Don't ask.

Wasn’t that an old Homer Simpson line or something, “it’s funny because it’s true?”  Anyway–here’s something I found pretty funny, although some of the commenters don’t seem to get the joke.  Actually, I think the author, Daniel J. Ennis, gets it right:  the oversupply of Ph.D.s is due to the satisfactions of smugness:

I don’t spend much time on The Outside, but I meet nondocs in the grocery, and at church, and at unavoidable family gatherings, and I see them struggle to achieve the smug. So much alcohol, so much philandering, so much striving for promotion to V.P., attachment to sports teams and political parties, time lavished on soup kitchens and animal shelters, on raising kids and caring for the aged, so much windsurfing and cross-training … so many airy castles designed to prove that there are good lives to be lived without that ne plus ultra of credentials. We were acquainted with those people before we went to graduate school. As Bob Dylan (honorary doctorate, Princeton) put it, “All those people we used to know /they’re an illusion to me now.” The nondoc trades thousands of dollars and hours for an uncertain shot at self-satisfaction. The person with a Ph.D. has a lifetime supply.

.       .       .       .      .       .      

While there is nothing more miserable and annoying than a doctorate-in-training, once that little sucker breaks out of the cocoon she can beat her wings like the butterfly she was meant to be. In mixed company (i.e. groups of doctorates and nondocs) she can let slip “when I was working on my doctorate” and the room becomes hers. In mixed marriages (distasteful, perhaps, but sometimes useful to pay for life’s little necessities, like health insurance), the Ph.D. can be the ultimate weapon in a decades-long struggle for emotional dominance. Nobody argued with The Professor (Ph.D., Botany, UCLA) on Gilligan’s Island. All those marooned nondocs depended on his serene intelligence when the chips were down.

I’ll admit it–this partially explains my attraction to graduate school.  I don’t come from a wealthy or prominent family, and I was the first person in my family to earn an advanced degree.  I was just lucky to finish my Ph.D. 14 years ago, when there was a brief break in the clouds through which many of us of that generation ascended into tenure-track jobs. 

Another reason Ennis’s article makes sense to me is that recently, I’ve been mulling over the problem of self-mortification among religious women in the early modern era.  All of the literature suggests that the new, Reformation-era orders like the Ursulines, with their apostolic missions, were encouraged to leave behind the tradition of self-mortification that contemplative orders engaged in.  And yet, there is evidence that it continued in European as well as New World convents from Mexico to Canada, and that Indian convert women adopt the same practices.  (They weren’t just improvising with cedar branches–someone, after all, was supplying appliances like “iron girdles.”)  I think Ennis’s approach to this problem is correct in that he asks what are people still getting out of a Ph.D. given that they can’t count on a job at the end of the line.  So in exploring what mortification practices did for religious women, it’s useful to ask what value was there in inflicting pain and irritating open sores on their bodies?  What did they get out of it?, not Why did they sacrifice their comfort and health?  When we ask the first question, we open up the possibility for new answers.

No posts! (How am I still upright?)

Howdy, friends!  I’m still (mostly) on holiday break here, but I thought you might enjoy some thoughts from bloggers more energetic than I am right now.  I hope to be back later this week–I just don’t seem to have any original thoughts to share at the moment.  So, herewith are my recommendations for your bloggy perusals:

