"Teacher Spice."
May 10, 2024 9:30 AM Subscribe
I think classicism is a real issue in academia and not knowing the lingo and the dress code can make it really hard to have credibility as a professor.
But also... since when are writing professors discriminated against for wearing dresses?
I just really wonder at the piece, it's pinging something in me that says that there's probably more to the story... It's close to "white conservatives who dress nicely are the real victims" territory.
Also, people of course choose flattering photos for their publicity shots, but nothing in any of the photos of Jenny Irish online looks... out of place? For a college writing professor and author.
If her account is right, just what is going on at Arizona State University that makes it okay for male colleagues to constantly comment on her dress and appearance, and students to file a report about 'feeling unsafe' based ONLY on her dress?
Maybe some college professors can weigh in on this, but none of what's described in the article feels normal to me.
posted by subdee at 9:58 AM on May 10 [19 favorites]
But also... since when are writing professors discriminated against for wearing dresses?
I just really wonder at the piece, it's pinging something in me that says that there's probably more to the story... It's close to "white conservatives who dress nicely are the real victims" territory.
Also, people of course choose flattering photos for their publicity shots, but nothing in any of the photos of Jenny Irish online looks... out of place? For a college writing professor and author.
If her account is right, just what is going on at Arizona State University that makes it okay for male colleagues to constantly comment on her dress and appearance, and students to file a report about 'feeling unsafe' based ONLY on her dress?
Maybe some college professors can weigh in on this, but none of what's described in the article feels normal to me.
posted by subdee at 9:58 AM on May 10 [19 favorites]
Well, that's the thing. As a society in general we're just starting to wonder whether people with beards are "he/him," even rarely deigning to ask. I'm not he/him and I have a beard and I get yes sirred all the frigging time. You get someone with tits showing up to a job site and they're going to get asked if they're in the right place. I shouldn't have to shave to make asking my pronouns more common. She shouldn't have to wear a beret to be taken seriously as an artist. Snap judgements on appearances are the problem and catering to them is not a solution, it's barely a stop-gap. The solution is to stake a claim on your appearance and say "i am not sir" or "i am an artist" because if you just go with the flow, no one is going to learn any better.
It takes energy to educate, and not everyone has it, and not all the time, and we all have our own battles and energy reserves. I'm just saying, people gotta take a stand to shift the window.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:02 AM on May 10 [13 favorites]
It takes energy to educate, and not everyone has it, and not all the time, and we all have our own battles and energy reserves. I'm just saying, people gotta take a stand to shift the window.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:02 AM on May 10 [13 favorites]
Well, yes, but like... this is written as a trend piece... is there really a trend of college writing professors getting in trouble for wearing dresses and heels? Because that's what she's saying. She is dressing in a normal way.
It just feels like stealth "college campuses are too damn liberal, it's not safe for conservatives" (in this case, the author doesn't say anything about her values but implies she is not conservative but just mistaken for being conservative based on how she dresses, and discriminated against based on that assumption).
I mean, maybe there is an out of control anti-conservative bias at Arizona State University that makes it hard for college professors who aren't even conservative but just like wearing pretty dresses and heels. But I don't know, something about this article just feels off.
posted by subdee at 10:10 AM on May 10 [5 favorites]
It just feels like stealth "college campuses are too damn liberal, it's not safe for conservatives" (in this case, the author doesn't say anything about her values but implies she is not conservative but just mistaken for being conservative based on how she dresses, and discriminated against based on that assumption).
I mean, maybe there is an out of control anti-conservative bias at Arizona State University that makes it hard for college professors who aren't even conservative but just like wearing pretty dresses and heels. But I don't know, something about this article just feels off.
posted by subdee at 10:10 AM on May 10 [5 favorites]
Oh students definitely comment on their professors' appearance. My spouse (a dude!), got some snarky comments in their student evaluations about their clothing. And women faculty are scrutinized more. I can't speak to this specific professor's experience, of course, but none of the comments/anecdotes that Irish shares in the essay are that surprising. Shitty, but not surprising.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:12 AM on May 10 [17 favorites]
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:12 AM on May 10 [17 favorites]
:(
I also teach (high school), so I know your appearance does matter to students. But to constantly have other faculty members comment on your appearance, that's horrible.
posted by subdee at 10:14 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I also teach (high school), so I know your appearance does matter to students. But to constantly have other faculty members comment on your appearance, that's horrible.
posted by subdee at 10:14 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]
Part of the reason that I dress as I do is a matter of practicality. Yes, I’m short. Yes, I’m chubby. I’m also a 36 DD. I do not carry my weight “well.” My proportions make finding pants difficult. A blouse is nearly impossible. This is the reality of living in my body. Dresses spare me a daily struggle to clothe myself in a way that is both comfortable and professional.
Whatever else this article does or doesn't say about the state of respect for female teachers or conservative teachers, I just want to note how much *this* resonated with me. I am taller and fatter than her, and I wear a dress nearly every single day because that is what is available to me that covers my body in a way that's viewed as appropriate.
And believe me, I tried. I have bought custom pants online. I have bought custom pants in person. I spent thousands of dollars and many hours consulting with professional pattern designers trying to get a pants pattern to fit me and I still don't have a pants pattern that fits me.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:15 AM on May 10 [26 favorites]
Whatever else this article does or doesn't say about the state of respect for female teachers or conservative teachers, I just want to note how much *this* resonated with me. I am taller and fatter than her, and I wear a dress nearly every single day because that is what is available to me that covers my body in a way that's viewed as appropriate.
And believe me, I tried. I have bought custom pants online. I have bought custom pants in person. I spent thousands of dollars and many hours consulting with professional pattern designers trying to get a pants pattern to fit me and I still don't have a pants pattern that fits me.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:15 AM on May 10 [26 favorites]
But also... since when are writing professors discriminated against for wearing dresses?
I work in academia and you can absolutely tell a great deal about people's jobs, education level and class status by how they dress and how they're built because there is great structural and immediate bias in who gets to be powerful in academia, and I can see how someone whose appearance made people think "secretary" would in fact be treated poorly, because secretaries are treated poorly.
Faculty and senior administrative staff are most likely to be from affluent backgrounds, likely to be white, likely to be tall, likely to be thin because thinness is more likely among the better off. There are short fat people of color in senior administrative roles, but not that many.
Faculty dress to reflect their educational/cultural background - in some fields that means dressing artily or "transgressively", in some fields it means expensive but rather sub fusc suits, in some fields it means dressing like you're ready for a field expedition any minute, etc.
Less expensive business casual or "professional" clothes absolutely read like you're an admin. A cheap way to get ahead as an admin, in fact, is to avoid as much as possible standard business casual, standard "professional" hairstyles, "professional" make-up, etc, because avoiding those things signals that you may be a secretary but you're from an educated/affluent background.
I find it entirely unsurprising that someone in an arty field full of people from more affluent backgrounds was stigmatized or distrusted for not dressing right, and it seems weird to me that this is some kind of giant red flag for people. Salon may be kind of junk journalism, but it's not exactly Breitbart.
It's easy to look up Jenny Irish's website and work, and it does not look like she is conservative in any way.
posted by Frowner at 10:15 AM on May 10 [52 favorites]
I work in academia and you can absolutely tell a great deal about people's jobs, education level and class status by how they dress and how they're built because there is great structural and immediate bias in who gets to be powerful in academia, and I can see how someone whose appearance made people think "secretary" would in fact be treated poorly, because secretaries are treated poorly.
