I met with the Vice President for Student Affairs and I asked about a transfer from Multicultural Affairs to another department, almost any other department so long as my every duty and every interaction with students didn’t have to be centred on race. It was risky but I told her I had nothing to give to the job, and that I was tired of seeing students being labelled before we even talked to them.
Very casually, the vice president said that a transfer would be difficult because my departure would leave two same gendered people of the same race in that office, and there would be some difficulty “finding another black woman to replace you.”
Ophelia Benson is pondering the word “pussy” and its connotations. In response to this Jesus and Mo cartoon on protecting deities from ridicule, a commenter writes,
I’ve always wondered [why] the gods of today, especially the god of Islam, is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.
The god of Islam “is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work” – meaning women are weak cowardly parasites.
Oh. What happened there? How did we get from this:
I’ve always wondered [why] the gods of today, especially the god of Islam, is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.
To this?
meaning women are weak cowardly parasites.
I realise the ambiguities of the word “pussy” may vary on the other side of the Atlantic, where the dubious sexual connotations are perhaps more often emphasised and have a less whimsical air. (Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a gay man thing, or a trash sitcom thing, but when I hear “pussy” in a sexual context, if anything at all comes to mind it could well be Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served?) On the very rare occasions I’ve used the word – ironically and with a terrible American accent – I’ve used it to denote a kind of feebleness. Naïve soul that I am, I took the intended meaning here to be that Allah appears to be a sissy, coward or weakling, perhaps rather pampered, like a house cat; not that Allah in some way resembles the female genitals, or that the aforementioned body parts are contemptible, or that all women are contemptible. (Conceivably, some female non-Muslims may take exception to the suggestion – if one were made – that their ladygarden is in any way similar to the befuddled deity of Islam.)
But Ophelia – who is, I think, American and perhaps more accustomed to hearing the vulgar, sexual usage – remains unconvinced:
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose you were talking to the barmaid [who often appears in the cartoon] – would you say to the barmaid, “The god of Islam is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work”? Maybe you would, maybe you would. But I wonder. I don’t think it’s accidental that none of my male friends and correspondents ever use “pussy” or “twat” or “cunt” that way in conversation or correspondence with me. If there’s a reason for that… then perhaps there’s something wrong with the terminology; perhaps that something is that it’s sexist.
Well, I don’t regard myself as particularly sexist and I understood the intended meaning as unobjectionable – unless, that is, one believes Allah is the creator of the universe and a top-notch guy. I’ve heard at least two women use the word “twat” with pejorative gusto to describe a man, and I’ve talked to women who used the word “dick” in its derogatory sense without taking umbrage personally or on behalf of menfolk everywhere. (I was, of course, assuming they weren’t talking about me.) And though I’d be mindful that the word “pussy” has other, very different, meanings from the ones I mentioned above, I’m not sure one can assume that its usage, as above, necessarily signifies some objectionable intent or basis for indignation.
KC Johnson visits three academic conferences in search of real debate. What he finds isn’t encouraging:
The second recent groupthink conference occurred at Duke, where several leading members of the Group of 88 – the professors who early in the lacrosse case publicly thanked protesters who had, among other things, urged castration of the lacrosse captains – hosted an academic conference on race in contemporary America. The very same people who got things spectacularly wrong in a high-profile case in their own backyard dealing with issues of race and politics offered their insights on “how modern racial prejudice shapes policy.”
In our increasingly multicultural society, such a conference topic might have provided an opportunity to bring together people with both innovative and widely disparate insights. Instead, the conference’s seven sessions (all but one of which was chaired by a Group member) featured little more than a recitation of the race/class/gender worldview dominant in most humanities departments today. Each session, moreover, began with an admonition against taping the panellists’ remarks: Group members apparently feared the possibility that their extremist ideas would be available beyond the campus walls.
