Keith,
A colleague who taught English literature had an unique solution to this problem for both male and female students who came to protest about the “D” grades on their papers.
After hearing about how their lives were to be ruined, their scholarships lost, their parents divorced and the collapse of nations, he would point to a wheel on his desk. The wheel had A,B,C,D and F on it, one of which would come to the top marker with each spin.
Sympathetically, he’s ask them if they’d like to take a chance and spin for their grade. Most, with so little to lose, would take him up on it, agreeing to abide by the outcome. And of course it was weighted to always come up F. But all was not lost, he’d say, taking pity on their even darker circumstance and allowing them to keep the grade they’d come in with that they'd actually earned.
Was he also a misogynist? Well, that’s another story.
Jerry
> On Feb 2, 2018, at 3:05 PM, Keith Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> Thanks to the recent writings of Kate Manne (Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny) I have discovered I am a misogynist. Not your common naïve kind of misogynist. Apparently, because I don’t hate all women, all the time and in every possible way, I am a real misogynist, one that likes his wife, respects his mother and thinks his grand daughter is cute as custard (she certainly doesn’t get away with her cuteness with me).
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> So, what do I do that’s wrong and must be corrected? Apparently I require women to service my emotional needs in the ways of a servant or subordinate. That is, I require female students to write essays, on topics I choose, to standards I set, to ensure that they gratify my understandings of myself as their master.
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> If female students resist this demand, from a male master, by cheating, conniving, and being deceitful, then this is evidence of the patriarchy. Their only way to resist my ordinate demands is to become the opposite of what I desire.
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> Instead of being the compliant, affirming high achieving female on a path to a university medal (virgin daughter) they become the defiant denying failing girl interrupted (naughty person).
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> The fact that the academic requirements of the tasks have been set in consultation with female and male colleagues; the fact that the set text is authored by a woman; the fact that there is a wide consensus across many similar institutions that these requirements are fair: these facts do not amount to a hill of philosopher’s beard hair because the demand is being made by a male.
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> Faced with strenuous male demands (in this case, to engage with law and ethics), the naughty female students are meant, in the patriarchal structure, to approach the master, humbly seeking his approval by showing their ignorance. This supplication is intended, in a patriarchal structure, to gratify my male needs to be the master. I need ignorant students to make my day. If they are female students, that is a double treat.
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> With a novice in my study, I can sit, on high, illustrating the wealth of my knowledge and even the substance of my qualifications to be the master. That is, I know this stuff, inside and out. So much superiority obviously demands to be acknowledged. The ignorant female student is compelled, by the patriarchy, to gratify the master’s vanity through pleas to be shown how to satisfy the master. Help me, help me, I am but a poor girl in need.
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> If the student does not approach the master to seek advice, then the misogynist master is irritated. He has been denied the emotional bowl of fruits expected of a supplicant. Apples and peaches and pears and figs for the teacher?
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> Knowing that the master will be cranky, because females have experienced this before with hundred of males including their fathers, their brothers and their boy friends, the distressed female students go on Google and find a solution: how to cheat and get away with it because university lecturers, especially males, think girls don’t cheat.
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> Why would male lecturers think that female students don’t cheat? Simple: in a patriarchal structure, women are to service men. Cheating is not servicing men; it is a betrayal of a trust so deep that it threatens to bring down patriarchal governments.
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> And there is the masculine heart of the matter. In a patriarchy, men presume that truth and honesty trump all other values, including love. They see themselves as the guardians of these values and they feel obliged to reinforce these values at every possible opportunity, including executing vile criminals.
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> Worse than just admiring these values, men seek to be stroked and acclaimed for the severity with which they will hold these values above all others: they approve of executing even female criminals. Little do they care for the tears of undergraduate females who protest the life failure that they face if they do not pass this course.
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> Well, actually, the misogynist in me protests at this sight of a weeping girl: I am doubly gratified by this flood of emotions. Now my superiority is obvious for all to see, including the student’s mother who has come along to protest that I am a monster. Here is my chance to proclaim loudly that I am the man. My petty dramatization of men’s hatred of women has been climaxed by woe. As I strut off stage, the Greek chorus is singing a lament worthy of Euripides’s tragedy, The Bacchae.
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> So, now I am confirmed and observed in my evil ways, what should I do? The answer that society is drifting towards is becoming more obvious to me as I face more and more meetings with deans where I am the target of accusations of my monstrosity which in the end amounts to my holding on to ancient academic standards. Learning is difficult.
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> What should I do? I should drop these academic standards as mere flags of misogyny? But wait, there is more. The sense that I am getting from these confrontations is that I should also drop my teaching altogether and just disappear like the books that take up space in the library that coffee shops might occupy.
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> I have emptied out my office of 30 years of stuff, waiting for the other shoe to drop. In sweet isolation, I sit at a naked desk deconstructing a career into air. I did solve this problem and that, I am sure.
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> When Milton was old and blind, his daughters read to him in Greek and Latin. Compliant as they were, they didn’t understand a word. How’s that for misogyny?
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> Keith Russell
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