A hilarious book to get you through grading season: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir).

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Yesterday, the Cave of Grading got something even better than hot-and-cold running margaritas. (OK, I recognize that hot running margaritas would be gross. Maybe hot running Irish coffee?) It got this:

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson (New York: Amy Einhorn Books, 2012)

I know what you’re thinking: How is a hilarious memoir about life in Texas (and on the internet) at all helpful in the project of catching up on a catastrophic grading backlog?

And it’s true, the book itself has not picked up a grading pen to help me get the job done. However, each of the conveniently-sized chapters in the book feels like a well-deserved reward after plowing through another 10 or 15 papers on the stack. Also, the guffaws Lawson’s writing provokes seem to restore some of the life-force depleted by grading. I haven’t subjected it to proper empirical investigation, but I hypothesize that these same guffaws result in better oxygenation of the blood, glossier hair, and a clearer complexion. Or at least they help me maintain enthusiasm for getting the job done, and restore me to a relatively cheerful baseline mood from which to evaluate student work with some modicum of compassion.

If you think your childhood was strange, or that you argue about weird stuff with your partner, or that the creatures in your yard or your house or your walls might be dangerous and/or haunted, Jenny Lawson pretty much has you beat, but you will still feel the comfort of recognition. You might also be moved to check to see when your last tetanus shot was.

Important stuff in this book:

  1. The observation that it may be harder to properly identify the type of bird in front of you than who that bird belongs to, and that this may have significant social consequences.
  2. Some liquids that have detectable odors and some that do not. Also, some liquids that are collectable, apparently, if that’s how your father rolls.
  3. Maybe the worst-ever attempt to “just fit in” with the other kids in high school, especially as it results in kind of getting stuck.
  4. A tremendously awesome discount outlet purchase that is not towels, but that someone maybe wishes had been after all.
  5. A frank discussion of what it can be like to live with an anxiety disorder, and how it’s much less hilarious to be living than its description might make it seem.
  6. Descriptions of parenting and grandparenting strategies favored by the author’s forebears, some of which involve sacks of animals of varying degrees of animation, some of which involve unconventional use of sugar cubes.
  7. Sufficient data for me to cross a job in HR off my list of potential careers if the academia thing doesn’t work out.
  8. Ample documentation of perfectly good words that spellcheck apparently did not want the author to use in writing her memoir, because spellcheck is kind of a jerk.
  9. Word problems. This book will exercise your brain! Not to mention guidance on the appropriate kickback for your English teacher (which, in my professional opinion, would also be appropriate for a philosophy professor).
  10. Flint-napping.

If it’s been too long since you’ve read a book that causes you to emit involuntary sounds of hilarity around others, you owe it to yourself to read Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.

(There’s also an audiobook version, but based on my experience of reading the book-book version, I would strongly advise against listening to it while driving on account of the uproariousness might cause you to lose control of the vehicle, hurting others and yourself. If you must, please save it for stop-and-go traffic.)

When patching the boat becomes unethical (a dispatch from a university in crisis).

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“We’ve spent years figuring out how to do more with less. It’s time for us to figure out how to do less.”

— my department chair, circa 2008

I have recently arrived at the suspicion that operating in crisis conditions undermines one’s ability to make objective judgments. My hunch is that the effect is especially strong when it comes to evaluating whether an on-the-ground response to an extreme reduction in resources will help or hurt the broader goals one (or one’s institution) is trying to achieve.

And indeed, this hunch is something I am just articulating to myself (rather than leaving it as a miasma that envelops my head and my workplace) as my assistance has been requested in devising a radical curricular response to “the new normal” of hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the budget (with more to come!) that we have been told are never coming back. The radical curricular response, as I understand it right now, would have the virtue of saving a significant amount of money. However, it would do so by taking particular pedagogical goals that it is difficult to achieve well in a 15 week semester and cramming them into about 5 weeks of another semester-long course — and by delivering the whole thing completely online to all of our incoming freshmen. This latter detail concerns me in terms of the workload it will entail for the faculty teaching the course and evaluating student work (since, in my experience, the time required teaching online has never been less than teaching the equivalent course in a classroom, and indeed has always been substantially more). And, it concerns me in terms of the challenges it will create as far as getting new college students to engage meaningfully with the course material, with their professors, and with each other. (My experience teaching upper division students online is that even keeping them engaged is a challenge.)

