrain on which our sort of feminism can once again flourish. Drawing its momentum from activist forces, and inspiring the latter in turn, the Obama compaign offers feminists, and other progressive forces, that rarest of political opportunities: the chance to help build and shape a major realignment of American politics. That is a prospect worthy of the best and the highest in American feminism.

Nancy Fraser
Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics
New School for Social Research

So, what do you think we will find out today about the Democratic nominee, if anything?

Secondly, what do you think of the many endorsements for Barack Obama that compare him to JFK?

Working Mom

2008-02-01T15:40:00.000-05:00

A friend, who is pregnant and after giving birth will need to return to work quite quickly, asked me to read this piece at Salon today. She also encouraged me to write some about my return to work and how to achieve that mystical balance that countless parenting magazines (aimed primarily at women, I might add) speak about.

Upon finishing up this woman's "Dear Cary" letter, I found myself feeling a bit disconnected from her worldview. It's not that I don't understand or respect where she is coming from--not wanting the role of mother be the primary role by which one identifies oneself--but rather my own views about being a mother and a mother who works outside the home have morphed quite a bit. Not too long ago, right after Maddie was born, I was writing feverishly that I didn't want to lose my identity as a Philosophy professor--as someone engaged with not only the public, but with ideas. Almost everytime I wrote something like that, I would be met with comments that warned me how much I would miss my daughter when I was back and work and how hard it would be to miss out on so many of her daily changes. I think that these kinds of comments might be what fuels the "Dear Cary" letter that this woman writes.

While my ideas about being a working mom or even the "role" or "identity" of mother have changed, they most certainly have not come around to embrace the rather scolding tone of women who warn that going back to work is a travesty or that it results in a disconnection from your child.

To be frank, this has not been my experience in the least. I am gratified to be back at work now and Maddie is really thriving in daycare. We leave for work together and she gets excited when I put her in her car seat. She loves the women who care for her and is starting to play with other babies. I love peeking in on her and seeing her smiling widely and reaching out to touch another little one. Don't get me wrong. The first few days were really hard, especially since she had been with me 24/7. I am also lucky that my daycare is on site and so I can walk over and see her whenever I want. I tend to nurse her on my lunch hours.

The way in which I feel disconnected from this Salon piece lies in the anxiety and anger that the woman writing it exhibits. I was there once. I felt really defensive and in need of staking my ground against a wave of sentiment that having a child and trying to maintain my pre-child identity was impossible. Now that I am doing it--working and mothering--I don't have any time or energy to care one wit about moralistic parents who think I am a bad or soon to be disappointed mom.

[Side-note: in a conversation with Hanno I realized why some women might opt out. The first few days (or longer) of daycare transition can be so difficult that some women might not have the ability to stand it and therefore they leave their job. This was never an option for me.]

I take such delight in my time a work. When I am at work, I am more than a mom. In public, with Maddie, I am practically invisible. Strangers or acquaintances are drawn to her and if they speak to me it is only to learn about her and how I am doing with my little one. I am not, however, resentful of this invisibility. I would rather look at and talk about Maddie too, who can blame them. I am a proud mama and delight in showing her off. But, before returning to work, I tired of having that sort of connection be my only way of relating to others.

When I am at work, I am a more complicated person. But let me first say that I am a mom and I love talking about that in my classes or working it in somehow. I think that being a mom is very important to my identity and that it should be reclaimed and praised. Becoming a mother has made me more interested and attentive to the larger world around me than ever before. Pre-mom I was pretty solipsistic (maybe narcissistic). I care more about politics, the economy, education, the environment, the difficulties of my students . . . you name it . . .with greater passion than ever. The world I live in now is the world Maddie will grow up in. So, I care about that world and the people in it a great deal more than I did.

At work, I am also a silly, whimsical, hyper woman who loves to talk about fashion and catch up on friends' love lives. That part of me doesn't get eclipsed by Maddie's presence. I am also someone who knows a great deal about what she is teaching and therefore students see me as, hopefully, an intellectual engaged in the world and interested in their own intellectual development. I am grateful--so grateful--that I have the space of work to be this person.

Having said that, I am tired and rarely well prepared for my classes. I wing it most of the time. I find it hard to do anything beyond my classes--i.e. write on my blog. When I go home, I know that I have several more hours to be "on," unlike before when I would go home after a day at work and do mindless activities. Sleep is so important to me now that I get bummed out when Za wants to "talk." I use to love that, now I love sleeping.

One of the upsides of having little time and sleep is that I just don't care anymore about being the "perfect" professor and scholar. I know things, I can communicate them, and I don't have to make my lectures or writing impeccable. I look around at my new female colleagues who are equally sleep deprived, but not from being mothers, but from worrying that they have to over prepare to earn the respect of students. I see now that that labor is decidedly not what earns the respect of students (but that is another post).

I guess if there is one thing I want to emphasize in this post about how my worldview differs from the "Dear Cary" letter writers' it is that being a "mom" is never just about being hermetically sealed up with your children. Children open the world to you and get you out in the world more than ever. So, the fact that being a mom has become associated with a kind of shut inness is just plain wrong-headed.

So, let's reclaim "mom" to connote cosmopolitan, worldly, publicly engaged and throw away, once and for all, the outmoded view that moms are nothing more than the emotional and nutritional providers for their children.

To sound trite--every mother is a working mother.

Is Feminine Writing about Storytelling?

2008-01-31T09:23:00.000-05:00

For a few days I have been ruminating a lot on what might be the differences between "masculine" and "feminine" writing. I am choosing to think of this in terms of gender roles rather than strict sex differences, because I know plenty of women who write--in what I will below articulate--as "masculine" voices and vice versa.

This whole "intuition"--because I am a philosopher, I don't do studies--came to me after I finished writing a grant. My male colleague in Psychology--who is masculine in very traditional ways--also wrote a grant for the same reason; we are co-teaching a course and looking for support. Anyway, when I reviewed his grant and compared it to mine, I was struck by how succinct, pared down, and downright terse it was in comparison to mine. I started to panic. That devil--self-doubt--creeped in and sent me into a spiral of fear and loathing. (Isn't amazing how writing for the public can do that so regularly?) I showed my version of the grant to a male colleage (who, tends to write in a more "feminine" mode) and he led me to the kernel of my intuition about gender differences in writing.

The first thing he said about my grant in comparison to my male colleagues' was that it read like I was telling a story. His reaction carried me back to a conversation I had years ago with a former colleague from the French department. We were discussing what kind of writing we liked better: the New Yorker with its long, sprawling stories or the terseness of the Economist. My French colleague preferred the latter because, "I just want the facts."

And in traveling back to this memory, I was jarred to reflect on a more recent conversation with Za, wherein he was gearing himself to complete some paperwork and relishing the idea of making his answers as succinct and terse as possible.

So, I thought about how much the stripped down writing--no run-on sentences, no unnecessary adjectives, no extra stuff--is generally more praised in our culture (Hemingwayesque). I have always resisted this kind of writing. I find it very hard to do well and yet so much of my own discipline hangs on this ability of getting at the core, the nub of the argument, cutting out what is unnecessary and extraneous to meaning.

So, why do I write like a storyteller? I guess I attribute it to my very traditionally feminine nature. I like to communicate--I like relate with my speaker, create a community, forge a relationship. I don't try to master the content--leave some openings--allow for the other to help shape what I want to communicate so that I can be sure that I am not being misunderstood. Granted, the terse style probably has the last goal as its primary aim--to not be misunderstood. But, the very terseness and bareness of this mode of expression is precisely what leaves me totally confused by what the writer means. I want examples; I want to know how to use this concept.

So, I guess my hypothesis about gender differences in writing is that women write long, sprawling stories that aim to communicate (and at times annoy more masculine writers and readers), while men aim for economy and clarity.

What do you think?

Let Me Tell You About My Mother [Guest Post]

2008-01-29T08:35:00.000-05:00

By Metapsychologist

I see my mother two or three times a year. Every time I come from the US to visit her in Britain, I spend a few days explaining to her how to use her TV and VCR. Now 77, she wants to be able to watch her videos but she gets very confused. To add to her problems, the UK has recently converted to digital TV, which means now she has a new remote control to struggle with. So now there's the TV remote, the VCR remote, and the Digital TV Box remote. The buttons are little and she has difficult pressing the right buttons. When she does press them, she holds them down hard for minute or so. Each time she has more difficulty learning new information, and makes the same mistakes again and again. Telling her to press the buttons gently and quickly doesn't do any good. The remotes are not designed with people like my mother in mind. Instead of words, the little buttons have little symbols on them. I have drawn much larger pictures of the remotes on pieces of paper with words explaining what the different buttons do, but these pictures don't help much. I wrote a list of instructions about how to turn on the TV and the Digital TV Box and select the desired channel, splitting up the procedure into several steps, but that's pretty confusing. I wrote another list of instructions about how to use the VCR, but after practicing for four days, she still gets confused. I doubt she will be able to watch many videos in the coming months. The whole process of explaining how to use the TV and VCR requires a great deal of patience -- generally more than I have. She was never very adept with this sort of technology, but clearly her abilities to remember and follow instructions have become worse. I tell her she needs to turn on the VCR, and she looks at me blankly. Occasionally she succeeds in playing a video, and sometimes she gets so frustrated she says she is just going to give away her video collection. I wonder why it is not possible to buy a TV/VCR combination designed for older people, but then I remember that VHS videos players aren't even for sale any more in the UK. My sister has suggested that my mother get a DVD player, but I tell them there is no way she could ever work out how to use it. Even if we could find a more user-friendly machine, my mother wouldn't be willing to pay for one, and she would get confused by having a totally new piece of technology in the home -- she is confused enough by the ones she has had for several years.

My mother's always had difficulty with technology. According to my father, forty years ago my mother had about one hundred driving lessons, and then the driving instructor gave up, saying that after a hundred lessons, she still didn't know where to put the key to turn on the ignition. She has often had problems with manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination too, yet she was able to use an electric typewriter for many years. She is able to use a telephone without too much trouble. So it's hard to know exactly what the problem is.
My mother has many skills and is able to cope on her own. She has always loved reading, and she often goes to see the latest art movies. She speaks several languages. She is often good at getting other people to help her, and she has some old friends. She had two marriages and two children. She strikes many as being full of emotion, charismatic and caring. One woman she knows recently described her as having a heart of gold.

I see her rather differently: she was rarely attentive to me or my sister when we were growing up, and in many ways has always been mainly concerned with herself. Everyone who has ever lived with her has ended up shouting at her, and on a regular basis. She makes people close to her angry with her, generally by asking what they want, and then completely ignoring what they just said and doing what she wants. Maybe she means well, but she is deeply frustrating.
She's a physically small woman, but she drinks a fair amount of wine, often starting well before lunch and going all day. Occasionally, with the encouragement and nagging of others, she cuts down a little but soon she goes back to her regular amounts. Her alcoholic father died in a psychiatric institution, a fact that she occasionally mentions, possibly with the thought that she may face the same fate. I don't know what psychiatric diagnosis she has, but I do know she takes a mood stabilizer, and has done so for nearly forty years. Her two sisters, both younger, have also had their share of psychiatric problems: one is a non-stop talker for every single minute she is awake, and made a suicide attempt at one point; the other has had significant problems with agoraphobia and depression. Their mother never got a diagnosis, but apparently she was so eccentric that her daughters would never bring their friends back home in case their mother embarrassed them.

Talking about my mother with others, I speculate about possible causes of her cognitive and emotional problems. We can come up with a long list of possible explanations: manic depression, attention deficit, learning disorders, her abusive father, the death of her mother, postpartum depression after the birth of my sister, Asperger's syndrome, alcohol abuse, Korsakoff's syndrome, decades of taking lithium carbonate on top of a steady diet of alcohol, her husbands, loneliness, Alzheimer's, or possibly some kind of brain damage. She's been evaluated by mental health professionals, but they don't invest much time in subtle diagnostic issues; she is stable on her current medication and on the occasions she has stopped taking her lithium, she has become more difficult. She is not motivated to try any other forms of treatment, and it is very hard to imagine any kind of talk therapy being of any possible use. She's not willing to make much effort to reduce her alcohol consumption. She might benefit from some kind of social services or community support, but so far she has turned down all the options available.

My mother is gradually declining in her abilities to think clearly and look after herself well enough to live independently, but she wants to keep living where she is. She keeps herself busy when she can, volunteering at a local charity store, playing cards with other people, seeing old friends very occasionally. She has a granddaughter, but she isn't really very interested in the little girl, and wonders why the girl makes so much noise. Certainly she can't help babysit or in other ways, and when my sister sees my mother with her granddaughter, it looks as if my mother never had anything called maternal instinct. So my mother spends a great deal of time alone, fretting about Princess Diana, little baby Madeline, and the latest human interest stories on the news. When I visit, I do what I can to help her, but there's only a certain amount one can do to help someone who is unwilling or unable to help themselves. As with many people with aging parents, I wonder what the future will bring, and find it hard to be optimistic. At some point, we will probably decide that she isn't able to live on her own, and then we will have to work out what to do next. We are already exploring the options.

So there's little to be done but do what I'm already doing and hope for the best. Without someone to help her, my mother will struggle on her own. She'll get out the instructions and try to work out which remote is which, and what she should do after she puts the video into the machine. Hopefully she will have turned on the TV first. There's nothing more I can do to help, at least until my next visit.

We Need Empathy: Reflections on Roe

2008-01-28T07:36:00.000-05:00

I missed the opportunity to blog about Roe's 35th anniversary last week. I just couldn't bring myself to say anything else about the issue of women's reproductive rights in this country. Many other bloggers wrote important pieces reminding us how much the right wing in this country keeps chipping away at Roe. Alternet rounded up many of the best posts. What strikes me as important to always keep in mind as folks line up on one side or another of Roe, is that this issue is about real women facing really difficult choices.

I learned that one of my best students traveled down to join the March for Life in front of the SCOTUS. I shouldn't have been surprised. I knew she was a devoted Catholic. But, I was disappointed nonetheless. I spent the weekend thinking about why I was so disappointed by this news, and it occurred to me that it couldn't really have anything to do specifically with her. After all, I don't know her reasons for taking off from school to join that march. She might have a really important story or good reasons for protesting abortion. Knowing her compassion and kind heart, I am sure that her reasons for protesting are hard to criticize.