Faculty and senior administrative staff are most likely to be from affluent backgrounds, likely to be white, likely to be tall, likely to be thin because thinness is more likely among the better off. There are short fat people of color in senior administrative roles, but not that many.
Faculty dress to reflect their educational/cultural background - in some fields that means dressing artily or "transgressively", in some fields it means expensive but rather sub fusc suits, in some fields it means dressing like you're ready for a field expedition any minute, etc.
Less expensive business casual or "professional" clothes absolutely read like you're an admin. A cheap way to get ahead as an admin, in fact, is to avoid as much as possible standard business casual, standard "professional" hairstyles, "professional" make-up, etc, because avoiding those things signals that you may be a secretary but you're from an educated/affluent background.
I find it entirely unsurprising that someone in an arty field full of people from more affluent backgrounds was stigmatized or distrusted for not dressing right, and it seems weird to me that this is some kind of giant red flag for people. Salon may be kind of junk journalism, but it's not exactly Breitbart.
It's easy to look up Jenny Irish's website and work, and it does not look like she is conservative in any way.
posted by Frowner at 10:15 AM on May 10 [52 favorites]
I now believe that my appearance allows miscoding. It can tell a story about me that I do not mean to tell, one that, in the fiercely liberal space of academia, inaccurately aligns me with conservative values
One of the most ardent leftists I know works in a trade, has just about the largest beard I've ever seen, dips, and drives a pickup. Big redneck vibes.
He also has a swastika tattoo ... an anthropomorphic swastika being punched by an anthropomorphic star of David, political-cartoon style. (I will make no comments on the appropriateness of the tattoo, but its intended meaning should be clear.)
posted by uncleozzy at 10:21 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]
One of the most ardent leftists I know works in a trade, has just about the largest beard I've ever seen, dips, and drives a pickup. Big redneck vibes.
He also has a swastika tattoo ... an anthropomorphic swastika being punched by an anthropomorphic star of David, political-cartoon style. (I will make no comments on the appropriateness of the tattoo, but its intended meaning should be clear.)
posted by uncleozzy at 10:21 AM on May 10 [1 favorite]
This reminded me of the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie interview from some years back talking about fashion, make-up, feminism and getting taken seriously as an artist (NYT, gift link):
"I do remember that when I moved to the U.S. — and I think maybe there are different standards for people who are supposed to be particularly intellectual or particularly creative — I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror."
Also, what Frowner said.
posted by thivaia at 10:25 AM on May 10 [10 favorites]
"I do remember that when I moved to the U.S. — and I think maybe there are different standards for people who are supposed to be particularly intellectual or particularly creative — I very quickly realized that if you want to seem as a serious writer, you can’t possibly look like a person who looks in the mirror."
Also, what Frowner said.
posted by thivaia at 10:25 AM on May 10 [10 favorites]
I think what's pinging me as subtly off about this is the "I'm being discriminated against for being too white, too bland, too tradwife-looking" strand. Especially the "unsafe" story. Students say inappropriate and unkind things about their teachers' looks all the time, but I find it hard to believe that a group of students would band together to complain to the administration about not feeling safe around a teacher based solely on her wearing dresses. "I'm oppressed because I dress normcore in the arts" feels a little weird, even set in the undeniable and highly recognizable context of male academics and students being shitty about what their female colleagues wear. (And, to be honest, it feels slightly tone-deaf, in that I went in thinking it was going to be about her skin color, or her age, or a visible disability...I don't know if I'd feel right complaining about anti-normcore discrimination in the present environment.)
posted by praemunire at 10:27 AM on May 10 [12 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 10:27 AM on May 10 [12 favorites]
Am a prof, but male and presenting as male and in a social science.
But also... since when are writing professors discriminated against for wearing dresses?
Since forever. Women in academia get disrespected and discriminated against because they wear a dress or because they wear pants or because their dresses are too frivolous or because their dresses are too frumpy or because their dresses are too serious-corporate or they dress too sexy or don't hide being attractive well enough or because they smile too much or not enough or aren't helpful enough or are too mommish.
I just really wonder at the piece, it's pinging something in me that says that there's probably more to the story... It's close to "white conservatives who dress nicely are the real victims" territory.
Nope. Pretty standard "women in academia." The only thing it's missing is a recognition that it would have been impossible for her to dress "correctly."
If her account is right, just what is going on at Arizona State University that makes it okay for male colleagues to constantly comment on her dress and appearance, and students to file a report about 'feeling unsafe' based ONLY on her dress?
What's going on is academia. Academia is profoundly classist. Nowhere is immune to it, but ISTFG anytime someone asks or feigns confusion about why a house might not have a wine fridge or thinks that summering in France is part of a normal American childhood, it's someone from some sort of (mostly-)literature department. Academia is also deeply misogynistic, but that's pretty orthogonal. Like, engineering departments generally seem the least classist, but that just means they do misogyny in a direct "eww girls are icky" way instead of couching it as classism.
As to the second thing, all sorts of weird shit gets around through undergrad grapevines. A couple of years ago students organized a discord for a class, fine, which ended up resulting in them denouncing me in a manifesto to my chair for all sorts of nonsense that both the syllabus and me, with my mouth, had previously said the reverse of.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:32 AM on May 10 [40 favorites]
But also... since when are writing professors discriminated against for wearing dresses?
Since forever. Women in academia get disrespected and discriminated against because they wear a dress or because they wear pants or because their dresses are too frivolous or because their dresses are too frumpy or because their dresses are too serious-corporate or they dress too sexy or don't hide being attractive well enough or because they smile too much or not enough or aren't helpful enough or are too mommish.
I just really wonder at the piece, it's pinging something in me that says that there's probably more to the story... It's close to "white conservatives who dress nicely are the real victims" territory.
Nope. Pretty standard "women in academia." The only thing it's missing is a recognition that it would have been impossible for her to dress "correctly."
If her account is right, just what is going on at Arizona State University that makes it okay for male colleagues to constantly comment on her dress and appearance, and students to file a report about 'feeling unsafe' based ONLY on her dress?
What's going on is academia. Academia is profoundly classist. Nowhere is immune to it, but ISTFG anytime someone asks or feigns confusion about why a house might not have a wine fridge or thinks that summering in France is part of a normal American childhood, it's someone from some sort of (mostly-)literature department. Academia is also deeply misogynistic, but that's pretty orthogonal. Like, engineering departments generally seem the least classist, but that just means they do misogyny in a direct "eww girls are icky" way instead of couching it as classism.
As to the second thing, all sorts of weird shit gets around through undergrad grapevines. A couple of years ago students organized a discord for a class, fine, which ended up resulting in them denouncing me in a manifesto to my chair for all sorts of nonsense that both the syllabus and me, with my mouth, had previously said the reverse of.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 10:32 AM on May 10 [40 favorites]
Yeah, I mean, if it's one thing I've learned over the years it's that American society will find a way to tell a woman they're doing it wrong. No matter what 'it' is or how she's doing it.
posted by Gygesringtone at 10:38 AM on May 10 [17 favorites]
posted by Gygesringtone at 10:38 AM on May 10 [17 favorites]
It's not a about the education, it's the experience that counts.
posted by sammyo at 10:39 AM on May 10
posted by sammyo at 10:39 AM on May 10
The LLM's and other "AI"'s that will be teaching online will figure that out quick enough and tailor the generated image for each student's optimum learning mood of the day.
posted by sammyo at 10:41 AM on May 10
posted by sammyo at 10:41 AM on May 10
Women in academia get disrespected and discriminated against because they wear a dress or because they wear pants or because their dresses are too frivolous or because their dresses are too frumpy or because their dresses are too serious-corporate or they dress too sexy or don't hide being attractive well enough or because they smile too much or not enough or aren't helpful enough or are too mommish.
