Womanly virtues Friday ...

Where the boys are
We have student houses in our neighbourhood. They are slowly being weeded out as this is is one of very few neighbourhoods in North America where house prices continue to climb. I have no idea why.

But some student places still survive because, oddly enough, students are really lousy tenants. Many landlords will refuse point blank to have them. As a consequence, students pay through the nose for housing. If you own a tear-down  in an upscale neighbourhood near a university, you can soak students until your place is condemned. And that is what happens here.

Anyway, we have the worse possible student tenants living down the road from us this summer: party girls. There are, I think, five of them. They don't seem to work and they don't seem to have classes this summer. They are just living here so they can have a good time away from home for the summer.

The girls themselves are not the problem. The problem is that a good time for them means having guys over. They always invite a lot more guys than girls. I counted at one party there were at least two guys for every girl. You'd think it would be pretty obvious that this was a recipe for trouble. Every party—and they had two or four a week—ended up with guys out front shouting at one another.

Until the cops came a week ago. It's been quiet since then. My theory is that at least one of the girls was jolted back to reality by this and put her foot down and told the others no more of this.

I mention all that by way of explaining that I am very dubious the hail of criticism that has landed on this article by Douglas W. Texter. Critics say he doesn't want to work in a university English department because the field is too feminized. (It's a shame really that a guy with a name like "Texter" isn't going into English.) I think he is making a more profound point and one women would do well to take to heart.


Here is what he says about women academics in English:

We think differently. What motivated me to go to graduate school was different from what seems to have motivated many tenured female academics I’ve talked to. Much of what I’ve heard from older women about why they became professors revolves around issues of professional acceptance, equity, the desire to allow other women’s voices to be heard, and wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds. Also, many of the older female professors I’ve known were quite angry about those issues. While I can certainly understand their drives, they are not mine.

I think there is something wrong with that list. It's like old Sesame Street game: one of these things does not belong with the others

1. Professional acceptance
2. Equity
3. Desire to allow other women's voices to be heard
4. Wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds

The first two and the last are self interested reasons and the third is idealism of a sort. And it's a lie.

Look, I've spent most of my life around the sort of women who who get serious Blue-state kinds of education and who work in pink ghettos such as Academics, Psychology, Law, Health Care, Human Resources and Communications. In theory they are all for allowing other women's voices to be heard but in practice they are mostly still the sorts of women who invite twice as many guys as other women to their parties. Theoretical women—particularly theoretical women of colour, theoretical lesbians, theoretical poor women—they love. Actual rivals, not so much.

In practice, they tend to behave just like the party girls down the street.  No matter what they say to the contrary, these women wish there were a lot more guys in their field. The reason men are not attracted to these fields has nothing to do with the supposedly hostile atmosphere. It has everything to do with what English departments have become. And I think Texter actually does a pretty good job of putting his finger on it:

The people and writers I like have a sense of adventure, wit, and intellectual fearlessness. Those are not the values of most of the men I’ve met in English departments. In 15 years in and out of the discipline of English (including a few stints in publishing), I have made exactly three male friends (other than college and high-school chums and my fund-raising colleagues). That’s not enough.

Not everyone agrees.  I don't think much of Texter as a man either but I do think he is smart enough to see what is missing in his life. If, for some reason, you were terrified of adventure, wit or intellectual fearlessness, the safest place for you would be an English department. And that isn't surprising if you read the following list of requirements again:

"... professional acceptance, equity, the desire to allow other women’s voices to be heard, and wanting a place in which to say what’s on their minds..."

You can't have these three things (minus the lie about other women's voices) and adventure, wit or intellectual fearlessness. A place where we can find acceptance, equity and where we can say what is on our minds is a place where real challenges have been expunged. It's a comfort zone where real dissent has been suppressed.

I'll stop about here because I don't have any terribly profound point to make. The non-profound point is this: Women, like men, make most of their life choices based on short-term interest. If you really want to be happy with a man—and no one is saying you have to—you need to understand male aspiration and that means looking beyond your short-term interest.

In literature, things have been going wrong for a long time.

(Note, some wording changes to clarify points have been made to this post.)