Should be the same, but...

posted August 19th, 2018 at 1:46 PM

Facebook is public and some people treat it too publicly and that can be amusing sometimes, or sad, really sad. Lately I've been creeping this academic as she goes through her midlife existential crisis. The creeping is not out of any genuine interest or anything. More like I feel I'm witnessing a really slow train crash that I can't look away from. 40s, self-critical about her aging, posting post after post trying to grasp onto her slipping sense of self-worth, objectifying young men in their twenties, bragging about luxuries, situating herself within the network of her discipline. I was thinking when male academics go through this they sleep with a few students and they do it quietly because of the power imbalance (and because it's f*cking sad). However, I don't see any of the anxiety about power when it's a woman at the top. Her friends all giving her thumbs up, hearts. You go girl! Abuse that tenure! WTF??

7 Comments

That is....

Aug 19, 2018 at 4:50pm

the hypocrisy of Feminism in a nutshell.

in the past year

Aug 19, 2018 at 5:37pm

I have read about senior academic women defending another senior who was apparently behaving just like a man abusing his power over a grad student. A couple of the same academics were also involved in an uproar over a junior colleague's controversial publication. It has been quite sad to see.
The thing about "objectifying" young men, is that for the most part they have not been subtly or obviously blocking the careers of women for one to two decades, something I at least find very unsexy. Young men are mostly limited to writing biased teaching evaluations.

It's because

Aug 19, 2018 at 5:49pm

women are socialized early on to whine, complain, and knock themselves down in order to gain favour with other women. I realized this one very late in life because my autism caused me to miss this lesson during girlhood.

Awww...Honey,

Aug 19, 2018 at 8:51pm

Read yourself...Leave that girl alone and take care of whatever is bothering you in your life, would you?

Vika

Aug 19, 2018 at 10:50pm

Now now, that's no way to talk about me.

@Aww

Aug 20, 2018 at 11:23am

yeah this wasn't fair of me. The person described, if real, didn't do anything to me personally, and I'm just angry at everyone and everything recently. -op