I suspect that this article is an attempt to impute a particular identity-discrimination aspect to her treatment that she feels more comfortable accepting than just boring old "no way to be a woman right" misogyny. That's why something feels a trifle off to me even though, from my own and my friends' experiences in and out of academia, I wouldn't begin to question most of her reported experiences (and, let me tell you, once you get past a certain bust-hip ratio, wearing a buttondown blouse is beyond a dream, the struggle is definitely real). It feels strange because the "bland white" identity (both terms she uses for herself, mind you) is not really appropriate for that kind of analysis. I'm not sure she's picked up the right tool for her problem.
posted by praemunire at 10:57 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]
I suspect that this article is an attempt to impute a particular identity-discrimination aspect to her treatment that she feels more comfortable accepting than just boring old "no way to be a woman right" misogyny. That's why something feels a trifle off to me even though, from my own and my friends' experiences in and out of academia, I wouldn't begin to question most of her reported experiences (and, let me tell you, once you get past a certain bust-hip ratio, wearing a buttondown blouse is beyond a dream, the struggle is definitely real). It feels strange because the "bland white" identity (both terms she uses for herself, mind you) is not really appropriate for that kind of analysis. I'm not sure she's picked up the right tool for her problem.
posted by praemunire at 10:57 AM on May 10 [3 favorites]
I just really wonder at the piece, it's pinging something in me that says that there's probably more to the story... It's close to "white conservatives who dress nicely are the real victims" territory.
This seems off to me as well. Students feel unsafe because she wears a dress -- that feels like a dispatch from the Fox News commentators vs. snowflake wars.
She's a writing professor? Half the women in MFA programs dress like they're auditioning for a film adaptation of Bunny. So many dresses!
(For my first day in MFA-land, I wore a navy sundress and pink cardigan. I look godawful in pink, but every now and then I try.)
I'm sure Irish is telling the truth about not getting along with her classmates, but I have a feeling the clothing was not the main reason. MFA programs can be weird and it might be easier for her to believe they were calling her "Taylor Swift" as a dig at her clothing when it was really about her writing, or that she can't shake things off.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:14 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]
This seems off to me as well. Students feel unsafe because she wears a dress -- that feels like a dispatch from the Fox News commentators vs. snowflake wars.
She's a writing professor? Half the women in MFA programs dress like they're auditioning for a film adaptation of Bunny. So many dresses!
(For my first day in MFA-land, I wore a navy sundress and pink cardigan. I look godawful in pink, but every now and then I try.)
I'm sure Irish is telling the truth about not getting along with her classmates, but I have a feeling the clothing was not the main reason. MFA programs can be weird and it might be easier for her to believe they were calling her "Taylor Swift" as a dig at her clothing when it was really about her writing, or that she can't shake things off.
posted by betweenthebars at 11:14 AM on May 10 [2 favorites]
I'm going to believe her until someone shows a reason I shouldn't.
posted by pracowity at 11:14 AM on May 10 [15 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 11:14 AM on May 10 [15 favorites]
I believe her. For me, the question isn’t “Did this happen to her,” but more “What agenda is her odd framing of it serving?”. She’s a creative writing professor; her framing isn’t incidental.
posted by vim876 at 11:32 AM on May 10 [7 favorites]
posted by vim876 at 11:32 AM on May 10 [7 favorites]
From TFA:
[her appearance] can tell a story about me that I do not mean to tell, one that, in the fiercely liberal space of academia, inaccurately aligns me with conservative values.
Lots of people in this thread that maybe didn't read the article and are jumping to the same conclusions as her coworkers.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:13 PM on May 10 [14 favorites]
[her appearance] can tell a story about me that I do not mean to tell, one that, in the fiercely liberal space of academia, inaccurately aligns me with conservative values.
Lots of people in this thread that maybe didn't read the article and are jumping to the same conclusions as her coworkers.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:13 PM on May 10 [14 favorites]
I don't think she's conservative (her work doesn't look like it is, certainly), but I do think it's possibly telling that she doesn't see how her rhetorical framing here drifts close to conservative "appropriated grievance" territory ("people in academia and the arts don't look like me, a cis white woman in a dress!"), which is what I think is prompting some unease in some of her readers, even people who are totally ready to accept an account in which male faculty say snide things about a woman faculty member's clothing/styling. Maybe this just isn't the best version of this essay.
posted by praemunire at 12:41 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 12:41 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]
I can't imagine my MFA classmates making a complaint that a professor's fashion choices made them feel unsafe, but there's something about this essay that feels familiar to me - I think there is a kind of paranoid parsing of fashion and appearance and all kinds of gendered / classed signals in order to try to figure out who is On Your Side in a meaningful way and who is (at best) Good-Hearted But Clueless.
I don't know. I'd love to hear the other side of the story. It is tremendously difficult to know how we come off to other people, and it's also tremendously difficult to know the basis on which we make judgments about others. Sometimes the vibes are just off; sometimes the vibes are off because one person is neurodivergent, and it doesn't feel like prejudice, it just feels like the vibes are off.
posted by Jeanne at 12:58 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
I don't know. I'd love to hear the other side of the story. It is tremendously difficult to know how we come off to other people, and it's also tremendously difficult to know the basis on which we make judgments about others. Sometimes the vibes are just off; sometimes the vibes are off because one person is neurodivergent, and it doesn't feel like prejudice, it just feels like the vibes are off.
posted by Jeanne at 12:58 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
If you're in art student at Arizona State you probably went to high school in a conservative town surrounded by conservative people who dress the way Irish describes herself. And the University probably has more students and faculty who are conservative than some schools. In that environment students in art departments might feel more of a need for markers like dress to figure out who is and isn't safe.
posted by straight at 1:11 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]
posted by straight at 1:11 PM on May 10 [6 favorites]
Fwiw, the author of the piece is a writer, not a visual artist. Broadly speaking, still an artist, but not the kind you might think of at first; she's not complaining that people expect her to be wearing a smock and paint-splattered sneakers with bits of clay flaking off her hands.
posted by surlyben at 1:32 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
posted by surlyben at 1:32 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
In that environment students in art departments might feel more of a need for markers like dress to figure out who is and isn't safe.
