"A teacher should never do your thinking for you. She should give you texts to read and guide you..."

"... along the path of making sense of them for yourself. She should introduce you to the books and essays of writers who disagree with one another and ask you to determine whose case is better. Many college professors don’t want to do that today. They don’t want to 'platform' a writer they think is wrong; they don’t want to participate in 'both sides-ism.' The same thing is true for the students who pound on the doors of lecture halls and pull fire alarms and throw garbage cans down hallways to protest the 45-minute speech of a visitor. They believe in sympathetic magic. They believe that words—even those spoken within a lecture hall—will damage them and their classmates. The truth is that they’re scared. They don’t think their ideas can outmatch those of the hated speaker...."

Writes Caitlin Flanagan, in "Colleges Are Lying to Their Students/They aren’t teaching them 'how to think'" (The Atlantic).

Here's the Wikipedia article "Sympathetic magic." Excerpt:

"What is coastal grandmother, you ask? It’s a term that I coined for this aesthetic.... If you love Nancy Meyers movies, coastal vibes, recipes and cooking..."

"... Ina Garten, cozy interiors, and more, there’s a good chance you might be a coastal grandmother. And no—you don’t have to be a grandmother to be a coastal grandmother. It’s for anyone and everyone. I even made this playlist on Spotify so you can have the coastal-gran ambience with you everywhere you go. If any of this sounds like you, follow along and we’ll gran together."

Said Lex Nicoleta — see her say it in this TikTok — quoted by Caitlin Flanagan in "I’m a Coastal Grandmother. Stop Appropriating Our Culture. Young people on TikTok are trying to hijack my lifestyle" (The Atlantic).

Hey, guys...

Why is everyone missing the best line of this video?

Where she talks about feminism’s great task: “the general reprogramming of most people’s minds?” https://t.co/IFjv8P98r9

— Caitlin Flanagan (@CaitlinPacific) September 11, 2019

I like the part about the etymology of "guy." I didn't know it's from the name Guy and the specific Guy, Guy Fawkes. I checked in the OED and this is the official origin of the common noun "guy."

It began with the effigy of Guy Fawkes, burnt on Guy Fawkes day. The effigy was called "a guy": "Once on a fifth of November I found a ‘Guy’ trusted to take care of himself there, while his proprietors had gone to dinner" (Charles Dickens, 1863).

From there it became "A person of grotesque appearance" — especially with respect to clothing, as in "We have far too many sculptured ‘Guys’ in the metropolis" (1880 Daily Tel.).

Finally, it was just "A man, fellow. originally U.S." Early examples:

1898 Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Sentinel 22 Jan. 4/7 I s'pose you got a Bible you'll let a guy look into.
1904 Cincinnati Commercial Tribune 29 June 4 Mr. Bryan is a hefty guy when it comes to Democratic conventions and the platforms thereof.
1928 D. H. Lawrence in T.P.'s Weekly 7 July 333/3 I say to Mother: Show me somebody happy, then! And she shows me some guy, or some bright young thing, and gets mad when I say: See the pretty monkey!

The OED has a "Draft addition" from October 2011 accepting the word "As a form of address to a man" and "Also in plural as a form of address to a group of people, in later use sometimes a mixed or all-female group."

1930 J. Dos Passos 42nd Parallel i. 102 Say, yous guys, this is fellowworker McCreary....
1993 M. Crichton Disclosure i. 22 Fuck 'em all. This reorg sucks. I'm with you on this one, guy....

I love that the OED has a completely gratuitous, random "fuck."

Anyway, should you address groups that are not all men as "guys"? You should know that some people will (in some situations) regard you as casually noninclusive.

What if the people you're addressing are are male? I know of a woman whose husband fell into a fury and berated her publicly for referring to him and his male friends as "guys." He heard it as a putdown. I wasn't there, so I can't tell how wrong he may have been. I could imagine a woman saying "guys" in a negative way. In which case, it's not the word. It's the inflection.

How about addressing just one man as "guy"? Reminds me of this old Right Guard commercial:

3 long sentences beginning with "When."

