Stacey and the Ocelot

My lovely friend Kylie has just started a blog, where she shares her gorgeous photography and stories from her life. 

"Oh you're a scientist!" Exclaimed my new acquaintance. "What are you researching?"

"Malaria," I replied, and registering his blank look, I added, "it's a parasite that kills a lot of people; mostly pregnant women and kids under the age of 5."

"Have you found a cure?" He asked casually, as if it's that easy. As if thousands of scientists worldwide haven't spent their lives trying to kill this bastard of a disease once and for all.

"I didn't find a way to kill the parasite, no. But I did find a way to stop one of the most severe symptoms from developing."

And he replied,

"See, this is the problem with modern medicine. You only focus on treating the symptoms, not the actual cause of the disease."

He meant well I'm sure; it does sound rather profound and humanitarian. But can I just say, from science to you, that it's unbelievably offensive. People spout this all the time, as if researchers are lazy. As if we only want easy answers, or to keep you taking pills so we can have your money. This is so far from the truth.

The symptom I found a treatment for was death. More specifically, death caused by brain inflammation and the resulting fatal seizures. Also for the possible deafness, blindness, partial paralysis and mental retardation that can affect those people who survive the brain inflammation and seizures. Sometimes people can be infected with malaria parasite and feel OK. Sometimes they get really, really sick. I found a way to delay that awfulness from developing, just long enough for the body to fight the parasite on its own. Sometimes, treating the symptoms is a very good thing.

I got into a rather heated discussion with my housemate last night. To cut it very short, he was arguing that feminism is a hypocritical movement, and that we should all be fighting for plain old equality; I was trying to express why that makes me sad, without mortally offending someone I still live with. It did not go well.

Because the truth is, it does upset me. Like viscerally, hormonally, up-all-night upsets me. A lot of well meaning people want to replace feminism with egalitarianism, and it makes me want to cry. Now I’m all for equal rights, don’t get me wrong. I love men, and men things, and paternity leave, and male custody rights, and sensible divorce settlements, and men not getting raped, and all that good stuff. Feminism is about equality. Sure it started as a fight for women to be granted certain rights, but once those were won, the movement broadened, and is now about opposing the gender norms in our society that hurt men and women and LGBTQIA alike. So in my mind, when people say they want to replace feminism with equality, it’s just a name change that they’re after. It’s a matter of semantics.

And semantics matter. Of course they do. For example, it is wonderful that we replaced the word mankind with humankind. The first one made women feel like they weren’t counted as people, regardless of how they were actually treated in society. Same goes for him/his as the generic singular pronoun; now we use they/their to the annoyance of grammar pedants and the great joy of women everywhere. These are good things. And I do understand why that might make me sound hypocritical. The word feminism has made some people feel as if they are not allowed to participate in the fight for equality. Regardless of what feminism is really about, the word has made people feel marginalised, as if the feminine were more important than the human; it’s discriminatory, so it should go. And honestly, for a while, that argument seemed pretty solid to me. I wondered if I really was just a big old hypocrite, and more than that, I wondered why I found this fight over words so unbelievably hurtful. Truth is, I’m still wondering. But here, I think, is part of it:

We change the names of things we are ashamed of. Mankind for example, is a relic of a time when women were not considered to have the same importance as men; they weren’t considered to be full citizens, and in some cases they weren’t even considered to be fully human. We don’t think like that anymore, and we’re ashamed of ever thinking like that, so we changed the word to something more positive and inclusive, which represents how we feel now. 

A couple of weeks ago, at the shockingly mature age of 27, I found myself single once again. Needless to say, the experience left me with a glittering party-pack of emotions, the most surprising of which was blind, flailing anger.

Frustrations; I had them by the dozen, and I hardly knew who's bollocks I wanted to staple-gun first. Society's, for making me feel like a used up, shelf mouldering spinster? My brother's, for lecturing me on how to be feminist? My parents', for having so many truly detailed opinions about literally everything, while flaunting their perfect married-at-21-permanent-job-at-22-house-purchased-for-$30,000 existence in my face? Naturally, (because we're all masochists at heart aren't we?) I gave myself the belting.

"It's your own stupid fault for having such ridiculous standards," I lectured, "and now look what you've done. Statistically speaking, you fall in love once every 6 years; add on a year of courtship, 6 months at least to arrange the wedding, 2 years to get to know yourselves as a couple, and you wont be having kids until you're 37. That's basically past fun-time on the biological clock, so well done genius, you're never having babies."

