Mansplainer Exposes Mansplainy Tactics, Internet is Polite

Screen shot of Jay Michaelson’s article, from Daily Beast.

I’m dashing this post off because I should be working. But it’s such a perfect example of something I’ve had a problem with for a while, that I can’t let it go.

Today, I read an article by one Dr Jay Michaelson, over on Daily Beast. Michaelson sets himself up as a righteously angry ally of transpeople, furious with ‘mainstream gay activists’. Pompously, Michaelson begins:

“For years, some mainstream gay activists said … “Just wait—first we’ll get our rights, and then you’ll get yours.”

As offensive and patronizing as that was, what has come to pass is far worse.”

This sonorous rhetoric would have had more effect, however, if Jay hadn’t mixed up two slightly important words in this debate. For, in the bit I’ve elided in the quotation above, he named the community he felt was suffering so. ‘The cisgender community’.

I thought it was a typo, but it’s not: throughout the article we have references to the many and sad instances of oppression of trans people, consistently referred to as ‘cis’.

Was it some kind of satire? Was Jay just very, very, very stupid? I couldn’t work it out, so I went off to twitter to see what everyone else thought.

Having seen what’s happened to Mary Beard, and to some of my Oxford colleagues, this past week, I did have a fair sense of what I’d find on twitter. We’d simply signed a letter speaking out against no-platforming of feminists, and this had blown up into a storm of (unfounded) accusations of transphobia. So how would people react to this bloke, who’d faked sympathy with trans people in order to take a pop at gay activists, and exposed his own bigotry by failing to grasp the simplest basics of trans-friendly language?

He’d be pilloried, right? Called evil, ugly, stupid, and senile? Told he must be inflicting terrible verbal violence and outrage?

Well … no. “I think you mixed the two up,” someone comments politely. “Lots of questions re. your use of ‘cisgender'” they continue, respectfully (oh, ok, it could be sarcasm, but it’s respectful sarcasm). “Article uses cisgender where it means transgender, I think?” questions someone else. Cos, you know, you politely question mansplainy dudes. You don’t correct them outright.

But worse was to come. I looked and looked, trying to see a glimmer of the outrage I’d have expected, to come upon the single outright insult … a reference to “slightly confused @jaymichaelson”.

Need I underline the lesson? Would this have happened if he’d been, say, a woman?

Update: Popped a screenshot in, as funnily enough, I imagine this will be edited (aka, swept under the carpet) soon enough.

Safe Space and the University (Trigger Warning)

I’m turning over a lot of thoughts about safe spaces and triggers at the moment.

Next year, I’m going to go into a lecture hall, hopefully with about 50-70 undergraduates, and I’m going to talk to them about how a brutal rape becomes funny, and then, about how men use it as an excuse to act out violent homoerotic fantasies. I’m going to talk about how the rapist – like most rapists in this context – is an immigrant, a foreigner. Many of his co-rapists are black. They are all monstrous, probably by nature. But then, most women are natural liars, with no sense of loyalty. Even supposedly impartial observers are so disgusted with them (or so bored?) they’ll write whole accounts of this brutal rape narrative, without ever mentioning the word rape.

Well, ok. You know, if you’re reading this, that I’m talking about a fictional narrative, and a fictional narrative written over 500 years ago (though that ‘impartial observer’ I’m thinking of is a scholar, who deserves a ‘WTF were you thinking’ for his article on the Alliterative Morte). You probably know, if you read this blog regularly, that I won’t go into the lecture hall and say it all just as I’ve written it here. I will explain context; I will talk to my students about how insidiously damaging this narrative is, how it still influences us, how it lies to us. I will name the problems: I will call it misogynistic and racist. But, it will still upset a lot of those students.

I know that, statistically, in that class of 50-70 students, some will be survivors of rape or sexual assault. Some will be students of ethnic minorities. Well over half will be women. That lecture hall will not be a ‘safe space’ for them to learn about literature in. It’s really difficult to know what to do about that. Do I give these lectures – which I firmly believe are good literary criticism, and provide us with good tools to be wise to the ways in which literature perpetuates racism and misogyny? Or do I avoid saying anything that will have these students shrinking inside, and feeling personally exposed, and upset?

The context of this question is this letter, which I’ve signed, and which went out in the Observer today. The gist of it is that, at the moment, there’s a big debate about what ‘safe space’ should mean in a university. Should speakers who may be controversial – or worse, who may say profoundly upsetting things – be allowed to speak? Should students feel duty-bound to protest?

I want to be clear: this is not, for me, about ‘censorship’. That letter only mentions the word ‘censorship’ once – in the quoted title of an article providing context. I don’t think no-platforming any individual is censorship (I don’t like it, but that’s not what it amounts to). It seems reasonable enough to decide you don’t want someone to speak – and it’s certainly reasonable to demonstrate, or protest, against invitations to speakers with whose views you profoundly disagree. No. The problem is that, when you look at the bigger pattern, we are still much more willing to silence women than men, feminists than not. That’s a pattern that worries me.

