Godless Professors and the Subversion of American Youth

Did you know that universities are subverting the minds of America's young people by turning them into godless socialists? Dr. Mike S. Adams, a professor at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is dispensing advice at Townhall to a father who is distraught about his daughter coming home with scary new leftist ideas. Jeff Fecke (h/t) has already taken down Dr. Mike bit-by-wingnutty-bit - including his coinage of the oh-so-clever acronym STD for "Socialist Teaching Disorder." I just want to zoom in on one little piece of Dr. Mike's take on university life:

First of all, I want you to understand that many of the crazy ideas you hear your daughter espousing are commonplace on college campuses. Nonetheless, it must have been shocking for you to hear that she supported Barack Obama in the last election principally because of his ideas about “the redistribution of wealth.” I know you were also disappointed to hear of her sudden opposition to the War on Terror and her sudden embrace of the United Nations. Most of all, I know you are disappointed that she has stopped going to church altogether.

Now that your daughter is not going to church it will be easier to get her to accept other policies based on economic and cultural Marxism. Socialist professors like the fact that average church attendance drops dramatically after just one year of college. God and socialism are simply incompatible. One cannot worship both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.

(If you must, you can read the rest here.)

Although I'm not a real socialist - just a fan of redistribution, thanks to my pastor when I was 14! - I am one of those freethinking university professors. Scandalously, I think it's a good thing when my students start to examine their beliefs and preconceptions.

I just finished teaching a class on religion, gender, and sexuality that might well enrage Dr. Mike. I framed patriarchy in materialist terms and lectured on how poverty multiplies the odds that a woman will terminate a pregnancy. (Socialism!) We discussed the Gnostic Gospels and the struggle between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in Christianity. (Heresy!) We delved into the roots of the Christian valorization of virginity. (Sluttishness!)

At the end of the quarter, students were asked to write a short essay in which they discussed how their views had changed over the past ten weeks. Many of them said that the class upset their certainties. Some of them questioned their faith. How, after all, can you trust the Bible's authority if a politicized Church hierarchy - not divine revelation - determined which books became canonical?

So yeah. Dr. Mike would hate this class. So did one student (out of 85), judging from the final exam. She objected to the feminist framing of the material. She would have preferred ten weeks of Catholic dogma. She transparently didn't bother to engage with the material in any serious way.

The rest of the students - including many current and former Catholics - realized that they didn't have to follow any party line. Not mine; not any religion's. One young Catholic woman had a real crisis of faith mid-quarter. By the end of the quarter, she felt stronger in her beliefs than before. Another young woman who's planning to become a minister wrote of her past and present struggles with her faith.

Did I turn those students godless? Not by any stretch. And that was never my intent. If a person is going to embrace faith as an adult, they're going to have to find it themselves. They can't just continue believing a Sunday School version of it with colorful, sanitized pictures of Daniel in the lion's den and Jesus surrounded by fluffy lambs. They'll have to navigate their way from dogma to actual faith. That's exactly how some of my religious students used the class. They started questions and haven't stopped. And they have matured in their beliefs. (Interestingly, a number of them declare some affinity for Buddhist ideas, even as they remain in their own faith tradition.)

A substantially minority of my students wrote that they consider themselves agnostics or atheists. So did I convert them to godlessness? A few of them did begin to call themselves agnostics during the class, but most of them came into it already rejecting or questioning religion. Many of them felt liberated at being able to "come out" about their unbelief in their discussion groups - something they often had felt unable to do, until now.

These students took my class for one of two reasons. Some had grown up without any religion and felt they needed to close a gap in their education. Others were questioning their religious upbringing or had rejected it altogether, often in the wake of a loved one's death. (It's ironic and sad that religion seems so often to fail people at the very moment when it's supposed to provide the most comfort.) Disproportionately, the students in this second group had been raised Catholic. For most of them, the Church's condemnation of homosexuality was a serious dealbreaker, with its position on abortion and contraception coming in a close second.

This is why the Pope's statement on gender last Christmas made me crazy. There was some controversy at the time about what the English word "gender" connotes when used in Italian (as in the Pope's address), and I can't speak to that as an expert. I know about a dozen words of Italian and I wasn't raised Catholic. But the context - as well as some of the smarter commentary on this - convinced me that he was affirming the church's teachings on the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and traditional gender roles.

More importantly, the Pope was trying to shut down all discussion of all gender issues within the Catholic Church. This is exactly what's driving young people out of the Church. They see the condemnation of homosexuality and the hierarchy's refusal to even discuss it as contemptuous and inhumane.

