Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Chobani Learns That HowMatters – and so Does Science

...and everything else, Pop Culture

HowMattersChobaniDuring the last Super Bowl, Chobani debuted an advertisement focusing on their use of natural ingredients and limited preservatives. It was an innocuous, somewhat bland, typically feel-good commercial, emphasizing that how things are made matters. And it probably would have gone largely unnoticed by media critics, science writers, and scientists, save for one wee problem:

Chobani extended the thought of the commercial to messages inside yogurt lids. But a commercial is 90 seconds of words and images; a yogurt lid is a lot less space. And in that space, they opted for the fatefully bad phrase:

Nature got us to 100 calories, not scientists. #HowMatters.

They might as well have painted a bullseye on the label.

Since then, Chobani’s social media team mistakenly tried to take the tongue-in-cheek approach, realized it was backfiring even further, apologized, explained they use science, and reassured consumers that the #WordsMatter and they’ve discontinued the lids.
ChobaniDiscontinued
Overall, I’ve seen worse responses from companies, and chances are excellent that this will blow over and be nothing but Google search memories in another week or so. But a couple of us were chatting on Twitter about what Chobani’s ideal response would be, even if it included a bit more risk for the company.1 We spitballed for a bit and then the conversation moved on, but the idea didn’t leave me. During what was undoubtedly procrastination on another project over the weekend, I realized that my ideal? Would be for Chobani to modify their #HowMatters commercial with the opening voice-over from Numb3rs:2

Chobani uses science every day:
to pasteurize milk, to tell temperature, to isolate probiotics.
Science is more than formulas or equations;
and it’s not something to be afraid of.
Science is using our minds to solve the biggest mysteries facing food production and safety in America.3

How does matter, and so does the science behind our yogurt. At Chobani, we’re committed to using the best advances in science to benefit everyone. We’re not saying we’re perfect, but our minds are in the right place.

#HowMatters
#SoDoesScience

Chobani is right: how they got to 100 calories matters, and they have a great opportunity to support and boost the positive benefits of science and STEM in America, peeling back the curtain a bit to let people see how science is truly part of everyday life. In a society where fear of chemicals (and thus science) is growing, thanks in large part to misinformation4 and lack of education, and when we need more rather than less people interested in STEM, this would be a small but significant gesture of goodwill—and it’d probably generate some positive PR, too.5

Childless: My Joy is Another’s Grief; Don’t Conflate the Two

...and everything else, life and living

This morning, CNN6 ran a piece on misunderstandings and stereotypes of childless women called “Check your ‘cat-lady’ preconceptions about childless women.” Naturally, it’s full of preconceptions, misunderstandings, and stereotypes of childless women. In particular, the women are still discussed by their relationship to/with children, and the voluntarily child-free are conflated with the involuntarily childless and uncertain.

Let’s take a quick walk through the women interviewed for this story:

  • Grell Yursik, 35: she and her husband have not decided whether they want to have children;
  • Laurie White, 43: refers to herself as “accidentally childless”;
  • Melanie Notkin, 45: says she has circumstantial infertility because she’s single and discusses “the pain and grief over not having children,” promotes maternal instincts of childless women;
  • Kitty Bradshaw, 35: heeded advice to wait to have children (portrayed as bad advice in the story), still dreams of having them and has moved to LA to find a husband;
  • Sheila Hoffman, 64: conscious choice to be child-free.

Women, still defined by the activity of their uteruses. Still defending their ability to be maternal,2 still looking for someone to create a child with,3 still using morally loaded language to justify their childless state as an accident of fate.

In fact, in an article ostensibly about the great life of childless women, four of the five women interviewed discuss wanting to have children and feeling that the circumstances of their lives simply don’t allow it. There are 33 paragraphs in the story, and three—the last three—talk to and about a woman, Sheila Hoffman, who actively made the choice to not have children. None of the paragraphs on Hoffman discuss her choice or how it makes her feel, only the need for role models for women that are not mothers. This, despite the fact that the DeVries Global white paper that at least in part prompted Wallace’s article showed that a full 36% of the 1000 women without children interviewed didn’t actually want children (and another 18% were on the fence).

So why did Wallace’s article spend absolutely zero time on this theoretically large segment of the American population?

Because it’s still not considered acceptable for women to not want children. Even the term being coined for these women, “Otherhood,”4 emphasizes the Otherness5 of women who have decided to skip having children.

