Helping shape the conversation
Yesterday we saw that University College Cork is putting on the 25th annual Lesbian Lives Conference, and that the first Keynote Presenter is Susan Stryker, a man. It’s interesting to see how he presented himself as a visiting professor at Yale.
He looks a little bit…burly.
Normally, of course, it’s obnoxious or worse to judge people on their appearances, but there is a genuine issue of male v female bodies here, along with issues of presentation and what one can get away with and so on. Stryker looks a bit like Steve Bannon. Very few women can get away with looking like Steve Bannon, and even fewer would feel 100% safe challenging him.
In other words why doesn’t it bother Susan Stryker that he looks intimidating? Why does he feel so okay with looking intimidating that he has a photo of himself with tatoos in a muscle shirt on his Yale faculty page?
I don’t know the answer to that.
Interesting, the tattoo on his arm. I recognize it: it’s the Robot from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. How apt: an artificial woman-shaped automaton, created by a man to fulfill his desires. A little on the nose, isn’t it?
Guess he missed the head-tilt memo.
Here’s a larger image of Stryker’s tattoo:
https://i0.wp.com/www.gscene.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Susan-Stryker-1.jpg
This isn’t the only example of a man flaunting a shoulder tattoo that lays bare the true meaning of his “gender journey.” There’s also Jaclyn Moore, the showrunner for Netflix’s Dear White People, who during Covid lockdown “discovered” his inner woman and can’t stop flaunting the shoulder tattoo he got in celebration: it depicts a… ahem… very excited man… with a buxom female body, naked except for skimpy lady-knickers, out of which is bursting… well, this is why you can tell it’s a very excited man.
It’s these men’s obsessions with their own bodies manifested in two ways: they have to make everyone else profess to believe their bodies are female, and then they have to get tattoos on their bodies depicting what it is they’re doing. A total meltdown of self-obsession. And the whole world (or at least, the supposedly progressive academic middle-class English-speaking part) is treating them like fucking new messiahs!
To be fair, messiahs were always narcissists. So I guess in that sense, it’s business as usual…
It’s enough to make one nostalgic for profs in tweed jackets, elbow patches, and chalk dust.
@Bruce
To be fair I’m always wistful for profs in tweed jackets, elbow patches and chalk dust. It’s a handsome look!
Does said prof have to smoke a pipe? I would be willing to wear tweed jackets with elbow patches. Chalk dust is a little hard to come by these days, but I’m sure they have some in Walgreens.
@iknklast
A pipe is certainly not required, but I would allow it. I actually like the smell of yesterday’s tobacco wafting off a coat or sweater.
I know, I’m weird.
I suppose allowances for the times might be made; a liberal srinkling of bytes and pixels should suffice as a chalk dust proxy.
Artymorty @7 — if you like scented candles, these are nice
https://www.frostbeardstudio.com/products/sherlocks-study
@mondegreen
Mmm, tobacco and rain. Sexy scents indeed. It reminds me that I have a trip to Britain coming up and I can’t bloody wait.
Arty @ 7, I’m the only one in my family who never smoked. My father and a brother both smoked pipes (after their lungs couldn’t cope with cigarettes anymore). I hate smoking, but there is something about pipe tobacco that is evocative. I think I’m almost old enough to carry the tweed jacket and patches look. I’ll have to give that some thought.
LM @ 9, Cool! Have you actually tried those ones?
As for Stryker, let me guess, he’s a butch lesbian? Otherwise known as a manipulative autogynephile.
I tried desperately hard to smoke, but was terrible at it. I tried everything – cigarettes, cigars, pipes, even clove cigarettes. Pipes, in particular, require a sort of dedication that I lack. I suppose maybe these days they have electronically enhanced pipes that don’t keep going out. But you still have to keep clenching them between your teeth, which is exhausting.
I loved college. I went to … nine of them, on three continents. I wore plenty tweed, starting at sixteen.
I was a professor ever so briefly, before I saw that the direction of academia in general was moving in directions I found unpleasant. I have never regretted my decision to abandon academia for industry – I made more money and had more fun – but I regret the death of what I loved best in academia. I would surely have been pilloried by now.
This is the biggest difference: academia is no longer safe for people who disagree.
And I am a most disagreeable sort.
what’s the t-shirt say?
I can only make out
@ soogeeoh:
“Outlaw poverty, not prostitution.” How very par for the course.
I bet he makes prostitutes tell him he’s a woman.
They also tend to be very naughty boys. Seems to fit here.
Oh, yes. Part of why I am retiring next year, several years before I planned to. They call it “21st Century pedagogy”, and it seems to involve making sure students don’t learn anything that makes them uncomfortable, and not making them learn reality, only feelings. Most the science teachers I know (but not all) are resisting as hard as we can, but the school is making more and more mandatory. i hope my one more year will scoot me out before I have to introduce interpretive dance to my mitosis lecture. I think…I will. A lot of the cogs turn slowly here, though I will say they tend to turn suddenly just when you least expect.
As the smoke rises upward #14
“Outlaw poverty, not prostitution.”
Maybe Universal Basic Income would make fewer people (men & women) feel they need the 2nd to avoid the 1st.
Iknklast #17: I have a vague memory of a funny video of actual scientists doing interpretive dance on their areas of research.
Putting the “mess” in “messiah” since…
Iknklast & Bruce Coppola: See Science magazine’s “Dance Your PhD” annual contest
https://www.science.org/content/article/watch-winner-year-s-dance-your-phd-contest
;-)
Ibbica: Yes, that’s it! The zebrafish larva one was stunning! All are fun.
Speaking of a mighty fine tweed jacket, check out Natalia Jagielska displaying her fossil.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/300524400/superbly-preserved-pterosaur-fossil-unearthed-in-scotland