Men don’t follow the rules; they make the rules. And by rules I mean political rules that do determine economics or the market, let alone society (norms, beliefs, values, et al.). Though women in power get to dictate in a multitude of directions (which is why they get called “uppity bitch” all the time). (My partner does not know what color of shoes to wear to what function.)
Put differently, SMIGS (straight male, Ivy, gender speak), instead of mugs (not to be confused with maiden names), who are not all smug (who again don’t know how to pair maidens with mugs any more than Ivies and their sisters — colleges that is).
At least my mug is not smug. He may have gone Ivy, and the only one in the largest city once controlled by the Dutch (New Netherlands), but he wasn’t about to attend HPY (our license plate – Harvard-Princeton-Yale connection, though we had no intention of being part of the “H’s: when it came to license plates).
My partner also helped me with SLAMs and SCAMs, though a great colleague thought this was insulting to men. With a 50 percent admission rate for legacy, we are talking about a very small group of smug people, and only one gender who could get in. Not only my partner but first generation of any nationality, let alone religion or tradition, or mixed first generation of any kind has this high of an admissions rate. (CUNY has a much lower admissions rate, in effect, than Harvard, Go figure.)
How do I know this? I went from CPS (Capitol Page School) to CMC (Claremont Men’s College), where they tried to “GCO” us (Get C-word Out). This is similar to the Princeton University Press book ”Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation.
A better way to look at gender, or women as the most trod-upon gender, is that when we enter the institution we make it stronger — intellectually first and foremost. No more need for Gentleman’s C’s. Having been disappointed by my mother’s notion that I only had to “earn” a Gentleman’s C, I was happy that I got into CMC instead of an all-female sister school, or the Western equivalent nearby. She transferred from Mills to Berkeley and regretted it. I got in via transfer and decided against going. I preferred understanding how socialism succeeded in the former Yugoslavia rather than attending a university with more men. I didn’t even accept an invitation to be the prototype or the type of professor — University Professor — since I found California less diverse than, yes, NYC, even though it is a one-Ivy town. UC Berkeley, or Cal, is over 85 percent privately funded with a public purpose, so where better to hide your former superiority to Harvard?
Before I forget, though I haven’t found the citation to this day to “Gov-Speak,” a Harvard thesis, MA thesis, or dissertation that gave us the rules of Gov-Speak, which is to say male speak. And while I’m the third professor in my 11-generation family, I’m only the second one who addresses religion. The first helped found Brown, was George Washington’s aide-de-camp, and practiced “pro-fessing,” not confessing, when he was a prof back in the 1790s. So the first prof in my family was a prof of religion. Back then Brown and other institutions were “liberal” (i.e. secular). Not only did I assume that this meant the religion professor helped clean Washington’s boots, but that the town he professed in must have been Princeton or New Brunswick, not Providence, Rhode Island. Being from a radical county of a radical state — New Jersey — (which allowed women to vote for a nanosecond or from the 1790s until 1807) — he helped found the community with Native Americans from one sovereign nation.
Ruth Frick O'Brien 