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.

Found: Twitter's Divine Feline Use

First, you have to get over your chimera-disgust at the idea of cats tweeting. Really, it can be quite natural! Not monstrous at all!

Second, you (well, I) have to get over our anti-Twitter biases.

And then you can enjoy the application for which Twitter was obviously made in the first place: the tweets of the Ceiling Cat.

I stumbled on this chirping deity while exploring the LOLcat Bible, which was helping me procrastinate my actual task of reading up on feminist theological projects like The Woman's Bible. The LOLcat Bible very nearly landed in my Tuesday lecture. Yeah, we're all punchy by now, students and instructors alike, in this, the last week of classes before finals. I now regret not doing it.

The LOLcreation, at the LOLcat Bible.

So here's a sample of feline revelation:

An Iz dump teh sno on teh norfeest, So dat teh hoomins stai insied an cuddle der kittehs an keep dem warm.

Yu kno why kittehs eet teh tinsel from yer Crismus Trees? Cuz wen I wuz leeding dem thru teh desert, dat is wut manna luk liek.

In other words: Proof positive that the 140-character count meshes perfectly with a cat's walnut-sized brain. Not sure if this says more about cats, or more about Twitter.

I should warn you that there's a rival Ceiling Cat tweeting. While it doesn't appear to be the Basement Cat in disguise, this one is less active and creative, but a whole lot more prurient - maybe he's laying the groundwork for a Catichean struggle? Maybe he's just gunning to lead a meagachurch? Anyway, here's his obsession:

Watching you masturbate.

Just call me LL Ceiling C, because judging from my followers: Ladies Love Ceiling Cat. And Ceiling Cat loves watching you... you know.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe some of the stuff y'all get up to.

Luckily for you (and by you, I once again mean me), Twitter offers the option: "Block Ceiling Cat."

The Perils and Privileges of Invisible Disability

This isn't exactly a LOLtopic, but invisibility of any sort calls for a kitteh - from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Spurred partly by my recent scary health experiences, and partly by posts from Julie at Alas and Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air, I've been thinking about the peculiarities of invisible disability.

About a week into my bizarro neurological adventures, I started to go public with my colleagues and a few students. I realized I wasn't going to be healthy again overnight. It became obvious that I might need some extra support - which I got in abundance.

The first group of colleagues I told were shocked. "But you looked like nothing had changed!" "Nobody could tell that there was anything wrong!" "Really, your lecture was just fine!"

What shocked me, upon reflection, is how gratified I felt to hear this. I had a mild tremor in my lower left lip, and I was convinced I must look like Inspector Dreyfus from the Pink Panther movies. My facial muscles were freakishly tight and I was sure my face resembled a death mask. Brain fog interrupted my ability to string together sentences, and I perceived my own lectures as rank gibberish.

I suppose it's understandable that I was glad to hear that none of this was evident to an outside observer. And yet, I think my reaction also betrays an investment in "normalcy" that I really ought to have shed by now. I've been teaching about disability in women's studies classes for years. My partner has a somewhat visible physical disability. While in grad school, I experienced another invisible, ultimately temporary, but fairly long-lasting disability when I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

What does it take for a gal to get over the ideal of normalcy? Why was passing so important to me?

There's a serious privilege built into invisible disability. While I'm still pretty far from normal (my hand tremor is acting up as I type this), I can choose whether to disclose it to people. I don't have to respond to questions from strangers about what happened to me - something that happened to my partner all the time when he was wearing an arm brace. It's as though any piece of orthopedic equipment makes your body and its history public property. I'm very relieved not to have to defend my personal space and privacy.

Faced with wearing a wrist brace that might help her heal but would call attention to her disability, Daisy explains why she can't quite make herself do it.

It makes me appear vulnerable and calls attention to my age, in a job market in which older workers are getting left behind. I try to look energetic and "happy" on my job, since we are "selling a lifestyle" and all that shit: I feel pressure in the health supplement industry to always appear healthy. Since it's a job in which people are always talking about their health, I am duly questioned about mine, when there are many times (like now) that I'd rather not answer. The overall sentiment seems to be: well, if you know so much about supplements, why are you falling apart? Aging is inevitable and people are in denial about that, as well as in denial about disability-as-part-of-life in general...

I'm not in the health industry, but in my work I'm surrounded by apparently-healthy young people. As their instructor, I often hear about what lies beneath. One person has ADHD, another is coping with rheumatoid arthritis, yet another has Crohn's disease, someone else comes down with mono, and a legion of them struggle with various mental health issues. Yet the norm on campus is what's visible. And all you can see - except for the occasional leg cast - is "healthy," vigorous youth. It's possible this is more pronounced at my university than most, because the campus is hilly and the accommodations for anyone who's mobility-impaired are a joke.

This silence and invisibility contribute to the denial Daisy mentions. So does our shared but repressed fear of mortality and decline.

There are also serious perils in looking "too healthy." Julie at Alas recounts how she can't wrap her own mind around the idea that her back pain is real, and this sabotages her ability to get the care she needs. Daisy points out that Julie's experience collides our expectation that if a person is young, attractive, middle-class, and educated, she ought to be healthy, too, just by definition.