I wish we were safe from people who look for simplistic markers like that to decide whether people are good.
posted by pracowity at 1:42 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
I wish we were safe from people who look for simplistic markers like that to decide whether people are good.
posted by pracowity at 1:42 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
The unsafe thing is definitely kind of odd. I can believe that dressing in a hyper-feminine way can turn off students who assume that the politics go with the outfit, and of course sexual harassment and condescension is everywhere, and not just from men, but "unsafe"? You do end up wondering if maybe there's a little bit more to the story.
posted by tavella at 2:04 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
posted by tavella at 2:04 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
I wish I'd had a creative writing professor. Wasn't really a thing around here unless you studied literature, alas.
posted by signal at 2:17 PM on May 10
posted by signal at 2:17 PM on May 10
Am I going crazy? She uses the word “unsafe” one time in the entire article? She doesn’t seem like a conservative and I think someone else in this thread has looked her up and confirmed this? I’m getting a “very special precious folks on Metafilter” feel called out by a working class person describing their marginalization by nominally “progressive”, “nonconformist” and “quirky” academic types who are used to seeing themselves as outsiders, but of course, aren’t. I dunno. Maybe I’m way off base and out of pocket here but I’ve never known metafilter to be very good at class and this feels like another example of that.
posted by flamk at 2:17 PM on May 10 [24 favorites]
posted by flamk at 2:17 PM on May 10 [24 favorites]
No, it was about the incident she described. She says that an entire group of students went to a colleague and said they would feel unsafe working with her. So it wasn't just one weirdo, and that's a little unusual and does make me wonder a bit about what those students would say if asked for comment.
posted by tavella at 2:26 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
posted by tavella at 2:26 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I haven't had to deal with this myself, but US colleagues commonly report that students have gotten good at using that kind of language to get what they want. That it's often just a new kind of dead grandmother.
I wouldn't take anything from it being a group instead of one student other than that the students were talking to each other. Students can believe the most amazingly dumb, utterly unfounded in fact things. And somehow when they start talking to each other it's the dumbest things that get reinforced. One student might ask "Hey when is the final exam?" Ten students talking to each other will tell you that your course having a fifty page final paper assignment instead of a final exam, which they've made up out of whole cloth and is contradicted several times in the course's syllabus, is really unfair.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:28 PM on May 10 [13 favorites]
I wouldn't take anything from it being a group instead of one student other than that the students were talking to each other. Students can believe the most amazingly dumb, utterly unfounded in fact things. And somehow when they start talking to each other it's the dumbest things that get reinforced. One student might ask "Hey when is the final exam?" Ten students talking to each other will tell you that your course having a fifty page final paper assignment instead of a final exam, which they've made up out of whole cloth and is contradicted several times in the course's syllabus, is really unfair.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 3:28 PM on May 10 [13 favorites]
Changed my mind about this article and regret starting the conversation off in that direction, but thanks academia folks for weighing in.
posted by subdee at 3:53 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]
posted by subdee at 3:53 PM on May 10 [4 favorites]
In that environment students in art departments might feel more of a need for markers like dress to figure out who is and isn't safe.
I wish we were safe from people who look for simplistic markers like that to decide whether people are good.
Yeah, but some undergraduates take longer to figure that out than others. Some may have only just realized there's stuff about their lives that some professors will welcome and others definitely will not and are in the process of figuring out which is which. Others grew up in places where the only adult(s) they'd found who would welcome and accept them were obviously non-conformist and they haven't realized (or don't yet fully believe) that there are adults who look like Irish that wouldn't reject them.
posted by straight at 4:02 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
I wish we were safe from people who look for simplistic markers like that to decide whether people are good.
Yeah, but some undergraduates take longer to figure that out than others. Some may have only just realized there's stuff about their lives that some professors will welcome and others definitely will not and are in the process of figuring out which is which. Others grew up in places where the only adult(s) they'd found who would welcome and accept them were obviously non-conformist and they haven't realized (or don't yet fully believe) that there are adults who look like Irish that wouldn't reject them.
posted by straight at 4:02 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
After rereading my comment while I still stand by the general point that this is (to me) about class, I’m also realizing I sounded harsh and made it personal and for that I apologize. :(
posted by flamk at 4:04 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]
posted by flamk at 4:04 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]
I agree that that "first day at the MFA" anecdote was inflected by class, but she's not working class now. She made $78,750.00 in 2021 as a professor and, if ASU's system is like others, she's tenured, too. (I looked it up because some adjunct lecturers can suffer great economic precarity.) She's not exactly affluent now, but she doesn't have to wear normcore for economic reasons, or because she no longer has the social capital to understand how people at her institution/in her profession often dress.
posted by praemunire at 4:23 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
posted by praemunire at 4:23 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
She doesn't need to have economic reasons. Within very wide boundaries, it's actually just fine for her to wear whatever the fuck she wants for whatever reasons seem fit to her, and it's the people who are remarking on her dress who are the villains here.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:39 PM on May 10 [27 favorites]
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:39 PM on May 10 [27 favorites]
there are adults who look like Irish that wouldn't reject them.
What does that mean?
posted by pracowity at 5:13 PM on May 10
What does that mean?
posted by pracowity at 5:13 PM on May 10
I wouldn't take anything from it being a group instead of one student other than that the students were talking to each other. Students can believe the most amazingly dumb, utterly unfounded in fact things. And somehow when they start talking to each other it's the dumbest things that get reinforced.
Mmm. My opinion is that "believe victims" also applies to students, and automatically dismissing a group of younger people as mere hysterics without hearing from them is... not good. As I said, I'm not automatically thinking she did anything wrong, but I would like to hear from the distressed students before I make any final conclusions.
posted by tavella at 5:33 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
Mmm. My opinion is that "believe victims" also applies to students, and automatically dismissing a group of younger people as mere hysterics without hearing from them is... not good. As I said, I'm not automatically thinking she did anything wrong, but I would like to hear from the distressed students before I make any final conclusions.
posted by tavella at 5:33 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
Class and income are not the same thing, and current income may tell you very little about a person's actual economic status, especially for an academic who may well have incurred considerable debt during many years of low salary in order to get where they are. Yes, professors at public institutions have their salaries made public, so this is not technically doxxing, but man this is a pretty upsetting line of argumentation for someone on MetaFilter to have chosen.
posted by biogeo at 5:49 PM on May 10 [18 favorites]
posted by biogeo at 5:49 PM on May 10 [18 favorites]
My opinion is that "believe victims" also applies to students
...but not Jenny Irish.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:25 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
...but not Jenny Irish.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:25 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
Amazing the contortions you managed to get out of "I'm not automatically thinking she did anything wrong, but I would like to hear from the distressed students before I make any final conclusions."
posted by tavella at 6:33 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
posted by tavella at 6:33 PM on May 10 [3 favorites]
So... I went to a counter-protest last week when a local transphobic church were picketing a youth clinic here.
I wore a nice pinstripe and a tie. I could say it was because I wanted to perform trad masculinity but mock it through entirely vintage clothing; or that it was in case things kicked off, because the cops' brains can't process suit wearering older men as being at fault; but the truth is I own these kinds of clothes and like dressing up.
I started chatting to someone next to me who asked in all seriousness "are you an authority here?" and when I looked blank said "I mean, do you run the clinic?"
The power of dress is VERY CONSIDERABLE. Dress conveys much about identity. But irony, affection for historic media, all kinds of things inform it. Unfortunately like all art the reception by the audience may not be what you intend and in particular can be superficial and thoughtless.
I think this essay is sincere and genuine and this is how Irish wants to dress. There is a dark irony in the debate in this thread about her intention.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:06 PM on May 10 [19 favorites]
I wore a nice pinstripe and a tie. I could say it was because I wanted to perform trad masculinity but mock it through entirely vintage clothing; or that it was in case things kicked off, because the cops' brains can't process suit wearering older men as being at fault; but the truth is I own these kinds of clothes and like dressing up.
I started chatting to someone next to me who asked in all seriousness "are you an authority here?" and when I looked blank said "I mean, do you run the clinic?"
