Tag Archives: Pasadena City College

The First Day of School and Imposter Syndrome

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An updated version of a post that appeared last year.

The fall semester begins today at Pasadena City College. If you look back through my archives, you’ll see that I usually have a “first day of school” post up on the last Monday in August. This year shall be no exception.

My mother tells me that my formal education began forty-one forty-two autumns ago, in September 1969. I was two when I first went to Santa Barbara’s long-vanished Humpty Dumpty Nursery School. Since that year of Woodstock and moon landings and the amazing Mets, I’ve been in school every fall without fail. I went from nursery school to graduate school without a break, and began teaching full-time at the community college while still finishing Ph.D. work at UCLA. I’m in my fifth decade in the educational system, which astounds me. And I’m beginning my eighteenth 19th year as a professor at PCC; this year, my youngest students will have been born after I started teaching here.

In August 2004, I wrote about still having butterflies in my stomach the first time I met a class. Six Seven years later, things remain very much the same in my innards. I wrote then of the reasons for my nervousness:

The obvious question is this one: why, after all this time, do I still get so nervous about the first day of school? It’s not stagefright; public speaking has never been a fear of mine. It’s not new material, at least not this year; all four courses I am teaching this fall are courses I have taught in the past. It’s not fear that my students won’t like me; though I do struggle with vanity, it’s not at the root of my jumpiness this morning. All three of these might be small factors at different times, but the core reason for this almost-pleasant state of anxiety is more basic: I still believe that I have the best job in the whole dang world, and I can’t believe they pay me to do it.

Even after all these years of full-time teaching (the last six 13 with tenure), I still expect someone to show up, and with an apologetic and yet officious tone, tell me “We’re sorry, Hugo, we made a mistake hiring you. There was this terrible mix-up, you see; we intended to get someone else. Though I can assure my readers that I did not lie or stretch the truth when I applied for this job, somehow after all this time I still suspect that I “got away with something” when I was hired to teach here.

I’ve talked about this with my parents and other colleagues who teach. My father (who taught philosophy for forty years at Alberta and UCSB) calls this feeling the suspicion of one’s own fraudulence. That phrase seems to sum things up nicely. Whenever I share these feelings, I note that it is often my most talented colleagues, students, and friends who say Really? That’s how I feel too! (One of the worst teachers I ever worked with, now thankfully retired, claimed never to feel this way.) I wonder if there isn’t some connection between periodic bouts of self-doubt (the imposter syndrome) and the drive to prove one’s self. Actually, that’s silly: I don’t wonder that at all, I know it with total certainty!

My office is a cheerful mess, I’m caffeinated and be-BrooksBrothered and readier than ever to begin the grand journey again.

UPDATE: Both in person in the hallways, and on my Facebook page, former and soon-to-be-current students have wished me “good luck” today. This isn’t new; I’m wished good luck each time a new semester begins. It might seem odd to wish it to the tenured professor; I’m not applying for anything, I’m not being evaluated this semester, and I’m not trying to get into a class. But I’m wished luck nonetheless.

I like to think it’s more than just a pleasantry offered when someone begins something new (or in my case, resumes an old and familiar task.) I like to think that it’s because even the very young recognize that there is an element of chance and mystery in teaching; some classes sizzle with chemistry while others, as we all acknowledge, are duds. Perhaps they are wishing me great students, or wishing me success in avoiding spilling on myself or teaching with my fly unzipped. Or perhaps they know that anything really can happen in the classroom, from the marvelous to the heartbreaking, and they are wishing me luck and grace and strength to cope with whatever comes, and to be as present and effective as I can be for all whom I will call my students.

Risk, Reputation and being Judged by Our Enemies

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As we come to the end of the first quarter of 2011, I note it’s been a personally challenging start to the year. I’ve had a series of health difficulties, mostly revolving around a respiratory infection that has lingered for the better part of two months. Last week, I popped out a rib while coughing; it popped right back but the pain was excruciating. Middle age is certainly upon me.

It’s also been a terrific three months in terms of reaching new audiences. In late January, I was hired as a featured columnist at the Good Men Project, and my pieces there are regularly syndicated at Alternet, the Huffington Post, and The Frisky. We’re putting the finishing touches on Beauty, Disrupted: The Carré Otis Story, a memoir on which I was privileged to serve as collaborator. I’ve been doing some more speaking. And next month, this website will undergo a dramatic transformation to reflect those changes.

