The Day I realized my Professor was insane and my Girlfriend wasn’t
I don’t spend a lot of time bashing feminism and I don’t make many blanket statements about it. The reasons for this are straightforward, and twofold.
1) There are too many center-right and center-left talking heads who’ve made a good career of pointing out the consequences of ceding the public square to the fringes of any movement and allowing them the heckler’s veto or giving the feelings of some element of society primacy over the rights of others. These critics are right, but their act has been done to death. And like public proclamations by atheists, these acts have become a safety valve by people who want to seem controversial but don’t want to jeopardize their careers by trampling on any real taboos.
2) Feminism is too heterogenous a movement for someone in good conscience to do as the provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos do (or did) and say something like, “Feminism is cancer.” There are plenty of feminists who believe that many strands of feminism are cancer. If we include suffragettes and other proto-feminist movements under the umbrella of the definition feminism, then feminism is the belief that women should be treated as equal human beings under the law. Some men (dating back at least to the fin-de-siècle days of salon culture) complained that the women in the prohibitionist/abstention/teetotaler movements were proof that the girls were just out to spoil the guys’ fun, and that these women’s groups were just a way for spinsters who’d abandoned puritanism to find another way to channel their fundamentalist energies toward a secular busybody pastime.
The truth, however, is that women had good reason to object to both the whoring and the drinking of their men. Venereal disease was still a much more debilitating malady then as compared to now, and while German women and children were starving during the Turnip Winter (due in part to the British Naval Blockade), grain was still being shipped to the Front to provide drinking rations to the men dying in the trenches and on the fields. And of course, anyone who’s read some Upton Sinclair or Steinbeck or Stephen Crane knows about men who blew their pay at taverns on the first of the month, while the women and children waited at home for food that would not be forthcoming, as well as waiting on a beating with the belt or leather strop that would arrive right on time.
If not wanting to be beaten or starved is feminism, then feminism can hardly be called cancer. Conversely, when someone like Andrea Dworkin (look her up in Google Images if you want to have nightmares) argues that pornography is essentially rape fuel, or someone else argues that men should be castrated as a matter of course, as if the unmanning were as normal as circumcision (a la Valerie Solanas), well … it becomes easier to understand how someone as one-note as Milo was able to get a toehold in the culture wars in the first place.
My own firsthand experience with second and third wave feminism came mostly during my time trying to receive my master’s degree in German Studies.
I had gotten my BA on the GI Bill and discovered through the VA that money was available for the Master’s program as well. Most of the guys I’d known from my time in the service had not availed themselves of the GI Bill (after enduring a lot of shit and horror in Iraq and Afghanistan), but I had gotten my degree, and decided to try to take it a step further by going for my MA.
I was at school to learn German language and history, but I needed some electives, and took one with a feminist teacher, on human sexuality. She was German, in her late forties, keen of mind, and yes, attractive.
About three-fourths of the class was female, and of that group, maybe half were somewhere on the feminist spectrum between the suffragettes and Dworkin, while maybe one or two of the other females were somewhere between Dworkin and Solanis on the spectrum. These in the latter group thought anything with the modifier “queer” before it gave an activity the seal-of-approval, but anything else, like non-queer porn, was probably suspect and responsible somewhere in the great chain of casualty that leads to things like rape and rape culture.
One of these girls was a TA (teacher’s assistant) and told me during her presentation that she taught her students that “sex was down here” (she pointed to her groin area, sheathed in blue jeans) and that gender was “here” (she pointed to her head, her temples more specifically). When I asked her what she taught, after a long pause, she answered, “Communication.” When you figure out what the link between teaching kids about their crotches and Communication is, let me know. Her presentation, incidentally, was about implied fisting (that is, the shoving of a hand up an ass) in Werner Fassbinder’s filmic adaptation of a novel by the French writer Jean Genet.
My own presentation came some days later, and dealt with the female gaze, an inversion of the phallocentric (and phallologocentric) process by which men order the world and their place and the place of women in it through a repressive taxonomizing system based on their own perceptions, beliefs, and desires (bored yet?).
