Commenter Archive

"Female culture war *has begun*"

Granted, he's talking about things like pro-choice vs. pro-life, but in my experience, for smaller matters at least, there's *always* been an intra-gender culture war among women - "mean girls" have pretty much always been a thing, I suspect. (My own growing up years are evidence; some things my mother has said about her own growing up years tells me it didn't start with Gen X).

It's a power thing. At least in grade school, the popular girls had the power, and they wielded it by making the less-popular girls' lives worse. Some of that came by "policing" how the other girls acted, dressed, what they ate, etc. Some of it came by excluding those who, either because they were rebellious or socially clueless, refused to conform to the Byzantine rules of "what is correct for a girl of your age in this particular place at this particular point in time."

(I was socially clueless but also my parents didn't have the money to buy the brands and types of clothing that were dictated as 'necessary' to fit in)

I think the "if you don't agree with me politically on everything, we have no common ground, and I am going to mock you or exclude you until you decide to conform" is perhaps just a grown-up's version of this.

I'm still socially clueless.

So it's not so much "we treat our employees well and here's how," it's #webelieveinequalpayforequalwork.

Yeah, that's pretty much our world now.

Virtue-signalling is much easier than actually being virtuous.

I wasn't emotionally resilient - the fact that I cried easily made me all the more fun to harass, I guess.

If you are correct in your assessment of the coming years, I give myself about 8 months before I run screaming for a cabin in the mountains, off the grid, with no human contact.

I've long said that "girl bullying" (which consists largely of snide comments, backhanded compliments, shunning, and spreading rumors) is worse than "boy bullying." Not all of my male friends agree with me on that.

The worst boss I ever had in my life, years and years ago, was a woman. I think women take out their insecurities on other women; that was what was going on there.

Another thought about the ad: I was probably unconvinced by it because I don't see a car as a way to signal my virtue or worth as a person. What I want in a car is something that will reliably start up every time I need it to, something that is relatively safe to drive, something that won't be ruinously expensive to maintain, and something I can haul field gear or a couple weeks' worth of groceries in. So I'm probably not in Audi's demographic.

I had to watch the ad a couple times on the tiny embedded youtube player to see the "stripper glitter" girl. At first I thought the Golden Daughter was her and I was all "Wait, she doesn't have braces."

Eh, meh. I neither found it awful in the way the TTAC dude did, nor did I find it inspiring at all. Yeah, great, dad. You have an Audi. Hoo-ray and a tiger for you! You're implying you're a better person because of the car you chose?

I found the ad deeply unconvincing. Then again: even when you win the rat race, you're still surrounded by rats, so.

I dunno. I remember catching more crap as a kid for a lot of things other than being a girl - being an egghead, having the wrong brand of jeans, being emotionally immature and crying easily. Most of my tormentors were fellow females. That may be why the "poor oppressed girls" rhetoric does not always work that well on me.

I moderate a couple discussion boards on a hobbyist website. One ("A") permits political discussion but it is very one-sided; that may be a mark of the make-up of the discussion board or it may be dissenting voices are concerned about disapproval and shunning*. The other board ("B"), anything political is immediately moved to ANOTHER board that is explicitly for "controversial" and non-hobby related discussions. (Interestingly: THAT board is more open to dissenting opinions and trying to find common ground than the Board "A" is.

But yeah. I kind of prefer some kind of an escape from politics some times and for people to say "Oh, but now it's got so deadly serious that we HAVE to talk politics in what was a non-politics space" makes me roll my eyes.

(*The membership is mostly women, and ain't NO ONE can shun like women can shun, in my experience.)

We have a "college success" class (one credit hour and I think optional) but I don't know how helpful it is.

okay guys: story time.

when I was first teaching here, I had a guy in my (intro, non-majors) bio class who fell SOUND asleep in class one day. Like snoring asleep. I was mortified. It happened shortly before the end of class and I was too embarrassed to wake the guy up so I asked a colleague to do it for me.

The next day, the students sitting around him (and WHY didn't they do anything?) were razzing him - they said, "Steve*, weren't you late for your next class? We thought you had class after this"

Steve responded: "Oh, it was just 'College Success.' It didn't seem useful to me so I dropped it."

(*name changed to protect the guilty)

I wanted to say - but didn't, as I was yet-untenured and scared - "Sounds like you missed the day on not falling asleep in class."

Though since then, I've had a few students fall asleep. They have always apologized later and it's usually something like, "I'm working the graveyard shift" or "we have a new baby and he won't sleep"

But we do have a "college success" class and I know we have programs for veterans as we also won some kind of award for being especially "veteran friendly."

Though honestly, some of it is on the profs to recognize and teach. (At one point we had an officious administrator who was suggesting the students didn't know how to shake hands properly and that we should teach them how before they had to go through graduation. That went over like a lead balloon, especially as it was suggested we do this mid-flu-season.)

I'm laughing, because the first thing that popped into my head upon reading that was, "That would be, 'How could they make the McRib worse, Alex.'"

OMG: "In about an hour, I'm going to dishonorably discharge this." Shaking with silent laughter at my desk.

