The Beaver: An Endangered Species

Happy Beaver, photo by Flickr user stevehdc, used under a Creative Commons license.

Weeks ago, I posted a Kotex ad featuring a cute, furry beaver. In comments, Euchalon Grandy asked where the term "beaver" comes from, anyway. At first I was surprised he asked, because I happen to know he came of age in the early 1980s, just like I did, at a time when there was lots of discussion (feminist and otherwise) about "beaver shots" in porn. And so I thought, "Duh! It's because beavers are furry. Everybody knows that."

But then I started wondering. Why a beaver, anyway? Why not some other mammal with a thick pelt? (I'm pretty sure this is what Euchalon was actually asking, and I just didn't get it.) Why not a raccoon, or a skunk, or a lemur? I suppose there's a stripe issue with those critters. Then again, the patterning of kitty fur is infinitely variable, yet the term "pussy" persists even though few of us sport calico or tabby markings. (I wouldn't rule out tortoiseshell, however, especially as we get older.)

Why "beaver," indeed? When I showed the beaver ad to the students in my women's studies capstone class, some of them were totally perplexed. They didn't get the ad, because to them a beaver is merely a furry woodland creature. They'd never heard the term applied to women. And so an ad with a beaver representing a pussy was just incoherent to them.

The reason for this came out in class discussion: The norm for pussies is now hairless, as anyone who's flipped through Cosmo in the past decade ought to know. If you don't take it all off, no guy will want to put his package anywhere near your vajajay (in Cosmo's anatomical lexicon). So our kitties are all supposed to be sphinx cats, and the beaver is on the verge of extinction.

Posted by Flickr user *n3wjack's world in pictures, used under a Creative Commons license.

This is a seriously generational phenomenon. It's not really possible for me to fathom it from my perch here on the far side of 40. I know young women, self-declared feminists, who believe that pubic hair is disgusting - that it makes them disgusting unless they're always smoothly waxed or shaven.

Maybe the closest parallel in my generation is that when I hit puberty in the 1970s, people took it equally for granted that girls would shave their legs and armpits. I've lived in hippy co-op houses, I spent years in Europe, I've considered myself a feminist since sixth grade. And guess what? I shave my legs. Inconsistently, irregularly, and often plain incompetently. (Being blind in the shower really doesn't help!) Ditto for my armpits, though more regularly and with less blood.

I choose to do this. But I don't claim that I do it without reference to social norms. That's where I part ways with my friend figleaf, who basically argues that any hairstyle is cool (so far so good) because it's a matter of personal style and choice (um, not entirely).

One of the college-aged women I know told me that a boyfriend pressured her to shave her pubic hair because she didn't look like the women in porn. She, too, made her choices. She shaved it. She hated the ingrown hairs and itching. She grew it out again. She ditched the douchey boyfriend.

She's not the only woman to discover that grooming pubic hair, even just the bikini line, is different from legs or armpits in some crucial ways. It's harder to achieve a smooth result by shaving. Waxing produces a smooth finish for a few days, but it can't be repeated until the regrowth is well past the stubble stage. (There's also some risk of infection, especially with Brazilians.) Laser treatments are expensive and don't work for all types of hair. Whatever the method, it's likely to result in red bumps and ingrown hairs. I'm not a dude, but I assume that red bumps are the very opposite of sexy.

In fairness, men, too, are subject to social pressures to shave. While we women can camoflage stubble under our clothes, they can't so easily hide their chins. Sure, a guy can get away with a ZZ Top beard if he's a lumberjack. For most white-collar jobs, he'd better make sure it looks distinguished and professorial - or just shear it off altogether.

I'm all for choice - but what exactly does choice mean when all the social pressure tilts in a single direction? Where is the pro-growth movement (as figleaf memorably calls it)? What magazine is extolling the glories of the unpruned bush? Organic Gardening, maybe?

I'm not saying women are anti-feminist dupes if they shave, and I sure don't want to shame anyone for doing it. I'm not opposed to grooming. Like I said, I do some of it myself. (And no, I'm not going to overshare on my more personal topiary choices.) But until there's actually a pro-growth faction, our choices will be tightly bounded and subject to pressure and penalties. That's not much of a choice at all. Especially when the pressures are greatest on young women who are still finding themselves and discovering their own bodies and sexuality.

The Abnormality of "Normal" Childbirth

Jaded as I am about medicine and medicalization, the assumptions behind this new study in Obstetrics and Gynecology still left me flummoxed:

OBJECTIVE: To assess the prognosis for vaginal delivery in women with entirely normal pregnancies who began spontaneous labor at term.

METHODS: Between January 1, 1988, and October 31, 2006, a total of 278,164 women delivered newborns at our hospital. A subset of women with uncomplicated pregnancies and spontaneous labor between 37 and 41 weeks of gestation then were identified for analysis of maternal and neonatal outcomes. The outcomes we studied included admission-to-delivery intervals, use of epidural analgesia, maternal perineal trauma, route of delivery, and several potential indices of neonatal condition at birth.

RESULTS: There were 103,526 (37%) women who delivered at our hospital during the study period who had normal term pregnancies and entered labor spontaneously. Overall, 96% of these women had vaginal deliveries, and adverse neonatal outcomes were rare. For example, perinatal deaths occurred in 0.3 of every 1,000 women.

CONCLUSION: Approximately one third of pregnant women have entirely normal pregnancies and enter spontaneous labor at term. Virtually all such women can anticipate safe vaginal deliveries for themselves and their infants.

[My emphasis. That's the entire abstract, but you can find it here. The full article is in

Obstetrics & Gynecology (April 2009, vol. 113): 812-816.]

I'm trying to fathom how only 37% of the women in this study had "normal" pregnancies that culminated in spontaneous labor (that is, without induction or a scheduled c-section). And I'm just failing. If you tally up all the women with prior cesareans, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes, placental abnormalities, and so on - do they really add up to nearly two-thirds of all pregnant women?

Yeah, the authors appear to be making a case for the safety of vaginal childbirth. But they do so on the basis of such a small subset of women that their conclusions can't carry any real force. Skeptics looking at their findings can easily object that the safety of vaginal delivery only applies to the healthiest women.

I'd really, really like to know how the study's authors defined "normal." I tried to look at the full text of this article, but my university's library doesn't carry this journal at all anymore - apparently not even in the print version - presumably because it's too expensive.

At any rate, it's a seriously through-the-looking-glass world when "normal" childbirth is defined such that it's actually outside the norm - that is, abnormal.

Update, March 25, 2009, 2:30 p.m.: Commenter smk has kindly provided the full text of the study. Its definitions of "normal" and "uncomplicated" closely match my assumptions, except that I neglected to mention anticipated fetal abnormalities. The authors of the study may serve a higher-risk population than is typical. They write: "Parkland Hospital is a tax-supported institution serving Dallas County that has a neonatal intensive care unit adjacent to the labor and delivery units." Taxpayer support suggests they may serve a disproportionate number of poor women, and the NICU means that the hospital will draw a clientele with an above-average rate of fetal complications.