So, her participation in this event helped remind me that people I so admire nonetheless reject abortion. And, it is precisely because I know that many of these folks are so genuinely admirable, moral, and caring people that I fully understand why Roe is such a divisive issue. So, the passing of Roe's birthday is not just a cause for celebrating the gains women have made in reproductive health, but it is an opportunity to remember the humanity of those who oppose Roe.

It is all too easy to attack the strawman, and paint all those who oppose Roe and abortion as women-hating folks. There is no doubt that what is troubling about most of the "Pro-life" groups is their total rejection of measures that would decrease the rates of unwanted pregnancies, e.g. supporting access to contraception and comprehensive sex education. Many religious figures leading the "Pro-life" movement advocate overturning Connecticut vs. Griswold, upholding the rights of pharmacists to refuse to fill birth control prescriptions, discrediting a right to privacy, and the rights of hospitals to refuse Plan B to rape victims. All of this is true. But, the many many supporters of the Pro-life movement, like my students aren't marching to deny women resources, help, services and their humanity.

When I put myself in the place of my student--and I don't know her real reasons since I am not going to shout her down or force her into a debate with me--I imagine that part of her passion for overturning Roe comes from a love of children and the gifts they bring. There are surely moments in my life when I think that there is nothing more precious than a baby, nothing so life-transforming in ways that I could've never imagined. But of course, that is wholly from my context, my experience, and my situation. I have to also admit, that if defending abortion was solely about defending a practice to end pregnancies from reckless sexual encounters, I would reject it as well. I worry that so many who protest abortion think that this is what they are protesting--reckless action that leads to the termination of a precious life. Man, who wouldn't oppose abortion if that was the story. But, it's not.

We will never get anywhere with this issue in American politics if we can't find a way to talk to each other--not shout talking points or slogans--about our views. And, when I mean talk to each other, I mean really communicate--bring into existence a community. We need to find a way to see ourselves as connected to each other and sensitive to the difficult life choices we might face. We need to talk from our experience and learn from each other. We need to widen our horizons and recognize that people face things that we can never imagine. We need more empathy.

On a related note, I was just talking to my colleague about judicial philosophies this morning. A student--who is partial to the rigid principled stance of Scalia--was writing a thesis that was in essence a total rejection of the more pragmatic judicial philosophy of Sandra Day O'Connor. I found myself really wondering why it is so attractive to have a rigid, black and white, worldview like Scalia. I mean, I guess if you are Scalia you don't have to think much about the nitty-gritty details of life--the grey, the ambiguity. You can just apply your principles from a distant and high perch. What appeals to me so much about a more pragmatic approach--and I don't really count Sandra Day O'Connor as my model here--is that it reflects the difficult nature of real decisions that we face in our lives. We can be perfectly moral and consistent without relying on such spare, decontextualized moral principles. Until radical conservatives understand that point, we will be unable to have a meaningful dialogue about the messy issues that beset our lives.

Happy Friday--Oh Yea

2008-01-18T18:17:00.001-05:00

Back to Work--You Tubing in the Classroom

2008-01-17T14:23:00.000-05:00

I am officially a working mum. I just completed my first day back to work after Maddie. I experienced some really embarrassing "mommy brain" moments earlier today. First of all, Za gave me my car key and I put it away in my purse and completely forgot the whole exchange. I called him up huffing and puffing--"where is my car key?" He reminded me in detail of when, where and what I was doing when he gave me the key. I insisted he was wrong, until I looked in my purse and with great embarrassment, found sitting there. Then, as I was off to class I asked our Administrative Assistant if I could borrow her keys to open up the cabinet with the computer. I said "I totally forgot to bring my keys into day," to which she responded, "well, how did you get in your office?" Blush. I was totally embarrased by this exchange.

Despite my challenged short-term memory, things got off to a great start. I enjoyed my new students, I am excited about the material, and feel right back in the swing of things We'll see how things last.

On a totally unrelated note, I spent some time surfing You Tube to find fun bits to use in my Kant and the 19th Century class. I found some real gems, which I will link to here.

Does anyone else use You Tube in the classroom? I am specifically interested in folks who might have encouraged students to do assignments that ended up on You Tube.

Is Motherhood a Point of Intersection?

2008-01-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

SteveG forwarded me the link to this discussion on Democracy Now!: The War and Peace Report between Gloria Steinem and Melissa Harris-Lacewell. I was able to watch 3/4 of the show until Maddie had enough and wanted to do something more fun. But, from what I did catch, I must report that I found myself adrift in a sea of very complicated emotions. I don't know how to say it, but Harris-Lacewell emasculated Gloria Steinem.

She began by telling Steinem how appalled she was by her Op-ed piece and never let up from there. Many times she referred to Steinem's piece as the worst example of what is wrong with 2nd Wave Feminism. [I take it that she is representing 3rd Wave Feminism, a wave that I have never fully comprehended. I guess I don't see us having resolved the major political issues of the 2nd Wave: Equal Pay, Reproductive Rights, Affordable and Quality Daycare, Pornography, Domestic Violence, Affordable Housing, Humane Welfare Policies, Fighting Environmental Racism, Fighting Homophobia. . . If anything, we have seen a real push back on whatever gains were made by the right wing in this country.]

What did make a great deal of sense to me about Harris-Lacewell's position was to point out why intersectionality theory is more powerful for unraveling the complex ways in which race, class and gender are fundamentally intertwined in the United States. Harris-Lacewell made the compelling argument--that so many others have in the past few days against Steinmen--that appropriating the experience of black women--or their positionality--to suggest that sexism is more potent in the United States than racism is appalling. If anything, black women's experiences show how complicated these forces are;they cannot be disentangled. Whenever they are, an Oppression Olympics kind of discussion usually follows. I think she is dead on.

What bothered me, however, was the adversarial nature of the conversation. Call me an overly conflict-phobic whitebread chick, but I didn't see the value in the aggression. Gloria Steinem, however, didn't help her case. She didn't seem to complete a thought; was not capable of defending herself well and generally backed down. But what was accomplished in this discussion? What I couldn't figure out was: is this a discussion about the persistent tensions and obstacles in feminism--why women cannot seem to unite around concrete goals and policies due to the failures to think through more effectively the intersectionality of race, class or gender? Or, was this an argument over why feminists who support Clinton and see her as standing up for all women are wrong? Was this a theoretical discussion? I don't think so.

When I first started blogging about HRC after the Iowa causes, I found myself disappointed in Clinton's loss because now that I had a daughter, I wanted to her to see a woman become president. And, then I go look at Harris-Lacewell's blog and she writes the following:

I am mad because on the night that Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses, I was in a crummy hotel room in Manchester, N.H. I was there with two dozen college students who came to work the primaries and see American democracy in action. Many of them were propelled to their first political action as a result of Obama’s campaign. I also brought my 5-year-old daughter, Parker, because I wanted her to take part in this historic election. When the Obama family took the stage in Iowa to perform the traditional presidential wave, I could not resist waking Parker from her sleep so that she could watch Barack, Michelle, and their daughters. “Look at the beautiful black girls who might get to live in the White House,” I told her as I held her sleepy head in my hands. Whatever authenticity anxieties the American media conjured last year, Barack’s Iowa triumph was unreservedly a moment of racial pride. Parker spent the rest of the week proudly carrying an Obama rally sign all over New Hampshire. Last night, I had to explain Obama’s loss. She wanted to know if his daughters were as sad as she was.

I read this and I think, man, aren't Harris-Lacewell and I both projecting a lot of hope and dreams onto these candidates--whether HRC or Obama--to make a new day for our daughters? She wants her daughter to grow up with racial pride; I want my daughter to grow up knowing that being a smart, competitive, and ambitious woman should not result in misogynistic attacks. Can Harris-Lacewell and I find a point of intersection in our hopes as mothers for a different world for our daughters. Can we start there? Then, can we talk about what leads us to be drawn to one candidate over another--why we find this choice often difficult because we see so many great options out there? Can we talk about how sometimes certain aspects of our identity tend to rise in importance in relations to others? Context matters. There is no easy decision to make her as feminists. That if we find a partiality toward HRC, we aren't just part of the same ole Middle-Class, White, Eurocentric narrative in this country?

I can't help but wonder if the vitriol that is likely to pit feminist against feminist--lead to charges of white guilt and/or identity politics--is the result not of the personalities and policies of Obama or HRC, but the winner-take-all political system? We are being forced to pick our candidates (and despite what my posts say, I really don't know yet who I will support) and then go on the attack of those who have rallied around another. We are put into a bind where we are feeling guilty if we are drawn--for not wholly rational, pragmatic, or political reasons--to a candidate.

I am finding it hard to continue writing this post because for almost every sentence I construct, I can already anticipate the arguments that will be made against me--even the attacks. So, I will stop and see what others think . . .

It's OK to be a Girl?

2008-01-11T10:46:00.000-05:00

Two very different takes on the meta-meaning of Hillary's teary-eyedness worth discussing. First of all, Judith Warner, blogger for NYT, argues that Hillary's melt down and the support it garnered among women is a bad omen for women in general. She writes:

I don’t for a moment begrudge Hillary her victory on Tuesday. But if victory came for the reasons we’ve been led to believe – because women voters ultimately saw in her, exhausted and near defeat, a countenance that mirrored their own – then I hate what that victory says about the state of their lives and the nature of the emotions they carry forward into this race. I hate the thought that women feel beaten down, backed into a corner, overwhelmed and near to breaking point, as Hillary appeared to be in the debate Saturday night. And I hate even more that they’ve got to see a strong, smart and savvy woman cut down to size before they can embrace her as one of their own. (my emphasis)

The overarching point of Warner's post seems to be that "feeling without thinking"--a no no that even the young Hillary Rodham decried--is a horrible basis upon which to vote for a candidate, whether that be HRC or others. I am partially sympathetic to this view, due to my philosophical training. Warner wants to say--I think--that women voting for HRC because they are beaten down by entrenched sexist institutions and attitudes and want to know that she is beaten down too is--well--ressentiment. The worst instincts among women lead to her win; only when she was down in the mud, enfeebled, weakened, and exhausted did she win them over.

I am not sure I like Warner's read of the situation. Since I am clearly someone who was warmed by Hillary's emotionality, I want to disagree that it was my need to see a savvy woman break down that made me a fan. I felt warmth from her. I saw her passion, her kindness and gratefulness in the face of what she took as concern (even if Warner shows us that it wasn't). If I may be so bold, it wasn't just her humanity that warmed me. It was her femininity. The softer, feminine emotions that she displayed made me hopeful that one day it may be OK for women to be able to display a range of emotions--even girlfriend bonding type stuff--and still be respected as competent. I want to say hurrah! It is OK for women to shed the armour, to drop their guard, and just be women. Do we really have to always act like men to be taken seriously. And, even if we are taken seriously, do we have to also be called a bitch on top of it?

I much prefer Mary Schmich's--of wear sunscreen fame-column. (H/T Specialk). I like her no nonsense advice and her take that Hillary needs to be careful not to lose the real message from the rallying support after her emotional display:

May we offer our thoughts?

*Get some sleep. We believe that sleep deprivation -- not political calculation or self-pity or weakness -- caused your mini-melt in New Hampshire on Monday. We can relate. We've all had those days, when the mind or the body crumples from fatigue.

As luck would have it, exhaustion served you well this week. That little crack in your voice apparently opened new vistas to voters. They saw a passionate, compassionate aspect of you often described by people who have met you but too seldom seen by those who know you only on a page or screen.

Even better, the mini-melt stirred a sexist overreaction ("Look! The wimpy girl is crying!") that ignited a counterreaction among women, especially middle-aged and older, who are tired of seeing you mocked for the way you dress, laugh or almost cry.

In general, however, lack of sleep causes errors. You can't afford one now.

*No need to tell us again that in New Hampshire you found your voice. Avoid the temptation to turn a natural moment into a stilted new script. Just use your new, true voice.

Be more conversational in your speeches.

You're never going to be a Baptist preacher, you're never going to be black, and you're never going to be a man, so don't try to impersonate them. When you do, you sound strained. When you sound strained, it makes us tense, or worse.

*Relax. If you could relax a little more, so could we. Have you tried meditation? Deep breathing? How about more exercise?

*Keep pointing out that you have had a wider range of political and policy experience than Barack Obama. Point out inconsistencies in what he says and does. But don't insult him. Never be snide.

Even people who don't support Obama tend to like him. Some of the same ones who rallied to you when they felt you were under sexist siege will rally to him if he's attacked.

*Find new ways to reach younger women.

Women over 45 -- who voted for you in Iowa and New Hampshire -- know that a woman born in 1947 has had to bust through brick walls with her head to achieve public power. Women close to your age have bumped into similar barriers, so they know how extraordinary your success is.

Younger women may understand, kind of. From history class. Or their mother's lectures. But they're unlikely to feel in their gut how amazing your journey has been and how much opportunity the trailblazing of women your age has opened to them. So the public toughness you've cultivated strikes many of them as rigid, bellicose, haughty, old, weird.

Let them see more of you at their age -- the personable college student who fought for civil rights; the law student who worked to protect abused children; the new mother with a job.

Show them that you were once a young woman like them -- one who wanted to change the world.

*More Chelsea in your campaign, less Bill.

*Really, less Bill. Everybody knows he's your husband. Everybody knows he was the president. No further reminder needed. Now you need to prove that you can fly alone.

*Be yourself. You're a wonk. Go for it.

By many reports, you're also down-to-earth and funny. Go for that, too.

*Resist fighting cynicism with cynicism, snark with snark. Among media pundits, snark and cynicism are the paving stones on the road to glory. Not so for politicians.

Your tone was perfect in the recent debate after the moderator asked what you'd say to voters who don't find you likable.

We liked how you answered wryly, but not sarcastically, "Well, that hurts my feelings."

*One final tip: Don't always obey your advisers.