• Suzie at Echidne offers a Swiftian satire after Julian Assange’s comment that Sweden is the “Saudi Arabia of feminism,” as in, ”Feminists run Sweden like wealthy sheikhs run Saudi Arabia.”  As if!  What a tool.  Once again, we see that so-called leftists are just as disgusting as right-wingers and just as opportunistic in their alternate deployment of feminist arguments and contempt for feminism and/or actual women.  (Even George W. Bush said we needed to invade Afghanistan because the Taliban were horrible patriarchal despots and we had to liberate women from their burkhas!  Remember that convenient feminist argument?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?)
• Tenured Radical is doing some quality pre-American Historical Association 125th Annual Meeting blogging these days, with a few posts for those of you fortunate enough to be interviewing for jobs this year.  (That is, fortunate enough either to be in a department that is hiring, or fortunate enough to have interviews lined up.)  “Tell Us About Your Dissertation:  And Other Commonly Fumbled Interview Questions” is a good primer for what to expect and how not to blow it.  I will just add my two cents:  first, assume that the people interviewing you have read your file but in the rush of interviewing have forgotten 90% of what you sent them.  They’ll be grateful to be reminded of a few key facts about your work and training if you can do it crisply and without fuss.  Secondly, pay particular attention to the comment by Comrade PhysioProf about how interviews are opportunities to present yourself as a colleague and peer to a wider professional network.  (He’s also posted a version of his comment on his blog here.)  Finally, it is a truth universally acknowledged by those of us forty and older that the ease of finding information on the web about hiring departments is apparently still a convenience of which most job candidates don’t avail themselves.  Do yourself a favor and get to know the department interviewing you and the individuals on the search committees.  You don’t need to read their books or kiss their a$$e$ by saying you’ve read their books–just know who’s who and who in the department teaches most closely to your field.  Ask an informed question or two.  Pretend like you’d like to be seen as a future colleague.
• Here’s a one-word nightmare of teevee-induced insanity:  “Bridalplasty.”  (Twisty explains it all.)  I thought it was annoying enough to have my Joyous Year of Affiancement 1997 mostly characterized by hearing dumba$$ questions about why my last name wasn’t changing, why I didn’t want an engagement ring or a big wedding, and why my job rather than his determined where we lived.  (And what were we going to call the children???  If they ever might exist.)  And the biggest irritation of all:  no one ever asks dudes these questions!  How lucky I was not to be badgered about which “procedures” I planned to endure in my unending quest for physical perfection!
• GayProf has a funny post about Christmas giving and receiving.  If you’re in the mood to give to GayProf, I suggest either bourbon, a vintage 1930s Tom and Jerry punchbowl, or bourbon. 

Marci Bowers, MD

After years of being an internationally-renowned place for sex reassignment surgery for forty years, Trinidad, Colorado no longer has a doc in town to do the work.  The Denver Post reports that Dr. Marci Bowers, herself a transgender surgery patient at one time, has moved to San Francisco because of what sounds like an extremely stupid business decision on the part of the local hospital:

Her work has been recorded in documentaries, magazine articles, TV shows — attention she has welcomed, even courted.

Mt. San Rafael Hospital, not so much.

Bowers views the publicity as part of her work.

“It’s important. It educates people,” Bowers said.

The hospital viewed it as an intrusion, an inconvenience and a royal pain. Crews dragging cameras, wires and microphones through the 24-bed hospital disrupt patient care and cost money, said chief executive Jim Robertson.

That prompted an unusual policy. Media must get hospital permission 60 days in advance before visiting and pay for access.

It was that policy, Bowers said, that drove her away.

“In September, I finally said, ‘Look, if I’m going to stay here, we’ve got to address this media policy,’ ” she said.

The hospital and its board weren’t about to do that.

“There are many residents of Trinidad who would like to have the city known for something other than gender-reassignment surgery,” said board member Dr. Jim Colt.

Uh, right:  let me guess.  I’m certainly no businesswoman, but does anyone really think that the one gynecologist the hospital has hired to replace Bowers and the new ”cardiac diagnostic tests” are really going to bring patients from around the world to Mt. San Rafael Hospital?  Bowers put 100 patients a year in that hospital, patients who needed extensive pre-op counseling and post-op care, prescriptions, meals, nights at local inns, and the like along with accommodations for their partners, friends, or family members.  What an awesomebusiness decision for a small town in the midst of the Great Recession!  (Don’t miss Bowers’s claim in the Denver Post story that she was driven out of town because the local yokels think they’re going to make a go of selling their luxury golf course to hoards of tourists!  As Ed Grimley would say, “Gimme a break!”)

Hospitals are a little nuts these days about how the changes in health care funding are going to affect them.  There’s a lot of (in my opinion) stupid, petty empire building going on among the hospitals in my area these days.  But, is there anything dumber than driving out of town the one physician who provides the one rather highly-specialized service for which your community of 10,000 people is well-known?

