So what happened?

From where I sit (pinned down by a cat), honestly, the title and raison d'etre of the blog really no longer apply. I've been out of academia now for something like five years--long enough that I'm not actually sure how long it's been. I still have strong opinions, but the severe unhappiness and depression that were, to be honest, major drivers of the urgency and bitchiness of the blog are also things of the past. For now anyway, and I hope permanently. And most importantly of all, my primary purpose in starting the blog has, I think, been met: there are *tons* of people out there who are also depressive/bitchy/feminist/mama/academic/anxious/funny/cynical/etc. types, who experience at least some parts of the world in ways that are congenial to me, and I to them, and the blog has, I think, been a successful part all of our discovering that the internet is a really awesome way to ditch the facades and talk, honestly, about our experiences. Even the pseudonymous part of doing so feels almost like an afterthought: it's been quite some time since Bitch was a fairly transparent (though still quite enjoyable) nom de plume, rather than a proper mask.

That plus it sort of feels like Bitch PhD is a more or less complete body of work. Not that we don't/won't continue to have things to say on the blog's topics--feminism, politics, society, recipes, even academia--but we, the various Bitches, have each reached a kind of closure of the parts of our lives that the blog served. Sybil has a job she's happy with, but it's not blog-friendly. Ding has switched jobs and found a man, for god's sake. LeBlanc got MARRIED. Taddy claims he hasn't changed, but he got cancer, recovered, is returning to his real life and (most importantly of all) has realized, I think, that he is a damn good writer. I'm a housewife, and Pseudonymous Kid is old enough now (10 next week!) that he has started to censor what I write about him, the little shit.

We may not all be living happily ever after, but I think we're all at transitional stages and ready to move to something new.

But as I said, that doesn't mean we're, like, dead or anything. Ding and I are both thinking of starting book blogs; LeBlanc may be getting annoyed by DC blog politics, but she's nonetheless become Somebody among the big boys and girls; Sybil may be blog-free for a while but she seems to have become a semiregular twit. Taddy, well, you guys gotta talk Taddy into starting a goddamn blog of his own.

For now the blog will stay exactly where it is. Lauren at Feministe has offered to archive some "best of" posts, and I may get around to taking her up on the offer. If/when I get my own domain (which I'm totally going to do with the next blog; some asshole has been squatting on bitchphd.com for years now) I'll try to figure out how to move everything over there. In other words, stuff will still be around, hopefully to be occasionally discovered by new readers as well as fondly printed out--EVERY SINGLE PAGE--and bound in gold leaf by each and every one of you.

I shall forever remain your humble servant.

Bitchphd

Labels: blogging, farewell, metablogging

Well, the NYC roundtable thingy was awesome and Tenured Radical is my new bff even though she hates children and mommies and I will blog more about that (the roundtable, not the mommy-hating, though maybe that too, who knows) later but right now I am still having coffee and thinking about unpacking. And my boyfriend served me coffee in the morning and took me to see a pre-release showing of the new Coen brothers movie, which is fucking awesome, people, and was his usual quiet urbane self and I was indulged most deliciously which I am a total sucker for, goddammit. And I had dinner with this fine lady, who is always most excellent company, and we talked about how we, too, not-so-sekritly hate children, at least sometimes. And I bought Pseudonymous Kid Pseudonymous Bosch's second book, If You're Reading This, It's Too Late, which I had originally bought the first one purely on the strength of the author's name, of course, but it turns out that the series is totally fun for clever kids who enjoy metafiction, so. And PK was all "ooh!" when I pulled it out of my suitcase. I think he was even more excited about the book than he was about the Mexican jumping beans I picked up during a brief plane change at the Phoenix airport. And the cats are glad I'm home and now I need more coffee and probably something solid to eat so I'ma hit "post" and if my cobloggers can't be bothered to feed you real content today this might be all you get because PK wants to make cookies.

Labels: books, boyfriend, mememe, metablogging, Pseudonymous Kid

Remember the latest heroine of the week post?

Turns out it was bullshit. The post's been updated accordingly. Because this blog cares about facts.

