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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Gina Barreca

July 2, 2009

The One Kind Of Woman Who Drives Me Crazy

Okay, I’ll admit it: sisterhood is powerful, but it isn’t all powerful.

There’s one kind of broad I just can’t stand. You know the type: she’s a delicate flower. (N.B.: Yes, I know: some men do it, too. But the culture congratulates women on helplessness while it punishes men—at least publicly. More about this in another post.)

What characterizes the delicate flower? She can’t wear anything except eighteen-carat-gold jewelry without getting a rash; she can only have silk next to the skin (or pima cotton if she’s really slumming it). She absolutely must have organically grown, hand-picked, hand-squeezed grapefruit juice and she would drop down dead if you applied anything but fresh tarragon to her chicken. She requires an office with a big window because she gets sad on long winter days but she pines for specially treated glass because she doesn’t like to work in direct sunlight.

She has never pumped her own gas.

Notice any impatience here? It’s well earned; I claim a collective voice. I speak for all of us who purchase earrings where the fanciest metallic detail is wrought in aluminum, those of us who wear blouses made from any fabric not needing ironing, who drink V-8, buy “Tubs O’Spice” from a warehouse club, and work in the green cinderblock basement office where they put us.

It’s not that we don’t have our own anxieties or weaknesses, but we face them with courage and accept responsibility for them. If we’re so terrified of thunderstorms that we can’t leave the house on a cloudy day, we don’t figure out how to work from home; we go to a counsellor. If we hate writing, we don’t become college professors; we choose a different career. If we hate driving, we don’t have somebody else take us everywhere; we learn to use the GPS; if we hate flying, we don’t travel by Bonanza; we learn to travel with Dr. Smirnoff.

We get help when we need it—and that help makes us more independent. We get on with life.

Does this make heroines? Does it even make us good sports? Do people look at us with respect and say “ Let me shake your hand, m’dear! You’re a real trooper!” No, it makes us lumbering peasants, Cinderella’s tacky sisters, pond scum far removed from the refined, exquisite, rare jewels who must be protected and cherished.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t complain about any woman getting attention any way she can, but it seems to me that the precious whiney delicate flowers are letting us all down.

These women were once the girls who broke movie dates with their best friends in order to wait at home in case a boy called; these are the ones who disassociate themselves from the causes around which other women rally because they want to be seen as unusual, and as wonderfully different from the rest of their sex.

While we’ve all been fighting the good fight to be accepted as peers, they insist on being seen as sweet little things who can’t stand the pressures of the big bad world.

When I hear the high-pitched wail of the princess, I steam like a pot of overcooked pasta. What happened to the rewards of independence?

to be continued/crossposted with PT

Comment [19]

June 28, 2009

Questions Concerning Women and Comedy

When Mae West said, “What a tragedy for a man, what an opportunity for a woman,” she summed up one of the ways in which women’s comedy differs from men’s — in some cases, women can see possibilities for comedy and humor where men can only see failure.

I’m not only thinking about governors, of course. But I’m not not thinking about them.

When things fall apart, women’s comedy comes into ascendency. Women are often their funniest after their worst experiences.

Women use comedy to narrate their experience and so diffuse the pain.

If you’re a woman, how many times have you called your best friend in the middle of the night, woken her up from a sound sleep to tell her the most horrible story about being abandoned at a party, being set up on the world’s worst blind date, about being fired, about being embarrassed, beginning the conversation with tears of anger or depression and ending with tears of laughter?

I bet it’s a lot.

How about if you’re a guy?

I bet it’s fewer.

Your friend will try to retrieve your sense of perspective by introducing humor; I would say it works more effectively with women.

Traditional forms of therapy work on the same, rather feminized principle: Tell somebody your troubles and it’ll help solve them. It is important to remember, however, that to anyone besides a therapist whom you pay to hear your problems, you had better make your stories as palatable as possible. It’s all right to complain as long as you don’t seem self-pitying and narcissistic.

