Knowing what you did

Among the issues raised by Harvey Weinstein and #MeToo, here's one I haven't seen discussed:

If you are, yourself, a serial harasser . . . how are you feeling right now?

First of all, do you know yourself--however dimly or with whatever caveats and attempts at exculpation--to be a harasser? And if you do, does that knowledge come with any fear or regret? Are you apologizing? Lawyering up?

Maybe the bad conscience of the abuser isn't the biggest issue here, but I do wonder. Because while there are certainly irredeemable predators, I suspect that not all harassers are, or would have been, absent a culture that encouraged or permitted them. I'd like to believe that there are some harassers out there who are capable of recognizing their behavior as unwanted and destructive, and who might feel, at this moment, some shame and remorse.

Last week The New York Times had an article that seems to hint at this possibility. It's a summary of research on non-criminal rapists--that is, men who have never been charged and who have no other criminal record, but who will privately admit to researchers that they've had nonconsensual sex. The most interesting part, to me, is that there appear to be some men who have nonconsensual sex once or twice, while others become serial predators. Although the reasons are far from clear, part of the explanation seems to be where the individual falls on the narcissism-empathy continuum. It doesn't surprise me that repeat offenders score high for narcissism, but the suggestion that some men might be predatory when young, or under the influence of toxic peers or alcohol or whatever, and grow out of it, is simultaneously proof of the power of rape culture and the possibility of its end.

In wondering about the emotional lives of abusers I don't want to perpetuate the practice of focusing on them rather than their victims (they're so important! and have so much to lose!). I've experienced harassment and things that fall at least generally into the category of assault, and I've heard much worse stories because I'm a woman who knows women. Indeed, living through this cultural moment has made me re-confront just how many things my friends and I talked about without really talking about them, the stuff we wrote off as bad dates or misunderstandings rather than as predatory; the workplaces where maybe no one was harassed, but where fraternization was encouraged and interactions were sexualized; all the things, in short, that we let into our consciousness only obliquely. (One friend, upon being asked whatever happened with that guy on that date, took a drag on her cigarette, stared off into space for a while, and then said, finally, "I don't know. But yo, that shit was not consensual.")

So I hope that serial harassers are feeling fear in this moment. I hope they hear hoofbeats and I hope they know what they did. I also hope that as many of them as possible face real-world consequences. But punishment alone isn't enough, nor is it going to change the culture as much as it needs to be changed. If we truly want abusers to know what they did--and on some level I think that's the desire of every victim of every wrong--we have to believe that they might be capable of repentance, too.

Teaching is political. Even when it's not.

It's been a week, and I'm still grappling not just with anxiety but actual grief at the outcome of the election. But if there's an upside--and it's my own special form of negative capability to exist simultaneously in optimism and despair--it's the sense of feeling responsible, in a new way, for the causes that I care about.

I've always donated to charities that protect the vulnerable. But like most people I know, this week has inspired me to give more--and to give it in the form of recurring monthly donations--to organizations ranging from the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center to my local foodbank. And I've always taken an interest in state and local politics, but that interest has mostly taken the form of voting and occasionally-but-rarely calling or writing my elected representatives. Now I'm calling their offices about everything. Tomorrow I'm attending a community meeting with the new county prosecutor (a/k/a the guy who replaced the guy who was voted out over Tamir Rice). And you'd better believe I'll be looking to volunteer for the Democratic campaigns for governor and senator in 2018.

But my greatest contribution will probably always be at my job, because my classrooms are much more diverse than my social circle and I spend much more time with my students than I spend with my neighbors. My classes reflect "the real America," if by that we mean all classes but the top, with veterans sitting next to immigrants sitting next to kids who've barely been outside the city, much less the state.

Does the election mean I'll teach my students differently? No. But yes.

I never talk about politics in the classroom. That won't change. But I've already started to make small changes around the edges, making explicit statements in my syllabi and policy documents about nondiscrimination, valuing and welcoming diverse viewpoints, and that kind of thing. I spend a lot more time making myself available to students and being proactive when I sense something is going on that's affecting their schoolwork. (And then there are the damn stickers.)

I'm also more mindful about inclusion: if humanly possible, I include writers of color on the syllabus. If not, I include texts that at least engage with issues of race, nationality, gender, and class. That's not some multi-culti sop: it's a way to highlight a more complex view of the past than many students (heck, many Americans) are familiar with. They're surprised that Medieval and Renaissance Europeans knew about Islam, that Europeans traveled to the Middle East, that there were sub-Saharan Africans in London. They're interested to learn that homosexual acts were rarely punished in early modern England, or how class conflicts expressed themselves.

