The XX Factor: What women really think.

Do I Have to Be an Astrophysicist?

While I can't answer Melinda's question of whether the bar for mothers-who-do-it-all was always set so high, as a young twentysomething just starting out in my career, I can see that bar vaulting upward among the women of my own generation. With few glass ceilings remaining, the limits to our professional ambitions seem next to nonexistent. But along with our heightened career expectations comes the decision to try to balance both work and family life. For all the inspirational value of Hillary Clinton's historic campaign, even she got choked up trying to explain how she did it all.

About a year and a half ago, I heard Linda Hirshman speak about her book, Get to Work ... And Get a Life, Before It's Too Late, at the women's college I attended. I remember vividly her assertion that women in college should not waste their time studying subjects such as art history. Now, I was an art history major at a liberal arts college, and among the audience were a number of art majors who had emerged from the print-making and painting studios down the hall to hear Hirshman speak. Needless to say, none of us were thrilled with her advice. We were all passionate about the subjects and challenged and fulfilled by our work. Why should we have felt guilty for pursuing our interests?

With the opportunity in recent years to disprove the stereotypes about women's aptitude (or lack thereof) in math and the hard sciences, I often felt in college that I was letting down women everywhere by taking art and literature courses instead of math and physics. Studying at a women's college, I didn't have to contend with gendered expectations about the classes I should take; test tubes and equations just didn't excite me. Still, Hirshman and others like her made me feel that there were fields into which I should venture simply because they remained unconquered by women. It's taken me some time to realize that this can't be right. Can it? Just because a woman can be an astrophysicist, doesn't mean she ought to be one, and just because female art historians are not venturing into male-only territory doesn't mean they should feel guilty about studying Picasso's cubist paintings or Bernini's sublime sculptures.

Called It!

Just after my post below speculating that the abortion-as-performance-art story was a hoax, a fellow Slatester sent around this press release from the Yale public relations office, stating that Aliza Shvarts never really impregnated herself or induced any home abortions, and that the entire thing was "a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body." The only ambiguity it brought up for me was the question of whether Shvarts was a liar or a lunatic. But it's not clear who at the university knew about this "creative fiction," and for how long—from the wording of the release, it appears that just today Shvarts was called upon to confirm to university officials that her project was a stunt. I'm interested to know what other XXers think: Was Shvarts' point simply to trick people into being horrified that a young woman might really have done this to herself (and, depending on your point of view about abortion, ended the lives of several incipient human beings in the process). And if so, was her piece a success?

Roe v. ...Yuck!

OK, I’m both resolutely pro-choice and a known oversharer on this topic, but that abortion-as-Yale-art-project item strikes me as genuinely repellent. It also strikes me as a scam. Though auto-insemination doesn’t always have to be high-tech and expensive (just ask any lesbian with a turkey-baster baby), it seems highly unlikely that nine months' worth of the most assiduous basting would result in four separate pregnancies and miscarriages. (Though the artist declines to specify how many times she knocked herself up, the description of the installation implies that that four separate filmed miscarriages will be projected onto that plastic-wrapped bloody cube suspended from the ceiling. Up for a jaunt to New Haven, anyone?)

And as long as we're getting technical, what's this wonderfully effective "herbal" abortifacient, apparently available without a doctor's prescription, with which the budding Duchamp supposedly induced her multiple miscarriages? And since an early-stage induced abortion can be indistinguishable from a menstrual period, who's to say the filmed miscarriages weren’t fake? The whole story rings false, particularly the notion that Aliza Shvarts’ adviser would sign off on a project that could endanger her student’s health and would almost certainly endanger her own job. Hoax or not, I guess Shvarts’ installation is an accomplishment by some negative measure: In a single attention-getting move, she’s managed to make the pro-choice movement, feminism, performance art, and Yale all look bad at the same time.