There is a piece of me that loves problem-solving enough that I have been thinking through topics and readings and assignments that might efficiently achieve the pedagogical goals in question. There are people I respect, people I like, who believe this goal is attainable and consistent with our educational mission.

But, there is another part of me, one whose voice is getting louder, that says this is an exercise in patching a boat that cannot, cannot stay afloat under these conditions. This part of me argues that we need to recognize this radical curricular response for what it really is: a signal that we have passed the point where we can actually deliver a quality college education with the resources we will be given.

If that’s what it is, can it be ethical to proceed as if we can somehow deliver something close enough to a quality college education? Should we not, instead, call it as we see it and identify the resources we need to do the job we’re supposed to do?

Obviously, asking for appropriate resources does not guarantee that we will get them. It may result in our doing the job right but for fewer students. Conceivably, it might also result in the administrators finding ways to clear out faculty who say the job cannot be done with less (by eliminating our departments, for example, or by ramping up class sizes and cutting salaries to the point that the job becomes intolerable) until the ones who remain are the ones willing to play ball.

I have tended to view adaptability as a good thing, but I have long been suspicious of the assumption that we should regard the environment to which we might adapt as an immovable object — especially when that environment is made up of people making policy decisions. I think I’m ready to find out whether university system administrations can adapt when faculty take a stand for quality education.

Announcing Dr. Free-Ride’s Ethics Line, discreet ethical advice by phone.

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Do you have an ethical dilemma?

Are you tired of grappling with it all by yourself?

Would you like to have my capable, experienced hands wrapped around your big, hard ethical problems?

The wait is over!

I’m pleased to introduce the launch of Dr. Free-Ride’s Ethics Line, bringing you discreet ethics consultations by phone for the reasonable rate of $1.99/minute.

Let me talk with you about your unique ethical needs. We can do this one-on-one, or, if you’re feeling adventurous, we can make it a group thing.

Or, tell me about your ethical fantasies hypotheticals. I can’t wait to hear all the details and then describe to you what we will do with them …

On Dr. Free-Ride’s Ethics Line, I will cater to your specific needs.

Want to get down and dirty in the details of federal regulations for research with human subjects or animals? I’ll do that with you.

Ready to work up the courage to disclose your significant financial interests to the world? Disclose them to me first on a private, non-judgmental call.

Tired of manipulating that same old figure for each journal submission? I’m prepared to tell you just how naughty you’ve been, to give you the punishment you’ve secretly been wanting, and to help you develop a plan to use your new data and figures that show off their natural beauty.

You know you want to. Click the payment button to get started.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Who else have you provided with this kind of, um, “consulting” service?

Lots of scientists, with ethical problems of all shapes and sizes. I can’t give you their names, though, and I’ll never reveal yours — confidentiality is just that important to me.

Does giving ethical advice for money compromise your objectivity?

Who gave you that idea? And do you really think $1.99/minute is enough to move me from my principles?

Look, if you call Dr. Free-Ride’s Ethics Line, I’m going to tell you what you need to hear, not necessarily what you want to hear. It may hurt at first, but you will love it. And if you don’t, at $1.99/minute, at least the pain isn’t costing you much.

Do you have any conflicts of interest to disclose here?

Not until the big corporations or universities that might be able to use my ethical advice decide to pay for my services. (You know where to find me, big corporations and universities!)

If I’m paying by credit card or PayPal, is our consulting session really confidential?

Yes! The charge for our session will appear on your statement as “Free-Ride’s Sexy Phone Time”.