But these days I'm thinking about what more I can do, inside the classroom and out. Would a class on early modern encounters with Islam make enrollment? What can I do at the curricular or advisement level? What kind of outreach can we do into local schools and the community?

I don't know. Maybe it's just an excuse--retreating into work rather than increasing my engagement with the world--but for now it's what I've got and what I know how to do.

Compulsory affect

I'm not one for bumper stickers or slogans. As a child of the '80s I did once have a number of buttons festooning jacket and backpack, but they were never a means of aligning myself with this cause or that. In fact, the one bumper sticker I really wanted to put on the family automobile, circa 1992, was a vintage one reading "The Nation Needs Nixon." That probably tells you everything you need to know about how I felt then, and still do feel, about people who think their politics need to be legible to every person they meet.

For this reason, I tend to stay away from social media on days like today. The constant demand for--and policing of--expressions of joy, outrage, or mourning is my least favorite thing about Facebook and Twitter. I mean, yeah: I may be shocked and saddened about something that happened, but if all I have to say is "oh no" or "can't believe the news," how is that useful? And though I do re-post opinion pieces that I find interesting or well-expressed, I try to stay away from mere venting or emoting ("how can people take this seriously??" or "SO HAPPY about the Supreme Court decision!").

Partly it's that I wish to avoid banality, and partly it's that I don't want to be reducible to a position or a set of beliefs. But it's also that I'm uncomfortable with the idea that I might be seen as performing my politics in a self-congratulatory way or in order to get credit for thinking the right thoughts. Most of my friends know my politics, more or less, and most share them. It's neither interesting nor brave for me to declare on Facebook how personally outraged I am by Donald Trump's latest racist remarks.

This is a long way of saying that I never thought I'd be the kind of professor with little stickers on her office door identifying her as down with this cause or that group. But here we are: a couple of weeks ago I found myself adding to my collage of images--portraits of John Donne and Queen Elizabeth, snapshots of the Globe, and images of Renaissance tapestries--a rainbow flag with "safe space" written on it and a #blacklivesmatter decal.

Because if my support for members of the LGBT community and people of color is something I can take for granted among my peers--to such a degree that sporting a button or bumper sticker would strike me as asking for a pat on my straight, white, head--this is not the case with my students. Moreover, my students do not necessarily themselves belong to networks where those positions are taken for granted.

I'm not sure whether I'd display such decals if I taught at a lefty liberal arts college, but I don't. I teach at an urban university whose population is overwhelmingly first-generation, 27% of whom are minorities (a number that does not include our many students of Middle Eastern descent). Like Dean Dad's students, a lot of them don't have the time to be political. Most of them have never heard the term "trigger warning" or know what people mean when they talk about "preferred gender pronouns." This doesn't mean that they're tougher than other students--less likely to find certain kinds of content upsetting or to be questioning their gender or sexuality--just that they're not in a place where they regularly encounter those debates.

And while for some people my being a humanities professor makes my liberalism axiomatic, what my students probably see is a middle-aged, married white lady who teaches really old poems. Why would they assume that I have any interest in the experiences of racial minorities or any familiarity with queer or transgender people? In that context, it seems possible those stickers might signal something a few students would value knowing.

I'm still not sure how comfortable I feel about this, and I have some concerns about misinterpretation. But for now I'm going with it. I'm also going to try to feel more generous about those who relentlessly perform their politics on Facebook. After all, I don't know their motives or audience any more than they know mine.

Give 'em hell, Hill

THIS LADY.

Ezra Klein has a terrific piece asking why it's been so hard for us to recognize that Hillary is actually a phenomenal politician--phenomenal because she's not great at retail politics. She's not a spell-binding speech-giver, or especially charismatic, but she keeps winning anyway.

His argument is that she's pursued a characteristically female strategy of working behind the scenes over the long term. Her detractors, he says, are right that she's an insider, with the support of "the establishment," but they're wrong about what this means or how she got that support:

She won the Democratic primary by spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and winning over allies. Today, 523 governors and members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; 13 have endorsed Sanders.

This work is a grind--it's not big speeches, it doesn't come with wide applause, and it requires an emotional toughness most human beings can't summon.

But Clinton is arguably better at that than anyone in American politics today. In 2000, she won a Senate seat that meant serving amidst Republicans who had destroyed her health care bill and sought to impeach her husband. And she kept her head down, found common ground, and won them over.

