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.

This Vain World - I have a slight cruel streak!

This Vain World

Workmen had been working on scaffolding on the side of the University for quite a few months. They were engaged in cleaning the Ashby Building and it was amazing to see the grey-blotched facade buffeted into a white clean smoothness. Every day as the transformation takes place, I look with envy and wonder if human faces could be rejuvenated with equal success. 

The gesturing workmen make odd noises in my direction, a kind of caterwauling with ‘all-rite-darlin’ somewhere in the midst. In my early twenties such calls would have engendered righteous indignation and anger at the ability of a group of humans to humiliate one of their own species on the grounds of sex.

Specifically, memories of my first job, with an electronics firm on the Isle of Wight as an assistant engineer come back vividly. The firm had taken on thirty new graduates, twenty-eight men and two women, and after a six-week induction course we had begun to form a sense of identity and confidence. My bubble burst on the seventh week when I had to go to the shop floor to check on some dimensions of equipment there.

My entrance into the grinding, hissing environment was greeted with all kinds of calls and whistles and I froze. I, who had delved into quantum mechanics, general relativity, microelectronics and vacuum technology with relative ease, found suddenly that I’d forgotten how to walk never mind speak. Suddenly, I was reminded that the only really important thing about me was my sex. 

It was as if you’d searched for a noble truth in human expression for many years and finally been told that actually the answer lay in page 3 of The Sun! Walking haltingly across the shop floor I felt as if my sexual organs had all grown. It was as if my breasts were dragging on the ground, the weight of them like huge whales being beached. You know those nightmares where you find you’ve forgotten to put your clothes on, in such unlikely situations as the local supermarket?

Well, that had been my feeling then, but a decade and three children later a different response is felt. When you are a mother you disappear. No, seriously, I wonder no one ever comments on it. When you have a buggy and a small child you become a non-person. Not only are you ignored by society but also everything is deliberately made difficult, to ensure you stay at home indoors. Buses, libraries, public buildings etc. all view you with distaste. 

Ever tried to have a dentist, doctor’s appointment with small children and you will know how implacable the hatred there is for women with small children in our society. Having experienced that rejection of one’s very existence, even a whistle from an overweight lorry driver can be viewed in a positive light. The caterwauls from the hanging walkways are a form of recognition. One, that I am a woman and two, that I might be considered attractive.

Okay, if the platforms were a little lower they would have questioned the latter, but in any event, I wave back. Motherhood has the effect of clothing one’s nature in a benevolent nurturing glow. Why hurt feelings, why be hurt, let’s just get on with life, eat your apple, drink your milk. Sexual organs become mechanical appendages that are required for a specific purpose.

I go inside the swing doors and enter the lift, which will take me to my tenth floor office. It is a peculiarly designed building, the Ashby. Housing the Engineering Department, it has toilets on every floor. Unfortunately, the only women’s toilets are found on the 7^th, 3^rd and ground floor. When the 7^th floor toilets were out of order for a few months I became sick and tired of the daily tour to find a suitable toilet. Especially when I had to go for an operation and subsequently seemed to bleed consistently for two months. A real bleeding nuisance! 

At exactly that time the Equality Unit in Queens University sent round an amazing little document about language. Don’t use the words manhole, mankind, policeman etc., as these are considered offensive. Being one of the few women in the department I received a lot of teasing and goading about this publication. I remember thinking as I drudged to that third floor toilet, bleeding like a stuck pig, call me Bill, Ben or Bob but please provide us with adequate basic facilities.

Unlike the outside, the inside of the building is scoured and abused. Paint peeling off and grubby blackened windows keep out the sunlight. Everywhere that feeling of neglect. The contrast with the newly restored facade outside reminds me of something my Sunday school teacher had said when I was very young. Mrs Roberts was elderly, sweet, and looked as every grandmother should. The subject for discussion was vanity and try as she did, we children could not grasp the meaning of this sin. Dressed up to look nice on the outside while inwardly dirty was her first attempt, but since all of us had been ‘dressed up’ in our Sunday best and yet inwardly had all kinds of unpleasant thoughts, that somehow failed to engender any measure of real naughtiness. We children were constantly dressed up despite all kinds of inner defects and it was usually by our parents. How could that be so wrong? 

Getting flustered she used an analogy: vanity is like a shop. A sweet shop, she said, full of beautiful sweet boxes, but when you go in to buy some sweets you realise they are all just for display and that there is not one sweet in the whole shop. For some reason that struck us all as a dirty horrible sin. To lure one with sweet nice chocolates and things and then have nothing at all inside. 

