language use

Sexism, misogyny, racism and inequality in women’s sports

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The tension and irritation has been building up in me for a long time, even though I was unaware of its presence and imperceptible growth. I am not an athlete nor am I someone who has been vocally feminist for much of my life. I had a few conversations with former colleagues – women who were much older than me, who had been through some of the trials of being the only woman working in a completely male-dominated workplace (an air traffic control center). It’s not as though women are not expected somehow – still – to take notes and make the coffee, but back then it was not just understood but was blatantly stated as a requirement and not questioned. Fighting against these slights in daily work life has never been a conscious part of my life. But strides made by women who came before me paved the way for me not to have to think about such things (as well as the installation of automatic coffee machines!).

I believe wholeheartedly in equality for everyone – and I mean everyone – but when I undertook a master’s program in gender studies, the extremes of feminist theory put me off by being so anti-man. I have not personally suffered – to my knowledge – for being a woman, and I am sure that in some measure this is because I am a white woman who, in the Nordic countries where I live, blends into the scenery and enjoys the privilege that comes from so many different aspects of the accident of my birth and the conscious choice of where I live (which is another layer of privilege – having the choice to decide where to live and to go there).

Similarly Scandinavia conscientiously attempts to lead the way on matters of equality. It does not always succeed, sometimes tripping over itself trying to be “too fair” or politically correct and coming out looking foolish. But the thinking is in the right place. I also say that I have not “consciously” suffered because I don’t know that we are always aware of the things we are numb or indoctrinated to. While no man is outwardly making lewd remarks or insisting that I do something degrading or something that is anything other than equal to what he would do, there have probably been times that I was perceived or treated as “lesser than” because I am a woman. I have been blissfully ignorant to this, if and when it did happen, because my life has still been lived on my terms and has been relatively easy to boot.

Revealing this as my backdrop, I can’t really explain what incensed me and pushed me over the edge about sexism, misogyny and racism in women’s athletics. Not even looking at the flat-out stereotypes any longer (as though all women athletes must exist at caricature-like extremes, i.e. either women who appear as masculine, steroid-pumped sportsmen-lesbians from Cold War era East Germany or ultra-feminine, would-be fashion models who look cute in a short skirt). Either direction these stereotypes travel, they smack of objectification and are on display for the criticism and analysis of the world (and it’s not just men engaging in the bitterest criticism). Not because they are athletes in the public eye but because they are women.

We can see this dynamic quite publicly and visibly played out in the form of Bruce Jenner, former Olympic champion, who is now known as Caitlyn Jenner. As Bruce the athlete, no one would have questioned how he looked or would have sexualized his existence to the degree that all women athletes put up with today. And as Caitlyn, she is suddenly subject to this kind of scrutiny. Jon Stewart explained it best in a recent episode of The Daily Show. Now, suddenly, as a woman, Jenner’s worth is all tied up in her “fuckability” and her beauty.

This holds true for women athletes the world over. And when it is not explicitly about their bodies as objects, and how their bodies and fashion sense reflect on their character (!) or deservedness to win (!!) (e.g., when a Wimbledon winner (Marion Bartoli) is ripped to shreds because she is “too ugly and/or too fat” to win), it’s about the invisibility or lack of support for their sports. FIFA‘s (soon-to-be-former president) Sepp Blatter infamously remarked that women’s football might be more popular if they wore tighter/shorter shorts; Al Jazeera reported on the discrimination against female footballers in Brazil while The Atlantic reports that Brazil’s biggest male footballer makes 15 million USD a year, while its biggest female football star cannot find a team to play for. Al Jazeera and more recently John Oliver highlighted the sexist inequality of FIFA insisting that the women’s World Cup be played on artificial turf rather than grass.

All of this is frustrating but not quite the infuriating push I needed to get really angry. Instead, Serena Williams’s win at the French Open this weekend finally made me seethe with rage. Looking at her winning history, she is singularly the greatest female tennis player ever to play the game. Can she be recognized simply for these record-breaking achievements in athleticism and sporting victory? No.

No one is or has been (in recent memory) more susceptible to the powerful and ugly forces of sexism, misogyny, racism and inequality than Serena Williams.

If all female pro-athletes, particularly in a “demure” arena like tennis, are treated like sex objects who should be supermodels, what can we expect? And when the kind of racially charged, barely veiled racist language cues come into play on top of the sexism and objectifying, shouldn’t every woman be angry?

**Edited later to note that The Atlantic published a piece on French Open men’s champion, Stan Wawrinka, which states: “It’s that Wawrinka doesn’t look or comport himself like a Grand Slam champion. From his bright pink “pajama” shorts to his faintly dadboddish physique, the Swiss native looks more like someone you’d find at Home Depot than Roland Garros.” Finally someone jumps on what a man looks like and how he “comports” himself. Equality, right?

Lunchtable TV Talk – Dig: More subtitled entertainment

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I have been a fan of A Fine Frenzy for years. I had no idea when I started watching Dig – a show that is not (so far) great by any means, but which has enough twists and turns and depth to keep me watching – that A Fine Frenzy’s Alison Sudol is one of its standout characters.

While it does not seem to be a great show yet, it fits squarely into the category of shows I have been considering and writing about lately – those shows that use languages other than English extensively (and thus a liberal use of subtitles). With Dig, it’s Hebrew.

Jason Isaacs often shows up in programs that are a bit too obscure and conceptual – and thus do not seem like they will be long for this world. Awake is a good example. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t bring exceptional insight to his roles. He plays grief and confusion quite well. This large cast, in addition to Isaacs and Sudol, includes some great talent; notably, Regina Taylor (also seen in The Unit and the great, long-gone but not-forgotten I’ll Fly Away), Anne Heche (also seen in Hung and Men in Trees), Lauren Ambrose (also seen in Six Feet Under and Torchwood), Richard E. Grant (also seen most recently in Downton Abbey and Girls – among a million other things) and David Costabile (also seen in Suits, Ripper Street, Breaking Bad, Flight of the Conchords, Damages and many others).