[. . . .]

And Clinton isn't just better--she's relentless. After losing to Barack Obama, she rebuilt those relationships, campaigning hard for him in the general, serving as his secretary of state, reaching out to longtime allies who had crushed her campaign by endorsing him over her.

This really sums up what I love about Hillary--not why I support her policies, which I do generally though not unreservedly, but why I have the kind of irrational love that supposedly no one feels for her. She reminds me of every female mentor I've ever had. She reminds me of all the women I know in business and academia and the arts who just keep plugging away, getting shit done, but who are rarely anointed "stars" even if they become partner, make tenure, write a best-selling novel.

And though I would never in a million years compare myself to Clinton--I don't have half, not a quarter of her toughness--I can't help but think that my previous post is partly about gender. I do know women who emerge from college or grad school fully poised and confident and (seemingly) without a doubt about their intellectual or scholarly authority. But I know fewer of them than I know men, and it's characteristically female to believe that one shouldn't yet do something--ask for a promotion, claim expertise--until she is really, REALLY sure that no one will doubt her credentials.

So yeah. I understand why people might not support Clinton. I understand why people might not like her. But I look at her and I see every talented, relentless, over-qualified woman who has, objectively speaking, achieved a lot, and who would never actually complain--but who still isn't considered as smart, promising, likeable as the charismatic male blowhard sitting next to her. Whose books don't get the same kind of reviews, who doesn't get invited onto the talk shows, who somehow (no one knows why!) just doesn't generate the same buzz or excitement.

Fuck. That. #ImWithHer

Crowdfunding is what happens when real funding dries up

Crowdfunding is great. Except as a substitute for all the other ways that people used to make or raise money: through jobs, a living wage, a social safety net, or established charities and arts organizations.

A year or two ago, a fiftysomething INRU staff member who used to work in the English department mentioned on Facebook that he'd been laid off by the university after decades of employment. He was a deeply beloved figure, someone who knew every undergraduate and grad student by name; each May, his bulletin board was crowded with thank-you notes and photos of that year's be-gowned, be-capped graduates. When he mentioned his firing, dozens of people wrote on his wall to express outrage and sympathy.

I still see his posts in my feed occasionally, but if he said anything more about his employment situation, I hadn't noticed. Then, earlier this week, he shared a post by his wife. It turns out she was also a long-time university employee who'd been laid off the year before he was. She'd managed to find a part-time minimum-wage job, but he was still looking. She indicated that they'd been struggling but managing--until their landlord announced he was selling their home and they suddenly had to come up with several thousand dollars for a security deposit, first and last month's rent, and a moving van. Evidently embarrassed, she set up a crowd-funded account to see if they could raise the money.

They met their goal in a few days, mostly via lots of small gifts from former students and coworkers who apparently cherished their memories as much as I did mine.

Still, I've been distressed by this ever since. I'm glad to have been able to help, as I'm glad to have been able to donate to various friends and friends-of-friends when they wanted to mount an experimental play, or cover printing costs for a graphic novel, or provide winter-weather supplies for the homeless. I'm pleased to have a small stake in worthwhile projects, and at this point in my financial life it's easy enough to kick in $50 here and there.

But it only works, really, as a one-off: you can't keep tapping your entire social network in the way an established nonprofit can ask donors to commit to annual gifts or automatic monthly deductions. Or I suppose you can, but you'd probably see diminishing returns: the loose and diffuse friendships fostered by social media aren't built for it. There are plenty of people I haven't seen in 15 years whom I feel warmly toward--but not so warmly that I'd appreciate repeated attempts to leverage my affection into a cash donation.

That doesn't mean I don't care; it just means that each of us has limited means, and when push comes to shove it's usually our family members and closest friends who have most claim to our financial and emotional assistance. The awfulness of the crowdfunded emergency bailout is that it reminds us how insufficient both our resources and our goodwill are.

I hope my old friend and his wife will be okay from here on out, but what if they're not? What if there's another emergency--or what if nothing's an "emergency," but they simply can't get by any more? And what about all the other people I don't know, with fewer friends and family to call upon, but equivalent needs?

Letters-to-the-editor idiocy knows no nation

I'm sure that many of my readers, like me, received as an extra punch to the gut the news that the plane shot down over Ukraine was carrying more than 100 HIV/AIDS researchers. This doesn't make the story worse, exactly--298 lives lost is a tragedy, whoever they are, and the geopolitical crisis doesn't care whether they're vacationers, bankers, or scholars. But it's a loss on top of those losses to think of how this affects an urgently important field of research.