What is acceptable is for a woman to want to have children, but to ruefully conclude that she cannot because she is single, cannot afford IVF treatments or being a single mother,6 or has lost her chance for reasons running the gamut from missed love to missing love. Women can and should be apologetic and sad about being childless; it is an accident, or a tragedy, rather than an empowered choice. And that’s reflected in Wallace’s article.

But beyond being infuriating for those of us—a third of the women sampled!—who are cheerful, happy, and decisive about our decision to not have children, the grouping of women who do not have children with women who do not want children is hurtful to the women who do feel that loss in their lives. These experiences—of feeling circumstantially infertile, of accidental childlessness, of deeply wanting a child—should not be lumped in with those of us who happily hug our IUDs, pills, and/or condoms whilst skipping gleefully down the Marvel toy aisle thinking “all for me, all for me.”7 Being infertile, circumstantially or medically, is a serious emotional wound that should not be conflated with a joyful and intentional life choice.

Write about the pain.

Write about the joy.

Don’t write about them at once, because that only does a disservice to both.

Sagan on Science and Philosophy: A Simple Response to Neil deGrasse Tyson

...and everything else

As apparently everyone on the internet has already seen, Neil deGrasse Tyson has once again dismissed the value of philosophy as an endeavor, going so far as to encourage smart students to stay away from philosophy, with joke-y comments that it breaks a person.

I have only one brief response:

Because science is inseparable from the rest of the human endeavor, it cannot be discussed without making contact, sometimes glancing, sometimes head-on, with a number of social, political, religious and philosophical issues.

Of course, that’s not my original thought. That one? That one is from the introduction to Cosmos, and it belongs to Carl Sagan.

A Penis Isn’t A Punchline (But It Is A Biological Structure)

...and everything else, Writing

Have you heard the one about Neotrogla? Neotrogla is an interesting cave insect discovered Brazil; instead of being blind or transparent or having other neat cave-specific adaptations, Neotrogla mixes things up with sex. In specific, Neotrogla females have a penis, while the males have an internal cavity that receives the penis. A great summary of the science can be found at Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of not-great science communication attempts out there with Neotrogla, and Annalee Newitz took aim at them over at io9. Unfortunately, Newitz got it wrong, too.

In particular, the issue with Newitz’s piece is it’s also conflating issues, mixing human gender-related issues with the more technical biology and anatomy of sex. She says

almost every news outlet covered the story by describing the insects as “females with penises.” This isn’t just painfully wrong ”” it’s bad for science.

and then goes on to support her assertion that this isn’t a penis, but a new structure (citing the also-incorrect Jason Goldman’s post for io9 on Neotrogla).

Newitz asks if we’ve ever heard of a penis inflating, or having barbs, or of marathon mating sessions, and the answer to all of those things is yes. NeotrogOctoIllustration A penis can have barbs and spines (cats), inflate (dogs), and mating can happen for a period of time humans consider long (moths). But as Professor Diane Kelly notes, a penis is, technically/biologically, an appendage that transfers reproductive material between mating creatures—which is why octopus have them, even if they’re weird little hentai-inspiring arm things. So yes, Neotrogla has a penis.

That said, Newitz is absolutely right that there has a lot of offensive coverage on the topic, and that? That should be called out. I saw the play on “chicks with dicks” she refers to, I saw “gender-bending insects!”, I saw articles referring to “the tranny bug” and other charmingly awful things. (Note: after thought, I decided not to link to any of the offensive articles. They don’t deserve the clicks. If you want to see them, Newitz had a good running list in her io9 post.) That sort of writing needs to be called out for what it is: offensive and wrong. The lazy writing that, as a whole, the science communication community should be ashamed of, is conflating issues of biological sex and gender for crude humour that requires the butt of a joke to be someone whose gender and biological sex don’t “match,” and we as a community should be better than “Crying Game cave insect” jokes.

But the thing is, naming and shaming those who want to use transgender, intersex, and other issues of identity and biological non-conformity is separate from an actual discussion of the biological structure of Neotrogla. Ultimately, noting that there is a female insect with a penis does do exactly what Newitz wants: emphasizes the awe-inspiring diversity of science. Because Neotrogla‘s female is female—she just happens to have a penis, too. Which means that how people want to define gender (as the rigid representation of biological structure, ie “men have penises, women do not”) is continuing to crumble. And that? That’s a good thing.