The authors cite CDC statistics that put 50% of all women into the uncomplicated category. Using the CDC numbers and assuming 25 to 30% fall into the complicated category due to a prior c-section, that would leave 20-25% with significant complications. Those numbers seem slightly less outlandish but still high.

Caturday Theology: Or, The Ceiling Cat Is Watching Me

Sistine kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

No, I'm not hallucinating - or seeing visions of angels - from too much grading. (Though I am still buried under heaps of term papers and exams.)

Verily, the Ceiling Cat has cast his beatific feline glance upon me.

He really does see everything. At least, he saw this post about his presence on Twitter. He utters some LOLspeak ("Talkin bowt meh? Dey dunt seme so revrent") and the next thing I know, legions of his followers, hooman and kitteh alike, are pouncing on this humble blog.

And yes, it was the real Ceiling Cat, not his masturbation-obsessed doppelganger. O Ceiling Cat, I promise not to block you. (Unless that was you peeking at me the other day when I had a few private moments and ... oh, never mind.)

Just so you don't think we're blaspheming - we are a cat-inspired blog, after all, and we weren't snarking when we said you've mastered the form of the tweet - here's a felidiction in your honor:

May the Ceiling Cat bless you and keep you;
May he tickle you with his whiskers
And bring half-dead mice to you
May the Ceiling Cat lift up his furry countenance upon you,
And protect us from fleas.

If that doggerel is too un-catlike for you, well, we'd be happy to oblige with belly rubs.

(Oh, and I broke down and started following Ceiling Cat on Twitter. I was not going to actually use my account, just squat it! Thus begins the road to perdition, or at least procrastination.)

Springing into Cognitive Dissonance

Am I the only one who thinks it's jarring that the first day of spring coincides with the sixth anniversary of the Iraq War? As if the war itself weren't appalling enough, the timing just seems like an affront to all that's good in the universe.

In a different register, but also distressing: Ohio's unemployment rate climbed to 9.4%, the highest in 25 years, according to figures released today.

In the face of all that, my daffodils have finally burst into bloom.

Sungold, Superathlete

Jock kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So I've decided I need to take a yoga class to help deal with some of my remaining symptoms - the fatigue and freaky muscle tension. My university's employee gym offers yoga classes for a very affordable membership price. This morning I hauled my sedentary butt to the gym for their mandatory pre-membership fitness test. Luckily the testing didn't include that nasty ritual humiliation, pull ups, which I couldn't even do as a kid. I just had to let my fat be calipered, take a pulmonary function test, and ride a stationary bike. All easy peasy.

But then I collided with something I hadn't done since 1979: push-ups. Seriously. It's been 30 years. I was asked to do a minute's worth of push-ups, followed by another minute of crunches. All I could think was: You've got to be fucking kidding. Of course, that's not what I said to the nice young exercise physiologist. Instead, I warned her that I might not be able to do a single push-up. Humiliation predicted is humiliation half-averted.

And then - to my amazement and amusement - the Sloth God intervened, or maybe just sheer cussedness. I did 34 push ups (yes, girly ones, but still!) and 36 crunches. When I got my fitness assessment, both of those measures came back as "excellent." Cardiovascular fitness was "good," despite being sick all winter. Lung function, cholesterol, BMI - all fabulous. On paper you'd mistake me for a jock. Except for the minor fact that I haven't exercised since last fall, and even then it was only my seven-minute bike ride to work.

So why does this super-athlete want to curl up in the corner like a pair of stinky old socks? I am beyond kaput - too tired to grade, too tired to blog intelligently. I managed to get a sunburn today while collecting take-home exams, and I'm fried inside and out.

Don't worry if blogging is a bit slow the next few days. Once I've recovered from my athletic feats, I've got to tackle end-of-quarter grading. I promise I'm still basically on the path to recovery - even if I'm not quite ready to give Mia Hamm a run for it. (Yeah, I know she's old by now, but so am I!)

Sex, Schools, and the Politics of Distraction

The superintendent of Westfall School District in south-central Ohio is being pilloried for accessing racy websites from work, the Columbus Dispatch reports. Okay, he shouldn't have done that. But is he really all that different from millions of other American employees who've done the same while at work? Don't millions more use work computers for personal stuff? This guy's biggest offense, I think, was forgetting how teachers and other school employees are held to higher standards than the rest of society. In other words, his main offense was stupidity.

And what did he actually look at? Well, he did check out one hardcore free porn site - exactly once. The rest appears to have been no spicier that what you see on the average newsstand. (Cosmo covers, anyone?)

At 6 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2007, [Superintendent] Cotner's computer was used to visit an Internet site that today features free online hard-core pornography videos, the newspaper [the Dispatch] found.

The computer assigned to the leader of the Pickaway County district also was used three times during the fall of 2006 to visit a site that sells sex aids and toys.

The majority of the site visits being examined by the Westfall school board involved Google image searches for pictures of swimsuit models, actresses and celebrities.

Some of those sites included Sports Illustrated swimsuit models and "almost-nude photos-wet-and-wild" of a female former American Idol contestant.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

Oooh, women in swimsuits! Wet women in swimsuits! I'm no big fan of the SI swimsuit editions (they give kids the idea that women's main role in sports is as eye candy), but does even the most prudish fundamentalist consider this to be porn? And is ordering a sex toy from a work computer any less ethical than shopping at Amazon while at work? Actually, if the superintendent had browsed the sex toy section of Amazon, no one would have been the wiser!

If I lived in this district, I'd be steamed, all right. But not about the superintendent's computer usage. The district's former treasurer is sitting in prison after pilfering tens of thousands of dollars. And its school board meeting drew a crowd of 300 last night. They came not to accuse the superintendent (though some attendees did call for his resignation), but to protest proposed budget cuts.

The politics of distraction is so handy in tough economic times.

Marx Was Wrong

Zombie bank kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

The proletariat isn't killing capitalism. The banks are.

This is not an economics blog, but I thought Robert Reich really nailed it in his commentary on the big bonuses AIG is paying to the guys who orchestrated the failure of our economy:

This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. [my emphasis]

(More like this here.)

The Obama Administration's greatest failure, so far, has been its unwillingness to insist on accountability. The lack of accountability built into the initial rescue package should have been obvious to the least perspicacious economic minds. I mean, it was obvious to me! But I thought Obama would institute accountability even though his appointees helped get us into this mess. I hoped he'd override Timothy Geithner on at least this one point.

Why is Robert Reich not in the White House? Why not Joseph Stiglitz? Dean Baker? George Soros? I could name a half-dozen other people who aren't so personally invested as Geithner or Larry Summers in maintaining the status quo. For crying out loud, Badtux the Snarky Penguin would make a helluva better Treasury Secretary than Geithner. (See this post for just one example of why I'm not joking about this!)

AIG and its ilk are going to have to be nationalized (or put into receivership, or whatever euphemism you prefer) sooner or later. The only question is whether Obama has the nerve and foresight to do it now, and not wait until another trillion or so is squandered. Joseph Stiglitz has a smart explanation of what's going wrong and how to fix it: basically, by splitting each of the zombie banks into two pieces, hiving off the bad investments, and sticking shareholders and executives with the losses. In other words, he advocates eliminating the current moral hazard and disincentives to lend while reinstating accountability.

