oof, i wish problems were more complicated

due to a bit of a scheduling snafu, i am teaching a class on women in science. no biggie, though, because i've got plenty to say on the topic, and i get a chance to read some stuff i've been meaning to for a while. as i somewhat expected, the (all women) class in general does not "feel" oppressed. after all, they are women on a mostly-male campus, pursuing careers in mostly male fields and as yet have not felt as though they can't do what they want to do because of their gender. many of them have encountered various asshole peers who tell them that girls can't program computers or whatever, but while that makes my students angry, they don't perceive such comments as having material impact on their lives.

anticipating this, and wanting to avoid a class based on personal experience anyway, i decided to focus the class on large-scale social patterns and feminist epistemology (broadly). great. i want the students to be able to see the bigger picture--both materially and abstractly--of which they are a part, develop a certain appreciation for history, and feel more confident and determined with new perspective on their own careers. appropriately intellectual goals, think i. that way the class won't devolve into a series of anecdotes supposedly representative of all women in science. and that way they can think about sexism not as a set of defined limits on their lives, or as stupid comments from peers, but as a systemic and subtle issue that demands more thought than recounting anecdotes and holding Men responsible for how they hold back Women.

but the other day i hear that our university president (outgoing, btw) has addressed incoming students and their parents at orientation at least two years in a row with an anecdote about the highest-ranking woman at the university swimming at his house and oops, not having a swimming suit and oops, jumping in the pool in a white t-shirt. as in, our president thinks it's appropriate to talk to freshmen and their parents at an official occasion about boobies. the boobies of a high-profile authority figure, no less.

it is so lame of him to make the world that easy to think about, to make himself that easily dismissable as sexist pig, and to make my lofty goals for my class waaaaaayyyy overreach. why bother with feminist epistemology when you can just point across the quad, sigh, and say, "eh?" in other words, yeah, that's dumb and really odd and surely does make him seem bluntly, boringly sexist, but far worse is his dumbing down the whole discourse of sexism. it really is that easy. stupid man.