Real Identity on the Internet (My Variation)

...and everything else, Writing

I have been online a long time. I have a digital trail that sometimes feels like it’s a mile wide, where I benefit more from the fact that a lot of content from the early days of the world wide web weren’t archived before servers went down than anything else. I’ve been anonymous, pseudonymous, known by my married name and my given one. TalkCityMissingIt gives me at least a little bit of perspective over the current debate over identity online, and it makes me uncomfortable to see me mentioned, even in passing, as a good “open identity” idea to emulate.

I, truth be told, never gave much thought to what it meant to be visible online before my editor, reading an article I’d handed in for my third op-ed, asked me if I was sure I wanted to publish it. Had I really thought about what I was saying, and was I okay putting it online? She closed the file and told me to think about it for a day before making my decision.

I did think it over. I thought about what I was saying, but I also thought about what I had already said over the last 18 months of courses and teaching and work and outreach, and realized I wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t already said elsewhere. I was okay putting it online. After all, I was writing an op-ed for a university paper; how many people really read those, anyhow?

A few weeks later, another column ended up, along with my headshot, on the dartboard outside the offices of a department at that university, and I realized that at least people on campus were reading what I wrote. Honestly? I laughed when I heard that, I was delighted over the hate mail my editor received, and I felt like I was doing something right.

I moved on from there to graduate school, which came along with writing for higher profile blogs on both bio and broader medical ethics. The idea of not writing under my given name was never even broached; I was developing an academic presence in a field known for controversy—and I admit that I relished the attention controversial posts received. (I sometimes think bioethicists seek validation in decibels, or at least in the number of opposition papers aimed at you.)

And then things collapsed around me; when I applied to other graduate schools, I was told, in confidence and by several different people at several different schools, that I would never work in bioethics again. My name and my record were too linked to things that had nothing to do with me, but would taint me via association.

Shortly after that, I ended up on Twitter, mostly as a lark. Some of you likely remember my first icon: one of my cats, not me. I used my first name, but I didn’t have a picture of myself online, and I didn’t closely tie my Twitter handle to my website; I never posted what little blogging I was doing to Twitter.

I don’t recall precisely when I decided to link my blog to Twitter. I was drawn back into blogging about bioethics by Twitter, so I would guess it was probably some time in early 2012. mentoledo_reasonably_smallAs for my face being out there, that came shortly before Science Online 2013, when attendees were asked to have a recognizable icon. (For a while, I seriously thought about bringing a cutout of my cat’s face to wear.) My full name didn’t get added to Twitter until last week, when people were confused about what that last name was, and I realized it wouldn’t hurt to be slightly more clear.

But here’s the thing: I really don’t have anything to lose by being Kelly Hills on Twitter. I don’t have anything to lose being open in criticizing Nature, or telling Science Online where I think they’ve gone wrong, or with anything else. What was of value to me has already been taken away. So Henry Gee can’t really threaten to put me on a hit list or take me out or destroy my career when that’s all already been done to me. In fact, given that I’ve been accused of throwing servers (that were on fire!) off of buildings in some sort of malicious revenge scheme, Gee’d have to do a lot worse to even get me to blink.

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been threatened, but it is to say that I am privileged in a way that most people aren’t, regardless of their race, class, or status: I have nothing, and that makes me a very difficult person to threaten.

I, if nothing, am your cautionary tale. I am the one that should be pointed to when people say be careful, because I am in the place you end up when the narrative spins out of your control and the idea of controlling damage is as laughable as your reputation.

We often talk about privilege as a good place to be, and most of the time it is. But there is privilege from being so far beyond damaged that you no longer have to care, and it’s not a good privilege. morpheus1I am privileged in that I can say what I think, but that’s because there are no longer any consequences for me in the particular places where I use my voice.

I am nothing but sympathetic to those who feel that their lives, their careers, their reputations, require some degree of caution when they are online, and as such choose to write either anonymously or pseudonymously. They’re doing a delicate calculus, attempting to balance incredibly contradictory and competing needs, and I would never presume I know what’s better for those people, and I rail against the idea that I should be held up as any example of good because, if you really want to, you can find out my middle name. If anything, where I am now—that you know who I am—is an act of defiance. It’s a giant “bring it” of bravado in front of “what else do I have?” It’s trying to make the best of a bad situation, and it’s the sort of thing people should be able to choose, rather than face with resignation.

 

This post came about both from discussions happening over Henry Gee, a senior editor for Nature, outing a pseudonymous blogger, discussions of what it means to boycott Nature, and a really excellent series over at Hope Jahren’s blog on real life identity and the internet.

And just for the general record, it’s not all been bad. I’ve made friends and met some amazing people I wouldn’t have met in a million years otherwise, including my fiancé.