Click on that first link! I tried to embed the video and failed.
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There being so little in this post without a pretty video picture, I will add a thought about our rigorous graduate program.
I think the people who flunked out didn’t fail, and I also think they were not all wildly crashing and burning so that a decision they wanted to make, but did not dare to, got made for them.
I think that actually, you had to flunk out to get out, because to get out you had to think of a plan, investigate it, and decide on it.
This had to happen during a term or two when you still had a TAship, not after quitting. That was a matter of practicality. What do you think?
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I don’t know. In the grad program I left, was the designated scapegoat. I went through three grad programs at that school and eventually left for a better program at a prestige college. At prestige colleges the professors don’t dare treat the students like dirt.
I don’t know, either. I taught at a prestige college and while they did pamper the students, they were sadistic toward faculty and staff, and I have absolutely no respect for prestige colleges or private universities after experiencing that, and making a few observations / hearing a few stories about other places like it.
I went to a public R1 and the professors were largely normal, or if not avoidable — except of course my dissertation director who had issues me, I never understood her but I guess I did not handle her right.
But my readings of things are never mainstream, and I wasn’t sexually harassed in graduate school as Kass Fleisher was — although some people were (or at least were in my view; my thought on it is that I didn’t have the confidence to dare taking those kinds of risks, but I’ve since been told it was that I had confidence to know I didn’t have to).
Graduate school was easy for me in some ways for several reasons that don’t apply to everyone; I took advantage of it for therapeutic and not career reasons, so I am an odd case.
But come to think of it: (I experienced much more oddness as a professor than as a graduate student) although I didn’t get involved “romantically” with male colleagues out to sabotage me, as happened with the author of the book we were discussing on another thread, I did have male colleagues corrupt me, so to speak, sometimes, with friendship/collegiality that worked in similar ways. There seems to be no easy answer at all; men are in the club automatically and things are completely different for them.
Things really are different for males everywhere. I think that many of them are genuinely perplexed when we try to explain that there are censurious blockages put in place to prevent us from moving around naturally so that we often virtually have to pre-plan our every move in order to get around these institutional, social and psychological impediments. When males don’t have to do this, they can tend to essentialise the natures of those who do, as if we had individually and consciously called these limitations down upon ourselves. Unfortunately, it is better to be dismissed as crazy and erratic (and be left alone) than be “assisted” by a male who thinks these problems are all in the mind, as it were. Helpful but uncomprehending males can be disastrous.
I was thinking about a colleague at my last job before I retired, who incessantly harassed me, staring, touching, commenting on my looks, using sexy language, and so on. It was unbelievable. He was a PhD who had lost good jobs and was now just hanging on. I wondered if harassment and his constant religious prosthletizing (sp) had not done him in in previous employment. His “style” was recognizable to me as the academic world’s brand of sexual persecution. He did this to my boss as well, another woman in her 60’s, in a relationship and, like me, with no interests in him beyond the collegial ones. Nonetheless, my boss stuck it out with him and even trained him to take over as office manager. She made him stop the behavior. She helped him because his miserable financial situation was not taking just him down but his entire family as well. She also found a summer job for his daughter.
None of this helped in the long run, though, because the whole program got shut down. Now he’s on the last few months of his unemployment and no job in sight.
Tough world.
moi aussi. Ultimately, I deduced, the reason for writing my PhD was therapy. And it worked! Well mostly. I can put myself in very novel situations, now, without requiring to understand them much beforehand. Well, I could do something similar before, but always and only within the current (caucasion) cultural matrix.
O good, I don’t have to feel too silly, I’m not the only one who did a PhD essentially for therapeutic reasons!
That’s a good point, Z, about the sadism toward faculty and staff. I saw some of that at Prestige School.
I’m wondering, too if Berkeley isn’t a special case: a school that flunks a lot of people out of undergraduate and graduate programs but is nonethess a prestige public university. From what little I’ve been able to find out, schools like Michigan and Wisconsin aren’t like that.
Do MI and WI treat people better, so they don’t fail, or fund them better, so they can stay, or accept fewer marginal people than Berkeley seemed to do, at least in some programs, in my day? (I think some of the people were there because the University needed TAs and had TAships, but that everyone knew they weren’t going to pass or would only barely pass.)
Possibly. Berkeley is a very strange case.
Also patriarchal “helping” types tend to leap upon empathy as a sign of pathology. For instance if one expresses ambivalence about a certain person’s behaviour. For instance, one might say: “I don’t want to have to use self-defence on this person because they also have one or two nice characteristics, despite being a domineering autocrat.” In that case, the empathy, the recognition that the person has good, as well as bad, characteristics, becomes the basis for indicting you as “wanting to hurt someone who has nice characteristics by punishing them for being a domineering autocrat.”
I tell you, that is how it is with the patriarchy. It is a veritable tar baby, and the more you fight it, the more you stick to it like glue.
Tar baby, that is so true. And the logic described in the earlier paragraph is so typical — one or two nice characteristics are enough to justify a patriarch!