Dr. Mike, his letter-writer, and (I'm betting) a lot of conservative parents want to short-circuit that discussion too. It's a terrible loss, because their kids want to have it. They need to have it. That goes for everyone from the young fundamentalist to the hard-core nihilist. (And yes, the range in my class was that wide.)

If Dr. Mike were paying attention to his students, he'd realize that whatever their professors do or say, they are at an age where they're bound to question their upbringing. A good university education should help them learn to think for themselves in a more thorough, systematic, and deeper way. It should prod them to question received wisdom and authority. It should expose them to a variety of viewpoints. (Yes, even Dr. Mike's.)

If that's subverting young people, then I'm blessed to be a part of it. One student sent me an email at the end of the quarter saying the class had changed her life; another said the same as she turned in her exam. I don't personally take too much credit, because the potentially life-changing work happened in the discussion groups, not in my lectures. But even so, staying on the job full-time this quarter through weeks of illness and fear was probably the hardest thing I've ever done, and I'd worried that my students got cheated. I blubbed in gratitude when I read that email.

Oh, and as far as I know, I didn't convert a single student to Marxism. Nary a Trotskyist. Not even a mild-mannered socialist-feminist. I guess I'd better try harder.

The Fun of Being a BAD, BAD Girl

Yay! Blogroll Amnesty Day is upon us, and its instigators - Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Jon Swift, and Blue Gal - have declared the festivities open now, even things don't get officially BAD until February 3. Well, at least Skippy is bounding over the start line (as befits a kangaroo, I suppose).

The premise, if you haven't already heard, is to link to five blogs with smaller readerships than one's own. Originally, the event was a protest against the big liberal blogs purging the smaller fish from the blogrolls (see Jon Swift's original post for the gory history). By now, it's mostly about fun and exuberance and sharing bloggy love.

Last year, people were lovely about nurturing me. I was less than a month into my blogging adventure. Kittywampus was as wet behind its ears as a newborn kitten. I was really grateful, and still am, for the encouragement I got from The Political Cat, Blue Gal, figleaf, and others.

I'll be happy to entertain blogrolling (almost) all comers, so just ask if you'd like to join the fun. I'll gladly add a followup post and put you on my blogroll. The only catch is that you need to join the BAD festivities, too - no matter how miniscule your blog may be. Oh, and I say "almost" all comers because last year a nice evangelical preacher asked to be added, and I callously said no. He would've been a mighty odd fit with the liberal, irreverent, smart feminist folks who populate my blogroll.

So here are the wonderful people I'm adding to my blogroll today. I don't know if any of their blogs are smaller than mine, but I'm pretty sure most of us move in the same universe. I may be cheating a bit, since I'd planned to add all of them weeks ago!

Sally at Jump off the Bridge tops that list: she's smart and lively and often on top of stories others don't pick up on. She's writing at The Feminist Underground these days, too, but I've been remiss in adding her own place.

Mom's Tinfoil Hat offers sharp insight into medicine and reproductive politics from an insider's view. She's often more jaded about obstetrics than I am, but since she's a med student, I'd say she's in a position to know.

Octogalore is one of the deeply intelligent commenters in the feminist blogosphere, and her blog, Astarte's Circus, is equally thoughtful, especially on issues of class, motherhood, and sexuality.

The tagline at Blue Milk pretty much sums it up: "thinking + motherhood = feminist." Yep. Not that this is the only route to feminism (I signed on a quarter century before I had my first baby) but it's definitely an express lane. Or perhaps the carpool lane.

I like Daisy's Dead Air for more than just our shared history of lovin' the Dead. She's an original thinker, sometimes downright contrarian, and she tells it like she sees it.

Professor, What If ...? will make you think, and not just about gender issues. Even her posts on TV are thought-provoking. Also, I love that her posts often run as long as my ramblings. I guess that's an occupational hazard. I also love that she doesn't apologize for it any more than I do.

Viva La Feminista focuses on feminism and parenting (and she too was nominated for Hottest Mommy Blogger - woo hoo!). She's younger than me, living in Chicago, and a proud Latina, and precisely those differences from my own life provide valuable perspectives on our shared concerns of motherhood and more.

The Apostate writes from the perspective of a young woman who grew up Muslim but is now alienated from her faith. She's been a bit less prolific lately, but I hope she'll carry on; her analysis is incisive and her perspective is - if not unique in the blogosphere - vastly underrepresented.

