"The Quotidian Miasma of Discrimination"

Is this a parody of the feminist movement? Come on... it's gotta be satire because I don't seem to be able to stop laughing!

My negotiations with the Lothario were always easier and more successful when I honored his role as mentor, protector, patron, father, leader, and Don Juan. He liked to make comments about our secretary’s weight, and once he referred to our retired women colleagues as “dingbats.” When one of the junior women got pregnant, he claimed in her written department review that her pregnancy had affected her job performance. At one of my first faculty dinners, he tipped back several glasses of wine and asked if I would be dancing on the table.

Unfortunately, our soft-spoken, measured, diplomatic dean did not take seriously the women who came forward with complaints about life in the kingdom of Lothario. Instead, the dean read women as damsels in distress to be rescued and then sent on their way with promises of inheritance, departmental ownership and pats on the head for good measure. But alas, in the end he returned the women colleagues to the oppressor’s fiefdom, unwilling to betray the code of male privilege and loyalty that works to keep women distressed and in constant competition with each other for validation from the male power structure.

If it's not parody, than it's certainly parody-proof. Not even a Harlequin romance novel could possibly compete with this screed for sheer, over-the-top, cliched, buzzword density. Thanks for the entertaining read, Ms. Barone. My hat is off.

UPDATE: Upon rereading, I can't resist quoting this paragraph:

I managed to live through years of torment by self-centered, self-important, yet mediocre senior colleagues who eventually did grant me tenure, on the strength of my credentials, but to this day, old men roaming the halls tell tales of how the dean “saved” my job, or of how some other man was instrumental in my rescue. I might as well have been wearing a pointed pink hat and waving a hankie out the window of a medieval stone tower. In the patriarchal grand narrative, I was the damsel in distress. I began to wonder if I could ever emerge from this male tale.

I. Cannot. Believe. That this might be for real. "I began to wonder if I could ever emerge from this male tale?" Male tale!?

(Via: Insty)