Before she hightailed it out of this state, I saw a lecture Bowers gave at Moo Moo U. here in Potterville last spring.  She’s quite a show-woman and every inch the competitive surgeon she has been for all of her professional life.  She even showed explicit slides of her work–and I have to say that I was incredibly impressed with both her M to F and her F to M work.  Amazing.  How sad for Trinidad that she couldn’t stay.

Anyway, back to science.  Zuska writes:

Okay, let’s play what if. What if the Science Cheerleaders are responsible for making just one girl stick with her science & math classes – isn’t it all worthwhile then?

Let’s say the Science Cheerleaders do keep one girl in advanced science or math classes, but make three other girls feel like they have to pornulate themselves in order to be 21st Century Fembot Compliant While Doing Science, and make five d00ds feel like it is perfectly okay to hang up soft porn pictures of sexay hawt babes in the lab and harass some colleague because hawt science women WANT to be appreciated for being sexay and smart! – is it still worth it?

She then goes on to describe an effective outreach program she worked with to get more girls, especially girls who would be first-generation college students, into STEM fields.  GROW–Girls Researching Our World–sounds like a fantastic program, involving a summer camp program and other events scheduled through the school year.  Zuska explains that it’s not looking like a cheerleader that’s important to these girls–it’s whether or not women can be scientists and have a dog, have a house, wear jeans to work, work with cool gear, and be normal and fun and self-sufficient.  As one of them explained to a clueless Football camper, “GROW, as in grow up, get a good job, and make a lot of money!”

I did a presentation and Q and A session for some third- and fourth-graders a few years’ back about being a historian, and the kind of questions Zuska’s GROW students asked the women scientists sounded a lot like the questions I got asked, which were more about how being a historian fit into my whole life, and how my whole life was enabled by my work.  (They were particuluarly jazzed about the idea of travelling for work.  Believe it or not, research trips are what sounded super-cool to them!)

Aside:  I wonder if the key is getting to some of these kids before the pressures of adolescence and before girls in particular fall into worries about their looks and body image?  Middle school may be too late for some girls.

Zuska concludes:

There is, indeed, no reason why a woman can’t be both cute and smart. But that was hardly the issue facing the young girls I saw in Kansas. It was lack of knowledge, lack of access, teachers and guidance counselors who didn’t know what was necessary for sci/eng careers and didn’t think it was all that important anyway to steer young girls towards them, parents who were overwhelmed and didn’t know about these careers or how to take the first step to get their kids on the college prep pathway let alone to a sci/eng career, young girls who were just dying for adults to invest some time and energy in caring for them and their bright minds and what they were capable of doing.

Science Cheerleaders is, at the very best, an outreach program for already-privileged girls who are already interested in science/engineering but who are afraid it will make them look like fat lesbians.

Right on.  And, one might ask, what is a super-smart and talented fat lesbian kid supposed to do with a program like Science Cheerleader, anyway?  Is she not deserving of encouragement and support?

Thanks for the shout-out to Fembots, Zuska!  For those of you dames d’un certain age, you might appreciate this.  (Just in time for the Christmas shopping season!)

I was in graduate school in 1995 when the movie was first released, and since I didn’t have any young children in my life, I never got around to watching it until about five years ago.  I like the movie a lot, and find a lot of the criticism of the movie at the time it was released too literal-minded.  I’ve even used clips of it to illustrate points I want to make in my undergraduate classes at both the introductory level and in upper-division classes.  The movie’s distortions are mostly in the service of fitting the Pocahontas legend into the Disney Princess mold–for example, the romance with Smith (we have to have a handsome prince, right?), the rebellion against her father (think about the wicked Queen or stepmothers, or King Triton in The Little Mermaid), the supernatural Mother Willow (fairy godmother, anyone?) and the adorably mischievous raccoon and hummingbird companions (Snow White’s forest friends, or the mice in Cinderella).  And although Pocahontas looks like she might have had breast implants, her costume is no more revealing than Ariel’s clamshell bra. 