From "Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jordan Peterson/The Canadian psychology professor’s stardom is evidence that leftism is on the decline—and deeply vulnerable," by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

When the poetry editors of The Nation virtuously publish an amateurish but super-woke poem, only to discover that the poem stumbled across several trip wires of political correctness; when these editors (one of them a full professor in the Harvard English department) then jointly write a letter oozing bathos and career anxiety and begging forgiveness from their critics; when the poet himself publishes a statement of his own—a missive falling somewhere between an apology, a Hail Mary pass, and a suicide note; and when all of this is accepted in the houses of the holy as one of the regrettable but minor incidents that take place along the path toward greater justice, something is dying.

When the top man at The New York Times publishes a sober statement about a meeting he had with the president in which he describes instructing Trump about the problem of his “deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric,” and then three days later the paper announces that it has hired a writer who has tweeted about her hatred of white people, of Republicans, of cops, of the president, of the need to stop certain female writers and journalists from “existing,” and when this new hire will not be a beat reporter, but will sit on the paper’s editorial board—having a hand in shaping the opinions the paper presents to the world—then it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system.

When even Barack Obama, the poet laureate of identity politics, is moved to issue a message to the faithful, hinting that that they could be tipping their hand on all of this—saying during a speech he delivered in South Africa that a culture is at a dead end when it decides someone has no “standing to speak” if he is a white man—and when even this mayday is ignored, the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end.

I was going to challenge you to diagram these sentences, but what I really want to ask you to do is to sing them to the tune of "Queen Jane Approximately." You know the Bob Dylan song I'm talking about?

When your mother sends back all your invitations/And your father to your sister he explains/That you’re tired of yourself and all of your creations...

Now when all of the flower ladies want back what they have lent you/And the smell of their roses does not remain/And all of your children start to resent you...

Now when all the clowns that you have commissioned/Have died in battle or in vain/And you’re sick of all this repetition...

When all of your advisers heave their plastic/At your feet to convince you of your pain/Trying to prove that your conclusions should be more drastic...

Now when all the bandits that you turned your other cheek to/All lay down their bandanas and complain/And you want somebody you don’t have to speak to...

Dylan follows all of his "when" clauses with "Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?" Flanagan's "when"s are followed by: 1. "something is dying," 2. "it is no mystery that a parallel culture of ideas has emerged to replace a corrupted system," and 3. "the doomsday clock ticks ever closer to the end." Which do you like better, the Flanagan variety or the Dylan repetition? Dylan gets an extra plus or minus because one of the "when"s is about being "sick of all this repetition." I give a plus, myself, especially since where all the "when"s get us is to a desire to be with "somebody you don’t have to speak to." There's no repetition like no talking at all.

Young people lack a sense of humor... and it's the professors' fault.

According to Caitlin Flanagan, talking to Bill Maher about her new piece in The Atlantic, "That’s Not Funny!/Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke."

This is a very old topic really. The only thing that seemed new is the long, inside look at the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities, through which many entertainers get hired and which doesn't work as a channel into paid employment for comedians who seem at all politically incorrect. For example, one comedian got laughs with the idea of a "sassy black friend":

But afterward, two white students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no. He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly. “We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “That thing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.” Many others, apparently, felt the same way: Yee ended up with 18 bookings—a respectable showing, but hardly a reflection of the excitement in the room when he performed.

I don't know why anyone would expect something as bureaucratic as the National Association for Campus Activities to bring anything edgy and transgressive into town.  That doesn't mean students don't know find transgressive things funny, just that they're staying out of trouble. And why court trouble over "sassy black friend" — which is just an old stereotype, eliciting an easy laugh? It's not the Lenny Bruce line of comedy that really challenges people! It's comfortable, careless, and silly.

Would Lenny Bruce seek approval and income through the National Association for Campus Activities? No. He wouldn't even try. And that's not because the students wouldn't find him funny. They would. And so would the professors. But he'd have to find a different path to reach them, and he wouldn't whine about that! He'd want to be rejected by the bureaucratic filters of the National Association for Campus Activities. I think. I don't know. He's dead. I'm just using his rotting corpse in a manner he's in no position to refute.

Flanagan says:

If your goal were simply to bring great comics to a college campus, it would be easily accomplished. You would gather the school’s comedy nerds, give them a budget, and tell them to book the best acts they could afford.

Who's the "you" here? The university administration? That's all so wrong-headed, handing $$$ to students who somehow could be identified as the "comedy nerds" and letting them choose "the best."

If you wanted to bring great comedy to college students, you'd open a comedy club near campus and operate entirely independently and beholden to nobody.

ADDED: Previously on this blog: "Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape?"