Labels: correction, heroine of the week, metablogging, the media

No one has time to blog any more.

So here's a cute video of a mouse. (PK has four these days: Squeaky, who is 100 almost three; and Star, Zebra, and Chiaroscuro, who are newbies because Cow died not too long ago.)

Labels: mama, metablogging, mice

1. The 66-yo woman who's pregnant. Why the fuck is it anyone's business but hers?

2. What Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. Look, either torture is a big fat fucking deal, in which case we should go after EVERYONE, including Pelosi but really she's pretty small potatoes as compared to everyone in the last administration, or else waterboarding isn't torture at all, in which case stfu already, mkay?

3. Maureen Dowd, George Will, et al. Yes, their columns all suck. Which is why I don't read 'em.

4. The American Idol whatever it is. Three words, people: GET A LIFE.

5. The Star Trek movie. Haven't seen it, don't care.

This completes your Saturday quickie post. I may or may not have time to write one of the posts I *do* want to write later today.

Labels: fluff, metablogging

I realize, of course, that Bitch. Ph.D. is the only blog worth reading. But just for the sake of variety, I do occasionally read other blogs. I even occasionally see the other bitches commenting elsewhere, doubtless merely for the sake of spreading the bitch gospel far and wide. Doubtless you ingrates readers, too, have been forced on rare occasion to read something someone else wrote, if only because of a slow posting day here.

Okay, but seriously. I have guilt. Guilt! About all the really brilliant things that I don't blog about on the grounds that "everyone" has blogged it already. I sort of realized how dumb this is when y'all started asking questions about the police beating video in this post. Duh, as I tell students: the stuff that's in your mind seems obvious *to you*, but that's because it's in *your* mind; the point of writing is to explain it to others.

Of course, we are usually best at teaching the things that we're most conscious of being not-so-good at ourselves, since those are the things we've had to deliberately think about improving, and this was one of my problems as an academic, too (and is a larger problem of mine in general): the assumption that if I know something, everyone else in the universe does, too, and that therefore there's no point in doing more than making, at best, a passing reference to whatever-it-is. That said, I am and will doubtless remain exceedingly lazy. So in lieu of actual work, I thought the least I could do would be link to a few of the blogs that I think are doing the best job these days of talking about the stuff I wish I were talking about, but don't because all I'd do is say "yeah, what she/he said."

ObWi has been doing a particularly awesome job of blogging Specter's shift to the Dems lately. This on top of Hilzoy's ongoing attention to the torture and rendition issues, which she's been doing so well for so long that I fear I've grown to take it for granted. If, however, for some reason you don't read ObWi every day, you really really should.

Along similar lines, I kind of assume that everyone reads Glenn Greenwald. Yes, I too find the one-note tendency of his blog (okay, two notes: torture and free speech) kind of, well, one-note. And yes, he tends towards wordy self-righteousness. But the fact is, he *is* right about this stuff, and he pays close enough attention to really provide detailed, fact-checked examples, ripe for the publicity machine. It's a real shame that his stuff pretty much only gets linked to in the liberal political blogosphere (that I know of); shit like Harman's hilarious hubris really needs to be all over the net and the cable news cycle, imho.

EotAW, like Bitch, is a mixed cornucopia of various tacks on a hodgepodge of multiple varied topics. But if you are at all interested in the economic recovery, you really should be checking in on Eric Rauchway's New Deal Denialist Truth Squadding posts, in which he takes on the "legitimate" authors who deal in teabag-style nuttery about history and economic policy. In fact, even if you think you're not interested in the economic recovery, you ought to read those posts. Those who don't know history are doomed to sound like fucking morons in public (and, more insidiously, possibly doomed to force the rest of us to deal with the consequences of their ignorance).

So that's a taste of my "if we had a blogroll" list. It's mostly politics focused, I guess, b/c that's the stuff I have the most guilt about not covering often enough these days (given all the interesting stuff happening). And it's short, b/c if we ever *do* have a blogroll again, I'm determined to keep it short--long, long blogrolls are pretty useless (and hard to maintain).

