especially

You're all so pathetic.

i find myself oddly repulsed and attracted to dfindley's posts.  part-troll, part-student of philosophy, all maniacal mystery.  i raise my glass to you, dfindley, for making me laugh
 
-sarah

Thanks. I didn't know if people could comprehend what it was talking about, but not like people could in the original context anyway.

Dealing with the vast openness that is 'work' time in graduate school is difficult to grapple with. I am on the verge of completing my MA and so can speak to the issue of class work load (things will only open up more after course work is completed and it is just you and the dissertation for 3+ years). I had 6 hrs of class/week (three 2hr seminars) and often found it difficult to develop a standard work routine. There are many ways to go about it and here are two:  either try and make sure the days when you have seminars are work days, i.e. you are putting in a concentrated 2-3 hours of work on each side of the seminars. Or do the opposite. On days when you are in class take it easy and focus on being fully cognitively present in the seminars and use days when you are not in class to do the majority of your work, i.e. 5-6hrs. I have had numerous conversations with professors over the years and they have all stressed the same point: whatever you do, treat graduate school like work. BUT something new I have discovered this year is that 'work' doesn't mean 8-10 hr days. Some people can do this, but not many. The consensus opinion in my MA program and in my undergrad was to attempt to put in 4-5 REAL hours of work every day in which you do some good philosophy. That means disconnected from the world, you and your work WORK. I would ask those who object to my advice to consider this interesting point a friend of mine raised the other night: those who are privileged enough to study philosophy are often times individuals who do not work well under the standard conception of work, i.e. 9-5 jobs. Perhaps when some of us are lucky enough to get a job then a return to the standard work day will be inevitable. But in graduate school, it is almost impossible to operate under such constraints. 
 
Hope that helps a bit. 

The mathematical possibility of obtaining an overall 3.9 GPA indicates your grades weren't that affected.

Here's my little buddy!
 

Wet food and dry food both, actually. Dry provides the fibre. Wet ..is more natural. Before Grain is generally considered one of the top brands for both.

I have (and had) an MA, but did not vote in the poll because the MA option does not accurately reflect my situation. I'm from (and in) a country that typically requires an MA before the PhD already. It had nothing to do with proving myself! (Although there's no doubt in my mind that the experience was valuable, and that I was a much stronger applicant as a result.)

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.

It is not as rare as your privileged perspective leads you to believe. Rarely reported? Yes. Rarely happens? No.

Dear Literal McLiteralson,
 
If you really believe these things cannot and do not slide into one another for some when supervisors and sex are involved, I'm not sure I can help you out here. One can feel simultaneously icky and intimidated, and most people in positions of authority should try their best not to make the people they have power over even feel icky, even if it is the lesser to these two, apparently diametral opposed concepts.

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?

Econosocio: I just mean, more generally, if anyone besides you chooses to add to this thread, please don't chime in just to say everything's sexist.

Or even better: Heterosexist!

so many lols

I'm used to this. It's kind of what I'm trying to talk about here. But I guess I'm being "HETEROSEXIST"
lawl

Yet, largely statistically accurate.
We're discussing heterosexual relationships. Though we can discuss homosexual relationships, too. If the amount of discourse about heterosexuality clocks in at about 85%, that will be proportional to the amount of heterosexuality in most regions. Disclaimer: I think gay is pretty great.
I argued precisely against that point. The gender roles came first. http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Sex-History-Revolution/dp/0199892415/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=1QWBS9HK76A7K&coliid=I2YEPLXD4055AA
The anthropomorphization into biology came second. http://www.amazon.com/Genial-Gene-Deconstructing-Darwinian-Selfishness/dp/0520265939/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355982335&sr=1-1&keywords=the+genial+gene
Is there anyone in the occident who actually believes that full-force anymore? That stereotype seems to increase in strength in inverse proportion to the mean national income of the population observed.
We've got some of the most malleable gender roles in the world.
Fair enough.

