This isn’t someone who barely squeaked through her degree. She was celebrated as the best there was at her school.

Janice Fiamengo ponders the mental state of a feminist and openly misandrist social worker. 

Kristina Agbebiyi, the lady in question, was hailed as “student of the year” by the University of Michigan’s social work department for her “commitment to political activities,” her embodiment of the “professional ethics of social work,” and for her “contribution to the positive image” of said field. Repeatedly boasting of a hatred of men is, we learn, not only a “commitment,” “a way of life” and a “revolutionary task,” but something to applaud. A credential of some kind. It “isn’t a game,” says Ms Agbebiyi.

Update, via the comments:

Readers may find themselves marvelling at how someone so fêted, and who evidently expects no challenging of her pronouncements by either peers or employers, nonetheless exults in theatrical victimhood and insists that she is “living oppression from the inside.” That the supposedly radical politics of which Ms Agbebiyi is so proud is usually an ostentatious leisure activity, an indulgence of the privileged, somehow passes unremarked. Though I do like the description of Ms Agbebiyi as a “narcissistic self-infatuate.”

Needless to say, the cause of this alleged “oppression” isn’t made clear, let alone persuasive. Apparently, it’s now the custom to invoke victimhood, as if it were a goal, a basis for acclaim, without actually specifying what it is that’s supposedly oppressing you. After browsing the lady’s Twitter feed, the best I can deduce is that the fact that prisons exist, at all, anywhere, is an unendurable burden on Ms Agbebiyi’s tissue-paper psyche. We should, it seems, wish for the “abolition” of prisons and “the ending of cops.” Because the world would be so much better if rapists, carjackers and sociopathic predators could act with impunity, uninhibited by even a small risk of punishment.

Some of Professor Fiamengo’s previous adventures in feminist psychology can be found here and here. 

Writing in the pages of Inside Higher Ed, sociology student and “self-identified fat woman” Bobbi Reidinger bemoans the hardships of the chunky would-be educator:

Fat academics need to be more vocal in calls for increased structural accessibility such as larger desks or substitutions for tables and chairs, greater ease in access to elevators, and more. Yet in addition to structural changes that campuses could make to help people of size be more comfortable — such as providing larger bathrooms, chairs without arms and larger auditorium seating — we need to discuss more techniques to combat stigma within classrooms.

You see, it’s not just a question of remodelling half the campus:

Weight-based stigma has an impact on the credibility of fat academics, in particular female academics who often must contend with both gender and fat stigmas… Weight stigma negatively impacts a professor’s credibility as a communicator within the classroom, with greater credibility being given to those who argue against their own self-interest.

Being sufficiently obese that it requires special furniture and enlarged bathrooms, and such that it becomes an obvious topic of classroom conversation, is in a person’s self-interest, apparently. As opposed to, say, a significant health concern – a cause of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, gallbladder disease, stroke, osteoarthritis, joint failure, incontinence, sleep apnea, breathing problems, depression, anxiety, and cancer.

Therefore, when a fat professor makes their fatness salient inside the classroom, their fatness overrides their educational and occupational statuses, as students interpret this information as coming from an unreliable source.

It occurs to me that if an overweight educator, or would-be educator, presents her own fatness as a kind of moral elevation, a political piety arrived at via victimhood, and then demands oversized desks, plus-sized seats without arms, modified lifts, modified bathrooms, modified auditoria, “and more” – and does all this while sidestepping responsibility for her own rotundity – then students would do well to question the motives and credibility of such a person. And when a teacher or grad student fails to convince a class and promptly blames that failure on some alleged-but-undemonstrated sexism or “weight stigma,” as if that were both obvious and the only conceivable explanation, this is not necessarily proof of injustice or unrecognised talent.

He was white, you see, and obviously that’s another incriminating feature:

Update, via the comments:

As so often, these little things are quite telling. I realise that gestures of politeness or chivalry aren’t always perfectly expressed, but it takes a certain churlishness, a practised sourness, to construe the above as some ill-intended act of patriarchal oppression, and therefore something to resist – before publicly congratulating yourself on Twitter. And as noted previously, it’s curious how all this feminist empowerment doesn’t seem to result in much stoicism or self-possession or mental resilience, just lots of narcissism, ingratitude and chronic whininess. Such that publicly disdaining the physical attributes – whiteness, maleness, middle-agedness – of the person offering to help you retrieve your overhead luggage – is deemed an act of woke piety. As if these were things for which a person should be disdained, along with their offers of help.

Via Ben Sixsmith. Also, open thread.

Yes, it’s time for an open thread. Feel free to share links and bicker.

As an enriching cultural bonus, here are some Estonian art gallery scenes, in which a full-figured feminist protests against the “violence” of the art on offer – while naked, obviously – during a visit by schoolchildren. The artist being denounced is Marko Mäetamm, whose offerings to the world are numerous and can be savoured here. The feminist lady taking umbrage, Mare Tralla, also makes bad art.

The boy in the hat, fourth from the right, rather captures the moment, I think.  

Via Orwell & Goode.

More feminist fun times in the pages of the Guardian, where Nicola Heath is bemoaning her womanly lot:

It feels very personal, the fight you have with your partner about who does the laundry or cleans the bathroom. But the second-wave feminists were right. The personal is political. 

“The personal is political,” says she. Well, so I hear. But it’s also worth considering just how often the political, or allegedly political, is a function of personality and a self-flattering rationalisation for personal shortcomings and sub-optimal choices. Not least among the kinds of people who loudly announce that the personal is political. In fact, hold that thought.

The unequal division of labour at home is a systemic issue that needs structural social change to solve it. 

In this instance, the claim of inequality and the case for “structural social change” are not entirely compelling:  

Like many heterosexual couples, it was the arrival of children that set my husband and me on divergent paths at home. I’ve been an avowed (and untidy) feminist since I was old enough to say the word. We were together for 10 years before the birth of our daughter – he knew his co-parent had zero aspirations to be a homemaker… Becoming a parent is… a huge transition. Your identity is reforged in the crucible of sleep deprivation and newfound responsibility. The pre-kid lifestyle of Friday night drinks, free time and sleeping in becomes a distant memory. 

Yes, in a shocking and unguessable turn of events, becoming a parent is usually a life-changing experience, a major development that entails compromise and sacrifice. A shifting of priorities. If only all of the other parents on the planet throughout human history had an inkling, some clue. Our Guardian writer is of course determined to frame the subsequent division of labour in the Heath household as a result of dark forces – including “social conditioning,” “prescribed gender roles” and the oft-invoked “gender pay gap.” An allegedly oppressive phenomenon that doesn’t actually exist. And then, inevitably, a whiff of self-pity:

When you have someone to take care of menial stuff such as running your life, there’s little incentive to change the status quo. It’s nice having someone wash your clothes and cook your food. When you don’t have to expend mental energy keeping track of grocery lists and family birthdays, you have the cognitive bandwidth to think about other things.

She’s expending mental energy on grocery lists. Someone bring medals, big ones.