I want to start out by congratulating Ms. Laura Kipnis.
 
I want to congratulate her for making it into menopause without ever having been sexually harassed, assaulted, stalked, or raped.

I’d like to commend her on her heterosexuality, on her cis-gender, on her white skin, and her evident comfort with (and indeed, ignorance of) all that these markers might entail.

I’d like to toast her for attending universities and colleges at a time when the average student debt was at half of what it is today, when a Humanities degree was not considered an utter wash of one’s time, when 1/3 of the student body did not take medication for depression and/or anxiety, when paper tablets were all the rage, when porn was something you had to purchase in a real-life sex shop, when no one even knew what ‘bukkake’ meant.

What foresight this woman had in the circumstances of her birth!

I curtsy her supreme majesty at not having been born in an abusive home or in poverty.

And I salute her stolid mental health.

May this Great Impenetrable continue to satisfy her narcissism in harmless, minxy flirtations with younger colleagues, while tickling her own fancy with the naughty high school thought that the very man who is meant to be teaching a Sexual Harassment workshop might be substituting masturbation with coin-jangling right in front of everyone! Tee-hee-hee…

What a saucy girl that Ms. Kipnis is. How great her imagination on the masturbation front, but occluded to literally all else.

It must be comfy… That whole ignorance thing.

To never have to wonder why all the training she received was voluntary (according to her own article), to entirely miss the seemingly singular incompetence of those running the workshop – and to miss it so thoroughly that the lack of preparation on the part of the man running it, “David,” becomes proof positive of her own superior intellect.

It is not that Northwestern has a muddy, ill-conceived Sexual Harassment and Assault policy with little-to-no training for its members, which is further executed (and exacerbated) by people who cannot answer the most basic questions pertaining to universal policy. It’s just that she’s a psychoanalytic genius perceiving the unconscious masturbatory signals of “David”!

Way to turn a potentially PTSD’ed frown upside-down, Kipnis!

May all us fragile, mentally-ill, pattern-perceivers bow down to your prurient ingenuity and robust one-track-mind!

Unless, of course, Freud was also right about that whole cigar thing… You know, about it not always being a penis?

At which point Professor Kipnis, herself, becomes evidence of the very lack of training and education that she failed to note during the voluntary Sexual Harassment workshops that she attended at Northwestern University; indeed, a symptom of the institution, itself.

This latest Kipnis fiasco is the third public scandal her esteemed institution has seen in the past five years alone, with Ludlow and a public fucksaw demonstration preceding it.

But I am certain that such mass hysteria is in no way linked to the fact that the people leading the only (read: voluntary) Sexual Harassment and Assault workshops at NU are unable to answer the simple, and daringly querulous question posed them by the ever astute Ms. Kipnis. Namely:

“How [does one] know that [their sexual advances] are unwanted until they try?”

Yikes! What a stumper! The answer to that couldn’t possibly be:

“Is this honestly your first try?”

Unfortunately for both NU and Ms. Kipnis, that would take some form of memory, and memory is so frighteningly close to PTSD, what with its pattern recognition and all, that I hesitate to recommend such a guideline for fear of contaminating Northwestern Professors’ collective mental health.

And certainly, that could never be my intent. Oh, no. All hail.

Besides traditionally powerless people/students now have such insane, castrating, vagina dentata powers that, as Kipnis points out, a married male editor in his undies of her acquaintance got on Skype with a writer and because of his undress suffered… absolutely nothing save the loss of one book contract. And for his part he got to repeatedly present himself to an accomplished, 30-something, woman writer as if she were an unpaid Cam Model cruising the interwebs for some sad-sack ‘pleasure’ worthy only of a Todd Solondz film.

I mean, imagine if this “nebbish” editor, and all the other quotidian creepers like him, were to be fired for their lack of professionality? Or for not doing their jobs? Or for (gasp) sexual harassment?!

My lord, it might be a veritable holocaust of male sexual entitlement in the halls of the hoity-toity.

And how thoroughly embarrassing for all the white, straight, cis-men! To actually have to conduct themselves with the same level of professionality expected of the hysterically unbalanced “survivors.”

But Kipnis, bless her simple heart, wouldn’t really know. She’s no “survivor.” (yuck!)

Rather, she’s got an iron uterus, having never suffered such an onslaught of psychotic male attention in all her mentally stable days! Or, at least, none that she cares to serve up publicly.

She only ever serves up other people’s traumas publicly.

And for such courage, as well as her willingness to speak for, and over, those with less power than herself, I salute her!

After all, why should Professors be held to the same professional standards as Therapists and Medical Professionals by students paying $50,000+ a year? The very idea is infantilizing to all grown-ups everywhere!

And so, I hail Kipnis and her rousing, pom-pom performance for the old-boys’ club that is academia. I was really worried for a second that it might actually die off. But thanks to Kipnis’ new Estroven regimen, I now know that there’s not a chance.

Stay free, Kipnis. Stay true. Stay privileged!

And don’t ever let your own students’ experiences sway you. After all, it’s your job to teach them (the hysterical child-sissies), not the other way around! Your brave fight is the stuff of which ballads are made, Sister.

The System works

                        Cuz I got Mine.

                        My Solidarity extends

                        Only as far as My own Behind.

Update: Northwestern has issued a notably unenlightening statement about recent sexual assault findings.