Imaginary drive-bys

Since my happy ultrasound, I've been stuck at home with 24-no-48-going-on-72-hour gastroenteritis. I can only keep down instant "chicken" noodle soup and the sofa here at our sublet is killing my back. I'm a little cranky. Today I'm awake, at least, but I've just been getting crankier as I surf.

ITEM: the cruelty of certain Catholics. Cecily pointed out the tremendously sad situation of a pregnant and staunchly pro-life blogger. I clicked, and clicked, and curled up in horror at some of the posts to her site from people who clearly believed they were helping.

Going through the hoops we had to go through to get pregnant, even, meant I had to learn a lot more about human reproductive biology and all the things can go wrong. This has set my pro-choice beliefs in stone. Why, in a world where so few fertilizations lead to babies, shouldn't humans use medical technology to have some control, too? Both positively and negatively?

I hadn't realized, though, until now, that those on the other side had thought through some worst-case scenarios as stringently as they have. Abstractly I have to respect the consistency of their positions. Concretely, I can only be thankful that the faith never stuck, despite my grandmother's efforts.

My grandmother knows we did IVF. She doesn't know that we had to create 14 embryos to get to a singleton pregnancy. She almost certainly doesn't know how wrong the Church would think that is. She's happy that I'm pregnant. She doesn't talk about how much she wants to die, or about how my mother should never have died before her, when I call now. (Of course, it's her Catholicism that's kept her from suicide.)

ITEM: Larry Summers, damnit. I can't take it anymore. Especially after a friend in the national media wrote to ask what I thought, but the resulting opinion piece fell in the "you harpies want to restrict free intellectual inquiry!" camp. See Crooked Timber and good ol' Stanley Fish for thoughts close to mine, except better expressed.

ITEM: Support. Do we really have to be nice to each other, and to everyone else on the planet, all the time? Has Grrl inadvertently opened up a can of worms, some of which crawled right over to Julie's? Look, I read infertility blogs for the snark. Well, that's not entirely fair. For the lack of sentimentality, too. For the curse words. For the often-but-not-always righteous anger. (And sometimes I find snark where it wasn't intended.)

Remember the IF-vs.-PGIF storm a few weeks ago? I only ran into a few ripples until I went looking, 'cause it was mostly on blogs I don't read regularly. We're a big, diverse group now. Given the variety of situations, options, incomes, locations, and religions represented, we mostly do an incredible job of getting along. I used to worry that I didn't fit in because our experience of infertility was so different: we knew it was coming, we were used to an overmedicalized lifestyle already. Plus, from the start I was planning to worry about things other than gonads on this blog. It still makes me grind my teeth when people say infertility's the worst thing that's ever happened to them, because, you know what? I'm so jealous of that, really I am.

In any case, it seems like there has been an expectation, in some recent posts, that the blogosphere follow the same kind of etiquette some bulletin boards strive for: don't say anything, if you can't say anything nice. Don't say anything that might make make someone else jealous. (Do I smell baby dust in the distance? Ick!) Look, there have been times when I've had to stop reading other blogs. But that doesn't mean the people writing them, should stop writing them any which way they need to. Mine's all about me, and yours is all about you. And that's okay.

Plus, it's always okay to make fun of the hair of any public figure, no matter how virtuous the person, no matter how exculpatory the determining factors might be.

ITEM: On the other hand, what the hell Guy Trebay In the damn New York Times?

Even so, there was a time when one could take for granted that models would be lovely, pardon the lapse of political correctness. Lovely is a lyrical, poetic and necessary notion, more of which the planet sorely needs. Fashion has long been counted on to provide the escapist pleasures of loveliness in a world well supplied with the horrific and the bleak. Lately, however, the catwalks have come to look like dog runs. Why is that? Who knows?

Meeeeee-ow!

ITEM: A heads-up to any academic readers who have made it this far: if your tenure case, or that of someone you care about, will involve scholarship that is in any way outside of the mainstream of your field's modalities—or even if you're just employed by a department in a slightly different discipline than that for which you trained—START PREPARING NOW. It will be up to you to make that case. Stuff your portfolio fat. Use your personal statement to actually explain what you do and why. Don't wait for anyone else to tell you what to put in, 'cause they might not ever, and, even if they do, they might be wrong.

ITEM: Judith Warner. Obsessed mothers and those who love to hate them. I don't have anything deep to say. But I want to note a particular flavor of obsessed parenting that happens in our little academic burg: homeschooling, but carried out by overeducated, underemployed faculty spouses. I don't doubt that their children are having a terrific time and learning lots. But it's a big enough movement now to have had a palpable effect on the population of, and atmosphere in, the local schools.