I can generally eyeball but I always try stuff on. Even if I'm buying two pairs of slacks, same manufacturer, same model, same size - there's enough slop in how things are made that sometimes something claiming to be one size actually isn't quite.

Yeah, women's clothing sizing can be super annoying. I have clothes in my closet that run from a 10 to an 18 and I can currently wear ANY of them. (Well, some of the 18s are kind of baggy on me right now, but)

Of course, some manufacturers will argue "women are hard" because of the waist/hip differential being different in women - but some companies (like Lee, bless them) now do a "curvy" fit for women like me who have a bigger waist/hip differential.

I would like a "actual sizes" sizing, with waist, hip, inseam or bust, waist, depending on the garment. I think women need to collectively learn to own their actual size rather than hiding behind some arbitrary number (or worse, Chico's sizes - 0, 1, 2, 3)

I wonder how much productivity would tank if new, "more ergonomic" keyboards with a different arrangement of the letters were mandated. I only learned to touch-type when I was in grad school and had to, and even when I'm on a different keyboard than I normally am (I mean, wider or narrower keys, not a different arrangement), the number of errors I make goes up.

I think part of it's that, women have been conditioned to want to believe we are as small as possible. See: vanity sizing, where what was a size 14 in the 1950s is roughly a size 10 today.

(I say "roughly" because most women today are unwilling to wear the layers of girdles and stuff that sucked tissue in for them, so 1950s clothing would also fit differently).

Ironically, patterns are one place where vanity sizing has hit less hard. It pains me to say this but I've occasionally wound up buying a size 20 pattern when I wear a 14 in ready to wear.

Yeah, Milo-what's-his-butt would want me deported, apparently.

I actually make more pieced quilts these days and redrafting a lot of my old patterns to work with metric would be kind of woeful and would involve lots of graph paper....

I have friends who rave about it. I tried it once, that was enough. (I also remember the jokes my brother made about the flatulence eating the McRib caused for him, which is definitely a turn off)

I also have had actual BBQ pork, and will choose that every time. Heck, I'd even choose bbq beef brisket - a huge Texas thing but something of which I am not greatly fond (pork is better bbq meat, IMHO) - over a McRib.

I also think of the jokes made on the Simpsons about the "Krusty Rib" and I regularly tease a friend who like McRibs about "Think smaller, more legs" when he talks about them.

I attended University of Michigan - not QUITE elite, but yeah, I can verify that they can lay the guilt on pretty hard. They also play that reverse auction thing where if you say you can't afford $500, they ask for $400 and keep on going.

I'm mostly immune to it though because they called me up once when I was in grad school and asked me to donate $1000 to the "discretionary fund" (read: slush fund) of a dean I disliked when I was a student there. At that time, $1000 was my take-home pay for a month. I explained that to the caller.

Now, I have Caller ID and I just ignore the calls.

I feel you. Last weekend and the weekend before that were largely spent writing a manuscript, which is now in (as Anne Lamott says) sh*tty first draft form. I have decided to let that marinate over the weekend and I'm going grocery shopping. (Woo.)

I know, grocery shopping sounds unexciting and I admit I'm apprehensive about the fact that there is a very large and popular football game Sunday (though not involving teams most people around here care about), but - I haven't been to a proper grocery in nearly a month, have been living on wal-mart supplies since the start of the semester.

I've also told myself that if I can get this SFD at least typed up, I can go to the new Ulta that opened and look at nail polish and lipstick.

It's kind of sad how little it takes to make me excited these days - getting out to a big-box "beauty" store and maybe buying a new lipstick....

There are also probably "vestigial appendages" in some of these evolved systems - like the bizarre "base 12, no, base 4, no, some other base" seen in Imperial measurements.

(disclaimer: I still use Imperial measurements for something, despite being a scientist. They seem to work better for sewing, for example)

And I think unfondly of an old stats program I used to use, where you had to type "CARDS;" at the end of the program in order to get it to run - apparently that was a leftover from the days when your input literally was on punched cards.

And I have read that the QWERTY keyboard, used by most people, is a vestige of the days of manual typewriters and a hack to try to prevent certain keys from jamming.

ED2: also, students from different SES have very different ideas about what "college" is, and "how to college." One of the things we struggle with at my school - we get a lot of rural kids who are the first in their families to attend college - is that we get a lot of students who are just not ready to deal with even the small bureaucracy we have.

I'm not saying it very well but I find that my assumptions of "what an 18 year old college student should be able to do" are regularly challenged.

What it means is the expectations my friends at more "elite" schools have are TOTALLY different from the expectations I have developed, and sometimes I find myself annoyed at their, "But why don't you just...." suggesting some kind of draconian policy that would not take into account the struggles of some of our students. Or they are regularly surprised at the things I tolerate.

We also get our fair share of students who have families (or are caring for family members - I'm working with someone right now who is the sole support for younger siblings) and/or are working full time, and I keep having to tamp down my annoyance about their college performance being their last priority because really, it probably SHOULD be.

I'm also reading "Hillbilly Elegy" right now....while it's not QUITE the experience many of our students have, I can see parallels.

