Ms. Mentor reminds you that professors' grades and comments are not the main education one acquires in school. Grad students, like all apprentices and underlings, learn best by doing. Through writing papers and reports, you teach yourself to put together ideas, come up with theses, and discuss and demonstrate them with quotations and conclusions, numbers and notations, theories and speculations. Professorial comments, whether ego-satisfying or soul-shattering, won't teach you to be an independent professional generating your own momentum.
Ms. Mentor, who is often the recipient of clumsy though well-deserved flattery, acknowledges that graduate students do need to please their elders. But the motivation to think, research, and write must come from within—not from the hope for more good grades or strokes. An academic needs a strong, independent drive; intellectual curiosity; and an unconquerable urge to write and publish.
Professorial feedback, Ms. Mentor concludes, is but a garnish. The meal—preferably lush and sweet and spicy, not chewy or stringy—is what you concoct yourself.
Ms. Mentor, of course, always brings the sage.
Class Conscious
Q: I'm in a history graduate program, and many of my classmates strike me as pompous, moneyed bores. (OK, I'm in an Ivy League school, and I do come from a preppie background.) Do academics ever escape their ancestry?
A: Rarely. In fact, few Americans stray far from their original class position. First-generation college students rarely get Ph.D.s and become academics, and few, if any, of those will be hired as faculty in the Ivy League, where the nasal “preppie honk” is still a favored accent. Someone who attended Cleveland State (for instance) will be considered quite exotic among people who all matriculated at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and the like. Ms. Mentor knows one academic in Oklahoma who grew up in foster homes and one in Illinois who is the child of migrant workers, but the typical academic is the offspring of a college-educated, suburban nuclear family.
Ms. Mentor recommends that you read Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory, edited by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay, and take to heart their descriptions of how the poor feel among the elite.
And should you tire of the pompous, moneyed bores about you (Ms. Mentor yawns and twitches when she thinks of them), you can always urge them to join you in a few hours a week of volunteer work for a battered women's program, or Planned Parenthood, or Habitat for Humanity, or a soup kitchen, abortion clinic, literacy program, or progressive political candidate.
In short, you can do your bit to revive the historical tradition of noblesse oblige. Ms. Mentor believes fervently that it behooves the rich, wise, and powerful to aid the less fortunate. That is why she shares her perfect wisdom with the masses. You, in your own way, can follow her lead.
Fat Chance
Q: I'm a grad student in education, and I'm very fat. I know women of size have problems with job discrimination and hostility, and my classmates all seem to be thin, white, suburban, and athletic, and obsessed with their weight, to the point of anorexia.
I'm used to anti-fat comments from people who don't know anything about metabolism or set points or the fact that more than 95 percent of diets fail. Even Oprah Winfrey's weight yo-yos, and that's far more unhealthy than being “overweight.” But I didn't expect educated people to still believe foolish myths about fat (it's a matter of poor willpower) or disease (fat will kill you—tomorrow), or to monitor every mouthful they eat with self-hating comments (“I hate myself for eating all this chocolate”). I get angry sometimes; mostly I get bored.
But I'm also worried about what this means for my academic future, as a fat woman who won't—and can't, anyway—get skinny. I've tried all my life, with starvation diets, self-punishment, killer exercise, and even some secret surgery. Nothing works, and I know that fat activists are right: if we're fat, it's because it's in our genes.
My adviser is a skinny woman who punishes herself to get that way. Yesterday she told me that if I don't lose weight, I might as well quit grad school, as it'll be wasted on me. Is she right?
A: While Ms. Mentor was fuming over your letter, she was hearing about olestra, a recently approved substance with the mouth feel of fat but not the calories. Apparently it just slides through the intestines, pirating away needed nutrients, and causing “unfortunate” side effects (say the popular media): explosive diarrhea and “anal leakage,” visible on the underwear of tasting volunteers.
Ms. Mentor hopes that by the time you read this, olestra will have been banned. But she thinks it more likely that several I-must-be-skinny-at-all-costs women will be permanently injured, malnourished, or dead. And the promoters of olestra will have fattened their profits at the expense of women.
“I Must Be Thin” strikes Ms. Mentor as a deadly mantra, one women should resist. It siphons away mental energy; it leads to ridicule and abuse and prejudice, for beauty standards have always depended on scarcity and difficulty. In poor societies, fat is in; among rich people, thin is in—so that U.S. women who can afford to dine grandly brag instead that they've learned to starve themselves. Ms. Mentor has heard that some women actually interrupt delicious dinner parties to denounce their own thighs.
And now universities, seemingly in cahoots with the sadistic designers of airline seats, have added a new torture. The latest brand of classroom furniture installed at, among other places, the University of Oklahoma and Louisiana State University, features seats that are only fourteen inches wide. The distance between the seats and their attached writing surfaces is so small that pregnant women and male athletes literally cannot fit inside the desks they're supposed to sit in.
(For further information about the madness of thin people, Ms. Mentor directs her readers to a marvelously funny ‘zine called Fat? So! available for $12/year from Fat! So?, P.O. Box 423464, San Francisco, CA 94142. NAAFA, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, can be reached at 1-800-442-1214, and they can share some surprising facts—not myths. Ms. Mentor also recommends the classic book Shadow on a Tightrope: Writings by Women on Fat Oppression, edited by Lisa Schoenfielder and Barb Wieser, and a new encourager: Cheri K. Erdman's Nothing to Lose: a Guide to Sane Living in a Larger Body.)
But all this does not answer your real question: Can a woman of substance be an academic?
To which Ms. Mentor responds: Yes, but you must be sly and choose your battles. Usually it is not worthwhile to try to educate the scrawny self-punishers about the uselessness of dieting: that will just frustrate you. You can leave around Fat? So! and NAAFA leaflets; you can give them to your adviser, if you think she's open to seeing fatophobia as a form of bigotry. If not, shrug and try to be amiable: you still need her approval.
You can also make yourself feel better by bedeviling and misleading the fatophobes around you:
• If you have a boyfriend—most fat women do, since men like a lot of woman to hug—flaunt him.
• Now and then, wear darker clothes: the skinnies will be bamboozled into thinking you've lost weight. Loose-fitting dresses rather than pants will also confound them: they can't easily see and judge your body. (A tip: under skirts, you can wear divided slips for comfort.)
• Silence patronizers (“You'd be so pretty if you'd just lose weight”) by claiming you're on a slow, medically approved diet. They don't have to know that your basic four food groups are whatever you like best—such as chili corn dogs, sour cream and onion-flavored potato chips, Godiva Chocolates, and Budweiser.
• Tell the skinnies that you're “part bulimic.” (You know which part: you like to binge, but you never purge.)
• Use the sterotypical role of Fat Woman as Everyone's Jolly Pal to get inside information. People will tell you secret stuff you need to know—not only gossip, but who really runs the show in your academic department. That's enormously useful.
Ms. Mentor also recommends finding a self-loving Women of Size support and exercise group: they'll be women to eat and laugh with. Call whichever local hospitals are touting the so-called ills of menopause: they'll