Miss Rants

Like every other person on Facebook I have a lot of Facebook friends whom I haven’t spoken to since the Clinton Administration. This means that inevitably I see the “Status Updates” of people about whom I don’t actually know anything about really, except maybe to which primary school they went. Most of the time, these little updates are brief windows into lives out of which I have long drifted. They mean little or nothing to me. Sometimes, however, they feel like windows into parts of society of which I will never be part. And to be honest, sometimes what I see is really scary.

For example, this morning I awoke to a particular status update that commented

“geez, no wonder most men think women are cheating whores..there is a lady in here with a man that is NOT her husband, and they definitely aren’t siblings..tramp”

As a feminist, no wait check that, actually as a human being this sort of remark worries me. I wanted to leave a “Comment” under the status but then I realized that it would probably be to no avail. The Updater, a woman no less, was committed to stigmatizing the open display of women’s sexuality. She was acting as an accomplice to the patriarchy and she most likely didn’t know it. It made me sick and sad and angry all at the same time; and not just angry at her, but angry at my own self-righteousness. Who am I to tell anyone that you aren’t supposed to use words like “whore” and “tramp” unless you are reclaiming them. The snobbery of Liberal Academics strikes again!

The fact is that my Facebook “friend” probably thinks more like the rest of the world than I do. At the same time I do not think that I and my cohorts (Hello there cohorts, or dare I say, Comrades! How are you guys?) think the way we do because we are sequestered in “The Ivory Tower” peacefully completing our apprenticeships before we slap a “Dr.” in front of our names and head off to lives full of Summer Vacations. We lead real lives full of office politics (probably more of that than most), drunken nights, crummy boyfriends, and dirty jokes. We know that no matter how much noise we make about the construction of race and gender that those things are real enough in the day to day living of individual lives. And yet I still know that the above status update was personally cruel and politically irresponsible. If that makes me an arrogant, liberal academic then so be it. I will wear that label with pride…or will I?