Maybe most people with invisible disabilities aren't as hard on themselves as Julie appears to be, but they also can't always count on the recognition and help they need. When I had my chronic fatigue experience, my grad school advisers were wonderfully supportive, but some of the other people in my orbit really didn't get it. My then-boyfriend once accused me of using my illness manipulatively because I could find energy for some activities but not others. It was hard for him to understand that my energy level varied, and that I had to set priorities. (This was the beginning of the end for me and him.) A few fellow students expressed skepticism behind my back, which came back to me through the grad-school gossip tree: How could I really be sick? I didn't look sick! Was I just trying to get a break on my coursework? To my face, though, some of my comrades radiated pity; this group overlapped with the skeptics, weirdly enough.

This time around, I've encountered only warmth and support from family, friends, and colleagues. My husband took on some of my usual household tasks. My mom sent money and offered to come help if we needed her. Friends took care of the kids, often at short notice, and one of them babysat overnight so we could go to Cleveland. One colleague gave a lecture while I was away, and another was on call to cover my seminar. Yet another found money to pay a grader so I didn't have to deal with 90 midterms.

I'm sure it helps that I'm out of the grad-school hothouse with its petty resentments. More importantly, most of the adults in my life are now old enough to have some close-up experience with disability. Without their support, I don't know how I'd have made it through the past weeks.

But the precondition for all this help was that I had to make the invisible visible. I had to take the risk of making it public. I couldn't hide under the mask of normalcy. I had to give up the privilege of passing, however uncomfortable that made me. I'm so grateful that the people in my life all chose to make that radical phenomenological leap of faith - to believe in the reality of my reality, no matter how impossible it was for them to see it.

What would it take to transform our society so that invisible disability is always taken seriously - and that leap of faith is no longer even necessary?

The Out-of-Control (Feminist?) Classroom

Control freak kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Historiann raises an interesting question of where professors experience the most control: research or teaching. In response to an MLA survey that contends professors, and especially women, may overinvest in teaching because it offers them a sense of control, she writes:

At least in my experience, research is the only area in which I have near complete control–not in the classroom, where someone else designed the rooms, and someone else determines the number of students and the number of courses we teach.

I agree completely. If I'm researching and writing, it's just me, the sources, and my ideas. Sure, someone else will eventually judge my work, but the process feels like it's within my own control. If I produce good work, it redounds to my credit. If it's crap ... well, there's no one else to blame. (Hmmm ... academic writing is a whole lot like blogging, that way.)

But teaching? There, the lack of control goes far beyond the conditions that Historiann mentions. Most importantly, the process of teaching escapes our control. We can steer, nudge, cajole. We can't totally direct it, however. In fact, I'd suggest that relinquishing control is sometimes necessary for effective teaching.

Teaching women's studies has forced me to wrestle with my inner control freak. (So has parenting, but that would be a whole 'nother post.) Let's just say my control freakery is not vanquished, but most days it's, well, under control. When I was interviewing last spring for my current job, the hiring committee posed this question, which I've been mulling over ever since:

How has your teaching changed now that you're in women's studies instead of history?

The big difference, for me personally at least, is that I've put more emphasis on discussion. In my lectures, I've increasingly taken an interactive, Socratic approach. I'm actually not convinced that such an approach is at all specific to feminist pedagogy. I think it's often just part of good teaching, period. But feminism definitely demands that the instructor repeatedly question the basis of her authority and how she expresses that authority in the classroom. This doesn't imply the professor has no special authority, a point that the occasional student - willfully? - misunderstands, only that she's obligated to draw on her education and experience to make that authority transparent and legitimate.

Teaching in the humanities often feels risky and humbling, anyway, because what you know is always dwarfed by what you don't. This is exacerbated when you throw touchy subjects such as sexual violence and abortion into the mix. I'm not saying that German history (my other areas of expertise) is uncontroversial, but at least there's a basic consensus that the Holocaust was a Bad Thing. There's no such consensus in women's studies.

It's often those out-of-control moments, though, that allow everyone to learn - me included. This past quarter in one of my intro classes, when one of my male freshmen boys insisted that being gay is a "lifestyle choice," other students had to articulate why they disagreed. My role was to make sure no one got hurt - including the guy who sparked the discussion - and otherwise to keep out of the way. This, by the way, is something I learned years ago as a T.A. in grad school, the first time I had to deal with a homophobic comment: other students can be far more effective teachers than me if I stay off my soapbox. That original incident actually occurred in a history course, which underscores the point that voluntarily and mindfully "losing" control can be useful in lots of different settings.

Or take the "cunt" discussion that erupted on the last day of my other intro class this fall. I'd previously talked with my theory class about reclaiming it and other pejorative terms, such as "bitch" or "queer," and we'd had the kind of reflective that made that group a huge pleasure to teach; they were advanced students with a basic commitment to feminist politics. But the intro class is a different beast, full of freshmen and business majors with little previous exposure to feminism. And so I was totally taken by surprise when one of my students - an outspoken Evangelical Christian feminist, and no that's not an oxymoron - wanted to end the quarter by discussing what's so offensive about "cunt" and why women might be able to use the word proudly.

I'm not sure I nudged that particular discussion in a fruitful direction. The other students weren't quite ready for it, and I really was ambushed by it, myself. A few of them were visibly embarrassed. And yet ... I'm willing to bet that at least one of them, sometimes in the hazy future, will think back on that discussion and feel just a bit less shame about her body.