I think Schmich is right to stress that she needs to stop obeying her advisers who apparently tell her to hide her warmth, likability, and humor (see kos). I also like her advice that she find ways to connect with young women voters who aren't as likely to know what a feat her success is.

Thoughts?

The Problem of Choosing from Personal Experience

2008-01-10T14:15:00.000-05:00

Lesboprof alerted me to this powerful and humbling post by AngryBlackBitch which brought me back to reality and reminded me how dangerous it is to get swept up in my own personal wishes and experience. I read Steinem's Op-ed and for better or worse parts of it really resonated with me. Her early rhetorical question--would a woman with Obama's qualifications become a front runner in the Presidential race--stopped me in my tracks. The questions conjured up the image of Carol Moseley-Brown--to me the most eloquent of the Democratic candidates running for the nomination in 2004. Every time she spoke, I agreed with her. She was far more qualified than Obama is now and didn't have a chance. But, as *I* reminded me in the comments to yesterday's post, not everyone is likely to answer a rhetorical question the way the author intends it. It is risky to start off that way, and doing so, Steinem did a poor job making her case. Perhaps, she consciously structured her Op-Ed to fire up women like me. If so, very Karl Rovian.

The second part of her piece that really resonated with me was the following paragraph:

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what (my emphasis).

In the past few days I have found myself surprisingly sympathetic to Clinton's candidacy. More than I thought I would. I shared the sentiment that *71* has: we didn't need another political dynasty. But, when she lost in Iowa, I was sincerely bummed. I tried to articulate it here, but I couldn't justify my support for her even when I set down to write it out. Upon greater reflection and thinking of those words bolded above, my support for Clinton comes precisely out of the social location I find myself in. I am a mother and a working woman, in a heavily male dominated field. I aspire to have greater roles of leadership someday, and I don't want to be called cold, calculating, robotic, power-hungry, or a bitch. The very qualities I admire in someone like HRC--very smart, very very articulate, very strategic, and ambitious--are precisely the qualities that so fully turn off others. I must say, however, that I do distinguish between those who reject HRC's political decisions, votes, centrist instincts, and corporate money taking from those who reject her because she is a cold, calculating, power hungry bitch who doesn't want to bake cookies. The former camp are my friends, people I respect, and people who truly challenge my support of Clinton. The latter camp is precisely what keeps redoubling my commitment to her during this primary process.

I am like many women who have had it with this sexist bullshit. I think *I* was dead on in the comments when she clarified what I thought was true in Steinem's piece. It is not that racism is not tolerated. Rather OVERT racism is not tolerated. There is no doubt that lots of structural racism, de facto segregation, and covert racism continues in this country without enough outrage. I was thinking about OVERT sexism and racism. The kinds of sexist comments that pundits make don't raise hackles nearly as much as Don Imus's comments did months ago. So, like many women trying to be ambitious, successful and a good mother, I got sick of the small box that I saw Hillary getting shoved into. Even my own father said--only half joking--that the reason most men his age won't vote for Hillary is because she reminds them of their first wives.

I don't have any ability to save Steinem's Op-Ed from Angry Black Bitch's eloquent rebuttal. I can see why Lesboprof and *I* are disappointed with Steinem. And, I wonder if I have been easily manipulated in this political process--after all--that is the game. I am very wary of stepping into the minefield of trying to figure out what holds us back more: race, class, sexual orientation, gender or ableness. I read Steinem say we shouldn't do it and skipped completely the subtext of the piece, which is indeed an attempt to prioritize feminist (white) issues over race.

I guess at this point, I want to open up this discussion and hear more from others.

I'm Thrilled.

2008-01-09T09:10:00.001-05:00

I'm thrilled. I can't hide it. The more negative press, the more sexism that creeps in against Clinton, the more I am behind her. Damn it, we need our first female president. (Having said that, I won't be upset if either Obama or Edwards win).
I was away for the past few days so I missed the footage of Hillary's teary-eyed declaration, but caught it on You Tube last night while watching the returns on CNN. I had heard about this from NPR, but in a manner that incensed me. The report was that many linguists were going to be hired to determine if her display of emotionality was in fact real. That was it. It was precisely at that moment that I wiped my hands with the wave of negative reporting and pot shots at Clinton. I would love to see many of those critics try to undergo what she does every day and see how well they weather it. When I saw her on Stephanopolus a few weeks ago, I admired how masterfully she was able to shake off the intense mudslinging with a "what do you expect George." I am not sure I have that kind of thick skin.

She is being tested and in ways that the male candidates aren't, nor will be. See Echidne on her blasting of Maureen Dowd and her analysis of Steinem's claim that sexism isn't taken as seriously as racism in this country. Well, the women voters have had enough of this crap.

Now, back to her "emotionality" that seeped through or how she put it: "I found my own voice." I was sincerely moved. I did not see this as scripted. She let us all in on the weariness she must feel and the passion with which she is pitching this battle. I am clearly not alone in my reaction to this.

I am not an ultra left winger. I have always been a big fan of Bill Clinton and was impressed with Hillary from the first time I heard her speak on my college campus in 1992. She is a woman that I would like to be; she is articulate, smart, and tough.

In the final analysis, this election--for me--is about the Supreme Court. The next President will determine if the SCOTUS will be lost to the Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas camp. I want a President who appoint a SCOTUS justice that will push back on last year's decisions, particularly the chipping away at Roe, the undermining of equal pay for equal work, and the de facto (de jure?) segregation of schools. Would Clinton appoint that kind of justice? Yes. Will she appoint a woman? Yes. So, there it is.

OK. Let's hear it . . . your incredulity with my view, your support, your confusion. It's all good.

UPDATE: And here is the co-chair of Obama's campaign doing everything but accusing HRC of faking her tears. Check out Melissa on this.

Conflicted about Hillary Coming in Third

2008-01-04T13:20:00.000-05:00

I was a bit surprised that Obama won in Iowa last night, although I probably shouldn't have. I guess I had become convinced by the MSM that Clinton was the obvious heir apparent. I am not sure how I feel about Obama's win. I like him; I really like him. But, I started getting jazzed about having a woman president now that I have had a daughter (not that the game is over). But, earlier on I made it clear that I was "all in" for Obama on this blog, so what happened to me?

I have to make a confession and one likely to get me lots of flak, but I guess I went all "identity politics." I chose the woman over the man of color as someone who would best represent me and my daughter in the future. I thought about my affiliation to Clinton as supporting a role model for Maddie. Another confession--I guess having read enough about Women's history and their long struggle to get the vote, I wanted a woman to be elected before a man of color. Women have always lined up after men of color when it comes to getting theirs.

There you have it. Two rather embarrassing, but honest confessions.

I am so jaded these days to believe that any politician is really going to bring the kind of change that would make a massive difference. Obama is great, young, vivacious, really turns out the vote (WOW!), but he bankrolled by big dollars and those supporters are gonna want something back. This is the reality of American politics. So, my heart is not really in this anymore. I want a Democrat. I like all the candidates. So, my primary affiliation has been motivated by something much more personal and perhaps petty.

What did the rest of you think?

Love Her

2008-01-03T08:56:00.000-05:00

Nellie McKay is my new favorite artist. I got her newest album, Obligatory Villians for Christmas.

She is hilarious, adorable, and a little trouble maker.

I am sure I am late in discovering her, as I am for all cool things. But, if you haven't yet heard her voice, listen to the preview of her song Mother of Pearl at Amazon here. Or watch this (crappy quality) video below.

Heidegger Isn't Helping Anymore.

2008-01-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

I wanted my post yesterday to be upbeat since New Years Eve was not so wonderful for us. Za found out that one of his new colleagues died in a freak accident. When he told me, I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. Maddie was sleeping as he told me the news and we both had an instinct to check in on her. The idea that someone young, thriving and full of life could die, suddenly, was too much to take in. I don't know the details of his colleagues' death, nor do I think it is appropriate to discuss it too much, but I wanted to take the opportunity to write some reflections, in general, about my first encounter with death post-Maddie.

Horror. That is the best word. Death has never been something I deal with well. In fact, this is probably the reason why I gravitated toward the work of Martin Heidegger while I was an undergraduate. The whole concept of Being-towards-death was the only way I could take something that scared the living shit out of me and turn it into something positive and powerful for my life. If I could remember to confront the fact of my death, then, Heidegger argued, I could begin to fully live my life--knowing full well that my life was finite and that it was conditioned by certain facts that I had no control over. Death was the occasion for life in Heidegger's early writings. In fact, death was the one inevitable possibility of our life that gave us the power to escape conformity. Through the confrontation of our death, we could choose a life that was our very own choosing, that capitalized on our best strengths, and gave us real joy.

That was how I read Heidegger. And, that was where my mind was supposed to go when I was reminded that death was the inevitable end of my life. What Heidegger doesn't talk about--at least not that I remember this--was that facing your death, once you are a parent, opens up profound fears about not you, not your life, but the life of your child. Heidegger does argue that death is what reveals (what he calls) the structure of Care--that we are related to a world, to others, and to meaning-making (leaving a legacy). But, he really sees death as about the self. Whereas now, I see death wholly about the others I leave behind. Death fundamentally discloses to me that I am responsible for a child and to leave that child alone in the world is frightening.

Of course, I can prepare for this possibility--wills, life insurance, god parents that will be most like me, etc. But, those actions do not seem to allay a new found fear I have about dying. Neither does Heidegger. I am set adrift again, looking for some solace in the wise writings of minds that came before me to help me reconceptualize what it means that at any moment I could drop dead and leave my daughter.

Since I have no way to think of this without great fear, I turn this problem over to my readers. Point the way for me . . . .

It's Going to Be a Good Year.

2008-01-01T12:51:00.000-05:00

The new year has finally arrived and I anticipate that it will be a good year. This will be the year that little Maddie will learn to crawl and say a few words (hopefully Mama). Za is embarking on new projects, including designing a nifty children's book about a beagle who can drive a motorcycle. And, I am gearing up to return to teaching with a new perspective on the students in front of me.

Becoming a mother has singularly transformed my life in ways that I could never have anticipated. Any inkling that I knew what was coming was just hog wash. My fears of the changes were well founded, but frankly I wasn't afraid enough. But, what I had no capacity to imagine was how much I would enjoy every second of watching this little baby girl grow, develop and change. I am in the bloom of my love affair with her, which is why posting on this blog has seemed less appealing than it once was.

I wrote to my colleague the other day (with a great deal of embarrassment) that having Maddie has literally given meaning to my life. Can you think of anything more trite than that to say? But it is true. I wake up every day knowing that she is in the world, that I get to play with her, and that she will smile at me and perhaps giggle and melt my heart. When I think about my future goals, what I want to write about, how I will teach my courses, where I want to travel, all of these decisions focus around her.

The important thing here is that putting her at the center (wish I could express this better) of these decisions is not putting myself on the back burner or fringes, as I once feared. Choosing for her is choosing for me. The unfortunate dichotomies that too many mothers and fathers absorb--her or me--are totally inept at capturing what the relationship is like. Sure, I am still new at this and I might change my opinions fifty times over. But, at this moment, what I realize is that doing what I love to do and parenting Maddie are not as incompatible as I feared. She has steered my interests in new directions and she has also redoubled my commitment to excellence at what I do. She also inspires me to continue to grow up (no other way to put this, I tried).

I imagine that when I return to work this week that my postings will return as well. But, my new years resolution is to make choices about what to do in a way that promotes my relationships to my family and friends. This might mean that I learn to crawl and speak new words along with Maddie this year.

What are your resolutions?

P.S. So this doesn't sound like the sappiest post in the world, I should mention that my day started with Maddie spitting up on me, yo which Za cleverly quipped "Happy New Years!"

A Fashionable Feminista: An Anathema?

2007-12-20T10:52:00.000-05:00

Fashion and Feminism seems like such a fraught topic, but I can't resist. The inspiration for this post is not so much my penchant for fashion, but the sheer delight I take in dressing up my little girl. You see, I love putting her in pink, girlie clothes. And, it really catches my friends and family off guard. Just yesterday my mom worried that I wouldn't like the pink hoodie she was going to buy Maddie, "would you like a blue one instead?" "No," I said. "I love pink." And, I do.

Many years ago, my friend Ann wrote a paper on beauty for an Aesthetics class we were in. I think she tried to send a version of it to Hypatia, but I don't know if it made it in. The basis for the paper was the rituals that her many sisters and mother performed to prepare for a wedding. It ranged from discussion of shaving, of when pearls are appropriate, make-up and hair. Each of Ann's sisters differed in their love of fashion, dress up, and make-up. Her mother was a rock, famously saying "Pearls are always appropriate." Ann's thesis was that these rituals were not frivolous, but really artistic processes.

I am not sure if she waded into the inevitably thorny issue of whether or not fashion and other beauty technologies are inherently patriarchal. This is a pretty pervasive theme. One of the most devastating essays on this is by Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections of Resistance. Ed. Lee Quinby and Irene Diamond. (Boston: Northeastern U P, 1988) Susan Bordo's work is also quite thought provoking, but she seems to have more of a love affair with femininity than Bartky does.

You see, the mantra "the personal is political" opened up a minefield for feminists to gingerly tiptoe through with their daily decisions on how to comport themselves. If the oppressor resides in the most minute and seemingly harmless everyday decisions, then an intense, vigilant practice of self-presentation, thought, and habits is inevitable. It is no surprise that many of feminists, my generation or younger, find it near impossible to live this way. In recent years a revival of knitting and sewing--by self-proclaimed feminists--have returned many women--of all stripes and political affiliations--to go back to women's work. The proliferation of DYI shows dealing with fashion, design, and home renovation has sought to wed the love of beauty, decoration and fashion with feminist messages of empowerment.

Such a landscape is likely to produce guilt or confusion in feminists who decidedly want to reject the kind of femininity that says "I need the total guidance of a man to make it in the world," but still want to look pretty. I am one of those feminists. I have made my peace with this for the most part. I am not sure that I have worked it out theoretically. I cannot give a defense of my love of fashion. I think most arguments that I put forward could be quite easily be demolished by someone like Bartky or Bordo.