And with the good fortune of becoming ever more public, the criticism grows harsher. The hate mail has increased exponentially in the past three months. I won’t link to them, but google my name with the search term “mangina” and you’ll find plenty of men’s rights advocates (MRAs) working themselves into venomous fits. Most of what’s out there is laughable, a little of it is disturbing, and all of it is is par for the course.

Last week, however, one well-known MRA posted a Youtube video about me. It’s a typical rant of the sort I’ve heard countless times before: veiled accusations of sexual impropriety, cheap psychoanalysis, and misogyny. What was different was that this MRA put up a sort of slide show during his ten-minute talk, mostly using photos of me and my friends that I’ve put up on Facebook. In two instances, he included pictures of me with young feminists, including a group shot taken and reposted widely as part of Feminist Coming Out Day. (Strangely, he didn’t include the pictures of me dressed as a White Swan, which I would have thought would have been a source of great delight to that crowd.)

Two of the students who were in those pictures contacted me (it was one of the ways I first found out about the MRA video). They were horrified and creeped out by what was said in the rant, as well as by seeing themselves on the screen in this way. “Why are people so hateful”? one asked.

I reminded my students that activism comes with a price. Sometimes, college campuses can seem like sanctuaries; we need to remember that in the outside world, progressive ideas are still regarded with contempt and suspicion. There is a small but vocal group of men who regard feminism as the single most destructive ideological force in the modern world. Frequently hiding behind pseudonyms, these guys will say truly hateful , hurtful things. The goal is to shame, the goal is to silence, the goal is to use a heckler’s veto to derail thoughtful discussion. And sadly, I know that it sometimes works. Some young activists will reconsider a life of public advocacy when they see what can happen. And while it’s easy to tell people to grow a thicker skin, it’s heartbreaking that some folks will and do decide it’s simply too high a price to pay.

I’m lucky. The MRAs can’t threaten my job. (My division dean tells me the college gets regular calls and letters complaining about me, but they’re always anonymous and never from my own students, so they get ignored.) Most people who do this work don’t have tenure, don’t have the security I have as well as the steadfast support of an entire community. When an indignant anti-feminist reads about my curriculum, he can say “I’m going to complain to your college”, and I’ll happily help him by providing him with the address. That’s a privilege others don’t enjoy. Threats to someone’s livelihood can be very, very real.

The MRAs do work tirelessly to threaten my reputation. I’ve made it clear time and again that I’ve been sober for nearly 13 years and that I haven’t slept with one of my students since that time. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: accuse me of something that happened before June 27, 1998, and it’s probably true. (I’ve forgotten a great deal, and remember other details all too well. One thing I will say is that my relationships with students, as unethical as they were, were with chronological peers, slightly younger or older. I wasn’t exactly a middle-aged lech chasing teens.) But while I am not perfect, I can proudly answer for my sexual boundaries since that date. Still, folks insinuate that I’m a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” yet (a common charge thrown at male feminists). And while that tired old charge doesn’t bother me, it does impact people around me.

One of my female mentees sent me a FB message yesterday. She asked if she should stop visiting my office hours so regularly. She’d seen the hate video, and though she wasn’t in it, had picked up on the cheesy intimation of sexual impropriety. She wrote:

You know I think you’re safe. I KNOW you’re safe. But I’m worried about your reputation and mine if I visit you so often. People see me coming into your office, or they see us walking to the Pass (where they sell sodas on campus). I worry that they’re talking about us and will think something is going on that isn’t. I still want to see you but I don’t want to damage your reputation. I also hate it that people might think something is going on that isn’t. I don’t want to be judged! What should I do?

I told her that of course she could continue to come. I also told her that if she’d rather talk more on email, that was fine too — she needed to assess her own comfort level. But it left me sad and angry, angry not at her but at the success this particular nasty tactic had had in rattling a young person.

If no one hates you, you’re not doing your job. I first heard that truism from the late Senator Alan Cranston, of all people, though the sentiment is millenia old. I’ve always been proud to have the friends I have — and proud to have the enemies I do as well. We judge people by the company they keep, and by those who won’t keep their company. By that calculus, I’m blessed.

“We’re going to Chicago because of Fukushima”

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A student I know well, who is taking his second class with me, called me an hour ago, very apologetic. “I won’t be in class tomorrow”, he said, “and I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Hopefully next week.”

