Thursday, October 4th 2012
Via Wikimedia Commons.
Readers of this blog are likely already aware of Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina: A New Biography. I’m late to the party, because it just seemed wrong to pile on a feminist more senior to me who, though misguided, is at least working towards equality for women. But the more I read, the harder it has been to stay out of things. So it is with my particular anthropological lens that I bring you my three problems with Wolf’s perspective, and the one thing that is kinda okay.
Problem 1: Universalizing one woman’s experience
The epiphany that partially led to Wolf writing this book came from a spinal surgery that restored her vaginal orgasms and, as Zoe Heller quotes in her review, Wolf’s renewed “sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive.” Yet the idea that vaginal orgasms are more spiritual, higher quality, or even categorically different from clitoral orgasms is easily contested. As a feminist raised on Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” and as an anthropologist who has read and taught extensively on the adaptiveness (or not) of female orgasm, I found myself extremely disappointed in Wolf’s interpretation of her experience, and how she took her white, straight, privileged core values and assumed they must be the same for all women.
Not all women have the same orgasms. Not all women get their rocks off from the same things. Not all women like men, or vaginal penetration, or any sex whatsoever. Not all women can have sex or orgasms due to injury. An extension of Wolf’s idea that this profound vagina-brain connection make us more spiritual would be that those who cannot or choose not to have orgasms for various reasons, or those who identify as asexual, are less spiritual and less in touch with, as she states in her introduction, their “female consciousness.”
At the same time it seems as though we are doubling down on princess gear and the color pink, I have a lot more friends, colleagues and students who are exploring what it means to be fully themselves. And being fully themselves means so much more than holding the same beliefs and sexual practices and preferences as Naomi Wolf.
And so it is sad, so very sad, to see a feminist try to reaffirm that being a woman carries a very specific set of conditions.
Problem 2: Alternately reducing women to animals and putting them on pedestals
The trouble with Wolf making the vagina-brain connection into one that is spiritually profound and integral to the experience of being female, is that she ends up clumsily alternating between two claims: women are animals driven by our biology, and are a manifestation of the Divine Feminine.
As Maia Szalavitz points out in her piece for TIME:
Wolf includes a similar oversimplification in her discussion of the neurotransmitter and hormone oxytocin, which is best known for its involvement in facilitating bonding between lovers and between parents and children. Wolf calls oxytocin “women’s emotional superpower” and, citing research in prairie voles, concludes that it makes women more likely to become emotionally connected with their sexual partners than men are.
But Young says there’s no data on gender differences in oxytocin in humans. “Based on what we know from animals, it is likely that when women have sex that they are going to experience more of an oxytocin release than men,” he says, adding, “We don’t know.”
Wolf then jumps from this conjecture to the notion that women’s intense oxytocin release makes them more likely to become literally addicted to sex: “Good sex is, in other words, actually addictive for women biochemically in certain ways that are different from the experience of men — meaning that one experiences discomfort when this stimulus is removed and a craving to secure it again.”
So, despite the evidence, Wolf makes the claim that women get more addicted to the hit of oxytocin (already massively problematic, as Ed Yong will tell you) than men. Yet she also says stuff like this:
“To understand the vaginal properly is to realize that it is not only coextensive with the female brain, but is also, essentially, part of the female soul….
“[T]he vagina’s experiences… can contribute to a woman’s sense of the joyful interconnectedness of the material and spiritual world….. They can help her experience a state of transcendental mysticism….” (Wolf, pages 4-5)
I hardly need to unpack these sentences for you. I am glad for the women out there who get some extra transcendental mysticism out of using their vaginas. But I am troubled by the way Wolf’s interpretation of the vulgar and spiritual vagina so closely matches the way we’ve been culturally conditioned to view women as, you guessed it, alternately animals and goddesses.
It’s Feminism 101 to notice and disrupt, rather than reinforce, these stereotypes.
Problem 3: Situating women as passive recipients of whatever their environment or biology slings at them
In my own research, I have become interested in the ways we inadvertently situate our research participants as passive reactors to our environment. It’s hard to escape this language: human biologists want to know what produces variation in the body, and so we can frame things as though factors in the environment unidirectionally influence, impact or affect variables like one’s hormones, reproductive success, or mood. Sometimes it’s an inadvertent shorthand. Notice I am very careful not to say this is a universal, and it’s increasingly less common in the research literature. But you still see it in the popular literature.
Humans are so much more than vessels shaped by our environment. We shape our environment, too. We react to it. Sometimes we choose it. Sometimes we make the best of what we have.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed that women and people of color have been the research participants more likely to be seen as ravaged by their environments. Racism, discrimination, patriarchy and male sexual strategies are stressors that can become embodied. There are several important scholars, primatologists mostly, who have demonstrated the ways that female sexual strategies can operate against or subvert those of males’ (e.g., Becky Stumpf, Barb Smuts, Patricia Gowaty, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy). But the language around discrimination and racism, when it comes to their health effects, still often shows oppression as something that just happens to people of color.