No matter what women decide to do in relation to fashion and beauty, they are embroiled in it. If they go crunchy like the many women in Maui I saw, it is still a statement. If they wear only natural, breathable fabrics that float, they are making a statement. If they choose the lumberjack look, they are making a statement. No matter how you dress, you are making a statement. You are announcing to the world a great deal of your personality, your likes/dislikes, your preoccupations, your investment in your self, etc. I am just not sure that there is a politically correct way to make that statement. Now, having said that, please, oh please, don't lump me with "choice feminism," whatever that is.

At bottom, "I love being a girl." I love dressing up my little girl, even in pink.

So, you tell me, is fashion to feminism an anathema?

How Much Would You Pay for Love?

2007-12-10T15:11:00.000-05:00

One of the more interesting conversations that I had while in Maui concerned the "price" of love. I know, an odd and already cynical-sounding conversation, but nonetheless it got me thinking. One of my Dad's friends told me that in the 80's some of the richest people were asked how much they would pay for love (not sex, or lust, or infatuation). (I have no idea if this is apocryphal story.) Supposedly, these rich folks said they would be willing to pay $1 million dollars (you'll have to adjust this for inflation).

When I first heard that sum, it occurred to me that love was not a high priority for these folks. My second thought was why would you put a sum on one of the best things that is free? My third thought is, what sort of romantic notion of love is operating here? After all, love means hanging in there with someone despite disappointments, stress, strain, illness, boredom, irritation, ad nauseum.

Now, this whole conversation started because we were discussing another friend of my Dad's who gets married quite regularly, signs pre-nups for about $200,000 and then divorces. I couldn't get my head around the idea that these women were willing to marry someone, who is a bit of a horn dog and not so loveable, in order to get that money. My Dad said (as he has my whole life): "everyone has a price." I responded, "well, then my price is much, much higher." At which point all the men at the table started to quote me a number to determine my price.

So, there are two odd things here: (1) Does everyone have a price? and (2) How much would you pay for love? To the first question, I have to say that I think that it is probably true that everyone has a price. But, I would love to be persuaded elsewise.

The second question fascinate me more when I start to think about whether or not I would pay to have my daughter's love. And, knowing what I know now, my answer is yes. But, the key is, knowing what I know now.

What do you all think?

Boy, Did I Pick the Wrong Week to Go to Maui? Then Again . . .

2007-12-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

I am still here. I haven't forgotten about all of you. You see, I have been in a bit of tough spot. You won't really believe me when I say that this tough spot is Maui. Maddie and I are visiting my Dad in Maui and on the second day of my visit, we are inundated with a huge rain storm. The power goes out in my Dad's place and then, after two hours, it is restored. Phew.

I go to sleep that night and wake around 1 am to feed Maddie when I hear again the howling wind, the rain pouring over my head, what sounds like trees smashing into the headboard above my bed. I try to flip the light switch, but the power is out. I try to go back to sleep, but it's hard with all of this noise. I wake up the next morning to discover the power is still out, it is still raining, and tree limbs are broken all over my Dad's property. We can't access any news since the power is out and we are not really prepared for this kind of storm. So, we head down to Kahului to get some baby formula and diapers. This is when I realize how bad this storm is. The road that leads from my Dad's street to the Kula Highway is suddenly a maze of torrential rivers, carrying tree limbs, mud, mud, and mud, and lots of water. We stop to admire the new waterfall that is carving a new river dangerously close to a house. Then, we head down to Kahului. It will be two days before we get back to Kula.

We ended up in Wailea for the night. My Dad has a friend who owns a condo there and we are saved. No hotels have any rooms left and we cannot get back home. Every time we make our way up the Kula Highway, we are stopped and told it will be another 30-45 minutes until they can clear the road. They say this about every hour. After my Dad gets us safely into the condo in Wailea, he decides to try one more time to get home. But, around 2:00 am he is back in Wailea.

The next morning we wake up happy because the power is back on. We make some coffee and try to get the cable to work to find out what is going on. The cable hasn't been restored. So, we just sip our coffee and watch the rain coming down when the power goes out again. We decide to head back up to Kula, but the highway leaving Wailea and Kihei is backed up with tons of people trying to get somewhere with power and food. It takes us several hours to get to Kahului and then we decide to go to Paia for a late lunch. We finally make it back to Kula around 5 pm and quickly get batteries into the lanterns we have just bought. We light candles, eat popcorn, and finally go to bed. When we wake up this morning, we discover that the power has still not returned so my Dad's wife decides we have to get out of Kula and so we pack to go to Wailea for the weekend. (This is actually pretty cool since we will be right near the resorts and great beach for a few days.)

On the way down the road leading from my Dad's house to the Kula Highway, we get a first hand look of the damage of this storm. You can see pictures and read about it in this article from the Maui News.

I bought Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray and Love before we were exiled from our home. I have been devouring it ever since the power went out. I strain to read it by candlelight or lantern, when my Dad isn't using it. And, the story that Gilbert tells of seeking a way to slow time and to be present resonates all the more in this stripped down, unplugged-from-the-grid existence that I am sharing with my Dad, his wife, and Maddie. Maddie doesn't care that she can't check her email, take a shower, or turn on the TV. She is just happy to be playing with her Grandpa. We are all together and really talking around candle light. I start to wish that I cultivated this kind of existence more.

The power outage has allowed me to slow down, to find some quiet, to really think about what matters. This storm has reminded me that nature always wins over man's quest to tame her. She can shut down all of our devices that keep us busy and deceive us into thinking we are in control of our lives. We aren't really. But this truth is only bitter for those who actually believe we can control anything outside of our own beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts. This is exactly the kind of truth that Gilbert goes seeking for in her memoir. However, while she has set out to find bliss, happiness, and divine love, I just wanted to hang out in Maui for a week. I had no grander quest in mind than a little sunshine and sea before returning to the snow. But, what I have stumbled upon is an invitation to reassess what I really need to be happy. Do I need to be in a well lit home, with my internet, cell phone juiced up, and TV on to feel good. Gilbert makes a distinction between being entertained and relaxing. The former is what I seek most of the time after a grueling day. But, what I have found during this bizarre Maui visit is true relaxation. It is just too bad that a few houses, cars, and trees had to be smashed up to give me this gift.

Enough of the "Right Wing as Liberators of Women" Crap!

2007-11-29T10:30:00.000-05:00

Back in the Fall of 2003, I was at a conference in NYC and arranged to meet up with a good friend from college, who was a NYTimes journalist. Over fancy cocktails in a Sex in the City like enclave in the West Village, I told her what really bugged me about the Bush Administration's appropriation of feminist rhetoric to justify their invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. All of a sudden, US foreign policy cared about how women were treated under radical factions of Islam like the Taliban. (Never mind that the US was all too happy to support warlords and the Taliban to drive out the Russians in Afghanistan). My friend told me I should write something about this. I was flattered, but demurred, figuring that what I was saying was obvious.

I was reminded of this episode today as I read over an article from FOX News sent to me for comment. The article is about a British teacher who incited the wrath of Sudanese Muslim Clerics for allowing a young boy to call his teddy bear Mohammad. The point of view of the article is outrage for the backward way in which Muslim clerics treat this innocent teacher and exasperation in general for how Islam treats women. Then, toward the end of the story, the following line of analysis shows up:

In the U.S., a spokeswoman for the National Organization for Women said the situation is definitely on the radar, and N.O.W. is not ignoring it.

But she added that the U.S.-based organization is not putting out a statement or taking a position.

Radio personality Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angles chapter of the National Organization for Women and past member of their board of directors, criticized the organization for not taking a stand.

“We have a duty to make a difference for women around the world,” Bruce told FOX News. “The supposed feminist establishment is refusing to take a position in this regard because they have no sensibility of what is right anymore. They're afraid of offending people. They are bound by political correctness.”

“The American feminist movement has not taken one stand to support the women of Iraq, the women of Afghanistan, the women of Iran,” she said. “It is the United States Marines who have been doing the feminist work by liberating women and children around the world.”

So this comes at the end of a news article and turns it into a denouncement of U.S. Feminism. How does that happen? Enter Tammy Bruce, the Fox News correspondent, who pretends to be a progressive feminist who hates NOW. Who is Tammy Bruce? A good place to start is to read this account of her at the Daily Howler. Essentially she is a shock jock, with Don Imusesque racist tendencies, who has been propped up by Fox News as a token progressive in the pathetic effort to appear "fair and balanced."

Bruce's claims above are totally factually inaccurate at best and meaningless rhetoric at worst. Notice the classic Fox Newspeak buzz phrases "political correctness" "no sensibility of what is right." She has said, essentially, nothing. And, the sad fact of this article is that it gives the irresponsibly false impression that U.S. feminists have not been championing the rights of women around the world.

Of course, as the basis of my idea for an article that I never wrote, I was going to demonstrate how the U.S. feminist movement and organizations like Feminist Majority and magazines such as Ms. Magazine had been decrying the treatment of women under horrific regimes such as the Taliban for a decade before "W" decided to bomb them. Did anyone listen? Did US foreign policy give a fig about the dire situation of women in Afghanistan under the Taliban or other Warlords who we supported in our fight against Russia?

What has been the main US foreign policy contribution to aiding women's plight by the Right Wing? The global gag rule. That is right. Women find themselves beaten, raped, kidnapped, tortured and sequestered by ruthless regimes and we tell prevent NGOs from mentioning abortion as an option for a woman who was brutally raped.

It pains me to know how many well-meaning folks get their propaganda from Fox News. I so rarely read or listen to Fox that I lose sight of how insidious their influence is. History, facts, real balance and journalistic ethics are abandoned by these folks in order to spin a particular world view that denounces all they disagree with.

If you are a Fox News reader/listener and find yourself here, then do yourself a favor and spend a few minutes studying what U.S. Feminist organizations have been doing for women around the globe for decades.

Should Female Profs Insist on Being Called Dr.?

2007-11-27T12:51:00.000-05:00

SteveG tackled a rather interesting issue yesterday concerning the unconscious sexism wielded by our students when they refer to female professors as Mrs., Ms. or Miss. I am calling this behavior "unconscious sexism" for a specific reason. It has always been my belief that students do this because from an early age they have had female teachers, starting with pre-Kindergarten. By the time they arrive at college they most likely have had far more female teachers than male teachers and the etiquette of elementary, middle and high school dictates that they call these teachers by Miss or Mrs. There is another component involved in why it is more "natural" for students to call female profs by these titles: the cultural image of a college professor is still stereotypically male (as SteveG described himself). So the unconscious sexism stems from the lingering effects of overt sexism that segregated the education field.

The far more interesting question is whether female professors should insist that students refer to them as Dr. Like SteveG I have always found this etiquette to be outmoded , if not silly. Our department culture is casual on purpose: it is more successful for educating. Steve is right to point out that we have moved beyond pedagogical models that erect Herr Doktor Professor above the class and force the underlings to bow to his authority. This model is horrible for good teaching outcomes, except in cases where the student doesn't really need a teacher because he or she is quite bright and self-sufficient.

I always aim to create a community in my classroom. I want students to know each others' name, feel safe and comfortable about asking me a question (so many are too intimidated to ask questions for fear of looking stupid). I also want my students--particularly my female students--to be able to imagine themselves in my role. Perhaps more of them will attempt a PhD if they can relate to me personally . I also agree with Steve that you shouldn't earn students' respect simply because you got a PhD; that accomplishment says nothing about whether or not you are a good teacher. So I do not insist or care if they call me Dr. Aspazia.

Having said that, I do agree that SteveG often gets more instant respect from students. Probably what is more important, however, is that students do not challenge SteveG's policies, arguments, and assignments as much as they do female professors. I am sure he gets this stuff, but not in the same numbers that female professors do. What is at the base of well-meaning advice from the more seasoned female faculty suggestion to insist on the title Dr. is a clear reminder to students who is the expert in the room and who has the skill to design the course and assignments.

SteveG writes:

I especially wonder about this advice coming from academic feminists, one of the central concerns of the field being the corrupting epistemological influence of uneven power structures. I fully get the irony that just when these women reach positions of power and prestige, we want to eliminate power and prestige; but the further irony is that their works document the harm from alienation based on power and prestige of being in a socially elite group which surely includes holders of a Ph.D., if it includes anyone. I'm not arguing that any professor doesn't deserve respect for their work and accomplishments, but to flaunt the title as a marker of superiority strikes me as unhelpful in getting students, who are just people (well, some of them anyway) like us to a place where it is most likely that they will see the world in new, wondrous, and disturbing ways. It seems to be emblematic of the old order where professors professed from behind a lectern, pouring their wisdom into the minds of those hearing their lectures -- a model of learning none of us thinks works very well.

The only--ever so slight--disagreement that I have with his assessment here is that what feminists are after is the right to be included in the socially elite group of PhDs. As I said above, I think they are looking for ways to remind students that these women are competent and knowledgeable.

I have chosen to ignore this well-meaning advice because I don't think that insisting on the title is the best way to clue students into my qualifications for being their professor. I have found that students are far more likely to give you respect if you actually show that you care about them. This means you are careful to explain well the point of assignments, the goal of the course, and offer help if they seem to be struggling. You also try to understand a little bit about their situation (I mean this is in the good old Existentialist way); you see these students as embedded in a world. Our students have all sorts of fears and obstacles about learning hard material. They also have real constraints on their time as well as resources. Acknowledging these realities while still being really clear about your expectations, your policies, and your goals is--to my mind--the best way to earn respect.

What is sad, but true, is that very few of our students care if we have published in the last year, or if we have been invited as a plenary speaker at a conference. They do often get wide-eyed if they find out we have written a book, but that stems more from the fact that they cannot imagine writing something that long, let alone getting published. They respect the hardwork, not so much the fame. I think if we landed on Oprah, Survivors, or Jeopardy, they might respect us more.

The old ways of earning respect just don't, in my view, apply. We are teaching a new generation of students and we have to adapt in ways that will really show them that we deserve their respect.

I should add that my post in no way should be construed as being "soft" or "squishy" when it comes to students. I am sure that my students who read this blog can attest to that. I think it is important to be consistent, clear, and firm. But, those qualities alone are not what makes students respect you.

Thoughts?

