Fellating your betters: what is too much saliva for engineering firms is just right for CWA or IWF internships.
Published by Kyso Kisaen March 17th, 2007 in Feminism, What Patriarchy?When I was just a young girl and had not yet been indocrinated by the soothing feminist brainwash, a well-meaning friend of mine gave me a really great summer job. For three summers, I was the token chick in a male-dominated department. My job was to get lunch, take care of all the little boring day-to-day details while the boys worked on more fun things, and to attempt to rein in some of the stupidity emanating from certain coworkers.
I’ll admit, it was fun. The job paid well and most of the guys were quite nice. And I was happy, because I was one of the few girls who ever got a chance to work on this fun job in this cool department, so of course I didn’t want to rock the boat by being too much of a bitch about the fact that I was never trained on quite as many things as some of the other guys. I was not assertive about getting good spots in key projects. So of course, by the time I left, I hadn’t gained as much real experience as the other guys and was percieved as kind of incompetent.
Had I been more of a ball buster, I would have gained more from the experience. I understand that now, and it helps me in my newer, harder, even cooler male-dominated career choice. Men don’t get ahead in competitive fields by simpering at their betters, so why would a woman chose that strategy? Because when you’re young and inexperienced and simply glad to be in the club, it looks like a good idea. By the time you realize it’s not, the damage is already done.
So it is with great sadness in my heart that I snark on Kathleen Bracken, anti-feminist and first-year Engineering student.
FROM THE beginning, women and gender studieshave been inherently political and biased toward radical feminist thought. The description of a “Studies in Women and Gender”course at the University claims that it, “draw[s] on feminist and other critical theories in order to analyze… gendered aspects [in society].” Conspicuously missing from this sentence is the outright admission that only modern liberal theories and ideas will be seriously addressed in the course.
Uh-oh, someone didn’t like her intro to women’s studies elective.
Are there any serious conservative feminist intellectuals churning out theories for women’s studies? Perhaps, I don’t have enough of a grasp of the serious feminist literature to say no, there aren’t. However, since “status quo forever!” and “maybe if we weren’t such assertive bitches, people would take us seriously” are not the philosophies of serious intellectuals, liberal or conservative, I doubt there are any that will be telling Kathleen exactly what she wants to hear.
By neglecting the reality of women’s lives, submerging biological evidence about what it means to be a gendered human and creating a new type of intellectual tyranny, women and gender studies fail to meet the criterion of a serious liberal arts discipline.
There’s no more valid criticism of a school program than that of a freshman from a completely different program. The blinding pompousity of such a statement cunningly distracts you from the previous statement, in which, if I am reading this correctly, she accuses women’s studies of suppressing the work of biologists. God damn, those women’s studies faculty sure are powerful. It’s because women’s studies departments are big and influential and bring status and revenue to a university, whereas nothing worth anything ever comes from puny, underfunded biology departments.
So why do people scoff at the idea of a women’s studies major? I mean, even if all it does is prepare you to teach women’s studies, then so what? Women’s studies faculty are clearly some of the most influential people in the nation.
As a conservative woman, I find no course in this department that begins to take my intellectual commitments seriously.
That’s because your intellectual commitment is to engineering, and women’s studies doesn’t really require a good working knowledge of AutoCad. Speaking of, why do you even have time to be taking a women’s studies course? You’re a fucking engineer- by now, it should have consumed your life and made you unable to even remember to eat, much less take the time to pen an angry op-ed about an academic program that you can’t possibly have that much experience with. People with less than 150% engineering dedication wash out of those programs right quickly. Ask the other token chick I worked with back in the day - she majored in engineering for about a year. She found pre-law and then law school to offer a healthier workload. They guy who was 150% dedicated to engineering tried every different kind of engineering track before he found one that wouldn’t kill him. I know probably 5 engineering school washouts for every engineer I’ve ever met, and engineering schools are proud of that rep. You’d best get that nose to the grindstone if you ever expect to be a junior engineering student.
According to the radical feminist thought supported in women and gender studies, I am unknowingly a victim of a patriarchal society and completely misled by societal norms.
Yep. So are your male classmates. Do you want to talk about why it is just assumed that men can spend 80 hours a week working at jobs like engineering, or how family-friendly corporate policies would help even men by offering a healthier work/life balance for everyone? No? OK then. Let’s just beat this dead horse labeled “the door thing.”
Men are thought to be the oppressors in women and gender studies, unfit for modern society and in need of quick evolution and thorough reeducating. The most respectful and benign forms of traditional manhood are belittled. Yet, I’d like to find a straight woman in her right mind who does not appreciate a kind and considerate man who, out of respect, opens a door.
Doors are a special problem, which we most certianly need to talk about. Ok, done. Next?
In an effort to propel radical physical and intellectual autonomy, feminisism rejects the ways that men are supposed to honor women.