The power of dress is VERY CONSIDERABLE. Dress conveys much about identity. But irony, affection for historic media, all kinds of things inform it. Unfortunately like all art the reception by the audience may not be what you intend and in particular can be superficial and thoughtless.
I think this essay is sincere and genuine and this is how Irish wants to dress. There is a dark irony in the debate in this thread about her intention.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 7:06 PM on May 10 [19 favorites]
"Believe victims" is one thing, but here there aren't any victims - that is, unless we assume that the writer is telling pretty significant lies. Some students who had not worked with her apparently requested not to work with her, and they didn't have to work with her - that doesn't strike me as a story of victimized students, it strikes me as a story of students who were able to get what they wanted by asking.
It's possible that she's a TERF, or constantly cackling in corners about how she likes to have only 2% of her students get A's or takes on a pious and patronizing tone whenever she talks to a person of color but by asserting that we're just basically making shit up - it doesn't line up with her published work, there aren't claims about her on the internet, etc.
Maybe I am alone in my sin, but there have been two times in my life where I "got the creeps" about someone enough to mention it to others, genuinely feel that they were unsafe, etc, and found that I was totally wrong. One time I was in college, one time I was a grown adult, and both times I was creeped out by white working class men just sort of based on vibes, by which you should understand class prejudice. Neither of those guys said or did anything out of line in any way, I just got bad vibes. Luckily, in each case someone who, like, actually knew the person told me I was full of shit. After that, I really stopped trusting vibes - actual behavior or nothing, baby.
So anyway, I can in fact believe that a group of students got bad vibes off this professor completely incorrectly. I don't think this would make them monsters or especially stupid or prove that kids today are fragile snowflakes, I just think that when you have low information and limited experience, you can believe some things that aren't true.
The thing is, especially when when we're young but really lifelong, we can make ignorant decisions, do things in order to be popular or fit in, etc. That's just normal. A college student could BOTH make some foolish assumptions about a professor AND also be harassed or discriminated against by another professor. A college student could BOTH have a broadly accurate analysis of power relations AND misapply that analysis in specific by mistake. A college student could even join a protest because all their friends were going and the protest could STILL be morally correct. Students can be flawed or wrong in specific instances and still be legitimate moral actors who deserve to be taken seriously.
That said, it's not like I wouldn't take a student account seriously if one came out saying, eg, that this writer is a well-known TERF, but I don't feel an overwhelming need to assume absent any evidence that the professor is lying.
posted by Frowner at 7:11 PM on May 10 [11 favorites]
It's possible that she's a TERF, or constantly cackling in corners about how she likes to have only 2% of her students get A's or takes on a pious and patronizing tone whenever she talks to a person of color but by asserting that we're just basically making shit up - it doesn't line up with her published work, there aren't claims about her on the internet, etc.
Maybe I am alone in my sin, but there have been two times in my life where I "got the creeps" about someone enough to mention it to others, genuinely feel that they were unsafe, etc, and found that I was totally wrong. One time I was in college, one time I was a grown adult, and both times I was creeped out by white working class men just sort of based on vibes, by which you should understand class prejudice. Neither of those guys said or did anything out of line in any way, I just got bad vibes. Luckily, in each case someone who, like, actually knew the person told me I was full of shit. After that, I really stopped trusting vibes - actual behavior or nothing, baby.
So anyway, I can in fact believe that a group of students got bad vibes off this professor completely incorrectly. I don't think this would make them monsters or especially stupid or prove that kids today are fragile snowflakes, I just think that when you have low information and limited experience, you can believe some things that aren't true.
The thing is, especially when when we're young but really lifelong, we can make ignorant decisions, do things in order to be popular or fit in, etc. That's just normal. A college student could BOTH make some foolish assumptions about a professor AND also be harassed or discriminated against by another professor. A college student could BOTH have a broadly accurate analysis of power relations AND misapply that analysis in specific by mistake. A college student could even join a protest because all their friends were going and the protest could STILL be morally correct. Students can be flawed or wrong in specific instances and still be legitimate moral actors who deserve to be taken seriously.
That said, it's not like I wouldn't take a student account seriously if one came out saying, eg, that this writer is a well-known TERF, but I don't feel an overwhelming need to assume absent any evidence that the professor is lying.
posted by Frowner at 7:11 PM on May 10 [11 favorites]
Also, in re college students - I knew some young trans activists a few years ago who made a whole zine about how they hated hated hated Judith Butler. It was a pretty mean zine, really captured a feeling of spiteful, personal dislike. It so happens that I've read some Judith Butler, so I asked them why they hated her so much. They had never read her work, didn't have an accurate idea of what it contained and were basically going off of internet rumor about what "gender performance" meant for transness. They had not encountered any of her later work or commentary on gender and had not sought any out. This was TBQH pretty dumb and childish and was obviously them egging each other on.
But as a broad generality that little group was a pretty brave little group and did some extremely courageous and militant stuff. They weren't saints and their every word wasn't genius, but they were people who really did try to live their beliefs - you don't need to say that they were saints and geniuses to admire them, because people don't have to be saints and geniuses to be worthy of admiration or respect.
My point here being that they had a little group folie around Butler's image, but that didn't undercut or even stack up very much against the other stuff they did, it was just sort of one of those things you think when you're young that is incomplete or mistaken.
posted by Frowner at 7:22 PM on May 10 [7 favorites]
But as a broad generality that little group was a pretty brave little group and did some extremely courageous and militant stuff. They weren't saints and their every word wasn't genius, but they were people who really did try to live their beliefs - you don't need to say that they were saints and geniuses to admire them, because people don't have to be saints and geniuses to be worthy of admiration or respect.
My point here being that they had a little group folie around Butler's image, but that didn't undercut or even stack up very much against the other stuff they did, it was just sort of one of those things you think when you're young that is incomplete or mistaken.
posted by Frowner at 7:22 PM on May 10 [7 favorites]
So me wanting to hear the students' side of why Irish made them feel unsafe -- as they *according to Irish* said -- is "just basically making shit up", while elaborate explanations about how it's just like people hating on Judith Butler and students believing "amazingly dumb, utterly unfounded in fact things" is... deeply reasoned and factually based? Maybe indeed it was a very foolish thing or opinion that drove the students to it, but I have learned over the years that it's useful to hear both sides of a story.
posted by tavella at 7:43 PM on May 10
posted by tavella at 7:43 PM on May 10
But we're reading an essay. I don't think it's super helpful to approach this essay reading it 100% against the information we have. The information we have is that this professor is not conservative, does not write in support of conservatism, writes what she calls feminist and anti-racist work, is a first-generation professional and consistently experiences people being assholes to her about her appearance. We don't have internet chatter about how awful she is. We don't have contradictory accounts. This essay was not published in a rightwing source. The writer doesn't in fact say "white women are the real victims here", she says that working class women in academia face discrimination, which has been pointed out many times by many other writers.
Most tellingly, her big issue with the commentary isn't about students, it's about faculty who make asshole remarks. In what possible world is it cool and normal for some random colleague to call someone else "Teacher Spice" and comment frequently on their clothes?
No one has taken up her observation that she gets judged harshly because she's fat, either. It doesn't sound weird at all that, as she says, biz caz dresses and heels might well be acceptable on a normatively attractive woman but are viewed as tradwife or frumpy or risible on a short fat woman because a short fat woman is always positioned as a frump, a controlling maternal figure, someone who fails at gender, etc.