There was a slide in my presentation which featured the feminist (?) authoress Ariel Levy, sexy in a specifically Jewish way I remember from seeing the older sisters and moms of the kids I played in youth basketball at the JCC (Jewish Community Center). She has brown eyes with a reflective, honeyed quality, and chestnut hair that curls a bit in older photos but seems straightened in newer ones (don’t get a nose job, Ariel!).
I thought Mx. Levey was attractive but didn’t see fit to remark on it in my presentation. Another student, one of the few males, did. He was an older Indian doctor, a bit more accustomed to the work and rigors of the real world than most of the students, and his age plus his profession usually made him a little standoffish in any social exchange that didn’t bear directly on the course work or class sessions.
On this day in question he stared up at Mx. Levy’s enchanting photo on the projector and muttered, “My god, she is beautiful.”
My professor looked over at him, pointed, and said, “I have to stop you there. I think that is a bit misogynistic to say that, to objectify her like that.” She looked around the room, and asked, “What do the others think?”
Everyone was silent for a moment. It could have been that the feminists in the class were wrestling with the potential contradictions that might come from criticizing a non-white male from their place of white privilege (I don’t know where Indian men fit on the victim totem pole), or it could have been that they didn’t agree with the professor, but knew the answer she wanted.
I came to the doctor’s defense, albeit in a qualified manner. “I think, if you’re in front of a woman, unless you’re on a date with her, you probably shouldn’t say something like that because you might put her on the spot. Otherwise, I don’t see the problem and don’t think it’s offensive.”
I shrugged, and could feel the professor and some of her TA minions glaring daggers at me. One of the TAs was a human tank, a “non-gender conforming feminist” who looked a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer if his glasses had been thicker, he weighed five-hundred pounds, and he was nominally female and was obsessed with getting Bernie Sanders elected president instead of consuming human flesh.
The class moved on from there. I got a B+ for my presentation. The TA who gave a presentation on fisting in Werner Fassbender’s Querelle got an A+.
Later I asked my girlfriend, while driving in the car on our way to breakfast, “Do you think it’s misogynistic or offensive to call a woman beautiful?”
She looked at me as if I’d asked her if pants were supposed to be worn around the head, and shoes on the hands. “No,” she said, scowling. “That’s stupid.”
I sensed as much at the time, but being in that classroom, or even being on campus, created the same sense of pressure one gets while being underwater for fifteen seconds or so. The impending feeling of a tightness in the ribs and chest starts, and the threat of something stronger to come feels implied in every breath. It was a different feeling than the dread that infected me when I roamed the halls of my high-school as a teenager, but it was unsettling nonetheless.
I hated college and miss my girlfriend quite a bit. My solution to most of life’s problems, and most of its insane ideologues, is to ignore them. It’s how I remain happy and sane. I know it’s possible that their grip on society (the corporeal meatspace, not just online) could extend to the point where that Indian doctor and I end up in some kind of gulag (or, if you like Alex Jones and don’t think he’s nuts, a FEMA camp) but I don’t sense such a movement in the wind. The pushback from the “radical center” as someone called it, feels too strong right now. Every time I fear for the future of humanity, I go to the park, watch mothers and fathers with their kids, or other childless weirdo dropouts like myself walking their dogs, and I remember that most people just want to live, to feel the sun’s rays on their skin and the breeze creeping along their necks. They don’t want to herd people into small rooms and tell them what to think, but because their sanity is a silent, peaceful state, it registers an octave or ten lower than the screeching by the lunatics who can’t enjoy the sun, the breeze, or the companionship of a dog (feminists seem to like cats, though).
There seems to be a bit of a forcefield of insanity around the campus, vacuum-sealing the nuttiness in to preserve the ideological purity of the bubble, but this also keeps the infection from spreading too far afield into reality (outside of echo chambers like blogs, some media outlets and human resources departments).
My heart goes out to you, though, if you have to put up with this shit on a daily basis. I did it for as long as I could endure it. I wouldn’t mind being called “Doctor,” but I couldn’t handle going back for my PhD. There are better ways to waste money. Like at the strip club.