Right now, the zombie banks are murdering markets and capitalism itself. Time for a new escape plan.

The Politics of Attraction

Bouncing off a hysterically funny post by Aunt B about the penis of one of Tennessee's douchiest state legislators, I've been thinking about how political convictions serve as a filter for who and what we find attractive. The legislator in question, Stacey Campfield, definitely fails to pass Aunt B's filter - and mine, too, now that I've seen his smarmy blog photo. The dude is not ugly - he's got the smooth, glossy looks of a former fraternity president - but geez, does he look self-satisfied. Smug is so not sexy. Especially coming from a sexist Republican.

Aunt B went on a rant inspired by Campfield's telling another legislator that if he had sex with her, he wouldn't want to pay for her children. The bottom line is that Aunt B doesn't want to think about this tool's tool:

So, here we are, forced to think about Campfield having sex. And I’m going to be honest, my first thought was that no conservative Christian woman are going to have sex with Campfield because they don’t have sex with men they aren’t married to and no libertarians are going to have sex with Campfield without him using a condom and them being on some form of birth control and no liberal woman who knows him is going to be able to have sex with him since his antics cause arid tightening in Democrats, so Campfield talking about potential kids he might or might not have is a little beside the point.

(Read the rest here.)

I just love that phrase "arid tightening."

I suppose political anti-sexiness feels different for guys - neither arid nor tight - but a similar phenomenon definitely exists for men, too. One day after last fall's election, possibly courting trouble, I asked my husband if he thought Sarah Palin was sexy. He said, well, she was pretty enough on the surface, but as soon as she opened her mouth? Both her politics and her (lack of) intelligence totally undid her looks. (My husband is clever, as you can see, but he was also perfectly sincere.)

Obviously not everyone feels that way. Lots of guys were ready to vote for Palin based solely on her sex appeal. Most of them appeared to be fellas in their 60s and 70s who'd never have a prayer with her - or at least, those were the ones willing to admit it on the Daily Show.

So here's my true confession: I once dated a guy who wasn't just a Republican, he was a minor player in California's College Republicans. Hey, I was a college freshman when I met him - not even old enough to vote - and he was a senior, so I figured he knew what he was doing. This was back in the early 1980s when moderate Republicans still existed. He was one of that dying breed, His politics tilted leftward of many present-day Democrats, even if he was also kind of an asshole. The assholery was mostly independent of his politics. In my defense I can only say that he was a pretty good kisser.

Maybe that experience also cured me of dating Republicans (and I use the term "dating" very euphemistically, since my friends and I didn't really date). As far as I know, I never got involved with another Republican again.

Oh, I know there are lots of long-term relationships - apparently happy ones - that cross party lines. During my adventures in canvassing last fall, I marveled at those households where husband and wife planned to cancel out each others' votes. In one case, they'd been doing it for 50 years. This couple was so warm and welcoming, they would have fed me cookies and iced tea if I'd been allowed to accept goodies. They were equally warm toward each other. Their political convictions seemed like a thing completely apart from their marriage.

But here's the thing. For me, my politics are my values. My values are my politics. There's no firewall between them. I'm not talking about rigid political correctness, just a deep basic commitment to the equal worth of all humans and the notion that "justice is what love looks like in public" (to quote Cornel West yet again). I can't imagine dating, much less building a life, with someone who didn't share those principles and all their ramifications. Anything else strikes me as, well, aridly tight.

Seeds, Sentiment, Magic

Sorry to illustrate a post about seeds with a flower I grew from a bulb, but hey, this is what's blooming in my garden today. The photo shows my little rock iris.

Today I started to plant my garden. Well, that's the truth if you don't mind a little embroidery. My garden is entirely indoors, so far, and all I planted was a slew of impatiens seeds.

It's hard not to get, well, impatient while planting those little buggers. They're small. Very small. I have to take off my glasses to see them. I end up hunched over the seeds and the flats like a clumsy horticultural Mr. Magoo. And so they make me feel old. Planting tiny seeds relentlessly tracks my presbyopia from year to year. (If you clicked on that link, you're probably young enough not to worry about it yet.) One of these years I'm going to need bifocals. For now, I can get by without them, but only because I can leverage my nearsightedness, Magoo-like.

Anyway. There aren't a whole lot of smart reasons to grow impatiens from seed. They're readily available from any nursery - even Wal-Mart. It's true I want a lot of them (for my too-abundant shady beds) and I'll save a little money by starting them myself. That is the official rationale.

If I'm honest about it, though, I'll admit it's not really about economizing. Not at all. I just love seeds. And so I'll promiscuously start almost anything indoors, weeks before I can really garden outside. I keep watch on the seed coat as it softens and relents. I'm spellbound by the improbability of the seed leaf emerging from its harsh husk, sometimes after years of dormancy, wakened from sleep by the kiss of moisture. I hold my breath in fear of damping off (the plague of seedlings). I'll dab my own spit on any recalcitrant seed coat that threatens to trap the leaves, then coax out the tender greenery. So much wonder and anticipation even before the first true leaves, never mind the flower and fruit.

I'm no different from my son the Tiger, who planted beans in his kindergarten class last week. He doesn't know exactly what to expect. He just knows they're magic. And he's waiting for that magic beanstalk to emerge, leading places only he can imagine.

Medical Abortion under Pressure in Ohio

Ohio's Democratic, pro-choice Attorney General, Richard Cordray, is sticking up for a state law that restricts the use of medical abortion (RU-486, aka mifepristone or the "abortion pill") to a narrower window of time than good medical practice currently requires.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, a 2004 Ohio law limits the use of RU-486 to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, while doctors commonly use it up through the ninth week. The original FDA approval covered only the first seven weeks, but subsequent experience with vastly larger numbers of women has shown it to be safe and effective for two weeks beyond that window. Doctors have been prescribing it off-label through the ninth week, in line with current medical knowledge. The Ohio law has never been implemented because Planned Parenthood sued to block it. This week, the Ohio Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the law should be allowed to take effect; the case has not yet been decided.

So what stake does the Ohio AG have in this? The Dispatch reports:

Anne Berry Straight, an attorney in Cordray's office, said she's not asking the court to set medical policy, only to recognize that lawmakers had the right to regulate the drug. ...

Straight pointed out that Ohio lawmakers already have banned the use of anabolic steroids for muscle-building and amphetamines for weight loss.

[Ohio Supreme Court] Justice Terrence O'Donnell said the court shouldn't be put in the position of playing surgeon general for Ohio.

"The court is going to micromanage the practice of medicine if we start getting into managing off-label uses like we're being asked to do (with RU-486)," O'Donnell said.

I'm not sure why either the courts or the legislature are mucking around with the fine points of medical policy! Whatever happened to the notion that doctors and public health experts should be regulating drugs? Neither the legislators nor the justices have the slightest qualifications. Heck, as a historian of medicine, I'm way more qualified than they are! Seriously!

