gilbertrollins

Scratch that. Transgendered pre-op.

I now think you are a homosexual man.

Structural arguments have dominated this thread. More broadly - I draw from one of my primary advisers, who's an English professor who's written several books on rhetoric, my friends in the rhetoric program at my school, and other reading outside of economics and sociology.

I don't think most everyone here has reacted with grade-school ethical offense because they're women, I think it's because that's the standard of argument in the English department. Dazledandbemused said some of the smartest things I've read on gender in a while. DontHate continues to argue, correctly, that deliberative discourse is more important than protecting everyone's hurted feels. I think, broadly, the problem here is structuralism and politics in extremum in the English department. Once upon a time, the emphasis in classical Rhetoric was on developing reasoned arguments, picking sides, and torturing warrants until something useful emerged. Pomo gender scholarship and critical theory have taken a giant shit on that enterprise, and we're now left with ideological parroting disguised as "criticism," merely because it claims to undermine ideology and structure -- while of course building up a brand new and fantastically skewed ideology of its own.

To be fair - that last paragraph is the only time I call into the arena the gender of my interlocutors, it is 106 words long, and I prefaced it transparently by saying I was about to exchange some ad hominem for the several rounds of them I'd received, based on my gender and home discipline.

Elevated hand slap.

As should be apparent from my behavior here, I douche regularly, and my vagina is hence hard to detect.

I actually read some soc literature recently on naming (wtf - someone that studies the economy is interested in linguistics?). Gendered phonemes, prefixes and suffixes reliably predict the actual gender of the named. There is also some work on chat dialogues my roommate's girlfriend did -- you can pick up gender from the stylistic tendencies of the way people write.

Well, what of it? Are you a man or a woman? My money is on woman.

People's definitions of harassment are rather loose, mostly because the reactionary nonsense displayed in this thread, which is indicative of the academic culture. The staggering point is that even within those ridiculous definitions, where "ickiness" gets read incredibly as "intimidation," men and women report it in equal proportion, which undermines your entire argument than men are the perpetrators here, and that I am thus confused about my position on the appropriate place of sexuality in scholarship.

Consider that I have examined the structural location of my identity rather thoroughly, and how it bears on my priors even more so, and continue to. And consider for your own scholastic integrity that everyone deserves to be given the benefit of the doubt that they have.

From http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/upload/DTLFinal.pdf 62% of female college students and 61% of male college students report having been sexually harassed at their university. Data!?!? Oh noes!

More first-course lessons in structuralism. I can and will speak directly to various forms of oppression and ideology, regardless what hangs between my legs and the color of my skin, and regardless the situated identity that emerges from my biology. The structuralist jab at one's opponent that she does not understand her own position because of the glitches in the Matrix she is a product of is pretentious, and ad hominem.

I didn't use the term "bitches" earnestly. I said, or tried to say, that the definition of a "bitch" when referring to a woman that shoots down a man - is a woman who does so rudely. Then I tried to be fair and say there are plenty of rude guys out there. We might call them douchebags, or assholes, or whatever. And now, for the second time, you've presumed to know something about my character and politics and attacked them, because apparently ad hominem is admissible as long as it's a fancied-up inference drawn from methodological/disciplinary debates, or drawn from socio-structural inference of my class and gender. Note that these arguments are really no better than something like: "You're just saying that because you're black." Oh wait -- they're not the same. Because as long as one points one's ad hominem at groups that deserve it, it's ok. But, since we're going there. Let's just go there. Here's what I've seen happen so far. DontHate, with a limited interest in canned readings of gender dynamics, who also likes to argue (gasp! In the academy!?!?) asked a very sane question about gender dynamics. The question was met with canned responses as if parroting freshman-course student-conduct-manual rhetoric was an intellectually meaningful way to engage. So I interjected with an actual argument about broadening the terms of debate, and tried to call to question standard gender roles and the empirical realities of departmental relationships. That, asleepawake and girlwithnoglasses seemed to agree with, yet somehow ended up arguing precisely the usual canned tripe about heterosexual male privilege. And rather predictably, the substance of those arguments ran out after a couple of Women's Issues 101 course summaries, and they turned to the ad hominem. Woman angry! Woman smash! Why? Well, apparently being a woman in the English department and reading a little Foucault makes one de facto contrarian and subtle . . .even if the substance of one's points adds nothing to the debate that hasn't been repeated ad nauseum in the English, and now most other departments (including economics, where women's issues make it to top journals consistently now), for the last thirty years. But I suppose that's fine, if the objective of scholarship in the English department is to beat to death old, widely accepted politics, then this thread duly serves its purpose and you all will no doubt have fortuitous careers ahead.

As I understand it, sending Fall grades is reserved for situations where there is significant information on them grad committees will be interested in (A's in grad courses, etc), or where schools specifically ask for them. I think you should certainly send your grades. And I would just get the official transcript, scan it, and attach it to an email to the grad coordinator at each department with a two-sentence explanation that there is a dramatic change in performance not elsewhere indicated in your package. If they don't want to include it - they can trash your email. I don't see the use in calling ahead of time to ask if they want it; it's not an unheard of thing and places no burden on them if you send without asking first.