The horror caused a momentary stunned silence in our class and even now a quarter of a century later vanity still strikes me as an enormous sin. Our building’s outer cleanliness and inner dirt was just such vanity. Mrs Roberts would have raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in disapproval.

I am in the lift and the lights that tell you which floor you have stopped at no longer work. The lift stops at the second floor and a bespectacled figure hugging a briefcase creeps cautiously in. We are alone in the lift together and I sense his panic rising. 

It is an amazing thing that there are brilliant minds in science which have forced back the frontiers of human knowledge, but who also have the social skills of a goldfish. This guy is one of them. His fear arises from the close proximity of a human being to whom he might have to say something or who may, God forbid, say something to him. The sweat breaks out on his brow and he studiously avoids eye contact. 

An informal ‘good morning’ would have put him out of his misery, as he would have been able to stutter good morning back bringing to an end the uneasiness of the moment. I perversely hold out no such hand of kindness; if he cannot master the rudimentary social skills, I am not inclined to help. The lift stops with a lurch and Dr Goldfish’s hysteria moves up a notch. 

His eyes are frantically scanning the floor lights, trying to determine what floor we have stopped at. In a choked stutter he turns and asks ‘Where am I?’ His panic is total hence his cry for assistance. He thinks this may be his floor but is unsure. The uncertainty principle is an acceptable feature of Physics but in the real world, certainties should be there to console one. There should be a light on one of the ten numbers above the lift door and the fact that none of them are on, has thrown him into a miscarriage of communication. 

He is looking at me now, hoping for an end to all his misery. I choose not to give it; motherhood has its cruel phases too. “As in life?” I query, as if his question is a fundamental statement of his need to know his position in the grand scheme of things. 

His eyes protrude, at the thought that he might have strayed not only into the shallows of basic communication but also into the dark murky waters of the meaning of his life. He presses the door open button and throws himself out, obviously deciding that if he’s on the wrong floor, flights of stairs would be preferable to sharing a lift with me. The door closes and the lift sails on to the tenth. I permit myself a smile, it’s good to be alive.

My son is getting married in the morning!

The wedding is tomorrow!  No time for blog.  So happy for them both.

An Urge to Communicate

At times you just want to rant about how you'd make the world if given a chance!  This piece is one of those.  I have a go at just about every institution and no one is spared.  Ah well it is good to get it out of your system.  Better than developing an ulcer.

An Urge to Communicate

The speaker cleared his throat and then continued, “if we then consider the relevance of early Victorian poetry to present day urbanization…” The lecture room had around eighty chairs and only four were occupied.  The speaker went on and I wondered if all over the world there are good minds analyzing absolute irrelevance to almost empty rooms.  All the papers presented would be published, I was told, and so reach a wider audience.  But what wider audience?  Who else but other preoccupied thinkers in this field would bother to read this epistle?  Who else would be interested?  It seems to me we have good brains revving away up dead alleys and the mainstream traffic is ploughing through the seedier parts of Soho.

Those you cannot distract with shopping, brain killing TV or the daily blurge of disasters, crime and exposés, get them studying the intricacies of embossed wallpaper and its influence on early reading skills.  Have them write papers that have to be read and studied and responded to.  Create such a mire of detailed analysis no one will ever pause to realize the futility of the whole exercise.  Has our academic world become a kind of King without robes, so that none of us can build up enough nerve to point out the inadequacies? 

Of course everything can be justified as a search for truth but with the world facing problems of immense proportions, should we be wasting our best minds on anything else?  Corporations can afford to scoop up the best of our graduates and fast track them to a life of acquiring material benefits in return for generating money for the company.  Anyone who drops out of this conveyor belt to self-gratification is viewed as a leftist agitator or a religious fanatic or by that general heading ‘loser’.  My question is where are the role models to lead this generation?  Who is there to admire?  Closet academics in their ivory towers, rich tycoons, bitter discontents who never made good, dictators, Joe Bloggs, the workingman?  Our difficulty now is whether we look up or down, to the left or right, we see nothing to inspire us.  Even worse, those who traditionally urge us to be better human beings (church leaders, philosophers, leaders of thought) are found to be sex perverts or flawed characters.  So we create antiheroes in the hope that at last we’ll have something to look up to.  Even these have lost their allure and we turn to what?

Sports. There’s something clean and noble and Olympian about those who engage in the noble arts.  But since winning has become the number one goal even sports has lost its luster.  Drug taking, back stabbing, nationalism, commercialism, a lack of team spirit seem to once again encapsulate all that is wrong with our culture.

Politics have become a farce.  Those who want positions of power are generally found to be the least suited.  So we have gravitation to the top of those who are there not because they can do the best for society but because they are experts in getting the best for themselves out of society.  Shit seems to float to the top.