In the last several years, scholars who study resilience, social support, race, health, ethnic identification and related fields have pushed against this (e.g., Carla Hunter, Edna Viruell-Fuentes, Arline Geronimus, Adriana Umaña-Taylor). This research has shown that people react to the environment differently, that they can corral resources, buffer themselves, and that different groups of people have different adaptive responses to the same conditions. And I think those who write on this do so beautifully: they don’t create an anyone-can-pull-themselves-up narrative that ignores the way that institutions constrain individual agency. But they do acknowledge the push and pull between the two.
This kind of nuance is sorely missing from what I’ve read of Wolf’s book and blog post.
Kinda okay thing 1: More people saying “vagina” without giggling
I am glad lots of people are talking about vaginas now (and not “vajayjays,” and not “down there”). Many of my meetings at work and lectures in the classroom have a liberal sprinkling of the word and its variations – in a recent meeting with collaborators who work on the vaginal microbiome, the word “vaginal” became a noun to refer to vaginal samples:
“Have you got the vaginals?”
“Have you extracted the vaginals?”
“How many owl monkey vaginals do we have?”
And there was no giggling at the term. (Okay, I may have smiled inwardly at the last one, I mean COME ON). Not because we are humorless ladies, as there was laughter at other points in our meeting. But because it was just another word to describe the awesome science that was being done.
And perhaps that is the biggest letdown from Wolf’s book. There is so much awesome science on the vagina, so much more to be done, that Wolf could only have gone out of her way to avoid it to come up with the problematic storytelling that resulted.
(I wrote this post because I asked the internets what I should blog about, and this is what David Dobbs requested (he has already written on the topic himself, here and here). And I can’t say no to the author of My Mother’s Lover.)
Friday, September 21st 2012
It’s that time of year when I take stock of how many more times I’ll be away from my family before the semester is through. I’ve pared things down quite a bit this year after traveling too much last year, and so my talks are semi-local, but open to the public. Stay tuned because there may be two more in the works.
September 24-25th, Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women. Obviously I am just an attendee for this conference, but as you probably know I was a huge fan last year. If any of you are going I hope you’ll tell me so we can say hi. I may be a bit battered and bruised because I have a sanctioned scrimmage on the 23rd in Evansville against Sioux Falls (they play Demo City the night before). And incidentally, I’ll be back in West Lafayette the following weekend to play the Lafayette Brawlin’ Dolls. But this is to tell you of my science whereabouts, so onward!
October 5th, Chambana Science Café. Science Cafés are local, casual events where the public and scientists get to engage with each other. The blurb for the one I’m a guest at is: “Kate Clancy is an assistant professor of biological anthropology, blogger of ladybusiness, avenger of bad science, and roller derby athlete. Come hear Dr. Clancy talk about science communication, her research, and how important it is to understand the female body in the face of cultural and political attacks on choice.”
- Where and when: 5:30pm, Espresso Royale Café (1117 W. Oregon St., Urbana).
October 16th, Bradley University, Peoria, IL “Women in Science” lecture series. My talk title is “The importance of public anthropology to the battle for women’s health.” I’m looking forward to meeting some great women’s studies students earlier that day, and then giving this talk intended for the general public.
Wednesday, September 19th 2012
Writing down all the factors in our sporting or academic lives in which we have no control is a bit disempowering. You mean I’m up against all that, and there isn’t anything I can do?
Except that there is! We are both more and less in control of our lives than we think.
In The Sports Psychology of Academia: Part I on Monday I made two main points:
- It’s important to recalibrate your understanding of success in the context of your environment.
- You can only control your own preparation and reaction to external factors.
So in this post we can try and unpack those preparations and reactions, but also identify and rock out on the factors that are in our control.
So how do you prepare for the uncontrollable? Some people find it useful to map out their responses to various scenarios. In athletics we often do visualizations – back when roller derby wasn’t all scrum starts, I often visualized being the first jammer off the line and racing to the back of the pack. I also practiced starts and did plyometrics designed to improve my starts, as a way of maximizing my preparation. So I could imagine scenarios, but also give myself the best possible advantage against any opponent by being at my fastest.
In academia, I try to plan for setbacks or slow progress while keeping a positive outlook. This actually comes from my union organizer days, where we set what we called “high expectations, low bar” for the folks we tried to organize into leaders. So, what journal will I submit to when I don’t get it in Glamor Pub (ok, I’ve never actually submitted to any of the Glamor Pubs, but you might)? If some of my undergrads drift away, how will I get this project completed without them?
