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POWER DISSIPATED*
When I was in middle school my father made me a deal: I could dye some of my hair black as long as I also got bangs. He was always very particular about my hair: ponytails were preferred to just letting it hang down looking ‘like twine’. I made an appointment at one of the two hair salons in our town, the seemingly cool one, and got bangs and the bottom layer of my hair dyed black. A girl in school later told me that it looked like someone ran out of sharpie while trying to scratch out all of the brown on my head. I’ve been dying my hair ever since, and for almost ten years I did also have bangs. Maybe my dad was just joking and the whole thing was silly, but thinking back on it I cannot shake the feeling that this was the first time I was aware that a man thought he could control my body.
I learned a lot from my dad. I learned about electronics, about soccer and about heavy metal. For a brief while he could keep up with my math homework and we spent countless hours messing with mundane settings of our early computers together. Nowadays I know more about all of those things, and I know that some of what I learned from him was not always quite correct. The least correct thing that I learned was how to talk about women on TV and their hips-to-waist ratio or their hair and lips. No math error is as bad as thinking that harshly joking about their bodies was normal. Just like a math error such sentiments tend to propagate until the jokes and comments become a reality – my reality. I remember my dad telling my mom that she should shave my legs, and learning that when you touch a girl she should be soft and smooth. At the time, my mom used an electric gadget instead or a razor, one that painfully pulled out each hair one by one through a set of scary looking rotating disks. She sat me on a wooden chair on our balcony and ran it on my legs until they were bright red and hairless. I am still self-conscious about my body hair and razors are the only subscription service I have given in to.
In college, I dated a man who also had a lot to say about what I looked like. Before we had gotten together he liked the ‘edgy aesthetics’ he thought I had cultivated. After we had dated for a few months, it was obvious that that infatuation was fleeting. We fought endlessly about why I could not just wear (regular) jeans and a (regular) t-shirt and why I was so set on wearing visible make-up. I tried a lot of strategies: appealing to how my clothes made me feel more like who I want to be, how wearing what I wanted made me more confident, how this was just what I liked and it was not really my fault if it occasionally drew attention. None of these pleas presented an argument that was rational enough to persuade him. I was childish and not confident enough and how could it possibly not make me feel unsafe to know that men on the street might look at me differently when I wear short shorts. I told myself he was hardheaded but had good intentions, that he wanted me to be confident and sure of myself regardless of what I wore and that, first and foremost, he wanted me to be safe. It probably helped that I had already learned that when men say they love you, they get to try and control your body.
In the past week the conversation about sexual harassment and sexual violence has been brought back to the forefront of regularly scheduled social media frenzy and thanks to an old, powerful man who has for years been enabled by silence and complacency to use that power in order to hurt women, we are again asked to share the details of our bad experiences and traumas to garner some abstract notion of support and visibility. I feel very strongly that victims of sexual violence and harassment should be unequivocally supported. I feel that they should be trusted and nurtured in the sense of real community care and accommodations for things that those of us who have been lucky to not have experienced more than a catcall cannot really truly understand. If publicly disclosing their experiences is a necessary part of that process, it is definitely one that is hard to get over. This whole week I have been deeply disheartened at the notion that understanding and care are predicated on being confronted with big numbers, that what amounts to data-gathering is more powerful than simply listening to those at risk of harassment, or previously hurt, in our own social (and broader) circles.
As many have often pointed out, sexual violence and sexual harassment have much more to do with power, control, and pride than they do with sex or physical attraction. In Harvey Weinstein’s case, power and money were definitely instrumental to his decades of criminal behavior. That power, though, does not always manifest itself in the visage of a Hollywood executive. It does not have to – for women** it is deeply encoded in all of our interactions with men in our lives from the very beginning. Even with men that do love us and may genuinely wish the best for us, as what they think is best for us is informed by the overall uneven, gendered power structure; as what they think love is is similarly shaped by those forces.
I have no empathy for ex-boyfriends that wanted to tell me what to do, but I am haunted by the idea of my father being the first to teach me that my autonomy is gendered. (When my brother grew his hair out as a teenager the only thing that was asked of him was to regularly wash it.) My father who I have to believe wanted me to be strong and independent and successful, who never once tried to tell me that soccer or math or heavy metal were men’s things. The unjustified instinct for having the right to control the bodies of women close to them can be that deeply ingrained in men around us. And we soak it right up.
