Category: Writing

So apparently Business Insider thought that they would do the world a solid and highlight the fact that scientists can be attractive, sexy people, too. It seems the idea that there can be more to being a scientist than a messy-haired, lab-coat-wearing dweeb is not only newsworthy, but list-worthy.

Now, on the one hand, in a world where the People’s Sexiest list generates dialog for weeks, I can see why someone would think that the same should be done for scientists. And the other hand really appreciates the fact that the list was split 50/50, male and female. In the past, a list like this would have been invariably dominated by women; equal opportunity oogling FTW.

But the gripping hand. Oh, that gripping hand.

Business Insider is trying to cast this list of sexy scientists as some sort of outreach list – people who are sexy, who make science sexy. The problem is, it’s alienating as fuck. Suddenly, there’s one more area of life to be judged by looks rather than anything else, and for many people, especially many women, science has been a refuge where brains are what matter (or at least what matter first). Unlike many areas of life, in science, what you can do matters more than how you look.

Speaking from experience, starting at a young age, girls are pressured to conform to social norms about weight and appearance. I remember this vividly because I was always tall for my age, I am a natural blonde, and I hit menarche and puberty years before most of my classmates.“Amazon” was the politer name I was called. “Bazoonga Boobs” was much less polite, and sadly more common. I don’t recommend hitting bra size DD when you’re 12. It was, in a word, hell. “You could be so pretty if” coupled with being different than my peers; kids are kids and they were vicious and cruel. My refuge, the place where what I looked like didn’t matter, was the science and computer lab, where my brain could run wild and free and I was judged based on how I thought and nothing else. I was judged based on what I could control, because I could learn the scientific method, I could research and I could form hypotheses; I could experiment and importantly, I could stretch my mind in a zone where my height just meant I could reach the top shelf of chemicals, where all that mattered about my hair was that it was pulled back, and what I wore and even what my body looked like was hidden by a white lab coat.

And I can imagine how I would have felt, at 12 years of age, had I come across a list like this, because I still feel twinges of it now, regardless of largely having shaken off cultural conditioning over the years. The women are so pretty, so successful, (so much younger!). Something I can never be. So why bother? Why bother at all, when brain is being judged in conjunction with body against an ideal I could only achieve through surgery (and how nice for people commenting on the Business Insider piece to note that’s an option).

We already know that low self-esteem negatively harms teen girls, and we’re starting to see more acknowledgement of how this damages teen boys, as well. Science, at least for the people I associated with (and still do associate with) was a refuge from the pressures and a place where our self-esteem could flourish, and we could be proud of ourselves for our achievements, not our ability to be the culturally-sanctioned right shape and size for our gender.

While I believe that Business Insider had at least some decent motive, in attempting to show that scientists can be “all kinds of people,” by only focusing on the exact opposite of the “dweeb scientist” image, the article only serves to spread the toxic notion that beauty is an important criteria for evaluating a person.

As Jacquelyn Gill ”so succinctly noted on Twitter, “Highlighting “sexy” scientists doesn’t make science more accessible, interesting or relevant. It [merely] fetishizes some scientists as curiosity.”

I was expressing my general frustration with myself on Twitter this morning, noting that I wished I could take a master class in pitching from one of the writers/editors that I quite admire and like. One of them, Bora Zivkovic, picked up the conversation and talked about writing a post on what he’s looking for at the SciAm Guest Blogs, which is admittedly a different beast than pitching to magazines (let alone paid sources). He also linked me to The Open Notebook, which is a URL that Leigh Turner actually passed on a while back — something I both acknowledged on Twitter and then joked about, saying that I need to just carve out some time to fail.

That concept, though, struck me.Obviously, as I’m now nattering on about it here. Failure isn’t really something we celebrate, or even much encourage in society — and within both academia and writing, failure might as well be a four letter word. Maybe I feel this more acutely due to a variety of pressures, including frequently being labeled “one of the smart kids who’ll figure it out on her own” and the pervasive sense of impostor syndromeI know, I know, post-SciO13 post coming. stemming from the fact that I managed to fall into semi-professional writing without having to learn the ropes. But a lot of the process is opaque to me — while I seem decent at the first steps of networking, moving beyond that to the selling self point? No clue. (And there is some irony here, in that I’m really very good at connecting other people together. Perhaps I should ditch aspirations of writing and instead become an agent.) And more than the process being opaque, I’m not even sure who to ask to make it less — and the advice I have received has been quite similar to school: “oh you’re smart, you’ll figure it out.”

We could quibble all day over the first statement, so won’t — but there is pressure within the second half, the “you’ll figure it out.” Why? In some ways, it feels like it takes away the safety net of failure. The presumption — at least how I read it — is that this thing I’m wondering about, be it pitching or anything else, is so simple that I should have no problems figuring it out, and therefore I cannot fail. Since I’m not a surgeon or in some other lives-depend-on-me profession, the notion of not being able to fail is rather silly, but the idea that I cannot is, in itself, paralyzing.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve encountered it, and I’ve heard from friends in the humanities, social and “hard” sciences who’ve had the same experience. Their PI or advisor tells them to take care of X, it’s so simple — one friend was told that a chemistry lab was so simple a monkey could do it. And he sat in the lab for several days, unable to decipher what he needed to do, but terrified to ask for help because he should be smarter than a monkey.

I wonder what we’re losing, by not giving ourselves — especially those of us just starting out — the chance to fail, and learn from those failures? I remember that being a common mantra from my mother when I was growing up: try. If you don’t succeed, try again. Learn from your mistakes. At some point, though, the idea of learning from mistakes dropped away and was replaced with the idea that there simply cannot be mistakes.

One of the most important concepts in Buddhism is that of beginner’s mind, perhaps best summed up by the quote that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. This concept basically says that you should always remain open to the world, eager and without preconceptions, as a novice would be, rather than live within the world of expectations and boundaries that come when you are an expert. Children are the best examples of beginner’s mind, because they explore the world with an openness and creativity that isn’t bound up in fear of failure or acknowledgement of limitations.

My initial reply to Bora, that I just need to carve out some time to fail, was a joke, but the more I think about it the more I realize that it’s true. I need to carve out that time to try new things, and to fail and be rejected, to apply beginner’s mind beyond the meditation cushion and give myself permission to not be perfect on the first try, but instead learn from those experiences, dust myself off, and try (try) again.