I know full well that Lisa Wade's Sociological Images is in a different league than me, but I've been meaning to add her too. And not just because she's got all this brilliant/dreadful material that's invaluable to my teaching.

Same goes for Plain(s)feminist. She's another fellow academic with consistently thoughtful views on feminism. Her recent posts on cancer have spoken to me (as the partner of a two-time survivor), but that's only one facet of her work. Of course, I appreciate her Great Plains viewpoint, too.

Hmmm. Somehow that's 5 + 5. I guess that's the hazard of counting on one's fingers; you can lose track of what hand you're on.

Here's wishing you a happy BAD weekend, one and all!

Bloggers: The Adjunct Professors of the Media?

The founder of Shakesville, Melissa McEwan, reappeared earlier this week after contemplating an end to her blogging career. I can't say I blame her. She does a daunting amount of work for no pay whatsoever. Melissa's long post explaining her absence and return is touching and illuminating. It sounds like she's experiencing the post-election fatigue that has struck many of us, combined with burnout from long hours for only intermittent recognition. And she's been working for free. Now, many of her loyal readers are pledging to support Shakesville with a regular stream of donations.

I'm glad Melissa has a supportive community. I think it's lovely that she's getting lots of donation offers. But she'll need an awful lot of small donors - or a few exceedingly generous ones - to even make minimum wage for her efforts. This still doesn't add up to an income!

Melissa's quandary makes me wonder how sustainable independent, progressive blogging will prove to be. It's precisely these truly independent progressive blogs that are creating a meaningful public sphere - a cradle of civil society - in a country that desperately needs reasonable, critical discourse. Yes, progressive bloggers do say "fuck" a lot, but they're civil on a far deeper level. They've placed relentless pressure on Democratic candidates to respond to our concerns. They've given voice to those who've been silenced. They've pushed a host of issues onto the agenda of the corporate media. In short, they're playing a leading role in transforming American politics. I seriously wonder if Obama could have won without them.

And most independent lefty bloggers do this work without any compensation. With loads of luck, their blogging might catapult them into the limelight long enough to snag a book contract or some freelance writing for established media. Needless to say, even those folks aren't getting rich from their writing.

What to do? Donations can only be a temporary, patchwork solution. In fact, the whole language of "donations" and "tip jars" has been troubling me all day. Other people who work their asses off to do a job don't expect to live from donations! They're paid wages or salaries. The language reminds us that they've earned their pay. Don't bloggers do the same? Or will people persist in seeing major projects like Shakesville as basically a hobby?

Here's where I have some hard-earned empathy for Melissa and others in her boat - less from my experience as a small-potatoes blogger than as a long-term adjunct professor.

Both bloggers and adjuncts repeatedly get the message that they should feel lucky to have a creative outlet for their talents. Both are too often looked down upon by colleagues who ought to be their allies: tenured professors and conventional journalists. Both earn a pittance or nothing at all. (In America, adjuncts usually get paid something, but in Germany unpaid gigs are quite common.)

And yet both bloggers and adjuncts serve an essential function in society. We educate. We inspire. We provoke. We contribute an outsider's perspective. We fill needs neglected by those in more comfy positions.

Universities, at least, have resources that can potentially be used to improve the lot of adjuncts. This just requires the will to recommit to teaching, as opposed to administration and capital projects. (My chair and dean have done that for me, and I'm now on an annual contract - bless them!)

The solution is less obvious for blogs, where many of the readers are themselves unpaid bloggers. As I've already suggested, the donations model is not sustainable on a large scale or in the long run. Melissa rightly argues that ads are no solution, either, especially for feminist blogs where key terms generate bizarrely counterproductive ads. Just one example: Last spring, Feministing was plagued by a Playboy ad, as my friend Sugarmag pointed out (I'd link to this if her blog were still up).

I don't have any realistic solutions. I do have a few fantasy ones. Maybe George Soros would establish a foundation for lefty bloggers? Better yet, how about a foundation supported by a surtax on Rupert Murdoch and other major media conglomerates? I think that'd be perfectly just, considering the yawning gap that they've created in media coverage - and that bloggers are bridging.

I just know one thing for sure: we'll be totally blinkered in seeking solutions until we reframe politically engaged blogging as something far more important and serious than a hobby. We need to ditch the talk of donations and tip jars. Especially on the scale of Shakesville, blogging is a public service and a crucial, vibrant part of civil society. Those who provide this service should be able to earn a decent living from it.