Are you ready to show me your ethical quandaries? Click the payment button now to get the ball rolling!

In which the professor expresses her frustration with the perennial bashing of her occupation.

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I am generally a patient person, sometimes more patient than I should be. I am also usually optimistic about people’s potential to learn and grow, which is probably a good thing since I am in the business of educating adults and since a good bit of my job also involves being on committees.

But darned if I’m not starting to believe that there are some issues that are black holes of dialogic suck, around which people are absolutely committed to killing the potential for learning and growth where it stands, and where any speck of patience is likely to be rewarded with a punch to the gut.

I refer you to this steaming pile of fail that posits that college professors do not work hard enough.

Others, including Zen, and DrugMonkey, and Crooked Timber, and Echidne, and Lawyers, Guns and Money, have gone into some of the dimensions along which the author’s model of what’s happening in non-R1 colleges and universities (and what, therefore, should be done) veers widely from reality.

And there’s part of me prepared to jump in to lay out what kind of time it takes to teach college students well — the time that is invisible because it happens out of the classroom, when we’re prepping classes, and updating classes, and designing assignments, and refining assignments, and grading assignments in ways that actually provide students with useful feedback that helps them figure out what they can do better on the next round of assignments for twice as many students as the same number of classes had not ten years ago, and seeing students in office hours, and answering their emails, and providing websites with announcements pages and periodic email blasts to one’s classes to keep them on track — and these are just the demands on time and effort of teaching, not even starting in to what research and “service” activities or various sorts pile on.

But I’m not going to lay out all these details because the people who are reading David C. Levy’s op-ed and nodding approvingly just don’t care.

They will simply deny that my workload could be what it actually is.

Or, they will insist that I’m somehow exceptional and that everyone else in a tenured position in a teaching-focused state university is doing much, much less (and that those slackers at community colleges are doing less still).

But I’m pretty sure the ugly truth is that these people believe that my students, and the community college students, do not deserve quality education at a reasonable price.

And, I’m pretty sure they believe that professors at teaching-focused state universities and at community colleges (not to mention public school teachers, too) do not deserve to make a middle-class wage. Never mind that we sometimes work so many hours that it’s hard to find time to spend it (for example, to get to the grocery store to buy food for our kids, or OTC medicine for ourselves so we can drag our lazy, sniffly asses in to class to keep teaching).

It matters not a whit to these people how many years we have devoted to our education and training. A Ph.D. program (or two) is obviously just a multi-year exercise in sloth.

Verily, to these people I and my entire sector of the workforce are a problem to be solved. We are doing something of which they do not approve, and even if we were giving it away for free and living on alms, they would hate us.

I can’t argue with committed ignorance of that magnitude. I cannot counter such thoroughgoing selfishness.

So this time, I won’t even try. Instead, I’m going to fix myself a drink, make dinner for my family, and brace myself for as many more hours of work as I can manage before my eyelids refuse to stay open.

When gate agents attempt to be social engineers.

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I have just returned to Casa Free-Ride after a few days at a thoroughly engaging conference about which I’ll have more to say soon. Getting home required air travel, this time on United.

There are many airlines that have so many levels of premium member stratification that they have run out of precious metals and gemstones by which to identify them in calling them to board. However, United is the first airline I have noticed that gets really tetchy about precisely which lane the non-premium members queue up in for their approach to the gate agent who scans the boarding passes even after all our betters the premium members have boarded. See, the premium lane has this special blue carpet on it that, it seems, is only to be trod upon by the feet of those special in the eyes of United Airlines. Indeed, on more than one leg of the trip I just completed, the gate agents actually halted the boarding of a plane to move everyone in the passenger-group-now-boarding from the fancy blue-carpeted premium lane to the economy lane.

Gate agents, the premium passengers have already boarded! They will not see the great unwashed swarm of economy travelers stepping on their blue carpet of awesomeness!

