Feminism and Figure Skating

One of the morals of the story is that when people are not accountable to anyone, most decent souls police themselves. Others do whatever they can get away with. These days, one manifestation of that is cheating on papers. With the advent of the internet, it's easy to find or buy information online. Most of us wouldn't cheat if a completed paper were lying on the street in front of us. But some will do whatever it takes (short of the work itself) to get ahead. Academic cheaters have extra power because they know how to use computers. The way to even the odds is to give teachers tools to detect cheating.

Academic cheaters shortchange mostly themselves. Instead of learning, they acquire bogus credentials with no skills to back them up. But cheaters like Professor Sleaze deprive people (mostly women in this case) of the education they would otherwise pursue. They also have a lot more personal power than an academic cheater. They can capriciously pass or fail a student whose reputation depends on her grades. They can derail the schooling of someone whose education depends on scholarship funds. This is not bullying. It is pure evil, and for many years, people like that man got away with it.

Not militant feminism, Math, but activist feminism, and with that word change I'd agree with you. The thing about people like Professor Sleaze is that they isolate their victims. They have power, and the individual victims have none. Each victim assumes that she's alone and without recourse, and the next step is to assume that she brought it on herself, and anyway that's all she's worth. When she can join with others, she will see the equation in a different way. (Math pun not intended.) She sees whose fault it really is, and she begins to see a way to even the odds. This is democracy in its purest form. Everyone gets to have a voice. Everyone deserves the right to protect herself or himself.

There are other morals to the story too, of course. The silence of the powerful when they do not themselves have anything at stake, for one. I'm sure we can think of others.

Mathman said:

^ See? That's why we need militant feminism. If a gang of ladies had got together and beat the bejesus out of him, he might have changed his ways.

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Not militant feminism, Math, but militants, and with that word change I'd agree with you.
Indeed, when social injustice is not properly dealt with, people may eventually take the law into their own hands (e.g., beat the bejesus out of him). I felt indignant when I read a story like that.

You know, when people complain that feminists are too militant, civil rights activists are too aggressive, gay pride advocates are too much in your face -- I have to say, consider what they are up against.

Here is Schopenhauer (from the essay "On Women")

One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labour. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. Great suffering, joy, exertion, is not for her: her life should flow by more quietly, trivially, gently than the man’s without being essentially happier or unhappier.



...Thus nature has equipped women, as it has all its creatures, with the tools and weapons she needs for securing her existence, and at just the time she needs them; in doing which nature has acted with its usual economy. For just as the female ant loses it’s wings after mating, since they are then superfluous, indeed harmful to the business of raising the family, so the woman usually loses her beauty after one or two childbeds, and probably for the same reason.

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Sez you, Arthur! Check out Kristi Yamaguchi or Ekaterina Gordeeva after two kids.

I don't know who Schopenhauer is, but if he comes to me for a psychoanalysis, my first impression upon hearing his view on women would be: Is his relationship with his mother strained? (Sorry, too much Freud in school). Were there constant fights and power struggles between his parents during his formative years? Is that his rationalization or defensive mechanism for his inability to establish a long-term loving commitment with another woman? Has he ever had a secret affair with a man? Then I would focus our session on the dynamic of his family, a family seemingly full of psychological suffering (I got that impression from his statement "She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering").

My point is: He needs to see a doctor.

And we women had to sit there and take this for generations, not only from religion, but from science. In his defense, Schopenhauer died in 1860. The poor man had limitations that he couldn't help.

But I love your suggested procedure, BC.

When told by his fellow clergymen that he had possibly acted hastily by inserting himself into the situation in Birmingham, Martin Luther King wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail, explaining why he felt that a certain urgency of behavior was warranted.

"We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter."