Anthropomorphism Gone Wild

One of my pet hates? Cartoon animals with breasts (I'm opening myself up for some horrendous Google searches, aren't I?).

Let's take Madagascar III as an example. All the animals in the first two iterations are relatively animal-like (other than the, you know, part where they can talk). Then we get to the third film and a love interest for Alex the Lion is introduced - a leopard called Gia.

Here's how I imagine the animators discussing how to draw Gia.

Animator 1: So she has to be, like, sexy. The viewer has to want to bang her or they won't believe the relationship between Gia and Alex.
Animator 2: Dude, you want to have sex with a big cat? That's got to be kind of dangerous.
Animator 1: Oh come on, don't try to tell me you didn't have a crush on Nala from the Lion King. That bit where she looks at him all sexily with those big eyes? [Mimes a lewd act]
Animator 2: Jesus, what have we become? [Drinks coffee laced with whiskey]
Animator 3: OK, so let's give her long eyelashes. Nothing says girl leopard like mascara.
Animator 1: Yes! And we can make her Italian. That accent...
Animator 3: [Leaps up from chair with fist thrust in air] And a little, tiny waist and BOOBIES!
Animator 2: Wait, what? Isn't that a bit weird?
Animators 1 and 3: Shut up, it will be hot.
Animator 2: [Stabs self in brain with pencil]

It's just...I mean, yeah, we need to humanise cartoon animals to a degree otherwise we'd just have Springwatch the Movie. But why always with the boobs?

The only thing worse has to be when characters based on non-mammalian animals are given the same hourglass figure to designate them as an appropriate love interest. Antz, a Bugs Life and, my personal favourite, Happy Feet. A penguin with breasts is a disturbing, disturbing thing.

Well at least mice and rabbits are mammals, I suppose...

But this? Yeah, this is odd.

[Insert witty breast-related pun here]

Kate Middleton’s boobs are everywhere, both in the flesh and spirit. That sounds like the plot of a horror film in itself (“Nooooo, we’re surrounded, I’m suffocating!”). But what I really want to bring to your attention is how boobs are somehow capable of turning normal, rational people into adipose-for-brains morons. Not coming to a cinema near you - Attack of the Insidious Mind-Control Mammaries.

What is this post all about?, I here you ask. To answer that question, let’s go back more than fifteen years to when Kat (that’s me, hi everyone!) was an immature, average-looking, shy/slightly weird fourteen-year-old. Six months later, young Kat looked and acted pretty much the same apart from two not-so-small changes. And, with the materialisation of those breasts, there came a complete annihilation of teenage Kat’s faith in humanity.

Men old enough to be her father asking her out and getting angry when she politely declined, van-drivers slowing down to shout suggestions of what they wanted to do to her breasts, every tenth car holding down their horns as they passed her, wolf-whistles, strangers staring at her chest while licking their lips or nudging their mates, men ‘accidentally’ touching her on the train. Every day, all the time, until it gradually tailed off when she was around 22.

Friends were jealous, her mother answered her unease with “you should be flattered!”, other women gave her dirty looks when she inspired explicit requests from men. And it wasn't sexual harassment or, on the occasions when their hands slipped or they tripped or whatever, sexual assault. Those things were dark and menacing, confined to shadowy alleyways and drunk girls stumbling alone out of seedy bars in the early hours. Not something constant and blazon and backlit by bright daylight.

Now here's where I attempt to make my point in an oh-so-clever way. Here's a quick test: reading the above, did you think a) wow, that's shitty, b) stop exaggerating, that's ridiculous, or c) wow, it must be hard being soooo pretty. Stop boasting and get over yourself?

See my big problem isn't really with the men who thought nothing of propositioning the teenage me. What makes me unbelievably sad is all the nice, reasonable, respectful people who roll their eyes when I try to explain that there's something very wrong with society's attitudes to women. We are constantly bombarded with images of female sexual availability - advertising, music videos, daily tabloids that celebrate male achievements and female mammaries. The message is that it's OK to ogle women's bodies in public, that secretly photographing celebrities without their clothes is something that they kind of asked for when they became famous, that treating women like sexual objects when they clearly don't want to be treated that way is perfectly fine.