In fact, when viewed against the other Disney Princess movies, the 80s and 90s versions–particularly Pocahontas and The Little Mermaid–what strikes me is that everyone has a (yes) cartoonishly improbable body.  Many of the women have enormous canteloupe boobs atop stick bodies–a body type not found in nature, needless to say–and the men look like they’re all on steroids.  Seriously–Disney’s John Smith looks like Mark McGwire.  I’m willing to believe that the Indian men were reasonably buff, but there’s no way that the hapless Jamestowne settlers all had Barry Bonds-like muscles.  (They were starving!)  But at least the 1980s and 90s Princesses are permitted to be more independent and courageous than the drippy Snow White of 1937 or the oddly passive Cinderella of 1950:  Ariel rescues the mulleted Prince Eric from drowning, Pocahontas provides valuable information to John Smith, Belle loves reading more than anything and swoons when she sees the Beast’s library, and Mulan transvests to go to war as a soldier.

In any case–physical and historical distortions nothwithstanding, here’s what I like about Pocahontas:

1. In its portrayal of the Powhatan Indians and the English, it emphasizes the similarities among the cultures rather than the differences.  This is a key point in a lot of the new scholarship on Anglo-Indian relations.  (See for example “Savages,” below.)
2. The eco-messaging is far too simplistic, but I think the portrayal of English rapacity isn’t overdone at all for the early Virginia settlers.  My favorite song and dance number is the “Mine, mine, mine” number, below.
3. In the end, Smith is injured and returns to England–he doesn’t marry Pocahontas in the movie.  (There was a pretty abysmal follow-up produced a few years later, Pocahontas II:  Journey to a New Word, with vastly inferior production values, that portrays her marriage to John Rolfe and her trip to England.  Utterly forgettable compared to the original!)
4. The songs, choreography, and drawings are brilliant.  And what more do we really want to get out of a Disney Princess movie?  I don’t think David Ogden Stiers ever got the credit he deserved for his zesty portrayal of the bad English guy Ratcliffe.

This creepy doll by Hans Bellmer, 1935

I can’t let the coincidence of this pass me by, since we’re talking about dolls and the objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies again.  Squadratomagico has a great post up on the off-label hormonal engineering of baby girl fetuses who have tested positive for (gasp!) Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which means that they frequently have ambiguous genitalia, may possess a strong interest in softball, and “as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role.” 

(Well, what thinking woman doesn’t agree with that last bit?  Seriously:  if you dig scrubbing crusty surfaces and wiping snotty noses and bums, that should be a symptom of clinical depression, not normative behavior in any adult, male or female.  Most of us do that junk because we don’t want the state condemning our houses and taking our kids away.)

Click immediately on this link to join the discussion.  I left a comment over there, so I’ll be following that thread.  Something else I didn’t mention in my comment is the odd equation of childhood behavior with adult predisposition for motherhood among these alleged sufferers of CAH:  “As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”  What a stupid way to think about children or the importance of play. 

My brother played army a lot and carried his guns in a purse when he was a child, and yet he neither grew up to enlist in the military nor carries a purse now at the age of 39.  When I was a kid, my entire room was lined with mini-kitchen appliances, and I wrote stories at school about how I wanted to grow up to be a “housewife.”  (And you can see how that turned out for me.)  Both of us loved making “forts” with blankets and couch cushions, and yet neither of us sleep regularly on the floor and in fact both of us live in traditional houses now.  It must be a genuine miracle of nature that we grew up to have different interests than our play-selves did at periods in our childhood!  (Somebody better go round up all of those little boys I played astronaut with back in the Apollo-mission days, because none of them grew up to be astronauts.  Test them!  Inject their sons and grandsons with untested hormones!)

(H/t to Vance Maverick for introducing me to the supremely creepy Hans Bellmer.)