For instance, you only need a dollop of medical knowledge to understand the difference between a medication that the FDA found to be safe and effective (RU-486) and drugs that are notorious for being abused (anabolic steroids and amphetamines). One of these things is not like the other; one of these things doesn't belong! Geez, my legislators need to watch more Sesame Street. (And no, I'm not saying that the FDA's process is perfect. It's often deeply screwed up. In this case, though, the FDA approved RU-486 in spite of intense political pressure to ignore the science.)

None of the statements from the AG's office explain why Cordray believed he had to stick up for the legislature's right to make medical policy. I understand that it's a constitutional issue as well as a matter of women's health, but I cannot fathom why the AG would have a stake in it. I do know that Cordray has publicly supported abortion rights, and I seriously fail to understand why protecting the scope of legislative power would trump his commitment to women's health.

Letting Kids Be Kids (Even When They're Parents)

I'm still on my soapbox about leaving Bristol Palin alone, and so all I've got to say on the announcement of her canceled engagement to Levi Johnston is that I'm glad if they're following their hearts, and I wish them both the best.

But all the angst-y right-wing commentary on the non-wedding of the season is fair game. Not to mention easy pickins! Here's what Lisa Schiffren of the National Review had to say (via Hugo Schwyzer):

I certainly don’t know if they should have gotten married. You’d have thought so . . . even if it didn’t last forever. Better odds for the kid. [My emphasis.] If the parents didn’t like it, well, they should have thought about that when they were drinking and fooling around. But, as we all know, shotgun marriages lead to plenty of unhappiness, some of the time. And very young marriages have a lousy track record. So parents of the expecting teens are not willing to push. And maybe they are sometimes right. Still, the default position of the girl, left on her own with the baby, now in serious and immediate need of further education and a set of remunerative skills with which to support herself and Tripp, which will be harder to acquire with her maternal responsibilities, isn’t much of a happy picture either.

For all of the high-minded discussion of marriage policy on these pages and elsewhere, to me it looks very late. That train left a while ago. Even Corner readers, who will discuss choosing life vs. abortion, with endless passion, do not get so worked up about marriage. Which is why all I have to say is, “poor girl.”

Hugo rightly points out the pity, condescension, and ethical bankruptcy in Schiffren's position. Amanda Marcotte argues that the pressure put on Bristol and Levi to redeem her pregnancy through coerced marriage reveals how ultimately, conservative anti-sex fury punishes men, too, by pushing them into unwanted and possibly loveless marriages.

Yes to all that. But I think the punishment goes deeper than the shotgun marriages that even Schriffren can't quite stomach. Schiffren unwittingly exposes this deeper dimension when she writes: "Better odds for the kid." I read that and thought: Which kid? Because Tripp is not the only child in this story! Bristol was 17 when she became pregnant!

In my book, that's still a kid. But in the anti-sex reactionary playbook, as soon as you have sex and get caught out - that is, if you turn up pregnant - you're disqualified from being a kid anymore. And since abortion isn't an option, you've got no choice but to plunge pell-mell into adulthood, whether you're 17 or 13.

I understand that a young parent will have to grow up faster than usual and meet the challenges of parenthood. Having had two babies, I know that babies impose their own limits and constraints, and unless you give your child up for adoption, your old freedom is toast. That doesn't mean young teen parents will instantly grow up, however. They are still kids - cognitively, emotionally, behaviorally - even if they rise to the challenge. This is why a pregnant child should always have the option to terminate, with or without parental permission; no one should be forced to grow up so fast. But if she does choose to carry the pregnancy to term, she deserves massive support to let her finish her education and maybe even have some fun once in a while. She deserves to enjoy whatever vestiges of childhood remain.

Imposing premature adulthood on pregnant girls and their partners as a punishment is just the flip side of seeing a baby as a righteous punishment for having sex. Both attitudes betray a profound contempt for children.

"Corrective" Rape: Where Misogyny and Homophobia Collide

While listening to BBC radio this morning, I learned a new term: "corrective" rape. I was driving at the time, and I nearly had to pull over. (Consider this your obligatory trigger warning; I'm so upset about this topic that I almost can't write about it, and yet I feel like I have to.)

"Corrective" rape refers to raping lesbians with the ostensible purpose of "curing" them of same-sex attractions. In "Hate Crimes: The Rise of 'Corrective' Rape in South Africa," the NGO ActionAid documents a sharp rise in the incidence of this crime (pdf available here). The BBC report stated that about ten "corrective" rapes are occuring each week in Cape Town alone. (See also this article in the Guardian.)

It's ironic that these crimes are on the rise in South Africa, because as the BBC report stated, the South African constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, guaranteeing equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. In practice, however, homophobia and misogyny combine in everyday life and the justice system, making lesbians' lives very dangerous, especially if they're women of color. Young boys are growing up with the idea that raping lesbians is acceptable - that they are actually doing women a favor by teaching them to appreciate a real man.

ActionAid reports that the targeting of lesbians represents an intensification of the risks that all women face:

In South Africa, no woman is safe from violence. There are an estimated 500,000 rapes, hundreds of murders and countless beatings carried out every year. Shockingly, it is estimated that almost half of all South African women will be raped during their lifetime. And for every 25 men bought to trial for rape in South Africa, 24 walk free. ...

As part of this oppression, the country is now witnessing a backlash of crimes targeted specifically at lesbian women, who are perceived as representing a direct and specific threat to the status quo. This violence often takes the form of ‘corrective’ rape – a way of punishing and ‘curing’ women of their sexual orientation. (p. 3) ...

‘Corrective’ rape survivors interviewed by ActionAid say that verbal abuse before and during the rape focused on being “taught a lesson” and being “shown how to be real women and what a real man tasted like." (p. 12)

So the hallmark of this crime is the assailant telling the woman that his attack will make her a proper woman - and yet, according to ActionAid reports, judges have balked at punishing such rapes as hate crimes. (Of course, one might argue that every rape is a hate crime since it's an expression of misogyny.) It remains a mystery how women are supposed to learn their lesson in the numerous instances where "corrective" rape culminates in murder.

The BBC report was followed up by a discussion of whether Western media show a negative bias in their reporting on Africa. I'm not qualified to judge whether that's so, although I agree that Americans almost never hear good news about Africa in the media. But I definitely see a danger in othering this phenomenon of "corrective" rape. We know lesbians are at risk of violence in the U.S., too, and I'm sure this crime occurs here as well, even if with (much?) less frequency than in South Africa, where violence of all kinds is so prevalent. We just haven't had a name for it.

Found: Twitter's Divine Feline Use

First, you have to get over your chimera-disgust at the idea of cats tweeting. Really, it can be quite natural! Not monstrous at all!

Second, you (well, I) have to get over our anti-Twitter biases.

And then you can enjoy the application for which Twitter was obviously made in the first place: the tweets of the Ceiling Cat.

I stumbled on this chirping deity while exploring the LOLcat Bible, which was helping me procrastinate my actual task of reading up on feminist theological projects like The Woman's Bible. The LOLcat Bible very nearly landed in my Tuesday lecture. Yeah, we're all punchy by now, students and instructors alike, in this, the last week of classes before finals. I now regret not doing it.

