Daily Bruin

Dear Garner: believe it or not, feminism is about you, too

Adena Chung

Dear Garner: I’m totally descending into my vices of yesteryear.
Or more like yestermonth. I’m smoking a Mild-7 as I sit on my
Shakespeare book-brick (a monster text) wondering why I’m smoking
instead of reading "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." I think it’s lack
of sleep which is making me feel like crap which is making me want
to smoke a cigarette. Or two. (I lit up another one.) At least I
understand why I’m acting this way; that makes me feel better. I
feel at a loss to do anything that’s good for me today so I’ll
drink my coffee and do whatever I feel like doing. Like smoke. It
feels good-bad, if you know what I mean. I know it’s twisted.

I had this idea for my next Viewpoint column that I thought was
great at the conception of it (isn’t that always the case). But
then, since I started writing for this one early, I had time to
think about it. Now I’m not so sure.

Spawned by a multitude of events but primarily inspired by
another column by Roxane Marquez, I jotted it down as I cruised the
405 on my way to school at the break of dawn one morning last week.
This is how it goes:

* * *

There are a lot of you guys out there who don’t appreciate
"feminism." You think, jokingly or seriously, that it means letting
your body hair grow, talking shit about males, turning to
lesbianism, female bonding, rejecting make-up and "pretty" clothes,
being obnoxious and outspoken and you don’t think it’s cool. That’s
a pretty long list, but there’s more.

There’s also the aching inside for a firm hand on you, the
reveling in a deep steady masculine voice that rolls off your name
or tells you a good story. Wanting a warm body thicker and longer
than you to smoothly lay against, skin on skin, and breathe in his
smell. The desire to knead out all a guy’s worries and stresses
with your strong fingers, work all over his body and exorcise the
bad day he had; ease his tension by absorbing it through your ears,
eyes, hands, absorbing it through your mouth when he kisses hard
with his dewy lips, through your thighs when he leans into them.
And taking him in moaning, sighing, sweet ecstasy on some lazy
orange afternoon or in the cool blue moonlight of the secret
night.

Yeah, feminism has a lot to do with fucking, which you
understand, right? But you still don’t understand feminism if you
can’t see that it also includes not wanting to be seen as an
object, even if we’re wearing some sexy little promiscuous thing,
not wanting to be talked down to, needing your reciprocal
admiration and respect, being crabby or insecure when we’re about
to have our period. You won’t know when to leave us alone because
we’re not in the mood, when flowers aren’t as good as your silent
attention, why cotton Calvin Kleins are better than Victoria’s
Secret in a lot of ways.

That’s too bad, because I don’t think you could really
understand fucking if you’re not ready to understand feminism in
its entirety with all of its rebellion and rejection of defunct
traditions, its anger which many of you see as gratuitous
nonsense.

It’s too bad, because so much of feminism has to do with you. We
are feminine because you are masculine. It’s like mental sex which
combined with physical sex makes sex in general pretty
incredible.

I can kind of understand how it would be hard for you. Is it all
a mystery? Or do you think you have it figured out? Because
treating a girl with respect isn’t all about catering to her needs
and taking care of her, pampering her and wining and dining her. I
like to be wined and dined, but more than I want you to feed my
mouth, I want you to feed my head. Wining and dining me isn’t going
to make me grow any way except laterally, which a lot of you guys
probably don’t like and I don’t like myself, either. And taking
care of me is different than caring about me. My parents have taken
care of me, and there isn’t any need for someone new to assume that
role.

Appreciating feminism is really simple. Treating a girl right is
to let her be exactly the way her inner self wants to be after
shedding all the expectations engendered by social, cultural and
religious sexist institutions that burden us like clunky metal
armor, like shells upon our backs. Give her the space, allow her to
ditch all that and what you should find is a woman who likes sex
just as much as you do and is willing to admit it. You’ll find
someone who will do "nice" things for you because it’s very normal
for her to nurture, someone who respects you and will support you
and stand by you, even when you are being a total "guy." Actually,
this would probably help cure a lot of other problems, too, like
bulimia, various neuroses, and, as a by-product, you’d probably get
laid more often.