There is no more reason to believe that she is lying than there is to believe that any other personal essay writer who works on gender is lying, but she's for some reason getting positioned as a probable victimizer of students, probably secretly right wing, etc in the face of all available evidence.
posted by Frowner at 8:03 PM on May 10 [31 favorites]
Most tellingly, her big issue with the commentary isn't about students, it's about faculty who make asshole remarks. In what possible world is it cool and normal for some random colleague to call someone else "Teacher Spice" and comment frequently on their clothes?
No one has taken up her observation that she gets judged harshly because she's fat, either. It doesn't sound weird at all that, as she says, biz caz dresses and heels might well be acceptable on a normatively attractive woman but are viewed as tradwife or frumpy or risible on a short fat woman because a short fat woman is always positioned as a frump, a controlling maternal figure, someone who fails at gender, etc.
There is no more reason to believe that she is lying than there is to believe that any other personal essay writer who works on gender is lying, but she's for some reason getting positioned as a probable victimizer of students, probably secretly right wing, etc in the face of all available evidence.
posted by Frowner at 8:03 PM on May 10 [31 favorites]
If anything, "colleagues in the program talk shit about her because of her looks" is a perfectly good explanation for the students thinking she's awful based on nothing in particular, if we are going to root around for facts not in evidence. Students might easily be completely persuaded by an admired or intimidating faculty member or grad student - department bullshit is not at all unusual in the humanities, and the one time I was close to a group of students and grad students in a small humanities program, there was so much rumor and one absolutely outrageous case of bullying of one grad student by another's social group.
This whole thing, like Bad Art Friend, sounds like a case of workplace bullying which is then gussied up with a lot of stuff about aesthetics and perceived morality.
posted by Frowner at 8:21 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
This whole thing, like Bad Art Friend, sounds like a case of workplace bullying which is then gussied up with a lot of stuff about aesthetics and perceived morality.
posted by Frowner at 8:21 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
Most jobs have at least de facto uniforms; Irish is apparently choosing (at this point if perhaps not on the first day of graduate school) not to wear the uniform for her job, in the opinion of some kind of critical mass of her coworkers and clients. She seems to have some ok reasons for doing that, but it nevertheless seems to be mildly damaging some of her work relationships. A person with sharper people skills could very likely mitigate the damage by taking a wide variety of actions; a person with thicker skin might think "fuck you, I'm so good at my job that I can wear what I want and all you can say about it is Teacher Spice"; instead we get this essay. By choosing a career in academia, Irish is somewhat insulated from the ordinary consequences of having poor soft skills; probably a smart move for her.
posted by Kwine at 8:34 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
posted by Kwine at 8:34 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I work at a university in a student-facing role, although not as a professor, and I dress and style myself in a conventionally feminine, non-artsy fashion. And I guess that I'm actually pretty conscious that I'm a middle-aged, conventionally-dressed white lady in a conservative state, and students may *justifiably* wonder whether I'm a safe person with whom to discuss their marginalized identities. They are absolutely within their rights to do that: they don't owe me the benefit of the doubt, and it is my job to earn their trust, rather than their duty to give it to me. I work with students who are literally under attack in our state, and they do not have the luxury of automatically trusting people who look like me. I need to consciously do things to signal to students what my political and ethical commitments are. And part of that is respecting students' reactions to me. If I heard that a group of students had approached a colleague to say that they worried that I would be unsafe to work with, I hope I would think about why they were getting that impression and how I could give a better impression, rather than thinking of myself as a victim.
None of this is to deny that her colleagues are sexist, classist assholes, because they may very well be. But yeah. The anecdote about the students didn't sit right with me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:43 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]
None of this is to deny that her colleagues are sexist, classist assholes, because they may very well be. But yeah. The anecdote about the students didn't sit right with me.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 8:43 PM on May 10 [5 favorites]
man this is a pretty upsetting line of argumentation for someone on MetaFilter to have chosen.
I've seen her referred to already multiple times in this post as "working class." This is not, in fact, how she describes herself in the present day. She says she has a working class background and that she can now afford to buy herself pretty dresses, so she does. (And good for her. She should dress in a way that makes her happy. Those faculty in particular, as grown adults rather than students, can go jump in a lake.) But if we're going to reverse-engineer a marginalized identity as a working-class person in the present day for her for some reason in spite of her own statements, it's worth looking at the economic reality.
I've worked in government for stretches in the past and my salary has always been public at those times, so making note of this sort of public information seems unobjectionable to me. I don't consider her salary to have some kind of moral valence (in fact, like most teachers, she's almost certainly underpaid for the value she provides); it just means she's not working class now, which...again...she doesn't describe herself as. If she'd been earning an adjunct's salary, she very arguably might be, which is why I looked it up. I wanted to be accurate.
posted by praemunire at 8:56 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I've seen her referred to already multiple times in this post as "working class." This is not, in fact, how she describes herself in the present day. She says she has a working class background and that she can now afford to buy herself pretty dresses, so she does. (And good for her. She should dress in a way that makes her happy. Those faculty in particular, as grown adults rather than students, can go jump in a lake.) But if we're going to reverse-engineer a marginalized identity as a working-class person in the present day for her for some reason in spite of her own statements, it's worth looking at the economic reality.
I've worked in government for stretches in the past and my salary has always been public at those times, so making note of this sort of public information seems unobjectionable to me. I don't consider her salary to have some kind of moral valence (in fact, like most teachers, she's almost certainly underpaid for the value she provides); it just means she's not working class now, which...again...she doesn't describe herself as. If she'd been earning an adjunct's salary, she very arguably might be, which is why I looked it up. I wanted to be accurate.
posted by praemunire at 8:56 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I liked the article. Jenny Irish just went and said all the quiet parts out loud, things that, if it ever happened to anyone, it just feelsso shameful and embarrassing they would never share it.
Her points are,
1. People hate her because she is fat and ugly, and they are good enough in reading social cues that they understand its ok to make fun of the fat woman.
2. Students can be the type of person in point 1.
3. Academia is sexist. Male colleagues are angry when they see a woman talking, especially if she's ugly.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 9:00 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
Her points are,
1. People hate her because she is fat and ugly, and they are good enough in reading social cues that they understand its ok to make fun of the fat woman.
2. Students can be the type of person in point 1.
3. Academia is sexist. Male colleagues are angry when they see a woman talking, especially if she's ugly.
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 9:00 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
she's for some reason getting positioned as a probable victimizer of students
I was thinking that she might be doing or have done something else that was unintentionally off-putting, rather than that she was out there deliberately doing bad things to make students feel unsafe. That can easily happen. I can imagine it happens extra easily in the hothouse MFA environment. Maybe she made some reference that was misunderstood or a joke that fell flat. Maybe she had a bad day and snapped a bit at one student once. Feed it to the rumor mill and there you go.
posted by praemunire at 9:04 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
I was thinking that she might be doing or have done something else that was unintentionally off-putting, rather than that she was out there deliberately doing bad things to make students feel unsafe. That can easily happen. I can imagine it happens extra easily in the hothouse MFA environment. Maybe she made some reference that was misunderstood or a joke that fell flat. Maybe she had a bad day and snapped a bit at one student once. Feed it to the rumor mill and there you go.
posted by praemunire at 9:04 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
Now, I admit that "working class" is a tricky term, but I don't think it makes sense to say, "you make a good salary now, so your class background has vanished and no longer shapes your experience". For one thing, the reverse would mean that an adjunct from an upper middle class background with connections and family money would be "working class" in the same way that someone who grew up working class and had scrabbled into adjuncting was.