His parents, the young man told me, are panicked about the prospect of radiation from the Fukushima nuclear reactor reaching California, and they’ve decided to go and stay at least through the weekend with family in Illinois. They fly out later today.

My student told me he had begged to stay, and that he knew perfectly well that the danger to the States from the Japanese meltdown is nonexistent. But his parents through a fit, and so he’s going off, hoping to be back by next Tuesday. If I didn’t know him so well, I’d think he was pulling my leg. But I believe he’s telling me the truth about his parents’ paranoia.

I’m hoping he’s the only one.

Better than I was: in defense of seniority rights for teachers

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It’s a month of anniversaries for me. Thirty years ago this March, I was kicked out of prep school, launching an adolescent rebellion that would continue on and off for years. 25 years ago this month, my career as a sex educator began when I started training with Berkeley’s Peer Sexuality Outreach. And twenty years ago, with the beginning of the spring quarter at UCLA, I began my teaching career as a Graduate Student Instructor in the Classics department.

GSIs (or TAs, as they were still known then) often lectured in discussion sections. I remember being so nervous before my first lecture (I was not quite 24) that I threw up in the Bunche Hall men’s room before meeting my students. Most were only two or three years my junior. I was excited and terrified, but knew after the first week of teaching that this was the life I wanted.

Two decades later, I’m still teaching. And though I don’t get as nervous as I did in 1991, I still get butterflies from time to time. More to the point, however, I’m an infinitely better teacher than I was back then. And that brings me to my point.

In the current political climate, it’s become fashionable to attack public employees — teachers in particular. Conservatives who have never been enamored of public education hope to take advantage of a weak economy to strip teachers of their pensions, bargaining rights, tenure, and other job protections. These attacks are odious and indefensible, motivated less by concern with fiscal rectitude or the well-being of young people and more by a desire to destroy the progressive public service unions.

One bit of this emerging conservative conventional wisdom drives me nuts: the idea that teachers are at their best when they are new. Complaining about seniority rules that follow the tradition of “last hired, first fired”, education “reformers” often describe older instructors as “dead wood” and the newest and most vulnerable teachers as the ones who do the most valuable work. Even some ostensibly progressive voices agree, arguing that too many senior faculty have “given up”, while the young (and less well-paid) are the ones who are still engaged.

In what other profession do we express such open contempt for experience? Do people board airplanes, saying “Gosh, I really hope our captain and first officer are new at this — enthusiastic young pilots are the kind I trust most!” Do people go to hospitals, asking “Could you please have a resident operate on my child? I’m worried that an older and more experienced surgeon won’t do the job right.” Of course not. In every other profession, experience is valued. In every other profession, seniority is seen not just as a perk for sticking around but as a resource for the entire community.

I am still an enthusiastic professor. I’ve taught 15,000 students (at the least) since I faced that first class twenty years ago this month. Last fall, my in-class teaching evaluations were higher than they’d ever been before. Even as I’ve given the same lectures over and over again — about Cicero and clitorises, about Gilgamesh and intersectionality, about the Pauline epistles and Betty Friedan — I’ve found ways to change and refine what I say. I know I’d shudder if I heard one of my early lectures now, simply because I’ve gotten so much better at the job of delivering a good talk.

Of course, there’s more to teaching than lecturing. I am more compassionate, more patient, and much quicker to recognize when a student is struggling. (I’m also much more ethical — my infamous and inexcusable sexual relationships with students all happened early on in my career.) I can discern the difference between the lack of motivation and the presence of a genuine learning disability in a way I simply couldn’t years ago. Experience has given me these tools. And if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that no amount of youthful energy can compensate for the benefit of accumulated wisdom.

I make more money now. My first year as a TA, I was paid $1050 a month. My first year as a full-time prof at Pasadena City College, I made $27,000. I have a base salary of approximately three times that now. (Finishing my doctorate in 1999 boosted my compensation nicely.) Am I worth the salary and the benefits? I don’t know, but I do know I’m worth more than I was when I started. And judging by my colleagues whose work I know well, the same is true for them as well. As with every true calling, as with every profession, experience matters for those of us who sweat and strut in the classrooms.

It’s time we push back against the attempt to de-legitimize our profession, and to dismiss the very real benefits of seniority.

Feminist Coming Out Day: a brief report, and a note on the connection between sexual liberation and global justice

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Happy Ash Wednesday to one and all.

