Tenure, she wrote

I've been following Tenure, she wrote, a lovely blog written by a fellow female academic about her own struggles with the current system's dead-ends and downfalls. This is the type of reading many people from my circle seem to be into lately and I guess it is a bit questionable how much of this reading is actually good for us and how much of it is just another type of self-poisoning, like listening to emotionally masochistic songs about break-up when the person you were stalking got away. Our plight seems to be a bit more sophisticated than that, but it's not, really: the academic dream was the stalked and we were the delusion-ed stalkers hoping it will still come out alright in spite of contrary evidence, it seems.
Of course, certain nuances need to be added, still: that unlike real stalking cases, the object of our desire actually did use and encourage us in the delusion (I know, this is probably what most stalkers would say), and the fact that not all of us were left on the outside. Some of us, after quite a lot of struggle, did make it into some kind of tenured position, though it's still pretty much a lottery.

Returning to what I wanted to share about Tenure, she wrote, I was particularly touched by this post of hers, in which she talks about a problem so common for some of us within academia, but so gender-specific that most academia-criticizing lit doesn't cover it. I've been in similar situations more times than I can keep count of, and I'm not the only one. The line between open aggression and hints to your gut is more blurred, finer and softer than it is in the streets, let's say, but this doesn't make the environment (much) safer, it just makes the harassers more shrouded and shroud-able in the cloak of "you got it all wrong".