The greatest comics always complained about their lives. Carol Leifer’s complaint about her ex-husband — “It was a mixed marriage,” she confides, “I’m human, he was Klingon” — is very different from the tedious repetition of wrongs so familiar to us all. Learning to frame our disappointments and anger by using comedy give us a sense of control over our own lives as well as letting other people express their concern without having to manipulate them into sympathy.

Dorothy Parker once commented that if all the girls at the Yale prom were “laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” “To hell with criticism,” remarked Tallulah Bankhead, “praise is good enough for me.” Mae West said that it was very hard to be funny when you had to be clean. When were images of strong, bitchy women found funny — when were these condemned? How could Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers get away with condemning their husbands and children in a 1960s world that believed in the “feminine mystique?”

Is it true, as Joan Rivers claims, that “There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl?”

More about this in a later post, but I’d like to know what you think particularly about Rivers’s line….

Comment [34]

June 23, 2009

'And I'd Like to Thank My Wife for ...'



In one of the most popular novels depicting the “masculine mystique” of the 1950s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, we hear one of the main characters worry about the difference between the fantasy of marriage and actual married life.

Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel describes a “typical” family living for “seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut,” which husband and wife both “detest,” for “many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling.” The crux of Wilson’s argument seems to be summed up by the line “Nothing’s wrong with our marriage, or at least nothing permanen. t. . . We can’t be like a couple of children . . . playing house forever.” By telling themselves that they can’t expect to play house forever, the couple in Sloan’s novel is trying to account for the loss of pleasure they experienced after the first few years of marriage.

They do not confront the deep nature of their misery but instead blame the system. They regard themselves as the victims of a world bent on destroying the integrity of the individual; they do not see that there could be something wrong with them as a couple. Tellingly, Sloan’s 1984 novel, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit II, has the couple divorce, showing each making new lives of their own.

But there is no hint of that split in the earlier book — unless one is to look at the author’s acknowledgements. This document, which is not part of the novel itself but is instead part of the nonfiction prefatory material, declares of the author’s wife that while “many of the thoughts on which this book is based are hers,” for two years she also “mowed the lawn, took care of the children, and managed the family finances” so that Sloan could find time to write.

Perhaps she grew tired of all her ideas being penned under someone else’s name while she did all the background work to make it possible?

The wife as volunteer muse/amanuensis/typist/editor/proofreader is not an unusual series of roles for a woman to assume. What is unusual for the wife in such a situation is getting any acknowledgement for her contributions, aside from a few words in the front of the book that can be altered with each edition. Being supportive of a spouse in his or her work is, surely, what one expects. When that support translates into doing another person’s work as if it were one’s own, however, the dynamic changes drastically. The male author does not see his wife as a co-author, even if she positions herself in such a manner. The dust jacket will boast his name, the check arrive with his social security number, and all fame will be awarded to him.

It is not true that behind every famous man stands a good woman, but what is true is that anyone standing behind someone else is necessarily overshadowed by them. I have heard tale after tale of academic wives, wives of writers, wives of musicians, wives of painters — wives of any sort of “creative” man — who are driven to fury by the position they find themselves in after years of doing someone else’s work instead of their own. Women who in their own right could have written, composed, covered canvases, or sculpted steel, find themselves discarded by their husbands or at least written off rather than written about.

What do these husbands have to say about the situation? “She became a functionary in my life. I swear that if I had learned to use a computer 10 years earlier, I probably never would have married her. God forgive me, but I knew that I couldn’t make it through graduate school without somebody like her. But, you see, it didn’t have to be her exactly — anyone like her would have been just as good,” confessed one aging colleague in genuine repentance. “I began to regard her as a collection of the tasks she performed — typist, cook, social organizer — and she became valuable not for who she was but because of what she did for me. I despised myself, finally, and I left her when my own self-loathing became too difficult to live with.”

No doubt by the end of her marriage this woman felt that the quickest way to a man’s heart was a knife through his back.

Such a wife is a casualty of the sort of response savored by many male artists. Ernest Hemingway who, when asked how he could leave his devoted wife and young children, replied “Because I am a bastard.”