Of course, none of this means you can just walk into a classroom unprepared. Quite the opposite. You need experience, confidence, and a pretty solid knowledge base.

And of course, I'm probably bloviating about the control issue precisely because I'm not prepared for winter quarter, which starts a week from today. :-)

Helicopter Parenting Goes off to College

Indulgent mama kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

There's humoring one's children. There's hovering. And then there's outright helicoptering.

So this morning, I get an email from the mother of a student who's enrolled in one of my classes winter quarter. She wants to know the names of the books for the course so she can buy them for him. The email concludes by saying I should "feel free" to contact her via email or phone.

Now, I realize that the money for my students' textbooks normally flows from their parents. That is, if they're lucky enough to have parents who are both solvent and supportive. But geez, there's a world of difference between paying for your kid's books and actually buying them for him.

This is not the first time I've had a mother contact me about book purchases. (And yes, so far it's always been mothers, not fathers.) When I spoke with the bookstore manager this morning, he said there's been a real uptick in mothers buying their kids' books.

What's more, some of the parents pay with their credit card but have the kid actually go to the bookstore. However, according to the manager, they don't trust the kid enough to give him or her the card or the number. The cashier then has to speak to the parents on the phone - usually with lines of other customers snaking out the door - to complete the sale.

Yes, I'm totally judging. As the store manager said: "Who dresses these kids in the morning?"

Of course, it's not just the parents coddling the kids. We professors coddle the parents. After speaking with the bookstore manager this morning, I fired off an email to mother with a list of the books and information on where to buy them. So yes, I'm an enabler.

Then again, with all the budgetary pressures my university faces, we can't afford to piss off parents. So coddle we must.

Pistol-Packin' Professoriate

"The Pink Mafia," photo by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license. Gotta love how the Lego people grin dementedly while wielding their guns.

This came via the faculty email list a couple of weeks ago, thanks to an moment of impressively poor judgment on the part of the colleague who forwarded it. You've surely heard of penis spam; well, this was pistol spam. (And yes, sometimes a pistol is just a pistol.)

I spoke to you on the phone about a week ago about hosting a seminar for faculty members to teach them the basics of firearm safety and to have them actually handle a firearm at a private range just out side of Athens. I am an NRA certified pistol instructor and personal protection in the home instructor. If you need to see proof of my credentials I can bring them by you office. I will attach a flier that you can send around to other faculty and let them know what is happening. The reason for the class is basic firearm safety and knowledge. No prior experience will be necessary for anyone to take part in the class and I will not charge anything for the class except the price of the ammunition they will be shooting. For insurance reasons I have to have them shoot factory ammunition as apposed to reloaded ammunition that is assembled at home.

At the time, I just thought this was snark-worthy. I tried to picture me and my equally nice-and-nerdy colleagues out on the shooting range. The scene was an unholy mix of camouflage and tweed. I tried to imagine myself as Agent Scully in the X-Files, mixing braininess and a killer aim. It was no good. My imagination was failing me.

But here's where the humor ends. Now, I'm wondering if this email was not just a poor student trying to recruit customers with a free sample, but instead the opening salvo in an arms race. And I don't mean that metaphorically. At Alternet, Lilian Segura describes how gun-rights groups are lobbying for students to bear arms:

A flurry of news stories earlier this year reported a pioneering solution proposed to the rash of recent campus shootings: instead of redoubling efforts to enforce the whole "gun-free school zone" thing -- a quaint little notion from, like the 1980s -- why not change the rules to let students bring more guns onto college campuses?

A few answers leapt to mind -- binge drinking, drug use, close living quarters in a high-pressure environment -- but for awhile, it seemed like the idea was catching on. In the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007, in which 32 people were killed, several states began considering legislation to expand the right to carry a concealed weapon onto college campuses.

Fortunately, as Segura reports, these concealed-carry laws have failed in fifteen states, including some pretty gun-friendly ones: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington. Utah is alone in having such a law. Ohio is considering one, and while my adopted state does plenty of goofy things, I can't imagine it'll allow guns on campus.

But I also don't suppose that'll be the end of the story. Segura says that a new group called Students for Concealed Carry on Campus claims 35,000 members. I'm wondering, now, if our local student offering free shooting lessons was one of them.

I'm no absolutist on guns. I come from a family of hunters and while I personally don't hanker to shoot critters, I won't tell others they should't. (It sure beats factory farming.) I think most people are responsible gun owners, although there was that time my dad shot a hole in the floor of his office ...

But on campus? As a women's studies professor, I didn't immediately connect the student concealed-carry movement with the Virginia Tech massacre (though that's probably most people's main association). My first thought was: We don't need another Montreal Massacre. In that attack at Montreal's École Polytechnique, fourteen people were killed and another fourteen injured in the name of "fighting feminism." Just last week was its nineteenth anniversary. If there were ever a reprise, a women's studies classroom would be an awfully convenient target.

Update December 10, 10:00 p.m.: In comments, Hesperia emphasizes that fourteen women - engineering students - were shot and killed. For the sake of readers who don't remember that event, I should have made that clear. They were targeted specifically because of the shooter's hatred of women in general and feminists in particular. I'm not at all sure that there's any basis for assuming all women engineers are also feminists, but hey, if you're a misogynist embarking on a hate crime, logic is probably not your strong suit. Similarly, most students in a women's studies class typically don't identify as feminists, but symbolically that might not matter to a potential attacker.