(And I bet I'm not the only one who's occasionally looked around the plane en route to a conference and thought, "damn: if this goes down, there goes half of Donne studies.")

So I wasn't surprised, on my flight back to the States yesterday, to see that one of the letters to the editor of the Guardian was also thinking about the relationship of the MH17 crash to the future of scholarship. I was, however, TOTALLY surprised by what he considered the tragedy an occasion to opine on.

Here's the letter in its entirety:

The overall loss of life in the Malaysia Airlines disaster (Report, 18 July) is the primary concern, but a separate issue is raised. Around 100 were scientists going to a conference in Australia. Is it not time to ask why such trips are necessary? The advent of large-screen TVs and rapid transmission of data and the spoken word mean it is no longer necessary to send thousands of people around the world at great expense and at major environmental cost. Now we have lost a very large number of people expert in the science of Aids. What cost will this be to those suffering from the disease?

Dr Simon Harris
Wrexham

Clearly, if there were no academic conferences, the public would be better off.

Don't sell out your colleagues. Even the assholes.

Yesterday's Times carried a story about Michigan's defense of its same-sex marriage ban, and particularly its use of scholarship arguing that children raised in same-sex households are disadvantaged. According to the article, Michigan's use of the child-welfare argument is unusual: most states have abandoned that approach, since most research now indicates that children raised in same-sex households fare about the same as those raised in heterosexual ones. Even more unusual is the response of the department that houses one dissenting researcher. Basically, it's rushed to disown him:

On the same day that Mark Regnerus, the most prominent of the state's witnesses, started his testimony, his own department of sociology at the University of Texas issued a highly unusual and stinging disclaimer:

"Dr. Regnerus's opinions are his own," wrote Christine L. Williams, the department chairwoman. "They do not reflect the views of the sociology department of the University of Texas at Austin. Nor do they reflect the views of the American Sociological Association, which takes the position that the conclusions he draws from his study of gay parenting are fundamentally flawed."

Confronted on the witness stand with that statement, Dr. Regnerus called it "regrettable" and said, "I guess they have been getting negative press probably about my appearance here."

I'm not a lawyer, but this strikes me as a weak move. Wouldn't it be better for the plaintiff's lawyers to cite the American Sociological Association itself? Or itemize the specific methodological flaws in Regnerus's work? Or present the studies that have come to contradictory conclusions? I mean, is the department chair an actual expert in this area? Who cares what she says?

Now, I support same-sex marriage and I'm skeptical of any work that suggests children are harmed by it. But since I'm not a sociologist, I'm not going to go around making public statements about the work of someone trained in that field. But you know what else I'm not going to do? I'm also not going to go around making public statements about the merits of the work done by my colleagues who are twentieth-century Americanists, or Victorianists, or medievalists. If I'm a department chair or on a P&T committee, sure: I have to make judgements about my colleagues' work from time to time, and to do so I have to rely largely on what other specialists say about it. But whatever I come think about their work, I'm not going to trash it in a public forum.

The Times doesn't make clear where Williams's statement was originally made, and that matters (the text appears on the department's website). But as presented in the article, this seems like a terrible precedent for academic departments, one as likely to be used against people who are on the cutting edge of research as those mounting a rear-guard action.

By all means: if your colleague's work strikes you as flawed or objectionable, and a reporter asks you about it, go ahead and point out that faculty pursue their own research interests, work independently, and that no one "speaks" for the department as a whole. But collegiality and confidentiality would both seem to demand you not go further than that.

Never that central, not really in crisis

A friend alerted me to this fascinating post arguing not only that the latest narrative of decline for the humanities is excessive and alarmist (there's no evidence that the past decade has seen a steep drop-off in the percentage of college students majoring in the humanities), but that there was never a period in American life where humanities majors accounted for more than a tiny percentage of the adult population.

Benjamin Schmidt, a graduate student at Princeton, runs the numbers and finds several things. First, the mid-to-late 1960s, when somewhere between 15 and 20% of all college students majored in the humanities, were a brief and anomalous blip: the best numbers from the previous decades suggest that about 10% of college students majored in the humanities in the 1940s and 1950s, compared with about 8% today--and of course, in the middle of the 20th century, vastly fewer Americans went to college and there were vastly fewer subjects available to major in. Second, there has never been a time when humanities majors accounted for more than about 4% of the entire adult population--compared with about 3% today.