What Diversity Costs Diverse Students

2007-11-19T16:39:00.001-05:00

Za called me up a few days ago with a rather interesting ethical dilemma I thought I would share (I especially want to hear from Dean Dad and Lesboprof on this one). The situation is this: he teaches at a very small Catholic women's college that extends partial scholarships to some of the poorest women from a very urban area (hence, the majority of these women are African-American). The scholarship gives these women just enough money to interest them to attend this college, but not enough to fully cover tuition. Hence, most of these women have to work one or two jobs on top of attending classes to cover all of their expenses.

Za learned about this situation while having a conversation with some of colleagues about why some of his students are doing so poorly. He gave them two chances to take an examination that really required putting in the hours to memorize bones. The only way to do well on this exam, unless you have an amazing memory is to sit there and work with flash cards or whatever mnemonic device to know your bones. After two exams, a great portion of the African American students failed. He was surprised since many of them seem engaged in class, hard working . . . rather than accept the racist explanation that these women were not intelligent enough, or the default explanation that they did not have study skills, he sought out the real explanation. All of these students have to work so many hours that they literally do not have enough time to be good, or even average, students.

Za really sees this as an ethical dilemma for the college (one for the nation as well!). One could argue that the ethical good here is getting these women a college degree, regardless of their G.P.A. or level of mastery of the material (hat tip to SteveG on this). On the other hand, the college is admitting students that they know full well will be unable to really excel or just do average work because they will have to work so many hours to pay for their education. So, they are paying thousands of dollars to the institution and barely passing their classes. I should add that the college is wholly committed to its mission to educate women from impoverished backgrounds and stresses diversity. 45% of their student population is diverse (a statistic that my LAC wishes it could accomplish).

Given that this (and many) institutions simply do not have enough money to give these women full rides, they stick to their mission by giving these partial scholarships that force them to work. Is this really living the commitment to their mission?

I Don't Like to Emote, Do You?

2007-11-14T10:56:00.000-05:00

I don't like to "emote." I probably wouldn't have chosen to use the word "emote"; I would've said that I don't like to throw tantrums, bully people into agreeing with me, employ guilt, or blow off steam when I am frustrated. But, let's stick with "emote," since its the word that my mom and I agreed on. We had a conversation about how much my family likes to "emote," except for me. Another "psychobabble" way to talk about it is my family likes to "externalize" emotions, while I prefer to "internalize" them. The difference is they express anger and frustration quite well; I just get sad and depressed.

Anyway, what interested me in this psychological evaluation of how I differ from my family was how it related to my decision to study philosophy. I remember when I first read Plato--it was the Meno. I was taking a course on Metaphysics while studying in Rome and rather than cut class to head up to Amsterdam or Berlin (to chip away at the wall, which had just come down), I wanted to read Plato. I found myself totally in love with Socrates. I especially liked how he put the stubborn, arrogant Meno in his place. He had a way of sticking to reason, consistency, and logic that I found to be safe.

I was telling my mom the other day that the reason I studied Philosophy was because I found the way of argument to be a refuge from the way things got hashed out in my family. I never could "win" an argument in my family because to do so, you had to either out "emote" everyone else, or know how to hit below the belt.

My mom was intrigued by this revelation. She pointed out that she used to worry about my "emotional" development when I was a teenager and younger. I was enthralled with science and math, which she found to be unusual in a young girl. I think I just enjoyed that these subjects had nothing to do with being able to shout down your opponent. I guess my move from science and math to Philosophy was "fated in the stars." Philosophy gave me the ability to argue about things that mattered to me--emotional things--in a way that required careful deliberation, soul searching, evidence, and moral courage. Sure, plenty of students of philosophy still "emote"; we are human after all. But, at base, there are rules and principles for fair discussion.

What I admire about my family and their ability to "emote," however is that they all seemed rather anchored to the world. They feel passionately about their worldview and will defend it with abandon. I think it is important for us to begin from somewhere. We need some fixed point of reference from which to begin to make sense of the world. I am not saying that I don't have such a standpoint. I fear, however, that mine is constantly under revision based on new evidence, better arguments . . .

What I don't like about those who feel so free to "emote" is how out of control they can get. I found myself victimized by the rants and tantrums of my family when I was younger. I don't think they were always setting out to terrorize me. They just felt less inhibited to express anger, frustration, or passion. The effect, however, was that I felt it was my duty to calm the situation; to stay cool headed--to help soothe them all to a calmer state of mind. But being the self-appointed peace keeper takes its toll. My heart always races when people start to get wildly emotional. Moreover, I have always been terrified of mentally ill people out in the world, fearing they would explode their rage upon me and I would be trapped by them, heart racing and panic attacks setting in (this, by the way, is partially why I am so interested in the Philosophy of Psychiatry).

The bottom line is that I escaped to philosophy because I wanted to find spaces where rules counted and one couldn't win just by shouting down the rest. Philosophy became my refuge from those who like to "emote."

I Am an Insignificant Microbe . . .

2007-11-11T12:02:00.001-05:00

. . . at least that is my new ranking according to The Truth Laid Bear. How did I fall so low you might wonder? Well, its pretty plain to me. If you don't generate content, you lose traffic. I am not surprised at this plummet in the ecosystem, but it has given me occasion to consider how concretely motherhood has affected my ability to write, think, and generate ideas.

Studies on how motherhood affects the lives of academic women have become routine, most often focusing on women in the sciences (thanks to Larry Summers). The recent issue of the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy focuses specifically on how to balance--or just survive--as a philosopher and a mother or a commuting spouse. (I recommend reading these pieces; they are fascinating and very well written).

I realize that blogging is not the same as academic research. But, for me the regularity with which I can blog is correlated with how much I am thinking, reading, and writing research oriented projects. So, becoming an insignificant microbe is a telling indication of how far I am from the kind of productivity that I have enjoyed for a decade. I am grateful that I am already tenured; I really cannot imagine how mothers without tenure survived, unless they had lots of lots of resources that enabled them to get round-the-clock child care.

I am definitely starting to feel a great deal of anxiety as January approaches and I am heading back to work. I have not yet figured out the day care situation and if I cannot do so, I will be really struggling to get my classes prepared and grade papers and whatnot. I am starting to fantasize about just bringing my baby girl with me everywhere rather than drop her off at some group care facility. I wonder if my students would be as distracted by her as they are by my colleagues' beagle? The thought is partly motivated by a wish to really challenge the system. Why not let women bring their children to work? After all, every time I eat lunch at the local tacqueria, the woman running the cash register has her little daughter with her, who loves to come and play with Maddie.

In any case, I am going to have to re-enter the academic workforce while still tending to a tiny infant that needs me. And, I am freaking out. It is not so much that I am so infected by mommy mush brain that I don't have things to say, but rather I don't have time to write them down. An hour or two to myself is such a luxury that I really have to prioritize what I want to get done in that hour and intellectual work hardly makes it to the top of the list.

Ok, I am going to play with my daughter. I hardly think this post is going to return me to the popularity I once enjoyed.

I Hate, Therefore I Am

2007-11-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

A recent email exchange with Hanno got me thinking more about self-deception. In particular I was thinking about how we tend to construct the narrative of our lives very differently at different stages in our history. What I mean by this becomes clear, I hope, when you think of how you tend to reevaluate your own life history in the face of someone that you despise. Let's say you despise someone--if you are being really honest--not because they are evil, bad, hurtful, or any other good reason, but because they have hurt you/you are jealous/or you feel rejected. I think these latter psychological processes are more interesting in relation to self-conceptions and self-deceptions (again, something Nietzsche was quite brilliant on in The Genealogy of Morals).

Back to my hypothesis. So you despise someone because they are a threat to you and the first thing it seems you do is redo your self-conception in a way that maximally highlights the ways in which you are different from the despised one. An example might make this clearer. Let's say that I despise Jane because she has successfully won the affections of a man who I have been pining over for months. I have never confessed my feelings to--let's call him--Dick. I was passive, waited for Dick to notice me, etc. But, Jane seduced Dick. I am hurt that Dick has chosen Jane rather than me and I grow to despise Jane.

Perhaps one of the first things I do is represent Jane as a big ole' Ho. She has no decorum, is unladylike, and requires male affection and attention to feel better about herself. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there is some truth to this view of Jane. However, a more compassionate person might find a way to relate to Jane's behavior and acknowledge her own weaknesses. But, a person hurt by Jane can only see these traits in the most negative light and then quickly work to build a self-conception that sees herself as the antithesis of Jane. I either omit, delete, or forget the parts of me that are like her and/or I trump up the moments in my life where I behaved better than Jane.

The reason I have been mulling over this is because Hanno suggested to me that perhaps our entire self-conception is nothing but fiction (or lies). We reinvent ourselves all the time given new events, challenges, or losses. My sense was if this is true, then we are likely to find relationships to others almost impossible and a downright miracle when they succeed. The capacity for truth-telling that is required, in my view, to foster needed compassion to approach people without fear and loathing is either non-existent (which I think is Hanno's view) or only certain angels can have this kind of moral courage and intellectual honesty.

Thoughts?

Psychiatry Sure Has Its Critics

2007-11-04T11:38:00.000-05:00

Not too long I wrote an article for a newsletter aimed at psychiatrists interested in a dialogue with philosophers. In this article I acknowledged that those of us trained as philosophers might seem rather cold and heartless to clinical psychiatrists when we start to talk about case studies. We often think in hypotheticals or we talk about mental diagnoses or illnesses in rather abstract terms and belie our lack of day to day interaction with those suffering from crippling illnesses.

I am not sure I want to justify what we do, but what I did say was that we aren't the only ones doing this. In fact, these days psychiatry has plenty of critics--perhaps those critics should take aim at the pharmaceutical industry. One of the regular features of the new criticism of psychiatry is the claim that mental illnesses diagnoses are fuzzy, are too inclusive of normal people, and that the DSM is an unfortunate compendium of mental illness diagnoses that the pharmaceutical companies exploit to sell new illnesses such as social anxiety disorder. I pointed this out to my colleagues in psychiatry in order to point to how philosophers might be helpful to psychiatrists these days when so many critics--ranging from scientologists to well-respected psychopharmacologists--are trying to delegitimize--once again--the profession of psychiatry. Philosophers might be able to clarify what it means to define a disorder, how classification works, why the DSM is not as evil as the critics want us to believe it is, and more importantly, how clinical psychiatrists differ from Big Pharma marketers.

Many of the psychiatrists responding to my article tended to dismiss my concerns as overblown or of little value to their "real" work. Perhaps they are right. But, when I found this article today over at the Wall Street Journal, I couldn't help but think that I was right. Unless someone steps in to explain why mental illness classification is not simply driven by Big Pharma, is not wholly arbitrary, or is not pseudo-scientific, we are likely to see many regular Americans totally turned off to the profession (even though they happily demand the drugs they see in TV ads).

Consider this book excerpt from Christopher Lane, an English Professor and author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.

One reason for the skyrocketing diagnoses is that doctors and psychiatrists require a very low burden of proof. They say social anxiety runs the gamut from stage fright to paralyzing fears of criticism and embarrassment. (The most common nightmare scenarios are eating alone in restaurants, with fear of hand-trembling a close second, and avoidance of public restrooms third.) Some doctors also include, as symptoms of the disorder, fears of sounding foolish and of being stumped when asked questions in social settings—fears that doubtless afflict almost everyone on the planet. Considering these elastic guidelines, we can grasp quite easily why the "illness" is so widely diagnosed, but it's harder to say why so many take the diagnosis seriously, much less accept its judgment of mental debility. The transformation of shyness into a disease occurred behind the closed doors of carefully vetted committee meetings. Over the course of six years, a small group of self-selecting American psychiatrists built a sweeping new consensus: shyness and a host of comparable traits were anxiety and personality disorders. And they stemmed not from psychological conflicts or social tensions, but rather from a chemical imbalance or faulty neurotransmitters in the brain.

Beginning in 1980, with much fanfare and confidence in its revised diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association added "social phobia," "avoidant personality disorder," and several similar conditions to the third edition of its massively expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In this five-hundred-page volume, the bible of psychiatrists the world over, the introverted individual morphed into the mildly psychotic person whose symptoms included being aloof, being dull, and simply "being alone."

The fact that psychiatrists often playfully call this reference manual their bible doesn't offset the reality that they follow its pronouncements chapter and verse. The influence of the DSM also extends far beyond psychiatry, to a vast network of healthcare agencies, social services, medical insurers, courts, prisons, and universities. It took the psychiatrists in question just a few years to update their manual and turn routine emotions into medical conditions, but their discussions—detailed here for the first time—rarely dwelled on the lasting consequences of their momentous decisions. Those expecting deep ruminations on what it means to call half the country mentally ill (the chief conclusion of the latest national survey), may be surprised to learn that the psychiatrists' fundamental concerns included how best to keep the Freudians out of the room, how to reward the work of allies, and who should get credit for plucking a term out of a dictionary. Tackling a vast array of human experience, the DSM drains it of complexity and boils it down to blunt assertions that daily determine the fate of millions of lives, in this country as in many others.

The fourth edition appeared in 1994 with four hundred more pages and dozens of new disorders. It sold over a million copies, in part because insurance companies require a DSM diagnosis before they will authorize reimbursement, while defense attorneys cite it as gospel when trying to explain or mitigate the charges against their clients. Until the 1990s, moreover, the DSM competed with a rival diagnostic system: the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), published by the World Health Organization in Geneva, is more favorably disposed to psychoanalysis and less reliant on ambiguous narrative. Since the publication of DSM-IV, however, the European system has lost some of its cachet. The DSM has by contrast assumed global authority, an outcome greatly increasing the importance of its once-local arguments about social anxiety and related disorders. Indeed, with managed care and the pharmaceutical industry, this reference manual has begun to transform how the world thinks about mental health. As one psychoanalyst recently lamented to me, "We used to have a word for sufferers of adhd. We called them boys."