It's also an interesting change from the past. 25 or 30 years ago, men with doctorates from good schools married schoolteachers. Several of my colleages on the verge of retirement have wives who work in the local schools—also on the verge of retirement, of course. I think Granolaton got better teachers back then than it could otherwise have recruited. But now that women have more opportunities, the smart ones are far less likely to head to ed school while searching for a professional husband... good for us, of course, but much less good for the local schools.

Meanwhile, today's displaced wives focus all their effort on their own broods, and female faculty send their children to rot in day care and the ever-declining public schools. I hope, hope, hope, that I will be able to stay cordial to all after joining that fray. It may be very difficult.

Comments

[Jody]

About ten years ago, I happened to run across an anniversary report on the first generation of women Rhodes scholars (elected in 1976, went up to Oxford in 1977). A frighteningly high number of those who participated in the report, something like fifty percent, were homeschooling. WTF?!

I'm an ABD history student and unemployed overeducated faculty wife who plans to get the damn PhD and figure out whether it still works as soon as the kids hit kindergarten. They'll go to public school, at least until/unless it proves to be disastrously ineffectual for them. What's the point of paying for university-town real estate if you're not going to attend the public schools? (Luckily, in this burg, the thriving and growing homeschooling movement hasn't yet had a tipping-point effect on the schools.)

[Melissa]

First, I really enjoy reading your blog. Second, the Larry Sanders thing is frustrating. It's as if there is a refusal to recognize that discrimination doesn't have to be pat on the ass, calling you "honey," or telling you that you're being paid less because your male colleague has a family for it to be in play. I practiced law in Texas for several years before moving to the East Coast and it's weird, but, I think there was less discrimination in Texas. Actually, discrimination is not at all the right word. Perhaps expectations? It's incredibly hard for me to articulate, but there was an acknowldegement from the men that the women were talented and successful and it wasn't because they were imitating men. We're good lawyers, there's no lack of intelligence. And on top of that women that work at and succeed at law firms are by and large very personable. Clients like us and trust us because we are honest with them. In Texas, this was seen as an asset, but where I am now it doesn't seem like it is as much. On the East Coast I still see the mindset that you have to be like the men to be successful.

And that seems to be what is happening in academia to some or a great extent. A refusal to acknowledge that a different approach might be valid. Well, that and my age old theory that women will achieve the same success as men once we insist that they truly share 50% or more of the household duties. As far as I know no one had every asked a man if he worries about balancing his career and children. Trite, but true.

[Dorcasina]

Re: the displaced faculty wives/home schooling. I've often had the same thought. And, as the PhD (almost) in our family with a husband who is no longer able to work, I'm frankly envious of those old-style wives...I want one! The whole what-to-do-with-my-child's-care-while-I'm-pursuing-intellectual-fulfillment-and-feeding-us is a terrible dilemma. I so deeply believe in public schools, but don't know that I'll have the energy as an almost-single parent to put into them what needs to be put in. And the dearth of childcare programs at universities is laughable, if it didn't reduce me to tears. Here's one area where lots of even relatively strapped public universities seem light-years away from my relatively flush liberal arts college, which repeatedly turns down the suggestion that good quality childcare might be a real plus in recruiting and retaining *productive* faculty. They seem stuck on the idea that even the youngest faculty hires have wives at home....this, despite the fact that some 7 of 8 recent hires have been young, married women--several of whom began immediately to procreate!

[MJ]

"In any case, it seems like there has been an expectation, in some recent posts, that the blogosphere follow the same kind of etiquette some bulletin boards strive for: don't say anything, if you can't say anything nice."

I've noticed that too. I think the culture of blogging is becoming more like the culture of bulletin boards--instead of blogs being about individuals writing what they want to in their own individual space, some bloggers (and their readers) see blogs as communities, where a post is the start of a thread. Regular commenters are community members, while occasional drop-ins are seen as outsiders and granted approval (or not) based on their comments.