Not only can’t you express any empathy (it will be taken as pathology) ar0und a patriarch, you can’t express self-awareness. This, too, is taken to be pathology. Did you know: “Fear is always guilt in disguise” (– from the latest episode of The Prisoner)? I’ve had this logic used on me by a number of patriarchal types. “What are you so afraid of, if you haven’t commited some thought crime? How dare you live in fear when our society is perfect? Your thought crime certainly deserves to be punished!”
I don’t mean that any patriarch has the sophistication to speak as I do above — that is, ironically. This is the gist of what they are saying.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com/2010/08/fear-is-always-guilt-in-disguise.html
I tried to comment there and my comment got eaten (on Blogger). One quick point — I can use this phrase to get past some of my fears, perhaps. Because I am fear ridden and also guilt ridden; all the fear is about imposed guilt, accusations that are false but stick and have implications, etc. So if I consider that fear isn’t “realistic,” it’s guilt eating at me, it will be an interesting exercise!
Yeah. In the drama, the meaning was less deep — more a representation of Orwellian political logic, rather than psychological as such. It reflected the logic of the oppressor, but very little about the oppressee, who was afraid of real violence, rather than simply feeling guilty in relation to the system as such. But the oppressor’s logic, “you wouldn’t be afraid unless you had done something wrong,” is pernicious. Oppressors, I think, don’t like to be seen as the monsters they are. They would prefer if their oppression were sugar coated. Put a mirror in front of an oppressor, and he will turn himself into stone. He cannot bear the sight of himself. So he imputes guilt (perhaps in the form of a guilty conscience) to those who show that they are afraid of him. It’s his way of avoiding coming into sight of his own image.
It’s strange that the lesson all patriarchs seem to be set upon imparting is: “You have to divorce yourself from your empathy, and from your careful approaches that involve weighing reality in the balance, and you have to start seeing the enemy as one hundred percent evil. Failing this, we will certainly not believe you to have any justification for your perceptions.”
Why do patriarchs seem to present that as their ultimatum? Do they hate themselves really that much?
And I mean this is the extremist nature of Western patriarchy. It reveals its extremism with its implicit ultimatums. (Women are expected to be too cowardly to take up their challenge, I suppose.) Zimbabwean patriarchy — well it is far less metaphysical, less abstract, and therefore less extremist than Western patriarchy tends to be. It is possible for male to be less than perfect in Zimbabwean society, and for others, male and female to take him up on that fact. (Many will think that of course this is the situation in Western societies, too, but that has not been my experience. This is a case of practical reality constantly tending to contradict the ideas we have about how things ought to work.)
Zimbabwean society, by contrast, has as its reference point a humanistic standard of values — that is, the idea that if some action is hurting a fellow human being then it must be wrong. In terms of its overt political and familiar structures it is still a patriarchy, but in terms of the values upheld within that society, it is hardly so.
Western metaphysics (with its idea that there are two genders that ultimately have nothing in common) creates a patriarchal system that is, in the final analysis, completely illogical and untenable — whereas Zimbabwean patriarchy, whist capable of opening women up to abuse, is still very, very moderate, comparatively.
So how would you compare Western patriarchy to, say, the Taliban? I’m not joking, or trying to be combative, or anything like that … I see parallels in the Christian mentality here in Maringouin, so I wonder how to classify all of this.
They do seem to require black and white thinking, although if you take an oppositional stance to something that is actually wrong, they will say you don’t have enough empathy.
I believe they do actually hate themselves that much.
I think I need to add something about thought crime in the banner to this blog, or in one of its explanations. “Fomenting thought crime since 2006…” 😉
They do seem to require black and white thinking, although if you take an oppositional stance to something that is actually wrong, they will say you don’t have enough empathy.
They will in fact do or say anything that will cut them some slack. Sometimes it is pleading for more empathy (so they can go on doing what they are doing). More often a smokescreen is employed: “You cannot have seen or experienced that which you claim to have seen/experienced.”
And it seems linked to self hatred, since these extreme measures of defence (attacking another’s character and perverting the truth) are hardly required. Most women — being human — are more forgiving of human foibles than these patriarchs seem to expect.
I think that part of what produces this disproportiate response is the patriarchal “othering” of women and what that leads to. When women as such are deemed to stand for the polar opposite of everything that a man — being a man — necessarily stands for, then everything she says or does has the quality of being a threat. In actual fact, she may not intend to threaten anybody, but she is still standing in this position of metaphysical opposition, because of the way that patriarchal thinking views the world. This means that almost anything she says can and will be construed as absolutely oppositional to cherished patriarchal values. Furthermore, the very fact that she speaks at all casts him into doubt about himself, and makes him feel demoralised. Patriarchal values can’t be sovereign, as they ought to be, he feels, so long as women still have the capacity to communicate.
My point is that the logic of patriarchal thinking sucks you into an oppositional stance in relation to these types, where none was originally intended. This is the aspect of patriarchal logic that I see as being full of self hatred. You look back over time and you think, “How did I get here?” (in this oppositional stance towards individuals). It has usually been the result of a very long process whereby one’s statements were radically misinterpreted, one’s good will was seen to have a manipulative undercurrent, and then, of course, the endless put-downs — (see how women offering self defence on YouTube are put down for daring to defy their gender roles as passive suppliants, for instance).