Of course, changing your hair or wearing different shorts cannot in any way be compared to being physically violated or having to submit to harassment in order to keep a job, but being taught that your body can be controlled, rated and used as a bargaining chip does not help in such situations. If women were more certain of their ownership of their bodies maybe there would at least be more rage and less of a need for ‘break the silence’ campaigns. Maybe we could finally make it out of the ‘bringing awareness’ stage of advocating not just for our rights but for our immediate physical safety.
It is painfully ironic to think that so many have stayed silent exactly because they were surrounded and raised by men who now demand to hear their voice in order to be convinced of the bad apples in their ranks (and their own complacency). It is important to give a voice to the oppressed but that is in itself not sufficient unless the oppressors are forced to deal with their act of silencing, active and passive, conscious and unconscious. Do they not still maintain power until they also have to publicly say ‘me too’ and make themselves vulnerable, this time about every instance when they have harassed a woman or touched her without her consent? Until they start to question the way they interact with women as much as many of us question whether we deserved past unfair treatment? Until that questioning goes deep enough to transform the way in which they try to help women they think they love? So often impact is more important than intent, and self-professed love means very little if it just reflects injustice. The burden of having uncomfortable, public, emotionally exhausting conversations about it should fall on you too, even if you are not a victim.
Best,
Karmela
* Consider a metal wire. If such a wire is a part of an electric circuit and connected to a source of an electric potential difference, such as a battery, an electric current will run through it. A current is composed of electrons moving approximately in unison and when those electrons encounter resistance in the wire – ‘friction’ to their motion – heating occurs and energy is lost. This lost energy, per unit of time, is the power dissipated due to the resistance. The more resistance there is, the more power is dissipated or lost.
** I have written this from my perspective as a cisgendered woman but it is worth underlining that men suffer from sexual violence too and that non-binary and transgendered persons are often at an extremely high risk of such violence as well.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LISTENING: I am certain that there are many podcasts dealing with the treatment of women in various industries and the gendered power dynamics we all encounter in our daily lives, but specifically seeking those stories out just seemed too depressing. In an effort to stay topical, this segment from This American Life is definitely worth listening to as it features a woman’s honest conversation with men that catcall her and completely misunderstand how that impacts her. This story aired a while back but I still think about it fairly often. It is really difficult listening to a man hear the reporter’s arguments again and again and still insist that what he does is not harmful. Stories like these serve as a good illustration as to just how ingrained some behaviors really are. Additionally, I recently heard this interview with a researcher that focuses on the “backfire effect” or our tendency to “double-down” on an argument once confronted with contradictory facts – even when those facts are true. This seems like an important thing to note when it comes to convincing anyone about anything perceived as even remotely high stakes. And, just to throw in something light hearted (I have for some reason had a lot of podcasts about true crime, conspiracies and cults in rotation this week), this old episode of Lost in the Stacks discusses the Voyager record that I have written about previously.
On the music side of things, I got around checking out the new Chelsea Wolfe album and as expected it is a study in haunting ambient sounds, not-too-over-the-top witchy vibes, and some pretty nicely grating guitar riffs. I approve. (Also this new Monolord record is a really enjoyable flavor of heavy, like the listening equivalent of watching a viscous fluid slowly move.)
LEARNING: It has been a somewhat frustrating week at work as I am spending more and more time on my teaching obligations and yet small mistakes and logistical snafus seem to be constantly creeping in. Misplaced minus signs and notational errors are not all that bad unless they have confronted 50 and upwards students with major confusion. Even more daunting than endless clarifications to students are the 11 pm emails from the course instructor about the sixth or seventh revision of assignments being given the very next day. I hope that in future weeks the whole teaching team will be more efficient and that, quite honestly, I will be doing less on this front.
Research-wise, I have received referee reports for a paper me and collaborators have submitted to Europhysics Letters earlier this year so the focus of my work for the upcoming week will most definitely be addressing the comments in these reports and revising our submission. It is good to see the publication process moving along, but it does not seem like we are quite done with this particular paper just yet. Additionally, I did get around to formulating some wavefunctions for one of my other projects (something I have been trying to do for a while) and have sketched out some perturbative calculations that, so far, seem to be in accordance with numerical results from last week. This is a really great development and a really good opportunity for me to triple-check my understanding of the system we are studying. My research group is also catching up with a local experimental groups next week and I hope that this will reanimate one of our collaborations that has lost a little bit of steam while I was preoccupied with paper writing this summer. It is really encouraging to see all of these things moving along despite me often feeling like my other obligations are seriously diminishing the amount of time I can allocate to research.