"So don't read The Sun," people say, failing to realise that even they have come to accept the objectification of women as not a big deal. The kind of harassment I experienced has been normalised to the point that people judge me as arrogant or boasting or, at best, overly-dramatic or a boring feminist when I try to talk about it.

I look around my train and try to work out which of the normal, polite suited-up business men, were I still a teenager, would be the ones to lose their self-control and start aggressively hitting on me. And which of the better behaved men and women would think I'd somehow asked to be harassed or would just accept it as normal.

Trying to explain to a non-believer how the over-sexualisation of women in the media harms us all is on a par with those little photos of rotten internal organs on cigarette packets. Smokers ignore the pictures, non-smokers such as myself get all worked up about all the passive smoke we may once have inhaled back when it was acceptable for people to exhale toxic chemicals on their friends. The people who need to be convinced aren’t even listening.

But when you tell me that it is natural for men to want to look at breasts, or 'jokingly' ask why I am such a man-hating feminist who wants to ban sex, or inform me that underwear adverts objectify men and it is no different, or roll your eyes and just change the subject, to me it sounds like you're basically saying that you don't think I have any reason to be upset and that I should just 'take the compliment'. That you think it's fine for certain men to treat a woman's breasts as if they are public property - whether they're a fifteen-year-old girl or the future queen.

The image at the top is borrowed from the awesome Indexed. Go check her other charts and stuff, they are very cool.

Natural isn't always harmless, especially if you are a rhino

At this time of year, the Kruger National Park in South Africa reaches temperatures of up to 38 degrees Celsius. This has nothing to do with the subject of this post, but I thought I would use it to illustrate one of my newly recognised great discoveries of the 20th century—in-car air-conditioning. It’s a pretty tenuous link to what I really want to talk about, but the invention of modern air-conditioning occurred in 1902 in Buffalo, New York (thanks to a guy called Willis Haviland Carrier) and it so happens that, while in the Kruger Park, our awesomely air-conditioned 4x4 was charged by a slightly over-exuberant buffalo. Close-up, buffalo are kind of scary.

So a safari in the Kruger tends to involve a lot of driving around, peering through binoculars at what could be an animal but, more often than not, proves to be a large rock. Along the way, it is possible to drop at off a number of rest stops for a deeply unpleasant burger and to look at maps of the park on which other visitors have stuck magnetic stickers indicating the positions in which various animals have been spotted. But it turns out that all the stickers for rhinos have been removed and replaced with a little sign saying that, for conservation reasons, the sightings of rhinos are no longer reported. This kind of sucks.

The Kruger National Park is home to around 10,000 white rhinos (see photo above taken from the confort of our air-conditioned 4x4) as well as about 500 black rhinos—a critically endangered species of which there are estimated to be around 3,500 left in the wild. And the main reason rhinos are so endangered? Because people keep poaching them for their horns, which are a key ingredient in Chinese herbal medicine. Just last year, something like 250 rhino were killed in the Kruger National Park. And, at the same time that we were in South Africa, there was a candlelit demonstration outside the Chinese embassy by a group asking the Chinese government to condemn the use of rhino horn in traditional medicine in an effort to stop this barbaric slaughter of animals. 

Now I’m all for preserving cultural traditions, but seriously? Since when is there any scientific evidence that powdered rhino horn is any use in treating fevers and convulsions, conditions for which it is prescribed? And do you know how your ailments are often diagnosed by a Chinese Medicine practitioner? By looking at your tongue. Yes, my tongue is one of my favourite bodily appendages, as evidenced by the multitude of delicious foods I partook in while visiting South Africa (buffalo included). But do I believe that it is some kind of medical window into my health status? Um, no. Based on self-inflicted internet-based Chinese tongue diagnosis, I currently have a Yin deficiency (which can be treated with rhino horn) and something known as ‘Damp heat’. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds troubling.   

Something that infuriates me is the on-going trendiness in the Western world for embracing herbal remedies. Here’s the thing—if such remedies were scientifically proven to work, they would be what us scientists like to call ‘prescription drugs’. Otherwise, they are concoctions of herbs and who-knows-what-else mixed up based on unsupported assumptions about how the body and disease works. I couldn’t find any clinical trial which conclusively demonstrated that Chinese herbal therapy has any positive effect. Something there is proof of, though? Arsenic, lead and mercury poisoning as a result of these herbal remedies. Just because it is 'natural' doesn’t mean it isn’t going to kill you.

