These are interesting comments. I don't agree that the attacks are purely or even primarily misogyny. And I can understand why one might still aspire to get a PhD. I completed one, in 2021. I was in coursework and then writing my dissertation during the height of Woke Online, in a humanities department. I am not privileged. My parents, before retirement, had lower middle class incomes. I had a teaching assistant stipend, with a tuition waiver and middling health insurance benefits for the first few years. And then I went back to work as a software engineer, worked 40 hrs a week while being a full time student, and paid my tuition in cash for 5 of the 8 years that it took me. I went for the PhD because I wanted to connect with other intellectuals. This had worked for me at an earlier point in my life, when I got a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I still have very good friends from that time. But this time, in the PhD program, I wasn't able to connect with people very well. The politics were very extreme, and I found myself avoiding campus.
There is one detail that I can contribute that others may not have considered: I wasn't given a choice to write a social justice dissertation vs a politically conservative or even moderate dissertation. It was presumed that I would write a social justice dissertation. It was a pretext of my having been admitted to the program. Any point I wanted to make about how social justice narratives didn't match what I was seeing in the archive of literature and film I was writing about I had to justify with all kinds of theoretical and literary citations. I did make some such points. But even then, I was only allowed to write those very subtle critiques of SJ ideology because I had a gay man for an advisor and he was willing to back me up. To be acceptable to my committee, my critiques had to be so subtle that if a casual reader found my dissertation in the library today, they probably wouldn't be able to spot that pushback. Still, they aren't subtle enough that I would have had an easy time publishing what I wrote, or getting hired. So, a) You do not get to choose the politics of your dissertation. You simply won't be allowed to defend until your dissertation agrees with the politics of your committee. b) Until you read the whole dissertation and see how SJ has been framed, you won't know what this woman really thinks. And yes, it is still hard work. It was the second most difficult period in my life, the first being when I was sick with Crohn's disease, in chronic pain that kept me from sleeping, and 40lbs underweight. You are living on almost no money, and at the mercy of (on average) very mercurial people, and constantly having to do mindless and frustrating things to deal with the university bureaucracy. Completing a PhD is not an easy thing to do.
That is such a great point. I remember the same thing being foisted onto my work when I was in a PhD program. I could only reference the "right" type of ideas and thinking or my advisor would not approve it. However, she seemed very proud of her topic and went into detail explaining the abstract.
Leslie, thanks for your compassionate take on this. She is definitely a symbol for an uprising happening in the cultural moment. I believe it was her innocence that became blood in the water. If she had posted that in an indignant, recalcitrant way I bet it would no have incited such a reaction. I feel sad for her, not only because being targeted is no fun, but also because she is now doubling down on the "value" of her work, which is what happens when we are attacked.
One of the reasons I rarely go on Facebook and long ago (pre-Elon era) closed my Twitter account was that I was worn out by the effort I had to make to control my temper when I was tempted to unload on someone or join in a mob. I had to make a conscious effort to try to not get provoked into joining in on a frenzy.
A lovely and thoughtful commentary that places blame on a useful target. There is something about this that inspires anger, but let's not take it out on this young woman.
Maybe this woman's work will lead to new ways to detect airborne chemicals, toxins, or diseases. Or it might help in training dogs to sniff out more than just drugs. The mockery just sounds like jealous people being dicks, and wanting to tear someone down who worked hard and did what the haters never would be smart enough to do.
My knee-jerk reaction is to pity-laugh-SMH at the young woman who is proud to be "PHDone."
Soon enough she will see that she is actually "PHDone like dinner."
The system let her down. If she had a crystal ball, she'd be able to see the hundreds of HR people who will be grimacing when they catch a glimpse of her doctorate's title two seconds before they drag her PDF into the recycling bin.
PDFuggetaboudit.
Is it too late for her to get a refund? Does the university have a 30-day money back policy?
Yes, and while this woman is indeed a grown adult, she began this journey as a teen, and as the parent of teens myself I have to wonder...where the hell are her parents and how did they allow/encourage/fund this?! They are either also naive as herself, or they know she will be taken care of financially despite this silliness and so no matter. I hope for her case it is the latter, although it probably won't help her build character.
You're very out of touch if you don't understand that this hate comes primarily from online misogyny. The men telling her to get back in the kitchen would rage even if she was a chemistry PhD. I don't like how you slap your narrative on things without understanding them
That's part of the problem, sure. Misogyny and misandry are at a fever pitch and there is an incredible intensity to it online.
