#2 has bronchitis and codeine, but #1 finished her grading and spent a lot of time surfing the net.
Linda’s not the only Chicago woman who has been inappropriately denied sterilization procedures.
How long do you have to wait for an abortion after mandatory counseling in each state?
Why Jill Abramson’s firing triggers women’s worst fears about sexism.
Maybe it’s time for employers to stop being so sexist when women ask for raises.
We are completely mystified why feminists have Clarissa’s blog on their blogrolls. You know, when she posts stuff about how she can’t hire women because they’re SO EMOTIONAL. Here’s a take-down from the daily show on that topic.
WordPress spellcheck is sexist.
Turkey in the straw turns out to have an incredibly racist past.
Discussing diverse books with our kids.
An oldie but a goodie.
bearded guy has t-shirt that says THIS MOUSTACHE KILLS FASCISTS. Guthrie would approve
Is Obama really forcing banks to close porn stars’ accounts? No, says Chase insider.
Impure thought police.
Frozen as a metaphor.
Your auntie advisor.
Separated at birth.
We sent you this before but it’s still awesome.
a life without mexican food and the revelation
We are not multitask masters.
UPDATE: What Now? Needs a fantasy novel to replace Charmed Life (whose plot has not gone over well with all parents, I won’t spoiler it, but it’s not the warmest and fuzziest part of the Diana Wynne Jones oeuvre) for Sixth Grade English at a fancy private school.
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
May 17, 2014 at 8:49 am
On Clarissa: we tangled on my blog a few years ago. IIRC, she was insisting that her sex had never interfered with the way in which she was evaluated, and that my analysis of systemic sex bias in academia was just whining. Real women are tough and solve their own problems. I told my other commenters not to argue with her, because if someone posted those comments under a man’s name, we would have just ignored him as the troll he was. That really pissed her off–she was angry that none of us would really engage her or show her “proof” of the legitimacy of our points of view about systemic bias.
She strikes me as a libertarian-type personality, plus I believe she’s on the autism spectrum, so I think she may have difficulty imagining the world from perspectives other than her own. She’s accomplished a great deal for all that–I wish her no ill, but I don’t see a lot of crossover among her audience and mine (or yours.)
May 17, 2014 at 9:01 am
I just wish she wasn’t on so many blogrolls– when the headline is “I don’t want to hire women” I can’t help but click. And then I feel icky when I do. I have managed not to click on all her “feminism sucks and feminists suck” posts, except the one in which she attacked Delagar with a really nonsensical attack.
Seriously, Undine, why do you have her there? Femomhist? Why? Her blog post titles alone contribute to a chilling environment for women. I get that it’s your blog and I can stop trawling your blogrolls, but I just don’t understand.
And yes, she is on the spectrum, but plenty of people manage to be on the spectrum without being overtly sexist. It’s one thing to not understand implicit bias. It’s another to engage in overt sexism.
Also, I’d like to note that if the company she’s employing people for employs more than 15 employees, then that recent blog post of hers is a smoking gun in an EEOC lawsuit. Direct statements like that are pretty much the only thing that wins EEOC lawsuits these days. So not just a bad person for women, but also potentially breaking the law.
May 17, 2014 at 8:03 pm
She’s also not a careful reader. She frequently gets all enraged about something she’s read and misunderstood (this happened once with something on my blog, but my case wasn’t particularly bad) and then throws up a post in the genre of OH MY GOD THIS PERSON SUCKS — and anyone who try to gently redirect her or point out her possible misreadings in the comments gets savaged. It’s bizarre.
May 17, 2014 at 10:14 am
I’ve been following her ever since that attack on me — out of curiosity, more than anything, since the attack was so bizarre — and have formed a kind of theory.
(1) She’s working in what is not, after all, her own language. That is, her first language is Russian, I think, and not English? And I also think she reads her sources very quickly. Many times when she makes these attacks, when I go back and check her sources, she has misread the sources radically. I don’t know if this is because she doesn’t pick up on nuance because she’s working in a second language, or because she is reading too quickly, or both; but for whatever reason, she very often misunderstands or misrepresents her sources, leading her to very wrong conclusions about what the source says.
(2) She says she’s a feminist, and by her lights I guess she is, but she’s an Ayn Rand sort of feminist, and she has no truck with any other sort of feminist. Since many of us (maybe most of us) are Audre Lorde sort of feminists, we’re really operating from different playing fields. That is, she thinks you can tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools just fine, and is not at all willing to hear differently.