That’s not to say that some Chinese herbal medicines don’t work. The thing is, how are we meant to know if it remains unregulated and untested? All I know is I am not putting anything in my mouth that has been prescribed as a result of some doctor poking my tongue and requires a rare animal such as the black rhino to be poached to the brink of extinction to provide supposed ‘medicines’.

Not born this way, or why I think Lady Gaga is underselling the awesomeness of the human race

There’s a lot in the news at the moment about a little boy who has been diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder and is now living as a girl. I can’t quite decide how I feel about this. Part of me thinks it is awesome that his parents and teachers are being so supportive—god knows we could do with a bit more understanding when it comes to adults who identify with the opposite gender to the one their chromosomes dictate. But there’s another part of me that is: a) hugely disturbed about what the parents’ motives are in plastering this five-year-old all over the newspapers and internet, and b) worried that too much emphasis is put on a person being either ‘male’ or ‘female’, especially at such a young age.

Despite what certain media reports might tell you, there is no such thing as a ‘male brain’ or a ‘female brain’. The truth is, no one really knows how our minds decide to associate with one gender or the other—is it physical, or chemical, or psychological, or a mixture of all three? Our entire personality certainly isn’t a product of our genes, so why are we so fixated with this idea that we are born a certain, fixed way when it comes to gender identity? Most people would be furious to be told that their upbringing and experiences have had no effect on their personalities—of course we don’t arrive on Earth with all our views and personality quirks preformed. Yet, when it comes to complicated and controversial topics such as gender identity, many seem determined to relinquish all control over something so integral to who we are as a person. Of course there might be a biological or chemical cause(s) for Gender Identity Disorder–but can we honestly say cultural gender definitions play no role? 

I think my big problem comes down to society’s definitions of what makes a girl and what makes a boy, as if the two are set in stone. You don’t like playing with dolls? Yeah, you’re male. You like talking to people and are great at empathy? Ohhh, such a girl. It’s ridiculous. Especially when there is no evidence that traits such as these are intrinsically ‘male’ or ‘female’. Whenever there is a perfectly reasonable scientific study into the physical characteristics of the brains of men and women (some brain disorders have much higher rates in a particular sex, meaning we can’t ignore these differences), certain non-scientists insist on using the data to make sweeping generalisations about the sexes that reinforce stereotypes and are simply not backed up by the science. In reality, many of these supposed scientifically–supported gender differences are completely mythical.

Let’s start with the old favourite ‘brains develop differently in girls and boys’. A school in Florida is not unique in its support of single sex schooling, and backed up their policy with:

‘‘In girls, the language areas of the brain develop before the areas used for spatial relations and for geometry. In boys, it’s the other way around.’’ and ‘‘In girls, emotion is processed in the same area of the brain that processes language. So, it’s easy for most girls to talk about their emotions. In boys, the brain regions involved in talking are separate from the regions involved in feeling.’’

Is there any real scientific evidence for this? Nope. Turns out the early studies that led to this hypothesis have not been backed up by more detailed analyses. Yet so many people persist with the idea that ‘boys are better at maths, girls are better at emotions’ as if it is a known fact—and this ‘fact’ has made it’s way into policies that effect how kids are educated! And all that ‘girls develop faster than boys’? Yeah, that’s not backed up by the evidence either. Despite widespread beliefs, neuroscientists do not know of any distinct ‘male’ or ‘female’ circuits that can explain differences in behaviour between the sexes.

So basically studies into brain structure have yet to identify any specific difference between the brains of the two sexes that leads to a specific difference in behaviour. Yet boys and girls do behave differently if we take an average over an entire population. (And, yes, I realise averages are rubbish when it comes to making judgements on an individual level). Let’s use one of the most obvious and earliest differences as an example—appreciation of the colour pink. Was I to stick all Britain’s little girls into one blender and all the boys into another, the former mixture would average out at a pink colour with a sprinkling of hearts and ponies, and the latter would be camouflage with a shot of train fuel and maybe a gun poking out the top.