And before I get way too sanctimonious, one final thought: I hope that Melissa really will use some of her earnings to buy some first-rate catnip and paint her house sparkly purple, as some of her commenters suggested. That is what we do with real income. We spend it on both projects both noble and silly without having to be accountable to "donors." If Grey Kitty, patron cat of Kittywampus, were still here today, she'd remind us that there's nothing nobler than good 'nip, even if it did make her drool.

Good Thing the Tiger Has a Hard Noggin

Political blogging will resume tomorrow, I hope, but this evening I'm pretty wrung out. Tonight at the Bear's soccer practice, while the younger siblings were playing on the sidelines, a six-year-old threw a rock at the Tiger and hit him in the head. Hard. I wasn't there, but I heard all about it from the rest of the family.

The Tiger proved once again that scalp injuries bleed like crazy. He'll be okay, but he arrived home looking like a refugee from one of those scary movies I haven't watched since my high school days.

It was a deep cut and hurt like hell, but worse, the incident wasn't an accident. It was deliberate and unprovoked. The child's father didn't say a word to my husband. Not cool.

It's hard to know how to handle this; the family is new to this team. I'm not one to hold grudges, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect an apology from the parents, or at least a word of concern. (The dad did insist his son apologize.) I'd also like some reassurance that in the future, they'll keep an eye on both of their children, especially if their younger son has a history of aggression.


Here's what the Tiger's noggin looked like up 'til a few hours ago, before it got bloodied and then shaved like a big bullseye around the wound. (Out of privacy concerns, I don't normally post pictures of my kids, but this one doesn't reveal his identity.)

Update 9/20/08: The mom of the other little boy sent us an apologetic email earlier today. That made me feel a lot better. Kids stand so much better a chance of getting it if their parents do, too. Although I really don't know these parents, I sort of suspect they may have a division of labor where the wife is charge of dealing with social situations, including the touchy ones.

My Sandbox, My Rules

Kittywampus is an itty-bitty blog. Maybe a few dozen people people come around and read regularly, and I love you guys for doing it. I love you even more when you leave comments. Others find me through search terms like "natural shrinkage of ovaries" or "attention getter activities for English classes" (which led to the Best Penis Spam post, so it'd better be a liberal school!) or "basement flooding pepper pike Ohio" (huh?!). Most of these random encounters end in one or the other party simply going "WTF?" and moving on.

But the past couple of days have been different. First a client (a certain publishing mega-conglomerate that shall henceforth remain nameless) found a post from a few days ago where I mentioned working on a job for them. In that post I promised I wouldn't divulge anything about the current translating job because it was unpublished, and then I referred interested readers to the public website for the larger project. The client objected - I still don't know why, since I was scrupulous about anything that was even remotely confidential, and the post was snark-free - but I removed it since I wanted to protect the job that shall also remain nameless.

Then yesterday I got a succession of increasingly unpleasant comments. The first took a mildly bullying tone on the Clinton-O'Bleness dust-up. The next took me to task for a spelling error (and for not fully appreciating my mother!) in my post on reproductive rights. The last one, by "John" on my follow-up post to the O'Bleness story, informed me: "You are so full of shit that the best I can offer is a cyber enema." (None of these three commenters had properly traceable IDs. Welcome to Trollville.)

That's not what this blog is about. The blogosphere bristles with rants and invective. So does cable TV. I don't think the world needs much more of that. Call me idealistic, but I don't think democracy can thrive without civil society. As a matter of style and temperament, too, I prefer reasoned arguments over name-calling. I try not to be too dull or pedantic, and while I'm sure I don't always succeed, I don't think potty humor is any remedy. I get enough of that from my beloved four-year-old Tiger, anyway, whose favorite "naughty" phrase right now is "poop on your head."

I'm sure this is just the normal bloggy growing pains that go with wading into controversial topics. Maybe it's also a reflection of the bitterness of this primary season. I'm aware I can be grateful that all I got was some scat and not overtly sexual threats or insults. (Then again, I don't know "John's" preferences; perhaps he thought he and I could have a real good time with an enema? Sorry, buddy. Not my thing.)

But I also don't need to put up with this Scheisse. So, you'll now see a comment policy right below Grey Kitty's picture. I'll delete liberally, if I must; I don't want to impede the conversation by turning on comment moderation. I'm leaving yesterday's comments up for the same reason my brother-in-law used to leave a trail of dead ants on his kitchen counter: to warn the next insects. We'll see if it helps!

Rock iris courtesy of Sungold's garden porn collection. It just finished blooming.