The LOLcreation, at the LOLcat Bible.

So here's a sample of feline revelation:

An Iz dump teh sno on teh norfeest, So dat teh hoomins stai insied an cuddle der kittehs an keep dem warm.

Yu kno why kittehs eet teh tinsel from yer Crismus Trees? Cuz wen I wuz leeding dem thru teh desert, dat is wut manna luk liek.

In other words: Proof positive that the 140-character count meshes perfectly with a cat's walnut-sized brain. Not sure if this says more about cats, or more about Twitter.

I should warn you that there's a rival Ceiling Cat tweeting. While it doesn't appear to be the Basement Cat in disguise, this one is less active and creative, but a whole lot more prurient - maybe he's laying the groundwork for a Catichean struggle? Maybe he's just gunning to lead a meagachurch? Anyway, here's his obsession:

Watching you masturbate.

Just call me LL Ceiling C, because judging from my followers: Ladies Love Ceiling Cat. And Ceiling Cat loves watching you... you know.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe some of the stuff y'all get up to.

Luckily for you (and by you, I once again mean me), Twitter offers the option: "Block Ceiling Cat."

The Science of Being Worried Sick

One of my bugaboos, ever since I learned there was a name for it, is iatrogenic risks: the damage that medicine itself can cause, however inadvertently. A big ole iatrogenic risk made the news recently, as Ivanhoe's medical news wire service reports:

The agonizing wait for breast cancer biopsy results can be harmful to a woman's health. The results of a new study suggests not knowing a diagnosis can lead to stress that may have adverse effects on the immune system.

More than 1.2 million breast biopsies are performed each year in the U.S. -- 80 percent result in non-cancerous findings. In this new study, researchers sought to establish a biochemical marker to assess the physical effects associated with the stress of extended waiting for a final diagnosis. They collected stress hormone [cortisol] samples from 126 women who had just undergone a large core biopsy. Four days later, the scientists learned the stress hormone levels of women with uncertain results were significantly different than women with benign results, but highly similar to women with malignant results.

(The original study is published in Radiology, March 2009, full reference below.)

Any of you who've awaited the results of high-stakes medical tests are probably thinking: Well, duh! The day I got my initial, troubling MRI results, I was in tears for much of the day before I even saw my doctor. I'm pretty sure my cortisol levels stayed sky-high for a several weeks, until I heard that I didn't have MS and that the radiologist who read the scans was probably mostly covering his ass.

So why is there any value in a study like this one? Because even though its findings are glaringly obvious, it points out that most of the women in the study had to wait at least five days for results. The study's authors, Elvira Lang et al., recommend in another well, duh! moment:

It is important to deliver histopathologic results in a timely fashion.

(Source: Elvira V. Lang et al., "Large-Core Breast Biopsy: Abnormal Salivary Cortisol Profiles Associated with Uncertainty of Diagnosis," Radiology 2009;250:631-637.)

Or to put it bluntly, doctors and hospitals need to organize anxiety-producing procedures with the patient's needs in mind, not the organization's. This would be worthwhile even if stress weren't a risk factor for (additional) illness.

By the way, it's not just women who would benefit from faster, healthier, and more humane delivery of test results. Lang et al. cite a larger, better-powered study in which men who underwent prostate biopsy had the most abnormal cortisol levels two weeks after the biopsy, right before they got their results. Like breast biopsies, prostate biopsies are more painful than doctors will generally admit, or so I hear from people who've experienced one or the other procedure. A cancer diagnosis in either case often strikes at a person's identity and sexuality as well as raising fears of mortality. Lang et al. write (again in the full text version):

These authors reported that some of their patients described the waiting period as a nightmare.

That earlier study was published in 1995, and yet people often still wait a week for test results. I'm hoping the new study might make a bigger splash, as breast cancer news tends to attract more media attention.

How long is the waiting period, exactly, before an obvious iatrogenic risk can be diagnosed and treated?

Sungold = Angela Davis?

So Daisy just bailed me out when I've got too much grading and class prep, and no time to develop a thoughtful post: She led me to a quiz, Which Western Feminist Icon Are You? (Daisy was bell hooks, a very cool result indeed.)

Somewhat weirdly, I came up as ...

You are Angela Davis! You were the THIRD WOMYN IN HISTORY to appear on the FBI's Most Wanted List. You are a communinist, black power-lovin' lady who shook up the United States when you refused to lie down quietly to oppression. You WENT TO JAIL! Wow. You kick so much more ass than Foxxy Brown.

Hmmm. I checked the box for wanting feminism to reflect intersectional analysis. I also consistently checked the one on attitudes toward men that stated "Men are comrades and they're fun in bed." Otherwise, I tried varying a few answers. No matter how else I answered, I kept coming up Angela.

It's mysterious because I'm no communist, not even on those days where my socialist leanings swell and grow. I think black power alone is analytically inadequate just as feminism alone cannot explain the world. I've never been to jail (though I did once pick up a friend there) and while I may well have an FBI file, I'm not sure what the file would hold apart from "friend of people who know people who embrace lefty politics. Oh, and married to a furriner."

Much as I admire Angela Davis' body of work over the years, the one time I saw her speak was an unmitigated disaster. She was trying to use a laptop in her talk, and she was clearly overwhelmed by the technology, to the point where she kept getting tangled up and lost in what she wanted to say. (It was one of those feminist empress-has-no-clothes moments, because most of the audience rhapsodized anyway, even though the talk was largely incoherent, in my not-so-humble opinoin.) I had the feeling she'd have given a fine speech, if only she hadn't felt tethered to the laptop.

But Angela I am - never mind my evident whiteness or lack of kickassness. I'll take it as a compliment. Maybe as a challenge. At the very least, it's a reminder not to let my beloved laptop get in the way of actual communicaiton.

The Perils and Privileges of Invisible Disability

This isn't exactly a LOLtopic, but invisibility of any sort calls for a kitteh - from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Spurred partly by my recent scary health experiences, and partly by posts from Julie at Alas and Daisy at Daisy's Dead Air, I've been thinking about the peculiarities of invisible disability.

About a week into my bizarro neurological adventures, I started to go public with my colleagues and a few students. I realized I wasn't going to be healthy again overnight. It became obvious that I might need some extra support - which I got in abundance.

The first group of colleagues I told were shocked. "But you looked like nothing had changed!" "Nobody could tell that there was anything wrong!" "Really, your lecture was just fine!"

What shocked me, upon reflection, is how gratified I felt to hear this. I had a mild tremor in my lower left lip, and I was convinced I must look like Inspector Dreyfus from the Pink Panther movies. My facial muscles were freakishly tight and I was sure my face resembled a death mask. Brain fog interrupted my ability to string together sentences, and I perceived my own lectures as rank gibberish.

I suppose it's understandable that I was glad to hear that none of this was evident to an outside observer. And yet, I think my reaction also betrays an investment in "normalcy" that I really ought to have shed by now. I've been teaching about disability in women's studies classes for years. My partner has a somewhat visible physical disability. While in grad school, I experienced another invisible, ultimately temporary, but fairly long-lasting disability when I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

What does it take for a gal to get over the ideal of normalcy? Why was passing so important to me?