Nominations from cobloggers? Readers? (Please provide "why" explanations.)

Labels: metablogging

Chalk it up to the weekend? Anyway, we're now losing to both the Panda AND Jesus. TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. Vote, my minions! If you do, LeBlanc might just have something special cooked up for y'all soon.

Labels: 2008 Weblog Awards, metablogging

What does a bitch have to do to get you people to vote? That damn Panda blog is beating us. Since when do a bunch of very large bitches get their asses kicked by some half-extinct, slow-moving vegetarians??

And when you're done with the fluff--but VERY IMPORTANT fluff!--pick up the phone and call your Representative and tell her or him to vote to support the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which is being voted on TOMORROW. We might should have enough Senate votes this time to get that fucker passed.


(Image is of a brooch that you can BUY at Etsy. If you are so inclined. She has a couple other cute things too. I want the brooch done as a pillow....)

Labels: equal pay, Ledbetter, metablogging

You can vote once a day. So I'm gonna bug you all about it.

In other "yay for voting" news, a really shitty article* in yesterday's NYT reports that the Dems intend to pass a Fair Pay Act, reinstating the understanding that victims of discrimination don't need to be mind readers that existed before SCOTUS ruled against Ledbetter.

*Ledbetter was *not* a response to Joe the idiot Plumber, chronologically or substantively. Also, the case discussed in the article is badly misrepresented--Garcia was suing the builders, who never owned the building, for having done the work. The judge's reasoning is asinine, but that part of Garcia's case was pretty weak anyway.

Labels: civics 101, feminism, metablogging, work

Hey! We've been nominated for Best Very Large Blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards! Starting Monday y'all can vote for us here, and the other fine nominees here.

Don't forget to vote for Black Women, Blow the Trumpet in the Small Blog category, both because she told us we'd been nominated (thanks, Black Women!) and because in the end, it's really all about the small blogs.

And you better vote, bitches. Because that "honor to be nominated" bullshit is bullshit. We wanna WIN.

And you know better than to mess with Very Large Women. We will kick your ass if you don't elevate us to the heights we deserve. I hear that winning means we get lots of 22-year old hottie groupies, because everyone knows that the kids love the internets.

Labels: cool stuff, metablogging

Sorry for the light blogging of late. Everyone's on holiday, obviously, including me. I'm sitting in a Minneapolis* coffee shop watching the snow (!!) and supposedly drafting some thoughts about a book proposal, though mostly I'm web-surfing since this is the first I've had the laptop open since Xmas, basically. I do, however, have Many Fascinating Posts that I need to write, but you know, visiting the boyfriend,** so after him the first priority is the getting-caught-up-on-the-internets thing, then the book proposal thing, and then maybe I'll get to you guys. In the meantime there's a ton of great stuff over at Jon Swift's year-end roundup, which has been keeping me from that book proposal all morning.



*I'm here. Visiting the boyfriend. Those of you to whom this is a shock--"but I thought you were married!"--can read the relevant posts down in the "best of" sidebar.

**Confidential to my dad: Dad, are you reading this blog after all? Does that mean you know why I'm in Minneapolis? Because I've noticed your unusual dearth of questions about my trip this time. So if you are reading, and we need to have a talk, we can. I hate being closeted about this anyway. That said, if you're not reading this blog and don't know, I'm not going to bring it up myself. So, you know, if that's the case, never mind.

Labels: boyfriend, cool stuff, mememe, metablogging

My own personal boss-lady comment re. the post below, since I do feel kinda responsible for the whole "official blog policy" thing in re. guest posters.

Yeah, I'm not going along with "Barbie" or with the idea that the right "caused" Oklahoma with Waco etc. I'll grant right-wing *rhetoric* some causative, or at least contributory, power, what with the anti-government, pro-gun crap, but by the same token you'd have to say the left was "responsible" for, I dunno, Susan Smith or whatever.

Violent, socially marginalized people will always latch on to the rhetoric that's available to them in whatever their historic moment, and their actions will always be interpreted within existing frameworks. Part of the *point* of this blog is to question those frameworks, not to accept them as a given.