Naturally, one of the panels – ponderously titled Race, Gender and Sexuality: Intersections on Multiple Dimensions – was to be moderated by the ever-moderate Wahneema Lubiano. Readers may recall Lubiano, a tenured professor at Duke, for her underwhelmingscholarship and her conviction that “knowledge factories” and “engines of dominance” [i.e. universities] should be “sabotaged” – by people much like herself. The professor’s courses in “critical studies” and “race and gender” are construed in such a way that students can be told, “once white working class people learn that corporate capitalism is using racism to manipulate them, they will want to join with racially oppressed people against capitalism.” Professor Lubiano also says things like this: “Western rationality’s hegemony marginalizes other ways of knowing about the world” – a claim that suggests the West is somehow devoid of literature, art, music and film, despite being the foremost producer and consumer of such things.
Some background on other panellists, and their “diversity,” can be found here, along with an audience member’s notes on the content of the “debates.” Readers will be thrilled by the presence of Lani Guinier, a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and advocate of “critical thinking,” who insists that standardised testing is “racist” because “talent is equally distributed among all people.”
Ophelia Benson recently aired some thoughts on the sly redefinition of “defamation” – a term now being used by those whose vanity is such they presume to take umbrage at things that are unflattering but true. I’ve touched on this subject before and noted how the language of religious supremacism is routinely couched in the rhetoric of personal injury. As when the preposterous Islamophile Yvonne Ridley declared: “My faith is my nationality and when you attack it you are being racist.”
Presumably, Ms Ridley would have us believe that it is simply wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof. There are, apparently, no good reasons for doing so. But this opportunist victimhood is hardly flattering or deserving of sympathy. The spread of pretentious grievance does harm to liberal culture. Those who can claim to belong to some Designated Victim Group can use political leverage to silence their critics by depicting them as oppressors who, in the interests of “fairness,” must be silenced by the state. As when the pious souls at Cambridge Mosque conjured “hate speech” and “incitement to religious and ethnic hatred” from an innocuous student cartoon, with the result that those responsible found themselves interrogated by Cambridgeshire police. But what is unfair – really unfair – is the demand for unearned deference and unilateral exemption from the testing of ideas. Those who regard hurt feelings, or claims thereof, as denoting virtue by default may see a weaker party facing unfair attack and rush to their defence. In practice, they may simply be excusing the party with the weaker argument. Political deference to such demands leads to dishonesty and unrealism on a sociological scale. In the interests of “fairness,” so conceived, judgment must be blunted. As I said in one of my very first posts,
Religious “freedom” is now presumed to entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs, and indeed may find them ludicrous. There is, apparently, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting.
R Joseph Hoffmann adds some thoughts of his own and ponders the conceit that religion – and one in particular – now has “human rights” too.:
According to Pakistan’s ambassador, Zamir Akram, “Defamation of religions is the cause that leads to incitement to hatred, discrimination and violence toward their followers.” That is stuff and nonsense of course. It is like saying that impugning General Motors workmanship is the cause of a car wreck. If religions, by a stretch, are products of culture, then the fact that they are sometimes “defamed” (read: criticised) might just have something to do with quality control and less to do with the insidious intentions of their detractors. To resituate the causes of religious violence and hatred from its source to the “defamers” is a standard tactic redolent of the Victim’s Handbook available at your local Discourse and Broomsticks Bookstore.
Related: Jeff Goldstein ponders advice to mind one’s language in certain company.
Via Stephen Hicks comes another staggering artistic triumph. In the cryptically titled Join or Die, San Francisco-based artist Justine Lai depicts herself getting busy with America’s deceased presidents. The results suggest a collision of 1970s porn magazines and painting by numbers. As the series of 18 x 24” canvases is being produced in chronological order, these necrophilic entanglements currently extend only to Ulysses S Grant and his hitherto unrecorded spanking fetish. Sadly, those of you aroused by the prospect of seeing, say, George W Bush getting it on with Ms Lai – with all the profundity that entails – may have to wait a while.