Only because you can’t get a lot done up on those pedestals. They’re small and it’s lonely and cold up there.
While theoretically reconstructing society, women and gender studies must reject the possibility of significant differences among the sexes that go beyond basic anatomy. This belief causes a distortion in the way husbands and wives raise their children and conduct their daily lives. Women have some evolutionary tendency for raising children and men have a tendency for protecting the family.
You know, it used to be that married women were expected to leave their jobs because they had a man to provide for them and some other single woman or man might need her job more, plus she’d just be having kids anyway and everyone knows that it’s less of a pain in the ass to just hire a single person or man whose wife can take care of the kids rather than accomodate a mother’s needs.
Just a little something to think about when you come back from your first maternity leave to find all of your AutoCad responsibilites reassinged to more reliable, less fertile people and you end up “choosing” to leave work and devote more time to the kids. Biology is destiny! and the younger you concurred.
It is not necessarily a bad thing for both parents to pursue full-time work outside the home, but other options should be discussed in women and gender studies with seriousness.
But feminsts do discuss this. Like, we discuss about how a SAHM puts herself at great economic risk, and how families would benefit if a stay-at-home-parent had a little social support, or if they got social security credits, or if they didn’t face such stigma for having gaps in their resumes if and when they ever have to go back to work. Or a million other things that make being a stay-at-home parent such a risky, unfulfilling venture. But it is true there is no “Housewifery: The Perfect Calling ?” class in most women’s studies programs.
Of course, compromise exists between radical feminism and staunch traditionalism.
For example, Kathleen should totally be allowed to persue an engineering degree while finding the efforts of current feminsts distasteful and not giving a thought to the previous uncouth radicals who actually paved the way for co-ed engineering programs to begin with. “I got mine, so screw the rest of y’all” is a perfectly valid school of feminist thought.
Most conservatives realize that we should not revert back to the injustice of earlier eras;however,
we’re kind of fond of the injustices of this era, because we can’t help but notice how comfortable our lives are and be against anything that might disturb that.
Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not a quote:
however, we ask that feminists be fair minded and temper their thirst for revolution with reality.
Like the reality of how you girls are just suited, via evolution, for parenthood and therefore should leave the providing up to yours mensfolks.
Fare thee well, Kathleen. You will most certainly wash out of engineering school, but there is a promising future for you as a professional anti-feminist. Just keep up with those Network of Enlightened Women contacts.
wow what university is she at.
Granted I am ten years out of university myself, but when I majored in Women’s Studies there were three guys in my classes taking the program as thier major and four guys taking it as thier minor. They were more than welcome to participate.
Guess she never actually spoke with any of the profs in the department before she wrote the screed….just makes me shake my head sometimes.
Speaking of, why do you even have time to be taking a women’s studies course?
A lot of universities require a “rounded” education - liberal-arts students have to take a certain number of science credits, engineering majors have to take a certain number of liberal arts classes. It never ceased to amaze me how the same engineering students who sneered at liberal-arts classes as “easy” kicked, screamed and threw tantrums when told they had to actually take one of those classes.
“As a conservative woman, I find no course in this department that begins to take my intellectual commitments seriously.”
How’s a first-year Engineering student get familiar enough with a whole department to be able to say things like that? When I was a freshman just starting out in Engineering, all I knew from the course descriptions of the electives I’d have to pick someday was that they used scary phrases like “term paper required”.
Heh, every woman should be required to read the section of Backlash where Faludi found that every woman who makes a living talking about how women need to go back to the kitchen wasn’t putting her barefoot, pregnant self where she said she belonged.
Here is a simple checklist for women like that:
One: are you going to school? Check.
Two: are you wearing, or have you ever worn, pants? Check.
If you answered yes to both these questions, research indicates you should probably stop dismantling hard-earned women’s rights.
A lot of universities require a “rounded” education
True. I was a physics major and it was the ethnomusicology class that had me tearing my hair out. “I ddooonnnn’tttt wwaaannnnnttttt ttoooo beeeee heeeereeeee!”
Of course, I managed to somehow keep my dislike of the one stupid music course I had to take from turning into a contemptual dismissal of the whole idea of ethnomusicology. But then, there’s nothing about the idea of tracking the development of cultures through their music that threatens my sense of how very special I am.
Amanda: that was my favorite section of the book. The best was the husband-wife couple who wrote books about how boys hate to cook and women can’t do math, even though the wife was a mathematician and their son’s favorite activity was cooking.
Also, yeah, people should shut up about majors they’re not doing. I (probable statistics major that I am) will certainly kick and scream when the time comes to get my literary analysis related course out of the way, but certainly not because I think it’s easy. (though, seriously, as annoying as it is coming from an engineering students, English majors who think the women’s studies department is “a waste of time” “intellectually unrigorous” and “generally full of BS” need to stop calling the kettle black. Nothing against English majors but I don’t see how a major devoted in large part to discussing things other people have made up is in any way MORE respectable than a major that occasionally breaks from that to discuss, y’know, the world).