Sorry, Nihilix. I Officially Disapprove of this post. Except for the point that yes, using horrific events for political gain is offensive--no matter who's doing it.

I do want to say, though, how important and appreciated Nihilix's posting about the protests in Minneapolis has been; this post isn't intended as a reprimand or anything, merely a clarification/correction.

Labels: metablogging

A li'l more self-promotion: here's Eric Rauchway, the panel organizer, talking about that blog panel thing.

What struck me at the time, and what I really wanted to say something about, was what Eric mentions in his post: the fact that most of the follow-up discussion was about the anxieties of blogging: aren't people afraid of what might happen if they blog?

These same questions have come up every time I've talked publicly about blogging to an academic audience, and I think Eric's thought that they're about different disciplinary discourses is at best only a partial explanation. The differences between humanities and science folks (let's include econ on the science side for argument's sake) on this anxiety-of-blogging question is, I think, just a small symptom of a larger disciplinary difference (which might be gendered, too) between fields where there are obvious and well-paying non-academic jobs and fields where there aren't. Which also means fields where there's less anxiety about getting and keeping jobs vs. fields where there's more.

I think that anxieties about blogging are mostly anxieties about unemployment. For academics in particular, unemployment anxieties have different forms: the will-I-finish anxiety, the will-I-get-a-job anxiety, the will-I-publish anxiety, the will-I-get-tenure anxiety. And because for academics, having a job is so deeply bound up with having an identity, these unemployment anxieties become personal anxieties, which are difficult to discuss with non-academics (because they don't share them) or with one's immediate colleagues (who are, after all, also one's competition and/or tenure committee).

So we turn to blogging, in part, to express these anxieties safely--which means impersonally and publicly. Interestingly, it seems that impersonal publication of one's personal private anxieties actually helps a lot--not just in terms of finding a like-minded audience (there are a lot of pseudonymous academic blogs, have you noticed?), but also simply because articulating them subjects them externalizes them: you realize that they're something you can analyze, that they're *not* just you or the entirety of you, that they're something more public, more shared, more systematic than that.

Which, you know, is a good thing. And it's part of the roots of feminist lit crit, too: the idea that expressing the mundane, the personal, the minute is actually a political act both because it gives "mere" experience a material aspect and because it helps/forces both the experience and the author to move outside herself, to become part of the public world.

I think these realizations are generalizable beyond myself, but I certainly have to admit that they're incredibly rooted in my own experience of blogging. It's pushed me from an anxious nobody into a self-possessed somebody even as it's brought me "out" of academia into a more broadly public/populist/common role. Ironically (I think I remember saying something like this a long time ago), the self-possession is more my "old" self than the anxiety. Or rather, the two have always existed in relationship to one another: the anxiety is internal, private; the self-possession is both identity and public performance.

So anyway, that's me. Notes, perhaps, towards a future, longer, and better articulated public effort/essay.

Labels: academia, metablogging

Or so say some people at a colloquium that was held last week somewhere.

I bet that chick who spoke second wishes she'd known how shitty the camera angle was, so that she'd have made use of the podium.

Labels: academia, metablogging

So Mr. Bicyclemark spent a few hours futzing around with the code--which is still not clean, RonO, I'm sorry--and the site does appear to work now in Safari for me. It's still slow, which seems to be an ad issue, and at some point I might get around to tinkering with the different ad codes just to see if the tradeoff between money and performance is really worth it (some ads pay better than others). But it *will* load, and if you don't want to wait for the ads, just make it stop loading.

I don't know what the story is with IE. If it ain't working for you Msoft slaves, (1) switch to Firefox; (2) stop reading blogs at work?

No, actually, if it's not working, let me know and I'll pay Mark or someone else who knows how to write for that stupid-ass program to fix it. Just because I love you all so much.



Oh, P.S. I got rid of the blogroll, temporarily, because it's hopelessly out of date at this point and has a lot of dead links. A shorter updated roll with new links will be up at some point. No really.

But probably not this month because I have two articles and a talk to write.