At least as interesting as the data are Schmidt's reflections on why so many people are so invested in a narrative of decline for the humanities. He suggests that it fulfills different needs for different groups: a belief in the prior-centrality of the humanities allows (a) humanists themselves to argue that their disciplines once were and still should be at the core of both university education and public life; (b) conservative critics of the academy to claim that misguided academics in thrall to something (multiculturalism! French theory!) destroyed the humanities; (c) business-oriented pragmatists to dismiss the humanities as outdated and irrelevant to the modern world.

He points out that, in fact, the great period of recovery for humanities majors (after the crash in the 1970s) came in the late 1980s and early 1990s--"in other words, the heart of the culture wars, perhaps the only period that everyone agrees was ruinous to the humanities."

Read the post and see what you think. Here's the big question I'm left with: what would it mean for us not to believe that the humanities are in crisis? How might we teach differently, research differently, or approach broader questions of educational policy differently?

Readers?

Who you are is what you do--but what you do can change

My corner of the internet has been full of justified outrage at the sympathetic slant of much news coverage of the convictions in the Steubenville rape case. CNN, among others, chose to dwell on the emotional devastation of the two star football players--the rapists--and the dashing of their once-promising futures. I share the outrage. Whatever errors their victim may have made, they were errors merely in judgment; none of her errors involved treating another human being as an object, as a disposable toy for pleasure and amusement. Any coverage of the case that downplays the wrongs done to her while inviting our sympathies for the perpetrators is indefensible.

But this is not to say there's no place for sympathy for the perpetrators.

Let me be clear: they deserve their convictions, and whatever follows from those convictions--including never playing football again, not getting into the colleges of their choice, being registered sex offenders, and having this case turn up for the rest of their lives whenever someone Googles them. The perpetrators' apparent remorse and tearful apologies don't absolve them of their crime or entitle them to forgiveness--either the victim's or the public's.

However, although they did a monstrous thing, that doesn't mean they are, in some absolute or final way, monstrous people. At the same time, hand-wringing over the perpetrators' lost "potential" is not the way to support them or emphasize their humanity. Focusing on what good boys they are doesn't allow us to acknowledge, to really acknowledge, that someone can be a good person and still do something terrible. And it also doesn't provide a path toward repentance and growth.

As a culture, we're obsessed with the idea that we have some kind of core, essential nature--and usually that nature is good. And when we (or those we like) do something bad, we're unable to assimilate that information. I'm not really a bad person! Or, okay. I did that one bad thing. But I'm really sorry! And can't you tell that I'm actually a good person? (And if the answer is no, it's the other person who's victimizing us by denying our essentially good nature and virtuous intentions.)

We see this all the time in discussions of racism or sexism (and I've even talked about it in connection with plagiarism): a person knows, deep down, that he couldn't be racist. Therefore, it's impossible that he said or did something racist. And how dare you call him that offensive slur, racist? The perpetrators and their supporters can't imagine them as "rapists," and--as I written before--I understand why. The term suggests an unchanging state, a psychological disorder, a permanent condition.

If you rape someone, you are a rapist. But that need not be your primary identity.

So the adults in Steubenville who feel so sympathetic for the perpetrators are not helping them by telling them what good guys they are--much less how they've been wronged by the system, or how their only mistake was circulating the story and images via text message and social media. Anyone who sees the perpetrators as good guys with potential needs to help them deliver on that potential by telling them, frankly, that they did a terrible thing and deserve to pay a penalty, but that they can become better people, that their story isn't over, that they can learn and grow and still contribute good to the world.

I don't know these kids. I know nothing about their potential or their essential nature. But neither does anyone else. It's what they do that matters.

Benedict XVI

Nothing in his papacy became him like the leaving of it.

Populism, yeah, yeah

It's probably not a coincidence that, just as the Presidential campaign starts to heat up, the soundtrack to "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" has gone into heavy rotation chez nous. The musical is, for my money, one of the best pieces of theatre of the past decade--and a smart, nasty take on the dysfunctions of American popular democracy. We were lucky to catch a performance a couple of years ago.

A decent assemblage of show clips:



And one of my favorite songs in its entirety:

Being a Christian means vaguely feeling some things are wrong

This ad by Rick Perry has been getting a lot of outraged attention and a lot of ridicule:



(For a great round-up of parodies, see here.)

Perry's homophobia--and the fact that he's directing it, specifically, at the men and women who are protecting and sometimes dying for our country--is the obvious and appropriate target for most of the outrage. But I'm equally as offended by his vision of Christianity. Let's take a closer look at what he says: "[Y]ou don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school."