Such a wife might feel like the shrewish, nightmarish wife in Philip Roth’s novel, My Life as a Man, in which the novelist-hero’s wife considers herself an “editor,” since she works with her husband on his manuscript. Roth’s hero, Peter, is increasingly frustrated by his wife’s insistence that she is as responsible for his work as he is; he resents her absorption of his talents. At a publishing party, Peter is asked by a young woman about his editor. He names a man at the publishing house, and suddenly his wife provokes a hideous scene. “‘What about me?’” she shrieks. “‘I’m your editor — you know very well I am! Only you refuse to admit it! I read every word you write, Peter. I make suggestions. I correct your spelling.’” Peter pleads with her, “‘Those are typos, Maureen,’” to which his wife, at once pathetic and terrifying, cries “‘But I correct them!’”

The exchange here damns both husband and wife. If the husband gives his wife credit for being indispensable, he should not then be surprised that she considers herself exactly that — especially if, as often happens in traditional male-female divisions of labor, his work is the only work that is formally recognized by the world as important. She makes herself indispensable, and he relies on her; they do a duet. If she had her own work and her own definition of herself, she would not have a stranglehold on his life; if he insisted on doing his own work without her assumption of the small and “menial” tasks, then he could resist such scenes without guilt. As it stands, they have trapped one another, like two cars mangled in a wreck.

- – -

adapted from Perfect Husbands…and Other Fairy Tales

(Photo by Flickr user Mlle Mathilde)

Comment [89]

June 18, 2009

Teaching and Tenure

“Have you ever voted against someone’s tenure because you didn’t think that person was a good teacher?”

One of my former graduate students, now an associate professor at another university, asked me this question recently. Let’s call him Rick — not his name — and say he teaches at Wombat State College. He’s been at Wombat for nine years and is fairly happy, despite the fact that he originally considered Wombat a “first job” sort of place and expected to have moved on by now. But he found a partner in another department and they bought a house together and have a child. Getting tenure right on time, so far Rick has published one book and three strong articles, is head of the Honors Program, and teaches a three-quarter load.

He’s considered a good guy by most of his 18 colleagues; the six untenured members of his department regard him as supportive and encouraging.

But there’s one woman Rick can’t abide. It’s nothing about her personally — it’s just that he observed her teaching last year and thought it was dreadful. He’s heard bad reports from students who’ve been in her courses. Almost without exception, they say she’s sloppy, disorganized, insecure, and poorly prepared. Writing a few vague comments on their papers, she hands her students work back both late and in batches, meaning that handfuls of them will receive their papers while others will have to wait until another class meeting to learn how they did on the same assignment.

She skips office hours regularly and cancels at least two classes every semester, “as if she’s working retail and cashing in on sick days,” according to Rick.

I ask if she publishes and if she contributes in other ways to the life of the college. After all, there are other ways to make a difference, right? “She’s edited a collection, has a manuscript under contract, and she’s got work in circulation. She goes to a lot of conferences, although fewer now since our travel budgets have been cut. And she organizes lectures on campus but usually by inviting people she knows from grad school.”

That doesn’t sound too bad, I say; it’s nothing stellar, but at least active-ish.

“But can I offer this woman a full-time teaching position for the rest of her life when she can’t teach? When I was observing her class, I felt nothing but pity for her students. She had only 11 people in the class — the limit was 30 but there were only 18 enrolled and only 11 showed up — and she couldn’t get any of them to speak. There wasn’t one hand raised. Nobody offered to add to the discussion. When she went to call on them because of the deadly silence and long pauses, it was clear she didn’t know their names. This was seven weeks into the semester. That 50-minute period took about nine hours.”

How did he handle the letter he submitted to the department about the class? Did he acknowledge his deep reservations?

Now it was Rick’s turn to offer a long silence.

“No. I didn’t have the guts. I tried to convey my distaste for her style by making the letter generic, writing chicken crap like ‘She attempts to connect with even the most reluctant student’ although I did force myself to say something like ‘Perhaps she might consider taking the “Improve Your Classroom Skills” workshop offered by Human Resources.’ My chair wanted to take that line out because she thought it might hurt the candidate but the committee voted to keep it in.”