In my humblest: bitches are rude. The reverse would be douchebags: rude. Invitation to press harder? Again in my subtleties: the only time I've read rejection as an invitation to press harder is when a woman had her shirt off and conveyed in a pretty clear tone that it was a game -- never had the misfortune of "misreading" such a situation. Safe-space had already been established. Can't speak for other guys. In sum, I don't think there's an abysmal Catch-22 set up for women on the flirtation front. The whole "no matter how you do it, you're going to be branded a bitch" attitude is fatalistic and I don't think particularly descriptive of the vast majority of rejections that happen. I can't remember a guy I know calling a girl a bitch just for rejecting him. Some do, sure. Again: douchbags. So we can agree that douchebags and bitches populate both genders, and probably at mirror proportions respectively. Hopefully we can agree too that it's not particularly constructive to turn the discussion on bad-apples. Thanks for letting me vent my privileged white male feelings on gender. That feels better.

I mean, isn't the general reality-check warning about adviser/advisee relationships that year 3-5 (or 7 for you humanities folks) is extremely lonely, with very little interaction and guidance? Isn't that why independent research is almost absolutely necessary as an UG, to signal that one can get through that stage? And can't one just back off a little to get the message across, use more formal language in emails, etc?

Ha. Caught. I'm an attractive, well-spoken, gregarious, white male. What do I do when homosexual men or older women hit on me? I feed into it. I usually love the attention; and these people 99% of the time understand where the actual boundaries are. I also related a story about the woman at the sandwich shop hitting on me, actually showing me her underwear, which made me a little sick for a while. Those subs are too damn good though. I've had a gay guy slide his hands down my pants at a gay club, and a substantially overweight girl I wanted nothing to do with try and fuck me while I was passed out drunk. That's a little sample of the sexual harassment I've been through. Then there's oh, I dunno, the ghetto that I live in where gangbangers try to eye me down on the street, the zillions of times I've been verbally accosted for being white and male and privileged by people whose politics don't agree with mine. It goes on. But your sophomore analysis that I just don't know what it feels like for women to receive unwanted advances, after having a wealth of girlfriends share stories about being raped and harassed, and even sharing one of those stories already here -- is noted. What has not been discussed here, at all, is that the way the coy-female/aggressive-male game is set up puts a host of power in women's hands -- they're the ones with the accept/reject button in their hand. The idea that men, especially a bunch of Aspergers-having men in University Professorships, hold all of the cards in our society and systematically abuse that power constantly, is ridiculous.

Most flirty vibes are unwanted, as most people are not significantly attracted to one another. Society gives us a wealth of tacit cues to signal when it is and is not wanted. And most of that behavior can get dealt with in a nice tactful way. E.g. when I check a girl out, she sees me in her peripheral, and scowls instead of looking back at me or pretending to not see me with a little lift in her face, etc. I do not understand why men being flirty with women they're attracted to, even in professional environments, should be seen as this disgusting infraction when it is the only way men have to find out whether or not their advances are wanted or not. That's the expectation, no? A man makes a move, puts a signal out there, takes the conversation to a slightly more personal place, etc etc. It's our responsibility to lead the first step in the dance, yet we're disgusting pigs if we didn't magically know a woman wasn't interested. If a guy can't take the hint and back off when it's unwanted - that's another thing. But I don't like the idea that men should have to constantly walk around in the shadow of the "disgusting old man rapist" stereotype.

Outside 1-3 above, I was arguing that sexual relationships are common in the workplace, even in the academy, and that Sensodyne conversations that privilege relatively rare cases of sexual male-on-younger-female harassment distort people's statistical estimation of how common the cases of it are, and therefore the broader ethics about the appropriateness of workplace sexuality, which can and should be dealt with more openly.

1) Negative sexual relationships are rare among the population of sexual relationships between advisers and advisees, which again are even rarer in the population of adviser/advisee relationships generally. 2) If the relationship is consenting, and turns sour, the parties have a responsibility to deal with it maturely and professionally just like a co-authorship gone badly. 3) If a younger woman feels substantially intimidated and uncomfortable around her adviser, she has a wealth of recourse due precisely to the reactionary gender politics common on campuses, and especially in the English department.

There we go again, redefining the terms of the debate by misrepresenting my argument. For the literally inclined (which I otherwise presume English scholars to be), I said: "substantive difference."

Dear Oxford English Dictionary, Is there a substantive difference between feeling "icky" and "intimidated?" Cheers, Non-Quantitative Researcher Dear Non-Quantitative Researcher, icky | ikky, adj. b. Sweet, sickly, sentimental; hence a general term of disapproval: nasty, repulsive, sticky, etc.; also, ill, sick. intimidate, v. trans. To render timid, inspire with fear; to overawe, cow; in modern use esp. to force to or deter from some action by threats or violence. Best, The Oxford English Dictionary

Is there? Do you have any evidence that a majority, or even significant portion of intra-departmental relationships lead to harassment, exploitation, and favoritism? Why should we presume, cynically, that people in a position of power in the department will often exploit that position sexually? What motivates that argument? Your experience? A cross-section of data on departments? Or the anxiety-inducing influence of gender scholarship narratives that are privileged in the English department?