Stubbornly Stylish Scientist

I WANTED to go contra dancing in Boulder tonight, but, as usual, Mother Nature had other plans, and I am thus stuck at home hiding from the snow that didn't come and almost certainly would have had I driven out.  So, instead, I finished off this post.  Be GRATEFUL for your good fortune.

Since late undergrad or so I began what I thought of, in my vainer moments, as a one woman rebellion against the culture of masculinity in the Earth sciences – I wore a skirt every now and then.  Then, it became a hairstyle more elaborate than the braid and/or headband combo I wore daily for the first three years of undergrad.*  Then, a non-binary selection of shoes.  Then, tentative eyeshadow experiments.  Bit by bit, I pushed back against what I perceived as the boundaries of appropriate attire for a true Earth scientist.

*In defense of my fashion choices, it's somewhat challenging to find anything ELSE that will fit under a bike helmet and then survive the removal of said helmet without leaving the wearer looking like the more stereotypical mad scientist. **
**It's very important not to blow the cover, you see.

Eventually in grad school I progressed to near-daily eyeshadow use, and wearing *gasp* dresses to campus on a regular basis.  After a rather nasty and slow-healing wound on my knee made wearing jeans painful for months, the only clothing I could wear that I felt not-embarrassed-in-public-in were skirts and dresses, and now I find I wear jeans maybe once or twice a week, if that.  I will even, on not too infrequent an occasion, wear PINK.*

*More of a rose-pink than, say, bubblegum.  I leave the bubblegum-pink-wearing to my sister, who is much more skilled in the art than I.

What I've come to realize only recently is that I wasn't really rebelling against the dress-code in Earth Sciences.  (Well, okay, maybe a bit.)  I came to realize I was instead rebelling against my own internal definition of what it meant to be feminine.

I place a great deal of my self-worth in my intelligence.  For better or for worse, I've pretty much always been told that I'm smart, and so I've always been loathe to do anything that detracts from my "smartness", or others' perception thereof.  And it seems that somewhere along the line, I decided that "feminine" equalled "stupid".

Ever since I graduated from the EVERYTHING MUST BE PINK phase around late elementary school or so* I developed this knee-jerk instinct against anything even hinting of femininity (with notable exceptions for formal events like church, recitals, or school dances).  My dress code from about middle school on was jeans-and-t-shirt, no skirts, maybe a sweater/hoodie if I was cold.  Pink was to be avoided at all costs.

*And promptly moved on to the EVERYTHING MUST BE YELLOW phase, followed by the EVERYTHING MUST BE GREEN phase.

Back in my pink phase I also went through a phase for each successive Disney princess – hard.  Think Barbie-doll Snow White cake, taking mandatory naps holding a rose to my chest a la Sleeping Beauty, a hand-sewn Belle costume made by my mother that was a verifiable work of art, a three-tier Cinderella birthday cake....*  I had it bad.  Fast-forward back to the present, and enter the current Disney princess debate.  I never quite lost my love of the Princesses, my repressed feminine side making me squirm just a bit when I saw the anti-pink tirades, the YouTube videos trumpeting the subversive messages revealed in the Princesses' characters.**

*I should also add that this occurred during the first 8 years of my life when I was an only child with an extremely clever and talented mother who had, it must be emphasized, ONE child...

** Which I'm in complete agreement with as far as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are concerned.  I mean, seriously, you meet the guy ONCE and you're in love, and then all you do is fall asleep for a while??  Now, Belle, on the other hand.... Stands up to bullies and is an incurable bookworm who follows her passion despite her peers' intolerance... Now THERE'S a role model.  

When I first saw the Disneyfied real-life heroines by artist David Trumble and his commentary on his motivations (Why should fictional heroines all look the same when real ones don't), I simply filed it away under "Anti-Disney" stuff with the usual flag of "vague unease and annoyance", as, generally, I did agree with the artist's point.  Like a good feminist, I viewed the sparkles and swirly dresses with the proper scorn every time the article popped up on my Facebook newsfeed, even though deep down I was secretly envious of Marie Curie's sweeping ball gown of science*.

*Which would probably be INCREDIBLY impractical in an actual lab

Some months later, I ran across this article.  I'd highly recommend reading the actual article, but in case (like me) you're too lazy to follow every link included in a blog, here's the quote that really got me:

"As I've noted before, the discomfort with princesses often seems to be a discomfort with those things considered feminine—frilly clothes, romance, sparkles, kittens, and sunshine. Making Gloria Steinem a princess is supposed to be silly and artificial because traditional femininity is silly and artificial.

But, as it turns out, making Gloria Steinem a princess is not silly and artificial. Instead, it is awesome. Which suggests, first of all, that femininity is, or can be, awesome."

Hang on a minute, what?  It's okay to be feminine?  It's awesome to be feminine?? Giving into some bits of femininity every now and then doesn't mean sacrificing my credibility as a scientist?  Well, heck.

So.....maybe my internal equation of feminine=stupid wasn't just coming from me.  I mean, it's the cheerleader stereotype, right?  Cheerleader is pretty, cheerleader is feminine, cheerleader is thus always stupid.....except I had a cheerleader in both of my AP Spanish classes.  School dances are stupid, vapid, vain, feminine affairs.... except I learned most of my organizational and people skills from helping organize groups of friends to go, plus I began my love affair with data by building the spreadsheets I used to help organize the events.

Why does it seem like a woman has be become masculine in order to become smart?  That beauty and brains are mutually exclusive?

Now, I realize when I discuss beauty I'm running the risk of opening a whole other can of worms with respect to the issues women face in the world, because of course the immense social pressure for women to be beautiful is generally regarded as Not A Good Thing.  Let me take this opportunity to say unequivocally that I'm not advocating that all women should be feminine.  I want women to could be feminine – if they want to be.

I'm not arguing that women HAVE to dress up pretty, I'm arguing that we need a world where the perception of a woman's intelligence is not dependent on whether she's wearing a dress or hiking pants, high heels or hiking boots.  I demand the right to be ALL the things!  Just as many in my mother's generation fought for the right for women to be masculine, I want it to be okay for them to be feminine, too.  We need a world where the idea of a female scientist a) exists (I'm looking at YOU, Hollywood) and b) can look like this or this or this or this or this.  There's so much talk of how stereotypes about women hold women back, that I wonder if this stereotype, feminine = stupid, isn't another one we should be trying to away with.  We need more sparkly scientists.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go do some hair physics.