I told him that I thought he did the right thing by at least mentioning his concerns about the class, but I also winced when I thought about his colleague reading that line about her teaching.

“How about her student evaluations?” I asked. “How did the students themselves rate her?”

“They put her in the lower-middle. She fell in the 5-6 range — not a disaster, but far below the department’s standard of 8 or so out of 10. But these aren’t usually factored in too seriously. I mean, there are too many variables in their responses, right?”

“So,” Rick asked me, “Have you ever voted against someone’s tenure because you didn’t think that person was a good teacher?”

“Yes,” I told him, “Yes, I have. But this is the first time I’ve admitted that out loud. And, to be honest, I’m not sure why. I’ve voted against people because of their lack of scholarship and not felt guilty. Why are we even having this conversation, Rick? Why is a dirty secret that some people just can’t teach?”

Comment [25]

June 15, 2009

'That's Our Mistress!' Follow-Up

All right, I’ll admit it. The mistress joke made me laugh.

Don’t hate me.

It’s not like it’s my favorite joke in the whole world.

And I certainly know better than to defend the politics of it.

But simply because the politics of the jokes are indefensible doesn’t mean the joke itself is not funny.

That’s part of the problem with jokes.

Even as we speak, people are now flying to the International Society for Humor Studies’ annual conference. At this wonderful yearly conference, hundreds of people, very few of whom will be wearing red clown noses, will spend days discussing the psychological, emotional, spiritual and, god help us, intellectual bases of every kind of funny you can imagine — and several kinds that you’ve never thought of, or at least never though of sober.

I’ve spent some time dealing with humor as an academic. I wrote They Used to Call me Snow White, but I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor (Penguin), Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature (Wayne State University Press), and edited The Signet Book of American Humor, The Penguin Book of Women’s Humor, Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, and New Perspectives on Women and Comedy (these last two both published by Gordon and Breach). I’ve only just finished teaching Jokes and the Unconscious for my Freud grad seminar this last semester. And probably the best recent conference I have been fortunate enough to attend was “Joking Apart: Gender, Literature and Humour, 1850-Present” at the Center for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex. In Sussex, a whole bunch of us spent a long time talking about sex, politics, culture, and what makes humor funny.

I say all this by way of explaining my non-street cred.

What I found most interesting about the responses to the Brainstorm post — in contrast, for example, to the responses to the Psychology Today post — is the fact that most of my academic colleagues seem to consider the joke outdated. Some are angry that the joke seems too rehearsed, misogynistic, punishingly narrow stereotype of traditional heterosexual gender roles. Many yawned, their sense of sophisticate irony irritated.

In contrast, my friends at PT were interested in the sexy, monogamy/polygamy/fooling-around generally aspect of the joke. They wanted to talk about money and power, too, but didn’t think it should be abstracted into the theory-sphere.

Only a few people thought it was downright cheesy, which I thought would be the big complaint.

So what made me laugh?

Part of it, I guess, is the old “You live by the sword, you die by the sword” mentality: If indeed you marry a man (or a woman, or one of Leona Helmsley’s doggie heirs) for money and power and he/she/it marries you for looks and vulnerability, and you’ve both traded (consciously or unconsciously) on this sort of package deal, then all the joke does is to expose the unspoken, underlying formal dynamic of the relationship.

It is, as my friend Cathy would put it, like a fart in church. It explodes the pious, sanctimonious, and superficial nature of the occasion; yes, it’s about incongruity, but it’s also about reminding us that we’re creatures of the flesh.

At least in theory.

cross posted with Psychology Today

Comment [29]

June 10, 2009

'That's Our Mistress!' and a Question

Question for my esteemed readers: Do you like this one?

Why or why not?

I’d love to know. I’ll write a piece in response after I hear from you.

Ready? Here goes:

A husband and wife were having dinner at a very fine restaurant when this absolutely stunning young woman comes over to their table, gives the husband a big french kiss, then says she’ll see him later and walks away.

The wife glares at her husband and says, “Who the hell was that?”

“Oh,” replies the husband, “she’s my mistress.”

“Well, that’s the last straw,” says the wife. “I’ve had enough. I want a divorce!”