Anyway, on the last leg of my travel, the amplified gate agent (who was announcing which groups were invited aboard) was both distinct from the gate agent scanning boarding passes and several yards away from the boarding lanes for the gate. Thus, she tried to direct people to the appropriate lane by reiterating that the premium lane was the one on the left and the economy lane was the lane on the right.

It turns out USian air travelers cannot (or will not) distinguish left from right any better than your typical U12 soccer player. (How well is that? As a soccer coach, let me tell you: not very well at all.)

In short, it strikes me that United is:

  1. Attempting to get USian air travelers to accept a rigid class system, and
  2. Attempting to do so based on people’s knowledge of the difference between right and left.

I fear both of these attempts are doomed to failure (although maybe for different reasons).

A hole inside where my optimism used to be.

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I have discovered that whatever patience I may have once had for students who think it’s a reasonable strategy to try to deceive their way through “meeting” requirements in an ethics course has completely eroded. There’s not a bit of it left, just a gaping hole where it used to be.

What’s more, I think I came to the mistaken impression that I still had some patience in reserve largely due to my lack of inner shout-y-ness* about these students.

It turns out the inner shout-y-ness is gone because the part of me that regulates it has concluded that it’s wasted energy. I cannot save adults who have decided to cheat at ethics for a grade. This is not to say I believe they cannot change — just that I cannot change them. At least, not with the tools at my disposal.**

This realization leaves me feeling kind of sad.

Also, I think it has changed my strategy with regards to setting explicit expectations (for example, specifying that students are only allowed to use class readings and notes, discussions with classmates, and their own wits on certain assignments, and that using any other materials for these assignments is forbidden), and then enforcing them with no wiggle-room. At this point, if a student specifies (in writing) that he or she understands the rules and agrees to follow them else fail the course and face administrative sanctions, I am going to treat that as an enforceable contract.

Because honestly, with a critical mass of students who do seem willing to conduct themselves ethically in an ethics class, it’s probably better for everyone if I can remove the few who are not.

I only wish removing the bad actors didn’t leave me feeling dead inside.

_____
*Shout-y-ness is so a word.

**This is not an oblique request for a torture chamber. That’s not really my scene.

Pursuing your goals in a world with other people.

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Apropos of the discussion here, I offer some general thoughts on pursuing partner, career, family, or other aims one deems important:

  1. Knowing what you want can be handy. Among other things, it can help you identify when you’ve found it. If you have no idea what you want, recognizing it when you have it can be harder.
  2. On the other hand, being able to specify exactly what you want is not a guarantee that you can or will attain it. It could be, for example, that your desired simultaneous combination of partner-career-family-other aims does not exist.
  3. Hypothetical people that meet all our desiderata may be easier to get along with in our imagination than are actual flesh-and-blood people who embody those desiderata. Happily, it often turns out that actual flesh-and-blood people who significantly depart from some of the desiderata we set a priori are wonderful to be with.
  4. It’s possible that there’s something creepy about choosing a life partner on the basis of an a priori list of criteria (as opposed to, say, getting to know hir and deciding zie is a person whose companionship you value), especially if those criteria tend to specify services that imagined life partner will provide in advancing your aims. It kind of sets you up to be a self-serving creep who doesn’t care about your partner’s needs or aspirations.
  5. If your aims matter to you — if they’re really worth pursuing — sometimes this requires that you sacrifice other aims.
  6. If you, personally, are unwilling to sacrifice aim X to pursue aim Y, that probably means that, push come to shove, you value aim X more. That’s fine — but it might be a good idea to make your peace with the possibility that you can’t have both X and Y.
  7. If you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X, you might have to adjust your expectations about the level of attainment that will be possible. (Depending on values of X and Y here, this might involve ratcheting down career aspirations to something slightly less competitive, lucrative, prestigious, and/or time-consuming, scaling back on the projected number of your progeny, ratcheting down your expectations for a spotless home, what have you.)
  8. On the other hand, if you really, really want to pursue aim Y without abandoning your pursuit of aim X and you therefore make it someone else’s job to pick up the slack on one of these two goals, it strikes me that you ought to make damn sure that this someone else (a) values the goal you are asking hir to pursue on your behalf and (b) that zie is not being forced thereby to abandon the pursuit of some other goal that zie values more.
  9. This is a good moment to remember Kant’s insight that treating others as mere means to advance your goals rather than recognizing them an setters of their own goals is thoroughly assy behavior.
  10. In some circumstances, the least exploitative way to achieve the goal that matters to you but not so much that you’ll sacrifice pursuit of your other goals to attain it is to pay someone else to do it. After all, money can be exchanged for goods and services, which might make it useful to the person whose assistance you are getting in pursuing some of hir goals.
  11. Institutions that stack the deck in favor of some classes of people being expected to sacrifice their own aims in order to accommodate (or actively support) other classes of people in the pursuit of their goals suck big bags of crap.
  12. When you recognize that institutional structures support your pursuit of your goals by limiting the options of others to pursue their goals, it would be a real show of humanity (and of not being an entitled ass) to do what you can to increase the potential for those other people to pursue their goals. It would also be cool to examine the institutional structures that stack the deck and figure out how to start dismantling them. (If you need a self-interested reason to do this, consider that fate may conspire to make you care greatly for the happiness and well-being of someone on the short end of this institutional structural stick.)
  13. In an environment where some people’s goals are presumed to matter more than others (because of what class they are in rather than anything to do with the particulars of their goals), or where certain goals are judged in advance to be more appropriate (or “natural”) to members of some classes of people, it is hard as hell to identify “freely chosen goals” that are actually free of the influence of various institutional structures. But, people who don’t live in vacuums can’t set goals that don’t assume the persistence of certain features of our background environment.
  14. Sometimes taking your own goals seriously may require imagining — even working for — the non-persistence of certain features of our background environment. This may also be required to take seriously the goals and aspirations of other people who matter to you. It doesn’t mean changing those features will be easy, but few goals worth pursuing are.

I hope I can be forgiven the Xs and Ys in the discussion here, as I think what’s at stake ranges far beyond the traditional work/life balance issues about how to divvy up housework and parenting, whose career advancement to prioritize, et cetera. I think it cuts to the core of treating other people as fully human.

And, for some reason, it seems an awful lot like politicians, policy makers, and pundits are having a harder time with that lately than they should be. It feels like the rest of us have to pick up some of that slack.

Some things I think are elitist.

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Given that some presidential hopefuls think it’s elitist for President Obama to support universal access to higher education, and given that I work in higher education, I figured this might be a good time for me to tell you about some things I think are elitist.

It’s elitist to decide “college isn’t for everyone” — not that people who choose not to go to college don’t deserve guff for that (I agree, they don’t), but that the people you’ve decided are needed to do the manual labor in your society shouldn’t go to college, because really, what would be the point?

Perhaps the point is that some of the people who attend to your manual labor needs want to go to college. Maybe they would find immersing themselves in higher education for a while enjoyable, something that feeds their needs as human beings. Just because higher education is not a requirement for workers in a particular kind of job does not mean that it would be “wasted” on those workers. Making the blanket assumption that it would be wasted on them is elitist.

It’s also elitist to decide that, even if it’s not strictly necessary for a career path, college is a fine way for people of means to spend their time and money, while deciding in the same breath that it’s an extravagance for people without lots of disposable income to partake of it. This attitude casts higher education as a commodity that only the wealthy deserve. It’s the same attitude that scolds college students for accumulating lots of student debt studying “useless” subjects with which they will not be able to secure big salaries upon graduation and swiftly pay off their student loans. It’s the same attitude that motivates tax payers to lean on lawmakers in their states to get rid of “frivolous” subjects in state university curricula (usually humanities, but pure sciences — and really, much of what isn’t business or engineering — regularly make these lists of curricular frivolity), the better to turn publicly supported higher education into no-frills trade schools.