But honestly, I’m sure you already do these things. What I find most important to remember about all this is that starting point and environment really matter. Scicurious has a great response to my post where she focuses on this. In particular, she notes:
I often hear about or go to seminars on “mentorship”, or “getting ahead in academia”, or “maximizing your networking potential”. A lot of these seminars are helpful, but a lot of them also actually depend on you having a good beginning position in the first place. “Getting ahead in academia” seminars often assume that you have already worked with some well known people and are already well published and funded. “Mentorship” seminars or “networking” seminars often assume that you are working with people who want to mentor you, or actively work to help you network, or heck, even successful social skills. And if you look around at those seminars, and you do NOT feel as poised and prepared as the others around you…well you start to wonder if this is all your fault.
I think we all understand that an athlete’s current abilities are determined not only by her current effort and resource availability, but the resources she had her entire life. I played soccer for a large public high school, on a team with a ton of raw talent. But few of my teammates had gone to the years and years of summer camps our opponents had had access to. So despite being among many athletes, we didn’t have the right attitude, conditioning or skill level to ever have a winning season in the four years I played.
* * *
In our roller derby sports psych session, once we had thought about what wasn’t in our control and what we could do about it, Dr. Walker had us list all the factors in our sport that we could control. Then came the scary part: we had to rate ourselves on a scale of 1-10 on each. Here’s what I put down:
- Nutrition -8
- Exercise -9
- Hydration -8
- Effort -9
- Strategy -7
- Communication -6
- Attitude -5
- Self-talk -5
- Focus -8
- Body language -7
- Sleep -6
- Decision-making -8
- Confidence -7
- Emotions -6
What he told us to do was take a hard look at these numbers. We all want to focus on the places where we’re already doing well, because that’s what makes us feel good. So for instance, when I want to feel good, I focus on nutrition (8) and off-skates exercise (9) and killing myself at practice (effort -9).
But what Dr. Walker encouraged us to do was make the three or four items where we scored lowest our focus. This means I need to work on attitude, self-talk, sleep, communication, and my emotions.
To succeed at what I’m doing on the top, I need to do more of what I’m doing on the bottom. Both photos by Alex Wild.
After almost two months of this – and I’m not doing anything especially different in my routine, just making a greater commitment to these things – I am a cooler-headed player. I get more sleep: instead of powering through articles I need to read for a literature review (or, ahem, watching another episode of Justified) I go to bed when I’m tired. As a team, we check in with each other more and are learning to read signs of distress and counteract them. I identify negative self-talk, even if I can’t necessarily stop it. I strive to be ever more generous with my team and referees.
I don’t know that this has changed our ultimate performance – whether our team wins or loses. But I think it has vastly aided my own preparation, my reactions to circumstances during bouts, and given me some confidence in places where I was previously lacking. In the coming months I am going to try and identify evidence-based interventions to actually help me with these factors, rather than just reflect on them passively.
* * *
What can I control as tenure-track faculty? Go on, make your own list of these or other criteria, and rate yourself. Here’s what I came up with:
- Time -8
- Effort -9
- Decision-making -7
- Confidence -7
- Attitude -6
- Self-talk -6
- Health (in the sense of taking care of myself) -9
- How I interact with colleagues -9
- How I mentor my students -7
- My knowledge of the literature -9
- My statistical skill set -7
- My lab skill set -7
- My writing skill set -8
Looking at this list, some of the same issues plague me as an academic and athlete: confidence, attitude, self-talk are things I need to improve (*cough* impostor syndrome! *cough*). But I also want to be a better mentor, a better statistician, a better lab scientist (to have knowledge of appropriate methods for my research so I can train and support my students). Finally, I want to be better at decision-making: how to allocate my time, what battles to fight, what strategies I should employ for success.
I think my results here reflect my graduate training, which is probably pretty typical. In graduate school, I learned that you have to put in the time, you have to work your ass off, and you have to know the literature. So those come easily. I have a good writing skill set because I taught composition for a year and write this blog. I think I interact with my colleagues fairly well because I try to be generous and fair.
But as many academics have pointed out many times: we aren’t really trained to do our jobs. I have no training in lab management, grantwriting, and personnel management. I have erred several times in my decision-making in the last four years simply because no one warned me about obstacles before I crashed headlong into them.
Moving forward, I want to continue to think about the ways academics beat themselves up for poor performance, which is where the negative self-talk and confidence issues find their way in. Some of the NSF Panels I’ve applied to in the last few years have had a 5% fund rate. Most jobs in my field have over a hundred applicants, which leads to a 1% success rate. And yet we are hard on ourselves when we don’t get the grants or the jobs? This is why it’s so important to parse worth and ultimate performance!
So this exercise brings to light two main issues: 1) ways individuals can work to overcome their weaknesses and thus increase their chances for great academic performance, and 2) ways institutions can better train academics to do their jobs, also increasing their chances for great performance.
How should this look? And what needs to shift for you?
