{"id":3052,"date":"2008-08-12T07:30:14","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T12:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3052"},"modified":"2010-02-08T19:30:17","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T00:30:17","slug":"when-the-mind-cant-get-any-bogglier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=3052","title":{"rendered":"When The Mind Can’t Get Any Bogglier"},"content":{"rendered":"

UPDATE 2\/8\/2010 – Greetings, visitors from “Also Spake Zustra!”\u00a0 I have a special message for you at the bottom of this post:<\/p>\n

Original post follows:<\/p>\n

———-<\/p>\n

I don’t read the blog “Feministing” for reasoned, rational commentary<\/a> (via KAR<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Indeed, I rarely read it at all.<\/p>\n

As the Twin Cities’ best feminist, it’s depressing, really, to see the perversions that pass for “Feminism” among some of these people.<\/p>\n

But you learn to accept that as a given after a while.<\/p>\n

What’s funny, though, is catching the occasional dispatch from Cloud Nine.<\/p>\n

Academic humanities departments,nationwide, are solidly left-of-center, politically and socially. While my English major advisor indeed, started me on the road to conservatism, we were both outliers. It’s entirely possible to go through a career in humanities, I suspect, and ever have to confront conservatism as anything but a set of stereotypes that you mock with your colleagues.<\/p>\n

So this bit here<\/a>, from a Teaching Assistant at an unnamed graduate program, is interesting; it’s a cry from the heart of a woman having to face…people who approach the world differently than her.<\/p>\n

And it’s heart-rending indeed:<\/p>\n

I’m a graduate student, teaching a freshman-level writing class. I’ve been a feminist pretty much from the moment my mom popped me out. Anyway, I always lived in a bubble–thinking that the way I thought was simple common sense. Women are equal. Birth control is good. Yada yada yada. I realized as a I grew up, however, that the liberal home life I knew was not the reality for the rest of my peers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, for many people that can be a growth experience.<\/p>\n

Question for the class: How did\/does our author perceive this?<\/p>\n

And then, last fall, I began teaching composition to university freshmen. My students are, by and large, white, affluent, politically and religiously conservative. To many of them, feminism is a bad word and young, female teachers are pushovers and useless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To be fair to the students, if this post is any indication, it may not be a group assessment.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s the age gap, as I am 26 to their 18. Maybe it’s the cultural gap, as I am in the deep-South, but spent most of my formative years in more urban, liberal regions of the globe. There are a lot of maybes here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, indeed. Let’s keep going:<\/p>\n