What kind of bird is on his shoulder? Is that his bird or just one that passed by?
I don't remember Hum 110 conferences being so rapey. We usually talked about books.
I know not what to think. If only there were a global telecommunications network that could tell me!
According to the version of the story I read, the class in question had nothing to do with sexual assault, but this guy wouldn't stop bringing up his obsession with false rape accusations regardless.
Nothing creepy about that at all...
here is more weirdness about that dude:
http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/male-students-non-pc-views-on-rape-stati
6 - see Jeremiah's condition for talking to the reporter at the end of the article.
I can't tell if George is trolling or not all that well.
For background, there was a huge blowup recently over the trigger language issue on the Reed community page at the other place, resulting in the ejection of at least one person from the forum and the creation of a new page for alums (splitters!). I'm not sure exactly how this is related, but I don't doubt that it is. I also don't understand why this wasn't handled as an honor code violation, which would have resulted in its being brought before the Judicial Board.
My guess would be that the professor is trying to keep things as low key as he can while managing the class - the guy isn't failing the class, as long as his work is submitted he'll get credit for it, he's just been dis-invited to the classroom (and invited to meet privately with the professor in place of it).
10: J-board is the appropriate venue for this. The fact that this douche wants to "start a movement" rather than appeal through channels that are pretty straightforward to access tells me a lot about his attitude.
This dude strikes me as a typical Reddit Men's Rights Activist. Won't shut up and won't change the subject. False accusations of rape are to these people the single most important thing in the world.
Does "conference" in this context mean "class"?
11: The conference is meant to be the essence of the class, though, so the ban is problematic in procedural terms as well as in the way the story is so easily spun by outside parties.
13: Basically. It's a lecture-conference format in which the entire freshman class attends lectures, and then they're split up into multiple conferences.
I thought everybody at Reed was too stoned for shit like this.
16: There's a load of amphetamines around to help people get through all the reading.
I've never tried amphetamines. Too much coffee makes me really jumpy. Awake and unable to do anything useful or interesting. It's not pleasant so I figured stronger stimulants were not for me.
The "1 in 5" rape statistic seems to be a very powerful recruiting tool for the Men's Rights movement. Instead of responding with "What? That's terrible? That's so much worse than I could have ever imagined!", the response is "Nope, I know a lot of women and as far as I know none of them have ever been raped. This whole hysteria is total BS."
Which is what happens most of the time when you try to induce cognitive dissonance.
He is SO CONCERNED with the slippery slope of callng everything rape.
He is SO CONCERNED with the slippery slope of callng everything rape.
You laugh, but before you know it we'll be talking like Smurfs, except instead of every third word being "smurf", it'll be "rape".
So that prof is doing extra work to prevent anyone from being harmed, and he gets the noise machine as a reward? Fantastic.
The 1/5 thing (esp. if described as a rape statistic) is perfect, because it's both false enough and prevalent enough to create maximum broutrage.
With that kind of obsession, you have to wonder if the guy actually raped somebody.
I'm thinking its more "I don't want to actually rape anyone, but what is America coming to if a guy can't meet a hot, drunk babe at a party and subject her to some unwelcome groping?"
A common lament, just not usually at reed.
Did you read his letter to the faculty? He doesn't sound well.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tb7iLgK-wqamJE506nWAHN47YnYH7YDogB9U2pghl5A/mobilebasic
16: There's a load of amphetamines around to help people get through all the reading.
Is that true? It doesn't fit my mental image of Reed at all.
27: I didn't read it, but the density and length really don't make for good signs.
Maybe not. It starts off with awareness that the message is long.
27: He sounds like a loon. That said, I'm uncomfortable with the notion that intellectual and emotional comfort is what college is all about. Is "higher education" just become a euphemism for baby sitting?
Kicking somebody out of class because they won't stop talking about something that isn't part of the lesson really has little to do with intellectual or emotional comfort.
There's a reasonable distinction to be made between discomfort caused by doing academic work, and discomfort that is an irrelevant distraction from academic work. This guy, from looking at the screed, sounds plausibly like a substantial cause of the latter type of discomfort.
So you'd rather the teacher babysit the one unhinged male student by indulging his obsessions than babysit the five female students with a perfectly reasonable reason to feel uncomfortable?
If he's derailing conversation, he's not just making life difficult for the five women who complained. He's ruining the class for everyone.
28: Aphetamines maybe aren't that common, but there were plenty around when I was there, with use clearly spiking during reading and exam weeks. I don't know what it was like when the other Reedies here attended.
THE 1-IN-5 STATISTIC IS WRONG!!! WE CAN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE OR TALK ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL EVERYONE ACKNOWLEDGES THAT THAT STATISTIC IS WRONG!!!
Emphasizing the disruption is a good way to blunt the inevitable "It's political correctness gone mad!" whining from conservatives. This guy's obsession is especially creepy, but even if he were derailing the class to rant about how lizard people from alpha centauri have infiltrated the office of homeland security, it would still be disruptive.
Students have some (formal or informal) rights, but "the right to blather on in class about anything you want whether it is related to the course content or not" isn't one of them.
I'm all for academic freedom, but there also too needs to be some provision for banning assholes.
I don't know about full-on amphetamines, but when I was there, plenty of people would use Ritalin and similar stuff to stay up all night and work. As a philosophy major, I didn't have that much work, so it wasn't an issue for me.
Reed attracts a lot of very clever, very unstable people. A lot of them don't make it past the first year. I strongly suspect that this guy's issues are not MRA concerns, but that he's stuck in his own head and not tracking reality very well. And to make things even harder, Reed really is a tough place to be African-American. I don't know current statistics but typically there've only been a handful of black students at any time.
Tl;dr - this won't end well for anyone.
The difference for LGBTQ, Afro-Americans, and post-colonial nations is that they understand they will never carry their identity into the oligarchy, never be hegemonic, will always be subservient, supportive, or doubly resistant. They can only accept vassalage.
An oligarchy always has three parts: the hegemonic or dominant, the vassalage, and slaves or serfs. Ancient world, antebellum South, low samurai vs peasant in Japan. The oligarchy or hegemony will often use the myths of the vassal in order to keep vassal quiescent and enhance their own hegemony as legitimately benevolent. The vassal has voice in only one direction, toward the outside of ruler-vassal relation, down toward the serfs or out to the other. The vassal must accept the dominant myth of the ruling class.
I bet if a hegemon tried, they could make four parts in an oligarchy.
28,37,41: I certainly knew people who used meth as a study drug. My approach to the need to be alert for exams and stuff was just to ease up on the pot and hit the coffee harder. I knew one guy who did all his homework stoned and ended up all but unable to do physics unless he was high. He took the qualifier baked out of his skull and still did better than me.
33-36 are all completely right. Complaints about how colleges are coddling people with 'trigger warnings', protecting people from being offended, and so on are almost universally bullshit promoted by the people who really really want to be able to keep people who disagree with them from having a space in which to do so.
I took an Econ exam once after getting high, which made sense because I had been high while I was studying, so it was important be stay in the same frame of mind. I got a B on that one.
43: Hegemonic Harmonics is my barbershop quartet.
It's not that hard to get an A in economics as an undergraduate. You just pretend the theories work.
An oligarchy always has three parts: the hegemonic or dominant, the vassalage, and slaves or serfs.
- What are we, then?
- We're serfs.
- Ooh. I thought we were part of an autonomous collective.
For the purposes of this thread, this discourse, the discussants don't even see skin color. This works in the same way that a gay man or a lesbian critiquing women or bourgeois feminism becomes respectively, a "man" (default, therefore "white" or...
Female masculinity is a particularly fruitful site of investigation because it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike . . . Within a lesbian context, female masculinity has been situated as a site where patriarchy goes to work on the female psyche and reproduces misogyny within femaleness . . ....Judith Halberstam
...a man.