If there is no proof for the existence of a defined, biologically male or female brain at birth, how do we explain the differing colours of our average-child-smoothies? There's always the issue of what hormones we are exposed to in the womb or after birth, but could it also be that sex differences are shaped by our gender-differentiated experiences? Perhaps small differences in preferences become amplified over time as society, either deliberately or not, reinforces traditional gender stereotypes (Yay, my little boy kicked a ball—sports, sports, sports! Oh, he tried on my high heels? Yeah, let’s just ignore that). How much of our gender identity is truly hardwired into our brains from birth and how much is culturally created?

This is why I have a problem with the little boy diagnosed as ‘a girl trapped in a boy’s body’ that I mentioned at the start of this rambling monologue. By trying their best to define him as a ‘girl’ rather than as an individual, the parents and school are doing the exact same thing that they were trying to avoid—attempting to fit him into a gender-shaped box which, in reality, few people truly belong in. In the end, my own opinion does come down on the side of those trying to support this child (but not with the asshats using her to make money), but I am concerned that they are swapping one rigid set of gender rules for another. There's a lot more to being a woman than occasionally wanting to be a princess and surely a five-year-old has a long way to go before they can be accurately pigeon-holed, if at all.

In my perfect world, children would be allowed to experiment without anyone making any judgements or diagnoses (why do we need a medical term to make it acceptable for a small child to play around with wearing a dress, or growing their hair long?). That way, when they were mature enough, they would be free to make a balanced and personal decision on who they want to be and how they can best fit in with the rest of the world, including with our culturally defined ideals of gender.

Understanding how differences between the sexes emerge has the potential to tell us so much about the nature-nurture interaction, and could help us understand why some people associate so strongly with the opposite sex. But, unfortunately, it is open to careless interpretation by the media and public, who seem determined to use it to reinforce the gap between men and women rather than to tell us more about what shapes each of us a person. 

Further reading:
This is a really interesting article on neurological sex differences pulished in Cell by the author of Pink brain, blue brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It, and some feminist perspectives on Sex and gender and trans issues.

Mars needs moms (and not scientists)

I’ve never, ever seen anything quite like the film 'Mars Needs Moms'. Maybe I should have known in advance that  a Disney animation was unlikely to do a good job of portraying mothers in a realistic manner (their mother-prototype tends to be of the dead variety). But I was surprised by just how anti-feminist this film aimed at kids proved to be. Like, crazy anti-feminist! And also not particularly supportive of non-traditional family units.

The film’s version of Mars is run by a bunch of unfeeling female Martians, overseen by a shrewish, man-hating supervisor. The women are brilliant soldiers and engineers and have become so preoccupied with their careers that they have lost the ability to mother. With no space in their icy Martian hearts for maternal instinct, the aliens are forced to steal Earth moms to discipline their offspring. For me, this felt far too close to comfort to the real-life dilemna faced by many working mums—does leaving your kids at home while you nurture your career make you a terrible person? Is it really possible to be a good parent and hold down a successfull job?

As the evil Martian leader says, "We do not have time to raise hatchlings. And the males - haaaa haaa - they never helped. Always dancing and playing. That is why we must throw them away." And that's exactly what the women do—they throw all male babies in the trash, where they are raised on underground rubbish heaps by long-haired savages who could have been plucked straight out of Dances with Wolves. ‘Hairy Tribe guys’ as one character calls them.

The intended audience for this film is unlikely to read anything into the plot—I doubt they're going to rush out of the cinema believing that striving for gender equality will lead us down a slippery slope which is going to result in women losing their mumminess and men being chucked onto the trash heap. I don't know if this subtext was even deliberate on the part of the film makers. I'd like to think it was accidental. But children are already surrounded by enough harmful messages about the place of women in the world for Disney to add another to the mix.