1) There are too many center-right and center-left talking heads who’ve made a good career of pointing out the consequences of ceding the public square to the fringes of any movement and allowing them the heckler’s veto or giving the feelings of some element of society primacy over the rights of others. These critics are right, but their act has been done to death. And like public proclamations by atheists, these acts have become a safety valve by people who want to seem controversial but don’t want to jeopardize their careers by trampling on any real taboos.
2) Feminism is too heterogenous a movement for someone in good conscience to do as the provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos do (or did) and say something like, “Feminism is cancer.” There are plenty of feminists who believe that many strands of feminism are cancer. If we include suffragettes and other proto-feminist movements under the umbrella of the definition feminism, then feminism is the belief that women should be treated as equal human beings under the law. Some men (dating back at least to the fin-de-siècle days of salon culture) complained that the women in the prohibitionist/abstention/teetotaler movements were proof that the girls were just out to spoil the guys’ fun, and that these women’s groups were just a way for spinsters who’d abandoned puritanism to find another way to channel their fundamentalist energies toward a secular busybody pastime.
The truth, however, is that women had good reason to object to both the whoring and the drinking of their men. Venereal disease was still a much more debilitating malady then as compared to now, and while German women and children were starving during the Turnip Winter (due in part to the British Naval Blockade), grain was still being shipped to the Front to provide drinking rations to the men dying in the trenches and on the fields. And of course, anyone who’s read some Upton Sinclair or Steinbeck or Stephen Crane knows about men who blew their pay at taverns on the first of the month, while the women and children waited at home for food that would not be forthcoming, as well as waiting on a beating with the belt or leather strop that would arrive right on time.
If not wanting to be beaten or starved is feminism, then feminism can hardly be called cancer. Conversely, when someone like Andrea Dworkin (look her up in Google Images if you want to have nightmares) argues that pornography is essentially rape fuel, or someone else argues that men should be castrated as a matter of course, as if the unmanning were as normal as circumcision (a la Valerie Solanas), well … it becomes easier to understand how someone as one-note as Milo was able to get a toehold in the culture wars in the first place.
My own firsthand experience with second and third wave feminism came mostly during my time trying to receive my master’s degree in German Studies.
I had gotten my BA on the GI Bill and discovered through the VA that money was available for the Master’s program as well. Most of the guys I’d known from my time in the service had not availed themselves of the GI Bill (after enduring a lot of shit and horror in Iraq and Afghanistan), but I had gotten my degree, and decided to try to take it a step further by going for my MA.
I was at school to learn German language and history, but I needed some electives, and took one with a feminist teacher, on human sexuality. She was German, in her late forties, keen of mind, and yes, attractive.
About three-fourths of the class was female, and of that group, maybe half were somewhere on the feminist spectrum between the suffragettes and Dworkin, while maybe one or two of the other females were somewhere between Dworkin and Solanis on the spectrum. These in the latter group thought anything with the modifier “queer” before it gave an activity the seal-of-approval, but anything else, like non-queer porn, was probably suspect and responsible somewhere in the great chain of casualty that leads to things like rape and rape culture.
One of these girls was a TA (teacher’s assistant) and told me during her presentation that she taught her students that “sex was down here” (she pointed to her groin area, sheathed in blue jeans) and that gender was “here” (she pointed to her head, her temples more specifically). When I asked her what she taught, after a long pause, she answered, “Communication.” When you figure out what the link between teaching kids about their crotches and Communication is, let me know. Her presentation, incidentally, was about implied fisting (that is, the shoving of a hand up an ass) in Werner Fassbinder’s filmic adaptation of a novel by the French writer Jean Genet.
My own presentation came some days later, and dealt with the female gaze, an inversion of the phallocentric (and phallologocentric) process by which men order the world and their place and the place of women in it through a repressive taxonomizing system based on their own perceptions, beliefs, and desires (bored yet?).