Fratguy has experienced malaria-like fevers for the past 36 hours or so, which is a little too much Stanislavski-like method medicine and/or method colonial American history for me, but there you go.  He says it’s just a virus, which I think is a ruse designed to get me off his back rather than take him to see a physician.  Back in 1991 when he was in medical school and broke, Fratguy enrolled in a medical experiment for a malaria vaccine funded by the U.S. Army.  It was just like that old OFF commercial:  after getting the vaccine, he had to stick his arm into a tank full of falciparum-infected mosquitoes and get bitten by them!  Well, guess what?  The vaccine didn’t work, so he got malaria.  (And when you’ve had malaria, that’s a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card for blood donation!)  But, he also got a ski trip to Whistler out of the deal, and I get a great little anecdote to trot out whenever I’m lecturing on the horrors of Jamestown or on the early English settlements in the Chesapeake and Caribbean in general.  Score! 

For those of you who didn’t study infectious disease before 1940 and/or colonial American history, malaria is caused by a plasmodium parasite (either the falciparum, which is deadlier, or the vivax parasite) carried by Anopheles mosquitoes.  The parasite gets into your blood and then settles into your liver and induces a series of very high fevers in the patient, which gradually subside (if they don’t kill you.)  Pregnant women and children are particularly susceptible, but it’s a survivable disease.  Fratguy tells stories about the disease in which he’d have a horrible fever and chills all day long, and then feel well enough to go out at night and attend a party, thinking that he was over it, and then the fever would return again overnight or the next morning.

From what I’ve read on the non-peer reviewed internets, a relapse is not at all likely after 19 years.  But, is it at all possible that he’s been harboring something in his liver all these years, like something out of Alien?  Do let me know if you’ve got any intel on this!  I’ll need to get myself and the kids (if I have any) out of the house.

• Tenured Radical has some interesting thoughts on the politics (and rampant paternalism) of egg donation in the high-tech fertility industry, and the deep, deep concern that some bioethicists have for the medical procedures involved in egg harvests and, of course, for women being paid to hand over their ova.  She notes how funny it is that no one expresses the same deep, deep concerns when women are injected, poked and prodded for their own eggs, which will be then used in fertility treatments in their own bodies:  “When was the last time you saw a front page article about the long-term risks associated with thirty-something and forty-something women juicing up their ovaries with dangerous chemicals over a period of anywhere from one to five years?  But that’s cool because they become mothers, as opposed to becoming unnatural, selfish women whose only goal is to pay for college and graduate school.”
• Roxie at Roxie’s World has been on fire about Elena Kagan and the question, is she or isn’t she?  (A natural brunette, that is–what did you think I meant?)  Tenured Radical addressed this last weekend, in case you missed it.
• Historiann wonders:  when the hell is President Obama going to send in the Navy Seals, or the Army Corps of Engineers, or someone to clean up the ongoing environmental travesty happening in the Gulf of Mexico?  Is it really the best policy to expect the irresponsible polluters to stop the pollution?  If it’s true that the U.S. government and armed forces combined have zero expertise to stop the spewing of oil and natural gas from the ocean floor, then this looks to me to be a hair on fire lapse in national security!  Could a terrorist have done worse than BP and Haliburton here? 
• More bad news:  Could Hello Kitty be discontinued?  Oh noes!  Or is this just a PR attempt to spur buyer interest by leaking the notion that HK might soon be “collectible?”  Tread carefully, fans. 

Have a great Saturday!  I hope it’s warm and lovely wherever you are this weekend.

This is particularly true, it seems, when the topic is nipples. Virtually none of the literature or education around the topic of breast cancer covers the sudden disappearance of erotic sensation in the breast. There is no attempt, as there is in a prostatectomy, to preserve the nerves. Modern mastectomy simply hacks off the offending tissue and creates a blank area where there once was tingling current.

There are also body-image issues after breast cancer surgery and reconstruction, for patients and their partners.  But, one young woman who tested positive for BRCA1 and chose to have a preventive double mastectomy makes it sound like her partner’s discomfort and even disgust with her surgery, recuperation, and new body were another problem for her to solve, a problem she didn’t handle well enough.  ”Jessie”‘s own mother had died at age 30, and she had five other maternal relatives die from the disease–so she figured, why take the chance? 

But her boyfriend disagreed.  He was angry and felt she hadn’t taken his feelings into account. He grew increasingly uncomfortable and remote throughout the procedure: double mastectomy, reconstruction of the breasts using cadaver tissue, and a messy, gory aftermath involving lymphatic drains.

