[Updated…]
Lots of people in the blogs are commenting on Dr. Diana York Blaine – the USC adjunct who among other things has people primarily focussing on her physical assets (go look for the nekkid pictures yourself). But I want to take a moment and comment on her inner self. Regardless of what you think of her ourter self, her inner self is frighteningly ugly:
Yesterday my father’s doctor and I were discussing dad’s imminent death from kidney failure. We spoke of the need for acceptance and letting go; we spoke of the need to span from bodies and pus to grace and light. We held one another and shared our experiences and cried. Then she got out a pad and prescribed me John Milton’s Paradise Lost.Needless to say it wasn’t your usual doctor visit. Then again in case you can’t tell I don’t exactly live a usual life.
She told me she was impressed with my depth and my humanity and my intellect. She also told me repeatedly that I was physically beautiful. I told her that I had learned through hard spiritual work to own these gifts of mine, that humility includes both acknowledging strengths as well as weaknesses. Anything less would be to spit in the face of the magical powers that made us.
Coincidentally (?), my husband, an English Renaissance scholar, had been speaking to me of these exact issues the night before and had brought up Milton as well. Wow. Don’t have to tell me thrice. It’s clearly time to get out that anthology I tore through in college in order to pass the tests and actually listen and learn with humility and gratitude from that seventeenth-century Christian visionary.
Oh. My. God.
Actually, this reminds me of one of my favorite stories. In college, or shortly thereafter, I was at dinner with two dear friends as we listened to a would-be seducer talk to his dinner companion. He said:
Actually, what I want is someone I can sit in fromt of the fire with, drinking red wine and discussing the warm humanitarianism in Wittgenstein.
Yeah, I bet he was almost as impressed with his depth and humanity and intellect as Dr. Blaine is with hers.
Truth be told, she’s barely above mediocre in the looks/body department. Compensation issue at work? Dunno, it’s puzzling.
Now, people do weird things under stress – and she’s pretty clearly a narcissist already. This is very unbecoming, but in terms of ugliness inside there are far worse things one could be. Not sure this rises to the characterization A.L. imputes.
Now, if you were a hater who dehumanizes about half of the human race, that might be different. If you were that AND a narcissist who can’t seem to talk about your father’s death without this kind of over the top self-praise, THAT would in fact be a combination that’s historically a predictor of sociopath-level ugliness/danger. Such people need to be kept away from power over other human beings at all costs.
“Oh, wait….”:http://cardinalmartini.mu.nu/archives/175914.php
I’m surprised that she left out the spiced lamb shanks and the bit where she relaxes in the ha-tub with her luv-ah.
You know, it’s nice to know that as screwed up as we are in the world, there is always somebody else worse off.
Thanks Joe.
Why is this important?
Wow. Professors with issues? I’m with “Passerby” here. Sorry, AL, this one’s not even a “leaner”:http://www.geocities.com/bloomfield_99/ . :\
There’s actually a link to larger issues – but it’s in my head, and I haven’t managed to get it down to post yet.
Give me a few days, then mock away freely.
A.L.
#6 from Armed Liberal: “There’s actually a link to larger issues – but it’s in my head, and I haven’t managed to get it down to post yet.”
I am reading the American philosophy professor’s blog extensively, and being amazed by these wider issues. Here is a good one (link), among many others:
Here’s where the Maxim-mentality stops and goes, oh, ha ha that’s so funny, breasts, get it, breasts, not women’s breasts, but chicken breasts. Ha ha. And here’s where the Maxim-mentality says, hey, Man Hating (and infuriatingly self-confident) Feminazi Dr Blaine, why are you reading so much into this? Can’t you take a joke? It’s just a commerical.
Patient sigh. And explanation.
No, it’s not. It’s not “just” anything. It’s an ideological piece of propaganda designed to justify two things: the annihilation of chicken’s lives and the annihilation of the human female’s self esteem. These are related, meat-eating and sexism, and I know this because scholar Carol Adams has explained it all in her books and demonstrates it with examples pulled from popular culture in her wonderful slide presentation which she gives at universities all across the land.