(3) Her main tactic of blogging is the same as Rush Limbaugh’s. She works by pissing people off. (See my Master’s Tool point above.) So a lot of what she says she may never even entirely believe — she just wants to provoke a response.
Anyway, this is my theory after reading her pretty steadily for several months now. I’m willing to be argued out of it.
May 17, 2014 at 10:18 am
A feminist does not say that ze will not hire women because women are emotional. That’s like obvious feminism 101 that even people steeped in implicit bias should understand without arguing. That’s something that radical feminists and liberal feminists can totally agree on. (Only cultural “feminists” who believe that women’s place is in the home because their emotions make them better care givers or whatever would disagree.) I’m not sure what Ayn Rand “feminists” would say– maybe you have to be a robot or pretend not to be female in the face of employers who refuse to hire any women because of emotions? I guess they’d say you have to be self-employed. Great.
My theory is that she’s just crazy, but that’s based on another series of her posts.
In any case, I would like to avoid her on the internet entirely, but to do that I’d have to stop reading a couple of blogs [that we like] entirely.
May 17, 2014 at 11:02 am
Oh, I agree she’s not actually a feminist! I think she *thinks* she’s one, though, the same way libertarians think they’re the real liberals.
May 17, 2014 at 11:05 am
If you notice, for instance, most of her posts slag on women and feminists, and almost all of her loyal commentators — the ones she showers with approval — are libertarian/reactionaries, and male.
May 17, 2014 at 11:07 am
I can’t say I ever read the comments. Ok, so why do feminist bloggers have this men’s rights activist on their blogroll?
May 21, 2014 at 3:27 pm
you did notice that the post about not employing females was accredited to a guest poster who runs a business, not by Clarissa herself?
(which doesn’t detract from many of the valid points you make, but, when someone who is described as misreading posts is being referred to in a way that suggests they themselves have been misread, it kinda dulls the edge of the argument)
May 21, 2014 at 3:42 pm
Instead of attacking you for correcting me, like Clarissa would (from what I understand, and from my limited experience in trying to correct her misinterpretation of delagar’s post that one time), I will say, no, I didn’t notice that, though I vaguely thought it weird that a Spanish professor would be hiring people, but not enough to investigate.
In any case, I never have to read another one of her misogynist (or otherwise crazy) blog post headlines again because I won’t be seeing her headlines on blogrolls anymore (yay). That’s good enough for me. I don’t need to win any who’s a bad person or not and why battle. Hopefully this is the last time I ever think of her!
May 18, 2014 at 9:46 am
I read Clarissa and I will say that she is never boring.
But I just want to chime here regarding something that delgar wrote above that really ticked me off. Clarissa speaks I think 6+ languages (Russian, Ukranian, English, Spanish, Portugese, German, and I think maybe even Italian and/or French). She has been speaking and reading English since a very early age.
But even if that weren’t the case, being a non-native speaker myself, I think it’s really insulting to imply that someone who has lived and *taught at a university* in the US for years cannot comprehend the writing in a blog post, however “nuanced” it is supposed to be. Blog posts are not where I would go to expand my vocabulary or have my command of the English language challenged.
Whatever the reasons may be that she writes what she does and potentially misrepresents the writing of others, it’s not because “she’s working in a second language.”
May 18, 2014 at 10:41 am
As I said, my theory is that she’s just crazy. And I don’t mean that in a mentally ill should seek help sort of way (which we would never want to stigmatize), I mean that in the colloquial she’s nuts way.
May 18, 2014 at 11:59 am
Oh, as I said, I’m willing to be argued out of it. I’m just looking for some explanation of why she seems to misread her sources so violently. As I said, she posts these hostile interpretations — like the recent one against Selfies, for instance? — and when I go back and look at the original source, she has misread the source entirely.
Now either she has misread the source intentionally, or she is missing the nuance, or she just can’t understand simple written English. You tell me which.
May 18, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Here’s the post I mean, for reference: http:// clarissasblog. com/2014/04/17/selfies-and-bookshelfies/
[Ed: link broken by grumpy rumblings]
May 18, 2014 at 1:02 pm
Oops– Sorry, N&M!
May 18, 2014 at 1:05 pm
Normally we don’t mind links, but in this case, we’d rather not bring attention.
May 17, 2014 at 3:24 pm
Oh, nicoleandmaggie–I probably saw a writing post one time and added the blog and then didn’t pay attention after that. I didn’t see those posts, but good point.
