Conflicted Feelings About Sex Workers

I don't know if it's my humble beginnings (read: no money), my liberal leanings (read: far enough left to fall over), or my generation (read: no standards or apathy, depending on how you spin it), but I've never felt any kind of judgment about sex workers. I have some thoughts about men who employ sex workers, either for the sex or the money, which I'll spare you all, Favored Readers. But not so much for the women and some men who make their money selling access to their bodies.

So a new book, reviewed in the New York Times, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys, has me conflicted. It's a collection of "essays, vignettes, rants, and poems" by sex workers and edited by two people with male-sounding names.

I want to read it, but I'm paralyzed by my politics. Anything that gives the ordinarily-voiceless a voice is good by me, just like anything done by two consenting adults is generally good by me. But just like prostitution isn't exactly the same as "two consenting adults," I'm not positive that this collection's purpose is to give sex workers a voice; I'm also not positive that it's not. For example, I wonder what the royalty agreement is between the editors and the publisher? Do the editors receive all of the royalty? Most of the royalty? How much of the royalty do the authors receive? Am I more suspect because men are the editors? Haven't I seen women exploit one another enough to know that that's equipossible?

Perhaps it's appropriate that my reaction to the book is the same kind of confusion that I feel about sex workers who sell themselves through dance (pretending for a moment that there's no overlap between stripping and prostitution). They're selling themselves but (allegedly) not having sex with the onlookers. Isn't that "better" than having to sell full access to your body? Or could it be that once you've decided that your best asset is your body, everything after that is equally . . . what? Bad? Not good?

So I'm not sure what the solution is. Buy it for my Kindle so the royalty is not as big? Buy it used so my money doesn't go into the royalty pot? Borrow it from the library? Do one of those things PLUS send 24 cents to every author whose piece I read?

Is Good Enough Really Good Enough?

If you haven't yet seen my friend and colleague Hollee Schwartz Temple's blog with Becky Beaupre Gillespie, which launched earlier this week, you're already behind the times.

The spelling of Hollee's first name and both women's double last names give you an optimistic inkling of what you'll find. They're young, accomplished professional women trying to balance the personal with the professional. Hollee and Becky are clever writers who are tackling serious questions with humor and self-deprecation. So far, the blog is a valentine to Xer moms everywhere. The second generation in the modern American women's movement, Xers are faced with the challenges of what do do when you can have it all. Does it mean you're lame if you don't want it all? What if you are allowed have it all, but you feel unequal to the task? Are you allowed to still only go after some of it? And while everyone supports us in theory, what really happens when you tell your boss you have to leave because you have a sick child or when you tell your husband he's in charge of dinner tonight because you have to attend a professional event?

Yesterday's post asked if giving up on perfection is giving up. Good question.

I struggle with whether letting go of who I wanted to be is admitting defeat or growing up and being realistic. But the truth is that most of my dreams of who I should be were the dreams of a very young woman with no life experience. I also thought that "jack of all trades and master of none" was a bad thing (because my Boomer parents told me it was; but they were pretty unhappy, too). But Jack of All Trades is what I feel like most days.

I'm a pretty good mom -- sometimes stunningly wise, sometimes staggeringly incompetent. I go back and forth between wondering if I should write a book about parenting and wondering if I should call Children's Protective Services on myself. I feel the same way about work. Some days I really can't believe no one gives me an award for the job I do. I mean, I. Am. A. Treasure. Other days, I can't believe that hiring searches have resulted in a law school faculty offering me a job -- surely with other people to pick from, they could have made a better decision than me.

Most of the time my feelings of success personally are directly inverse to my feelings of success professionally, and vice versa, so I at least feel quasi-successful 90% of the time. About once every couple of years, I feel like I'm juggling it all masterfully and hitting on all cylinders. One every couple of months, I feel like I'm about to be fired, divorced, and stripped of my parental rights. It's usually triggered by something like running late, forgetting to send in the chips for the kindergarten party, and having to fill my car with gas all before my first class. Truth be told, I could juggle the first two if it weren't for the trip to the gas station. Somehow it's the gas station that feels like a moral failing.

So 90% of the time, I'm good enough. I'm not Gloria Steinem. I'm not Mother Theresa. I'm not Oprah, but I at least make enough money to partake of her media empire in its many forms. Would the me from two decades ago be disappointed in who I turned out to be? Will my daughters be disappointed in who I am? Will my husband wish he had married someone who could make a damn decision about whether to be Mommy or President? I don't know. I have horrible visions of my girls reaching adulthood and saying, "you sacrificed being a better mother so you could achieve this paltry degree of professional success? Are you kidding?" Then again, they're much nicer than I am, so they'll probably cut me some slack.