In other words, you don't have to be making any effort to lead a Christian life (going to church, wrestling with what's in the Bible, performing works of mercy) to call yourself one. Proof of your Christianity comes from your vague belief in traditional, religious values--which, ideally, someone else should be responsible for teaching. After all, if the principal of your kids' school leads them in prayer and there's a big crèche in front of City Hall, then you don't have to do any religious instruction of your own, much less model a life of faith for your children; you can just rest secure in your own rightthink.

Also, if you're uncomfortable with gay people? That's okay, because it proves you're a Christian! In fact, if you're uncomfortable with anything, that's probably because it's wrong. And wrong in a cosmic, Bible-forbidden kind of way. (Which is why, as I've noted before, so many Christians don't actually read the Bible: they already know that everything they believe is in there.)

According to Rick Perry, being a Christian means being part of a very special and persecuted minority on whom no real demands are ever made.

Tedium and terrorism

I narrated my 9/11 experiences on this blog five years ago, and I can't retell them any better now, nor do I wish to try.

But here's what else I remember: amidst all the fear and anxiety and what-the-fuck-do-we-do-now, I remember feeling exasperated. I was exasperated when I couldn't get through to my friends in New York because the phone lines were jammed. I was exasperated that I might not be able to visit the city the next weekend, as I'd planned. I was exasperated that my then-partner (a heavy, late sleeper) wouldn't wake up when I called him repeatedly that morning, and I was exasperated that my parents, whom I did wake up, didn't seem to understand what I was telling them.

I was exasperated because I didn't know what to do, and exasperated because I did know what to do, and that included reconciling with people I didn't want to reconcile with. Late at night on September 10th, I'd written an email to someone I hadn't spoken to in a while and who I felt at the time had wronged me. It was a cold, hard message, laced with sarcasm and self-righteousness. I rewrote it several times, but had second thoughts about sending it. I hit "save" and went to bed. When I rediscovered the message a day or two later, my first response was annoyance: the recipient had family in New York, and now I couldn't send even a mild version of my original message. I deleted it and wrote a short note asking after the recipient's family and friends and saying that we should be in touch.

Fucking terrorists, I thought, and hit "send."

But we were all exasperated. Exasperated that our loved ones lived far away, that we couldn't travel to see them, that we still had to study for our orals and teach classes when we didn't know whether any of that mattered any more--but also because we wanted badly for those things to be all that mattered: our everyday concerns and preoccupations. We wanted to be able to be self-absorbed, as always, and not vaguely and ineffectually focused on everyone else, on the country, and on whatever was going to happen next.

Exasperation might be a selfish response, but ten years out it strikes me as a better one than fear or rage, at least for those of us who weren't directly touched by loss. It's better, certainly, than the maudlin, luxurious catharsis we're invited to engage in every time September 11th is mentioned (and which I succumb to as much as anyone, but with as little right as most). To be exasperated is not to be paralyzed, and not to be rash. Exasperation measures the distance between how things are and how we wish they were, and if it's not the noblest of emotions it's far from the most venal.

Fucking terrorists.

Something other, something different

Apologies for my extended absence here and elsewhere on the internet--moving plus a delayed Time Warner hookup means I've been reliant on an erratic stolen wireless connection.

Patchy as my internet access has been, I did follow the news from the New York state senate pretty much as it was breaking on Friday night. I'm very glad that my adopted home state has legalized gay marriage, and I do think it's an important step in the fight for gay and lesbian equality. However, I share some of the ambivalence that other people have expressed about turning marriage into the default standard for "loving, committed relationship." Let me be clear: I'm a big believer in marriage, and although I understand that some people can't get over the icky feelings that the patriarchal model of marriage produces in them, I don't personally believe that marriage is limited to or compromised by that model.

Nevertheless, though I want all my gay friends who want to get married to be able to do so, I don't totally love the way that gay marriage has gotten marketed as "gay people are exactly like you and me! they want exactly the same things that you want (or are supposed to want)! They're good consumers and citizens, and if only we allowed them to marry they wouldn't have to go to those scary nightclubs or wear weird clothes and stuff."