Not all of what Lane says is wrong. But what is unfortunate is how easily these criticisms of mental illness diagnosis, mental illness classification, and Big Pharma venality tend to get conflated with what clinical psychiatrists do. No matter how hard psychiatry tries to make itself legitimate--such as jettisoning Freudian psychoanalysis and embracing neuroscience--critics always turn up to depict the psychiatrist as one who finds abnormality everywhere. Meanwhile clinicians are seeing people who are really suffering from disorders that they scramble to label, such as social anxiety disorder. These folks didn't just go knocking on doors to tell shy people they were abnormal. Rather, they spent hours with patients who were miserable, suffering, and found their life crippled. This story gets left out of the critics' sweeping condemnations.

I am somewhat sympathetic to Lane's project, and would like to read the rest of his book. However, when I talk critically about contemporary psychopharmacological usage, I see it as a new moral dilemma over the permissibility of enhancement. If shy people want to take Paxil, should they be denied it? I worry less that the psychiatrists are pushing this on patients. I would worry far more about the drug company marketers.

What do you think?

What Za's Food Poisoning Taught Me

2007-10-27T13:23:00.001-04:00

My husband never gets sick. He goes years without seeing a doctor, taking a day to rest from a cold, or even take an aspirin. When he returned from his annual exam with a new physician, he delighted in rubbing it in that his doctor was hard pressed to find anything wrong with him. (I am the opposite; I get sick a lot.) When Za does get sick, boy, does he just hit it out of the park.

I awoke at 1:30 am last night to find Za collapsed (yet conscious) on the bathroom floor throwing up every few minutes. It appeared to me that he was suffering from food poisoning. I asked him if he needed to get to the hospital and, to my surprise, he asked, very calmly, if I would call an ambulance since he could not walk. He was very dehydrated and shivering. He had come downstairs to find more blankets and could not move beyond the bucket (which I leave in the bathroom to soak Maddie's clothes), which he clung to for fear another wave of nausea would hit. I had never seen Za this utterly helpless.

I had never called an ambulance before so he had to walk me through it. [I have to say that I was blown away by how utterly calm he was while suffering from this much pain.] The medics got him onto a stretcher and put him in the back of the ambulance. I got Maddie bundled, in her car seat, grabbed some clothes, Za's wallet and followed them to the hospital. While they got him onto a bed, I registered him.

When I walked back to the ER and saw Za lying on a gurney, with warmed blankets barely covering his naked body and groaning in pain. Maddie was just staring at him with perplex. Za intuitively knew that she was upset and whispered to me, with whatever strength he had, to pick up the baby and hold her because she knows something is wrong. Za asked for more blankets since he was shivering and some water. The nurse complied with the first request, but told him he could not have any water since he was nauseous. He did give me a swab and I kept moistening his lips, tongue and cheeks. Eventually they got an IV in him and gave him some anti-nausea medicine.

While they were putting the IV in him, he grabbed my hand and said, "I really don't like being in this hospital." He was as vulnerable as I have ever seen him. He couldn't speak enough to get what he needed. He couldn't keep himself warm. And, he couldn't relax for fear another wave of nausea would hit him.

Seeing Za this way, it finally hit me why most men do whatever they can to avoid seeking any medical help. Being that physically vulnerable is at complete odds with what masculinity demands from men. So, it takes being that ill for Za to finally break down and get himself to the hospital. (I realize now that he probably gets sick more than he admits, but works through it rather than submit himself to medical care.)

It was not 4 months ago that I lay in the same hospital, recovering from my C-section. I too was as vulnerable and pained as he was last night, but for me being in a hospital, surrounded by nurses and family was comforting. Being that vulnerable actually gave me a break from my life, where I have to take care of others and rarely get to be the one who needs tending.

Seeking medical help simply does not threaten my identity in any way. We hear daily the statistics that report how men have higher suicide rates or higher heart attack rates. Both of these, the experts say, follow from men's failure to seek medical attention way before a problem presents itself so that it does not develop into something life threatening. I have heard this stuff and studied this stuff for years. But it took me seeing Za that helpless to really get it emotionally.

Part of the reason I think I got it--if I am honest with myself--is because it was scary for me to see him that vulnerable. I felt uncomfortable by the prospect that he couldn't stand up, walk to the car, or help himself in any way. I too have internalized what men are supposed to be like and when they deviate from this, I get a bit frightened.

I was listening today to a podcast of Fresh Air, where Terry Gross discussed Shalom Auslander's Foreskin Lament: A Memoir, wherein he recounts his attempt to will away the frightening God that he grew up with in his Orthodox home. What hit me, listening to him explain the difference between being religious and being observant, was how similar the effects of a powerful religious upbringing are to gender roles. No matter how much Auslander has renounced theology and the practices of his orthodox upbringing, emotionally he cannot cast out this God from his childhood. He claims to be crippled by his belief in God. Auslander shared with Terry a eerie Jesuit saying: "give me the boy for 7 years and you will see the man." The intensity with which we train children in religion, or gender roles, is such that no matter how much intellectual work we do--for the rest of our lives--we are crippled by these beliefs that have been emotionally, not intellectually, implanted in us.

So, we face a crisis that men generally do not seek help from medical professionals in this country. We throw all sorts of information at men in public service announcements. But, at the end of the day, getting men to put themselves in a position of helplessness is not something to be achieved by intellectual means.

P.S. Za is fine and resting.

Confessions of a Closet Co-sleeper

2007-10-24T10:22:00.000-04:00

Oh Hallelujah, how I enjoyed this little piece on co-sleeping with your baby from Tuesday's Science Times section. I admit that before having Maddie I was suspicious of co-sleeping, but that is because I am far too conventional. I haven't embraced a lot of the parenting techniques that have become vogue, inspired by anthropologists and attachment parents. This, by the way, is odd to my mother who is an expert on attachment theory and bought me Dr. Sears' book. I guess I just wanted to imagine that I could get my baby to sleep on her own in the crib and thereby give me back some of my own time and space. I couldn't have been more wrong.

In a paper last month in Infant and Child Development, Dr. Dyer proposed that co-sleeping families fall into three distinct categories. There are intentional co-sleepers — those who sleep with their children because they want to breast-feed for a long stretch and believe bed sharing is good for a child’s well-being and emotional development. Another group is reactive co-sleepers, those parents who don’t really want to sleep with their kids, but do so because they can’t get their children to sleep any other way or because financial hardship requires them to share a room with a child.

And then there is a third group that she tentatively calls circumstantial co-sleepers — parents who sleep with their children occasionally because of circumstances like sharing a bed on a family vacation, during a thunderstorm or because the child is sick.

Bed sharing is most likely of greatest concern among reactive co-sleepers, Dr. Dyer says, because the practice is essentially forced on parents. In those cases, the practice is likely to be stressful for both parent and child.

My opening bit should make it clear that I am not an intentional co-sleeper. But, I am happy to say that I am neither a reactive co-sleeper. I think I fit into the circumstantial co-sleeper slot, but I am not sure. Maybe there is a fourth category, intermittent co-sleeper or what-else-are-you-going-to-do-if-you-are-sleep-deprived co-sleeper?

Ask parents if they sleep with their kids, and most will say no. But there is evidence that the prevalence of bed sharing is far greater than reported. Many parents are “closet co-sleepers,” fearful of disapproval if anyone finds out, notes James J. McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame.

“They’re tired of being censured or criticized,” Dr. McKenna said. “It’s not just that their babies are being judged negatively for not being a good baby compared to the baby who sleeps by himself, but they’re being judged badly for having these babies and being needy.”

In fact, research shows that parents often talk about their children’s sleep habits in terms of where the child starts off the night or where the child is supposed to sleep — not necessarily where the child usually ends up sleeping.

This is the part of the article that really resonated with me. Maddie starts off nice and snug in her crib these days. She even falls asleep in it without much incident (I am proud that we made it cozy). However, more nights than not she wakes up in the middle of the night and if we both fail to get her back to sleep, she ends up in the bed with us. Last night she woke up around 11:00pm and I was going on three days of little sleep, so I just scooped her up, put her in the bed, and started to nurse her to sleep. I was certain that I was becoming an insomniac again since I could not relax enough to sleep and within a minute of nursing her I was sleeping like a baby (what an odd expression that is to parents!)

I tend to downplay that Maddie ends up in the bed at some point in the night because you wouldn't believe how many people ask about sleep. Sometimes it is because they are about to have a baby, anxious that they will never sleep again, and therefore want some sign that it is possible to get your baby to sleep snugly. Other times it is the judgmental set. I used to just say up front that we end up with Maddie in the bed a lot because it is the only way we all get sleep. But, I quickly learned that if I said that to the wrong person I would get a sassy quip from him or her like: "well you'll be breastfeeding that baby in bed for 3 years." There are some people for whom that comment would be a delight. But not me--the very conventional girl who wanted to follow all the right rules for getting my baby to sleep without needing my boob.

Anyway, what I like about this article is that it makes plain that there are a lot of us closet co-sleepers. We hide this for a variety of reasons--in my case a combination of not wanting to appear a hypocrite, fearing judgmental sneers, and distinguishing myself from intentional co-sleepers.

I also like how this article points to a phenomenon that I have been trying to better articulate since becoming a parent. I guess it is the pervasive moralism directed at parents, and particularly mothers. (I say particularly mothers because almost every time Za is out with Maddie women and other by-standers are so impressed that he is alone with his daughter that he just gets showered with compliments). I was shocked by how shrill and tendentious most books on babies and sleep are. There are clearly drawn battle lines and no author seems capable of promoting his or her approach without making a strawperson out of the other approach. Moreover, all baby and sleep books need to paint the opposing camp as heretics; I am not kidding. The moralism in parenting manuals seems to resemble religious wars more than reasoned debate.

So, I will continue to be happy as a closeted circumstantial co-sleeper. While I foresee that Maddie will end up in the bed less and less, both Za and I are a little wistful that we won't have our little girl to cuddle up with each night. In fact, what probably drags this process out the most is our needs more than hers. She is showing all sorts of signs that she is happy in her crib and seeking independence from our bed. But, letting her go is hard . . .

"Mad Men" Really Brings Home Patriarchal Sexism

2007-10-21T12:55:00.000-04:00

If there is something that has dogged me about feminism in general, it has been the lack of precision about what feminists mean when they are criticizing patriarchy. In fact, I believe that equivocating on what 'patriarchy' means has been at the root of much of the vitriolic backlash against feminism. What often happens is that feminist will use 'sexism' and 'patriarchy' interchangeably and never define either terms.

A few weeks ago, I laid out what I thought was a helpful definition of patriarchy, put forth by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist/socio-biologist. Hrdy distinguishes between patrilines and patriarchies, both of which occur in animal nature as well as human nature. Patrilines reckon descent through the father. Patriarchies are kinship arrangements in patrilineal societies set up to guard against misattributed paternity. Patriarchies thereby "gain control over the resources that mothers need to survive and produce." In human societies, one tool that men employ to gain control over resources is to disseminate and perpetuate sexism. Sexism, therefore, is a worldview that considers women to be inferior to men. It should be clear that one can be sexist without being a patriarch or living in a patriarchal society. Sexism can linger long after kinship arrangements have changed, as they have in the United States at various points in history.

Having made this distinction, I think one era in U.S. history in which sexism was a part and parcel of patriarchal rule was post WWII. And, the fantastic TV series that has really brought home how bad things were for women, ethnic minorities, and racial minorities is AMC's Mad Men. I haven't watched the whole series (since I am downloading them from iTunes and watching when I can), but from what I have seen, I am convinced Matthew Weiner's fundamental motivation for producing this series is to remind the post-feminist/reverse discrimination era why exactly the women's movement and civil rights movements took place. While the cultural wars abound in print and the blogosphere--deriding feminists, gay rights activists, and civil rights groups fighting institutionalized racism (read: Jena 6), it seems that few of these pundits--particularly the women and racial/ethnic minorities-- have really taken stock of what their life chances would have been in the 50s. Would Ann Coulter exist in 1960? What about Condolezza Rice?

If you haven't seen Mad Men, I highly recommend that you download it soon. One of the important benefits of this show is to clarify what the nature of our feminist criticisms of sexism are now. We are not living in that era, but surely there are fringe right wingnut groups--the kind of folks that Amanda at Pandagon excels in taking on--that would love to return to those good old days. I think that any young women who have thrown their lot in with such fringe groups should watch Mad Men and ask themselves if that is the world to which they want to return. Some might. But, I bet the majority would not. We can also use Mad Men as a touchstone for making more nuanced arguments about persisting sexism, e.g. where it comes from and why it lingers, without mistakenly referring to our era as patriarchal (with the exception of some subcultures).

Who else is as addicted to Mad Men as I am?

What a Real Abortion Decision Looks Like

2007-10-18T09:01:00.000-04:00

The tragedy of most moral debates in the political realm or even the classroom is that they are always construed in abstract and absolute terms. This is especially true when it comes to abortion. It has been my experience that those who take the most absolutist stances (with the exception of Rick Santorum) have never faced any of the real situations in which a woman (and her partner) must make the difficult decision to terminate a pregnancy. Sadly, I found out yesterday that a friend of mine is facing a very difficult decision regarding her pregnancy and I want to share it with my readers to stress--once again--that the decision to terminate a pregnancy belongs to the parents, not the politicians, churches, or even the medical establishment.

Fiona is 41 years old. A month ago her husband called us to let us know they were expecting their first child! We were excited for them and looking forward to our children growing up together. Because of Fiona's age, she and her husband underwent genetic counseling and prenatal tests. Unfortunately, the laboratory took their own sweet time to return the results of these tests and now, 5 months into her pregnancy, she has discovered that her husband is recessive for Tay-Sachs disease and the tests to determine whether or not she was came back inconclusive.

Tay-Sachs is a horrible genetic disease that has no cure and always results in death by age 4. Here is an excerpt from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke:

Infants with Tay-Sachs disease appear to develop normally for the first few months of life. Then, as nerve cells become distended with fatty material, a relentless deterioration of mental and physical abilities occurs. The child becomes blind, deaf, and unable to swallow. Muscles begin to atrophy and paralysis sets in. Other neurological symptoms include dementia, seizures, and an increased startle reflex to noise.