I also realize how lucky/privileged/blessed I was to be an 18 year old college student with ONLY myself to worry about, and with parents who had attended college (and in fact, my dad worked briefly as a college admin) and so knew some of the "hacks" to deal with offices that seemed to not want to help you.

But I will say: despite my recognition of my privilege, still, stuff that happens to people has ripples and it's depressing and frustrating to have to work with a student to try to reconstruct their research project after their angry ex stole their laptop and destroyed their class notes (which happened to one of my students once). Not that that that would necessarily be impossible to happen to a kid at Harvard, but they might have more ways of dealing (and might have known to save their data to "the cloud")

I have a quotation from Clyde Crashcup (a v. obscure 1960s cartoon character) on my senior page. I am deeply embarrassed about that now. I mean, it was pretty innocuous and it was mostly me being the stupid proto-hipster I was as a teen (I liked caring about obscure things), but still - we all do stupid stuff as teens though maybe some is more potentially-damagingly-stupid than others.

And yeah, it maybe does reveal some kind of underlying thought pattern, but....I don't think it's that I deep down have a thing for men with big noses, mustaches, and a decidedly-effete way of speaking.

I suspect they notice it in different ways. That someone who is a subsistence farmer sees an entirely different set of problems than the person who is an office worker in a city.

I think of the (probably apocryphal) story about two women at a UN meeting talking - one from the US, one representing a rural, tropical nation. The US woman was complaining about non-inclusive language (e.g., "man" instead of "humanity") and the woman from the tropical nation was essentially, "I'll get back to you on that once we can reduce infant mortality to the level your country experiences."

I mean, a lot of the stuff I bitch about, I realize that I have the privilege to bitch about it because I'm not worrying about how to stay physically safe or where my next meal is coming from.

I dunno. I think of my dad's comment about how freedom of speech is great because "The a-holes self-identify."

If any banning happens, he needs to decide to ban himself. Unlikely, because I am not convinced impulse control is something that comes naturally.

About the "society is broken" - it seems that mostly (entirely?) people in more-developed countries were surveyed. I wonder what folks in a small town in rural Kenya would think, or people in Vanuatu. I'm wondering if "brokenness in society" is something you are more inclined to notice, and be concerned about, when your belly is full and you have somewhere to go to get out of the rain?

That's not saying society isn't broken; it's just saying maybe people in the West notice it more because we've fulfilled the most basic of Maslow's needs.

we regularly got into was the wickedness of new and different translations. (Revised Standard Version == Devised Satanic Perversion, for example.)

Wow. Was that terminology (the Satanic thing) actually used? I thought that kind of snark only existed in political discussion. Or at least, I hoped it did. I dunno; my estimation of an arguer's point goes down approximately 75% when he or she pulls out the snarky pun-based-on-the-original-term.

(Some days, becoming a hermit like the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers looks distinctly appealing)

A couple random thoughts. (Disclaimer: I am a practicing Protestant Christian, so YMMV):

1. I attended a (private) high school where we did read selected sections of the Bible in English. But the focus was more as "this is part of our culture, you need to understand things like Job if you are going to understand the Western canon" It wasn't treated lightly or flippantly or as "I think this is bunk but I'm asked to teach it" but neither was it treated as something we were expected to accept totally. (I had Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu classmates). I don't remember a whole lot of resistance to it but then again we were there voluntarily (the other choice being the public schools in our respective towns and as most of us were weird, nerdy kids, we knew we were better off at the prep school)

We were asked to purchase a version in the New English translation (which is an okay translation but somewhat stilted in places, and is more Anglo-centric than many) with the Apocrypha. I think that was the first time I was really aware there were books that "didn't make the cut" into the Protestant Bible.

2. Translations matter, too. There are enormous differences between translations and I think people would do well to consider more than one. (And the KJV, much beloved by some of a more Fundamentalist persuasion, does contain some translation inaccuracies, or so I've been told).

3. I actually kind of LIKE Paul's letters, in the sense of "Huh, so humanity hasn't gotten vastly worse in the past 2000 years." Though it also frustrates me to realize that we haven't really gotten any better, either. Also I get some sense of the frustration of someone trying to teach and lead people who are still mired in stuff like following human leaders. I can imagine Paul rubbing his forehead at times and going, "No, wait, that's NOT what I meant...."

I suspect, though, there would be enough people offended by the proposal of either "You're going to make my kid read THE BIBLE?!?!?!!" (or "The CHRISTIAN BIBLE?!?!!?!") or "You're asking my kid to CUT UP the Bible and determine what is and is not sacred?" that it wouldn't fly. At least not in public schools.

If this weren't taking place in my country (and not so deadly serious), I'd be popping popcorn and opening a soda. As it is, I'm wondering if I need to stock up on canned goods and learn how to shoot a gun well.

Apples to Apples is sort of a tamer (and slightly different) version of CAH. I've played it with a high-school youth group, with a bunch of cousins, with a bunch of friends.

(In fact, I remember one of the few times I laughed so hard I started crying was when I played it with my cousins. I can't even remember what the goofy link was that was so funny, but it was very very funny)