“I can understand that,” replies her husband, “but remember, if we get a divorce it will mean no more shopping trips to Paris, no more wintering in Barbados, no more summers in Tuscany, no more Infiniti or Lexus in the garage, and no more yacht club. But the decision is yours.”

Just then, a mutual friend enters the restaurant with a gorgeous babe on his arm.

“Who’s that woman with Jim?” asks the wife.

“That’s his mistress,” says her husband.

“Ours is prettier,” she replies.

(cross-posted with Psychology Today)

Comment [41]

June 2, 2009

RIP: The Joke's On Us

There are many ways to encourage senior faculty to retire. After all, you can’t just go around kicking their weakening shins until they fall down; they’ll simply lecture while sitting.

One way NOT to entice them into retirement is by making them laugh. If you make them laugh, they will simply grow stronger by the hour and then you’ll never be able to put those tenure track faculty lines to their BEST use: which is, naturally, not in the hiring of bright and clever new faculty, but in the hiring of new administrators, associate administrators, deans, deanlings, and deanlettes (or “dean lites” as they are sometimes known).

Not that I’m bitter.

So, although I am reluctant to make sport of my own university, I must call attention to the fact that UConn might well be facing a dearth of retirements because of the outright and prolonged laughter initiated by a recent memo directed — ironically enough — specifically toward those who might think about it. The trouble is, anybody thinking about retirement is now laughing too hard to leave; they can’t sign the paperwork because they can’t see, they’re so hysterical.

As Dave Barry and Robert Benchley would say, I am not making this up.

Ready?

Here’s the first line of a memo sent to all university employees by the benefits manager: “Please take note of the following if you are eligible to retire under the Retirement Incentive Program (RIP).”

What I want to know is this: WHO was the GENIUS who thought it was a good idea to call a retirement program, pretty much directed to, umm, retirement-age people, RIP?

Why not just call it DOA?

My husband, also a professor in the English Department, pointed out the absurdity of RIP not only to me but to one of our colleagues. Michael wrote, in an email, “How’s this for acronymic sensitivity to the faculty?” to which our friend replied “RIP — the ultimate furlough.”

It’s almost too easy to kid about this — but not quite.

I mean, how can I resist the following ACTUAL sentence: “To RSVP for a Group Sign-Up Session, call the RIP Information Line”?

It sounds like an offer for one of those cults where people drink the Kool Aid; “Hello? I’d like to know exactly how long I’ll be able to rest in peace on my annual salary of $13.46? Yes, I’ll hold. …”

Besides, any real “RIP Information Line” would have an 800 number, wouldn’t it?

Life’s a riot and then you die. But, hey, when I go, at least I’ll have the Group Sign-Up Session number on me.

Comment [12]

May 27, 2009

Past. Tense. A poem.

Can we recover from our past?

Or does it seep through to the present
as the garish color of underlying old wallpaper
left unstripped
will usually show through
to the pale expensive layer on top
and spoil
everything?

You know the answer.

The past
is never safely
in the past.

It punctures the present: a needle pricking a balloon.
It sneaks into right-now life, sly as a pickpocket,
invisible and unnoticed
until a witness cries out.

The unhealed past will seep through layers of time
as a deep enough wound will bleed through layers of gauze bandages,
however neatly applied.

It’s not like hanging wash on a line, where everything is clean and pinned into place, waiting for you to gather and fold it neatly into bundles.

The past is not done, or washed through, or finished. Don’t fool yourself, please.

Don’t look around; don’t look down. Don’t bother. It’s there.
That’s your past: at your feet, on your shoulders, its hand on the back of your neck.

It’s stroking you softly in the very way you’ve come to hate.

Comment [23]

May 22, 2009

Grant Writing and Binge Eating

Our academic culture turns scholars into grant writers.

Institutions increasingly place emphasis on securing “external funding” for work in the humanities, where there is no equivalent of Pfizer to fund research and development.

And, as a result, many faculty members have learned to become as persistent (but not as amicable or useful) as ordinary panhandlers. They spend their time with a hand out, but with their fingers on the keyboard; they use their writing talents attempting to secure their institutions more money in order that they might be permitted to get a small percentage for themselves.

