Exeter Audit Shows Forty Seven Dollars Were Misappropriated

By which I meant, and mean, that if my efforts to not oppress women with my gaze were powerless in the face of entrenched sexism, I guess I would just enjoy my position as the one who benefitted from the structure of society I can’t change. It was out of my hands, right? It was a bummer, to be sure, and I would have liked to choose to act honorably rather than in a predatory way. But because of the structural obsessions of cultural studies, and their attendant lack of faith in personal solutions, I felt essentially freed from my responsibility to make the right choices in this domain. Because I was being taught that my choices didn’t matter - because if they did matter then the oppression couldn’t be universalized and sold as eternal, which is the paradigm of cultural studies when it comes to topics like sexism and patriarchy.

(I still don’t leer at women, for the record, and I don’t think you should either.)