We had a great turnout last night at our Feminist Coming Out Day Panel here at Pasadena City College. (If you click here and scroll down, you can see me with two of my great student organizers and speakers.) I was one of six speakers talking about feminism on a panel moderated by my wonderful colleague from the speech and rhetoric department, A.C. Panella. My fellow panelists included Myra Duran from Feminist Majority Foundation, Dinah Stephens from Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, Phoebe Brauer from Planned Parenthood Pasadena, Kathy Heintzmann, a teacher at nearby Arcadia High School who developed Women’s Lit courses on that campus, and my wonderful student Ahlam Hope Hariri, a Muslim-American feminist.

Our students worked tirelessly to put on the event, and KPFK radio taped the entire panel discussion for future broadcast. (I’ll have a link when available).

I was reminded, yet again, that we live with feminisms. There is no single code to which we all subscribe, beyond a conviction that sexual equality is worth fighting for and is a cause to which we have dedicated our lives. Oppressions intersect, as we so often say, and the fight for sexual justice is linked to other fights. It is always good to be reminded of that, particularly when you’re a middle-aged white male, tenured and cis-gendered and married and veritably dripping in unearned privilege!

I made one point last night that I always try to make. So much of my writing and teaching focuses on issues of sexuality and self-esteem, around pop culture and body image, eating disorders and perfectionism. Often, the more radically (or globally) inclined suggest that these are middle-class concerns. As one young man asked me recently, “How come you spend so much time talking about body image when we’ve got women suffering and dying in the Congo? Are eating disorders as bad as the rape epidemic going on there?”

Justice, I reminded him, is not a zero-sum game. Critiquing “princess culture” among middle-class American girls doesn’t mean that one has no interest in the plight of less fortunate women in the Congo, Afghanistan, or in undocumented migrant communities right here in Los Angeles. Furthermore, as I said last night, our personal liberation is a prerequisite for being a truly effective agent for change in the lives of others. As I learned in Twelve Step eons ago, “you can’t give away what you haven’t got.” Young women who are struggling with eating disorders often find that the disorder sucks up a tremendous amount of psychic energy. Sexual shame limits our capacity for compassion. If the privileged young women and men of America (and compared to the Congo, even working-class Americans of color are privileged) are beset by anxiety and self-doubt then they’re not going to be able to do as much as they otherwise might do for those who are suffering elsewhere.

So teaching sex-positivity and a responsible, pleasure-centred sex-ed curriculum is vital justice work. Equipping young women to extricate themselves from relentless perfectionism is part of healing the larger world. It’s not bourgeois myopia to focus on sex and the body — rather, focusing on these intensely personal issues is the gateway to building a more peaceful, equitable, light-filled world. Shame leads not only to self-absorption but to a sense of personal powerlessness. Empowering young people in the most intimate aspects of their lives gives them the tools and the energy and the excitement to go out and do the vital work of Tikkun Olam, healing the world.

Personal empowerment and collective liberation are not at odds. Giving young people the first is what inspires them to be effective agents for bringing about the latter.

Feminist Coming Out Day

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I’ll have a permalink to my appearance today on Hay House Radio with Michelle Phillips when it becomes available. And if you, like me, are a Los Angeles resident and voting in tomorrow’s municipal election, you might take the excellent recommendations of the LA Progressive website.

Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, and it’s also Feminist Coming Out Day. Originally started at Harvard University in 2010, FCOD has gone nationwide this year. But of all the campuses doing official Feminist Coming Out Day projects, there’s only one two-year school formally participating: Pasadena City College. As an adviser to the college Feminist Club, I’m very proud of my students. I’m particularly proud that the club hosted an inspirational visit last month from Lena Chen, a Feminist Coming Out Day founder and celebrated columnist. Chen — who first emerged as a courageous sex blogger during her undergraduate years — is a marvelous role model to my students. We’re so pleased to be part of this extraordinary project she helped found.

I’ll be one of many panelists for a Feminist Coming Out Day Event tomorrow evening from 6-8PM in the Circadian Lounge in the Campus Center at PCC. The public is welcome, and you can check out our Facebook event page here. And if you twitter, use the hashtag #afeministlookslike.

