Modern Mysogony

I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the current crop of misogyny among the far right but I am. This isn’t simply a case of taking one step back for every three steps forward. These men are repeating ideas about woman which seem to date to the last century, before woman could vote, much less before abortion was legal and contraception widely available.

We’ve been talking about feminist backlash for nearly two decades now and it has reached a kind of off-hand casualness that is astonishing. I found a remarkable post that catalogs the wide variety of rapes so far identified by Republicans:

GIFT-FROM-GOD-RAPE: “When life begins with that horrible situation of rape, that is something that God intended to happen.” -Richard Mourdock (R), candidate for Senate in Indiana, on October 23, 2012

“The right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless…a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.” -Rick Santorum (R), Senator and Presidential candidate, on January 20, 2012

“Richard and I, along with millions of Americans…believe that life is a gift from God.” -Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas voicing his support of Richard Mourdock’s statement about rape-induced abortions, on October 24, 2012

LEGITIMATE RAPE

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” -Republican Congressman & Senate candidate Todd Akin of Missouri on August 20, 2012

HONEST RAPE

“If it’s an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room, I would give them a shot of estrogen.” -Republican Congressman & Presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas on February 3, 2012

EMERGENCY RAPE

“It was an issue about a Catholic church being forced to offer those pills if the person came in in an emergency rape.” -Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon of Connecticut (also confusing churches with hospitals) on October 15, 2012

EASY RAPE

“If you go down that road, some girls, they rape so easy.” -Republican State Representative Roger Rivard of Wisconsin, on December 21, 2011 and endorsed by VP Candidate Paul Ryan on August 9, 2012

FORCIBLE RAPE

Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Paul Ryan, Todd “legitimate rape” Akin and 214 other Republicans co-sponsored the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, which would prohibit federal funding of abortions except in instances of “an act of forcible rape or, if a minor, an act of incest.” -H.R. 3, 112th Congress, January 20, 2011

GOP Misogyny: Republican Embrace of Rape Culture” Nancy a Heitzeg

It’s as if there were a secret linguistic underground out there that had long been discussing rape in this hateful fashion and, without anyone really noticing, developing an entire misogynistic lexicon.

What is a Phillip Roth?

I’m not sure why I find this so entertaining, but I just found an article by Phillip Roth, “AN OPEN LETTER TO WIKIPEDIA” in which he complains that he cannot control his own Wikipedia article. “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”  I think the Foucault of  “What is  an Author”? is spinning in his grave somewhere.

Wikipedia falsely claims, Roth says, that  the Human Stain is “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard.” In fact, Roth says, the novel is based on “an unhappy event in the life of my late friend Melvin Tumin, professor of sociology at Princeton…”  The Wikipedia article, to make this debate even more post-modern, has already been changed, neatly folding the debate into the text, like egg white in a souffle.  Here’s the new entry:

Roth was motivated to explain the inspiration for the book after noticing what he referred to as a “serious misstatement” in the Wikipedia entry on The Human Stain. His request to have the entry amended was prevented by Wikipedia policy because he did not have a secondary source for his inspiration. Roth was responding to comments in the article referring to reviews by Michiko Kakutani, Lorrie Moore, Charles Taylor, and Brent Staples, who had all stated in their reviews that the book was “partly inspired by the late Anatole Broyard”, a writer and New York Times literary critic.

It’s a battle between the literary (print) and the collective (digital) forms of authorship and I think Roth is the looser. In traditional terms, the Wikipedia people have good evidence. Even if Roth didn’t consciously draw on Broyard,  a handful of smart people see a  strong connection that Ross himself could have missed. Ross’s argument is a little silly; he says, roughly, “I knew Tumin much better than I knew Broyard. Since I didn’t know Broyard well, I couldn’t write about him.”  That hardly seems conclusive, much less persuasive.

What Roth seems to miss is that Wikipedia has a different model of authority and author. A Wikipedia entry, Foucault might say, “is valorized without any questions about the identity of [its] author.”  Unlike a folk-tale or a myth, though, the validity of the entry rests on a institutional rather than historical process. In part, Ross is confusing apples and oranges. “The same types of texts have not always required authors,” Foucault notes, although “literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.” Not so much, now.

MOOC’s as Research and Development

I’ve been skeptical about massive open online courses (MOOC”s) for several reasons. It’s a great idea to try to make education, especially from elite institutions, more accessible. As long as you have a computer and an internet connection (no small thing in many parts of the world), MOOC’s are free and the list of universities offering them in the U.S. and Europe especially is impressive and growing.

It’s possible to root online education inn authentic human interaction but you have to work at it. You can’t simply expect it to happen spontaneously; it has to be embedded in the pedagogy and in the design of the course.  I think our understanding of how to do this is incomplete at best. Any course, such as a MOOC, which is self guided, has a real problem creating authentic relationships, especially when there are 100,000 students taking it.

My instinct, then, suggests that these courses are going to be most useful for motivated autodidacts but difficult for the rest of us. I’ve just watched a TED video by Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera, that has gone a long way to change my mind.   What’s fascinating is that the students themselves are creating solutions to some of the problems of MOOC’s. They’ve formed study groups, for example, that meet in person all over the world.

Coursera is also using a peer grading system, which suggests one strategy for dealing with writing-based assessment. Coursera is using the massive amount of data they generate to investigate what does and doesn’t work and create strategies to improve learning.  There’s never been such a large pool of data or a group of researchers dedicated to learning from it; it promises to be a prominent force in the future of online education.

Teaching the New Poll Tax

In 1995, when OJ Simpson was on trial, the debate over his innocence or guilt took over the teaching of first year college English in many places because it epitomized the complex dynamics of racial politics in the U.S.  I am hoping that something similar will happen around voting laws this fall, for the very same reasons.  There’s a lot of good information to be had to launch the discussions. A recent report by the Brennan Center for Justice paints a frightening picture of the extensive sweep of the new poll tax, restricting voting access for million of U.S citizens.  The statistics are daunting:

At least 180 restrictive bills introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states.

47 restrictive bills currently pending in 12 states.

24 laws and 2 executive actions passed since the beginning of 2011 in 19 states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin).

16 states have passed restrictive voting laws that have the potential to impact the 2012 election (Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and West Virginia). These states account for 214 electoral votes, or nearly 79 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.

Of these, 13 laws and executive actions are currently in effect in 9 states (Florida, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia).

2012 Summary of Voting Law Changes” Wendy R. Weiser and Lawrence Norden

Just a quick glance at a map of the states where these new laws have been enacted illustrates their political intent.  The election of the first Black president has fueled some of the most reactionary legislation in decades, much of it aimed at keeping the poor and non-white and elderly– all groups unlikely to vote Republican– out of the electoral process.  The Voting Rights Act, along with Roe v. Wade, Social Security, and Medicare, is clearly on the target list of the extreme far right (aka the Tea Party).  These new restrictive voting laws have been spearheaded by Republican governors and legislatures and are focused on states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, that played a key role in the last several presidential elections.  Students can listen to Bill Moyers’ interview with the authors of the report as well has his investigation into the difficulty of getting official identification.