At the time, Jessie was entirely focused on her own body and its recovery. [ed. note:  selfish, selfish woman!  How dare she?]  She didn’t want to die. And how, exactly, was she supposed to negotiate this decision with her lover when no expert she consulted ever mentioned sex?

Looking back, she says she wishes she had handled it differently. [Emphasis Historiann's.]  Her boyfriend really tried. He stayed. He helped her to the bathroom and brought her Vicodin at 4 a.m.  [ed. note:  big deal!  Isn't that what you would do for anyone recovering from major surgery?]

“If I could talk to women, I’d tell them do not let your man drain you,” Jessie says, referring to the process of emptying and measuring the bloody lymphatic fluid siphoned off by her surgical drains. “That whole area is just a mess. I think my partner couldn’t deal with the act of being a caregiver. And a lot is written about the women’s side of it, but I don’t think men get due credit for what it does to him.”

This is clearly a failure of 1) this man, who was incapable of assuming the responsibilities of a committed relationship, and 2) standard breast cancer therapies and counseling, which are focused on the restoration of the cosmetic rather than the sexual sensations of reconstructed breasts.  Although even if breast cancer therapies addressed the woman’s sexual sensations and sexual functioning after mastectomy, I’m pretty sure all of the sex therapy in the world would be wasted on trying to get me excited about a man who thought my mastectomy was all about him and his feelings.)  Fortunately, this couple broke up, and I suppose it was better that “Jessie” find out what a creep her boyfriend was as an otherwise healthy young woman.  Lord help her had she follwed his wishes to keep her breasts, and she got cancer and then had to count on him to get her through it all. 

I just don’t understand the fetishization of a body part that this kind of attitude implies–a fetishization that puts a body part above the health and well-being of his girlfriend.  This fetishization also renders a body part no longer part of a human body–not flesh, blood, and lymphatic fluid, somehow.  (What did this guy imagine is inside a breast?  Confetti?  Butterscotch pudding?  Or, as The Forty Year Old Virgin put it, “sand?”)  Yet “Jessie” blames herself for her genetically imperfect breasts and her lymphatic drains, which apparently really spoiled the show for her boyfriend.

Of course our illnesses and amputations affect not just patients but our friends and loved ones, but I always assumed it was because they love us and don’t want us to be sick or to die, not because they can’t imagine being our friends or lovers unless our bodies are whole and perfectly healthy.  I can completely understand that breast cancer patients and their partners would mourn the loss of what they had thought was a perfect and healthy body.  But–what a turd this guy is.  Apparently in retrospect, he acknowledges this.  When Bauer introduced “Jessie” in the article, she explained that “Jessie” is “a pseudonym — while she wouldn’t mind using her real name, her ex would be mortified, she says.”  You don’t say!  I wonder what he tells the other women he dates when explaining why he and “Jessie” broke up?

On the one hand, right-wing opponents of health care reform claim that they shouldn’t have to pay for anyone else’s abortion, even indirectly.  On the other hand, they complain that health care reform will force them to pay for the health care of undocumented immigrants.  In both cases, some people, somewhere are having sex and making decisions about their own bodies and families of which others disapprove and don’t want to underwrite with their tax dollars.

I agree!  I don’t want to have to pay for any medications or procedures of which I disapprove on religious grounds, either.  So, here’s what we’ll ban next:  coverage for all boner pills, and all elective cosmetic surgeries.  If you think you need those things–too bad!  My God says they’re vain and foolish, not to mention sinful distortions of the human body, so you should just learn to live with your flawed, flaccid selves.  (Plus, God is really tired of watching those same dumb TV ads during football games that feature middle-aged heterosexualists soaking in hot tubs, cuddling on sofas, and throwing footballs through tire swings.)  Hey–don’t blame me if you don’t like it.  It’s God’s will, not mine, and it’s just a coincidence that I’m a flawless female specimen who will never need a boner pill or elective plastic surgery.

What?  I’m not a medical doctor, so I can’t presume to advise other people what to do with their bodies?  What a fascinating argument.