Feminism isn’t just an ideology to me. It isn’t just what I “do” professionally, though I am blessed to make a living as a feminist professor and writer. Feminism is a movement for global and personal transformation, the single best vehicle for bringing about a more just and compassionate world that I have ever encountered. Feminism connected me to my humanity, reminded me that my biology was never my destiny nor my limitation. Feminism liberated me to see myself as a complete human being, and it forced me to do the hard but glorious work of growing up and taking full responsibility for my actions and my life.

After nearly twenty years of teaching women’s studies, I’ve watched how feminist scholarship and activism has empowered and reshaped the lives of countless students, men and women alike. I’ve watched in awe as young (and not so young) women found their voices, found their passion, found their anger and found their purpose in feminist work. I’ve watched with pride as young (and not so young) men have come to reconsider their relationships with mothers, sisters, wives and lovers as a result of beginning a feminist journey. I am convinced to my core that feminism is a force for political, social, sexual, economic and even spiritual liberation in the lives of men and women.

I am proud to call myself a feminist.

For every slacker, a perfectionist: some thoughts on class, sex, and the community college

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One of the things about teaching full-time at an urban community college is that I have a front-row seat for social, economic, and cultural change. And when it comes to issues of race, class, and gender, the transformations I’ve seen in the last two years have been profound.

California, like so many other states, has been hard-hit by the recession. We’re on our third straight year of draconian cutbacks to higher education, with no end in sight. Fees are rising, class sections are being cut, hiring is frozen. And this has changed the student population, at least in my classes.

My students are whiter and more middle-class than they’ve been in over a decade. From the mid-90s until the mid-00′s, Pasadena City College grew progressively “less white”, with European-American students falling from perhaps 30% of the student body when I began teaching to about 15% by 2005. (And at PCC, we count immigrants from the former Soviet Union and from much of the Middle East as “white”, including students of Arabic and Armenian descent.) But with the coming of the economic downturn, the white middle-class kids are returning in droves.

Students who once would have skipped the community college and headed straight to state universities are coming here first, both because of cost considerations and because spaces have been drastically reduced at California’s public four-year institutions. In our community college district, we have more than a dozen high schools that serve as our feeders. But traditionally, we’ve drawn relatively small numbers of kids from the “affluent” schools (like La Canada and San Marino High Schools). I note — and this is all anecdata — that within the past two years, the number of students coming from those more prosperous communities has climbed.

What this means, of course, is that I have more students than ever in my classes who are “college-ready.” The percentage of my students whose writing and reasoning skills need remedial attention is lower. But the danger is that at a place like PCC, the students from more privileged backgrounds raise the competition level — and make it easier for those who lack basic skills to fall through the cracks. When the average goes up (and in most of my classes over the past two years, the “average” scores on exams have indeed risen), competition grows fiercer. And in an era of declining resources (we’ve had major cutbacks to our tutoring and counseling services), that means it’s harder than ever for the college to function as a ladder into the middle class.

There’s something interesting happening as well around gender. I’m getting more men in my classes again. In my nearly twenty years here, women have averaged around 55% of overall enrollment, though that number is skewed by the high number of men in vocational education classes. In the humanities and social sciences, the percentage of women has hovered around 65% of all students until recently. But we’re seeing more men coming in, no doubt due to the terrible job climate.

But here’s where the sex differences remain stark. It’s axiomatic that the poor economy has ratcheted up anxiety for everyone. But from listening to students in my gender studies classes, that anxiety manifests quite differently for men and women. While both men and women are more likely to live with their parents for longer periods than before, my female students are much more likely to carry full academic loads. While I have roughly equal numbers of men and women in all my classes save for women’s studies, those who are taking more than the standard 15 unit semester load are overwhelmingly female. My female students are also more likely to be working multiple part-time jobs. Continue reading →

It would be funny if it weren’t so deadly: why Amy Chua has blood on her hands

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A reader sends me a link to this piece that’s getting a fair amount of discussion this week: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior. I read it twice, convinced on the first read that it was satire, but on the second, coming to the depressing conclusion that it was anything but. Amy Chua, a professor at Yale, celebrates the relentless inculcation of perfectionism, pushing back against the growing public concern about the damage that the relentless pursuit of the unattainable is doing to our children (particularly our daughters.) Indeed, Chua’s piece is so outrageous, so Swiftian in its defense of the indefensible, that part of me still suspects it’s particularly well-veiled satire.