It worries me because I would like to keep teaching in a context where I can talk about things that are profoundly upsetting, and triggering, and on which I do have an ideological perspective. I want to teach in a context where people feel able to disagree with me – absolutely, categorically, without reservations – but where they’ll talk to me about it. I don’t want to see a university where we never mention questions like the politics of rape, of heterosex, of prostitution, of race relations.

Applying for a Postdoc. First, imagine you are an idiot …

Ok, just a rant.

I read the Guardian HE section, on and off, and sometimes it’s quite helpful and interesting. Not so much, today. Today we have a guide to getting a postdoc. I started reading, winced at the stats (14% of Arts and Humanities PhDs end up with research posts), and got settled in to the advice section. This is advice culled (and, I suspect, heavily edited down and decontextualised) from a group of senior academics. I’m sure they meant really well, and I’m fairly sure they don’t actually believe their PhD students are idiots, but … really?

It’s easy to be mean. “Be cautious about firing off out-of-the-blue emails” made me snort. There’s a bit of a stereotype of well-intended advice you get from your bewildered family (‘she seemed so smart at school, but she’s 29 and still just reading things’), which includes ‘couldn’t you just send Oxford your CV and ask if they’ve got anything?’ I suppose it’s nice to know that this is, like, officially frowned upon, but I kinda think most of us have worked that one out.

On the positive side, reading this article it would seem that the competition for jobs includes people who’ve completed a PhD and still haven’t cottoned on that applying using the form and guidelines provided, as opposed to, perhaps, interpretative dance, would be a great start. If these really are the hurdles at which most prospective postdocs fall, then really, we should all be celebrating.

What bothers me most about this advice, though, is that I think some of it is actually wrong. Tucked in amongst snippets I think my careers advisor told me when I was 16, there’s this:

Applying when you don’t meet the essential requirements is a waste of time. It also has reputation costs. If you get a number of applications that is not huge, you will tend to remember names from one time to the next. It doesn’t make a good impression to receive the application of someone a second time if you still remember that this person applied for another job for which he or she was not suitable at all. It sends a signal that they are not attentive to detail, which is something highly valued in academic jobs. (Laura Morales, professor in comparative politics, University of Leicester)

I see where she’s coming from with this, and I bet it is really frustrating to keep getting the same puppy-eyed candidate popping up everywhere, but I think this needs unpicking.

When I started applying for jobs, I didn’t get anywhere. Nada. Not even a call to interview. At some point, my supervisor started sending me job adverts, for jobs for which I wasn’t qualified. And I’d write back and point out, look, they’re asking me to have experience supervising MA candidates, and I don’t. Or, look, they only want someone with publications, and I don’t have any. One day, I fired off an application for a teaching job at Cambridge, for which I didn’t meet the job spec.

I can’t actually remember how I didn’t meet the spec now. I was so sure I wasn’t going to need it that I deleted the job particulars from my computer after I’d sent in my application. Don’t try this at home, kids. It’s really annoying when you get called for interview and have only a hazy memory of what you’re applying for. On a related note, when you’re in the interview and they ask if there’s any reason you applied for the one-year post and not the twenty-six month one, you should probably find something better than ‘nah, I was just disorganized’. Also, when they phone you a couple of hours after the interview, that’s a good sign. You want to be listening for your phone to take that call. You do not want to be fannying around Cambridge, such that the very kind head of the Search Committee has to ring you back at 9pm.

At every stage in the process, I did not expect to get that job. Because I’ve read an awful lot of pieces like the one in the Guardian, and they all made me feel as if I was bound to fail – for the most trivial reasons – before I’d even started.

What’s telling about my experience – other than the fact that, clearly, I am an idiot – is that an awful lot of women (and, I’m sure, some men) do the same things. We don’t expect to get jobs. We read the stats and we know that only 14% of us will get research jobs (NB: mine is not a research job). And we look at our own CVs and they never measure up to what the job is asking for.

I know there are far more very good people than there are academic jobs. I can believe it’s really frustrating to come across candidates who make the really basic mistakes described in the Guardian article. But I think there is a bigger problem with articles like this one, which don’t really provide any useful advice that couldn’t be gleaned from a sixth-form careers day. They suggest we’re all failing to get jobs because, really, we’re all a bit lazy, stupid, and unmotivated. We think too highly of ourselves and expect we’ll be considered without having the courtesy to fill in a proper application form, wait for an official job advert, or bother to get to know people in the field.

I’ve no idea how you get a postdoc. Luck, probably. But you definitely don’t get a postdoc if you keep telling yourself you’re no good and might as well not apply.