And in the end, I guess that says as much about my success as anything else.

An idea I got from Leonardo DiCaprio

Remember in Catch Me If You Can how Leonardo DiCaprio played con artist Frank Abagnale ultimately became a consultant for law enforcement to help them understand how the criminal mind works? (If you don't remember, you'll just have to trust me on this.)

I was thinking that we could do that with cheating and plagiarism in law school. Imagine a kind of diversionary program in which students who are caught cheating or plagiarizing are offered the chance to have their misdeed expunged if they help the law school design policies and practices to prevent and punish similar misdeeds by other students.

What do you think?

A la Carte Legal Skills Education

So here's a cool idea I had, prompted by this piece in Inside Higher Ed about a la carte skills training at community colleges. The idea is that those who need updated skills to compete in the workforce can take a course to learn a specific skill rather than getting the whole course content. The courses cost less money and take less time, thus the attraction.

So what about this for law schools? After the first year, do a la carte skills training. Instead of a drafting course that included several different types of contracts (will, divorce settlement, commercial contract), have a one-hour Intro to Drafting course. Then students could follow it up with another one credit course, depending on their interest: Drafting a Divorce Settlement, Drafting a Commercial Contract, Drafting a Client Engagement Contract, Drafting a Will. Students could still end up with 2-4 hours of education in drafting, but it would be completely cutomized so they get exactly what they want.

One thing I've learned in Student Services this past year: students are dying for one-credit courses, either during the regular sessions or during an intersession. And these would be fun classes to teach. Students would be more engaged because they get to choose the specific kinds of documents they draft, and professors could have fun just designing a course around a single type of document rather than feeling like the course is jack of all trades and master of none.

The Real Housewives of [Your School's] Law Faculty

This post pulls together several threads in my life and culminates in, if I do say so myself, a summer blockbuster-scaled idea.

The first thread is my reality TV fetish. I can't get enough of it. But I feel bad about it. So I have a standard that guides what I will and won't watch: the show has to highlight an actual skill that someone has. Like being able to cook food (Top Chef) or flip houses (Flipping Out) or being a mob wife (Real Housewives of New Jersey).

Related to that is the second thread: the fact that I would like my children to have lives that are too rich and meaningful to leave them time for reality television (always an Xer trying to make my Millennial children's lives better so Boomer professors can later complain that my children behave as if their lives were better). This means I have to lead by example. So we stopped watching television for 30 days. Cold turkey, baby. It was fine. Anticlimactic really. Emma and Kate have petitioned for television to be allowed on Saturday and Sunday mornings going forward, because sometimes it's boring being the only one awake in the house. Good point. Watch away. (If they had asked me what I would let them have post-TV-fast, I would have told them I was prepared to allot them a combined total of 7 hours per week. Live and learn, girls . . . live and learn.)

Which brings us to the third thread. During the 30 days, as you might have predicted, I read even more than I usually do. One of the books I read was Straight Man by Richard Russo, about the goings-on of a small liberal arts college's English department. Russo paints a picture of faculty life that is as hilarious as it is painful.

Enter the final thread. So this all made me think of something that my female professor friends and I have always agreed on: if you truly want to level the field for academic women, you need to assign us each a wife. What I could do with a wife! Holy smokes. I don't need, of course, the kind of wife that *I* am. I'm useless to anyone as a bona fide wife. I'd be an excellent husband, though. That's the only thing wrong with my marriage: it's staffed with career men.

Anyway, so all of this is swirling around in my head, and I thought, hey! We could have a reality show (or a book, whatever is your pleasure) depicting the lives of law faculty significant others.

Now obviously we cannot call it The Real Significant Others of [Your School's] Law Faculty. It's not catchy. It's got no panache. And, in fact, most of our law school names aren't going to be much of a draw, right? I mean, there's no show called The Real Housewives of Seguin, Texas. It's all big names. So I think we would have to go with something like The Real Housewives of Harvard Law, understanding that we could include men and women, gay and straight under the category of "housewives" and further understanding that by "Harvard," we mean "whatever law school might consent to this to improve their USNWR rankings."

I'm feeling pretty good about this. Any ideas for what the stock characters might be like? I'm willing to take a couple of production partners if you get your ideas in early.

Stay tuned. Next week, I plan to roll out my idea for "RateMyProfessors.com: The Musical!"