I think the portrait of women preferring older men and vice versa is overly simplified, heterosexist, and sort of seems like painting a biological explanation over Mad Men flavored sexism. Yeah, the western world seems to have collectively agreed on the idea that the older man/younger woman relationship is not only acceptable but preferred but that's based on the idea that women are going to be at home and men are going to be at work and these people are going to pair off accordingly and everyone will be happily upper middle class. The assertions don't just sound sexist, they're predicated on and only supportable by a society with very strict gender roles and sex rules. Am I saying that this is not often the case? No. But I am weary of basing assumptions around it and I am not super comfortable with its continued normalization (at the expense of all other different kinds of relationships and this is the part where Gayle Rubin pulls out the charts, I think).

I'm also uncomfortable with thinking about professor/student relationships only in terms of good/bad. I DO think there is room for consent and I think assuming otherwise can often unfairly ruin careers but I am not wholly comfortable with it, to be honest.

Women don't prefer attractive and youthful men? Do women that prefer older men prefer them because they look like Grandpa, or because of their ostensible (and often times questionable) existential maturity?

To your first statement there:

"Sexual currency" imputes some sort of materialistic and economistic corruption onto women's sexuality. In less pretentious terms: it's an allusion to prostitution. I suppose I could write a very long and upset diatribe about why I don't like the usage and think it's uncharitable to both womens' and mens' framing of their relationships, but I won't. Gender scholarship tends on my (very small) reading to thrive on this sort of out-of-control cynicism.

And your assertion that the currency is predicated on looks implies that men have basal, one-dimensional sexualities. In less pretentious terms: all men want is a fuck. Again I think that's not just uncharitable, but empirically incorrect.

As it happens, a majority of the aggressive male / coy female binaries originated very recently in Victorian England. Yet these of course have been anachronistically painted on the rest of history, have fueled an outrageous public discourse that makes both men and women untrusting of one another, and have even been anthropomorphized into sociobiology. In this view then, "in the beginning" early hominids like the rest of the animal kingdom ran around raping their way to genetic proliferation, a situation which putatively has only made minor improvements over 10,000 years of civilized history, and only really since 1st wave feminism cracked the DiVinci Code in the 1970s.

I think what everyone's concerned about here is the "young impressionable female advisee or undergraduate meets the older, wiser, and hip-er professor" stereotype. And I think that's narrow, saying very little about the intelligence and agency of young women, and very little about the ethics and motivations of older men. Innocent little girl / dirty old man binaries don't get us very far here.

Outside direct conflicts of interest, I do not see the problem with people finding romantic or sexual partners at work, whether in the academy or not.

dudes, check out the beard on this monkey.

Well, what should be on my mind is my thesis (still need to write 2.5 chapters) and my conference paper for NeMLA in March...

But honestly, I will probably spend January only half-assedly reading what I should be reading and mostly re-watching Buffy and checking this board every 30 seconds...

You don't generally retain ownership of a topic or where it goes on a discussion board.

And you've made it quite clear that you, personally don't see the need for any more discussion.

I guess I just don't see why, if you don't see the point in the discussion, you keep participating in it. Frequently.

You're just wrong. Most of what Phil was criticizing, notwithstanding the potentially interesting discussion on the sexual tensions between grad students and professors, was nothing "intellectually useful." It was the general bitterness, rudeness, and hostile elitism that some people on this forum spoke (wrote) with. If you're going to systematically act that way, despite what you might think about between the differences of on and offline personalities, it says something about your character that, in my opinion, calls into question how good of a colleague, educator, and mentor you would be. Because this is a public space, and because it is so tied to academia, there is nothing wrong with members of admissions committees potentially browsing these forums, seeing a litany of posts by a single author that signal personal qualities they don't want in their department, and taking that judgement into account if said poster decided to reveal telling personal details, like what programs he or she is applying to.

YOU GUYS

YOU GUYS

The internet, especially sites like this, are not anonymous. They're psuedononymous. I've had people from my school get in touch with me about things I've said here, and I'm not being all that obvious.

I also know who several people are that post here.

It's something that's really good to get accustomed to if you stay in academia- it's not that big of a field. This pops up from time to time on the CHE forums with people posting about interviews and job applications, and having it come out that the admissions committee members are reading that board, or are regulars there.

Don't post things on the internet you mind getting associated with you, it's quite simple.