Also, these are my thoughts. My "narrative" as you say. You are welcome to write your own narratives. Perhaps that would help you approach others' narratives with less hostility.
That's not my take on it, at all. Yes, there is misogyny in the world, and we can talk about where it is at its worst and why.
But the over-arching theme here (you missed it?) is that a "doctorate," per se, has become worthless. Our expensive system of credentialing has deteriorated to the point that someone who spends 4 years studying "the phallocentric narrative of the Kazakhstani missile program" can put the same letters after their name as a PhD in nuclear physics.
Student debt is outrageously high. Universities will be happy to print a degree for you (but the signature of the dean will be reproduced by a machine's hand) , as long as you pay the tuition fees (that increase well beyond mere inflation). Universities have a license to print money.
And Starbucks gets all the tattooed, purple-haired baristas they need for the next 500 years.
Agreed. As a western woman in middle age I can tell you (with much experience now) that most men are not misogynist, and actually most have an instinct to protect women, but the ones that ARE usually come out when a woman excels at something that they feel enfringes on "men's territory." Not in this case.
So, if this woman was a genuine, stellar, non-DEI engineering student at MIT who designed an amazing car engine that exceeded all others, a small percentage of men would decend to tear her apart. THOSE are the misogynists. They have a fragile and external sense of masculinity that is easily threatened. This is why most male misogynists are on the political left. They've been emasculated for too long by their political party and weak men are dangerous.
On the other hand, toxic femininity often presents as manipulation and character assasination, and a lot of very poorly behaving women will claim it to flip the script. This leads to an irony in that the women most likely to be receiving ACTUAL misogyny tend to be calm and fight back with logic and reason, and the ones who are merely toxic manipulators tend to scream it from the rooftops with emotional appeals that suck up all the attention.
"You're very out of touch...I don't like how you slap your narrative on things without understanding them." I don't think your comment is even correct. My impression is that you are out of touch, while still describing something that is a subset of the comments.
These are interesting comments. I don't agree that the attacks are purely or even primarily misogyny. And I can understand why one might still aspire to get a PhD. I completed one, in 2021. I was in coursework and then writing my dissertation during the height of Woke Online, in a humanities department. I am not privileged. My parents, before retirement, had lower middle class incomes. I had a teaching assistant stipend, with a tuition waiver and middling health insurance benefits for the first few years. And then I went back to work as a software engineer, worked 40 hrs a week while being a full time student, and paid my tuition in cash for 5 of the 8 years that it took me. I went for the PhD because I wanted to connect with other intellectuals. This had worked for me at an earlier point in my life, when I got a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. I still have very good friends from that time. But this time, in the PhD program, I wasn't able to connect with people very well. The politics were very extreme, and I found myself avoiding campus.
There is one detail that I can contribute that others may not have considered: I wasn't given a choice to write a social justice dissertation vs a politically conservative or even moderate dissertation. It was presumed that I would write a social justice dissertation. It was a pretext of my having been admitted to the program. Any point I wanted to make about how social justice narratives didn't match what I was seeing in the archive of literature and film I was writing about I had to justify with all kinds of theoretical and literary citations. I did make some such points. But even then, I was only allowed to write those very subtle critiques of SJ ideology because I had a gay man for an advisor and he was willing to back me up. To be acceptable to my committee, my critiques had to be so subtle that if a casual reader found my dissertation in the library today, they probably wouldn't be able to spot that pushback. Still, they aren't subtle enough that I would have had an easy time publishing what I wrote, or getting hired. So, a) You do not get to choose the politics of your dissertation. You simply won't be allowed to defend until your dissertation agrees with the politics of your committee. b) Until you read the whole dissertation and see how SJ has been framed, you won't know what this woman really thinks. And yes, it is still hard work. It was the second most difficult period in my life, the first being when I was sick with Crohn's disease, in chronic pain that kept me from sleeping, and 40lbs underweight. You are living on almost no money, and at the mercy of (on average) very mercurial people, and constantly having to do mindless and frustrating things to deal with the university bureaucracy. Completing a PhD is not an easy thing to do.
That is such a great point. I remember the same thing being foisted onto my work when I was in a PhD program. I could only reference the "right" type of ideas and thinking or my advisor would not approve it. However, she seemed very proud of her topic and went into detail explaining the abstract.
It's true. I think it's a special kind of student who is even aware that they are being pushed to espose particular ideas.
Your writing is brilliant, Leslie.
Thank you, Brian!