Not Shrinking Violets

One more time, the trolls and troglodytes are harassing women on the web. This time, sex columnist Violet Blue came in for a bunch of unwarranted crap. She fought back late last week with a column that's worth reading in its entirety (so go check it out). The proximate cause of it was this chivalrous comment in an online chat about sex scandals:

"Sorry, but being an unattractive skank is not enough to make you an expert. Watching Violet is like watching the female version of Bill Gates expound on sex — something you just don't want to see. Or hear (thank God we don't have smell-o-vision!)"

Eew. Thank God we don't have to see what this guy is insecure about! Does he look like the Geico caveman? Or is he just an ordinary guy who'd be lucky to get a date with a smart, witty, attractive woman like Violet Blue who knows way more about sex than he ever will?

See? I can play that game too. But mostly, when women attack men online, we go after the substance of what they've said. We do sometimes take aim at their personal qualities, especially when they've got a long track record of assholery and dipshittery. I'm speaking now mostly about liberal women, not wingnut women, who generally inhabit a different Internet than I do.

Women aren't angels. Online, plenty of women indulge in ad hominem attacks, launched at each other as well as at men. That's part of the general coarseness and incivility that online anonymity seems to breed in people. (For a particularly vile example of this, see this comment thread at Pandagon, which in general is one of my favorite-most blogs.)

But liberal women don't generally attack people's appearance as a first or even last resort, and I have yet to see a woman threaten another poster with physical and/or sexual violence. While men, too, can take the brunt of nasty and even bullying behavior online, I don't know of any case involving a man that went as far as the death threats that dogged Kathy Sierra and forced her to quit tech blogging.

Violet Blue's response to the targeting of women online was inspired - and inspiring:

I just write and talk about sex. But every woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. ...

The problem is, with so many women I talk to, the trolling is effective. The number of times I've talked down a crying girlfriend after she's been trolled in her comments about being fat, ugly, skanky, slutty or stupid is higher than I can count (no matter what she writes about). Trolls watch too much mainstream porn and TV, and believe stereotypes are real; they slap us with it and then we believe it, too. ...

In Margaret Cho's "Beautiful" tour, she talks about recently being on a radio show and having the host ask her point-blank, live, on the air, "What if you woke up one day, and you were beautiful?" When asked, he defined beautiful as blonde, thin, large-breasted, a porno stereotype. Cho says, "Just think of what life is like for this poor guy. There's beauty all around him in the world, and he can only see the most narrow definition of it."

So maybe if you're a woman, you're just going to be fat and ugly on the Internet no matter what you look like, say or do. Of course, I could swap out my SFGate bio photo for Jenna Jameson's. Then maybe we'd have some serious discourse about sex culture around here.

(I quoted at length because it's all spot-on, but do read the rest here.)

Right. It's a classic double bind. If you're sexy, you can't be smart and serious. If you're smart and serious, you'd better not reveal your sexy side or you won't be taken seriously. And yet, when women don't combine all those things at once, we fall short of what Anna Quindlen called "effortless perfection."

I'm not suggesting the guys need to shoot for perfection, too. But how about we all cut women a little slack, and let us be our imperfect, sexy, smart, silly, sassy selves - out loud, in public, without fearing attacks on our person or safety.

Photo by Flickr user Lady-bug, used under a Creative Commons license.

Blogroll Amnesty Day

One of my favorite bloggers, Jon Swift (satirist and "reasonable conservative"), and his buddy Skippy the Bush Kangaroo have declared today Blogroll Amnesty Day.

Jon lays out the whole backstory. Basically, they're encouraging medium-sized bloggers to add smaller bloggers to their blogrolls, and so on down the food chain, with the idea of nudging some traffic to us small fry.

As one of the minnows of the blogsphere (please just ignore how that metaphor clashes with my cat theme), I can't really go any further down the chain or I'll land somewhere in the primordial ooze. Not that this has stopped me from visiting some of the smart and inventive people that Jon linked to, and then some of the folks they linked to.

It's a hugely entertaining way to procrastinate instead of grading quizzes. Plus it's a free pass on promiscuous shameless blogwhoring. Considering that someone has actually stumbled on this blog by searching for Porno Barbie, maybe it's time for me to start soliciting people who might be interested in non-porn, non-Barbie themed stuff.

So far, I've added
Last Left Turn before Hooterville
The Political Cat
Blue Gal
and (independent of BAD, just 'cause I've been meaning to anyway)
Holly's Self Portrait As

These blogs are all smart, political, and well-written - and not least, they're all friendly to cats.

I'll update this later, but now I've got to go explore some more new-to-me blogs.