And why did the Wall Street Journal publish it? Was there a whole lot more material in the original article, which was then edited down to make Flanagan look utterly ridiculous? 

It begins with the description of one horrible crime. It ends with Flanagan describing her own fear of men. It's lurid and emotional to tell us about one woman's victimization and another woman's feelings, but where's the support for Flanagan's proposition that fraternities should be shut so that women can achieve equality on campus?...

"An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities."

A sentence that makes more sense if you know that it appears in the middle of an article titled "The Dark Power of Fraternities/A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems — and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame."

The article is by Caitlin Flanagan, and it appears in the same new issue of The Atlantic as the article (linked in the previous post) that gave us a perfectly serious and sympathetic presentation of men who are fixated on wearing silicone rubber masks that depict exaggerated, heavily made-up female faces.

Caitlin Flanagan's name has appeared only once before on this blog, in a post titled: "Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape?"

And why did the Wall Street Journal publish it? Was there a whole lot more material in the original article, which was then edited down to make Flanagan look utterly ridiculous?

I'm not going to spend the time with The Atlantic's "Dark Power" article to figure out whether it's better supported than the WSJ's Caitlin Flanagan article. I don't have that kind of time. The title is ludicrous, I can't imagine being astonished by whatever the number of CEOs and politicians is, and I'm just struck by the presence of this article in the same issue as that piece about the "masking scene."

Why did Caitlin Flanagan write such a poorly supported article on fraternities and rape?

And why did the Wall Street Journal publish it? Was there a whole lot more material in the original article, which was then edited down to make Flanagan look utterly ridiculous?

It begins with the description of one horrible crime. It ends with Flanagan describing her own fear of men. It's lurid and emotional to tell us about one woman's victimization and another woman's feelings, but where's the support for Flanagan's proposition that fraternities should be shut so that women can achieve equality on campus? Here's the middle of the article, where the substance should be:

The Greek system is dedicated to quelling young men's anxiety about submitting themselves to four years of sissy-pants book learning by providing them with a variety of he-man activities: drinking, drugging, ESPN watching and the sexual mistreatment of women.

So... guys in college seek fun in addition to study. That's unremarkable. So do females. Characterizing study as inherently feminine — "sissy-pants book learning" — doesn't make the assertion any less shallow. It seems to me that many young males and females indulge in substances, sports, and sex. Those activities maybe be great fun or horrible (or something in between).

A 2007 National Institute of Justice study found that about one in five women are victims of sexual assault in college; almost all of those incidents go unreported.

How did they find it if it was unreported? Much of life is ugly but not criminal. If it's a crime report it. If it's not a crime, what was it? What are these statistics that get thrown at us constantly? I've been seeing them since 1988 when "I Never Called It Rape: The Ms. Report on Recognizing, Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape" was published. Over the years, college women have learned to call it rape, but why haven't they learned to report it, if it is rape or some other crime?  You can chose to think of something bad that happened as a crime but are you willing to hold your opinion up to the judgment of officials who have the obligation to treat the accused man fairly? Almost all of those incidents go unreported. Exactly why?

It also noted that fraternity men—who tend to drink more heavily and frequently than nonmembers — are more likely to perpetrate sexual assault than nonfraternity men, according to previous studies. Over a quarter of sexual-assault victims who were incapacitated reported that the assailant was a fraternity member.

Over a quarter?! Is this limited to the college situation? What are we learning from this flabby factual material? Young people drink too much.

It is against this boorish cartel...

Cartel? What cartel?

... that 16 Yale students and recent alumni asserted themselves in a Title IX complaint brought against the institution last month — a complaint that could cost the university $500 million in federal funds.

The claim concerns both the ways that sexual assaults are handled by the university and also the effect that various fraternity "pranks" have had on its female students. The last straw for the complainants seems to have been a Delta Kappa Epsilon initiation last fall in which a mob of pledges chanted "No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!" and other enlightening slogans....

That was the last straw? A stupid chant? Why don't women use their immense power of being able to laugh at men? Give them the finger? Wasn't the idea of the chant to humiliate the pledges by making them say things that would make them look bad to women? Why don't women claim the power they have instead of running to Daddy (i.e., the government)?

The Yale complaint is a pathetic step backward for feminism. It is not empowerment.

***

Here's a book I read a while back: "Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus." By the way, for a few years in the early 90s, I taught law school course on rape and wrote articles on the subject.