It's not that hard to get an A in economics as an undergraduate. You just pretend the theories work.
As an undergraduate, I'm ashamed to say, I actually believed it.
it has been vilified by heterosexist and feminist/womanist programs alike
Is "womanism" a thing? How is it different from feminism?
It's much harder if you do.
In my defense, I was stoned.
Okay. If he's being nutty enough to elicit this response, he had to go. I've had annoyingly persistent students, "Enough!" was always enough.
"The entire conference without exception, men as well as women, feel that your presence makes them uncomfortable enough that they would rather not be there if you are there, and they have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes. I, as conference leader, have to do what is best for the well-being of the entire class, and I am therefore banning you from conference for the remainder of the semester."
54: I say with the least amount of authority possible -- yes, it is a thing, it's a movement of black women who are seeking goals that I would generally think of as feminist, but who resist identification with feminism because they believe that it systematically excludes the needs and perspectives of women of color. Think intersectionality for a related term indicating attention to the same or similar issues.
I would be very interested to know the details of what particular book(s) were being discussed in this Reed literature class, because it is not beyond imagining that aspects of the patriarchy or rape culture could come up in the student discussion, and not interjected out-of-context by the male student.
Ralph Ellison? Maya Angelou? Alice Walker? Early Oates?
Huh. Well, I have no reason to doubt their goals are worthy and their grievances are well-founded, but I'm having trouble resisting the urge to make the obvious joke about the Judean People's Front.
54: "Intersectionality" always works down. In practice, and covertly in theory, it is "we will grant you some secondary space and time for your issues"
As I said above, LGBTQ, Afro-Americans, and post-colonialists are not excluded from the discourse, they are accepted, but only in a position of vassalage.
Judging from the letter, this guy (kid?) needs to learn that someone's refusal to respond to him or to engage in a dialogue with him on his terms does not necessarily mean that he is right or that he has been dealt with unfairly.
"In this world, we are as if in a cave, watching flickers on the wall about the 1 and 5 women are raped statistic"
62: Okay, thank you. Damn, is Reed "great books" like St John's or Kotsko's place? That is also a very careful syllabus. "Clouds?"
Apuleius or Ovid could generate the controversy. Like I said, I would be interested in the specific context, not taking either side's narrative for granted.
Looked up Reed, 55% women, 3% Afro-American
It must have been during the discussion of "The Golden Ass".
60: "Womanism" significantly predates the current talk about intersectionality, though LB's right about the focus. I'm pretty sure Alice Walker coined the term but since the second-wave feminist movement (and certainly before) there have been explicit discussions by black women who are interested in women's and POC liberation about how best to address those issues from a theoretical standpoint.
Also, I reject being bob's vassal, but whatevs.
It must have been during the discussion of "The Golden Ass".
Come on, there is a whole other thread for this...
Ovid's Metamorphoses is a pretty rapey book, as I recall. 1 in 5 might not be far off.
Reed's combo of ultra-intense ultra-competitive intellectual environment and everyone is amped to the max on drugs always seemed particularly terrifying. "You just spent the last 48 hours in the K-Hole having sex with random strangers? Great, now let me rip you to shreds for failing to understand Aristotle's concept of catharsis, while mildly mentally ill geniuses laugh at you."
I, for one, welcome my new McManusian overlord.
I'm studying up on Hawaii, since I think Bob mentioned that it's kind of important to him.
To be clear, Reed is one of the institutions that deserves to survive the giant collegiate institution destroying fireball of which Pitbull sings. It just seems a little too intense.
AcademicLurker beat me to 71. The Metamorphoses are rape -- laurel tree! rape -- myrtle tree! rape --cow!
The best vassals don't realize they're vassals.
Also the Sabines as part of the founding myth of the state, not long after getting to grips with the Oresteia as the founding myth of justice. Even though the latter is murder not rape.
Also, I reject being bob's vassal, but whatevs.
That's good, because it pretty obviously ain't my hegemony or sovereignty.