End-of-Term Caturday

I just finished grading 400 pages of final exams. Classes don't resume until January. My kids are in school until December 19.

I'm feeling being rich in time and tickled pink about it. Time to prepare for two new classes in winter quarter, write a few less-superficial blog posts, and maybe even strip the wallpaper in the dining room. Oh, and I'm hoping to get some serious sleep too, if the kids allow. (Ha.)

Forget about that half empty/half full silliness. My martini glass is full to the brim - though less wholesomely than this kitty's - complete with two gin-drenched olives.

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

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.

Counter-Osmosis

I haven't had much to say the past couple of days because I'm struggling to dig out from under mountains of grading. Student essays, midterms, quizzes ... more than one person has told me I should just throw them up in the air and see which ones land on either side of an arbitrary line. My chemist friend asks if I can't boil feminist theory down to a Scantron exam: just fill in the bubbles with a number two pencil and watch as sexism melts into air. My mom, the former English teacher, tells me to stop assigning essays. My back, which has slipped out of place again, says I should give everyone an F - except when I'm adequately medicated, in which case everyone deserves an A.

Since I've mostly been vastly undermedicated (maybe I learned my lesson last summer?), I've been slowly, doggedly slogging through the work, ignoring my worse angels. (Or, um, demons.)

I wish that I could miraculously reverse my own learning process and spew my comments effortlessly onto my students' work in a process of counter-osmosis.

Oh, wait. Grey Kitty was the master of that in her day. Most people called it ... hairballs.

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Palin Debating: How to Flunk My Final Exam

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

Say I give a final exam that asks about date rape and a student provides an answer about falling in love; I ask about eating disorders and the student tells me how cool Cosmo is; I ask about the problems mothers face in American society and the student tells me "it's the hardest job in the world" and we just need to cut taxes ...

... what sort of grade do you think that exam would earn?

A simple "F" would be a mercy compared to the negative number it actually deserved.

Now, Gwen Ifill was constrained by the rigid format of the debates from pinning Palin down when she refused to answer the question - a good 80 to 90 percent of the time, I'd guess. We voters operate under no such limitations. We don't have to give a free pass to a candidate who spews "responses" from a random talking points generator, not deigning to provide any real answers.

And we sure don't have to reward that candidate with historically expansive vice presidential powers. Look how great that worked out with Cheney. He snarls. She winks. Either way, it's a tic, not real engagement with us citizens.

Meet the New Prof - Same as the Old Prof

Except not entirely. Today was my first day teaching as an "assistant visiting professor." Never mind the "visiting" part of it; I still felt a lot less tenuous than I did as an adjunct. I know what I'm doing through early June, and that feels wonderful.

I also seem to have a wonderful group of students in my feminist theory class. It's a small group, and they seem curious, lively, and glad to be there. Funny thing - that's how I felt about it, too.

Soon enough, I'll be grading papers and exams, and I'll be a little less jubilant. For now, I just want to celebrate. There's time enough for politics again tomorrow. (Well, okay, we talked about Palin in class today, but that, too, can wait.)

The Leathered Look

I'm sort of fried tonight because I just finished photocopying the syllabus for my new course on feminist theory. It's an existing course in the program but my first time teaching it; expect me to spout off about it for the next ten weeks. It starts with Mary Wollstonecraft and ends up with Judith Butler and intersectionality. It will kick my students' asses - and probably mine, too. Karmic justice.

But since I'm fried, I'm only good for a brief rant. Driving to the office at 9:30 p.m., after the kids were tucked in, was an obstacle course. With human bodies as the obstacles. Two days before classes begin, my little college town is a bacchanalia of late-summer partying. The college boys saunter along in their baggy shorts. The college girls teeter along, clad in strategically placed scraps of fabric. By the hundreds, they're tripping off the edge of the sidewalk or walking down the middle of the street.

Yeah, the dress code is pretty sexist. But that's not what got my dander up. I was struck, again, by how tan the young women are. I can appreciate the slenderizing value of a good tan. On the rare occasions when I've managed to get some color on my thighs, they seemed to shrink three sizes.

But as a pasty-faced native of North Dakota, I've rarely been tan. Best case: People stop asking why I'm so pale. If I live long enough, maybe my freckles will merge.

You know what? That's okay. I'm 44 now, and while no one will mistake me for 20 anymore, I'm holding up reasonably well. I'd be nothing but a mass of misplaced origami folds by now, had I visited the tanning salon as often as my young female students do. The demand to be tan has escalated dramatically since I was their age.

There are lots of things to criticize about the beauty ideal, but the imperative to be tan is particularly evil because it imposes a double bind with a time lag. What makes you "sexy" at age 20 will make you look haggard and old 20 years later. (I realize I'm leaving skin cancer out of the equation. Clearly, if you're having to undergo surgery and chemo, that won't make you prettier, either.) My students realize that tanning will lead to wrinkles later on, yet it all seems abstract. For them, aging is still something that happens to other people. I thought the same thing at age 20.

I wish there were a way to get this across to young women. I joke about it and my point sails right past them. I don't know how to discuss it seriously without sounding like an old scold. I suppose I could tell them that they'll still want to appear sexy and desirable in 20 or 30 years - but that's probably a little too close to hearing that your mother still wants to get off.

