Difference

Geeks, Nerds, and Mundanes

Stephanie Zvan

This letter was prompted by a high schooler attending our session at ScienceOnline2011. I think, however, that it’s worth saying to an awful lot more kids.

Dear Stacy Baker’s students:

First of all, thank you for so many of you attending the It’s All Geek to Me session. You added a multi-generational perspective that’s hard to achieve in a conference setting, and you cracked us all up more than once. You also asked good questions.

Now, please let me apologize for how I handled one of those questions. I should have been ready to answer the nerd-vs.-geek question, but I wasn’t, and I mangled it badly. My joke about “I hang out with geeks with social skills” was only a joke, but it’s not remotely funny outside a group of people who know what I actually think about the subject. To anybody else who’s been called a nerd, it’s just hurtful. I’m very sorry about that.

“Nerd” is a stereotype, of course. A nerd is that person who can’t make conversation, can’t ever think of the right thing to say, can’t dress the way everybody else does (clothes being another form of communication), has awkward body language. A nerd is a person defined by their inabilities. A nerd has no social skills. And since humans are pretty much defined as the social animal, a nerd is somehow impaired in his or her humanity.

It’s an ugly stereotype. This is what I meant when I said I don’t use the word because it’s exclusionary.

What I didn’t get around to saying was that it is also nonsense. Social interaction is critical to humanity, but it is our capacity for abstract thought that sets us apart much more. Geeks who don’t fit in socially among non-geeks tend to do very well in the realm of abstract reasoning. There’s absolutely no basis look down on these geeks and plenty of reasons to look up to them.

That’s not the only reason it’s nonsense, either. It isn’t that people classed as nerds have no social skills (despite my stupid joke). Everybody, even the most developmentally delayed person, has some social skills. If you have the ability to make someone laugh on purpose–not everyone all the time, just someone even once–you have advanced social skills. Humor is hard. It requires empathy, understanding others’ expectations, coordinating timing, negotiating taboos, and a host of other joke-specific considerations. You can’t be purposely funny without social skills.

So why do people say nerds don’t have social skills? Well, largely because they’re not using that empathy. Also because they’re looking at the question from the limited perspective of their own culture.

One of the things we talked about in the session is how valuing information very highly shapes social interaction. If you get enough people together who value information to that degree, eventually those ways of interacting become their own set of agreed-upon social rules. At that point, you’ve got a culture.

In this case, you’ve got a geek culture, or a geek subculture, since geeks aren’t in the majority. It doesn’t look like the mainstream culture, but that doesn’t make it any less valid–just different. Being able to successfully navigate the geek subculture isn’t any harder or easier in terms of requiring social skills than navigating mainstream culture. It’s also just different.

While someone from the geek culture may have a difficult time navigating the mainstream culture, it’s not the case that geek culture is easier. Someone from the mainstream culture won’t be able to easily navigate the social expectations of geek culture either. There are really only two differences. The first is that people in geek culture feel more pressure, as the minority, to accommodate someone from mainstream culture.

Second, there are different words for people who “invade” each culture from the other unsuccessfully. Those who are strangers in the mainstream culture are called “nerds.” Those who are strangers in the geek culture are sometimes called “mundanes.” It’s not any nicer or less judgmental a word than “nerd.” It’s just coming from a different source.

So the real answer to “What’s the difference between geeks and nerds?” is that a nerd is a geek outside of her or his culture. And that’s why I don’t use “nerd.” It’s just one more word that says, “Your kind isn’t welcome here.”

Now, as for the reason I made the joke I did. To understand, you have to know a certain amount about my past.

I really did grow up with limited social skills. I was very shy, and I grew up in a house where getting things wrong had consequences that no kid should have to deal with. Since developing good social skills requires a lot of trial and error, I was pretty backward in that respect.

A little later, I spent a lot of time as a poor geek in an area where the geeks were mostly well-off. If geek and non-geek are different cultures, so are poor and rich, or even poor and comfortably middle class. This was a disadvantage for me in that I moved between cultures where I never quite fit in. If I was with the geeks, I was behaving “wrong” for their socioeconomic culture. If I hung out with my class, my interests (and thus I) bored them to tears. I didn’t meet their cultural expectations for entertainment.

I was always under pressure to conform to a culture that was a major mismatch to my identity. On the other hand, that situation taught me so much more about cultures, acceptance and exclusion, and the variability of what is “right” than being comfortable could ever have done. I learned a huge repertoire of social skills adaptable to most situations. And I became the kind of communication geek who could and would propose a session about navigating the cultural expectations of geeks and non-geeks.

Ironically, that joke came out in that session at ScienceOnline because I was as close to being in a room of my peers as I ever am in a group of more than about ten people. My mistake was in assuming that shared geekhood would provide enough shared background for everyone to understand what I would mean by “geeks with social skills.”

I apologize for taking that for granted, and I hope this post helps.

Geeks, Nerds, and Mundanes
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Discriminating Against the Discriminating

Stephanie Zvan3 Comments

It isn’t terribly hard to find Christians who claim to be persecuted for their beliefs. It’s particularly easy this time of year, when people are told that the inclusive wishing of “Happy Holidays” is somehow an affront. Forget that one’s religious beliefs aren’t and shouldn’t be assumed to be somehow visible in a casual encounter or that “Merry Christmas” is grossly inappropriate to many, where “Happy Holidays” welcomes essentially everyone. They’re told they’ve been insulted, and they believe it.

Now, however, via Skepchick, we find a group of Christians who have lost substantially more than their holiday cheer over their religious beliefs. Or at least, they’ve lost over some kind of belief. Let’s see what they lost and why.

But in 2006, after he qualified as a psychosexual therapist, he told his employers that he did not feel able to give sex therapy advice to homosexuals.

A Christian bed and breakfast owner was threatened with legal action for turning away a homosexual couple in March 2010.

Dr Sheila Matthews, a Christian doctor, was told she would be removed from a council’s adoption panel because she refuses to recommend cases involving homosexual couples.

Shirley Chaplin, a 54-year-old grandmother, was taken off wards and moved to a desk job after refusing to remove the crucifix that hangs around her neck. In April 2010 she was told by an employment tribunal that wearing the cross raised health and safety concerns and was not a “mandatory requirement” of the Christian faith.

Right. We have one person who thinks her display of public piety is more important than patient health despite anything written in Matthew and three people who think an injunction from the Old Testament is more vitally Christian than the New Testament’s pervasive call to service for the most vulnerable among us.

That, right there, is the problem with allowing “religious” belief some kind of ascendency over the standards of our public life. As Voltaire said, “If God has made us in his image, we have returned the favor.” These beliefs may be closely held, but they are not religious in nature.

I live in a city with a relatively long history of acceptance of homosexuality. Churches here–of most denominations–largely reflect that acceptance. Those that don’t belong to communities that are not traditionally as accepting. The churches simply codify existing prejudices and values, with the “religious beliefs” of each denomination being shaped by the community rather than the other way around.

Of course, individual’s beliefs are supported and reinforced by their membership in these religious communities. However, when they are not, people generally do one of two things. They convert to a sect that supports their personal beliefs, or they ignore the teachings of their sect in favor of their own preferences (as with the quarter of Catholics who do not believe in transubstantiation or the majority of Protestants who do). This suggests again that labeling beliefs as “religious” and privileging them as such is a problematic practice. Is a belief religious if your religion doesn’t support that belief?

Then we have the fact that there are any number of religious beliefs we collectively refuse to recognize. Banks do not recognize the loan forgiveness of Shmita. We do not kill people for adultery (or consensual extramarital sex). Parents whose children suffer or die because of reliance on faith healing are prosecuted. We allow manufacturers to produce wool-linen blends.

In other words, we legally recognize interests that override an individual’s ability to impose their religious beliefs on others. Going back to our sample discriminatees, the interests of hospital patients in maintaining a sterile treatment environment are obvious. I would hope that the interests of sexual minorities in equal treatment would be equally obvious, but I know that there are those who suggest that it hurts nothing for those minorities to receive their services from someone else.

There are two problems with this reasoning. The first is that requiring sexual minorities to shop around to find someone who will serve them is not equal treatment. It places additional burdens on them that others are not required to shoulder. The second is that while the religious do have the right not to serve in a way that contradicts their religious beliefs, they do not have a right to a service job if they cannot or will not serve.

This isn’t merely in the interest of those who are protected from discrimination. It’s in the interest of our society as a whole that we all have a recognized right to equal treatment, equal rights and responsibilities, that can’t be taken from us at the whim of anyone who finds a community or sect that reinforces their prejudices. After all, there isn’t a form of discrimination or brutality that hasn’t found (or had made) some religious reasoning that makes it all acceptable.

That those in this article can’t see that they’re being held to the same standards as everyone else and being offered the same protections is far more a testament to the fact that their rights haven’t been in question than it is any indication of persecution.

Discriminating Against the Discriminating

Nothing to Hide

Stephanie Zvan

Do you know how many people were killed on the four hijacked flights on September 11, 2001? The answer is 266, including the 19 hijackers. Two months later, 260 people died when a single plane broke apart in the air due to pilot error. None of them were hijackers.

Yes, there were thousands on the ground who died. I am not forgetting them. I am very happy to report that the U.S. government and airlines quickly took measures to securely separate passengers from flight controls.

I’m also happy to say that the U.S. quickly took some measures to tighten up what was some of the industrialized world’s sloppiest airport security. Before the hijackings, I was on a trip to Scotland that involved the transportation of large amounts of camera equipment and a lead-lined bag containing film. I thanked the security scanners in the Glasgow airport for being the only people who bothered to look in the bag to make sure it was film. Things were incredibly lax before the hijackings. They did not stay that way.

In the nine years that have followed the hijackings, how many people have died in terrorist attacks on planes with passengers screened by the TSA? Of the attacks that happened and failed, how many were not carried out by fanatics who were willing to die? Or to put the same question in terms of relevance today: How many of them were less motivated than your average drug mule, who won’t be discovered by anything less than a cavity search?

The answer to that last question is important. That is the number of attacks that will be prevented by the new, highly invasive screening measures the TSA has recently implemented.

I don’t know the answer to that question. Neither do you, but we can both make pretty good estimates. I’m going with zero. Your answer may be different, but it won’t be wildly different. We have taken effective measures to increase our security since the hijackings. I don’t see any way that this new measure can even incrementally increase our current level of airline security. This is pure security theater.

Anil Dash wrote a couple of weeks ago about the value of security theater. I recommend reading his post. If nothing else, he lays out the maximum value we obtain from measures like these. It is the value of an illusion, but it is a value. And given that we won’t obtain any safety increases from allowing subjecting ourselves to this sort of search, it is the total value we will receive. Please keep that value fixed firmly in your mind as you keep reading.

I also have Fibromyalgia. There are points on my body that fire up an amazing amount of pain in response to the slightest pressure. I educate new lovers with brightly-colored disc bandages or stickers. Somehow I doubt the airport authorities will comply with the sticker game.

So… okay. I’ll just dodge the freak-out and the pain by sucking in my lumpy bits and walking through the scanner. I’m generally not shy with my body, I don’t travel often, and I’m not on a first-name basis with the x-ray/MRI tech at the local clinic, so there shouldn’t be an issue.

But wait! There’s more!

I have a genital piercing (a vertical clitoral-hood bar to be specific), and the horror stories have already begun circulating among the metallically-infused about pat-downs, hassles, and fucking strip-searches following these scans. Is it possible these stories are just stories? Urban legends for the new era? Sure. Does it matter to the lizard-brain nested in my head? Absofuckinglutely not.

I am a transexual man. Being “caught” by TSA as a person of transexual past could literally mean my death. Transgender people have the highest rate of hate-crime and the highest rate as murder victims in the USA.

I don’t fly. And I won’t at any point in the foreseeable future. I haven’t for several years due to the invasive screening I had in 2004 that left me with nightmares.

I am a rape survivor. And I know that if I am forced to have the kind of circle jerk that I’ve seen on video–where a bunch of TSA screeners surround me and one of them touches me in very private places–there is a real chance I’m going to freak out. Traveling is always very stressful, in part because I have visual processing issues and epilepsy (see above; i.e, fractured head). Add onto that reliving a painful part of my past–someone touching me and I have no ability to say “I don’t consent“–I am not a happy traveler.

I’m getting ready for a business trip right now. I’m on the job hunt too, since I’ll be laid off next May. I’m hoping to make some important connections with these meetings.

Am I worried that I won’t make a good impression on the bigwigs that I’m going to meet? Am I spending time crunching data to make a good impression when I present my TPS reports?

Nope.
I’m freaking out about just getting on the fucking plane. That’s what I’m spending all my energy on. And that’s not right.

For my friend with a colostomy bag. For my sister with a partial breast reconstruction. For the oh-so-many other women who have been raped or molested.

There has to be a better way.

I’m completely with Bug Girl. There has to be a better, less-invasive way to make people feel a little better. More importantly, there has to be a way to do this that doesn’t step all over–by design–those who have something real to worry about.

Yes, by design. We don’t know where the next attack will come from. We don’t know what it will look like. What we do know is that it will almost certainly look different than any previous attack. And what that means is that screeners have to look for the different. At least, they need to do that if they’re going to do a proper job of things instead of assuming a terrorist has no creativity.

That means that anything a standard-issue government employee doesn’t recognize or understand is cause for suspicion. Really, that’s always been the case, but now there’s a new twist. Instead of looking at our luggage, the TSA is looking at us. They’re turning their attention from what we’re carrying to what we are.

That is the unconscionable problem with this new scheme. Being different, under this scheme, is exactly what will get you treated with suspicion, with disdain, with aggression–treated like a terrorist. Being different. Having nothing you need to hide is an amazing privilege, and it is a very different thing than not being a threat.

Want to see who has that privilege? Take a look at Jay Rosen’s list of people in the media who have decided that the appropriate response to everyone’s concerns is to tell us to “grow up.” The funny thing about that list is that these are the people who have so much privilege they’ve never needed to grow up. They’ve never had to figure out how to deal with the stigma and loss of opportunity that comes with being a sexual minority, surviving sexual assault, or presenting a visible disability. They live in a society where they’ve never needed to figure out how to love and desire despite being heaped with shame for the very shapes of their bodies. Their happy childhoods, at least in this respect, continue to this day, but they tell us to grow up.

They tell us that the costs are small (although they fail to note the lack of benefits from this new program), and they are–to them. They’re being borne by others
(who include, of course, the traditionally visible ethnic minorities). The quotes I listed above are from those describing their fears, but those fears are proving prescient.

“I went through the body scan first,” she said. “And after I went through the body scan, a bunch of officers came over, took my bags and basically put me in a private room and I had no idea what was going on.”

Alyssa is diabetic and wears a small wireless insulin pump, which was noticed in the body scan.

“I had a sweat suit on and had to lift parts of my sweat suit up and parts of my sweat suit down for them to check,” she said. “They basically patted me down in my private parts from head to toe.”

“I was so upset. I tried to remain as calm as I could through this process. I was treated like a criminal and I was afraid anything I would have said or done maybe would not have allowed me to get back to Austin.”

She continued, “And after I was finally cleared to go to the gate, I just started crying. In my whole life I’ve never felt like such a victim before.”

The 3-year-breast cancer survivor agreed, but was then asked by two female Charlotte TSA agents to go to a private room for further screening, and they began what Ms Bossi described as an aggressive pat down.

She said they stopped when they got around to feeling her right breast – the one she had lost through her illness.

Ms Bossi said: ‘She put her full hand on my breast and said, ‘What is this?’. And I said, ‘It’s my prosthesis because I’ve had breast cancer.’ And she said, ‘Well, you’ll need to show me that’.’

She was then apparently asked to remove the prosthetic breast from her bra and show it to the TSA agents.

I stood there, an American citizen, a mom traveling with a baby with special needs formula, sexually assaulted by a government official. I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours, and woke up the next day shaking.

Here is why I was sexually assaulted. She never told me the new body search policy. She never told me that she was going to touch my private parts. She never told me when or where she was going to touch me. She did not inform me that a private screening was available. She did not inform me of my rights that were a part of these new enhanced patdown procedures.

When I booked my ticket, I was given no information that the TSA had changed their wand and unintrusive patdown procedures to “enhanced” patdown procedures that involved the touching of all parts of your body, including breasts and vagina on women and testicles and penis on men. I was not informed by any signs on the front side of security about the new procedures. I had not seen any media coverage about the issue, so I had no idea that this was a new government sanctioned policy.

Another important piece in this story, the Dayton airport does not have the new body scanners. I was not given any other search options. It was enhanced patdown, or nothing. (And I would have opted for the body scanner, if I were going to be subject to a sexual assault.)

Read all too much more at ACLU’s site.

This is why, as I go through airport security this morning (right about the time this posts), I won’t be going through any scanner. It isn’t because I have anything to hide. It’s because I don’t. It’s because the invasive search can’t really hurt me. I know what will happen. I don’t have any medical equipment that can be dislodged or touch triggers or body shame.

What I do have is time and the right to demand that if someone wants to get that personal with me, they look me in the eyes. What I have is the willingness to talk to the TSA agent about what kind of job satisfaction they’re feeling these days.

Nothing to Hide

Speaking Out

Stephanie Zvan2 Comments

Unless you speak up and tell the world that gays, lesbians and other sexual and gender minorities are due the same protection of their human rights under the law that the rest of us have, this is what you’re supporting.

United Nations — African and Arab nations succeeded by a whisker in deleting three words from a resolution that would have included gays in a denunciation of arbitrary killings. Europeans protested in vain.

…

The reference in the three-page draft came in the sixth of 22 paragraphs and urged investigations of all killings “committed for any discriminatory reason, including sexual orientation.” The provision was among many that had been proposed and analyzed by a “special rapporteur” (investigator) on the subject.

Benin, the chair of the African group of nations, proposed the amendment and Morocco, on behalf of the Islamic Conference, argued that there was no foundation for gays in international human rights instruments as there was in cases of race, gender and religious discrimination.

Whether by your voice, your vote, or your silence, you lend support to the idea that it’s okay to kill gays. Sometimes it really is just that simple.

“Oh, but wait,” I hear, “I don’t support killing anyone. I just don’t want them to get married.”

That doesn’t matter. These people, they understand that you’re weak, that you don’t like getting your hands dirty, that you settle for marginalizing “them” and their relationships. They think less of you for it, sure, but they’re still happy to do your work for you. After all, you and them? You’re on the same page.

That’s what you’ve told them.

Speaking Out

HPV and the Bigots of AVN

Stephanie Zvan5 Comments

Jane J Kim, PhD, an assistant professor of health decision science in the department of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, constructed models to assess the cost-effectiveness of the HPV shot across a range of potential scenarios involving men who have sex with men. The scenarios were based on age, previous exposure to the types of warts that are targeted by the vaccine, and HIV status. Men who test positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are at higher risk for HPV and anal cancer.

Researchers used measurements called “QALY.” QALY — which stands for “quality adjusted life year” — is a measurement of both quality and length of life. In the study, a cost-effectiveness ratio of less than $50,000 per QALY gained is considered a “good value for money.”

Vaccinating men who have sex with other men against HPV between the ages of 12 to 26 is a cost-effective strategy, Kim concludes. If further study shows that this vaccine is also effective against HPV-related cancers it may be an even more cost-effective intervention.

This is pretty awesome news. There are still issues to be worked out, of course, particularly in terms of how we get the vaccine to the people most likely to benefit from it. The issue of how people identify sexually versus how they behave sexually, particularly at the ages at which the vaccine will be most effective, will require some decisions to be made about how broadly to cast the vaccination net.

Still, we have an opportunity to help a population that already suffers a disproportionate burden of disease. We can even offer them passive protection up front, when it is most likely to be effective.

Of course, that’s not how the Anti-Vaccination Nitwits (yes, I know it’s Australian Vaccination Network) sees the issue. From their Facebook page:


Yes, they really did say that young male homosexuals (they left out bisexuals entirely)–and by young, I mean teenagers and very young adults–have a bunch of disposable income. Not only did they indulge in rank stereotyping of gay men, but they completely ignored the truly ugly situation faced by young homosexuals. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Australia is completely civilized in how gay and lesbian teens are treated.

Right.

Is it any wonder that the first response to their post was the comment below (removed after six hours on a thoroughly moderated page, according to Reasonable Hank, but captured by StopAVN and brought to my attention by Bob Apthorpe)?

I’m not sure why they bothered to take it down, actually, since it says the same thing the AVN itself said.

Sadly, this stance is entirely in line with what the AVN has previously had to say in an article on HPV vaccines.

This vaccine aims to protect people from a virus that is basically only transmitted when a person engages in what amounts to optional behaviour. HPV is not a public health threat in the same way, say, polio or measles are.

Did I get HPV through having sex? Yes. But it seems a bit odd to refer to something that half of all Australian teenagers have done before leaving high school as “optional behaviour.” It’s the most pointless of technicalities. Still, that usually how the AVN gets their victim blaming in, if this article is any indication.

Most women who develop invasive cervical cancers have not had regular Pap smears. So to say that because 1,000 women in the U.K. die of cervical cancer every year, and there is thus an urgent public-health need to vaccinate every adolescent girl–without mentioning that many if not most of these women did not have regular screenings–is somewhat disingenuous.

Because heart disease, lung cancer, diabetes, emphysema, and everything else that has a partial cause in human choices is not actually any kind of public health issue. Again, right.

I guess the only thing to do now is to wait for actual vaccination recommendations to be made. In the meantime, we can all “amuse” ourselves laying bets on how the AVN will react to the news. Will it be clueless stereotyping, ignorance of human behavior, or a combination of the three?

HPV and the Bigots of AVN

Coming Out

Stephanie Zvan3 Comments

No, not me. I am, from what the data says, unusually heterosexual, and any queerness I might choose to share doesn’t involve just my information. So, no, I’m not talking about me. It is National Coming Out Day, however, and a couple of people are doing it up right.

Jen is, at Blag Hag:

Oh, it was awkward, and it was heartbreaking – but mostly because that’s how all crushes are to a 13 year old girl. I was just lucky that I never thought it was sinful or wrong. I wasn’t religious, and I was delightfully oblivious to the people who thought my feelings were disgusting.

But it still wasn’t easy. There was something overwhelmingly horrible knowing the odds are against you – that, if you’re rounding up, maybe 10% of people would also be interested in the same sex. I couldn’t get my friend out of my mind, but I knew the odds of her feeling the same way were slim to none. It’s terrible liking someone without them liking you back, but it seems just a tad more terrible when you know there’s literally nothing you can do about it. No amount of persuasion will change their biology.

Do read the comments at Blag Hag. I love the number of people who are saying they already knew, and only partly because I also thought Jen was already out. There have been plenty of offhand, light references on the blog and on Twitter to finding women attractive, and I’m tickled to see how many people never considered that Jen would somehow have to be “just joking” about it. Some days, I like people.

Elizabeth is reflecting on being out as well, over at Sex in the Public Square:

And this brings me to a reflection on another difficulty of being out. Outness is partly a matter of context. In what circumstances at work does it become appropriate for me to make reference to other lovers? Relatively infrequently. But just recently a colleage to whom I’m not especially out asked me about weekend plans. As it happens I had a date with a woman I care deeply about. I said “I have a date.” She asked no further questions, and so the conversation died there. I was ready to explain further, but she did not inquire and quite probably assumed that I either was making reference to going out with a friend or that I was referring to a date with Will.

While coming out is a continual process, ceremonial days like National Coming Out Day are useful because they provide a context for self disclosure. They also provide a ritual moment for reminding others that our lives may not be as clear and simple as they appear on the surface.

For all those who are not at all out, it is important that the rest of us show ourselves openly to help dispel stereotypes and to strengthen the system of mutual support that outness can provide.

It also makes me quite happy that most of the people I know who fall under the broad heading of GLBTQ (where Q = queer of some sort) are already generally out. A friend of a friend referred to today as “Happy ‘Yeah we know dude’ day.” Today was a day for affirmation for most of them, rather than a day of added risk or longing for what it would be unwise to actually do. One person I’m proud to call a friend used the day to come out as bisexual to her Catholic family.

All that is progress, but it isn’t enough. I live in a very liberal city, with lots of artists and academics for friends. I hang out with people who make a point of trying to question received wisdom about the social order. Even here, I know of one situation in which two of my friends don’t feel comfortable being out. The prominent heterosexuality of the place is such that even identifying the location would out those people.

Then we get outside the city and outside my generation. I see a teenager who can’t understand why “so gay” is an insult but still uses it as one, all but guaranteeing that her friends will at least hesitate before coming out to her. I see a woman several years into her retirement, who moved across the country with her “roommate” and whose parents will likely die within the next year or two without ever having discussed her sexuality (if they allow themselves to know about it). Then there are all the people who are not safe or who don’t feel safe, just because of their sexuality, practiced–or merely experienced–in private.

Kelley expresses how this feels better than I can at Watching the Wheels:

I do know that I will love this man and stand by him as long as I am able. And I know that whatever the future brings we will work through it together.

Today I’m not telling my parents any of this. I wish that I could. It feels so wrong to be so happy and to not share it with two of the people that mean the most to me in this world. One of my sisters is sure I will be disowned. I don’t know with any degree of confidence that she’s wrong. Today I’m not ready to find out.

But I think it’s worth the risk, to share this part of my life with them. Maybe next year I’ll be ready. And maybe next year my fears will be proven wrong. Maybe I’ll be accepted, my happiness will be accepted. Maybe, but maybe not today.

For them (and for you, because in hiding is a scary, toxic place to be), come out today, if you can. If you can afford to take those risks, for yourself and for others, tell the world who you are. Come on out.

Coming Out

About Those HPV Vaccines

Stephanie Zvan8 Comments

Go get them for your kids who are in the appropriate age range. Tell people you know who have kids in that age range that these are important. That’s all. Just help deal a major blow to the most pernicious forms of this virus.

Why?

Yesterday I had an appointment to get a Pap smear. This is a routine appointment for most women. It isn’t for me. It was a six-month follow-up to my last test (clear), which was a follow-up to my surgery for cancer in situ last November.

It also marks the second birthday in a row during which I will be waiting for more information on my health. A friend noted yesterday, “It’s not a Heisenberg cervix; you won’t alter it by looking at it. So even if it WAS bad news, that means you can enjoy your birthday without having it hang over your head.” It doesn’t exactly change the situation, but at least it made me laugh, which I needed by then.

I didn’t think the Pap was going to bother me. I thought it would be just as routine as any before last year. Some part of me had other ideas.

I should have known something was weird when I had trouble remembering I had the appointment. I nearly forgot to get a referral for insurance purposes. I forgot to put it on my work calendar. I scheduled client calls without thinking about whether they’d conflict. I forgot to account for it when planning the number of hours I’d need to work yesterday. I forgot to tell my husband about it at all.

It didn’t get any better after I had to remember it. About an hour before the appointment, I started to get twitchy. I walked over to the doctor’s office using a route I hadn’t taken yet. In the elevator up, I remembered the only other two times I’d been to the office. The first was when I’d bled all over the place, due to what I termed “helpful violence.” On the second, I was told I needed surgery, although what I was told didn’t give me even a hint of what I was in for afterward.

I was panting just a little by the time I hit the office. I nearly laughed at the nurse who took my blood pressure, and I didn’t bother to find out what it was. There was no point. It wasn’t going to tell anyone anything about the general state of my health.

They made a very smart move when they put me in the examination room to wait for the doctor. They gave me a little paper lap robe and made me take my pants off. In the ten minutes or so that I was waiting, that extra step between me and escape kept me where I was. Of course, it also kept me from pacing or doing anything else to burn off the adrenaline.

Instead, I looked at the kit for the test. Picture a tapered pipe cleaner on a long handle, about three-quarters of an inch of stiff white brushes, with a small metal paddle at the end for scraping. Next to that is a larger paddle that would look something like a white butterfly if it weren’t made of hard white plastic with ridges for more scraping. Once I knew what everything was, I found something else to look at.

The doctor turned out to be much nicer than I remember. Fairly sweet guy, in fact. I have no idea what he saw when he walked into the room, but he went from “You’ll have your results in just a couple of weeks if everything is fine” to “I’ll call you when I get the results in a few days, whatever they are” in about a minute.

We talked about the new baseball stadium while I was getting my actual exam. I don’t know whether he was being extra thorough because he didn’t want to chance missing anything or whether the Pap smears I’ll be getting for the rest of my life (most women can stop in their sixties) are just going to hurt and cramp that much. I’m healed from the surgery, but there’s less of my cervix than there was the last time I had a “normal” exam, and that was the first time I’d bled from a Pap test.

Then it was over and I jittered my way out of there. I was still on the edge of tears, as I’d been for the whole exam, but at least I could move again. Unfortunately, I only had one errand to run, a quick trip to get some chamomile tea to help deal with the cramping. All too soon, I was back at my desk, expected to sit still and work as though nothing out of the ordinary had bitten a big hole in my day, as though nothing had taken out so large a portion of my last year that anything that reminds me of it terrifies me.

So why get kids the HPV vaccine, you ask? I’ll admit it; part of my answer is that I want to see the bug that did this to me eradicated. I know that’s unlikely, though. Still, I’ll settle for fewer people having to go through anything approaching what I have.

Wouldn’t you?

About Those HPV Vaccines

Benny the Rat Embraces His Nazi Past

Stephanie Zvan4 Comments

I wasn’t terribly concerned over Joseph Ratzinger’s election to pope simply because he had a Nazi past, having been part of the Hitler Youth. He was, after all, quite young at the time. That he didn’t make the hard choice to oppose the government of his time was not exceptional, a fact that undermined any claim to a particular inherent virtue in the new pope but didn’t make a case for inherent evil either.

That case was made by Ratzinger’s adult behavior. His regressive attitude toward his predecessor’s humanitarian gestures and his emphasis on authority over forgiveness on the subject of HIV and condoms told me all I needed to know about this new pope. Later revelations about his role as enforcer in keeping the church’s predatory scandals quiet weren’t a surprise. Not from Benny the Rat.

Now, however, Ratzinger seems to be reaching back to embrace his Nazi past.

Yes, I’m quite serious. What else can you call his recent statement about atheists?

“Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live,” he said.

“I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious people who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives.

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society …”

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs rightly calls it revisionism. Beyond that, it is revisionism that parallels what Ratzinger has seen before, in his formative years.

Jews may not be acceptable targets in most of the civilized world at the moment (I wish I could say, “anymore”), but atheists are still subject to open and unapologetic religious discrimination even from sects and authority figures that consider themselves religiously liberal. It is perfectly fine to suggest that our moral character is inherently defective, despite evidence to the contrary. It’s almost trendy to characterize our open, unashamed, sometimes opinionated existence as an attack on others. Our very lack of invisibility is considered a problem.

Then there is the atmosphere in which the pope’s statements were made. It is not a mere coincidence that the Nazis came to power during a time of international economic turbulence and deep uncertainties about the future. I could say more about that, but Tom Levenson’s excellent post on what Albert Einstein has to tell us about the tea partiers says it more eloquently than I could. (Read also his take on the moral failure of Ratzinger’s remarks.)

Nor is the problem just that the pope is exploiting the uncertainty of our times. He is doing it as the head of an institution that bears direct responsibility for many of our global problems. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Turn away from your comfortable “First World” life for a moment and think about what the promotion of poverty, disease, overpopulation and submissiveness means to our world, both in general and specifically in building tensions between the have-littles and have-nones. This tension is a political force that should never be underestimated, particularly in its power to destroy.

Yet Ratzinger not only fails to take responsibility for the actions and policies of his institution, or for the power that gives them such far-reaching effects. He also deflects this responsibility onto atheists, an unorganized group without anything like the power to create the phenomena for which he blames them. Atheists, denied social influence by virtue of their atheism–and political power in many places, can no more be specially responsible for the world’s problems than the Jews of Germany could be responsible for the failures of the German government.

They can, however, serve as a scapegoat for a leader who wants power without the responsibility that should come with it. Of all the current political and religious leaders in our world, Ratzinger has the fewest excuses for claiming ignorance as to where that can lead.

Ratzinger was a child when he participated in the Hitler Youth. He shouldn’t be held responsible for what he supported then, although a truly moral man might claim that responsibility despite his immaturity at the time. We are, after all, none of us ever truly mature, and it’s the repercussions of our lingering immaturities of which we should be most aware.

Benny the Rat is no longer a child. He is an adult of an age to have seen the Holocaust first hand and remember its lessons. That he has said what he has said under the circumstances in which he said it strongly suggests that he is embracing those lessons. It is appalling that he can remain the head of an institution with any power at all when he is so clearly embracing the wrong ones.

Benny the Rat Embraces His Nazi Past

Forced Perspective

Stephanie Zvan8 Comments

I’m loving this video. For once, the entire internet understands what heights look like to me. Sooo nice to not be the only one.

Update: Noooo! Not fair. They took it down. Something about giving the industry a bad image or something. Although, how any industry involving heights can have a good image is beyond me to start with.

Ah, well. Try this one instead.

Forced Perspective

Promoting and Learning from Diversity

Stephanie Zvan

I’m a bit quiet, I know. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about a couple of big things that will probably never see text. If you’re having trouble keeping busy, and even if you’re not, I recommend the following couple of videos from this year’s Secular Student Alliance conference.

The first is Debbie Goddard, whom I mentioned I wanted to hear more from after Skepchickcon. Here I got to hear more. Debbie talks about diversity in the campus freethought movement: how much there is, when and why it’s important, and how (specifically) to increase it.

Promoting and Learning from Diversity