I am also still trying to be actively involved with the graduate employees union as there has been no progress when it comes to the negotiation of our contract with the university administration. We have been without a contract for more than two months and an assurance that our wages, tuition wavers and healthcare will continue to be protected is becoming more and more necessary with every day that the administration does not engage in contract negotiation. Ultimately, without the endless amount of work that graduate employees put in daily, the university would really struggle to function.
And I learned a ton about laser cooling in my atomic physics class. Experimental ingenuity, dating back to early days of optical molasses in the early 80s, continues to amaze me.
WATCHING/READING: This week has been way to busy for me to try and absorb any media other than podcasts. Luckily, my boyfriend is visiting for the weekend so hopefully we will manage at least a movie date if not a full TV-binge session. I still haven’t seen any of the new Twin Peaks, which is a slight tragedy.
EATING: Are you sick of seeing butternut squash recipes yet? I keep thinking I will grow tired of the taste but the chili I am sharing below definitely challenged that. It is thick and texturally rich (hominy is such a discovery to me) and the flavor plays with sweet and spicy really well. I adapted it from a Food52 recipe that called for canned pumpkin puree but since the plant variety that is used for those cans is much more close to a butternut squash I decided that I might as well use puree made from scratch. This is a great dish to make ahead and then either freeze or just ration throughout the week. It is not only very seasonal and satisfying on a grey day or a chilly night but also a pretty good source of plant protein.
For one batch (about 5 servings), you will need:
1 yellow onion, finely diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons chopped chipotle chilis (from a can, packed in adobo sauce)
2 teaspoons ground cumin
One butternut squash, roasted until very soft* or one 15 oz can of pumpkin puree
2 14.5 oz cans of petite-diced tomatoes
1 14.5 oz can pinto beans (or other beans), drained and rinsed
1 14.5 oz can dark red kidney beans (or other beans), drained and rinsed
1 14.5 oz can yellow hominy
1 oz unsweetened, dark chocolate, chopped or grated
For serving: avocado, rice or quinoa, parsley or cilantro, lime juice, red pepper flakes
Sautee the aromatics: in a large pot, over medium heat, warm up the olive oil then add the onion and bell pepper and sauté until the onion is soft and translucent. Add the garlic and sauté for another minute or two, stirring and making sure that it does not burn.
Add spices and puree: add the spices, chipotle chilis and the butternut (pumpkin) puree. Mix until a homogenous paste forms.
Add canned ingredients: add the tomatoes and hominy (with the water from the cans) and the beans. Mix well. If the mixture seems too thick add a cup or two of water (or vegetable broth if you have some at hand)
Add chocolate and simmer: add the chopped chocolate and stir will so that it melts then lower the heat and let the chili simmer for at an hour and a half, uncovered. Taste and add salt and pepper as desired.
For one serving use about a ¼ of the batch with ½ cup of rice or quinoa, ½ of an avocado and other garnishes to taste.
Tips: I ate about 4 servings of this chili in as many days and it just keeps getting better and better so I do not have all that many tips other than the usual – you can use whichever beans you want, you can add a chopped hot pepper in the sautéing aromatics section to add more heat, you can omit the hominy or the chocolate if they make you suspicious (the chocolate taste is extremely subtle and I personally found the texture of hominy really nice but maybe 1/3 of a cup of dry quinoa would not be bad either – you would just have to increase the amount of liquids used) and you could probably mix in some corn or reserved chunks of raw butternut when adding the beans if you would like a chunkier texture.
*To make the butternut puree from scratch: cut the squash along its long side and remove the seeds (I find that just going in with a spoon and scooping does the job well), then lay the two halves cut side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and roast at 400F for 30 minutes or more, until the peel has shriveled up and the flesh is fork tender and slightly browned. Let the squash cool then scoop-out the flesh and either mash it with a fork or pulse in a food processor. (For this chili I only did the former because I knew I would be using it to give more texture to the dish but had I been planning on using it for a smoother soup or in baking I would have most definitely blended it with either a few tablespoons of water or non-dairy milk.)