Julia Baird on brandishing titles like a torch

I remember the first time it happened: I was sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office, flipping through a magazine and trying to ignore the usual daytime television drivel, not exactly dreading my dental work but not much looking forward to it either, when the friendly hygienist opened the door and called for "Dr. Hogue."

Did you hear that? Not "Miss Hogue" or "Ms. Hogue" or "Bev" but "Dr. Hogue." I'm not a fool: living in Appalachia, I know there's no better way to alienate my neighbors than to brandish my academic credentials in public, but on the other hand, it feels good to occasionally receive a little professional respect, even in the dentist's waiting room. 

In today's New York Times, Julia Baird examines what happens when that respect breaks down (read it here).  In "Women, Own Your 'Dr.' Titles," Baird explains, "It had never occurred to me to add 'Ph.D.' to my name on Twitter until I was slammed for mentioning that I had one." Daring to assert her credentials subjected her to online attacks from those who "viewed the degree not as a sign of expertise but as a provocation, a pretension."

Academics were divided in their response to the uproar, "with a horde of women revealing that they, too, had been taunted for using their titles, while many men who had not received such criticism were baffled." She offers examples of the unequal treatment of men's and women's titles in media and academe, but I just sat there nodding, recalling the former administrator who consistently used "Dr." only for male academics, referring to women at every rank as "Professor." Nothing wrong with "Professor," but why the gendered distinction? And then there are the relatives who will introduce my husband as Rev. Hogue and me as just plain old Bev.

I'm happy to be plain old Bev in most settings, so I don't get bent out of shape when the "Dr." gets dropped, but Baird is correct in connecting this lack of professional respect with the long history of disregard for women's voices. This whole conversation harks back to Rebecca Solnit's essay "Men Explain Things to Me," in which she describes an encounter with a man who doubted her expertise on the topic of a book that she had written. "Every woman knows what I'm talking about," writes Solnit:

It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment in the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

Julia Baird's encounter with online trolls who doubt her expertise is just the next step in this progression. "For centuries," she writes, "the voices of women have been muted, discounted and minimized. Our right to speak has been questioned, our power undermined, our authority mocked....We are repeatedly told to apologize, to shrink, to shut up."

"So don't," she commands, and let's give Dr. Baird the respect of allowing her to have the last word:

You don't need a title to speak. But if you have one, use it. Find your voice, and raise it. Stake your authority, and state it. Don't recoil. Don't back down.

Sometimes authority should be worn lightly. But sometimes it should be brandished like a torch. 

Holy jokes! That's REALLY not funny!

So we were discussing that annoying Christopher Hitchens article--the one that links the ability to bear children with a significant decline in funniness--when someone raised the question, "Was Jesus funny?" Far be it from me to try to resolve the thorny theological issue that caused so much bloodshed in The Name of the Rose, in which merely speculating about whether Jesus had a sense of humor could result in the gruesome death of the speculator and the immersion of his body in a vat of blood drained from freshly slaughtered pigs. There's something about torture that just takes all the fun out of humor, you know? So rather than risk such treatment, I'll just paraphrase the words of Umberto Eco himself: if Jesus wasn't funny, why did he get invited to so many dinners?

A laughing Jesus I can envision, but a laughing Mary? She's not laughing in all those byzantine icons, but then neither is anyone else. In fact, if religious art is any indication, the laugh was a heresy introduced after the Second Vatican Council. I'm trying to recall an image of Mary that suggests laughter, but nothing is coming to mind; the most we ever see is a sort of Mona Lisa smile--quiet, subtle, mysterious. If Hitchens is right, then Mary was less likely to crack a joke than to purse her lips and say, "That's not funny." And the minute those lips were pursed, you can bet some byzantine artist would come along and start slathering on the gold leaf. Did you ever try to crack a smile through half an inch of gold leaf? That's gotta hurt. If Mary followed the Hitchens model of humor-free females, where, then, did Jesus get his excellent sense of humor?

Our furry green friend points out that Hitchens's argument relating humor to powerlessness is a bit circular: men use humor as a smoke screen to hide their own powerlessness, while women use humorlessness to hide their power. If this theory is correct, then surely ultimate power should be linked with ultimate humorlessness, which gives us a stern Jesus straight out of The Name of the Rose. Meanwhile, Mary, the submissive, servantlike handmaiden of the Lord, ought to have a lucrative career in stand-up comedy.

But this is all, of course, mere speculation--as is Hitchens's article, for that matter. I'm sure it would never enter into anyone's head to immerse either of us in a vat of pigs' blood simply for the sin of getting serious about humor. But if someone has to suffer for the cause, let it be Christopher Hitchens. He's the one who links humor with powerlessness, and the way I see it, he can use all the powerlessness he can get.

That's not funny

In the January Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens attempts to answer the age-old question, "Why are men funnier than women?" (Read about it here.) He covers the topic in some depth, including results from an unfunny study on the topic and concluding that "the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise."

I've been mulling over possible responses, most of them remarkably unfunny, which would just provide further support for his underlying assumption that (most) women aren't particularly funny, or that women don't feel the pressure to be funny that men do. I know some very funny women, but they're not professionally funny--their humor is not a career in itself but a byproduct that bubbles out while they're otherwise occupied. This suggests that Hitchens is right, sort of, but this annoys me because I want him to be wrong, but proving him wrong would require a whole lot of serious, articulate prose, preferably with a coherent argument involving bullet points and scientific studies quantifying differences in humor levels. And you know what? That's just not funny.

So let Christopher Hitchens be funny today. I'll go back to being morose.

When "no" means "yes"

Yesterday's Columbus Dispatch included an article about a junior high school in Columbus that is trying to cure an outbreak of inappropriate touching among the students. One 14-year-old boy was quoted saying, "The girls say they don't like it, but they really do."

There, in a nutshell, you have every rapist's justification for his action. Where did a 14-year-old learn that a woman's "No" is just a flirty invitation? Let's hope the boy's parents saw his name in the paper and decided to give him a more complete education. If not, let's hope the girls at that school will soon learn how to deliver a well-placed kick.