May 17, 2014 at 3:32 pm
And problem solved :)
May 17, 2014 at 3:43 pm
Thanks! We love your blog and your blogroll. :)
May 17, 2014 at 4:49 pm
I hope #2 feels better soon!
Lots of great links, #1. Thanks for sharing them!
You probably remember my rant awhile back about how I don’t buy the argument that the reason men in tech are often sexist assholes is that they are on the autism spectrum. In my experience, the guys I’ve worked with who really ARE on the spectrum are actually quite good at not being sexist assholes. In general, I think the reason there are people who are sexist assholes is that there are people who want to be sexist assholes, regardless of whether their are neurotypical or not. I suppose sometimes people may be unaware of the fact that they are sexist assholes and are somehow missing the cues women give them that they are in fact sexist assholes… but in my experience, that isn’t common.
May 17, 2014 at 5:03 pm
ITA. Autism spectrum people can learn not to be overtly sexist just like everybody else. Some of the students we had who were on the spectrum had issues with women but most of them didn’t, and even the on-the-spectrum kids who started college at age 16 being (in some cases, mildly dangerous) sexist jackholes ended up not being that way after getting into trouble for it. They were more likely to actually change, I think, because they didn’t start out hiding the bad behavior and once they knew it was wrong and there were consequences, they stopped.
I wonder if there’s any relationship between being on the spectrum and implicit bias. One might think that autistic people would be less likely to have implicit bias, but that’s waaay out of my wheelhouse and armchair conjecture from someone who never took more than psych 101. Oh hey, that’s not a stupid conjecture, at least according to the second google hit on the topic: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22322582
I missed my calling in a different social science, I guess.
May 18, 2014 at 9:08 am
by casual observation, I’d guess it varies wildly and depends a lot on how the person learned their social skills/attitudes – for how hard it can be for them to pick up some social skills, all the ASD kids I’ve known the last few years have had a disturbingly unerring talent for picking up who is where on the social pecking order. Also people who grew up undiagnosed seem to hold onto the rules they did manage to learn as solid black and whites.
There’s no autism/assholery link, but there is definitely an autism/black and white thinking link.
May 18, 2014 at 9:10 am
like the “computer programmers are assholes because they are on the spectrum” thing is bullshit, but “computer programming classes & companies often reward asshole behavior” and “people on the spectrum have a harder time applying the correct social behavior to different social situations” isn’t.
May 18, 2014 at 8:17 am
The more I reflect on what I had to go through to get my tubal ligation, the angrier I get. At least I got it, even if I had to sign some sort of waiver and bring in my husband to meet the doc. It’s crazy that there are women who can’t find a doctor to do the procedure. The last quote from that woman is spot on: “I felt like I was only allowed to make reproductive decisions if they fell in line with the status quo,” she said. “Basically my life could be anything I wanted it to be as long as it was motherhood.” Count me in with the 80% who are very happy with the procedure!
May 18, 2014 at 9:43 pm
Thanks for the link to the list of books with non-casual (formal?) diversity! We’ve had and have a few in our house, but I’m glad to have leads to others.
May 18, 2014 at 11:07 pm
I just did not understand Get Rich Slowly today.
May 19, 2014 at 5:25 am
Here’s how I’m still not making it in my 30s because of poor choices I’m going to say are good choices? Also, please go to my website and buy my services?
May 19, 2014 at 11:45 pm
I’m not sure whether that writer putting 3.5% down to buy a house through FHA is more or less crazy than my friends buying $1+ million dollar houses in their twenties and thirties. This random calculator I found on the internet said I could buy an $800,000 house by myself. I think it’s a crazy calculator. Mortgage lenders be crazy.
May 19, 2014 at 11:00 am
I don’t know what a Clarissa is but I am going to choose to remain ignorant on that aspect.
Jon Stewart is brilliant and gets brillianter every day.
My immediate thought is to replace Charmed Life with Wrinkle in Time but now I think Ender’s Game or Golden Compass would be better. I tried leaving the comment on the blog post but I’m getting errors like crazy.
Reel Big Fish was one of my favorite bands in high school and I saw them in concert a couple of times. Good memories!
I have really enjoyed reading the Abramson coverage. I had a high school teacher that would always tell me I would be the editor of the New York Times one day. She did it in a patronizing way trying to tell me I sucked at math and science and should do Englishy things instead.