Science, the new God of the modern age, has demonstrated the importance of motive behind all endeavors.  If I am innocently gardening but secretly loath and despise my neighbours, then I should not be surprised if my shovel gradually grows to resemble a club.  For if we shape our own destiny our motives give living colour to the final outcome.  Whereas before, science was driven by our desire to defend ourselves at all costs, nowadays it is motivated by a desire to have economic dominance by whatever means.  Both have an end game that will either be constant war between nations or terrorism on a scale we cannot as yet comprehend.  If we were to look to the end of things, would we not make science a tool for the betterment of a just human society?

Education has long been held up as the last arena of hope.  Whatever the problems facing society, surely education must be the key.  In whose hand is this key?  What should be the goal of education?  To create an educational elite, to provide a basic measure of literacy, to give the populace a means of earning a living, to produce decent citizens?  There seems to be no general consensus but things are going seriously wrong in our educational establishments and all the bright minds and all the best intentions cannot seem to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Communication has transformed our lives.  Years ago at a conference I remember being told that the microelectronic revolution was now a thing of the past.  Looking to the future it is the field of communication that will take over the reins of progress.  Tragedies, wars, disease can be flashed around the world in seconds, even live.  We are confronted with all our defects and find it depressing beyond belief.  Our seeming helplessness is only compounded by the fact that media lets us see only what it wants.  Instead of faithfully reflecting what goes on in our world we see instead a version chosen for us by vested interests.  Truth has taken a back seat and entertainment is far more important.  What should serve to inform, uplift, correct has become an opportunity to degrade, pervert, distract and titillate.  

So given that all these institutions are failing us what should we do?  Years ago while at university, our small newly formed International society was allocated a small office on campus.  This was to be shared with one other university society, the Anarchist society.  It did not come as any surprise that their first decision was to steal the shared typewriter (it was a few years ago) and set fire to the office.  Ever since then I have had an aversion to those who seek to pull down existing institutions, social order etc.  All their energies are in destruct mode and despite all the rhetoric, you get the feeling that even if suddenly the new world order arrived - just, balanced and fair - they would be still exploding bombs and setting fire to things.  Whether this present day order is falling apart or being actively rolled up, our energies are surely better spent in construction rather than in demolishing or arson.  Finding a positive role to play empowers and encourages.  I must choose to hope for a better future and do all I can to further that goal.  So having dissected many of our institutions, let me finish by re-building them, as I would have them.

Academics would excel and create centers of learning that develop the individual’s capacity and inspire and equip students with the tools to help humanity.

Sports would be about fair and just competition, where sportsmanship would be celebrated as much as winning.

Politics would be an arena of service, not self-aggrandizement, and politicians chosen because of their ability to do the job, not their desire to have it.

Science would be a tool for an ever-advancing civilization, responsible for a World Community, a global treasure and a precious environment.

Education should be about ‘bringing out’ the real capacity of each individual.  It must help create healthy citizens in mind and body.  In a family it would be sick to have one child educated to university level and allow the other to starve to death yet, we do this on a global level and expect a healthy society?  Mankind is a single body and true education would embrace this truth and build upon it, not allow mutilation or gangrene of any part.

Communication is today’s revolution.  We have no idea where this wave will eventually take us.  I choose to hope that with honesty, truthfulness, consultation and, most important, unity in our diversity, we can do more than right wrongs.  We are a world community and when we choose to act as one we will have undreamed of victories.  I hear a voice calling to me of hope, great endeavours and mighty deeds.  At present this world is on its knees but it is going to find its way soon and I want to be one of many urging it upward and onward.

Family Affairs

Memories of life on an estate in Northern Ireland, glad a few of you remember the same estate so vividly!  We probably all need therapy to eradicate it from our brains.  But I am also so grateful for all the wonderful people I knew there.  So here's a bit about one family.

Family Affairs

We had neighbours on our estate called Wilson. I liked them. Jackie was the matriarchal figure of the family. She was benevolent and loving. Her husband had left her for another woman and she had brought up her four young children herself, in difficult financial and social circumstances. She was describing one day, her point of desperation. She’d had to move out of her house as debts demanded it, and she’d driven to a lonely road high on the mountains. There she had decided to take her life and that of her four children. The pain of life had become too intense and she could no longer cope. She drove back from that lonely road and faced the future. As it turned out, that future was hard, very hard, and yet she faced it. 

Donna was her daughter, a pretty teenager, who during the troubled marriage break up, had turned from a bright intelligent pupil to a resentful adolescent. Her exam results spelt an end to an academic life and meant she joined her place in the town’s dole queue with no other outlet. She turned with a vengeance to the social life available in the town. Discos and dances, these enlivened her week. I was always amazed at how she could transform herself from a reasonably attractive jean-clad figure in sloppy jumpers to a glamorous disco dancer on a mere pittance. 