Indeed, I don’t know how it isn’t elitist to decide for loads of other people you don’t even know (let alone for people you do know) what it’s worth their time to study. I have no problem if you decide that you don’t want to explore Latin American philosophy, or German literature, or interior design, or forensic chemistry, but once you tell someone else that she shouldn’t? You’re deciding that you know what’s best for her with no clear basis for this judgment beyond your commitment that people like her don’t need to study [X] (and thus shouldn’t).

And the cherry on top of the elitist sundae is for anyone — professors, politicians, parents, whoever — to decide that it’s appropriate to remake someone else in your image. No other human being, child or grown-up, is a lump of Play-Doh whose role is to take your impression. Treating others primarily as fodder for your attempts at self-replication is deeply disrespectful and elitist in that it singles out certain people as appropriate impression-makers and everyone else as an appropriate impression-taker.

My job as a liberal arts college professor is to give my students the tools to set their own paths in life (to the extent one can in a world in which we share space and other resources with other people, and have to pay rent, and such). I’m not going to tell them who to be. I don’t want to tell them who to be. I want to help them find the space, and to have the freedom, to figure out who they want to be, and then to set about being that person. And, I believe that all of my students (and all of the humans who are not my students) are entitled to this without regard to socioeconomic class.

If that’s what’s passing for “elitist” these days, then I’m going to need a new dictionary to keep up.

On being asked a question to which I did not have a ready answer.

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After my “Ethics in Science” class today, one of my students asked me a question:

“What is philosophy?”

My immediate response was, “That’s a good question!”

I didn’t have a course catalogue handy from which to crib a pithy description, nor my department website (although it turns out that describes instrumental reasons one might want to study philosophy rather than pinning down what exactly it is that you’d be studying).

I could have gone the Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” route, but I have too many memories of people doing this in my graduate department — and in a way so narrow that is seemed often to put everything that was not logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, or old school philosophy of science on the “That doesn’t look like philosophy to me!” side of the line.

What I ended up saying is that philosophy tends to take things we take for granted — justice, right and wrong, friendship, time and space, knowledge, science, beauty, what have you — and interrogate what we think we know about them.

Do we have a coherent concept of (say) cause and effect? Do we have a consistent view? Is it a view that corresponds to actual stuff in the world, or just to the structures of the human mind organizing the information we can get about the stuff in the world? Do we need that concept to do other stuff we care about? Would we be better off without such a concept (and if so, how)?

What comes out of these efforts at interrogation varies. Sometimes we come away with a better understanding of the concept or practice about which we’ve been asking questions. Sometimes we come away with a lot of unanswered questions (some of which may even leave us without good strategies for trying to nail down answers). Sometimes we piss people off, upset the social order, and get handed the cup o’ hemlock.

Maybe this means that philosophy is less a unified subject matter than a set of habits of mind, “question[ing] everything … except your intelligence,” as the Philosophy Talk guys describe it in their tagline. Or maybe it means I need to be sure I have a concise answer at the ready the next time this question comes up … except that I had a real Suzanne Farrell moment* thinking about the question: I didn’t know the answer to the question, but I love that my student made me think about it again.

_____
* Let the record reflect that this was a Suzanne Farrell moment that did not involve an affair with the parent of one of my students.

Is it time to go Lysistrata?

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In the ancient (written circa 411 BCE) Greek comedy Lysistrata, the character of the title attempts to end the Peloponnesian War by getting the women of Greece to leverage what power they have to influence the men in charge of that society. These women agree that until the war is over, there will be no sex.*

It strikes me that in the year 2012 we are seeing in the U.S. a political war waged against women’s personhood and bodily autonomy.** As part of this war, lawmakers have required women to endure waiting periods (in the span of days) to obtain a legal medical procedure which becomes progressively less safe the longer it is delayed. As part of this war, lawmakers will require that women who seek a legal medical procedure be subjected to a medically unnecessary procedure that, when conducted without consent, amounts to rape. As part of this war, other lawmakers are seeking to remove the legal right to this medical procedure altogether (and to treat doctors who perform it as criminals). The warriors rolling back bodily autonomy elide termination of pregnancy with prevention of pregnancy, and frame as a matter of religious freedom the desire of members of certain religions to restrict the bodily autonomy of people who do not even adhere to those religions.