Leslie, thanks for your compassionate take on this. She is definitely a symbol for an uprising happening in the cultural moment. I believe it was her innocence that became blood in the water. If she had posted that in an indignant, recalcitrant way I bet it would no have incited such a reaction. I feel sad for her, not only because being targeted is no fun, but also because she is now doubling down on the "value" of her work, which is what happens when we are attacked.
One of the reasons I rarely go on Facebook and long ago (pre-Elon era) closed my Twitter account was that I was worn out by the effort I had to make to control my temper when I was tempted to unload on someone or join in a mob. I had to make a conscious effort to try to not get provoked into joining in on a frenzy.
I am glad you have posted this, but I do think you should not be that way. I have no problem being reasonable rather than grabbing a pitch fork.
A lovely and thoughtful commentary that places blame on a useful target. There is something about this that inspires anger, but let's not take it out on this young woman.
Maybe this woman's work will lead to new ways to detect airborne chemicals, toxins, or diseases. Or it might help in training dogs to sniff out more than just drugs. The mockery just sounds like jealous people being dicks, and wanting to tear someone down who worked hard and did what the haters never would be smart enough to do.
Great article.
My knee-jerk reaction is to pity-laugh-SMH at the young woman who is proud to be "PHDone."
Soon enough she will see that she is actually "PHDone like dinner."
The system let her down. If she had a crystal ball, she'd be able to see the hundreds of HR people who will be grimacing when they catch a glimpse of her doctorate's title two seconds before they drag her PDF into the recycling bin.
PDFuggetaboudit.
Is it too late for her to get a refund? Does the university have a 30-day money back policy?
Yes, and while this woman is indeed a grown adult, she began this journey as a teen, and as the parent of teens myself I have to wonder...where the hell are her parents and how did they allow/encourage/fund this?! They are either also naive as herself, or they know she will be taken care of financially despite this silliness and so no matter. I hope for her case it is the latter, although it probably won't help her build character.
As a person with an acute sense of smell, I see no problem with the thesis.
As I type, the smell of the waste processing facility is rolling in from the northwest, since the facility is always rank after food holidays.
Smell/chemical recognition is possibly the first sense we develop, and the last to go.
Congratulations to the PhD!
You're very out of touch if you don't understand that this hate comes primarily from online misogyny. The men telling her to get back in the kitchen would rage even if she was a chemistry PhD. I don't like how you slap your narrative on things without understanding them
That's part of the problem, sure. Misogyny and misandry are at a fever pitch and there is an incredible intensity to it online.
Also, these are my thoughts. My "narrative" as you say. You are welcome to write your own narratives. Perhaps that would help you approach others' narratives with less hostility.
If a man posted a picture of himself with a PhD thesis called "Olfactory ethics" he would be ripped to shreds as well.
That's not my take on it, at all. Yes, there is misogyny in the world, and we can talk about where it is at its worst and why.
But the over-arching theme here (you missed it?) is that a "doctorate," per se, has become worthless. Our expensive system of credentialing has deteriorated to the point that someone who spends 4 years studying "the phallocentric narrative of the Kazakhstani missile program" can put the same letters after their name as a PhD in nuclear physics.
Student debt is outrageously high. Universities will be happy to print a degree for you (but the signature of the dean will be reproduced by a machine's hand) , as long as you pay the tuition fees (that increase well beyond mere inflation). Universities have a license to print money.
And Starbucks gets all the tattooed, purple-haired baristas they need for the next 500 years.
Agreed. As a western woman in middle age I can tell you (with much experience now) that most men are not misogynist, and actually most have an instinct to protect women, but the ones that ARE usually come out when a woman excels at something that they feel enfringes on "men's territory." Not in this case.
So, if this woman was a genuine, stellar, non-DEI engineering student at MIT who designed an amazing car engine that exceeded all others, a small percentage of men would decend to tear her apart. THOSE are the misogynists. They have a fragile and external sense of masculinity that is easily threatened. This is why most male misogynists are on the political left. They've been emasculated for too long by their political party and weak men are dangerous.
On the other hand, toxic femininity often presents as manipulation and character assasination, and a lot of very poorly behaving women will claim it to flip the script. This leads to an irony in that the women most likely to be receiving ACTUAL misogyny tend to be calm and fight back with logic and reason, and the ones who are merely toxic manipulators tend to scream it from the rooftops with emotional appeals that suck up all the attention.
<sigh>
"You're very out of touch...I don't like how you slap your narrative on things without understanding them." I don't think your comment is even correct. My impression is that you are out of touch, while still describing something that is a subset of the comments.