Also, you're a lot more likely to be short and fat if you're a prole. I've been in lots of situations where, for instance, there was a working class audience and a representative body of upper class speakers/presenters/administrators, and we were always shorter, fatter and less healthy looking than they were. Your body is marked by your class experience.
For another, your culture comes with you - my family have tended to be smart and educated but lower middle class, and that's more or less why I'm a junior accountant now and not anything fancy. I work around many people from very privileged backgrounds. We don't speak the same. I was not raised to have an air of command and assurance. It is a constant struggle when I'm technically the one with authority due to the finance piece but they can't bear to accept correction or demands from me - there are a couple of people who have huge problems dealing with culturally lower middle class people in authority and it makes material, documentable problems in their work and my work.
There's also the fact that when you grew up working class, you tend to have working class family and friends who are likely to need your financial assistance, whereas if you grew up in privilege, you are much less likely to need to assist your friends and relatives. This is really a fact not in evidence for Irish, so I'm just bringing it in as a generality - people from working class backgrounds who make good wages tend to have more serious calls on those wages than people from wealthier backgrounds do, and this impacts their financial stability and, god knows, their ability to participate in "normal" things among their peers like international travel, purchase of a nice house, purchase of expensive clothes, etc.
From an organizing standpoint, it's wages and working conditions that determine class - people in working class jobs are working class, whether they are Smiths or Rockefellers. And I think that given enough money and power, working class origins probably cease to define you in a way that matters - if Irish were making $500,000 a year as the Vice President for the Student Experience, it wouldn't be super meaningful to worry about her class background. But $78,000 a year, while certainly a comfortable wage almost everywhere in the US and meaningfully more than I make, still isn't really enough for the kind of security where class can't get you anymore.
posted by Frowner at 9:23 PM on May 10 [15 favorites]
Also, you're a lot more likely to be short and fat if you're a prole. I've been in lots of situations where, for instance, there was a working class audience and a representative body of upper class speakers/presenters/administrators, and we were always shorter, fatter and less healthy looking than they were. Your body is marked by your class experience.
For another, your culture comes with you - my family have tended to be smart and educated but lower middle class, and that's more or less why I'm a junior accountant now and not anything fancy. I work around many people from very privileged backgrounds. We don't speak the same. I was not raised to have an air of command and assurance. It is a constant struggle when I'm technically the one with authority due to the finance piece but they can't bear to accept correction or demands from me - there are a couple of people who have huge problems dealing with culturally lower middle class people in authority and it makes material, documentable problems in their work and my work.
There's also the fact that when you grew up working class, you tend to have working class family and friends who are likely to need your financial assistance, whereas if you grew up in privilege, you are much less likely to need to assist your friends and relatives. This is really a fact not in evidence for Irish, so I'm just bringing it in as a generality - people from working class backgrounds who make good wages tend to have more serious calls on those wages than people from wealthier backgrounds do, and this impacts their financial stability and, god knows, their ability to participate in "normal" things among their peers like international travel, purchase of a nice house, purchase of expensive clothes, etc.
From an organizing standpoint, it's wages and working conditions that determine class - people in working class jobs are working class, whether they are Smiths or Rockefellers. And I think that given enough money and power, working class origins probably cease to define you in a way that matters - if Irish were making $500,000 a year as the Vice President for the Student Experience, it wouldn't be super meaningful to worry about her class background. But $78,000 a year, while certainly a comfortable wage almost everywhere in the US and meaningfully more than I make, still isn't really enough for the kind of security where class can't get you anymore.
posted by Frowner at 9:23 PM on May 10 [15 favorites]
Speaking for all of my fellow fat, not-conventionally attractive ladies that work in the arts and education and wear dresses, we would have gotten away with our nefarious plans for committing great evil and then lying about it in Salon essays if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!
posted by thivaia at 9:29 PM on May 10 [12 favorites]
posted by thivaia at 9:29 PM on May 10 [12 favorites]
1. People hate her because she is fat and ugly, and they are good enough in reading social cues that they understand its ok to make fun of the fat woman.According to her article, she wears a size 12. I googled pictures of her, and she looks fine. (Example 1. Example 2) The idea that people hate her because she's fat and ugly is, frankly, bizarre.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:43 PM on May 10 [2 favorites]
@ArbitraryAndCapricious I know its bizarre. But actually she implied it in the article and I think that she's telling the truth. That her appearance is why people treat her so poorly. We live in a world where women over thirty are seen as old frumps unless they look like Margot Robbie. Like basically she's saying that femininity is seen as a bad thing unless you're hot. Something that I have also observed. Its a very cruel world out there. :(
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 9:52 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
posted by Didnt_do_enough at 9:52 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
Size 12 and 5’1” is a size people will judge.
Irish doesn’t specify exactly when this student complaint occurred but if you haven’t been around college students since COVID you might want to take a breath before calling it unbelievable. I’m not saying I’m any kind of expert but every time I ask someone who teaches how the students ar doing they get an expression. Before and after.
posted by bq at 10:24 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
Irish doesn’t specify exactly when this student complaint occurred but if you haven’t been around college students since COVID you might want to take a breath before calling it unbelievable. I’m not saying I’m any kind of expert but every time I ask someone who teaches how the students ar doing they get an expression. Before and after.
posted by bq at 10:24 PM on May 10 [9 favorites]
Irish doesn’t specify exactly when this student complaint occurred but if you haven’t been around college students since COVID you might want to take a breath before calling it unbelievable.I met with four students today, and this was an exceptionally low-traffic day for me, being the Friday of exam week.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:01 PM on May 10 [1 favorite]
"All of my writing has some connection with class and cycles of violence. I have the possibility of a more financially stable life than either of my parents, but to really achieve it, to be stable and secure, I have to pay off all the student debt I’ve accrued. Without a dramatic event, I think class is a very hard position to alter, and in my experience, both lived and witnessed, addiction and familial violence are connected with being trapped in unstable positions. It contributes to a sense of fatalism. Tooth Box is steeped in that attitude, the effort to live differently, and the realities that challenge that." - A Conversation with Jenny Irish, The Adroit Journal, Sept. 18, 2023
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:28 PM on May 10 [13 favorites]
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:28 PM on May 10 [13 favorites]
Yikes. Some super uncharitable readings here. I’m a fat female academic and I can tell you that people do indeed judge you by how you present physically. I felt I needed to prove my worth at my job for like six months before I risked showing up in a skirt. My feeling was I had better not do anything to remind my boss that I was someone who might eventually get pregnant. That was fifteen years ago, and I worry less now that I’m established in my role (and work remotely to boot), but yes, what she said made a lot of sense to me.
posted by eirias at 1:42 AM on May 11 [15 favorites]
posted by eirias at 1:42 AM on May 11 [15 favorites]
There's a lot of "hasn't happened to me so it doesn't exist" in this thread.
posted by signal at 6:16 AM on May 11 [10 favorites]
posted by signal at 6:16 AM on May 11 [10 favorites]
The “unsafe” issue could easily make sense through the lens of conservative christian culture, wherein girls and women are viewed as at least partly responsible for the sexual behaviour of men. It comes with lots of repressed sexuality and misogyny. Throw in a bit of hot for teacher fantasy. But the author doesn’t quite fit that mold. Worse, she is in a position of power. I could easily imagine the dissonance coming out in a turd of projection accusing her of being unsafe.
