C'mon ladies....

Rawr. So apparently we all should be quite peeved that Lady Scotland, the attorney general and the highest legal authority in England and Wales, has employed - oh no! - an illegal immigrant. Never mind that said illegal immigrant is "not a welfare scrounger, drugs racketeer or slum landlord, but a respectable, hard-working, married woman." 

This story becomes even more Greek tragedy-esque when we remember that it was Lady Scotland that played a crucial role in steering the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act of 2006 which, among other provisions, imposes stricter penalties for employers that failed to ensure their employees were able to work legally in the UK blah blah blah boring legal political stuff...Fuckit, Herstorian is bored. Let's gossip about the gals!

Mrs. Loloahi Tapui-Zivancevic grew up in a one-room house with five sisters and two brothers on the island of Vava'u in Tonga. Her family lives on the meagre income garnered from her sisters' mat-weaving business for the tourism industry and her fathers' subsistance farming. She attended school until age 17, and then helped her mother to run their impoverished household.  As the oldest sibling, it was considered her responsibility to provide for her younger siblings. She emigrated to the UK on a student visa in 2003. Since then she has supported her family in Tonga with regular remittances. 

 "I thought she was a really nice woman", says Lady Scotland, (Hmmmmm....Herstorian thinks so too) "but it looks as if I made a number of errors of judgment in terms of character."

Herstorian is confused. Exactly what kind of character has Mrs. Tapui-Zinvancevic displayed? Helping her mother to run a household under circumstances that are less than ideal?  Getting an education? Supporting a family? Sure she was - oh, dear! that evil of evils -Illegal. But Herstorian still suspects Lady Scotland might have had it right in the beginning. 

In a speech at the "Women of the Year" Lunchean in 1993 Lady Scotland argued there is a female and a male way to do things in any profession. Herstorian wishes Lady Scotland would take a dose of her own advice and look at the Loloahi scandal with a female perspective. 

Tough, tough. No worries though, L.S.! Herstorian will help get you started....

Hmmmm...a female perspective... Well, it might guide us to an understanding that the Loloahi Tapui-Zivanocevic is hardly an individual, isolated incident.  Women make up the bulk of the world's poor. No surprise then, that women make up the bulk of the world's survival migrants. Many developing nations rely on the remittances sent home by their surplus supply of desperate - and therefore cheap and exploitable - female labour and encourage migration as a development strategy. At the same time, developed industrial nations (England, that means you) rely on draconian immigration policies to keep needed migrant labour 'illegal' and therefore cheap.  

L.S., a female perspective involves examining incidents like the Loloahi Tapui-Zivancevic scandal for what they reveal about wider structural gender inequalities. It means questioning "common sense" statements like "she is illegal" for what they really mean. It means discovering who is really benefitting from controlling the discourse surrounding issues like "illegal" migration (Ahem...Herstorian says the answer is men, the answer is always men...kidding. Kinda.). 

It means seeing beyond the values and the ways of thinking about the world that serve to impoverish, subjugate and exploit women. Come on, ladies....let's all follow our first instincts and be "really nice" to one another. 

What your tutor is realllly thinking about while you're talking about your essay....

Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of The University of Buckingham, has kindly taken time out of his busy schedule to warn his colleagues of the dangers of lust in the lecture theatre.

...what happens when the natural order is disrupted by faculty members who, on parking their cars, head for the students' bedrooms?

What indeed, Terence?

The great academic novel of the 19th century was George Eliot's Middlemarch. The great academic novel of the 20th century was Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man. Both books chronicle lust between male scholars and female acolytes, and I expect that the great academic novel of the 21st century will describe more of the same. So, why do universities pullulate with transgressive intercourse?

Why is the overarching narrative, the only relationship conceivable between teacher and student, that of the male scholar and the female "acolyte"? Women are scholars too, my friend. And, here's a little secret for you: not all female students are devoted acolytes. In fact, some of them - and Herstorian is just taking a wild stab in the dark here -  think you're a pompous pontificating little prick.  Hmmm....Good SAT word there with pullulate, though. But too bad -  Herstorian says: you're still a dick. Let's read on! 

The fault lies with the females.

Oh, dear! 

...girls fantasise. This was encapsulated by Beverly in Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, who forces herself on to JoJo, the campus sports star, with the explanation that "all girls want sex with heroes". On an English campus, academics can be heroes.

Herstorian gets the impression Terence really wants to be a Hero. Tom Wolfe, too.

Normal girls - more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos - will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

Ahem, we'll just leave the whole "calling women girls" thing slide. Herstorian would hate to be thought of as one of those strident, nit-picking feminazi types. Oh, horrors! However, Herstorian would like our friend Terence to define normal girls. Herstorian thinks of herself as a normal girl, and she couldn't care less about abs, pecs, or triceps. She is, however, quite embarrassed that all of those times she asked for advice on an essay, she was coming on to her lecturer! What a little slut! And here she thought she was just being a conscientious student. 

So, what advice does Terence have for his poor academic heroes, especially those cursed - one might even say pullulating - with treacherous normal-girl-distracting abs, pecs and triceps?

Enjoy her! She's a perk. She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.

Yup, I'm afraid so. As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch.

Herstorian has several fancy degrees (but no job....hmmmm) and is saddened to realize that all these years, to her male lecturers, she was just a perk. Not a person. Just a perk with no passions, no interests, no opinions. 

Terence has defended his article by saying it is just humour deployed to make the point that academics and students shouldn't sleep together. But things are funny for a reason.  They are funny because they reveal a truth. The male academics that would find this article funny do so because, deep down, they really do think of their female students as voluptuous, wanton Dorotheas, Felicitys and Beverlys. The humour of the article comes from the fact that Terence has transgressed the social boundaries that keep those thoughts hidden. 

Terence is right. It is just a humourous article. For some. It's funny. But it shouldn't be. 

Hair where?

Ah! Clarification! Herstorian has been confused by hair etiquette for years and finally - Thank God! - the fashion world has come to the rescue. Apparently, hair is good! - desirable, even - when it is on one's head, on one's feet, and costs a lot. Legs, pits and cunts still off-limits, though, ladies! So don't throw away that Nair! And by-god don't cancel that Brazilian with the scary woman with a fierce belief in the aesthetics of no eyebrows, slicked-back hair, and the liberal application of lip liner (How else would she terrify a gal into getting into positions no person with any respect for the dignity of the human body would consider? "Now lift your legs and spread your.....").

Seriously, though. When and why did hair there become such a big deal? This certainly isn't a new phenomenon. Female nudes have traditionally never had hair. Gustave Courbet was one of the first artists to ever show a female nude with pubic hair and he was practically rode out of the Paris Salon on a rail. (Herstorian has a bit of a crush on Gustave.)  The little girl look, however, has seemed to take on a new, different kind of resonance in recent years. Herstorian watched an old episode of Sex and the City - that avatar of modern heterosexual relations - recently in which a major story line revolves around the naughtiness, the strangeness, of a no-hair-there situation. Ten years later the baby girl look is not only desirable, but common, acceptable, the norm even. Herstorian wonders if this isn't a reaction to women getting more power, being more independent, and putting less stock in their relationships with men. Scary for the boys, who need to make their women girls again. Scary too, for the women, who just want to be girls again, when daddy, grampy, uncle or Prince Charming would make everything okay. Maybe we're just talking through modern gender relations with our twats. 

In the interest of full disclosure, Herstorian herself has left Brazil long ago and moved to Hollywood. Discuss.