I am interested in humanizing and demythologizing the Presidents by addressing their public legacies and private lives. The presidency itself is a seemingly immortal and impenetrable institution; by inserting myself in its timeline, I attempt to locate something intimate and mortal. I use this intimacy to subvert authority, but it demands that I make myself vulnerable along with the Presidents. A power lies in rendering these patriarchal figures the possible object of shame, ridicule and desire, but it is a power that is constantly negotiated… I approach the spectacle of sex and politics with a certain playfulness… One could also imagine a series preoccupied with wearing its “Fuck the Man” symbolism on its sleeve. But I wish to move beyond these things and make something playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous, but exuberantly so. This, I feel, is the most humanizing act I can do.
Somehow, I remain unconvinced that painting long-dead American presidents doing the nasty with a young woman is “subverting authority” in any meaningful sense. Nor am I persuaded that Ms Lai has “moved beyond” the “Fuck the Man” symbolism that evidently preoccupies her. Though one might note her eagerness to “insert herself” into the project – which raises the question of whether Ms Lai’s ego has merely led her to seek out celebrity by bedding powerful men, albeit figuratively. Readers will no doubt decide for themselves whether Ms Lai’s handiwork is “playful,” “tender,” “exuberant” and “humanising.” Though in fairness she has set up any number of dubious quips about “vice presidents,” “sexual congress” and “secretaries of the interior.”
Via Critical Mass, here’s a short follow-up film on the indoctrination efforts of Delaware University’s ResLife programme – described by its proponents as a “treatment” – in which students were told, “The term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.” The film, embedded here in two parts, is aimed primarily at trustees and alumni, but it deserves wider attention.
Part 1: Wait for the marshmallow “oppression” story around 2:05.
“In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works.”
Dr Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, Illinois. He is co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton, 1998), and has published in academic journals as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. His book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault was published in 2004 by Scholargy Publishing and is now in its eighth printing. He is the author and narrator of a DVD documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was published in 2006 by Ockham’s Razor Publishing.
DT: In an exchange with Ophelia Benson, I mentioned ExplainingPostmodernism and suggested one of the book’s main themes is that postmodernism marks a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality among the academic left. Is that a fair, if crude, summary?
SH: It is striking that the major postmodernists – Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty – are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis – a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism.
For all its faults, the Guardian can be counted on to steer one’s mind to subjects whose political import had previously been overlooked. It’s difficult to forget Adharanand Finn mulling the politics of showering, or Cath Elliott’s timely ruminations on KitKat bars and peanut butter residue. Today, Tracy Quan ponders the socio-political significance of Michelle Obama’s upper arms, while posing that thorniest of questions: Are Biceps the New Breasts?
Like the J Crew outfits women are buying en masse, the first lady’s biceps are quickly becoming the next must have on our list. Women at every stage of life are finding ways to emulate Michelle, wanting to bond with her physically, whether through exercise or the display of flesh. I just can’t imagine feeling this way about Laura Bush or Hillary Clinton, can you? Neither seemed to be physically in love with herself the way Michelle is. No wonder her body lends itself so nicely to political myth.
Shamefully, I hadn’t hitherto considered Mrs Obama’s upper arms, or those of ladies generally, as the stuff of “political myth.” I shall, of course, try harder to register these things. I’ll also try to fathom the correct political response to Ms Quan’s belief that,
Those of us who regard our breasts as a private treat are always in need of alternative cleavage.
Amidst this celebration of the First Lady’s forelimbs, readers are warned,
We should avoid treating the female biceps as a visual trophy. Whether we oppose or welcome its display, it’s a mistake to get too fixated on a particular muscle.
Indeed.
Getting your arms to such an exalted place involves the use of many different muscles. Indeed, Michelle shouldn’t be known for “one body part” but rather for the way she uses her lats, traps, rhoms and delts – muscles in the back and shoulder – to get there… The bicep is a showy muscle, ripe for comic symbolism. Think of Popeye.
Actually, Popeye isn’t memorable for his biceps, which are rarely seen and are generally depicted as somewhat puny. Ms Quan is perhaps thinking of Popeye’s distinctive facial deformity, or more probably his forearms, the alarming proportions of which suggest a need for immediate medical attention.