LOLcat in a bind from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Binging on Prohibition

Photo by Flickr user kspoddar, used under a Creative Commons license.

A legal drinking age of 21 prevents high-risk drinking among college students, right?

Umm ... not so fast. Over 100 college presidents have signed onto the Amethyst Initiative, a petition calling for a national conversation on rethinking the drinking age.

Already there's a predictable counterreaction, as the Columbus Dispatch reports:

... Mothers Against Drunk Driving says that lowering the drinking age would lead to more fatal car crashes and urges parents to think carefully about the safety of colleges whose presidents have signed on.

"It's very clear the 21-year-old drinking age will not be enforced at those campuses," said Laura Dean-Mooney, MADD's national president.

Joining with MADD is Nationwide, which released a survey last week indicating 72 percent of adults think lowering the drinking age would make alcohol more accessible to minors, and nearly half think it would increase binge drinking among teens.

But here's the thing: Unlike the general public, college presidents have a close-up view of underage drinking. A lot of them apparently realize that neo-prohibition has failed miserably on their campuses. Students engage in binge drinking partly because they have to do it on the sly. So they front-load their evenings, drinking heavily behind closed doors, before they mosey out to the bars or parties where they might not be served.

I have an even closer view of the issue because my students have talked to me frankly about it. A year ago, I took an informal in-class poll of who had gotten in trouble for alcohol violations. At least a third of my students in two different sections of 40 raised their hands. That makes roughly 25 students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, whose college careers were threatened with derailment. Those who raised their hands are only the ones who got caught and were willing to admit to it in public; the true number is probably somewhat higher. Even those who'd never been caught - including most of the teetotalers - saw the system as capricious and unfair.

The result? Diligent, responsible students are threatened with suspension if they get caught twice with alcohol in their dorm rooms. They don't need to be drinking themselves, they merely need to be in the same room as friends who are imbibing. I've written letters imploring student judiciaries to go easy on students who've been swept up in this trap. Alcohol infractions clog the judiciary system, crowding out plagiarism cases and diverting attention from much more serious violations of policy.

Not least, as long as drinking is criminalized, students are much less likely to report sexual assault. Alcohol is almost always in the mix when college students experience unwanted sexual contact. The Kyle Payne case is only an especially infamous and egregious instance of this. Every sexual assault case that I know about first-hand involved alcohol. But the current approach - "just don't drink and you'll be safe" - is a failure.

I'm not naive enough to think that irresponsible drinking will disappear if alcohol becomes legal on campus. I was an RA for two years in college. I was also a student, fer goodness sake. I did enough stupid things to have a permanent aversion to tequila.

But because I was an RA in the dark ages (1984-86), I also know that things can be different. We RAs bought the alcohol for dorm parties. (Okay, I know that won't fly anymore! You'd get your butt sued.) With social life centered in the residences, we could easily keep tabs on our charges. Sure, people still regularly overindulged. But we knew who was overdoing it, and we made sure they were cared for.

As far as I know, no one was ever sexually assaulted on my watch. It might have happened without my knowing; that's in the nature of acquaintance rape. Certainly in the mid-1980s, "date rape" - as it was then called - was such a new concept, few women would have applied it to nonconsensual sex.

Still, we had a safety net, composed not just of RAs but of friends and dorm-mates and resident faculty. I'm positive that this averted lots of potentially ugly situations. Often, I was part of that net. On more than one occasion, I was the person it protected.

I'd love to bring back that net. Although Gordon Gee of Ohio State has signed the Amethyst petition, the president of my university has not, and I'm sure he won't. My university has a reputation as a party school. Signing the petition could create a short-term PR problem. But in the long run, bringing alcohol use out of the shadows is the first step toward fostering a more responsible drinking culture.

Men in the WS Classroom, Part 2: The Guys' Views

So I’ve already explained why I welcome men taking my women’s and gender studies classes, and why I’m glad they’re no longer a teensy minority. But my more interesting contribution to the NWSA panel on men in the WS classroom came not from me, but from the guys themselves.

I’ll readily admit that this was probably the most unscientific survey ever. I asked a number of my former male students for their views on the opportunities and difficulties for men in women’s studies. I emailed a bunch of guys who did well in my classes because I wanted bright, thoughtful, informed opinions. They did well partly because they seemed to enjoy the class, and they enjoyed the class partly because they did well in it. So, in other words, I totally cherry-picked my sample.

The guys’ comments covered three main themes: experience, marginalization, and gender. Though they addressed the classroom situation, I think their responses are valuable to anyone interested in men’s relation to feminism (and not just in academia).

Experience is a central category for women’s studies. It’s the foundation for both the academic field and feminist activism. But experience is a vexed category for my male students. They believe they can’t enter into women’s lived experience, so they may feel shut out of the discussion or alienated from the course material. Some men react to personal essays on the syllabus as being less scientific than other academic material, and thus less convincing or authoritative. Many men are less comfortable than women when it comes to “body talk,” and this has broad ramifications for their classroom situation. One student in a mid-level class on “gendered bodies” with only about 20 percent men wrote:

I just felt awkward commenting on certain issues knowing that 75% of the class were women. Sometimes I would feel embarrassed, and others I felt like I might offend someone. For example, I just didn't feel comfortable commenting on male sexual insecurity knowing that most of the people listening are of the opposite sex. However, I know there's not really much you can do about that until more guys sign up for the class.

