What are new years resolutions to grad students? What are my options? Write more? Read more? Publish more? Burn my heart out and become a research machine? All we have to give ourselves are admonishments to work more and produce more. So, in my defeat, I decided to sign up for one of those academic support websites because my supervisor offered to pay for it.
Some of it seems all well and good - support forums, writing workshops, daily check-ins. All harmless if a little banal. Well, it looked that way until I ventured into one of those listicles about how to survive academic life from grad school to tenure.
I've read hundreds of these. They're on Reddit and Facebook, they're on blogs, they've been written out as Medium articles, and they're even passed around in academic writing groups. I, like everyone else, consume them knowing they don't do any good. They're just survivor-bias dolled up to look like a viable path to jobs that don't exist anymore. Every one of them is the same even though they like to take on different characters - you have the bootstrap guy with rich parents, the follow-your-passions guy who was tenured in 1962, and the you-come-first-self-care lady who wants to sell you a book.
The list I found on my pricey little writing site was essentially the first type and these are always especially rich when they're written by women. Oh you've never taken a personal day Jan? Good for you for evading the care burden foisted onto the rest of your female peers. I'm sure you've worked so much harder than the rest of us. This list was nothing special, but it had a line that made the whole project of academic self-help turn from generally boring to actively mocking for me. The eighth bullet point advised me with: "Don't start dressing either like a character out of Kafka or a like a hooker."
And you know what? Fuck it.
That's all it is in the end for women isn't it? Aesthetics. Sexual aesthetics. This site appears to be made up almost entirely of women and here we are giving each other tips for surviving a system we did not make and it all boils right back down to whether or not we're just whores in the end. This was a recommendation for what to do after you earn tenure. You can be a tenured professor and you are still at risk of looking like a hooker and nothing else. It all just dissolves away if someone sees you as sexually promiscuous. Have we really come a long way at all, babies?
This is not to mention the umbrage I take at the idea that hookers are somehow antithetical to education. Are there no knowledgeable hookers? Can women not have both a sexuality and something else to do or are our sex lives still that all-consuming? Here were are selling our intellect and our personal time for barely a living wage and we're going to pretend we're better than sex workers? As if capitalism doesn't make whores of us all? I imagine I could learn far more far better from a hooker than any uptight ~professional~ who doesn't have the courage to realize that we've always already been seen. That modest skirt suit won't save you from anything and nor should it. We shouldn't have to put up such a feeble defense against the students and faculty that harass us. They hate us already and buttoning your blouse won't change their mind.
If the whole thing is really this fragile can I even avoid being mistaken for a hooker? If it's already a binary between depressive caricature and prostitute does it actually matter how I dress? Why is any of this my fault? Do you really expect me to be so naïve as to think I can dress my way out from under the patriarchy?
And you know what? I am naïve. I really thought that hanging around academia was the best way to live out a feminist life. A place where I could teach and write for the movement. I've been a fool to think that this world was any less damned than the next. This is just one more place where women line up to spit on each other and then convince themselves that it's for our own good.
Any woman who advises another not to dress like a whore is deluding herself - the world already sees us that way and no amount of respectability will make it go away. Call me defeatist and call me bitter, but I refuse to buy misogyny sold to me as power or safety.
Dress how you want and let the whole thing burn.
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