Science and Sex

It’s been fascinating watching the adverts placed on this blog.  Obviously, they must look for key words and choose appropriate ads. I am a little tired of the menopausal cream, mature dating sites, wrinkle cream and stomach reducing tricks.  So it is with a little hesitation I make this posting.  Heaven's knows what adverts will be triggered by this.

Science and Sex

All through my Physics degree, at University, there was a major mystery that I never understood. I was puzzled by a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomena. This concerned the behaviour of male lecturers in the presence of young female undergraduates. So many of my female friends would point out some well liked lecturer and mutter ‘Gawd, he’s awful!’ or ‘He gave me the eye again today’ or more menacing, ‘he won’t keep his hands to himself’. I would turn and see the object of their wrath, a lecturer, and think, he’s never done any of that to me. I took to smelling my arm pits and examining myself critically in the mirror. These men never said anything to me, never ‘gave me the eye’, never mind lay hands upon my person. Now women as a rule are riddled with misconceptions about their appearance. My own misgivings began at an early age.

We lived in a small one street village, called Dungiven, and I was convinced I was cross-eyed. People had not commented on it, because my parents had, I felt, told them not to mention it - to pretend I was normal. It was no good, then, relying on local villagers, as they and my neighbourhood friends would not let on there was anything wrong. But outsiders, they would not have been warned and so anyone strange in the street was sure to give the game away. Mirrors would not show me, because if my eyes were squinty then they would not be able to see the defect, although by looking side on suddenly, I could get quick glimpses of my ‘squinty true self’ at times. This was enough to feed my conviction. The only way to verify what had by now become almost a religious conviction, was to see a stranger and watch carefully their reaction. When walking with my parents, I would spy an unknown person. It’s weird how they stand out in a small village. They often think no one notices them, as they know no one, but we who all know each other, if not by name at least by face, can spot them at the drop of a hat. Then, having spied a stranger, I would make my approach. I’d manoeuvre myself closer, head raised, hair pushed back so they could see clearly the ‘squint’, and I’d watch their faces intensely. Sure enough whenever a stranger did take the trouble to notice me, they would have a strange look in their eye. It was the squint. I knew it. 

Okay, my parents thought they were being kind, but really, didn’t they realise it would have been kinder to tell me up front. It was like adoption, better to know from the beginning, than have it thrown in your face by another crueller hand. Satisfied by my discovery, I ignored a flaw in my experiment. Ten year old girls who hold their hair on top of their heads, walk sideways on pavements to accost strangers, stare fixedly without speaking and with a kind of knowing dread in their eye, generally engender an unusual response in the viewer. They are viewing something out of the ordinary and their quizzical expressions show a mixture of curiosity tinged with discomfort. Exactly the response those with deformities like mine have come to expect. The squint was simply a figment of my imagination. So years later I wondered were these girls suffering from similar delusions. I was not smelly, or totally unattractive to the opposite sex, so why was I not subjected to these unwanted attentions. Were my friends misinterpreting innocent looks, words etc? It was as a postgraduate six years later, my interpretation, long assumed, like the squint became suspect. 

A relation of mine who worked in BT came to do some research at our labs. She was an engineer recently married and we got on reasonably well. She stayed with me at my flat, and we travelled in to University together. After a few days she burst into tears one evening and said that Ian had ‘tried something on’, in the lab. Having worked with Ian on long evenings alone in the lab, even travelled over to Daresbury with him to work shifts on the synchrotron, I was shocked. I asked what did she mean ‘try something on’, half convinced there had been some total misunderstanding. I knew this guy. Her distress however, was too real to be ignored. I was confused. It had been late, she said, and he’d told her some things she hadn’t felt comfortable with, but later on he’d even tried to put his arms around her and had frightened and upset her. Maybe he had only been joking, I suggested hopefully. More tears and more explanations followed, which convinced me her experience had been a real one. 

Apparently her boss at BT had also made unwelcome advances, she explained. He had bought her a ticket to the Paris Air Show and had been angry when she refused to go with him for a weekend. While listening I must admit to giving myself a furtive sniff under the armpits. Perhaps there was the explanation as to why no one accosted me? Here was this business again, and this time I knew this unwelcome attention for her was real. Not imagination as my earlier premise had been. It was time for a rethink. The only other woman in the department was Nihal from Egypt. A woman in her early forties, she might be able to throw some light on this man-woman thing. As I investigated, it became apparent that Nihal had never been accosted in fifteen years of research by a colleague. I remembered how on her first week at the university some of the lads were laughing over some sexy scenes in a movie the previous night. Nihal proceeded to elaborate in some detail on a pornographic novel she was reading, much to the lads’ discomfort. No one had ever accosted Nihal with sweet nothings across the vacuum pumps or fumbled with her in stainless steel lifts. Then thinking about Nihal and my cousin, I thought I saw an explanation. 

My cousin was not inviting attention, but she got it. Nihal was very sexually explicit in even her normal conversation but she was never the victim of harassment. My cousin was gentle, unassuming and rather accommodating by nature. Nihal was assertive, fearless and not accommodating by nature. Could it be that there was a vulnerability that lent itself to abuse by those so inclined, that human nature flawed as it is, can sense a weak spot and home in on it like the jugular vein. Some willingly expose their sexuality hoping for a bite, perhaps retreating in anger and recrimination when one occurs. Others by nature are predisposed to respond to the demands made on them by others, ‘be a good girl’, ‘be a gentle person’, ‘don’t hurt my feelings by saying no’, and this is picked up like a cue for attention and men rise to this more subtle bait of submission. This time because the abuse is neither consciously encouraged nor wanted, it is so much more frightening for the subject of this treatment. Then there are the Nihals, whose personality hits you like an express train long before their sexuality. One is so busy coping with the person; their sexuality is somehow a secondary issue. 

Where does this leave me, or us? It leaves most women vulnerable to themselves and others. Our personalities are geared to be tender, compassionate, and our natures, compliant. Being brought up as the only girl in a family of boys, I learnt at a young age the satisfaction of climbing trees, walking the tops of gates, and fighting. There was no encouragement of the use of my sexuality to obtain attention. Brothers don’t normally conceive of sisters as real girls, just bloody nuisances. To win attention I had to climb higher, run faster, be braver. Tenacity of will would have to overcome what they thought of as my deficiency of being female. So the mystery has really remained a mystery to me. I have no answers as to why no one has harassed me. One friend suggested that I might have just never noticed the signals being given, due to my thick-skinned nature or sheer naiveté. This could have an element of truth, I don’t know. It is certainly a subject that is of interest to both sexes. Giving a talk on metal-semiconductor interfaces to the Business and Professional Women in Belfast, some years ago, I noted that half my audience was comatose. I devoted the rest of the talk to sexual harassment in the electronics industry. The entire audience woke up! Perhaps we have created an acquired taste for the sexual side of things? Can I recommend tree climbing, or even gate walking as a healthy alternative? For many women it can seem more productive and less painful, even when you fall off.