There's a serious privilege built into invisible disability. While I'm still pretty far from normal (my hand tremor is acting up as I type this), I can choose whether to disclose it to people. I don't have to respond to questions from strangers about what happened to me - something that happened to my partner all the time when he was wearing an arm brace. It's as though any piece of orthopedic equipment makes your body and its history public property. I'm very relieved not to have to defend my personal space and privacy.

Faced with wearing a wrist brace that might help her heal but would call attention to her disability, Daisy explains why she can't quite make herself do it.

It makes me appear vulnerable and calls attention to my age, in a job market in which older workers are getting left behind. I try to look energetic and "happy" on my job, since we are "selling a lifestyle" and all that shit: I feel pressure in the health supplement industry to always appear healthy. Since it's a job in which people are always talking about their health, I am duly questioned about mine, when there are many times (like now) that I'd rather not answer. The overall sentiment seems to be: well, if you know so much about supplements, why are you falling apart? Aging is inevitable and people are in denial about that, as well as in denial about disability-as-part-of-life in general...

I'm not in the health industry, but in my work I'm surrounded by apparently-healthy young people. As their instructor, I often hear about what lies beneath. One person has ADHD, another is coping with rheumatoid arthritis, yet another has Crohn's disease, someone else comes down with mono, and a legion of them struggle with various mental health issues. Yet the norm on campus is what's visible. And all you can see - except for the occasional leg cast - is "healthy," vigorous youth. It's possible this is more pronounced at my university than most, because the campus is hilly and the accommodations for anyone who's mobility-impaired are a joke.

This silence and invisibility contribute to the denial Daisy mentions. So does our shared but repressed fear of mortality and decline.

There are also serious perils in looking "too healthy." Julie at Alas recounts how she can't wrap her own mind around the idea that her back pain is real, and this sabotages her ability to get the care she needs. Daisy points out that Julie's experience collides our expectation that if a person is young, attractive, middle-class, and educated, she ought to be healthy, too, just by definition.

Maybe most people with invisible disabilities aren't as hard on themselves as Julie appears to be, but they also can't always count on the recognition and help they need. When I had my chronic fatigue experience, my grad school advisers were wonderfully supportive, but some of the other people in my orbit really didn't get it. My then-boyfriend once accused me of using my illness manipulatively because I could find energy for some activities but not others. It was hard for him to understand that my energy level varied, and that I had to set priorities. (This was the beginning of the end for me and him.) A few fellow students expressed skepticism behind my back, which came back to me through the grad-school gossip tree: How could I really be sick? I didn't look sick! Was I just trying to get a break on my coursework? To my face, though, some of my comrades radiated pity; this group overlapped with the skeptics, weirdly enough.

This time around, I've encountered only warmth and support from family, friends, and colleagues. My husband took on some of my usual household tasks. My mom sent money and offered to come help if we needed her. Friends took care of the kids, often at short notice, and one of them babysat overnight so we could go to Cleveland. One colleague gave a lecture while I was away, and another was on call to cover my seminar. Yet another found money to pay a grader so I didn't have to deal with 90 midterms.

I'm sure it helps that I'm out of the grad-school hothouse with its petty resentments. More importantly, most of the adults in my life are now old enough to have some close-up experience with disability. Without their support, I don't know how I'd have made it through the past weeks.

But the precondition for all this help was that I had to make the invisible visible. I had to take the risk of making it public. I couldn't hide under the mask of normalcy. I had to give up the privilege of passing, however uncomfortable that made me. I'm so grateful that the people in my life all chose to make that radical phenomenological leap of faith - to believe in the reality of my reality, no matter how impossible it was for them to see it.

What would it take to transform our society so that invisible disability is always taken seriously - and that leap of faith is no longer even necessary?

War of the Roses and Clematis

I have no energy to post on the stuff that's really got me thinking today - because I've become a casualty of the undeclared war of the roses and clematis.

Today was stunningly beautiful, and so our whole family trooped out to the yard to try and undo the winter's damage. Well, two of us tried; the other two, the small ones, played with household chemicals and made rockets blast off with Alka-seltzer tablets. On balance, this was probably less risky than entrusting them with pruning shears.

My mission was to save my poor diseased clematis. If you've been with me since summer, you might recall some of the pictures I posted here. Well, I have a confession: Like more conventional porn, my garden porn is cleverly cropped to hide imperfections. While I haven't stooped to airbrushing (yet!), I did conceal the fungus-ridden foliage on my clematis.

So I determined to prune them all hard (not just the jackmanii, which expects a hard pruning) and hope that what grows back will be less fungified. It took a few hours and I felt like I was performing an amputation, but I pruned my darlings back to short (4- to 6-inch) stumps, bagged up all the nasty foliage, and removed a bit of topsoil to boot. Now I'm praying to the Ceiling Cat that my plan works.

The only problem? My clematis shares space with the roses. All the garden guides will tell you that clematis and roses are excellent partners. I'm sure that the authors of said guides let their hired help do the pruning.

Because it was a bloody mess - quite literally. Even though I waited until my husband had first pruned the roses, I ended up with scratches and fragments of thorns in my arms, a deep cut in one finger (how I got that one, I can't even say), and a thorn under a thumbnail. Yes, that was as hideous as it sounds. I think I shouted some words that I usually avoid saying in front of the kids, but I really don't know, because I was seeing swirls and starbursts of yellow, orange, and red and trying not to scream a second time.

Oh, and I got a mild sunburn, too - while working in the shade, in Ohio, on the seventh day of March. I'm actually kind of tickled about this, since it really is mild and it seems just as happily anomalous as the perfect day that just ended.

I'm so grateful that I had the energy to work in my garden. I'm paying for it tonight, and I'll likely be kaput tomorrow, but it buoys my hope that I'll keep on healing. (In case you were wondering, I'm not back to "normal," though I'm continuously improving. The fatigue is the worst of my remaining symptoms.)

Since the only thing to show for my work is some black dirt and a blank trellis, here's a more photogenic alternative: an update on the crocus that popped up a week ago. It's no longer alone, so you can expect more pictures in the days ahead. If you click to embiggen the photo, you'll see the tracery of russet veins on the petals.

Round and Round: Virtuous and Vicious Circles in Relationships

Image from Flicker use POSITiv, used under a Creative Commons license.

Earlier today, figleaf got me thinking about what it takes to keep a long-term relationship happy and not just bumbling along on life support. He wrote:

Relationship Tip #1: Caring *deeply* isn't the same as caring *perfectly.*

Much relationship [stress?] derives from confusing the two. One can wind up feeling more love, and feeling loved, when one understands the difference.

This can be a huge source of either conflict or generosity in a relationship. (And not just romantic ones.)

(The rest of his post is here.)