David, Donna’s eldest brother, was only twenty-three but he was aware of his responsibilities. As the only breadwinner in the family, he had taken out a huge insurance policy. If anything happened to him, he wanted to be sure his mother and younger brothers and sister would be taken care of. It often struck me, as I watched his immaculate car and neat careful clothes in our disgusting estate, that David fought for order and decency in a world which didn’t play by the rules. It seemed so unfair that he be born in this mad world. He had problems buying his car, I remember. Because his dad had run up debts with almost all the banks, David was viewed as being tarred with a similar brush. It didn’t help that he had his father’s name and lived on the same estate. I often saw their father walking around with his girlfriend. They lived only five minutes away and he often came to visit his former wife. Jackie said she held no grudges and was glad to see him, but David behaved stiffly and formally when his father called. He was probably old enough to remember all the trauma of the marriage break up. 

Donna became pregnant. Okay, she should have known better, she should have taken precautions, but then who is perfect? The father was a boy from Derry and marriage was not on the cards. He will never know he fathered a son. Donna told her mother eventually and, although shocked, Jackie was supportive. Together they told David, who was angry but determined. He would support the new baby too. David’s broad shoulders just had to carry a little more, that was all.

Christopher was born and strangely, although unplanned and initially unwanted, he brought so much happiness to everyone in the family and even the street. He was the same age as my eldest son and they spent a lot of time together in our home. I loved Christopher. We all did. Sometimes the worst mistakes become our biggest joys. We lived only two doors away from Jackie and they were all a part of our lives. I remember having a morning makeover session in my living room where five of us had our hair done and make up applied. There was so much laughter and I still have a lovely photograph of Jackie’s finished work over. She is looking at the camera, self-conscious but with laughter playing around her mouth at all the fun of that morning. Christopher was four when Jackie was told she had cancer. It was too late to operate and she faded fast, much too fast for all of us to comprehend. Donna helped to nurse her and towards the end the doctor gave Donna two plastic bags full of heroin and morphine. Donna gave Jackie the injections alternately to help control the pain. It was hard. One day Donna called and wanted to borrow milk or sugar or something. I went to get it and when I came back she was slumped against the wall, crying. I was devastated. Bright, bouncy, Donna, who never gave a damn, was being beaten to her knees. I’m useless in these circumstances. I should have held her, comforted her, but all I did was mutter sympathetic noises and make some tea. She recovered quickly and I only saw her cry again at the funeral. It was hard though, and once over coffee, while Christopher played with my son, I asked Donna, ‘How do you stand it?’ Her chin jutted and her face lit up. She leaned over the table conspiratorially and said ‘as long as I have my disco on a Thursday, I can take anything!’ As long as she had her one night of laughter and dance, she could cope with the other endless pain ridden days and nights. When she said that, I suddenly had a lot of respect for the resilience of youth. Its joy of life and exuberance is something else. I admired Donna and saw there was something special about this family. Perhaps there is in every family, but somehow I felt theirs. I looked after Christopher the day of the funeral and kept out of the way. I took the boys to the playground and all their favourite haunts. I wanted to make Christopher happy, give him something. He’d lost his grandmother and somehow she was the kingpin of the whole set up. I was afraid the family would never be the same, lose its heart, and drift apart or something. Three months later Donna was pregnant again. It must have been conceived in those grief-ridden days. This time there was no one to tell but David and she didn’t tell him until she was five or six months pregnant. This time Donna was determined to give the child up for adoption. She didn’t tell anyone else but David she was pregnant. I directly asked her one day if she was pregnant, even under the floppy jumpers she wore, there was a bump visible. She denied it, and I believed her and mentally berated myself. She’d just put on weight, that was all. David had been against the adoption and refused to speak to Donna. There was a chill in the house and I sensed it and put it down to the effect of Jackie’s death. They were going to fall apart without her, I was sure of it. Donna went into hospital and had the baby. She left a day later without him. After two days she woke up in the middle of the night from a dream and woke David. She wanted the baby. David hugged her and drove her up to get the baby. Afterwards she said it was because she’d had a dream about the baby. When she’d left him at the hospital, it had been visiting time and all the other babies were wheeled down beside their mothers. Her baby had been the only one in a glass trolley in the nursery when she went in to say goodbye. That night in her dream that picture of her baby alone came vividly back, and when she woke she’d changed her mind. So Daniel joined Christopher and somehow Donna coped. They are two happy boys. There is something special about the family. Jackie had it, so do her children, and I think her grandchildren will have it too.