Chua writes that we (presumably middle and upper-middle class “white” parents of the sort who make up many of her fellow Ivy League faculty) are far too concerned with our children’s self-esteem, and focused too little on what actually gives kids esteem, which is mastery of something. That’s the sort of thing that sounds good when you first read it, but becomes horrifying upon reflection — and upon comparison of Chua’s gleeful celebration of Chinese success with the reality I work with every damn day in my classes.

Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it. (And when Chinese kids do excel, there is plenty of ego-inflating parental praise lavished in the privacy of the home.)

About one-third of the students at Pasadena City College — a public two-year, open-admission institution — are of Asian ancestry. The plurality, if not the outright majority of those East Asian students are of Chinese ancestry. Some are immigrants themselves, many are children of immigrants, but few are more than second-generation Americans. They came from across the Chinese world and its diaspora (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, as well as the mainland itself.) Most are Mandarin-speakers.

Many of them, particularly in my Humanities and Gender Studies classes, tell me that their mothers were much like Amy Chua. Many were shamed, some were beaten, almost all were made to feel inadequate. Many, particularly from the more affluent areas of the San Gabriel Valley like San Marino, were expected to get straight As and be accepted into prestigious four-year universities. A great many didn’t, and most (despite what Chua claims) got Bs, and more than a few had high school transcripts littered with Cs. Chua peddles (one hopes, how one hopes, with tongue in cheek) the myth of the model minority, the myth in which average grades, depression, drug and alcohol problems, eating disorders and significant learning disabilities simply don’t happen to Chinese children. In her world, Chinese children don’t get rejected from Berkeley and Stanford and Princeton. But I have Chinese-American students who were not only rejected from those schools, they didn’t have the grades to get into Cal State Los Angeles.

Many of these Chinese-American students are at PCC for financial reasons, but the notion that all or even most could have gone to Berkeley if only there’d been a bit more money is also very much a myth. Many of these students were pushed and tutored and browbeaten (and beaten for real), and still couldn’t make the grades. Some marinate at home, they tell me, in the hostile simmer of their parents’ disappointment. A lucky few have parents who have adopted a more tender and compassionate model, encouraging effort rather than insisting rigidly on a perfect outcome. They are a small minority. Far more are shell-shocked, numb from years and years of the very abuse that Chua celebrates. (I not only know this through my students, but from my first wife, who was born to a Chinese mother and a Filipino father. I saw the success — but also the haunting damage — up close.)

The Yale professor may have daughters who play instruments beautifully and got near-perfect scores on their SATS. I had a student in 2008, the daughter of immigrants who owned a dry cleaners, who tried to kill herself by drinking cleaning products when her transfer application was rejected by UCLA. I’ve heard many other stories of suicide and suicide attempts. If we’re gonna get anecdotal, no ethnic group in the multicultural melting pot that is PCC has had as many self-reported incidents of self-harm per capita as have my East Asian students. That’s based on more than 18 years of community college teaching and mentoring, including five years as advisor to the overwhelmingly Asian honor students’ society, but it’s also based on the reality that Chinese-Americans 15-24 are much more likely to kill themselves than are white teens, a statistic that’s remained depressingly consistent since the 1980s. None of my Chinese students have taken their lives while my students, but I hear more stories of attempts — and the deaths of friends and siblings — than I do from any other ethnic group.

Chua’s assumption — that the pressure cooker of perfectionism will cause short-term pain but long-term success — simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. Let her come and meet my queer Chinese-American students who’ve been hit and humiliated and disowned. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students with dyslexia who’ve been called stupid so often the light has faded from their eyes. Let her come and meet my Chinese-American students who are overweight, including the young woman whose mother only lets her eat cabbage and water at home and rifles through her room, looking for the sweets she’s convinced her daughter is hiding. I’m not for a minute suggesting that Chinese-American parents have a monopoly on the cruel inculcation of perfectionism; that is, as even Chua admits, a multi-ethnic phenomenon. But to assume, as she does with staggering myopia, that a little adolescent suffering invariably leads to long-term success, simply isn’t backed by the evidence.