I'm studying up on Hawaii, since I think Bob mentioned that it's kind of important to him.
My favorite pot in the early 80s.
Not really, one of my Japanese-American feminist sociologists worked from Hawaii, early before grants worked with the local J-A community, but mostly worked in Japan.
It is also interesting in the fairly miserable Japanese studies in Hawaii, despite the demographics, and the historical reasons...but I am not very interested in Japanese-Americans.
Judging from the letter, this guy (kid?) needs to learn that someone's refusal to respond to him or to engage in a dialogue with him on his terms does not necessarily mean that he is right or that he has been dealt with unfairly.
But that's the entire foundation of "chan" online culture. The person willing to spend the most total hours / square feet of text arguing has won the argument.
First you get the most square feet of text. Then you win the argument. Then you get the women, if the women were as tedious as you.
Sorry, that slash does not imply a ratio. It should be hours multiplied by square feet of text, if anything.
I thought Reed was U of C for hippies.
I wrote a paper about how *all* of the foundings and refoundings of Rome in Livy (Romulus and Remus, Sabines, Lucretia, Verginia) are predicated on rape. Of course I did.
Also the Aeneid is totally a post-colonial text and I am not the slightest bit kidding. (More papers, obvs.)
I visited Reed and felt out of place among what seemed like a bunch of coolkids, because I was extraordinarily uptight.
I thought for sure this was satire. I googled the professor's name fully expecting the first hit to be a mascot for a Mexican frozen food company.
|?
62 bothers me, pretty good, but with no hesitation I would remove The Republic and replace it with The Theban Trilogy
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The funny thing is, Reed students aren't the laidback sexhaving cool kids that they look like from the outside. There are a lot of hookups, but it always seemed based on the fact that everyone is too socially awkward to understand casual conversations, dating, etc. Most people there are totally uptight, but they think they're supposed to be laidback and cool and swinging, so they clumsily fumble themselves into situations. But everyone there thinks everyone else is laid back. It's a weird place. Great academics though.
94 is true, or at least was when I was there. Reed is also a lot less druggy now than it used to be.
The three schools my parents wouldn't allow me to apply to were Smith (lesbians), Chicago (suicide) and Reed (student-professor sex). I don't think they generally have a lot of thematic overlap with T"R"O, but maybe they do.
89: You'll just have to take my word for it that the past sixteen years have seen me gradually decrease in general uptightness. For instance, when I was seventeen, I would probably not have reacted with grace and elan to an offer to make me such a thing as this.
97: I was joking. You and I are very much alike on that front.
Smith does have a shit-ton of lesbians.
97: Oh dear God. I don't want to know if you use it.
94, 95: Hampshire College was sort of similar back in the day. No idea what it's like now.
Yet, what school other than Chicago has a suicide prevention day?
96: I knew about a couple of professors who had sex with students (not including the two who married former students, though those relationships probably started while the women were still in school), but I didn't know that the school was known for it.
The thing is, you have to prevent it every day.
102: It may not have suicide prevention day, but Cornell does have a dedicated wikipedia page for its suicides.
103: This was before I knew that one of my parents had at least dated a TA at a wholesome Catholic school, so I don't know what prompted the specific prohibition there.
Have we done the Laura Kipnis thing here? I thought that was more interesting than the sad little nut in the OP, because as repugnant as Kipnis is, she speaks for something broader.
Plus, I think Goldberg is correct that parts of the backlash have lent Kipnis some credibility.
Goldberg's piece is, itself, kind of screwed up. She seems to think it's an incidental point that Kipnis misrepresents the power dynamic between students and professors.
Kipnis speaks for something broader: the right of faculty members to sate themselves on nubile 20-year-olds, because it's not like state legislatures are giving faculty other reasons to come into work.
We were so much older then. We're more nubile than that now.
From the Goldberg article:
"Every professor's affected by the current climate, unless they're oblivious," Kipnis told me via e-mail.