Labels: metablogging, mindless kvetching

Check it out: feminist blogging has its own special issue of a real genuine academic journal. With, natch, an associated blog for discussion.

It's like we're being co-opted or something.

Labels: feminism, metablogging

So y'all, Kieran over at Crooked Timber reminded me of the email I got, oh, about a week ago telling me to take some old Blogads code out of my template. Which I did. Does the site work better now?

If it does, and if you've at all been following the brouhaha over the Althouse breast controversy, do, do check out this video.

Labels: metablogging, stupid shitstorms

While I'm turning the blog's content over to you, the commenters, let me also beg those of you with technical know-how to help me out with problems I'm having on that side of things? I'm hearing from some readers that the site's acting up: not loading, or taking forever, links not working, etc. I've also heard that some people are having similar problems with other Blogger blogs, but many of the people writing me to ask what's wrong haven't mentioned that, so it may be just me.

I, myself, haven't had any problems (on Firefox 2.0); readers are reporting problems in IE and Safari.

I haven't done anything recently to change the template.

(1) If you are having a problem in a recent version of Firefox (and you can read this post, duh), let me know, please? bitchphd AT yahoo.

(2) If you have a clue what might be the problem, ditto?

(3) If I can't figure it out and need to pay someone money to do so, how much would you charge to fix the goddamn thing? Quote me a per hour, and let me know if you're willing to also do a li'l updating to the template, because I've got some minor changes I've been wanting to make.

Labels: good cause, metablogging, work

Hey, Markos--we met at a Minneapolis Drinking Liberally once when you were promoting your book, remember? So I'm gonna play the "acquaintance" card as well as the fellow blogger card here.

Dude, this post is messed up. I agree with you that the proposed blogger code of conduct is asinine, but it certainly doesn't follow that Kathy Sierra (or any other women who are threatened with death, rape, or frivolous lawsuit, ahem) are making shit up or overreacting or (as you kind of imply) being hysterical.

Maybe, despite being a major blogger, you haven't spent much time thinking about the specific online experiences of women. In which case, you should know that women online--not just bloggers, but women in chat rooms or commenting on blogs or on internet forums--get twenty-five times more harassment than men do. That's not 25%; it's 2500%.

In other words, no; you haven't gotten "your fair share" of this kind of thing. Not even close. And good for you; no one should have to put up with that crap. But when your own experience of harassment is, relatively speaking, very minimal, it's really easy to tell other people that they should just ignore it. It's hard to realize exactly how much cultural energy is devoted to teaching women to be afraid.

Now, I agree with you: the vast majority of that kind of assholish crap isn't *really* threatening. Most email or comment threats are just hot air. But at some point, some dickhead is going to stir up enough craziness that someone really *is* going to get attacked in real life as the result of some online bullshit.

Codes of conduct aren't going to prevent that, of course. Maybe nothing will. But people like you and me *can*, I think, postpone its happening, maybe even make it less likely, by not just saying (in effect) "butch up or quit blogging." The voices of vulnerable people matter too. Maybe even more than the voices of those of us who aren't easily intimidated. And let's get something straight: what needs to happen isn't that the recipients of death threats need to shrug them off. What needs to happen is that those of us who have a fairly weighty online presence need to say, in no uncertain terms, that threats and harassment and sexism and racism and homophobia and all that other offensive shit is flat-out unacceptable, both in real life and online.

The best way to make that clear isn't to tell victims, publicly, that "if they can't handle it" they should quit blogging. Nope. Instead, those of us who provide readers with opportunities to respond--in blog comments, or on online forums, or in chat groups--need to make sure we come down hard on assholes who use those opportunities to hassle, harass, or threaten people (including us). For god's sake, don't make excuses for them by pretending that they're some kind of force of nature, like an earthquake, that we can't do anything about. Because we can, if we shut them down when they show up.

And if we don't "have time" to manage our own commenters (or forum members, etc.) then we don't have time to blog. If we run forums or chat groups or blogs but don't have time to read what people say--well, maybe we should try another line of work.