I don’t even know what the commercial was for, so incensed was I at the blatant misogyny thrust into my sunny nook that I went into a sort of white-out. Probably it’s Carl’s Jr., since they have thrived on featuring truly virulent anti-woman ads for some time, but Burger King has recently joined the fray with their “woman as hamburger” campaign that ran front and center during the Super Bowl.
Please to show respect, Armed Liberal, and not thrust your blatant misogyny into the professor’s sunny nook, as she is very sensitive there.
A fat girl with saggy titties is “physically beautiful?”
Does she hear anything else but the sound of her own shallow thoughts?
Sorry, not “professor”. Doctor Diana doesn’t say that, and it would be wrong to foist on her a false claim she doesn’t make.
Doctor Diana is simply a humble American PhD philosopher and academic educator. (And a writer, adventurer, bon vivant and buttkicker too!)
She has a magic key! (link)
The cool part of that is that she discovered Feminist Theory while a PhD candidate at UCLA. Two different colleges gave her women’s studies classes to teach, assuming since she was a woman, she must be an expert in that stuff. Well she wasn’t but she learned to be and in the process discovered one of the magical keys to the world: feminism.
Turns out there wasn’t anything wrong with Diana York, there was something wrong with how we define women. She was physically powerful, intellectually powerful, ultimately it turned out even spiritually powerful, and all of this scared the people in her world badly enough that they tried to strip her of her powers. And until she found feminism, she pretty much let them.
Now that same girl ls a woman, someone who walks through the world armed with all kinds of tools to make herself comfortable and to help her interpret what she sees.
(Wonders if these tools include a magic lasso and an invisible robot plane – or is it just a magic key now? I can’t keep up with revised DC continuity…) Anyway:
Follow her adventures in her famous blog!
Learn to understand the philosophy that is molding the minds of the next generation of leaders!
Roderick Reilly, in answer to your silly question, there is nothing you can say about Doctor Diana that she cannot surpass!
Just read her blog, you can’t top it! (link):
Can I Write Myself a Fan Letter?
I’ve been cruising through your comments this morning, and notice a pattern to those who would silence me. You hate my confidence. You hate that I am sure of myself and happy with what I am doing and certain about my positions. You hate that I have remained this way consistently without wavering. You hate that I am sure I am right in my defense of victims and my loathing of sexism.
As I muse these bizarre lines of attack, I realize that I don’t hate those things about me. I LOVE them.
Yep, I do. I am sitting here this morning in my sunny nook, surrounded by flowers that friends brought over last night to celebrate life and fellowship and miracles, and I am smiling, not only with satisfaction… “
And so on – and on – and on, in one form or another, in one post after another. Get it?
What philosophy! What wisdom!
What a model for girls! Do you want to be what society rewards and what the institutions that enshrine our highest learning validate as truth – be like this!
Yay!!
I dated someone like this for a while. I got pulled into her world because she had a deft mind and a gift for spewing long complicated thought exercises out onto paper, which were fun to read. However I didn’t stay with her long because I soon observed that her supposedly unshakable self-image was actually a carefully filtered front, behind which she hid some very real deficiencies and problems – from the disturbing to the laughable. Combine that with a tendency to USE other people as opportunities to show off, INSTEAD of showing genuine respect and/or warmth, and I lost interest in her quickly.
I think I know what irks all of you about her, and I think I can describe it with a simple story:
Three cowboys were sitting around a campfire. The first cowboy leaned forward, spat into the fire, and said, “I’m the toughest cowboy here. Just today I wrestled a mad bull to the ground with my bare hands!” The second cowboy laughed and said, “That’s noting. Today I bit the head clean off a rattlesnake for breakfast, stopped two stampedes single-handed, and beat ten cattle rustlers in a fight! I’M the toughest, bravest cowboy here!” The first cowboy nodded. “Not bad,” he said. Then he turned to the third cowboy. “Howbout you? How tough are you?”
The third cowboy just stoked the coals and said nothing.