I can see that professors teaching courses that must at some point broach topics related to sex are affected by the "current climate," but that must be a tiny fraction of all professors, no? Certainly I never have the need to bring up trigger warnings in my class and I don't think it's because I'm oblivious.
Maybe that could be your big breakthrough. Nonconsensual pulsars or something.
How did The Nation manage to attract that set of commenters? There's a bunch of crazy MRA-ish stuff in their comments. Maybe that's true everywhere on the web now.
Further from the Goldberg article: Someone on my campus--tenured--wrote me about literally lying awake at night worrying about causing trauma to a student, becoming a national story, losing her job, and not being able to support her kid.
And Kipnis is criticizing students for being over the top?
112: More or less all online versions of newspapers or magazines have comment sections populated by lunatics. I think it's been that way for a while.
It's actually one 47-year old male lunatic in his basement.
But, actually, there's some kind of lefty-anti-PC movement that's out there, Karl Marx compels you to exercise your sexual freedom to sexy time your students and only bourgeois reactionaries think otherwise. You see this occasionally online.
Of course nosflow is going to look uptight next to Laura Kipnis. It's not a fair comparison.
Is Laura Kipnis aspiring to be the new Camille Paglia?
I think "repugnant" is pretty harsh. How about "unrealistic in her belief that the average undergraduate is as cool, hip and mature as she was".
Or maybe she should just issue a corrected revision that makes it clear that it only applies to art school.
116:Nah, as the resident Marxist, the Marxian influences are very marginal. The Slate picture series below from yesterday might give a clue as to certain trends among urban elite young people today (you could have noticed the references to BDSM in the Goldberg article;who do think is playing which roles?)
What Does It Mean to Be Masculine
Is Laura Kipnis aspiring to be the new Camille Paglia?
She made her initial splash with a book titled Against Love: a Polemic, stocked with things like "The hidden linguistic universe of companianate couples... rests entirely on one generative phrase: 'Would you please stop doing that.'"
So she's been playing the provocateur for a while now. She has quite a way to go to reach Paglia levels of obnoxious, though.
There are Marxians, like Mark Davies, who notice the systematic exclusion of class from most current discourses, but they really aren't getting it. You might have also noticed Goldberg mentioning the "melodramatic imagination" of the mattress-bearers, which almost set me off on a pasting binge. I will spare you. Melodramatic expressionism comes to the fore when there is a shift in hegemonies within existing class relations. New bosses. Classically bourgeois and petite bourgeois in early 19th, merchant and financial classes replacing nobility, military and clerics.
If you study the pictures in 120, the subjects are not only expropriating masculinities, they are also dressing down with faux working-class fashion.
Ok, one just extended quote, because I wouldn't want to be considered a troll. With a surprise, and one italicization.
This is, however, what we suggest occurs within the space provided by female masculinity in the Takarazuka Theatre, some aspects of shojo culture, manga and anime in Japan. The particular gender of the space centred around the masculine female heroes/heroines in each allows for the creation of a space where sex, gender and sexuality are suspended for a carefully delineated amount of time. We turn now to a more detailed consideration of these spaces, with a particular focus on the Takarazuka Theatre.There are also Takarazuka 'students' who are in their late forties, and even one who is in her eighties, making their nominal childhood status even more difficult to sustain. However, as we will discuss, this very childhood status is critical in maintaining the fundamental asexuality of the performance space.
The otoko-yaku or male impersonators in particular attract legions of female fans and have often been portrayed in the context of an 'ideal male' image. They are outstandingly handsome, pure, kind, emotional, charming, funny, romantic and intelligent - that is, the complete antithesis of the salaryman/oyaji stereotype of Japanese men.
Takarazuka playwright Ogita Koichi responded to our question on this topic:
"There are those who, looking at Takarazuka from the outside, try to understand it in terms of sexuality. That is not enough. Analysing only the raw bodies (namami [the physicality]) of Takarazuka will lead you to ignore a completely different dimension of the Theatre - that Takarazuka is ultimately a fantasy, a fictional creation.