Always the damn door-opening with these people. Never fails.
junk science, I was just thinking that.
Tempting to tell her “You know, if you’re an engineer men will think you’re a dyke. You should go into a nice feminine major, like English, and then lots of men will open doors for you.”
Just a note here–I went through an engineering program (ABET-accredited, so I assume it’s standard), and I did have to take a variety of gen-eds; in fact, the gen-eds I had to take were a superset of those that the liberal-arts majors had. So it’s not that weird that she was taking a WS course; it may have been required. Heck, I took two WS courses for gen eds when I was an undergrad.
But clearly, at least, she doesn’t believe some of the Larry-Summers-style “biological” theory about women, because she chose to be an engineering major.
You don’t choose something with that kind of a workload if you’re just at college to get your MRS degree.
Yes, there might be some real antifeminism there, but what I mostly see is an engineering major deriding the humanities, and someone trying to play the gadfly in the campus newspaper. At the end of the day, she can still be found in the computer lab cranking out code instead of babies (at the prime breeding age of 18, no less), blissfully oblivious to the women who made it possible for her to be there.
As a side note, I’ve never had a guy complain that I was deconstructing his patriarchy by opening the door for him. Maybe they’re also just glad someone is being nice?
Yes, there might be some real antifeminism there, but what I mostly see is an engineering major deriding the humanities
She’s not just bitching about the humanities, she’s also an officer in her school chapter of NeW, the Network of Enlightened women, which appears to be some sort junior Independent Women’s Forum type club. I would imagine that they consider themselves enlightened because they totally see past all this feminist claptrap.
From thier “about” page:
It’s also been featured in not one but two Mallard Fillmore comics. Whoohoo!
Whatever she joined the club for, she’s clearly absorbed the junior anti-feminist mindset. Not a single argument in that article was original - someone’s been feeding her this stuff.
But clearly, at least, she doesn’t believe some of the Larry-Summers-style “biological” theory about women, because she chose to be an engineering major.
It’s really surprising how many of these people honestly seem to believe they got where they are all on their own, or who think all progress should stop once they’ve gotten what they want.
I remember being particularly pissed off about the music class because I had transferred in from a different university, and was for three semesters assured by three different arts & sciences advisors that my arts credit requirements were in the bag.
Then I went a fourth time, just to be sure and I hear “uh-oh! all your art credits are in the applied arts. You’ll need a fine arts course” add that to needing one honors course and there being an honors ethnomusicology course but no honors physics courses, and there I am, sputtering in outrage because this clearly unreasonable man expects me to hear the difference between 3/4 time and 4/4 time just by listening. If I had those talents, I’d play a fucking instrument. Give me my C and let me go home.
I normally like my humanities credits. But this semester, I had to take Microeconomics (which is humanities, but has the audacity to pawn itself off as a science). I got a 100 on the first exam, all while going “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care” in my head.
isn’t it strange to look back at the sorts of crap you put up with? i also worked a school-break job for three years at a male-dominated place — a cigar shop — and i know it’s not exactly a prestigious sort of job, but we could wear whatever we wanted and play our own music in the store and smoke on the job, and i thought it was just about the coolest place to work ever, being the obsessed-with-empire-records-sort and all … I was the only girl there and at the time I realized, obviously, that I was being sexually harassed left and right by my coworkers — not just verbal, but ass-pats and the like, and once my 30-something married boss even whipped his dick out in the storage room … and yet, it kind of never occurred to me that this was something I should really be offended/annoyed by, that i had a right to, in anything but a vague way … it was just, like, well, i’m a girl in this male-dominated place, so I guess this is what I have to put up with in order to work here ….
it’s not like it was scarring in any sort of giant sense, but I just sort of find it amazing to look back at and marvel at my lack-of-reaction …
sorry for the lack of response and it’s lack-of-relevance to the focus of this post, yo. your description of your summer employment just struck a chord ….
long response, I meant
Count me among the people who are surprised this woman had the free time to hack out a rant like this while studying engineering. I remember touring a university’s computer science department when I was still debating where to apply, and the one female professor kept telling me how wonderful it’d be to have another woman in the program. They had a support group! Because it’s so hard to work with men all the time! I could join! I was like, lady, I’m a software engineer. When the hell do you think I’ll have time to join your coffee klatch and bitch about the boys? And if I do have free time, why’d I sit around and kvetch when I could be at a LAN party with said boys?
I don’t recall whether my uni had women’s study courses. I did take a Women in Art History course, though. It was taught by a woman, but she was bizarrely uptight. I’m sorry, if you can’t say the words “rape” or “vagina” aloud without blushing and stuttering, maaaybe you shouldn’t be teaching a course focusing on people like Artemisia Gentileschi and Georgia O’Keefe? Just a thought?