Labels: civility, feminism, metablogging, sexism, stupid shitstorms

So there's a proposed blogland response to the misogynist bullshit Kathy Sierra had to put up with is apparently some "Code of Conduct". I've seen this talked about in places other than the NYT, but let that link demonstrate that the idea of a Blog Conduct Code is getting some press.

Blah blah, "we restrict comments that aren't civil." "We won't say anything online we wouldn't say in person." "We'll resolve inter-blog spats through private email rather than posting about them." "If someone's being a dick, we'll ask them to stop, pretty please, before we call the cops." "We won't allow pseudonyms." "We'll ignore trolls." "We want hosting sites to police blogs."

Break me a fucking give, people. It's not that fucking hard. Yes, anonymous publishing makes some people act like dickheads. Yes, blogspats are silly wastes of time. Yeah, basic standards of rational argument are good things. Yeah, trolls suck.

But (1) the main problem in the Sierra case was rampant misogyny, and I don't see any "We won't tolerate racism or sexism" up there. And (2) Pseudonymity is not the problem. The fact of the matter is that an established pseudonym is at least as much of a "check" on assholishness as the real name of someone no one's ever heard of; "Bitch, Ph.D." has a reputation to maintain (of sorts), and that's one reason she doesn't say dumbass shit. (I realize that this is debatable. What I mean is I won't threaten people or out them or otherwise act like an asshole.)

The real "solution" to assholes on the internet is for bloggers, site moderators, etc. to fucking read and participate in their own comment threads. If the blogger him- or herself is an asshole, then they'll allow assholes to comment there. Not much you can do about that: assholes exist, and they, too, can often type. If the blogger isn't an asshole, they'll delete, argue with, or shut down asshole comments, according to their personal tastes.

I, personally, find that the simple policy of "obnoxious comments will be deleted" works just great. I don't give a shit if people swear or are "incivil" about things that, imho, don't deserve civil treatment--and if someone disagrees that, say, sexist nonsense doesn't deserve civility, then they can read another blog, or they can argue with me in comments. So fuck that civility shit. I'm entirely pro-pseudonym: since I care, in fact, about writing--as any blogger damn well should--and I'm not a moron, I know perfectly well that pseudonyms allow writers to create different personae, to try different voices, and to protect their personal or professional lives (the threats against Kathy Sierra demonstrating *precisely why* bloggers, especially women, need the option of using pseudonyms, thankyouverymuchMr.HighHorseIUseMyOwnName).

I do care about people who create what in academic and legal circles gets called a "hostile environment." Sexist, racist, or homophobic bullshit either gets deleted or left up as an example of assholishness to which I, or other regular commenters, respond accordingly. Physical threats--except for obvious hyperbole like "I'd like to smack Larry Summers"--would get deleted, maybe, or else retained on purpose in case evidence were needed at some later date. Somewhere back in a very old comment thread there is a rape threat against me that I have left up for that very purpose (and no, I am not going to tell you where it is). I think bloggers (hello, Michelle Malkin, you fucking hypocrite) who "out" people's personal information are assholes--and I don't see *that* little piece of bullshit on the "blogger code of conduct," probably because it thinks pseudonymous commenting is inherently suspect.

In fact, anonymous and pseudonymous writing is as old as the hills. And foolish critics have always argued that anonymous writers were cowards, or frauds, or mercenaries. But one of the major benefits of anonymous writing is that it forces readers to focus on what they're reading, rather than on the personality of the person who writes it. (And, as a rather nice result, it forces authors to do the same, which saves the rest of us listening to them whining about whether or not the other side "likes" them ::cough::Malkin::cough::Althouse::.) It fosters and encourages a public sphere--one of the central requirements of a, yes, civil society--by allowing marginalized folks, whistleblowers, inner-circle critics, and people who are (hello?) easily threatened to speak out without putting themselves in jeopardy. These are good things. Things we should encourage, not forbid.

So no, I'm not interested in signing on to some "Code of Conduct" and displaying a "good behavior badge" on my site, thanks. I prefer to let my words speak for themselves.

Labels: civility, metablogging, racism, sexism, stupid shitstorms