The flurry of news stories surrounding marriage equality has also made me brood more on the cover story from last week's NYT Magazine about the psychotherapeutic treatment of gay people who don't want to be gay. According to this story, an increasing number of mental health professionals--including those who are themselves openly and happily gay--are attempting methods of treatment for closeted patients that are not necessarily aimed at making those patients embrace and affirm their true gay selves. As one therapist notes, it's not always true that life would be happier or get better for them if they came out. When confronted with a deeply religious man who's attracted to other men, but who is married to and loves a woman, has children, and is utterly convinced homosexuality is wrong, their approach is basically to figure out how the patient sees himself: his orientation might indeed be homosexual while his identity is heterosexual. The therapist's job is to help him lessen the conflict between those two things so that he's able both to be honest with himself and others--and to lead more or less the (heterosexual) life he wants to lead.

I suppose one way of reading that story in light of New York's legalization of gay marriage is to see it only as evidence that we haven't come far enough yet: some day no one will be closeted, because even a conservative, religious kid who likes boys will be able to attend a theologically traditional church, meet another conservative boy there, and get married and have kids and coach little league and serve on the PTA.

I actually think the above scenario will eventually mostly come to pass (the most interesting chapter of the fight for gay equality will surely be the one that unfolds in the Bible Belt), but that's not my primary reading of the Times magazine article or why I've been brooding over it. I find the plight of the gays-who-don't-want-to-be-gays sad, but not because I think they're just deceiving themselves or that there's a direct line from gay liberation to self-actualization for men like those profiled in the story. (No female patients were profiled, nor was it suggested that conservative, religious lesbians confront the same problems--or even that they exist. There's probably more to say about that omission or assumption.)

What interests me about the article is the way it dramatizes the experience of identity conflict. Basically, what do you do when who you are doesn't make sense? What happens when two or more intensely-held aspects of your identity seem to be in conflict with one another? That may not be a universal problem, but it's not just a gay one or just a religious one. I've talked before about my fascination with personal experiences that don't seem tellable because they exist outside the normative categories of description or defy narrative logic. And though the gays-who-don't-want-to-be-gays might seem to be the exact opposite of the gays and lesbians who are so comfortable in their sexual identity that they don't want to get married, and who resist the enfolding or smothering of gay culture into the dominant culture, the two groups have at least this in common: they want something other, something different, and to be whom they imagine themselves to be--even when there's not an obvious or explicable path for them to follow or when that life comes at great personal cost.

We talk a lot in this country about going our own way and doing our own thing and having the "courage" to be different. But normalcy is hard, too, and the people who are different don't always look it. Being a functioning member of society without being a liar or a hypocrite is everyone's work, but there's no single path to that end. The men in the article have found a way that works for them, at least for now. Isn't that as much as any of us can hope for?

The forgotten voices of the rich and educationally advantaged

The following letter appeared on today's NYT letters page in response to a recent Times article about the lack of economic diversity at elite colleges and universities:

To the Editor:

David Leonhardt forgot about me. I grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and attended private school before Bryn Mawr College, the University of Pennsylvania and now the University of Oxford. And yes, my parents paid for it all.

I realize that not needing to work at 7-Eleven afforded me more time to study, read and learn. But I used it. Acceptance letters don't come because my parents foot the bill; kids like me get in because we are responsible, passionate and talented.

In theory, hard-working, low-income kids deserve help; in practice, their 1,250 SAT scores' counting for more than my 1,300 doesn't reflect meritocracy.

College admissions are a zero-sum game. Universities putting their "thumb on the scale" for a South Bronx applicant's 1,250 lessens the weight of my achievements. His 1,250's win is my loss.

JAIMIE ARONA KREMS
Philadelphia, May 27, 2011

I'm willing to listen to arguments against certain forms of affirmative action, and I have some sympathy for those less advantaged white students who believe that "their spots" at a given college have gone to significantly less-qualified minority students. I think that belief is almost always unfounded, but I can still understand the aggrieved sense of exclusion felt by students from the struggling middle classes.

But this aggrieved sense of exclusion from someone who is wealthy and entitled is breathtaking. (And, seriously: a person with all her time, money, and alleged talent should do better than 1300 on the SAT--or at any rate score more than 50 points higher than a disadvantaged kid from the Bronx.)

Shorter Ms. Krems: people like her deserve all rather than most of the cookies.

The upside of working on stuff no one cares about

There was an astonishing article in the New York Times on Wednesday about the ways in which the N.R.A. has systematically blocked research into gun violence--including such central and seemingly non-partisan questions as whether owning a gun makes people safer or less safe, or whether waiting periods or background checks have any effect.