Mid rant, this complete insanity was (thankfully) checked by a sudden and glorious epiphany; I am the exact same age as Charlotte Lucas was when she married Mr Collins. I am the same age now as she was when she agreed to spend the rest of her days with an insufferable prat, purely because matrimony 'was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune'. And as I walked around my piquantly vacant 3 bedroom rental - mostly naked because of the heat, and enjoying honey-toast-with-a-side-of-sav-blanc for dinner because I can - I became overwhelmed with gratitude to have been born in 1987.

"Right-o then, Spinsterhood" I told the empty living room at large. "You can just take your guilt riddled overtones, and shove them up your arse."

I am young, I am single, and I have my independence.

Let the adventures begin.*

His eyes are open now, and he groans. "How can you writhe subtly?" he asks, astonished. "You know, you never cease to amaze me."

On Saturday I finally cracked and bought a copy of Fifty Shades. I suspected I wasn't going to enjoy it much, but now that the movie's out and the internet has exploded with the It's-abuse/stop-being-a-prude debate, I was sick of being left out of the conversation. I got 60 pages in before I got jack of Anastasia Steele. 150 pages in, after the first night of sexy-time, I'd had it with the entire book. But what to do? Jumping straight online to join the haters camp seemed a bit redundant; throwing the thing in the bin and ranting about self-possession over some vino seemed a bit alcoholic at 9 in the morning.

In the end, I went out and bought a packet of Sharpies, and began defacing the book in the style of newspaper blackout (only on the pages I've already read. Don't panic, I'm going to finish the thing). My plan was to do something constructive, by making poetry that created a new narrative - one of self-love and self-determinism. I was going to create an Ana I could get behind (hur hur). And that's where things got interesting (well the poetry got bad; the plot got interesting). I'm not going to proffer an opinion on the afore-mentioned debate. All I'll say is this: Ana almost never describes herself with positive attributes. Christian gets lots of descriptions of his physical appearance, and adjectives like 'powerful' and 'controlling' and 'scary' and 'intimidating'. Together, that makes it supremely difficult to write empowering poetry in this style; the words just aren't there on the page to be used.

How is it, that you can sequence the human genome so cheaply that we can get it done over the counter now; that you can put humans into space so successfully you're planning to set up a colony on Mars; that you can make a machine that puts single atoms into a controlled collision; but you can't come up with a viable system for awarding grants that allows researchers to take small career gaps without significant penalty?

I wanted to say

"You look like Wes Anderson".

Lena Dunham

Purely for the fact that Girls expressed a reality I knew well, but one that I had never seen on screen. When I first visited the US, I was overwhelmed by how much everything felt like a movie set. The houses, buses, schools - they all looked just like the films. I remember being very thankful that I had always had a point of difference that allowed me to clearly remove my own life from the normative  pressures of Hollywood; it was easy to say "that might be alright for Americans, but I live in Australia, and here things aren't really like that."

Ellen Yeh

Unlike the others in this list, you've no doubt never heard of Ellen Yeh. She researches Malaria at Stanford University, and gave the most entertaining conference presentation I've ever sat through. She's young, good looking*, and an absolute wizard. She got up, and in 10 minutes almost destroyed a whole field of malaria research with one experiment and a basketball analogy. Of course there is currently debate about her work and it's implications - this is science after all - but I admire her balls. 

CS Lewis

This man's writings were the starting point of all my adult thinking about Christianity. Time and again he would say "but of course no sensible person would ever think that…." And I would find myself responding "Oh shit, I was thinking exactly that." Plus he wrote the Narnia books, and I spent roughly 90% of my childhood pretending to be Susan Pevensie.

Merrill Garbus

There are many musicians I could put here, but I can't stop listening to TuneYards at the minute. To hear a woman (or anyone for that matter) throwing off the tired old tropes of  dance-floor romance and heteronormative sex appeal, and jumping knee deep into rhythm and lyrical ingenuity with such joyous abandon - it makes my heart sing. ABAB rhyming structures; What's that about? 

"He gave me a dollar, a blood soaked dollar; I cannot get the spot out, but that's OK it still works in the store."

Staceyann Chin

I stumbled on Staceyann's poetry through the youtube suggestion list, and I speak no word of a lie when I say that until I heard this poem (link at the bottom), I did not fully appreciate my own womanhood, or indeed feminism. I did not know that it was possible to be so passionate, so riotous, or so proud to have two X chromosomes. I didn't know it was possible to simultaneously embody rebellion and acceptance, or to be so aggressively feminine. Many women say that they're glad to be a girl; often they only mean that they like wearing dresses and flirting with men. Staceyann says it with a relish that evokes something deeper, wilder and altogether more powerful.