I’d be more impressed if the symbol of our strength were the first lady’s less-talked-about triceps. This is the harder muscle to train, and a real challenge for most women. Also, the state of your triceps is what really determines whether you should go sleeveless in the first place. Michelle’s are unimpeachable.
Swoon.
Ms Quan has been hailed as “the only chick-lit writer to discuss indentured labour… and the proper purse in which to carry a dildo.”
In December 2008, Yale University president Richard Levin announced a series of budget cuts to compensate for a 25 percent drop in the value of Yale’s endowment. This February, the university launched the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Resources to provide support for Yale’s homosexual community. According to its director, the new office is intended to make the “University feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place” to gays. The recession, it appears, is going to have little impact on the academic culture of victimology and the ever-growing bureaucracy that supports it. The idea that Yale is an “alien, hostile place” to gays is one of those absurd conceits that could only be maintained in the alternative universe of academia. Yale students and faculty are undoubtedly the most tolerant, least homophobic people on Earth; Yale helped launch the field of gay studies three decades ago and has only increased its involvement since.
Ah, but the drama must go on indefinitely. That’s the whole point. A while ago, in a post on the academic radical, I noted a tendency towards escalation:
The problem is that adversarial role-play has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination, or paranoia, may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiouslyinvisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.
Unsurprisingly, this appetite for grievance and indulgence has been exploited and internalised by many students, especially those entranced by tribal identities and the leverage those identities make possible. (Not least among those who believe we live in the 1950s.) MacDonald goes on to list Yale’s pandering to this particular tribe, including lectures, conferences, professorships, elaborate nondiscrimination policies, the establishment of a Lesbian and Gay Studies Centre, the hiring of “special assistants for LGBTQ issues,” oral history projects, “critical analysis of queer and normative sexualities,” the provision and subsidy of “safe spaces” for LGBTQ students, and courses in “music and queer identities” and “gender transgression.” She continues,
In light of this history, one might think it impossible to maintain that Yale needs a new LGBTQ office in order to “feel like a friendly place as opposed to an alien, hostile place” to gays. Especially since the director of that new office, Maria Trumpler, has already been serving as “special assistant to the deans for LGBTQ issues.” But Trumpler herself charges that Yale has heretofore failed to confer on gays the power to form a community. If you’re tempted to ask why students require administration backing in order to form a “community,” you don’t understand the co-dependent relationship between self-engrossed students and the adults whose careers consist of catering to that self-involvement. Students in today’s university regularly act out little psychodramas of oppression before an appreciative audience of deans and provosts. The essence of those psychodramas is to force the university to recognize a student’s narrowly defined “identity” through ever more elaborate bureaucratic mechanisms. Rather than laugh the student players off the stage, the deans, provosts, and sundry other administrators willingly participate in their drama, intently negotiating with them and conferring additional benefits wherever possible.
In other words, enabling, in the pejorative sense. Obviously, as a gay man, I too feel aggrieved and entitled. Entitled, that is, to say, “Get the hell over yourselves, you whiny, parasitic little bitches.”
The phrase “asymmetric warfare” has entered popular usage and many of those who use it focus primarily on the asymmetry of military capability, rather than the asymmetry of morality, tactics and intention. Again, this follows from the notion that the ability to defend oneself is a very bad thing indeed, with the exception of certain perceived underdogs, for whom an entirely different moral standard is available. (The words “Israel-Palestine conflict” spring immediately to mind.) Those of a critical disposition may wish to object at this point on the basis that the asymmetry of military capability is for most purposes a moral non sequitur. Simply put, if a person threatens me or my family with a baseball bat and I happen to be carrying a gun, the fact that I’m better armed is in no meaningful sense “unfair”.
Some viewers may wonder if many faculty members are bewitched by the homogeneity of their insulated fiefdoms and are thus unaccustomed to their assumptions being challenged. Others may suspect that some of these educators are less naïve and all too happy to do in private what they cannot defend in public. Either way, a question arises for supporters of identity politics and pretentious sensitivity: What happens when the most oppressive “hegemony” in town is, in fact, your own?
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