That is why the Theatre has been able to continue for over eighty years without experiencing any limitations in regards to the otoko-yaku as the main role. Furthermore, I have never written a play with the intention of portraying [real] men. That is because the otoko-yaku are otoko-yaku and are not men. The same goes for the onna-yaku (female roles) - both the otoko-yaku and the onna-yaku are constructs that exist within a particular fantasy [or fictional space]. I do not equate them at all with the raw bodies (namami ) of [actual] women." (Matsuo 2000b: 120)
Whatyathink, did white men have a conference to establish the hegemony, or did it arise spontaneously in fantasy, fashion, interests, and everyday interactions?
IF JAPAN DID NOT EXIST, BARTHES BOB WOULD HAVE HAD TO INVENT IT
The latest from the college is that this is not a free speech issue, they can't disclose details, and they urge everyone to chill and be compassionate. The subtext is that the kid is messed up, and they're trying to get him help.
Sorry, it's Mark Fisher, not Davies, author of Capitalist Realism and "Vampire Castle"
Here is a randomly selected critique of Fisher Marxism Race and Vampires
I visit that edge of the blogosphere, which is pretty active and interesting but marginal to the spaces frequented by this commentariat. They are likely to be organizing marches in Brighton, but very unlikely to be trolling Marcotte.
And endnotes/tiqqun does try to fuse everything, but in a very obscure post-Marxist style.
It may have nothing to do with who you are talking about.
124:Barthes mistake was relying on personal experience and direct observation. Always leads ya wrong.
Come to think of it, if you found yourself in solitary confinement, it might help blunt the mental damage to compose Unfogged comment threads in your head.
Probably not The Nation, though.
129 Start committing as many Moby Hick puns to memory as you can.
124. Or, as j\w\z says, "Japanese people, please stop telling us about your sexuality."
132: From whom do you think I get 90% of my information? Did you even read 123? Authors of the Takarazuka article:Karen Nakamura and Hisako Matsuo, not that you would care.
Hisako Matsuo is a freelance writer and researcher based in Hyo ¯go, Japan. She is the author of the first major book on transgender behaviour in Japan,
Transgenderism: The Twilight Between the Sexes (Seori Shobo ¯ , 1996). She has written extensively about sex and gender issues including the Takarazuka Theatre, about which she has a book forthcoming. Her home page is located at: http://www.gpsy.com/matsuo/
Karen Nakamura is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College (Saint Paul, MN). She was born in Indonesia and grew up in Australia, Japan and the US. She has just completed her PhD dissertation research on deaf identity and
minority social movements in modern Japan at Yale University. Her interest in the Takarazuka Theatre merges with her previous research on non-normative
genders and sexualities as well as with girls' comic books and anime in Japan. Her home page is at: http://www.deaflibrary.org/nakamura/
Not that you would care, because you know somebody who knows somebody, who told you something, so it's the truth.
I tell you what, I will stop talking about Japan when y'all stop talking about your personal experiences, people you know, places you've seen.
I don't really do that much, do I?
Well, it is partly because I am a little secretive, but also because it is embarrassingly narcissistic and parochial, and because I don't think personal narratives are at all trustworthy, and that includes my own.
There is a whole very aggressive game, a totalizing ideology, a radical anti-intellectualism going on with:
"Scientific studies say 95% of x is y"
"Not true for me."
Bob, you talk about nothing else but your personal experience. When you read a book, that's you having a personal experience. It's a very naive attitude to privilege one modality of experiential acquisition over another simply because your Western patriarchal model of learning about the world has brought you to believe that know (ledge) in a book is somehow objective and free from the burden of interpersonality and human subjective hierarchy in a way that other forms of knowledge are not. Defy the duality!
What you forget, ajay, is that bob has transcended personhood and become an entity of pure understanding.
Well, everybody knows that bob has transcended personhood and become an entity of pure understanding. What this comment presupposes is … maybe he didn't.
A Reedy at the other place posted this letter of alumni support for Savery.