This is a war in which, in the year 2012, the very availability of contraceptives (which, by the way, have reasonable medical uses besides preventing pregnancy) is now up for grabs.

I don’t know about you, but my plans for 2012 ran more to jet-packs than The Handmaid’s Tale. And I’m starting to wonder if it might not be time to go Lysistrata to end this damn war.

You see, the fact that in the U.S. women make up more than half of the voting age population doesn’t mean that women make up a proportional share of elected lawmakers (or judges, or presidents of the United States). And members of the U.S. House of Representatives apparently think it’s just fine to convene hearings on contraception coverage featuring 10 expert witnesses, eight of whom are male, and none of whom testify in support of contraceptive coverage. And politicians from the party that’s supposedly carrying the progressive banner think it’s politically smart to use our bodily autonomy as a bargaining chip — to get stuff that’s more important, apparently.

What’s more important to you than autonomy over your own body? If you can make a list here, I’m guessing it’s not very long.

What if we declared a sex-strike until the people who purport to represent us came around to the view that our personhood and bodily autonomy is non-negotiable?

Sure, such an action is unlikely to reach the forced-birth theocratic extremists, since they are pretty open in their view that women are lesser creatures, not to be trusted with decisions about their own health or lives.*** My guess is that these people do not care terribly about the wishes of women with whom they are partnered**** (or, if they do, that they regard these women as exceptional compared to the women against whom they seek to use governmental power). Persuading these extremists of my personhood would be about as rewarding trying to have a dialogue with a hexagon, and significantly less likely to succeed.

But maybe a sex-strike would grab the attention of our fair-weather feminist allies, the ones who pay all kinds of lip service to our personhood and bodily autonomy when there’s an election to win, then turn on their heels and start bargaining it away for their own political advantage.

These folks might change their ways if they had skin in the game — or, as they case might be, if they got no skin and no game.

Far be it from me to suggest that men are more vulnerable to their desire for funsexytime than are women. They are not. However, I reckon it’s easier to be in the mood for funsexytime when your very personhood is not up for debate.

I find legislative threats to my bodily autonomy a real mood-killer. And, I’d much rather share funsexytime with a partner who takes my well-being seriously enough to view the war on woman as a war that needs to be stopped in its tracks, now. Someone who wouldn’t see it as politically expedient, let alone clever.

Because guess what? I would never presume I was entitled to funsexytime with someone whose personhood and bodily autonomy I didn’t step up to fight for when it was under threat. Heck, I would step up to fight for the personhood and bodily autonomy even of people with whom I have no desire to have funsexytime because that’s what decent human beings do.

And my choice is to refrain from funsexytime with anyone to whom my interests do not matter at least that much. People who cannot manage to see me and others like me as fully human do not deserve to get any action that might not also result in a repetitive stress injury.

Not being all-in in the fight to protect the bodily autonomy and personhood of women and others with uteri is a deal-breaker for me. Is it a deal-breaker for you?

_____
*Including no “Lioness on The Cheese Grater,” a sex position upon which we can only hope SciCurious will one day blog.

**This is also a war against the bodily autonomy of other persons with uteri.

***And yet, to be entrusted with babies that they may not want. If ever there was a non-standard logic …

****This does raise the question for me of how men of this sort can have sex with women who they view as not-fully-human by virtue of the very fact that they are women. Wouldn’t such sexual congress amount to bestiality, the next step on the slippery slope after gay marriage, which they are generally against?