So here is the situation the couple find themselves in. Fiona is 5 months pregnant, very attached and excited about her baby girl, but knows that there is a greater than normal risk that this child will be born with Tay-Sachs. In order to better determine what that risk is, she needs to undergo another screening, but the results take even longer this time because they involve cell cultures. By the time she gets the results, she will most likely be in her third trimester or near her third trimester. If the tests show her child has Tay-Sachs, then she has to figure out how to get a late term abortion or choose to have the child and watch it suffer a horrible demise and death. Neither of these choices are easy to make.

It is precisely these real life decisions that have committed me to reproductive freedom for women. The idea that someone besides Fiona and her husband could make a better decision about what to do in this situation is just plain insane.

It is also worth noting here how inhumane the lab was in not getting this result back to her in a timely manner. When physicians or lab technicians screw up in delivering information during a pregnancy, it sets up unbelievably difficult moral dilemmas. One would hope that if the wacko anti-choice politicians are going to decide who can get an abortion, that at least the medical establishment would not bungle prenatal care in such a way that makes it extremely difficult to have any real choices to make.

What Does it Take for a Woman to Get Laughs: Not Be A Woman?

2007-10-16T15:08:00.001-04:00

I've only watched the Sarah Silverman Show on Comedy Central once. It was pretty lame as far as I was concerned. She plays a self-involved, narcissistic, potty mouth. Some people find this funny, but I don't. I have a name for her kind of humor: orifice humor. I usually associate it with comedies aimed at men where there is all sorts of farts, burps, and random references to anal sex with animals or whatnot. Most men laugh hysterically at orifice humor, but I need something else.

But, my post is not about why I don't really like Sarah Silverman. Instead, I am sort of curious about how a couple of men I know reacted to her show and why I finally get the problem with women breaking into comedy. Last year Kate Clinton came to speak at my college, invited by the Women's Studies program. She mentioned how few women really make it in comedy, let alone get their own show. And then there was that provocative piece written by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, back in January, that claimed that women have more important things to do (read: reproduction) than be funny. Hitchens agrees with my assessment that men are into "orifice humor," although he doesn't put it that way:

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about "intelligent design." The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. ("Think they'd wear this? Well, they're gonna have to.") The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That's what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there's another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. "Men obviously like gross stuff," says Fran Lebowitz. "Why? Because it's childish." Keep your eye on that last word. Women's appetite for talk about that fine product known as Depend is limited. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. ("Premature for whom?" as a friend of mine indignantly demands to know.)

So, Hitchens would argue that men are funny because they are allowed to be childish. Clinton, on the other hand, would point to some sexism and double standards operating in comedy.

Alessia and I were partial to Clinton's explanation. After all, Silverman's humor is the classic guy filth humor that Hitchens is describing. So why does her act deep bother a lot of men? Could it be that she is crossing the line of what is acceptable humor for women? She is not just making fun of women's issues/stuff, but acting in all sorts of ways like the male jack ass comedians on Comedy Central and elsewhere. Alessia and I even compared her outrageousness to Andrew Dice Clay; she is shocking--pushing peoples' comfort levels.

So what do the rest of you think of Silverman? Is she funny? If you find her offensive, why? Would you find a male comedian making similar jokes equally offensive?

Another Reason Why I Detest Fraternities

2007-10-10T10:29:00.000-04:00

Hanno forwarded me this gem from ESPN:

LUBBOCK, Texas -- Texas Tech has banned the sale of a T-shirt bearing the likeness of Michael Vick hanging the dog mascot of rival Texas A&M.

The red and black shirts, with text that says "VICK 'EM" on the front in an apparent reference to the Aggies' slogan "Gig 'em," was created by a Tech student who was trying to sell them before Saturday's game in Lubbock.

The back of the shirt shows a football player wearing the No. 7 Vick jersey holding a rope with an image of the mascot Reveille at the end of a noose. Vick, who faces up to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a federal dogfighting charge, is suspended indefinitely by the NFL.

Tech officials late Tuesday announced the fraternity that sold the shirts was suspended temporarily and will face judicial review for allegedly violating the solicitation section of the students' code of conduct.

The school said it wouldn't allow the sale on campus of items that are "derogatory, inflammatory, insensitive, or in such bad taste."

No more shirts are being produced, the school said in a release.

A&M officials, in a statement, thanked Tech administrators for "their response and action regarding this matter."

Geoffrey Candia, the creator of the shirts who is with the Theta Chi fraternity, told The Associated Press they were taking full responsibility. "We realize the shirts shouldn't have been printed," he said.

He told The Battalion, A&M's newspaper, for Tuesday's editions that the university prohibited sale of the shirts on campus through his fraternity. He said he originally had wanted to give 50 percent of the proceeds to an animal defense league in Lubbock "because we knew there would be a controversy about the shirts, you know, animal rights, stuff like that."

Candia told the newspaper about 300 had been sold. He had hoped 500 would be sold before Saturday's game.

In a posting on his Facebook site at about 4 a.m. Tuesday, Candia wrote: "a little tshirt get aggies all worked up... its a t-shirt people!"

The controversy comes about 2½ months after Gerald Myers, Tech's athletic director, announced a campaign to promote good sportsmanship across the campus and at athletic events. The words used in the effort are honor, respect, pride and tradition.

Myers did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

"You can't make light of a situation like that," Tech media relations spokesman Chris Cook said. "That is in poor taste and poor judgment."

Robyn Katz, president of Tech's chapter of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund, said her organization "wouldn't take a dime" from Candia.

"If he really wanted to help promote anti-animal cruelty then he would donate time" at a no-kill shelter," she said. "He's really doing the Tech community a disservice. There's plenty of other ways to promote a rivalry."

Hanno then made a very interesting analogy: "Sure some girls get raped at frats... but we donate money to women's shelters, too! Why dont you report that!"

What goes through these kids' minds when they offer up ridiculous justifications like that?

On Charity

2007-10-09T09:52:00.000-04:00

Money is tight--really tight. Every pay check is dedicated to living expenses, debt, mortgage and insurance. There is always a little left over, but not much. I have to remember, however, that I am fairly privileged. I am not rich--not by a long shot--but I have a home, retirement, insurance, and very steady employment. Still money is tight.

Given this reality, I feel torn each time I am presented with a request for charity. There are lots of organizations to which that I like to give money. I get regular requests to do so from those same organizations almost daily. And, given the tight money situation, I am not giving. I couldn't help but really analyze how sincere my wish to be charitable was given my behavior.

There are lots of ways to give, to help others who or more needy, who are in a tough spot, or who want to build an organization to improve conditions for others. But, what I find is that most of us give only when it is convenient for us. So much about charity is about the self. Think about the dreaded pledge drives on NPR. How to the fundraisers motivate us? They tell us we can get a tax break or that we will get a membership or gifts. Or, take another example, fundraising for a college. How do you do it? You appeal to the vanity of those with money. You figure out what they want to give and tell them you will memorialize them by naming a building after them or a endowed chair or a scholarship prize. The point here is to get those with a great deal of money to give, you have to convince them that there is something in it for them.

But it seems that true charity hurts the giver a bit. Maybe it means you give up things you want to give to others--you have less money for entertainment, travel, clothes, or even food. You realize that it is more important to help someone in need or an organization you care about than it is to spend that money on yourself or family. Moreover, it seems that true charity is to give without expectation for a return or glory or even thanks.

In fact, true charity really exposes what the whole point of a gift is or should be. A gift. But how often do we ever really give to others without some expectation of thanks, or reciprocation, or acknowledgment of our greatness. Too much of giving is about power or self interest. This is what is concerning. And yet, let's face it, the only way so many charitable organizations can function is to appeal to vanity and self-interest.

I think a lot about the whole Republican view that we should shrink government and let charitable organizations do the work of a large, inefficient, unwieldy bureaucracy. Why should not be coerced to pay taxes, so the argument goes, but rather we should be free to choose who we want to give to and how. Hell, in theory this sounds great. But that is the whole problem with the "party of ideas"--sounds great on paper, but never works in practice. Why? Because people need incentives to do what is not immediately in their self-interest.

Very few of us are truly capable of charity. In fact, I would argue that charity is almost impossible in such a highly driven consumer culture like ours. For example, I caught a bit of the Extreme Home Makeover television show last Sunday. The purported motivation of the show is to give back--in the form of a luxurious home--to people who have struggled and scarified for others. Again, on paper, a good idea. But, I was haunted by the episode I saw where the gift to a young girl suffering from cancer was to build her a room that was like a shopping spree. They gave her a huge closet filled with clothes and shoes and accessories so "she can finally be a kid who can play." So, charity is giving a shopping spree to a young girl--giving her an addiction to material goods. Maybe I am being too harsh, but it seems to me that with so many people unable to feed their families across the world, we can do better than conceive of charity as giving people luxurious homes with the top of the line consumer goods, right?

In any case, this is my preoccupation today. What do the rest of you think?

The Mom Job

2007-10-05T13:58:00.000-04:00

No, I am not going to write about the difficulties inherent to raising children, or proposals for renumeration for mothers, or the lack of respect given to mothers who do the important work of raising children. Nope. What I am going to write about today is the new plastic surgery craze--the "Mommy Job" described yesterday in the Fashion & Style (!?!) of the NYTimes.

Look, I am pretty ambivalent about plastic surgery. I don't tend to take the hardline against plastic surgery, claiming that it is micropolitical enactment of patriarchy (see, for example, Sandra Bartky, "Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power" in I. Diamond & L. Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988 ). Nor do I take up what I think is a rather silly and naive view of feminism as 'all about choice." (See Echidne on this). I can't really say I have a coherent position on this, other than it being a rather pervasive technological innovation to the age old human quest for human perfectability.

Having put that disclaimer out there, I am pretty pissed off at the "mommy job." I agree wholeheartedly with this assessment of the procedure:

Many women struggle with the impact of aging and pregnancy on their bodies. But the marketing of the “mommy makeover” seeks to pathologize the postpartum body, characterizing pregnancy and childbirth as maladies with disfiguring aftereffects that can be repaired with the help of scalpels and cannulae.

“The message is that, after having children, women’s bodies change for the worse,” said Diana Zuckerman, the president of the National Research Center for Women and Families, a nonprofit group in Washington. If marketing could turn the postpregnancy body “into a socially unacceptable thing, think of how big your audience would be and how many surgeries you could sell them,” she said.

Like I have enough shit to worry about that I have to now endure the remaking of the postpregnancy body as repugnant. Don't new mommies have enough to worry about?

But, what is also so odd to me about this story and the phenomena of the "mommy job," is how damn expensive it is: between $10,000 and $30,000. Who can afford this but the Paris Hilton (or should I say Nicole Ritchie?) set or others willing to put themselves in needless debt--robbing their children's college fund--to combat a fictionalized malady.

Is there anything left in this culture that doesn't need to be fixed, remade, or reinvented? Is everything really for sale? That is what is dawning on me now, more than ever. Sure, lots of other people wised up to the horrors of our consumer society. It took me having a child and facing the anxieties associated with new motherhood--not to mention too much time to watch TV and its self-esteem robbing advertisements--to finally get to the point where enough is enough. We don't need so much damn shit. And, we don't need to turn our postpartum bodies into a new kind of commodity either.

Ok, I am done with my rant.

Self-Conceptions are Often Just Self-Deceptions

2007-10-03T10:10:00.000-04:00

I discovered that I can download podcasts of Fresh Air from iTunes and this has been my savior on mega walks with daughter. I was listening to Terry's interview with Jeffrey Toobin about his new book, The Nine. The book sounds utterly fascinating, especially to someone like me who is obsessed with the direction of the Supreme Court. But, this is not really what I want to write about. What really got me thinking was something he said in his long discussion of Sandra Day O'Connor. He suggested that after she cast her vote in the Gore v. Bush case, on the side of Bush, that the public outcry really challenged her self-conception. O'Connor, Toobin argues, prided herself on her "fairness" which the public outcry really pushed her to look at honestly.

The idea that our self-conceptions are often self-deceptions really stuck with me for the rest of the day and into the night. I kept thinking about how much of our political and ethical judgments are both an expression of and justified by what we think our self-conception is. I think this insight is really the key to understanding those who seem so full of shit to us. We listen to people whose politics couldn't be more widely divergent from our own and they say things that seem so wholly disingenuous when you compare them to what they actually do--what causes they support, who they vote for, and how they live their lives and treat others--that it is hard to make sense of them. The problem is always assuming that what they say about themselves--how they fashion their self-conception--is in fact true or, better yet, honest.

As someone who has spent many years teaching both ethics and feminism, I have heard a lot of bullshit in the classroom. I have listen to young women talk about themselves as tough, empowered, and independent, while they wore the uniform of their sorority, giggled like flirty school girls when a man spoke up and said something inane, and put themselves in risky and dangerous sexual situations. I have also listened to students champion the "boot straps" myth of selfhood and success, while knowing full well that everything they currently have was a gift from very rich and indulgent parents. I witness a lot of self-deception in students' self-conception.

And for me, what you really need to do to teach ethics or political philosophy well, is get at peoples' self-conceptions and get them to be honest with themselves. This is not only ridiculously hard work, but it is downright draining. No one likes to have a mirror held up to them and the defenses against taking a good look are mighty powerful. But, this is what good teaching is. I reject any notion that the idea behind teaching philosophy--especially ethics--is to help students clarify the right principles and apply them consistently. This is just a game and doesn't really get at the more important question: what kind of person am I? What do I really value? And, how do my actions match those values? This is a lot tougher and not something that can easily be achieved in a semester or even four years for that matter.

I am constantly evaluating my self--wondering how credible criticisms against me are and taking them too painfully to heart. I am sure that I am not a good example of what you should do to achieve intellectual honesty. But, I will say that I try damn hard to keep it real.

And yet, what really haunts me about the powerful ways that our self-conceptions are really self-deceptions is that we are unable to ever fully be honest about who we are. In fact, I wonder if we could really live without a lot of self-delusions; perhaps they are even healthy? But, if it is the case that we can't be fully honest about who we are, then to what extent can we ever live without hypocrisy?