There was a slide in my presentation which featured the feminist (?) authoress Ariel Levy, sexy in a specifically Jewish way I remember from seeing the older sisters and moms of the kids I played in youth basketball at the JCC (Jewish Community Center). She has brown eyes with a reflective, honeyed quality, and chestnut hair that curls a bit in older photos but seems straightened in newer ones (don’t get a nose job, Ariel!).
I thought Mx. Levey was attractive but didn’t see fit to remark on it in my presentation. Another student, one of the few males, did. He was an older Indian doctor, a bit more accustomed to the work and rigors of the real world than most of the students, and his age plus his profession usually made him a little standoffish in any social exchange that didn’t bear directly on the course work or class sessions.
On this day in question he stared up at Mx. Levy’s enchanting photo on the projector and muttered, “My god, she is beautiful.”
My professor looked over at him, pointed, and said, “I have to stop you there. I think that is a bit misogynistic to say that, to objectify her like that.” She looked around the room, and asked, “What do the others think?”
Everyone was silent for a moment. It could have been that the feminists in the class were wrestling with the potential contradictions that might come from criticizing a non-white male from their place of white privilege (I don’t know where Indian men fit on the victim totem pole), or it could have been that they didn’t agree with the professor, but knew the answer she wanted.
I came to the doctor’s defense, albeit in a qualified manner. “I think, if you’re in front of a woman, unless you’re on a date with her, you probably shouldn’t say something like that because you might put her on the spot. Otherwise, I don’t see the problem and don’t think it’s offensive.”
I shrugged, and could feel the professor and some of her TA minions glaring daggers at me. One of the TAs was a human tank, a “non-gender conforming feminist” who looked a bit like Jeffrey Dahmer if his glasses had been thicker, he weighed five-hundred pounds, and he was nominally female and was obsessed with getting Bernie Sanders elected president instead of consuming human flesh.
The class moved on from there. I got a B+ for my presentation. The TA who gave a presentation on fisting in Werner Fassbender’s Querelle got an A+.
Later I asked my girlfriend, while driving in the car on our way to breakfast, “Do you think it’s misogynistic or offensive to call a woman beautiful?”
She looked at me as if I’d asked her if pants were supposed to be worn around the head, and shoes on the hands. “No,” she said, scowling. “That’s stupid.”
I sensed as much at the time, but being in that classroom, or even being on campus, created the same sense of pressure one gets while being underwater for fifteen seconds or so. The impending feeling of a tightness in the ribs and chest starts, and the threat of something stronger to come feels implied in every breath. It was a different feeling than the dread that infected me when I roamed the halls of my high-school as a teenager, but it was unsettling nonetheless.
I hated college and miss my girlfriend quite a bit. My solution to most of life’s problems, and most of its insane ideologues, is to ignore them. It’s how I remain happy and sane. I know it’s possible that their grip on society (the corporeal meatspace, not just online) could extend to the point where that Indian doctor and I end up in some kind of gulag (or, if you like Alex Jones and don’t think he’s nuts, a FEMA camp) but I don’t sense such a movement in the wind. The pushback from the “radical center” as someone called it, feels too strong right now. Every time I fear for the future of humanity, I go to the park, watch mothers and fathers with their kids, or other childless weirdo dropouts like myself walking their dogs, and I remember that most people just want to live, to feel the sun’s rays on their skin and the breeze creeping along their necks. They don’t want to herd people into small rooms and tell them what to think, but because their sanity is a silent, peaceful state, it registers an octave or ten lower than the screeching by the lunatics who can’t enjoy the sun, the breeze, or the companionship of a dog (feminists seem to like cats, though).
There seems to be a bit of a forcefield of insanity around the campus, vacuum-sealing the nuttiness in to preserve the ideological purity of the bubble, but this also keeps the infection from spreading too far afield into reality (outside of echo chambers like blogs, some media outlets and human resources departments).
My heart goes out to you, though, if you have to put up with this shit on a daily basis. I did it for as long as I could endure it. I wouldn’t mind being called “Doctor,” but I couldn’t handle going back for my PhD. There are better ways to waste money. Like at the strip club.
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