I thought it was a very good article.
posted by sillyman at 6:50 AM on May 11 [2 favorites]
I thought it was a very good article.
posted by sillyman at 6:50 AM on May 11 [2 favorites]
I can see someone of that size who dresses in that way being put in an Umbridge mental box.
posted by bq at 7:47 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]
posted by bq at 7:47 AM on May 11 [1 favorite]
I taught at boarding school from 2018 -2022 a real wild period and yeah, "unsafe" is not as specific anymore. I've heard unsafe used to mean a lot of different things from unidentifiable "discomfort" to real threats to physical safety. Terms come into favor and get used more broadly, unsafe is one. Update your internal dictionaries, and ask follow up questions. And as a queer who was once a young queer, yeah I can imagine a group of young queer people easily deciding someone is "unsafe" bc they look like "a tradwife". And as a short fat woman who never wore pants until I was in my 20s, her story is extremely believable.
posted by wellifyouinsist at 8:33 AM on May 11 [7 favorites]
posted by wellifyouinsist at 8:33 AM on May 11 [7 favorites]
According to her article, she wears a size 12. I googled pictures of her, and she looks fine.
Observations like this of the “she’s not that fat” variety are an insidious form of fatphobia where you have an unspoken threshold of what “fat” is and anything below that is, as you say, “fine.” Whether you consciously meant it or not, this implies that if you read her as “fat” that’s not fine.
Part of combatting fat phobia is accepting that fat is fine.
posted by sonika at 6:22 PM on May 11 [7 favorites]
Observations like this of the “she’s not that fat” variety are an insidious form of fatphobia where you have an unspoken threshold of what “fat” is and anything below that is, as you say, “fine.” Whether you consciously meant it or not, this implies that if you read her as “fat” that’s not fine.
Part of combatting fat phobia is accepting that fat is fine.
posted by sonika at 6:22 PM on May 11 [7 favorites]
I understand that point of view, but as someone who is very close to the same size as her, I've been influenced by fat thinkers (especially Aubrey Gorden of, among other things, the Maintenance Phase podcast) to believe otherwise. Women like her and me are not fat. We do not experience anti-fat oppression. Outside of Hollywood and a very few other image-conscious industries, we do not experience employment discrimination based on being fat. Doctors do not misdiagnose serious conditions because they attribute every symptom we ever have to our weight. We do not have to worry about whether there will be seats at work events that we can fit into. Nobody expects us to buy a second plane ticket every time we fly. We may feel insecure about our bodies, and that's bad, but that's not the same as anti-fat oppression. And you're just not going to convince me, as someone who is probably less pretty than she appears to be, that a woman who looks like her is going to be discriminated against because she is fat and ugly. I absolutely agree that there is a boatload of classism in academia and that it plays out in all sorts of insidious ways, but I don't think her appearance has a thing to do with it. She is well within the normal range, appearance-wise, and normal-looking but not gorgeous women are not discriminated against in academia or most other professions.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:02 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:02 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
And I should be clear: I am not saying that she is within the acceptable range, so she should not be discriminated against. I am saying that she is within what society considers to be the acceptable range, and I don't believe that she is discriminated against for her appearance. I think that bit is probably her projecting her insecurities. I absolutely believe that she is discriminated against for her class background, and her class background may be reflected in her clothes, although I don't think that's a particularly straightforward proposition. (I know a fair number of women academics from working-class backgrounds, and it would be hard for me to generalize about their style of dress.) And finally, I think that students, especially students with marginalized identities, are sometimes wary of conventionally-dressed white people in positions of authority, and there are better ways to deal with that than to get offended. That's not discrimination, and you need to figure out ways to signal to students that you are a safe person for them to engage with, because they're entitled to read the signals you're sending out, including the ones that you're sending out through your clothes. So if your clothes say that you might be comfy at your local evangelical mega-church, and I'm conscious that mine sometimes do, then you need to do some other stuff to make it clear that you won't get weird if a student mentions that he lives with his boyfriend or asks you to refer to them using they/them pronouns.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:17 PM on May 11 [3 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:17 PM on May 11 [3 favorites]
When someone says they feel “unsafe” I read that as “the professor is holding a knife” or “the professor is a creepy guy who has propositioned students”. Also yeah, people in here are being super cruel to this person who has no evidence of being anything other than what they say. Gotta score those internet points!
posted by caviar2d2 at 7:40 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
posted by caviar2d2 at 7:40 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]
Income is inversely correlated with bmi for white women smoothly from 31 to 24. A size 14 woman cannot usually find clothing that fits in a standard store. Every single woman who wasn’t a admin in the financial services company I used to work for was of lower than average bmi. There’s no cutoff where people of higher BMIs cease to experience discrimination.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486733
posted by bq at 9:01 AM on May 12 [7 favorites]
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/486733
posted by bq at 9:01 AM on May 12 [7 favorites]
For what it's worth, I worked as an admin in academia for years, and in all that time the secretaries/program assistants, etc., were nearly always "overweight" and the female faculty were nearly always thin. As a general rule this held fairly well, with a few exceptions that usually came down to class background.
posted by jokeefe at 2:53 PM on May 12 [2 favorites]
posted by jokeefe at 2:53 PM on May 12 [2 favorites]
I don't know what to make of this article or this thread - it's so off from my 8 years in university at 4 different universities, and (some) meeting with administration, and with years working in mega-corporate life.
My opinion is that she definitely experienced sexual harassment + unkind comments + systemic sexism, as most women of many different sizes, looks, and choices of dress probably did. It can be true that she experienced these things, and true that her own perception of them is that it is due to her way of dress/background/etc that no-one else even notices. We have 'ask metafilters' about those every day.
Does that make her perceptions of what happens to her 'true'? Not necessarily, not any more 'true' than billionaires thinking they have to keep working and earning to maintain their billions, or the government is going to take it away.
IMO (again) you can kind of see this in her anger at being compared to Taylor Swift and The Spice Girls. She takes the most negative possible connotation of their nicknames, without even considering any potential (and obvious) positive correlations. The tradwife thing too "Thirdhand accounts are inevitably distorted" - yeah they sure are, but this one should be taken to be 100% true? I totally get why this feels made up and Fox Newsy to people.
This person needs a bit more self-confidence. She's a professor, author, and artist. Seems like she's earned it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:55 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
My opinion is that she definitely experienced sexual harassment + unkind comments + systemic sexism, as most women of many different sizes, looks, and choices of dress probably did. It can be true that she experienced these things, and true that her own perception of them is that it is due to her way of dress/background/etc that no-one else even notices. We have 'ask metafilters' about those every day.
Does that make her perceptions of what happens to her 'true'? Not necessarily, not any more 'true' than billionaires thinking they have to keep working and earning to maintain their billions, or the government is going to take it away.
IMO (again) you can kind of see this in her anger at being compared to Taylor Swift and The Spice Girls. She takes the most negative possible connotation of their nicknames, without even considering any potential (and obvious) positive correlations. The tradwife thing too "Thirdhand accounts are inevitably distorted" - yeah they sure are, but this one should be taken to be 100% true? I totally get why this feels made up and Fox Newsy to people.
This person needs a bit more self-confidence. She's a professor, author, and artist. Seems like she's earned it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:55 AM on May 13 [3 favorites]
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