...says the first-time commenter on your blog. ;-)

Anyway, I personally don't like that particular view of blogging, but I've watched the same thing happen on listservs and other forums as they reach critical mass. I know the prevailing opinion on this is that things are usually going along quite well until a group of newbies who don't understand the rules comes along and starts breaking all the accepted conventions of the medium. However, in my experience--dating from the days of dial-in BBSes and listservs populated entirely by people reading their e-mail in Elm--things are usually going along quite well, with negligible levels of enforcement, until a certain percentage of natural rule-makers joins up and decides to enforce their perception of social norms on the group. So people who have been posting mild differences of opinion with no problem for a couple of years are suddenly criticized for being too critical and not respecting others' rights to speak their opinions. At that point I usually leave the forum. :-)

And Melissa: I know exactly what you're talking about. I saw less in the way of *actual* gender bias in higher ed in Oklahoma than I see in the northeast--at least, in my area of it (which has a lot more in common with the Midwest). At the school where I work, they talk a lot about non-discrimination, but fewer women have any real power, and there's a subtle difference in the way we're treated by our male colleagues and bosses. I can't quite put my finger on it either.

It was also easier to be a liberal there, oddly enough. I suspect that may no longer be the case. :-)

[delagar]

I believed in the public schools, too, until I had to put my kid in one in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which was infested with Levitican Christians. We don't home school, but I've moved her to a Montessori school we can't quite afford because I got tired of explaining to her classmates and her classmates parents every single day that no, we did not want to "visit" their church this Sunday, thank you. And even at the Montessori school we're still having problems with the kid being threatened with hellfire by her fundie classmates. (We're Jewish, so she's damned, of course.)

[Cecily]

Hey, no making fun of the fabulousness that is Anne Lamott!

Ok, but just her hair.

[Rachel]

I also work in higher education. I haven't read Warner's book (only been witnessing the discussion in various blogs) so I may be off the mark here, but I feel like we've seen a huge change in our students in the past few years and I chalk it up to parents who are both having to work so when they can they're focusing all of their attention on their kids. We're so focused on getting our kids in activities and then the parents trot around the state watching all of the soccer games and indulging the offspring to make up for all of the daycare when they were little. By the time they land in their small midwestern liberal arts college they've developed an attitude that the world spins around them. Of course that isn't all of our students, but I'm continually amazed by the expectation that we're all here merely to serve their needs.

A friend just pointed your blog out to me last week and I've read the whole thing over the weekend. Thank you so much for sharing.

[Emma Jane]

Dorcasina, oh boy, do I hear you on the almost-single-parent thing. I don't know how far we are from that, and it's one of my biggest fears in this whole game. And what is it with these institutions the rest of the world thinks are so horribly progressive, once you start looking at actual policy? Granolan's maternity leave policy (two months paid leave) makes sense for neither mothers nor institution.

Delagar, my head would explode if I lived in your town. Oh my g...ack. Granolaton, and its woes, seemed peculiarly complex when I first moved there. But, is every small place unhappy in its own way?

Cecily: whose hair should I make fun of? (I had a surprisingly hard time finding people to abuse, and did feel at least a little bad about two of them.)

Rachel, um, wow! Thanks for reading! (And doesn't the world spin around students at little liberal arts colleges?)

[Mary]

I do not think it is true that 30 years ago, a lot of intelligent women would choose schoolteaching. That is going back more than 30 years, and they often dropped out after the first child came. There was always a lot of turnover of female teachers, since more women stayed home as housewives.

I think there is another reason that intelligent people of any gender shun schoolteaching these days: they have no control or authority over the kids as they once had. Their word was once law, and they were to be feared, with the kids getting double whammy if they went home and admitted that they had been bad enough to get a whack from the teacher.

Imagine the power and certainty those teachers once had! The kids could not help but know that what that teacher said counted, no "ifs, ands or buts".

These days? Kids are trained to challenge and question his/her words, to give charges of racism or sexism, and to have to give only liberal party lines on all nontechnical subjects.

Today in San Francisco, where I work as a tourguide, there was a gaggle of private school 1st-graders taking a walk in Pacific Heights, amongst the $30 Million mansions on Broadway near the Presidio. One loud girl was declaring proudly over and over, to a pregant exercising woman, that she had two mommies. My group of tourists, trying to appreciate the view, could not help but stare at this dynamo of free speech. Finally one lady, an actuary from Quebec, said to the girl, "Well, you have a father somewhere!"

The girl was astounded. Her mouth literally dropped open, speechless at last.

I quickly beat a hasty retreat back to the bus and loaded the folks before the teacher, Higher Powers forbid!, got wind of this remark. Oh Lordy, liberal SF!!!

Perhaps she has several daddies, come to think of it.

But it is the teachers of yore who would never have allowed such remarks in public. A slap would have done it.