{"id":7305,"date":"2018-09-25T07:45:12","date_gmt":"2018-09-25T07:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7305"},"modified":"2018-09-25T07:45:12","modified_gmt":"2018-09-25T07:45:12","slug":"overly-masculine-photocopying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/09\/25\/overly-masculine-photocopying\/","title":{"rendered":"Overly-masculine photocopying"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About 25 years ago I worked on a UK-wide project with three rather splendid colleagues, the memories of whom rest with me today. \u00a0One of them, a witty, clever, insightful man of huge experience, regularly had me helpless with laughter as he told his many stories, quite often of his mishaps. \u00a0He had a vulnerability with a certain sort of female academic. \u00a0He was, for example, once publicly harangued for using a photocopier in an overly-masculine way. \u00a0Although this never made any sense to me (and still doesn't), there was always a small part of me which wondered what he'd done to deserve this. \u00a0I record this here as an act of atonement as it's now clear that he was probably just being bullied by someone who liked doing things like that. \u00a0This came to me as I read Lionel Shriver's <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/2018\/09\/millennials-arent-taking-offence-theyre-hunting-for-victims\/\">article<\/a> in a recent Spectator:\u00a0<em>Millennials aren\u2019t taking offence. They\u2019re hunting for victims<\/em> \u2013 with its rich tales of campus aggression, this time from students. \u00a0Here's a taster:<\/p>\n<p>\"Despite youth\u2019s reputed belief in the importance of being earnest, the whole ID politics movement is emotionally disingenuous. When during that Evergreen foofaraw a rabid convocation of students cowed the college president into lowering his arms at the podium because they found his hand gestures \u2018threatening\u2019, those students didn\u2019t feel jeopardised; they were dominating and emasculating a man supposedly in authority. The students cowering in \u2018safe spaces\u2019 don\u2019t feel endangered; they\u2019re claiming territory. In protecting the faux-helpless from noxious opinions via no-platforming, they\u2019re exercising power. The experience of exercising power isn\u2019t scary, except on the receiving end; it\u2019s supremely gratifying. These people aren\u2019t frightened. They want you to be frightened of them. And we\u2019re not talking \u2018microaggression\u2019. PC police often prefer macroaggression, the kind that can get people sacked.\"<\/p>\n<p>The only positive thing about any of this is \"foofaraw\" a word new to me and one to be used again ... . \u00a0Here's a Merriam Webster <em>word of the day<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.merriam-webster.com\/dictionary\/foofaraw\">podcast<\/a> to explain all. \u00a0NB, when I looked this up, the word of the day was almost as good,\u00a0<i>paradiddle.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About 25 years ago I worked on a UK-wide project with three rather splendid colleagues, the memories of whom rest with me today. \u00a0One of them, a witty, clever, insightful man of huge experience, regularly had me helpless with laughter...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}