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from the I'm-not-touching-this-with-a-ten-foot-pole dept.
The Guardian has a fascinating piece entitled Sexual paranoia on campus – and the professor at the eye of the storm. There is a lot going on in this article/interview and it touches on a lot of different issues in both society and higher-ed in general. Some choice quotes:
But you do end up making strange bedfellows. The people supporting free speech now are the conservatives. It's incomprehensible to me, but it's the so-called liberals on campus, the students who think of themselves as activists, who are becoming increasingly authoritarian. So I'm trying to step carefully. It's not like you want to make certain allies, particularly the men's rights people.
Kipnis's original essay was provoked by an email she received about a year before, informing her that relationships – dating, romantic or sexual – between undergraduates and faculty members at Northwestern were now banned. The same email informed her that relationships between graduates and staff, though not forbidden, were also problematic, and had to be reported to department chairs. "It annoyed me," she says. The language was neutral, but it seemed clear that it was mostly women this code was meant to protect. She thought of all those she knew who are married to former students, or who are the children of such couples, and wondered where this left them. It seemed to her this was part of a process that was transforming the "professoriate" into a sexually suspicious class: "would-be harassers all, sexual predators in waiting".
On a personal note, when I interact with students (which is every day), it's always either with an open office door, or in a public area. So as not to be discriminatory, I do the same for all students, men, women, or others. This sort of culture on campuses does make everyone suspicious of everyone else and it makes it hard to trust others. Students can't trust the instructors because they might "do something", staff can't trust the students because even a false accusation can be career ending, so there's this overall chilling effect that occurs when what should be a collegiate environment turns into an us vs them thing. This is definitely worse in some places than others, but there is an undercurrent of it everywhere. I applaud Laura Kipnis for bringing these issues to the light -- if we're going down this route, it should at least be a conscious community decision rather than bureaucratic policy handed down from University Counsel and risk assessment teams.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday April 14 2017, @02:33AM (2 children)
Hmmm. Interesting.
Do you think that maybe the progressives will make a stop along the way, and declare that women of child bearing age have the RIGHT to decide not to work, to stay at home, and to raise their families, to care for invalids, tend a garden, or whatever the hell else they want to do?
While I am aware that women have ALWAYS been part of the workforce, there was a time when women could CHOOSE to be part of that workforce. Unfortunately, there have also always been women who didn't have a choice. Primarily young mother's whose mates abandoned them, or maybe even died.
Women's fashions do come and go, and all this women's lib may just be part of a fashion cycle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 14 2017, @02:56AM
I wonder if we'll get any real progressives so we can implement UBI or some kind of real union-friendly policy.
This would enable women to choose to stay at home, where I think a lot of women would rather be.
50% of the "workforce" should be able to live without providing income.
You'll have to let the gays in on this deal, but statistically it would be a wash.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cubancigar11 on Friday April 14 2017, @04:10AM
It won't be exactly that and it won't be a total circle. Women already have the right to decide not to work if they are married in more feminist countries such as nordic countries. The current demand is to have gender parity in positions of power i.e. 50% of board members ought to women and CEOs and management, basically all high paying jobs, should have 50% of women by law. The low paying jobs are divided into two categories: mostly female workers (e.g. nursing), and mostly male workers (e.g. construction). The former will prevail because entry of men is a land mine of sexual-harassment complaints, while latter are prone to be automatized and made obsolete.
This is not because of the college level leftist activism aka teenage angst or feminism used for political advantage, but rather those are a result of something else. We living through a bigger economical social change which started by industrialization and triggered the decline of agrarian culture and values. The trend I see is elimination of large number of men - the gender ratio is already skewed against men in Nordic countries, then other developed countries, and it is worst in the least industrialized countries such as middle east and Africa. In fact the only place it is normal (950:1000) is in purely agrarian societies that still exist in small pockets of Africa.
My theory is that women have always wanted to fuck the king, and king has always wanted to maintain his harem. Peasants were just required throughout history so they were tolerated. Now with complete automation and advent of AI, peasants are not really required. Women will keep finding one reason or the other to complain about their pathetic lives with poor peasants, and the rich conservatives will keep giving them concessions for one reason or the other.
Laura Kipnis? I didn't knew her but the moment she said she doesn't want to be seen associated with MRAs, I realized she is basically a conservative feminist aka 2nd or 1st gen of feminist but knows The Guardian won't allow her to right something without that disclaimer. The leftist control of media is so complete that I hardly encounter any person who is against MRA but can tell me what exactly MRA say except repeating some bs they read on a blog written by a feminist.