So it seems like patriarchy creates enemies as a matter of course, and then various patriarchs profess absolute ignorance as to why.
@Hattie — well, when I started working at a highly selective SLAC I noticed how much less sharp the undergraduates were than the ones at UCB … when I started working at a different R1, I was amazed at how supportive and non destructive faculty were of graduate students.
A friend says Berkeley was competitive, i.e. among the graduate students, but I didn’t notice that, and faculty were nice to and supportive of me when I was an undergraduate. What I did notice was that a lot of faculty (although hardly all) seemed to consider graduate students the enemy. These are just my perceptions, though, and they’re very subjective. They also really did, especially in French and Spanish, accept a lot of graduate students that you could tell from the start weren’t going to make it, and I’m not being snobbish or critical in saying that, just realistic about what the system is looking for and requires.
So how would you compare Western patriarchy to, say, the Taliban? I’m not joking, or trying to be combative, or anything like that … I see parallels in the Christian mentality here in Maringouin, so I wonder how to classify all of this.
The Western patriarchy is obviously less extreme than the Taliban. Its purpose is the same, though, and that is to terrorise. If you don’t understand that, then you wonder why every time you engage with patriarchal injustice, a representative of that point of view will terrorise you. The interesting thing is that this happens when one is not attacking anything as such, not least anything so monolithic and well defined as The Patriarchy. This is at the stage when one doesn’t even know that it is there yet. But its like playing the game of battleships. One shoots off a remark or two designed only to get feedback about the nature and shape of the world one lives in — and some patriarch takes it as an attack. Then there follows some techniques designed to put you off your balance. There will be an attempt to smokescreen reality, to make it seem other than what it seems to you. Patriarchs will, as a rule, profess to be able to see more clearly into your life than you can see. They don’t even need to know your story yet — they can already see its vague outline beginning to take shape in their imaginations.
So unlike the Taliban, which resorts to physical abuse, Western Patriarchy seems to function predominantly at the level of Psy. war.
It really is like the show, The Prisoner, in many regards, since most men are, to some degree, defenders of the Western Patriarchy. So when one wants to speak out about a problem (not yet defined as being linked to W.P.) one has to be very careful who one confides in. Just about anyone can be a patriarch — which means you might end up confiding in an informer. (You will know if this is the case when your efforts turn out to have made things very much worse, rather than better.) And all you wanted to do was to say, “I think there is something very wrong with the situation around here? What about you?” I mean that your approach doesn’t constitute an attack, but like it is in that TV drama, asking the wrong sorts of questions is viewed to constitute an attack — very much so.
Psy war, definitely…
Sent you a story about my experience at Zim customs. And, just to let you know, I have always found W.P. to be much more traumatising…
OK, I will check mail. I am somewhat prepared for Zim customs, although surely not entirely.
Just got a comment out of moderation, it is way above and discusses among other things self hatred.
Definitely self hatred; is this a reaction to the violence of the process in and by which the patriarch is formed, do you think?
Much to ponder in this thread, I’m being brief but this is because I’m Thinking.
I think the self-hatred is probably due to the manner of the formation process of the patriarchal character. If somebody has been teased at school for not being masculine enough, (or perhaps this takes place in some other character forming community, like a frat club — or whilst undergoing military service), then one is likely to have contempt for the elements of character that one must necessarily disown in order to become socially acceptable. One is also likely to resent women for seeming to have it easier — i.e. for not having to undergo precisely this sort of hazing. Thus the wrongheaded notion of “female privilege” is born.
I confess that I am still unsure whether there is a kind of masculinity that might be differently formed than this. Part of my problem is the way in which the term, “masculinity”, is normalised through a cultural matrix — implying that it is learned and therefore somewhat arbitrary.
I wonder, all the same, whether there can be a kind of masculinity that it not founded upon a forcible (meaning socially driven) transcendence of “the feminine”. This other kind of masculinity would necessarily not be found in a hostile relation to something it deemed “femininity”, but might rather find in “the feminine” its complementary nature. What “the feminine” might possibly mean in this context I am not sure, since it has so far come to mean almost the same thing as “that which males must transcend in order to become properly masculine.”
In the mean time, masculinity carries with it as part and parcel of its identity a certain quantity of self-hatred.
As a footnote: Mike, who was brought up by his mother (his father died in a road accident whilst he was still very young) has the qualities of self-acceptance that I would deem properly masculine in that second sense. He is very, very powerfully attractive, and yet without having to try to be. I find this kind of masculinity much more convincing than the kind that is always trying to prove itself.
From way up thread: being the polar opposite is then my key Psychological Problem. I must speak and act yet any speech or action may cause me to get bombed. I have the idea that I must speak and act while still basing myself upon my pedestal. I guess what I need to do is jump off it entirely.
Yes, if you can, jump off it entirely. Whatever you do don’t respond to the images and illusions of you that others have developed. That just makes them stronger.
Teacher: Now, you must remember: the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.
Yes, I will try to remember this.