Objectify This

So, I’m a girl. I know this may come as a shock. But don’t worry, I’ve had my cooties shots.

Chances are, there are some other girls in your life. If so, you might care to hear about this article published in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by Associate Professor Maryjane Wraga of the Psychology department at Smith College.

In a study conducted in 2006, Professor Wraga remarked that “Recent negative focus on women’s academic abilities” (coming from personages of such high academic standing as the president of Harvard University) “has fueled disputes over gender disparities in the sciences.

“The controversy derives, in part, from women’s relatively poorer performance in aptitude tests, many of which require skills of spatial reasoning. We used functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural structure underlying shifts in women’s performance of a spatial reasoning tasks introduced by positive and negative stereotypes.

“Three groups of participants performed a task involving imagined rotations of the self. Prior to scanning, the postive-stereotype group was exposed to a false but plausible stereotype of women’s superior perspective-taking abilities; the negative stereotype group was exposed to the pervasive stereotype that men outperform women on spatial tasks, and the control group received neutral information.

“The significantly poorer performance we found in the negative stereotype group corresponded to increased activation in brain regions associated with increased activation in visual processing areas and, to a lesser degree, complex working memory processes. These findings suggest that stereotype messages affect the brain selectively, with positive messages producing relatively more efficient neural strategies than negative messages.”

In other words, what Wraga has found is that stereotypes are self-perpetuating. What better argument is there for feminism in the classroom than the argument that women are subjected to ideas of their inferiority by academia?

Larry Summers was not the first to say it, and won’t be the last, but it’s true that there are differences between men and women – just as it’s true that definition of these differences varies greatly.

This is especially significant for women who work in academia, as it can sometimes require the intellectually rigorous defense of an opinion to even join in academic arguments.

Women enter the academic ring with everything to lose. To enter a class and be told a rape joke by the lecturer, or to know women who were raped whose cases were thrown out of court – these are potent disempowering experiences. The popular failure of feminism speaks to the overwhelming pessimism and passivity of the women of my generation – which are the probable results of consistent exposure to these kinds of stereotypes, and a lack of engagement with them.
What this means is that we need to examine objectification in our own lives more seriously. How can we cultivate agency for ourselves and those around us? In a recent lecture, Professor Wraga cited a study which showed that a threat-activating environment, such as simply being outnumbered by men in the room, can cause discomfort in women. Women who took an SAT math and verbal exam in a condition with two males performed significantly worse than comparable females who took the test surrounded by two other females. Additionally, the researchers found that the threat-condition group ate up to three times as much ice cream after the test than the control.

Interestingly, Wraga also noted that such conditions have been documented in both men and women on the basis of race. When two groups of white males, math majors and non-math majors, were confronted with a neutral message at the beginning of their math test, the math majors did better. But when the groups faced a message that indicated that Asian men were superior at math, the non-majors’ scores exceeded those of the math major.

Thus, Wraga argued, threat must affect certain kinds of mental performance. Women perform better when exposed to a positive message, and men exposed to a negative message perform like women in the baseline group. Thus, women appear to be reacting to a higher overall level of stress, and gender gaps in cognitive processes are not as biologically entrenched as sociobiology would have us believe.

So what can we do to avoid saturating ourselves with oppression? I don’t advocate avoiding contact with men because I love men– though this threat-hypothesis is worrisome. But there are lots of things we can do (here’s where it sounds like I’m a crazy didact, but consider these merely suggestions) don’t buy glossy magazines that tell you to lose weight. Wear clothes that make you feel comfortable and powerful. Eat whatever makes you feel comfortable and powerful. Sleep with whoever makes you feel comfortable and powerful (did I mention that feminists have better sex?). When you meet people who are comfortable and powerful, make a comfortable, powerful peace with them. And someone, please, put some feminism in the classroom.

Hillary, you say? I don’t even want to get into Hillary because I’ve already got to start by pointing out that I will be ready to puke if the Bush-Clinton joint chair of the White House for the last twenty years continues for another four or eight, because I will consider myself to be living in something dangerously close to a dictatorship. But I’m torn, because at the same time, Hillary is the only kind of woman who would ever stand a chance of winning the presidency. And considering the threat hypothesis, she’s already demonstrating some nerves of steel that her opponents don’t have to contend with. As Carl Friedrich Gauss wrote to Sophie Germain in 1807, when she revealed that he had been corresponding with a female mathematician, and not the male identity she’d assumed, “when a woman, who because of her sex and our prejudices encounters infinitely more obstacles that an man in familiarizing herself with complicated problems, succeeds nevertheless in surmounting these obstacles and penetrating the most obscure parts of them, without doubt she must have the noblest courage, quite extraordinary talents and superior genius.”

Of course, we must laugh at the idea that success involves “surmounting” and “penetrating” our obstacles’ “obscure parts”, because we don’t really have a choice about it. For more about gendered language, refer to this post. I got to go to sleep.