But encountering strange experiences can have a huge upside as well. Open-minded individuals can learn a lot from new and unfamiliar perspectives (and I assume that the women in my classes learn equally from the men). Best of all, exchanging experiences can spark empathy, which - as Patricia Hill Collins and others have argued - is the necessary basis for building alliances:

I felt this was a very useful class for learning future skills for how to be a better husband and parent and just a more considerate person to others. … It just makes guys think a little about what others feel, and it helped me, in particular, understand why women sometimes act the way they do in certain situations. (Here, I'm thinking about our discussions about walking on campus at night and related topics.) So...it is very useful, and I think that it makes guys into better people to learn how the girls feel about things.

A discussion format, my students agreed, is essential to this process. I don’t lecture more than I absolutely have to, but even so, these guys reminded me that there are times when the instructor just needs to make room for the students’ dialogue:

I do not see any problems with men being in women studies courses, instead just the opposite. This is good for both women and men in the classroom because they offer each other the opposite sex’s opinions and thoughts where they wouldn’t receive anywhere else outside the classroom to gain a better understanding of each other.

One wrinkle in this, of course, is that the desire for discussion can collide with men’s sense of marginalization. If the men feel too alienated, it can shut down discussion even if they’re not hiding behind a trenchcoat or baseball cap. Typically, men enter the classroom on the first day feeling nervous that the women will pounce on them. I suspect it’s the men of good will who fret most about this:

I think the main problem for men is just a worry that it's going to be the stereotype that people try to put on it ... that all of the women will gang up on the guys, and they will be in a hostile environment where they don't feel like they can learn. I obviously can't speak for all Women's Studies classes, but it was clearly not the case in our class. I guess I was very careful about what I said, though, because I did not want to put myself in a situation where I was saying something that would unintentionally be seen as insulting to the majority of the class.

But a sense of marginalization can also be a valuable experience if someone has rarely been in that position; it too can create empathy. It can help relatively privileged individuals get a taste of what their world would be like, were they much less privileged. This is something I think I need to spend more time addressing explicitly in class.

So dealing with marginalization as tricking. Male students see the instructor’s stance as decisive in whether they will speak freely. But when does this go too far? I get compliments on not being a feminazi. But on the flip side, I think it’s also possible to be too conciliatory, watering down the material and failing to challenge my students.

Two keys to striking a balance seem to be respect and humor. At least, these are themes the guys mentioned repeatedly. One commented:

Both of you [me and a colleague of mine] were very inviting and non-judgmental, and I felt comfortable participating in most of the discussions. Also, neither of you were afraid to crack a joke, and laughter definitely helps alleviate some of the tension that comes with many of those topics. All in all, both of you made me feel like a valued part of the class rather than someone to be criticized.

Pardon me if I’m seemingly tooting my horn by quoting this; I’m sure I also have former students who’d beg to differ. But the point is that when the classroom dynamics work well, both respect and humor have to be part of the mix.

Finally, male students appreciate a broad focus on gender and not just on women. I’m convinced this is good for everyone. You can’t hope to understand femininity as a social construct unless you devote roughly equal time to masculinity. This is something I’m already committed to, but it’s good to be reminded:

It really seems like there are three types of guys that take Women's Studies. The first type is a guy that thinks maybe he'll learn something new and understand people better after it, the second is a guy that thinks the class will be funny and controversial and wants to see if there are any crazy women to make fun of, and the third is someone who just fit it into their schedule. So ... I guess you can't do much about that second group, and the first group just needs to find a couple worthwhile things to make them think the class is worth it. The third group seems like the one that should be a focus. If somehow you can figure out a way to make them feel the class was worthwhile, then more guys will recommend it to others and it will grow. How do you do that? It's tough to tell. I feel Women's Studies is on the right path, though. For a class that was probably started by focusing on the female struggle, there really is a strong focus on men's problem, such as gender, stereotypes and parenting.

Agreed, that WS instructors and feminists in general shouldn’t just be preaching to the choir. And yet, I’m actually really interested in that first group, too: the guys that start off open-minded. I think they bring the most to the classroom, and they stand to gain the most from the course.

I have a feeling that all the men who generously responded to my informal little survey fell into that first group from day one, and I’m grateful for their feedback, advice, criticism, and appreciation. (So thanks, guys!) They are proof positive that the opportunities opened by including men in the classroom far outweigh the greater complexity in guiding classroom dynamics. For them, taking a course women’s studies is rapidly becoming a totally “normal” thing to do. And so I’ll let one of the guys have the final word (but I happen to agree with him completely):

Women[‘s] studies is just like another school subject such as history or math and broadening anyone’s knowledge in this area is a good thing.

The Paradox of Men in Women’s Studies

Now that I’m done conferencing (though still on the road), you can expect a few posts on my mental fallout from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting. The presentations I enjoyed at the Berks were stronger, on the whole, but the NWSA still got me thinking.

My own panel at the NWSA addressed the question of men in the classroom. I was part of this discussion because my university has relatively robust enrollments of men in our women’s and gender studies classes, thanks to a business school requirement that funnels lots of male undergrads in our direction.