And the resolution at the end of the film was positively icky. Turns out, the only good way to raise a kid needs a mommy and a daddy. Gay couples or single-parents, anyone? The film may have been attempting to show that kids do best when raised by a loving family in which the men and women can play an equal part, but it failed to follow this through. The main character’s human father was absent on a business trip for the whole film and it seemed that the whole caring, pastoral parental role was solely fulfilled by the mom. This wasn't dealt with in any way, or even mentioned in a negative manner. My problem with this is that today, even in a supposedly equal society, women are often still shouldered with the majority of childcare responsibilities. While I’ll admit it isn’t totally acceptable for a man to work all hours and miss out on raising his kids, it is a damn sight better-tolerated than when a woman does the same! We don't need a film to reinforce this old-fashioned attitude by portraying working mothers in a solely negative light while depicting stay-at-home mums as selfless, loving characters.

As a woman who values her career, I find it hard to reconcile my own ambitions with my potential future foray into parenthood. I rarely see women reach the top positions in science—a quick look around my department and nearly all of the principle investigators are men. The few female professors I have encountered have been widely referred to as ‘ball-busters’ and various other derogatory terms for an ambitious woman. Is it really the case that successful women have to be willing to walk over their peers to succeed? Or maybe there’s a bit of jealousy and unease triggered by a woman doing something that the majority of their sex fails to achieve.

So is the lack of women in the highest positions in science because it proves too difficult for them to balance family-life with having kids? It doesn’t appear to hinder men. So what’s the difference? I’ve been personally told enough times that mums should be at home with the baby, as if planning to have a career as well as a family makes me selfish. Staying at home with your kids is great if that’s what you want to do but it’s not for everyone. I personally believe a working mum can make up for less time at home by providing their children with a positive, female role-model. And I believe there are so few women in top positions that we should be celebrating any move towards equality instead of demonising the women who strive to reach the pinnacles of their chosen careers.

The media’s portrayal of women does nothing to help. Women are often reduced to sexualised pieces of meat or man-nagging bats, or elevated to the unattainable position of saintly mummy. What ever happened to judging a person based on their worth as an individual? Expecting women to conform to an unrealistic ideal of motherhood and demonising her when she fails does children no favours. It doesn’t promote family values and provide children with a nourishing loving environment, it teaches them that a mom is not an individual but a thing. It says that attempting to live your life the best way you know how is only acceptable if that path conforms to an old-fashioned version of a family in which a woman loses all identity upon having children.

Which is why films like Mars Needs Moms are bad. Anything with a message that makes assumptions about an entire gender surely can’t be teaching kids a good lesson?

Thirteen things about doing a science PhD...

...that I wish I could tell my younger self:

1. It’s not going to be easy or, at least, it won’t feel easy. At some point, you’re probably going to start doubting everything about yourself, from your ability to generate high-quality data to whether that old lady on the bus moved seats because the stench of E. coli DH5a has somehow impregnated itself into your very soul. Of course, make it to post-doc status and you’ll look back on your PhD days with a mixture of nostalgia and nausea—how could you not have realised back then that pretty much everyone passes? I suppose it is a kind of rite of passage. Like the Satere-Mawe Tribe of the Amazon who endure the agonizing stings of hundreds of bullet ants to prove themselves men. Awesome.

2. Be prepared for failure. Things don’t always work in science. Even when you go it right. Don’t take it personally. Instead, add the phrase ‘optimising the procedure’ to your dictionary and whip it out any time someone asks why you have no results.

3. Don’t expect to know everything straight away. And it’s alright to admit that. By the end of the PhD, your little brain is going to be so full of esoteric information that it may have purged large portions of your childhood from your memory. But you can’t miss something you don’t even remember.

4. Take responsibility for your mistakes, and don’t try to come up with explanations until you know enough to not look like a twit. Occam’s razor—the simplest answer is usually the correct one. If your culture is contaminated, you’ve probably got your mucky little fingers too close to it. The autoclave is not the problem—it works for everyone else. If your digests haven’t worked, I can bet it’s because you’ve forgotten to add an enzyme. It’s highly unlikely that the air-conditioning is causing temperature fluctuations that set up convectional currents within the tube thus preventing access to the enzyme’s active site. Own your mistakes and then deal with them. No one else wants to sit through an hour-long lab meeting in which you describe how DNA from the air has floated into your ligation and caused mutations. Learn to do it right before you decide Science is the one who's wrong.

