Dr. Simone Moonglow Lenin Rothschild frowned at her computer screen. As a teacher of Advanced Grievance Indoctrination she was required to give these idiots a grade. Yet here it was in black and white, all five of them had aced the test! Who aces a 200 question test? They were inhuman!
Dr. Rothschild’s classes were open to all students; which meant of course that white males need not apply. These five jackasses were pasty and not even metrosexual. They were ruining everything!
The other students were normal. They were a self-selected group that was correctly vaginocentric or at least gynocurious and they drifted in five minutes late while staring at their smartphones. They were college students after all. Also they were using college for its true purpose; to explore new (pre-approved) personalities. All 58 students (aside from the five) were experimenting, en masse, with new behaviors. This was good. Nothing made Dr. Rothschild happier than seeing 58 students expressing their individuality by behaving identically.
Except those five idiots. Did they even have cell phones? Worst of all, they wore ties. Why didn’t they heed the implications of the first assignment? “Ties and Nooses, Hats and Vices, Thoughts on Why Men Are Stupid And Violent Due To Their Torturous Mode of Dress With Examples from Glen or Glenda by Ed Wood.” It was Dr. Rothschild’s best work. She had assigned it specifically because of those five nincompoops. The whole point of the scientific paper was that one should be free to wear whatever they wished, so long as it wasn’t a tie or hat. As she’d explained at length, ties were symbolic nooses and thus a dog whistle employed by phallocentric oppressors and the last vestigial remnant of slavery in the United States. For some inexplicable reason they continued wearing ties despite her explanations. Who were they to make choices which made the rest of the class uncomfortable?
Not only that but those five idiots read the whole paper! They had practically memorized all 18 pages and could quote from it, verbatim, at any moment. They noticed and pointed out(!) a couple of spelling errors; talk about mansplaining! Of course nobody else read it. Who would? Any student with half a brain knew you were supposed to scan the abstract and scatter its vocabulary into rambling answers later on. She didn’t expect students to read her work any more than the students expected her to read their assignments.
Everything they did was infuriating. They dressed neatly. They arrived early for class. They paid attention to everything. They took notes. They finished every assignment early. They carpooled. They recycled. They were polite, attentive, and intelligent. They didn’t drink. They didn’t smoke. They didn’t swear. It was disconcerting at best and downright terrifying when she thought about it in depth!
When the semester had started they’d had a tendency to open doors for fellow students and say horrific things like “ma’am”. She’d publicly berated them for hours. This usually chased Y-chromosomally challenged bible thumpers away; but they merely smiled and complied. They dutifully barged through the door like a herd of buffalo as all the other students did and they’d replaced “ma’am” with a more appropriate non-committal, gender specific but carefully non-binary, grunt.
But it was just an act! She’d seen them at a grocery store and they were unfailingly polite to everyone there (it was off campus or she’d have called them on it!). She knew that when they carried an elderly lady’s groceries to her car it was their way of taking control of a powerful matriarch and forcing her into a position of weakness and subordination. Bastards!
No male students had held up to her onslaught before. She’d cratered six engineering students and a math wizard who fretted over GPAs. She’d baffled a stoner until he swapped into chemistry class and a computer science student until he became a stoner. Two Russian exchange students moved to Bosnia. A veterinary science student who needed an elective had become a monk. She’d convinced three hulking flannel clad forestry students they were gay. (They were helping her write her next paper “I’m A Lumberjack And I’m OK”.) Even male ROTC cadets and returning war veterans gave her a wide berth.
But these five unapologetically conservative males had blown the curve! She’d made a grave error by using an electronically graded test. Normally she’d assign an essay and distribute grades as she saw fit. But, in a moment of weakness, she’d thought about all the time she’d save. After all, she was leaving to visit her androgynous same-sex soul mate in Amsterdam next month.
The mechanical test had been risky and those five jerks had used it to drop a bomb on her. What the hell was she going to do now? You can’t give an A in Grievance Studies to a white male!
It was time to bring out the big guns; she fired up Facebook and clicked to her favorite site, “Mary And Terry Hate Men”. They had some interesting theories. She read the first six of eleven posts and nodded. She clicked to bring up linked audio files and listened:
“My resistance is running low
And every day the hold is getting tighter and it troubles me so.”
She tapped her designer label pencil on her exquisite silver toned keyboard. Yes, this might be the answer:
“Under attack, I’m being taken
About to crack, defenses breaking.”
This could do the trick. With a silent nod of thanks to the Goddess, she began composing the agenda for an “optional” weekend seminar. It would be called “Disco-cracy, Abba, And Transspecies Raptors, An Examination of Societal Norms”. According to Mary and Terry it only took 56 hours to turn a male into putty so they’d make it a three day “experience” that subsituted for Monday’s lecture.
She frowned; it was a little odd that the authors used squirrels and birds in their lectures. She would have preferred more logical non-binary constructs like zieself and emself. Duh! Even so, nothing is perfect and everyone loves disco! She was so excited she didn’t bother to read the remaining five posts. She’d do that later. All hail Facebook!