This made me reflect on the dynamics that kick in when people stop feeling the love. While I may sound like I'm being an old curmudgeon, taking a basically upbeat piece of advice and twisting it into its unhappy negative, what I really want to think about is how a moribund relationship can be turned around again. I’ll apologize in advance for being awfully abstract; it’s because I’m thinking about other people’s relationships, not just my own, and also because even when it comes to my own concrete experiences, they aren’t mine alone. Either way, I don't want to suggest I'm referring to anyone in particular, living or dead, human or feline, since this post isn’t about airing dirty laundry. (Though I’m sure it would be more juicy that way: I could create a bunch of fake people and give them pseudonyms, pretending that I'm writing for Cosmo instead of Kittywampus, and then we could proceed to discuss erotic uses for hair scrunchies).

I completely agree that in a basically happy, sound relationship, partners give each other the benefit of the doubt. I don’t think many grownups expect perfection. When one person goofs up – as will inevitably happen from time to time – the other partner cuts them some slack. Patience and good will beget more of the same in a kind of virtuous circle. I’d go so far as to say that this virtuous circle is a hallmark of a good relationship.

But this spirit of generous forbearance sometimes goes missing even though both people care deeply about each other. When that happens – in my experience, anyway – a lot of the gap between the depth (or even the fact) of one person’s caring, and what the other person actually perceives, comes down to communication. When a person repeatedly sends mixed signals over a sustained period of time, or just assumes that their partner knows they’re loved, it tends to obscure the caring, no matter how real or deep. Mixed messages can communicate indifference, coldness, lack of appreciation, or put-downs – even though affection isn’t dead. Sometimes both parties are equally involved in the communication breakdown; sometimes it's mainly one partner who checks out, leaving the other to wonder what happened. Either way, over the long run a recipient of mixed messages will likely stop defaulting to the assumption that their partner really does care.

At that point, the benefit of the doubt is hard to maintain, and if one partner feels that the other has withdrawn, they may reflexively do the same to protect themselves from further hurt. And this sets in motion the vicious cousin of the virtuous circle. In place of generosity come hurt, anger, alienation, and quarreling about seeming trivialities, often simmering at a low level and only occasionally boiling over. Can’t we all think of couples who’ve been frozen into this zombie-like state for years upon years – people who are actually pretty well matched and could be happy again if only they could find ways to recapture that basic sense of good will?

I’m not suggesting that generosity must be earned, or that it’s a tentative gift that can and should be withdrawn capriciously. I’m saying it can erode over time when communication is cavalier or downright hurtful, or when partners feel taken for granted.

Turning a vicious circle back to a virtuous one does usually require confrontation in order to get back to that place of generosity. And that may involve outright conflict, especially when one partner sees a problem and the other is satisfied with the status quo (or dissatisfied but unable to imagine anything better). I’ve seen that it can be turned around, but it’s hard and it only works if both people, eventually, are willing to talk about what went awry in the first place and work toward avoiding the problem in the future.

Without a willingness to confront those mixed signals – not with conflict as an end in itself, but as the first step toward reclaiming a spirit of generosity – I wonder if my own marriage might have ended up in the ranks of the undead. Instead, it’s in a mostly happy place. Given my druthers, I’d live a life free of conflict, because nothing stresses me more; nothing makes me unhappier, in the short run. Maybe that’s why it took me 40 years to figure out that avoiding conflict would make me even unhappier in the long run. But having finally begun to understand that picking one’s battles doesn’t mean avoiding them entirely, I’m now skeptical of the idea that there’s a disconnect or dichotomy between “conflict” and “generosity.”

But if confrontation stops at the conflict stage, that too is a vicious circle. I think that sometimes, the simple act of both partners clarifying their intentions, stating their intentions out loud instead of assuming that they’re evident to the other – simply saying “yes, I still love you and can’t imagine life without you” – can be the next step in the process. Somehow, one has to move through conflict and toward a real rapprochement. Substituting careful for casual communication is a pretty good start. Maybe that’s screamingly obvious, but if so, it’s much easier to say it than to live it.

And then eventually, there has to be the sort of forgiveness and mutual understanding that lets history become history. That, too, is hard, but it's not impossible, and if you can actually get there, it's so, so worth it. The thing is, forgiveness can't be rushed or short-circuited. Dwelling on the past isn't especially helpful. However - and maybe it's just my bias as a historian - I think that learning from past mistakes in hopes of not repeating them is the only way to keep the virtuous circle spiraling happily skyward.

The Fall Unemployment Forecast, Minus One

Motivational kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Maybe I don't have it quite as good as this LOLcat, but I do have a job I love. For the past several months, though, it hung in the balance as the university awaited Obama's stimulus plan and then the contours of the Ohio state budget. At one point, rumor had it that every last "visiting" and "part-time" regular faculty person would be laid off. That would've included me, too.

Today I heard that my job is safe for next year. I'm overjoyed, albeit in a rather sober key. There's not much to crow about when my county is at 7 percent unemployment and most of the surrounding ones are over 10 percent. I also haven't heard if anyone in my orbit has gotten bad news. The university is making deep cuts, and I'll be amazed if they don't hit any of my friends and colleagues.

While I think I'm pretty good at what I do, I can't claim my brilliance saved my position. I'm not deluded enough to believe academia is a pure meritocracy. My chair is smart and savvy. Our dean has been supportive of our program. Women's and Gender Studies teaches a lot of students on the cheap. All of those factors probably far outweighed my actual sterling qualities as a teacher.

However it happened, I'm so, so grateful not to be joining the ranks of the unemployed. I'd love to celebrate, but the Tiger has a high fever, so I'm not going anywhere tonight. Festivities will consist of a glass of wine and the second season of Weeds on DVD.

Wherever you are, please raise a glass with me.

Foolishness about Smart People and Dating

Smart kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Are smart people romantically impaired? If you believe Alex Benzer's new HuffPost piece, "Why the Smartest People Have the Toughest Time Dating," you'd think that anyone who went to an Ivy League or equivalent college was doomed to watch their genes go extinct. His basic argument is that smart people invest too much time and energy into achievement with the result that their dating and mating skills are at best vestigial, at worst nonexistent.**

I think he's full of crap. I went to two of the schools he mentions. I'll leave grad school out of this, because that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish; the demands of an academic career skew the picture. But going back to my undergrad years at Stanford, virtually everyone I know is partnered. Very, very few people I know from my college years are divorced. (I can actually only think of two examples - a couple from band who were young, neurotic, and doomed from the start, and who filed upon returning from their honeymoon - and a former housemate who was always a free spirit.) I'm willing to use my college friends' low divorce rate as a proxy for happiness in love; it's at least as scientific as Benzer's method, which is to provide no real evidence at all, only assertions about what "smart people" are like.

Now, it's possible that my friends and I killed enough brain cells to collectively reduce our IQs by 30 points, opening the way to luck in love. Maybe being in California for my undergrad years, in the mid-1980s when admissions weren't yet so cutthroat, made my experience radically different from Benzer's time at Harvard. I'm willing to grant that Harvard may be more dysfunctional than my alma maters just by virtue of its mystique, so possibly Benzer's points apply to that much smaller pool. But funny thing: I know a few Harvard grads, too, and they're no more likely than my college friends to be single or unhappily partnered. Besides, someone has to be spawning all of those legacy admissions!