In retail, as I remember, we called this “working on commission.”

At a national conference not too long ago, I was seated next to a distinguished administrator — once an Americanist — who spent the entire dinner explaining why those working in the humanities should be judged by the number and kinds of grants they received.

In a deep-throated drawl, he announced, “One’s recognition of value during the earliest stages of one’s work by one’s peers is the mightiest form of recognition,” or something along those lines.

All I know is that there were a lot of “one’s” and I stopped listening after two.

And then I started to wonder whether it was wise to encourage this ridiculous man in his pious and self-serving belief that work receiving the imprimatur of a grant should be held in the highest esteem.

Not that I’m bitter, but the number of works this man had actually published didn’t add up to my dress size (which, admittedly, is fairly high).

Should that matter? After all, I’ll also admit without cringing that I am a failure — as a student might say — ”grantwise.”

In contrast, he’d racked up every grant within spitting distance; clearly others believed in his work. Or had once.

But isn’t estimating someone’s work based almost exclusively on how many grants they’ve racked up sort of like saying “Let’s decide whether somebody gets promotion to full professor based on how many times he or she has engaged in binge-eating”?

In other words, should those who decide not to engage in this practice be punished for our choice to opt out and get on with the writing of books and articles rather than grant applications?

Comment [6]

May 17, 2009

I Hold These Truths, Etc.

Am I the only one to find the following truths to be self-evident?

— Movies divide into two categories: helmets and guns vs. candlelight and talking.
— Goo Gone is one of the great achievements of our civilization.
— Writing with a fountain pen makes you feel as if what you are writing matters, even when you are writing yourself a note concerning when gin goes on sale.
— Some people are entirely self-contained yet vulnerable, like an egg. Be wary if you find yourself in a basket among them.
— Interrupting somebody’s yawn by putting your finger in his mouth is funny only to the person doing the interrupting. Rarely does it delight the yawner.
— Nobody is enthralled by Magic Eye pictures anymore.
— There comes a point in every relationship when you either break up or get married.
— You alone understand what your pet is trying to say. Everyone else is just guessing.
— There’s a big difference between a checkmate and a stalemate.
— Propinquity is a poor basis for life-long passion. Just because you brush up against somebody in the dark a few times doesn’t mean you have to vow to love them forever.
— If, as the old saying goes, you have to be cruel to be kind, then it also goes without saying that sometimes you have to be kind to be cruel. Consider the classic joke about a surly New York waiter and his disgruntled boss. The waiter’s constant display of arrogance, perpetual whining, and unrelenting complaints seem to have gotten him exactly the response he’s been aiming for: the boss decides to give the waiter a big raise in salary. The waiter, feeling very good about himself, brags to the rest of the staff that he finally wore the old man down, and finally won himself a rightful place above the rest of the herd. A week later, the boss asks the waiter to come into the head office. “You’re fired!” the boss shouts, slamming his fist down on the table with a grin. “Fired?” cries the waiter, astonished. “How can you fire me after you just increased my wages? This is crazy. Why would you fire somebody after giving him a such a big raise?” The boss, opening the door to show him out, says simply “I wanted you to lose a better job.” (Thanks to George for this one.)
— Returning to what you know in an inevitably painful relationship is like licking the last of the frosting and knowing you risk slicing your tongue on the knife.
— One of the great definitions of literature ( as heard in Quentin Tarantino’s 1995 movie, From Dusk Till Dawn): Preacher: “Has anybody here read a real book about vampires, or are we just remembering what a movie said? I mean a real book.” Biker: “You mean like a Time-Life book?”
— If you’ve spent your life listening to what other people say, you are certainly an interested person; you are not, however, necessarily an interesting one.
— Achieving the predictable isn’t the same as reaching for the possible.
— While we understand about scurvy and all, do we really believe a lemon wedge can save somebody’s life? Isn’t the issue of life and death bigger than an adequate supply of citrus? And if it isn’t, shouldn’t it be?
— If there is a lesson to be learned in life, you have probably learned that same lesson before.

Comment [13]

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