Let me just say I really like having men in the classroom. I think it adds a dimension to the discussion that wouldn’t otherwise be present. I recognize that there’s a trade-off: in an all-female space, women will talk more freely about certain issues than with men present. But all it takes is one male to completely change the dynamic - without, however, much immediate gain.

So here’s the paradox: If a classroom is going to be mixed-gender, you’re much better off teaching a bunch of men, not just a token or two.

In my own student days, WS classes tended to be all-female, and any man who ventured to join us was probably on a quest to understand his own non-normative sexuality. He was likely gay or bi or questioning. By the time I taught my first WS in 2002, this was starting to change. I had two male students, both evidently heterosexual, neither quite sure why he was there. One was bright but hid behind his baseball cap, too shy to speak. The other wore a trenchcoat and expressed a certain sympathy for the Columbine shooters.

By now my colleagues and I commonly have 30 to 40 percent men in our courses. This is terrific in that men no longer feel like they’re mere tokens; they’re much more likely to speak up. It’s a great opportunity to broaden the discussion, in my view, and to widen people’s horizons. By this I don’t mean that I get to indoctrinate the guys; try that, and you’ve lost them on day one. The same is just as true for the women, by the way. But I do believe that good ideas will tend to win people over at the end of the day.

Above 35 to 40 percent, the men can actually start to dominate the conversation, so this can be a mixed blessing, as one of my fellow panelists observed. At his university, however, the WS classes are bristling with football players! I have to admit I’m grateful that I don’t get classes where a full third of the students play on the same team, sit in the same corner, and disrupt the conversation. Yikes! I’m glad I’m not dealing with big blocs of jocks. But another presenter who spoke about this sees it as an opportunity to reach the macho guys and maybe help reduce sexual violence, and so she deals with the discipline issues by working with the coaches.

So the emerging women’s studies classroom is a far cry from the all-female environments that early feminists nurtured and Mary Daly famously decreed. Myself, I’ll gladly deal with the difficulty of balancing male and female participation in exchange for change to discuss not just women but men – and thus gender as a relational system.

Not least, when men reach a certain critical mass, they challenge each other, they take the class more seriously, and they turn in better work. A few years ago, I still saw some serious slackerdom among the men; now, they're performing just as well as the gals. And that makes my job a whole lot more fun.

You Can Call Me Professor Sungold

Okay, I'm enough of a stickler for titles after my sojourn in Germany that I'd better qualify that. You can call me Visiting Assistant Professor Sungold.

Technically, I didn't quite get the job I interviewed for, but I'm still very, very happy with the outcome. I was offered a job I didn't know existed: a visiting gig that's renewable for up to three years. It's full time, but honestly it won't be that much more work than my current purportedly half-time deal. It carries benefits, which means I won't have to depend on my spouse anymore for health insurance. (He's now healthy, but his medical history is complicated enough that it's been nerve-wracking for him to be our sole safety net.) And here's the fun part: I expect I'll get to teach some new classes. Yay!

Oh, and I'll be making more money than I've ever earned in my life. This doesn't mean much, since the last time I had a full-time job (not a grad student stipend, not freelance contracts, not adjuncting work) was twenty years ago, and I was working as a pseudo-engineer at the time. So if you adjust for inflation, I was still "better off" before I quit my job for grad school in 1988. But let's pretend we're ignorant of basic economics and just celebrate my good fortune, okay? The dean was far more generous than I expected, and I'm tickled pink.


Another internal candidate who's already done a three-year visiting stint got the original job, and I'm pleased about that, too. She's smart, a fine teacher, and dedicated to the program. For a number of reasons that I won't go into here (because they belong to her story, not mine), hiring her represents exactly the commitment to fairness that I think Women's Studies ought to stand for. I'm not at all surprised to see this coming from my chair and colleagues. They're wonderful people in every way. I don't just respect them intellectually and politically, I like them very much for human reasons, too. Hovering in the background is a nice measure support from our dean, which portends well for the future of our program.

I don't know what'll happen for me after the next three years, but it opens some doors without slamming any shut. This could be a step toward a permanent position, especially if I do a good job. And from there, who knows? An endowed chair in feminist blogging? Empress of the universe? Wherever it ends, I'm feeling giddily, awesomely happy.

Chives/hardy geraniums, yellow rose whose name I forget, and Will Goodwin clematis from my garden. Actually the roses are my husband's babies, which is why I'm usually clueless about their names.

Modern Physics Caturday

Quantum LOLcat from I Can Has Cheezburger?

I've got a bit of uncertainty in my life lately. It's partly related to the health of people I love - routine post-illness checkups that will probably provide reassurance in the end, but only after they raise everyone's anxiety through the roof. That's all I have to say about it because I feel like blogging about it could invade their privacy and maybe jinx them, too. (I'm superstitious that way.)

The other uncertainty is professional. I've applied for a job at my university that would be a notch up from my current marginal status. It's not a tenure-track position, but it'd be full time and it would include health insurance, which I'm not currently eligible even to purchase through my employer. I teach women's studies and I depend on my husband's health plan, by necessity, not choice. At least two deans have been untroubled by the irony of this, if indeed they notice it at all. Maybe being blind to irony is a job requirement for upper-level higher ed administrators.

Trouble is, there are at least three internal candidates, including me. We've all been slogging along without any real security, and we'd all be wonderful.

I'll be happy if any of us gets the job, since that would demonstrate a commitment to eventually doing right by all of us (budget permitting, of course). If an outside candidate gets the nod, I'll be deeply disappointed unless she's clearly better than the rest of us. Sometimes there's a "grass is greener" effect that weighs against the known knowns. Also a "get the milk for (nearly) free" effect, since we're all captive spouses (so to speak) who will likely soldier on in our current positions no matter what. Everyone on the search committee knows us all well, and I have a lot of sympathy for the impossible choice they'll have to make.

Anyway, there's been a recent spate of physics humor at I Can Has Cheezburger, and even though I'm no physics whiz, these LOLcats seemed to capture something true about my life right now.

Fractal LOLcats from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Testing, Testing

I'm partly just testing to make sure I can still post from my new computer - woohoo! I got a lovely MacBook Pro, which arrived just today. And then I spent a good long time trying to get the wireless to work. Which, obviously, I did - and (not so obviously) without any help other than what Google could serve up.

But what I really want to grouse about is school testing, which the Bear is going through this week. He's in second grade. He's utterly casual and unstressed about it. He tests easily and well. He's lucky, I'm lucky, and I know it. That's not my point, though. Even though I really like our elementary school, the testing system is absurd and I'm not at all sure who it's supposed to be helping.

The older kids? All of them are obviously stressed, even if - like some of the fifth graders I know - they're not so much uptight about the tests themselves as burned out on all the homework that led up to them.

The teachers? They've been like hamsters in a wheel ever since our eleven snow days torpedoed their lesson plans. The problem with snow days, coming in winter as they tend to do, is that they also tend to fall before testing week. On top of this, the Bear's main teacher is dealing with some scary-serious health problems. She's wonderful. She's done an awesome job in the face of major physical challenges. Someone should please give her an A+ and call it good.

And what are the kids learning, anyway? For starters, that you learn stuff to pass the test, and afterward you get to hit auto-erase and goof off for the rest of the year. That tests come fast and furious, all in one week, and nothing else really counts. That material and ideas don't matter unless they might appear on the tests.

Most curiously, they learn that the reward for a job well done is - sugar! Nothing against rewards or sweets - I like 'em both - but in moderation, please. All year long, the school tries to promote healthy eating. And then, during testing week, the school bombards them with sweets after their exams - and even during. Both second-grade classes get to suck on lollipops or hard candies. According to the Bear, who's usually a reliable reporter on such things, there are studies showing that pressure on the roof of one's mouth helps people perform better on exams. I haven't tried to verify it. The kids, in any event, think it's a sweet deal.

Self-Luminous

This week in the religion, gender, and sexuality class I'm helping teach, we read an account of the Buddhist creation myth. One of the fun things about teaching is having a chance to learn about stuff that is completely new to me. At least in the humanities and social sciences, I think this is virtually always true, even if you're teaching in your own research field. But it's even truer when half the course is really outside your area of expertise. So this Buddhist origin story, the Agganna Sutta, was all new to me.

And since I'm so not an expert on it, I mostly just want to offer a modest appreciation of its beauty.

There comes a time . . . when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance, usually come to life as humans. And they become made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory, and remain thus for a long, long period of time.
(This is from the version I read for class. Here's the whole Agganna Sutta but in a slightly less beautiful translation.)

Such gorgeous language. Feeding on rapture! Self-luminous! Imagine such an existence.


The catch is that if you've got self-luminance, you don't get to have a body. Later on, as the earth solidifies from liquid to a sweet milky substance to plants (a nifty evolution story), the formerly radiant beings grow more solid. As they solidify, they come to know cravings. And so, although there's no Eve to take the fall for the Fall in this story, sex becomes a polluting force. (Buddhism has its own issues with women and the flesh, as it turns out.)

But even so. I would like to be self-luminous and traverse the air for just an hour, as long as I didn't have to stay in the World of Radiance. The funny thing is, I feel like I have my share of radiance in my own little earth-bound life with all its cravings, desires, and beauty.


The petite red tulips come from the Bear's elementary school; the others, from my garden. All photos by me.

Floral Procrastination

I've been a bit spotty about posting because the new quarter is revving up and I'm co-teaching a new-to-me course. I'm almost on leave from teaching this quarter; I'm don't have my usual Women's Studies course but am helping out as a discussion leader for a class called Religion, Gender, and Sexuality. I'm really sort of a glorified TA, which feels like a welcome break, since it'll give me time for an upcoming translation project and a scholarly article I probably should've written over winter break.

I'm sure this class will inspire a slew of posts once I pull my head out of my butt and get up to speed with the reading. For tomorrow alone, the readings range from Sufism's dichotomous view of gender to Old Testament texts on women and purity; from Buddhist renunciation of fleshly pleasures to Mary Daly on footbinding.

But I'm already behind with all that reading for the best of reasons. Today was a gorgeous day, a short respite from the grey skies and rain that have clouded any chance of preparing my garden. And my new camera arrived in the mail today. Lucky me! So I spent the afternoon outside cleaning up garden debris, pruning my clematis, and trying out my new toy. Here's a first taste of last year's planting, my spooky blue rock iris, which have been in bloom for the past couple of weeks.