On Whining

2007-10-01T10:45:00.000-04:00

There is nothing that irritates me more than whining. I can tolerate it better from a 4 year-old than a 20 year-old, but I don't like it in either case. I started thinking about whining last night as I was kept awake by my daughter, who just seemed incapable of getting herself back to sleep. She wasn't really whining, since she can't really communicate any other way than to cry or sometimes scream. But, nonetheless, the effect of her crying got me thinking about how much I am turned off by whining. I am not sure why and so it seemed like as good an idea as any to write about whining today.

The iconic whiner, to me, is a college student who starts complaining about the amount of reading, or the length of the exam, or the stress of juggling several papers at once. It is usually a young woman, who has decided that I am her buddy more than her professor, and she starts expressing in baby-like whining language how freaked out she is, stressed out she is, and wants me to fix it for her. She usually does this in front of the entire class, since there is no problem presenting yourself as a ditsy, whining little girl on my campus. After all, many of these 18-22 year old women are donning ponytails with big grosgrain pink polka dot ribbons. Looking like a little girl is de rigeur around these parts.

My usual response is to immediately ban whining. I warn that if she continues to whine, then I will add more work. I know, not very kind of me, nor good disciplining, but, I do it nonetheless. I just want the whining to stop. Why? Why does it bug me so much?

Part of it might be that these young women are acting like babies to get their way. And, now that I have a baby, I know how effective crying/whining is. Maddie does, in the end, get her way. But, it seems to me that there should be much more sophisticated ways of getting your way as a young female than to resort to baby-like pouting. I can't imagine that these young women were indulged in their whining when they were 4 year-olds; didn't their parents say "use your words" or something similar?

Whining is a behavior adopted among many cutesy young women to bend people and institutions toward their will. The downside is that they lose all credibility as adults in the process. I mean, look at how annoyed I am at them. How will the professional world ever take these young women seriously if this is their only tool for getting help, attention, or a reprieve?

Bottom line: whining is a survival skill that tiny infants, incapable of speech, adopt to get the attention of their caretakers. Once speech becomes possible, whining has to go . . .

Men Are Happier?

2007-09-27T13:54:00.000-04:00

According to a team of psychologists and an economist, the happiness gap between men and women is widening with, guess what?, women claiming to be less happy than men.

Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even starker pattern. Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more.
Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

Well that sucks, but there is no real new news here. We know that women are working double shifts. I didn't know, however, that men are relaxing more and working less. But, what really caught my eye about this study is the following:

These trends are reminiscent of the idea of “the second shift,” the name of a 1989 book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, arguing that modern women effectively had to hold down two jobs. The first shift was at the office, and the second at home.
But researchers who have looked at time-use data say the second-shift theory misses an important detail. Women are not actually working more than they were 30 or 40 years ago. They are instead doing different kinds of work. They’re spending more time on paid work and less on cleaning and cooking.
What has changed — and what seems to be the most likely explanation for the happiness trends — is that women now have a much longer to-do list than they once did (including helping their aging parents). They can’t possibly get it all done, and many end up feeling as if they are somehow falling short.

I do think its right to point out that women are not necessarily working more hours now, but rather are splitting their days into paid work and unpaid work. In fact, I am not sure that I have seen anyone else point out that out.

Mr. Krueger’s data, for instance, shows that the average time devoted to dusting has fallen significantly in recent decades. There haven’t been any dust-related technological breakthroughs, so houses are probably just dirtier than they used to be. I imagine that the new American dustiness affects women’s happiness more than men’s.
Ms. Stevenson was recently having drinks with a business school graduate who came up with a nice way of summarizing the problem. Her mother’s goals in life, the student said, were to have a beautiful garden, a well-kept house and well-adjusted children who did well in school. “I sort of want all those things, too,” the student said, as Ms. Stevenson recalled, “but I also want to have a great career and have an impact on the broader world.”
It’s telling that there is also a happiness gap between boys and girls in high school. As life has generally gotten better over the last generation — less crime, longer-living grandparents and much cooler gadgets — male high school seniors have gotten happier. About 25 percent say they are very satisfied with their lives, up from 16 percent in 1976. Roughly 22 percent of senior girls now give that answer, unchanged from the 1970s.
When Ms. Stevenson and I were talking last week about possible explanations, she mentioned her “hottie theory.” It’s based on an April article in this newspaper by Sara Rimer, about a group of incredibly impressive teenage girls in Newton, Mass. The girls were getting better grades than the boys, playing varsity sports, helping to run the student government and doing community service. Yet one girl who had gotten a perfect 2,400 on her college entrance exams noted that she and her friends still felt pressure to be “effortlessly hot.”
As Ms. Stevenson, who’s 36, said: “When I was in high school, it was clear being a hottie was the most important thing, and it’s not that it’s any less important today. It’s that other things have become more important. And, frankly, people spent a lot of time trying to be a hottie when I was in high school. So I don’t know where they find the time today.”
The two new papers — Mr. Krueger’s will be published in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and the Stevenson-Wolfers one is still in draft form — are part of a burst of happiness research in recent years. There is no question that the research has its limitations. Happiness, of course, is highly subjective.
A big reason that women reported being happier three decades ago — despite far more discrimination — is probably that they had narrower ambitions, Ms. Stevenson says. Many compared themselves only to other women, rather than to men as well. This doesn’t mean they were better off back then.
But it does show just how incomplete the gender revolution has been. Although women have flooded into the work force, American society hasn’t fully come to grips with the change. The United States still doesn’t have universal preschool, and, in contrast to other industrialized countries, there is no guaranteed paid leave for new parents.
Government policy isn’t the only problem, either. Inside of families, men still haven’t figured out how to shoulder their fair share of the household burden. Instead, we’re spending more time on the phone and in front of the television.

I am not sure that in my lifetime we will see a massive shift in how men and women view housework. The only way that men are going to shoulder their fair share of the household burden is if they grow up seeing their fathers sharing these burdens with their mother. But, obviously, this isn't happening. And, mothers are still imparting to their children gender roles that dictate women manage the household. What women my age seem to have to do is nag their spouses to clean up. In my case it is not that Za is a lazy bastard, but rather his definition of clean is very different from mine. It is impossible, as far as I am concerned, to change this fact. I wish I could live in the same kind of disorder he can, but it drives me completely bat shit crazy, so I have to get him to help me do stuff. Happily, some of it he does without me nagging anymore. But, I doubt we will ever have a nag free situation and I am acutely aware that Maddie will learn that nice home=mother cleaning/managing.

What do y'all think?

UPDATE: Pandagon and Echidne point out why this study is full of shit and the happiness gap doesn't exist.

Now, That's Some Chuztpah!

2007-09-26T10:12:00.000-04:00

My WS colleagues have luckily kept me in the loop during my maternity leave on the interesting things happening on campus this semester. A former student of mine just stepped up and bravely called out the Greek life on campus for its blatant sexism. I am so relieved to finally see some bold action here generated by another student. While I have heard plenty of criticisms of Greek life in my office, and even sometimes in classes, rarely do students put themselves out there in such a public way. When they do write op-eds to the paper, like Cassie did, they generally tone down their arguments to be respectful to the feelings of Greek students. Whatever!

Because I am impressed with Cassie's letter and I want to support her indictment of Greek life on my campus, I am posting her op-ed here for my readers:

The Gettysburg College Social Scene through the Eyes of a Woman

I’ve learned some tricks over the years to getting along in the social scene here on campus. Let’s see…First of all, I don’t eat Thursday dinner, and I only have a snack like an orange or a yogurt Friday afternoon. I don’t want to be one of those girls turned away at the door of a party because I’m fat. I remember a sign posted outside a frat that made it so clear: “No Fat Bitches Allowed.” I mean, hello. They put it right out there. If you’re fat, don’t expect to get in. Not everyone can fit into a house at once.
Secondly, don’t bring guys along if you want to get in. There has to be a ratio of 3 girls to every 1 boy, at least. Unless the brothers at the door know the guys. In that case, make sure to bring a token few and you might get in even easier. You have to make sure that if you’re trying to get in with guys of a different frat, they better like each other. A fight or yelling match doesn’t get you in the door.
Also, don’t go out with your ugly friends! I mean, this is about having a good time, right? I remember one time I was so stupid. I was in a co-ed group of friends who were fun and loud, but not the cutest people around. The brothers at the door told us the house was full and we should get the f--- off their driveway immediately. If only I had known to surround myself with prettier people, then I wouldn’t have put them in a situation where they had to be mean.
It’s not always necessary, but at least one girl should have cleavage, and another with a short skirt helps. Not everyone screening at the door judges you on your looks, but better safe than sorry!
Now, if you make it into the door, your next goal is beer of course. There are a few options in this situation: You can send your cutest friend to flirt with the beer-dispensing brother. Make sure she knows to smile and lean over the bar when asking for the cups. She can also act a little bit drunk already so the guy feels in control of the situation. No one wants to deal with a sober woman who demands what she wants!
Now once you’re in and you have your beer, you’re set. Just keep reapplying these rules at each house until you’re sloppy to blackout drunk. (Sometimes a mystery friend will help you speed up this process by dropping a roofie in your drink.) Then go to someone’s room who you don’t care about, sleep with him in order to express your repressed sexuality (but later blame it on the booze, rather than the natural human desire to have sex), take the shame walk home in the morning, have a short cry, and laugh about it with your friends at Servo. Isn’t it fun being a girl at Gettysburg College?

Not satisfied?

Create your own social scene.

Before you get defensive and angry about this article, take a moment. Take a moment to think about if you have ever experienced these things on campus, as my friends or I have first hand. Even if you only observed these situations, you cannot justify letting them perpetuate. I understand not every guy or girl present at frat parties acts like this, but these actions are present on this campus. Let’s change that.

If you agree that social change against sexism is necessary in order to improve our campus, please sign the banner that will be displayed at the Women’s Center CUB table later this week and into the next.

I have written many, many times about how the Greek system and its sexist ways dominate the social scene at my college. Cassie does a good job clarifying what exactly that means in easy to understand examples in her op-ed.

What I predict will happen in response to her letter is a flurry of letters denying the reality of what she is saying. She will be accused of being "judgmental," perhaps of being sexist in her assessment of Greek women. What won't happen is an honest dialogue about how degrading this atmosphere is for women on campus. One thing to always keep in mind when you are evaluating what goes on here on my campus (which is no different from most campuses with a Greek life) is that these women are intellectually superior to the men they degrade themselves for to win a spot in their fraternity house.

My sincere wish is that Cassie gets students like her fired up enough to take back this campus and make it non-coercive, welcoming atmosphere for all.

Enough of the Affirmative Action Debates!

2007-09-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

Last week I met with a financial planner to start a college fund for my daughter. While I am a college professor and therefore, my daughter can attend my school for free (a huge benefit), I want to give her the opportunity to attend whatever college she wishes. Well, I wanted to give her that opportunity. What I discovered was that I would have to save $12,000.00 a year to have enough money by the time she turns 18. When you are a college professor, saving $1000.00 a month for your newborn is just plain out of the question.

I am lucky because I can ensure that Maddie will get an excellent college education no matter what. But, this reality check really alerted me to how increasingly unlikely the majority of Americans will be able to afford college tuition for their children. When I asked how much I should set aside for a public university, I was told $500.00 a month. Frightening.

It is wholly clear to me that a college education will be another hurdle separating those with money from those without. Little about higher education will be based on merit when it costs that much to attend. Sure, you could take out student loans for the whole lot, but who on earth would be able to ever pay back that kind of debt? It would be akin to taking out a sub prime jumbo mortgage.

I couldn't help but agree with Jerome Karabel's op-ed in the NYTimes, entitled "The New College Try." (Leave it to a sociologist to demystify the reality of institutions). Karabel's central claim is that what gets Americans into top colleges is not merit, but money. Actually he says socio-economic class. I wonder where I fall in terms of socio-economic class. While I don't make a whole lot of money, I am exceptionally well-educated and therefore likely to pass these class advantages onto my daughter.

Karabel writes:

AMERICANS are committed to the belief that everyone, no matter how humble his origins, has a chance to rise to the top. Our leading colleges and universities play a pivotal role in this national narrative, for they are considered major pathways to power and privilege.

Today, the competition to get into these institutions is at an all-time high, and this has led to serious problems across the socioeconomic spectrum — gnawing and pervasive anxiety among the affluent, underrepresentation among the middle classes and an almost total lack of access among the poor. Changing the situation will take drastic action. Despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.

Just how skewed the system is toward the already advantaged is illustrated by the findings of a recent study of 146 selective colleges and universities, which concluded that students from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy (based on parental income, education and occupation) are 25 times more likely to attend a “top tier” college than students from the bottom quartile.

Yet at least since the 1970s, selective colleges have repeatedly claimed — most recently in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the landmark affirmative case concerning the University of Michigan — to give an edge in admissions to disadvantaged students, regardless of race. So it came as a rude shock a few years ago when William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, and his associates discovered, in a rigorous study of 19 selective colleges, that applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, “get essentially no break in the admissions process.”

The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

There is so much that is right on about this argument. First of all, it exposes that "merit" is a lie. When you have debates about affirmative action and very privileged students demand that admission should be based on merit, what they are really arguing--though few of them realize it--is that their class privilege should be protected. Because these students have every advantage working for them to get them into an elite college, they essentially didn't earn their spot, well, at least not in a fair competition from the outset.

Secondly, Karabel points out that the argument that students of color or lower socio-economic class students are not getting an advantage in admissions processes. Despite all the hullabaloo that undeserving students will get a spot at Princeton (i.e. African American or Latino students from poor backgrounds), the reality is that very few of them ever do. Affirmative action seems to be working far more for those with money.

You have to wonder then why affirmative action debates still draw such intensity these days given that these students are not losing their spots educationally and professionally to minority students. In fact, what seems clear is that the divide between the privileged "haves" and the disadvantaged "have nots" is ever widening.

I can't help but think of Za's college. It is one of the few places left that is truly committed to giving disadvantaged students an opportunity to raise themselves up economically and educationally. And yet, his college is teetering on the edge of financial collapse. The endowment is nothing and the school doesn't make up for it in tuition, since it is recruiting students who cannot pay full tuition. These students are excellent, but the college lacks the resources to give them the same quality of education that students at the college next door get.

My deepest hope is that Za's college stays alive; that it beats the odds and continues to make a difference in the lives of its students.