So I think Benzer is just plain wrong. But parts of his argument hold just enough truth to get under my skin, and so I can't resist dissecting it piece by piece, even though it might be, uh, smarter to just ignore, ignore. (His main points are in bold and taken verbatim from his own list.)

1. Smart people spent more time on achievements than on relationships when growing up.

This is one argument that resonated with me. I wasn't achievement-oriented, per se, and I was totally clueless about the college admissions game. But I didn't spend my whole adolescence pining after boys. Most of my energy went into music because I loved it and it often gave me an excuse to skip boring, slow-paced academic classes. And so I spent most of my teenage years with my lips attached to a French horn or my fingers glued to a piano keyboard. Although that didn't stop me from being interested in boys, it did keep some crucial body parts happily busy. Sublimation is not a bad thing when you're a 15-year-old girl; it can keep you from diving deep into sex before you're emotionally ready.

But here's the thing. Just because I wasn't cultivating intense romances doesn't mean I was neglecting relationships. I had plenty of friends, boys and girls alike. Most of them were not precocious daters, either; they played in band and/or they were part of what a high school friend dubbed the "smart and chaste crowd." (That sounds more prissy than it really was; we'd had a few drinks when she said it.) While many of us weren't world-class flirts, we definitely did learn social skills. Who says sex has to be thrown into the mix at a young age in order to learn to relate to a future partner?

It's true that there wasn't much of a dating scene in college. As one friend of mine said, "No one dates at Stanford. We just sleep together." We pioneered the "hookup culture," I suppose, for good or ill. People were busy (as Benzer rightly observes), the campus was isolated from the town by large swaths of land, and most of us didn't have cars. Oddly enough, people did find romantic partners, even without much formal dating and without the elaborate bar culture that dominates social life at the university where I now teach.

2. Smart people feel that they're entitled to love because of their achievements.

This is rank bullshit. I saw plenty of entitlement during my undergrad years. I'd say 99% of it was economic. I knew a handful of rich kids who thought they were above the rules (and a few of them got busted - unsurprisingly - for plagiarism). Maybe a few of them felt entitled to love, since they already believed that Daddy's money could buy anything. More prevalent were kids who weren't rich but figured their cleverness and work ethic predestined them for wealth. It was the height of the Reagan era, after all.

But entitled to love? My college friends were just as unsure about that as any other group of people I've known. If anything, because the dating scene was so rudimentary, most of us wondered how we'd ever find love. We spent many late nights eating ramen and commiserating about our lack of prospects. Almost no one ended up single in the long run, but my friends and I couldn't envision that back in 1983.

3. You don't feel like a fully-realized sexual being, and therefore don't act like one.

Here's where Benzer gets downright retrograde. Just see what it takes to be sexual!

Now you could be absolutely stunning (in which case you're both smart AND pretty and everyone hates you except for me -- call me, like, immediately), but your identity is still bound up in being The Smart One. So maybe you dress frumpy and don't pay a lot of attention to your appearance. Or never bothered to cultivate your sensuality as a woman. Or your sexual aggression as a male.

Attracting a partner is all about the dance of polarity. Energy flows between positive and negative electrodes, anode and cathode, magnetic north and south. Unless you actually convey femininity as a woman or masculinity as a man, you're not going to attract a suitable companion of the opposite sex.

Part of the issue is this: when all of your personal energy is concentrated in the head, it never gets a chance to trickle down to the heart, or, god forbid, the groin. By virtue of being born of the union of male and female, yang and yin, you are a sexual being. Deal with it. Now do what you need to do to perpetuate the race already. Use what mama amoeba gave you.

For starters, if you're not 100% heterosexual, you're apparently SOL and Benzer can't help you. Sorry, kthx bai.

If you're straight, then you're just not trying hard enough to live up to gender stereotypes. Smart girls let themselves go! A boy will never notice you if you wear sweats to class! And smart boys aren't aggressive enough! (How this squares with a sense of sexual entitlement remains a mystery.)

In other words, smart girls had better look hot. Smart boys had better act butch.

We just need to retreat into rigid, clichéd gender roles, in Benzer's scheme, and romantic fulfillment will be ours. There's no place for female sexual initiative in this vision. Nor does he imagine men can be sensual. Heaven forbid you've got any yang mixed with your yin - or vice versa.

I can't help but think that Benzer's ideas have some kinship to that silly pseudo-survey last spring that claimed smart girls have lousy sex. On the surface, he appears to be an equal-opportunity critic of men and women, since he says men need to adjust their habits, too. Dig a little deeper, though, and his views on sexuality are equally sexist. There's nothing new at all about telling women to act more feminine and men to be more aggressive.

4. You're exceptionally talented at getting in the way of your own romantic success.

Sure. Smart people routinely overthink things. That's not limited to love.

But Benzer claims we overthink love and lust to such an extreme that we've tuned out the most basic biological wisdom:

To put it plainly, you are programmed to reproduce. Now quit thinking you're smarter than the 3 billion base pairs in your genome and 4 billion years of evolution. Actually, just stop thinking altogether. Let the program do its work.

Evidence, please?

Or is this just a backdoor way of invoking the most cartoonish principles ev psych - man hunter, woman hunted? (Nostalgia for yin/yang gender stereotypes) + (vague appeals to evolution) = (pop ev psych)!

I'm always skeptical when someone tells me to stop thinking.

5. By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect.

Benzer exhorts us to "loosen up" - to stop expecting to pair off with a partner who's comparably smart. The penalty for not doing so? Celibacy - or exile to Germany's fashion capital!

Do a very thorough search all over the planet and be prepared to move to Duesseldorf.

I didn't actually move to Duesseldorf. Berlin was more fun (especially for a frump: Duesseldorf is way too stylish). It's also where I conveniently met my husband while using a truly revolutionary technique for man-hunting: doing the things that already made me happy. (I met him while standing in line for symphony tickets, but that's another story.)

Benzer has a legitimate point: If you're smart and want intelligence in a partner, you do narrow your potential pool. Sometimes dramatically. It's important to be aware of the trade-offs entailed by high expectations.

What Benzer doesn't mention: Yes, holding out for someone who's a kindred spirit may mean many youthful Saturday nights spent hanging out platonically with pals. In the long run, though, being picky and knowing what you want just might increase the chances of finding a happy match. My Saturday nights are usually still just spent hanging out, now with my husband. Seventeen years after chatting him up in the ticket line, I'm nowhere close to bored with our conversation. Of course that's not due to his intelligence alone - he's kind and funny and a bunch of other good stuff - but I can't imagine being nearly as beguiled if he weren't bright enough to still surprise and challenge and delight me.

**Benzer conflates "smart" with "people who attend 'elite' schools" and I recognize how problematic this is. I had two real dates while at Stanford, and one of them was with a guy who was so dull it hurt. Conversely, oodles of brilliant people go to less fancy-pants schools or drop out altogether. (I married a high-school dropout who eventually earned a Ph.D.) Obviously, there are lots of other forms of intelligence that don't depend on being bookish, as well. So even though this post discusses academically bright high achievers who went to Ivy-ish schools, I don't for a minute think that Benzer is right when it comes to that much larger universe of smart folks, either.