The N.R.A.'s contention is that, basically, any research into gun violence is politically slanted. It has therefore worked to defund the National Center for Injury Control and Prevention, a part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which used to perform the bulk of research into firearm injury and safety. Although Congress still funds the C.D.C. for research on traumatic brain injuries, there is a stipulation that "None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control. . . may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

Although funding is available through private foundations, those foundations tend to be "much more interested in work that leads to immediate results and less willing to finance basic epidemiological research"--or in other words, private foundations tend to be more partisan and less willing to let scientific research take its course.

It's been a long time since I felt this grateful to be doing work that nobody cares enough to restrict, and that doesn't require enough funding to defund.

Bonny and blithe, good and gay

Though the number of junior officers and returning young veterans I've known over the past decade had already convinced me that the repeal of DADT will be no big whoop among the actual members of our actual military, this video is a nice reminder of one reason why:



Gay culture is everyone's culture now.

Snapshot of a profession

This semester, unlike last semester, the students in my M.A. seminar better reflect RU's traditional graduate student population. Whereas in my class last spring only three of my sixteen students were public-school teachers, of the nineteen students who showed up for the first meeting of my new grad class, only three or four weren't teachers.

However, no more than half of the teachers are employed full-time in their own classrooms (which probably explains why some of them are in grad school in the first place). As we went around the room doing introductions, I heard about students who, though certified, had been unable to find jobs; students whose teaching positions had been eliminated; students who had been relieved finally to find jobs as "permament subs"; and one student who, though he was downsized the year before getting tenure, counted himself lucky to have found another job right away--albeit at a high school 45 minutes from his home.

Unions aren't perfect. The public schools aren't perfect, and neither are their systems of promotion and reward. But this Labor Day I'm hoping for secure jobs for more of the many talented, dedicated teachers I know.

Facebook, savior of democracy!

Allegedly, the internet is speeding up the rate at which Americans are retreating into self-validating communities of the like-minded: if you want, you can get all your news from right-wing or left-wing sources, and never encounter a serious challenge to that perspective.

But Facebook is, in many ways, an exception to that. That's both incredibly annoying and sometimes enlightening.

Most people now have hundreds of "friends" from various stages of their lives. Personally, I rarely reject a friend request if it's from someone I actually know or once knew, but I "hide" people all the time because I'm uninterested in the minutiae of their lives and the stupid Facebook games they play or gifts they receive. I pitch my status updates and my links to an audience that I envision as being much like my blog audience: my academic friends, my college friends, and other people with similar interests and similar senses of humor. As for the rest, if they're baffled, uninterested, or annoyed--well, fuck 'em.

But at the same time that I am, in a sense, restricting my social world, I find it fascinating to have access to so many different communities. A lot of the women I went to high school with are now full-time moms, and though I was close to exactly none of them, even 17 years ago, they've friended me en masse. Some of them turn out to be funny and interesting, and I'm pleased to have made their reacquaintance. Others, though, post nonstop nonsense all day long: So-and-So is happy to have the kids out of the house for two hours! So-and-so is making her special gravy! So-and-so's poor hubby has to work late again! So-and-so is washing a very muddy puppy!

I hide such people, of course, but sometimes I go to their pages anyway just to see what their lives look like and what kind of communities they're participating in. It's interesting to see how the mommies encourage and sympathize and advise one another, just as it's interesting to see how my born-again teen-age cousin communicates with her friends, rhapsodizes about the hottness of a Christian pop star, or talks about God's blessings in her life.

Other people I don't hide, though I tend not to participate in the conversations they start. I was recently friended by a guy I knew in high school but whom I haven't seen or had contact with since we graduated. He's someone I've thought about occasionally, though, because he was the first in a string of argumentative, conservative men with whom I've developed rather warm friendships over the years. He went to the Citadel, joined the Army, got a J.D., and is now a JAG officer. I'm not about to get into a political argument with him on Facebook, in part because that seems like poor manners--hey there! we haven't spoken in almost two decades! thanks for friending me! But dude, you are so wrong about the financial reform bill!--but I'm pleased to be in minimal touch and interested in seeing who his friends are and how he interacts with them.

I guess it's this: there are a lot of people out there whom I have no desire to be friends with (including some people I'm friends with on Facebook). But I'm not uninterested in the lives they lead and the communities they're a part of. And getting bulletins from all these semi-random people in barely-overlapping social worlds has to be broadening.

But I'm sure as shit not going to stop using the "hide" function.

Ain't no party like a union party 'cause a union party don't STOP

Suddenly, all those hours I spent grumblingly organizing for my grad school union feel like time well-spent.