I don’t know what to tell you if you only want to get laid,
though. So I guess just keep flowing the drinks, get her tanked and
hope she’s weak enough to go home with you so you can get some
mediocre action for the night. With all the STDs going around
today, though, it’d probably be more fun just to lay in bed
spanking the monkey with your own erotic fantasies.

* * *

So that’s what I wrote for the article. I really liked it, and
then came the onslaught of second thoughts which made me doubt
whether what I wrote was worth submitting. What will "they" think?
That I’m loose, hard-up and out of control? That I’m pretentious?
Would "real" feminists think I’m a poseur?

Now as I sit here writing to you who always made me feel
comfortable being whatever I was at that moment, you who always
made me feel strong, I remember that this doubt is just what has
stymied my life in the past. So I lay to rest the second thoughts
and turn this in. Thanks for being you because it has helped me to
be me.

Love,

Adena

Chung is a senior English student.

‘Crisis of the classroom’ pervades UCLA lectures

By William Allen

This article was previously published in the Summer 1994 edition
of the California Political Review.

I am a grumpy professor at a prestigious university. I am grumpy
because I am a professor. For I do very little teaching; instead, I
merely conduct classes. More accurately, while conducting classes,
I profess much profundity ­ but not much is learned. And what
little is learned is largely confined, by choice of the customers,
to immediate, nitty-gritty concerns of the final exam.

The intellectual returns from student investment cannot be great
when the investment is not great. And there is not likely to be
great investment by those who are uncommitted, unorganized,
undisciplined, unprepared and unconscious, who have no professional
pride and no conception of competence and accomplishment.

The problem is not only that most children of the campus ­
and there are a blessed few exceptions ­ do not know much and
cannot do much. In addition, most are blissfully unaware of how
little they know and can do; they are not effectively engaged in
the subtle and rigorous process of learning and have little notion
of what is entailed in learning; and they have neither found nor
had impressed upon them effective incentive to try to discover what
to do in trying to learn. They are young even for their tender
years.

Such dour assessment reflects a mountain of discouraging
evidence. A few anecdotes can illustrate.

*There was the freshman who allowed as how she would like to be
a biologist, for, in her only biology class (in a lousy high
school), she received a grade of D.

*There was the senior who had a part-time job as receptionist in
an engineering firm, and concluded that it would be "neat" to be an
engineer ­ although she found it quite impossible to grasp the
concept of the slope of a straight line.

*There was the upper-division customer in a history class who
asked the instructor during the final exam if we are living in the
20th century. (The reply was: "Most of us are.") Several of the
student’s colleagues in the class were uncertain as to whether the
1700s are the 17th century or the 18th.

*There was the large proportion of another history class who
agreed that Aristotle elaborated received Christian doctrine ­
more than 300 years before Jesus.

*There was the final exam in a principles-of-economics class in
which half of the young scholars agreed that "most goods are not
free because most property is privately owned" and "because
business is run for profit"; and a third of the elite group held
that "recurring waves of inflation are the result of recurring
waves of greed or irresponsibility of business managers or workers
or consumers."

These young people ­ almost all of them genial and likeable
when treated very gently ­ hardly try seriously to
conceptualize, synthesize and generalize; they have gained
virtually no erudition or perspective; they are embarrassingly
inarticulate and illiterate; they have no developed wisdom or
insightfulness or sense of the wholeness and evolution of any part
of their world; they are utterly lacking analytic intuition, feel
for causal relations and intellectual flair. And they commonly
become either surly or sassy if criticized. They consider any grade
less than B an insult.

An eminent colleague has publicly stated "the majority of
students cannot think or write or study at the college level.
Neither will they learn. Most will graduate with a C, C+ or B-
grade average. But they aren’t totally uneducated. And most of them
don’t know it, having picked up no idea of what an education might
be. The whole thing is scandalous."

Scandalous, indeed. But, in this crisis of the campus, do not
look for much voluntary reform from college administrators or even
from faculty, who typically acquiesce in and often prosper from the
scandal. For dilution of professionalism can mean more bodies in
the classroom, more classrooms, more faculty and more deans. And of
course, more is always better.

Allen is a UCLA professor of economics.