Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

This Brat's for You

This Brat's for You Co m p l i c a t i o n s BOTTOMS UP This Brat’s for You Sometime in 2011, before the gestation of my second son, my employer, Boston University, implemented paternity leave for its male professors. A colleague informed me of this news with much envy and astonishment: his four young children had been born before BU joined the twenty-first century by electing to give to fathers the same benefits it had been giving all along to mothers. I’m not certain how this enlightened advance came about, but I instantly pictured a phalanx of ultramodern men parading down Commonwealth Avenue, jabbing placards that read “It’s My Seed, So Give Me Leave,” or some such slogan. BU doesn’t actually advertise this lofty development as “paternity leave”; after all, some of the men I know there might begin impregnating people just to earn a semester off with pay. Instead, and in typical bureaucratic form, school administrators call it “workload reduction.” Maybe it was the euphemism that misdirected me, for my workload reduction led to my being loaded, and reduced, in quite a different way from what “paternity leave” would have intended. GR AHAM ROUMIEU When Pascal suggested http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Baffler MIT Press

This Brat's for You

Giraldi, William
The Baffler – Jul 1, 2014
Download PDF
2 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/mit-press/this-brat-s-for-you-A36m7KIG73
Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2014 William Giraldi
ISSN
1059-9789
eISSN
2164-926X
DOI
10.1162/BFLR_a_00276
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Co m p l i c a t i o n s BOTTOMS UP This Brat’s for You Sometime in 2011, before the gestation of my second son, my employer, Boston University, implemented paternity leave for its male professors. A colleague informed me of this news with much envy and astonishment: his four young children had been born before BU joined the twenty-first century by electing to give to fathers the same benefits it had been giving all along to mothers. I’m not certain how this enlightened advance came about, but I instantly pictured a phalanx of ultramodern men parading down Commonwealth Avenue, jabbing placards that read “It’s My Seed, So Give Me Leave,” or some such slogan. BU doesn’t actually advertise this lofty development as “paternity leave”; after all, some of the men I know there might begin impregnating people just to earn a semester off with pay. Instead, and in typical bureaucratic form, school administrators call it “workload reduction.” Maybe it was the euphemism that misdirected me, for my workload reduction led to my being loaded, and reduced, in quite a different way from what “paternity leave” would have intended. GR AHAM ROUMIEU When Pascal suggested

Journal

The Baffler – MIT Press

Published: Jul 1, 2014

There are no references for this article.