5. Don’t cry in the lab. How I love undergraduate project time. It always feels like a lottery—what if we get that student. Not the one who uses the last Miniprep column without ordering a new kit, or who leaves all the antibodies on their bench for several weeks. Or even the one who doesn’t actually turn up to the lab. I mean the student who (brace yourself) cries when their experiments fail. Scientists are not always known for their interpersonal skills so we have absolutely no idea how to react to a sobbing undergraduate who has just accidentally murdered ten billion bacteria by adding formaldehyde instead of glycerol to their culture. Once you get to PhD level, it’s time to get really good at learning to fix your own mistakes—the post-docs don’t need to know and we certainly don’t need to console you and tell you it’s all going to be OK. It’s not.

6. You’re not an undergraduate anymore so don’t act like one. That ‘I’m still a student’ safety net is great, don’t get me wrong. But now is the time to take responsibility for your own work and start acting like this is a real job. That means turning up on time when you need someone to help you, solving your own problems, and coming up with your own ideas. Asking lots of questions is one thing but you need to ask yourself if they generally take the form of: "I did [insert something dumb here] to my experiment, will it still work?" This is basically asking for reassurance in the same way that a freshly xmas-fattened person asks if they have put on weight: it's not something a co-worker wants to discuss with you and you don't want the real answer anyway. Just do it again. This brings me on to…

7. A post-doc is not your mother. Post-docs have their own jobs to do and supervising students in the lab is not top of their priorities. If you can’t find something in the freezer, what makes you think they will have any more luck? OK, yes, they will probably find it because they’ll do this amazing thing known as ‘looking properly’. Lost your lab book? Same answer. Expecting someone else to drop everything to do something for you that you could do yourself is kind of crappy.

8. If you think all your work is brilliant, it probably isn’t. Self-criticism is the best skill you can learn. No one likes an arrogant PhD student and we’re unlikely to be sympathetic when your viva examiners rip you to pieces. Mwah ha ha.

9. No one else is responsible for your PhD, but be thankful for any input you get. When it comes to the viva, you’re pretty much on your own. So what if your supervisor came up with the original project and the post-docs made suggestions for what controls to include? Your examiners won’t care if you can’t defend the work. ‘Because I was told to’ is never a valid answer. However, there’s a fine-line between taking control of your own project and walking on the faces of people who have helped you. Failing to acknowledge someone else for the work they’ve done for you doesn’t make you look more productive, it makes you look like an ass.

10. Cutting corners will come back to bite you. Think it doesn’t matter that some of your graphs have error bars the size of the moon? You think you’ll have so many brilliant results after 3-4 years that none of the setup will make it into the thesis? Think again. A PhD thesis is a weird document—you may well end up including all those negative results that would never make it into a paper. Attempting to use Photoshop to reconstitute the seventeen pieces of your protein gel into something that doesn’t look like cack is not going to end well. Just run the gel again to start with. Or don’t drop it in the sink in the first place.

11. You might be stressed but so is everyone else. Your PhD, your mini breakdown. I remember starting my PhD and thinking everything would be alright once I finished. All those post-docs had it easy, didn’t they? So why weren’t they helping me All The Time, and putting off their own experiments so I could finish mine? But, trust me, it doesn’t get less stressful. Everyone is scrabbling for a handhold on science’s crumbling cliff face and pounding your little fists in fury only loosens the rocks. 

12. 9-to-5 isn’t a bad thing. Have you noticed how working long hours often makes a person intolerably smug about their work ethic, regardless of how many results they actually have? Yes, getting into the lab at 8 am and staying past 10 pm is all well and good, but not if you spend half that time on Facebook or go insane from never seeing daylight. Having a life outside science is not something to be ashamed of and adequate organisational skills will always trump long hours. I personally like lists—see, I even turn my angy rants into lists. Bringing me on to...

13. Those bitter post-docs – you’re probably going to be one of them. If I could go back in time and talk to my 22-year-old self, I would warn them that science is not a very reliable career path. It's all short-term contracts and far more post-docs than there are permanent positions. Hard work is all well and good, but there is sometimes a fair amount of luck involved and failing to progress past a couple of post-doc positions is not always a comment on someone’s abilities and intelligence. A backup plan is always a good idea.