Taki's Mag

Continuing its blanket coverage of the problems of people who don’t really have problems, The New York Times turns from the plight of female Harvard Business School students to the tribulation of female Yale physics majors.

In “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?,” Eileen Pollack, head of the creative writing MFA program at the U. of Michigan, devotes 8,000 words to the churning passions that accompanied her return to Yale, where she was a physics major in the mid-1970s before losing all interest in science and math. Why, she cries out, did society not persuade her to pursue “the prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income” that come with attending grad school in astrophysics?

Why?

Together, these Harvard and Yale articles make informative reading because they show how protean feminist analysis has become. Feminism rationalizes a culture of complaint no matter how contradictory the gripes.

For example, the Harvard article recounted a lesbian dean’s struggle to prevent heterosexual women students from coming to class on Halloween dressed up in “sexy pirate costumes.” In contrast, the Yale tale told by Ms. Pollack, a middle-aged girly girl with an ex-husband and a son, protests how our culture discourages women scientists from wearing sexy clothes such as fishnet stockings in the laboratory.

Similarly, while the HBS women are oppressed by a lack of time to finish their homework because future Jack Donaghys keep asking them out on exciting dates, the Yale women in STEM majors (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) are oppressed by a lack of exciting beaus because they find the boys in their classes to be immature Sheldon Coopers.

Nationally, female students have come to comprise a majority in almost all venues of higher education, except the most exclusive. Even the student body of mighty Yale Law School, alma mater of two of the last seven presidents, is now 49.3 percent women.

Among the few remaining academic institutions where men outnumber women are elite MBA schools such as Harvard’s and elite STEM programs such as Yale’s. So they receive an inordinate amount of attention because a male majority facilitates traditional feminist critiques of men as the suffocating mainstream. (Of course, there are also unmentioned advantages to being in the minority sex. For example, would dowdy Hillary Rodham have snagged handsome Bill Clinton if the gender ratio at Yale Law School four decades ago had been more equal?)

To explore the pain of being a young woman surrounded by highly intelligent young men, Pollack quickly found 80 Yale coeds who wanted to talk about their searing emotions. The airing of grievances included:

“The boys in my group don’t take anything I say seriously,” one astrophysics major complained. “I hate to be aggressive. Is that what it takes?...Will I have to be this aggressive in graduate school? For the rest of my life?”

Good question.

Pollack recalls one reason she quit science:

I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine.

Three and a half decades later, a grad student complains to her “about men not taking you seriously because you dress like a girl.”

Fortunately, there is hope abroad:

[Professor Meg] Urry told me that at the space telescope institute where she used to work, the women from Italy and France “dress very well, what Americans would call revealing. You’ll see a Frenchwoman in a short skirt and fishnets; that’s normal for them.”

And then there’s the issue of dating:

Another said she disliked when she and her sister went out to a club and her sister introduced her as an astrophysics major. “I kick her under the table. I hate when people in a bar or at a party find out I’m majoring in physics. The minute they find out, I can see the guys turn away.” Yet another went on about how even at Yale the men didn’t want to date a physics major, and how she was worried she’d go through four years there without a date.

Of course, Yale STEM coeds don’t have to go to dance clubs to meet men—there are always a surplus of unattached males right across the lab bench.

But who wants to date them?

You may have assumed that the immense ratings of the television comedy about Caltech physicists, The Big Bang Theory, signals a new era of tolerance and even popularity for Nerd Americans.

Wrong. Pollack shudders:

“The Big Bang Theory” is a sitcom, of course, and therefore every character is a caricature, but what remotely normal young person would want to enter a field populated by misfits like Sheldon, Howard and Raj?…According to the study’s authors, native-born American students of both sexes steer clear of math clubs and competitions because “only Asians and nerds” would voluntarily do math.

Pollack issues a ringing call for sexier scientists:

Most of all, we need to make sure that women — and men — don’t grow up in a society in which they absorb images of scientists as geeky male misfits.

In a climactic scene, the creative writer confronts her former math professor, whom she has never forgotten nor forgiven for not mentioning to her that she should go on to grad school. Frustratingly, the abstracted mathematician’s memories of their academic relationship turn out to be much less vivid than hers—assuming he remembers much of anything about her, which appears uncertain. Not that it occurs to Pollack to ask: How could anyone forget something so laden with profound emotions?

Nor does it strike Pollack that her professors might have done her a favor by perhaps surmising that she wouldn’t have been happy pursuing a career of inhuman abstraction. As is appropriate for a professor of creative writing, Pollack is a bit of a drama queen. In an interview promoting her last novel, she used the word “passion” 11 times in just 90 words:

“I’m very interested in passion in all its forms: political passion, religious passion, and romantic passion, and the way in which passion is, on the one hand, something that is devoutly to be wished—a life without passion would just, I think, be very dull, and you wouldn’t know what to do with yourself, because a passion determines what you do with your life,” said Pollack. “We think of political passion as a good thing, or religious passion, and surely passion for another person. But passion is also very destructive.”

After all this, you may be wondering whether feminism’s principles logically demand a pro- or anti-sexy-pirate-costume stance. But that just shows you are missing the point. The notion that principles should apply to everyone is so Second Millennium. We’re beyond all that categorical imperative stuff now.

Contemporary feminism is quite simple:

• If men are at fault for you not being able to do whatever it is you want to do, blame men.

• But if women are at fault, blame society or American culture or the media or institutional sexism or whatever.

How many will dare call you on your verbal sleight of hand? Who will even notice? And after a while, you won’t notice it, either.

 

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