Chua knows this, of course. She knows that Chinese-American children don’t all go to Yale or its equivalent. Many have parents who pushed them relentlessly, but for any number of excellent reasons, the straight As did not appear. There are more Chinese and Chinese-American students in community colleges than in the Ivy League, and I’d venture that since I started teaching here in 1993, I’ve taught at least 4000 of them, probably more than she has or even ever will. But she knows, surely, about the higher rate of suicide as well as suicidal ideation and depression — and she probably knows those rates are particularly high among Chinese-American young women. If she does know — and if this isn’t Swiftian satire — then she’s guilty of celebrating not only a falsehood, but a lethal one. Chua deserves not mere polite disagreement, but repudiation and scorn for perpetuating an ideal that is directly and unmistakably linked to suffering and self-harm. I’ve seen too much suffering in my years of teaching and mentoring — and been too convinced of the cause by unmistakable evidence — to let a fear of being labeled culturally insensitive blind me from my obligation to say three words to Chua: Shame. On. You.

Fortunately, the repudiation is coming from many quarters, including some wonderful and important bloggers like Angry Asian Man.
 May it continue to come.

The challenge of confrontation: dismantling rape culture one conversation at a time

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Clarisse Thorn wrote a Thanksgiving post, in which she raises an all-too-familiar problem:

One very intense, very important issue I grappled with this week was having a friend email me to inform me that another friend — someone I like and admire a lot — has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a person who will never press charges. This has come up before in my life; every time it’s a little different, and yet so many things are the same: a person is assaulted, the news gets out among friends, the survivor doesn’t press charges, there is confusion among the friends about how to act, eventually things die down, and I feel as though I should have done more.

Clarisse wrote to an ex of hers for his take, and he replied:

Nobody is composed of unmixed goodness or evil, no matter how much of a paragon/fiend 1) they seem to be or 2) their principles require. People we respect and love are not forces of nature or avatars of their cause of choice, no matter how thoroughly they embody it to us… I can’t see how it could ever be good to allow things like this to just slide. Honestly, I’m not sure what else you can do but (as you suggest in one of your messages) politely ask your friend about their take on the story. If nothing else, it will demonstrate that people are paying attention to this thing…

I agree with Clarisse’s ex, both about the necessity of confrontation in some form and the wisdom of acknowledging that those around us are never entirely what they seem. (This doesn’t mean that most people are fraudulent, merely that we tend to see blacks and whites more clearly than we see shades of gray.) And I think this willingness to raise hard questions is particularly important for men.

I’ve often made the case that the true measure of a man’s commitment to gender justice doesn’t just lie in how he treats women, but how he interacts with other men when there are no women around. Most young women have had the utterly infuriating experience of having a male buddy, boyfriend, or brother who is sweet and sensitive when she’s alone with him — but who turns into a troglodytic jerk when other men are around. That sudden shift from kindness to doltishness can be chalked up to the homosocial pressure to be “one of the guys”, a pressure that tends to trump everything else in young men’s lives. And so I repeat the message that I learned a long time ago: part of being a good male ally lies in challenging the sexism of other men even when there are no women around. Actually, if there is a litmus test that distinguishes a boy from a man, that might be it: the courage to stand up to other men and to endure the homophobic insults that will surely come when he challenges the attitudes and actions of his “bros.”

Feminists often talk about “rape culture.” Rape culture doesn’t just mean a culture in which rape happens — it means a culture in which sexual assault is condoned, or excused, or minimized, or even actively facilitated. For example, fraternity parties to which young women are invited and encouraged to binge drink are part of rape culture, as they involve the use of alcohol and social pressure to undermine young women’s capacity to give or deny meaningful consent to sex. Rape jokes are part of rape culture, as is the loathsome use of “rape”idiomatically to refer to any action of domination or success. (An example I overheard in the hall last week: “Dude, I totally raped that test.”) But nothing — nothing — sustains rape culture like silence. And given that men are raised to be homosocial (meaning they place intense value on the opinion of their male peers), and given that it is men who are doing almost all of the raping, it is the reluctance of the so-called “good guys” to challenge other men that allows rape culture to survive.

A true story:

As I’ve written many, many times, I had a series of consensual sexual relationships with my adult students when I was first a professor at PCC. The fact that most of these students were my chronological peers (one or two were even older than I), and that the relationships were often initiated by those students does nothing to mitigate the unethical and irresponsible nature of what I did. It was an abuse of power, and all sexualized abuses of power fall on what might be called a “rape spectrum.” What I did wasn’t rape in that it didn’t violate the consent of the adult women with whom I was having sex — but it was on that spectrum nonetheless because the power imbalance may have had at least some impact on the capacity of these women to give meaningful consent. (I acknowledge agency, but also acknowledge the social and cultural pressures that can undermine agency.) Continue reading →