With Dig, which has a few related storylines in play in parallel, it might be too slow, too intricate and again, obscure, for most viewers. But I will give it a shot… and like every time I watch a film from Israel, wish that I knew Hebrew.

With Dig, which has a few related storylines in play in parallel, it might be too slow, too intricate and again, obscure, for most viewers. But I will give it a shot… and like every time I watch a film from Israel, wish that I knew Hebrew.

Subtitled entertainment – Language realism on TV

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As a person who often multitasks while “watching” television, I don’t always pay close attention to every moment of action. (That is, I hear all the dialogue but don’t always catch the visuals going with it.) Particularly with some of the dumber shows I watch, such as The Following or The Slap, this does not bother me much. I pay closer attention to shows I enjoy. But then there is a growing middle category: subtitled entertainment.

When I watch a foreign (non-English-language) film, I already know there will be subtitles, and I don’t watch something like that until I am ready to focus. But television is starting to introduce more and more subtitled content. In a sense it’s an era of language realism. In most films and TV of the past, we’d be treated to unrealistic and frankly stupid dialogue in which the actors (English speakers) adopted some kind of vaguely similar regional accent representing the place they were supposed to be from… and very little of the actual local language would appear.

Now, in a further change to content development – language is adding to the realism of many TV shows. The Americans probably leads the way, with a liberal mix of English and Russian. An article has even been written on how the writers decide when to use Russian. Hint: The choice comes down to authenticity. In The Americans, it makes perfect sense. Russians working within a Soviet institution in the United States are not going to speak to each other in English.

Another show where the blend makes perfect sense is the US version of The Bridge. It takes place on the US-Mexico border, and US police and working closely with Mexican police.

It has appeared more and more in various shows recently, such as Allegiance and The Blacklist. Interesting, it appears in shows in which the plot involves a lot of international intrigue. No big surprise. Language realism also appears in shows like Jane the Virgin, in which the grandmother speaks exclusively in Spanish, but understands English perfectly. She always speaks Spanish with her daughter, Xiomara, and granddaughter, Jane, but they almost always answer her in English.

The same kind of mix has appeared in Netflix’s Lilyhammer. An American organized criminal, exiled in witness protection in Lillehammer, Norway, navigates Norwegian language and society – the longer the show goes on, the more it’s conducted in Norwegian, mirroring the main character’s “integration” (which never quite happens fully).

These are all one-hour dramas, and somehow the language realism feels more expected in that setting. But it’s also happening more and more in the half-hour sitcom format, which feels strange in that I can’t imagine people having the attention span required to read the screen. But strangely – they do. The best example of this I can come up with is Welcome to Sweden, in which a fairly typical American guy moves to Stockholm with his Swedish girlfriend. His comical trials feature prominently – often in Swedish (particularly interactions with his in-laws). I did not even think about it when I recommended it to someone who only speaks English. He was going to watch it using my Swedish Netflix account, which did not offer subtitles in English.

It seems remarkable that as foreign language is receiving less emphasis than ever in US schools, language and culture diversity is appearing in a bigger way than ever on America’s TV shows. And it has jumped from just the occasional bit of Spanish, which has arguably been the most common second language on US TV, to reflect a slightly wider range of language diversity.

Married to the TV – Wasting Berlin

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I am in a fantastic city (Berlin) and also have an article I need to finish writing that has been hanging over my head for ages. All these options and obligations and what do I do?

Of course, I watch a beyond ridiculous German television reality show (in German, of course – which I don’t understand at all – half the process was trying to figure out what was going on) called 4 Hochzeiten und eine Traumreise. Horrible. Its premise is three couples competing to have the best wedding or something similar – the brides each rate the others’ weddings (and different aspects of the weddings – food, entertainment, dress, etc.). It was nothing less than astounding in its stupidity – and I am nothing less than stupid for watching.

However, in the end, when tacky couple Rana and Samer won “best wedding” (if you could call it that) and then the dream trip, the whole 45 minute nonsense turned out to be worth having watched because of the bizarre physical reaction of the groom. He mimicked a kind of “boxing-match, rapid-motion, punch-to-the-gut” motion. TO HIS WIFE. Really, follow the link and click on the video called “Rana und Samer fliegen auf die Seychellen.”

This has provided an entire evening full of laughter, replaying this in our heads.

 

Beszél magyarul?

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An interesting overlap between the latest season of the TV show Louie and my work trip to Budapest has been this Hungarian connection. Louie begins to date a Hungarian woman this season. They can’t communicate – she speaks no English. She speaks quite a lot of Hungarian during the show. No subtitles. We are not meant to understand – and probably to assume and “grope” as much as Louie has to. I, of course, don’t speak Hungarian. Just before departing for Budapest, though, I started paging through my old Hungarian textbooks, and read an article on a website that tried to position Hungarian as “a language as easy as any other”. I learned a few fundamentals that actually were never explained well in textbooks – including a piece of information that helped in trying to figure out which bottles of water were carbonated and which were not (later I discovered that the color on the bottle could just as well have decoded that little mystery – but hey, I worked with what I knew!). In one of the latest episodes of Louie when the Hungarian woman started chatting with a Hungarian-speaking waiter, I was happy to understand a few words (basic!) – but the whole feeling produced by Louie’s relationship with this woman he could not understand (and who could not understand him) was certainly a hallmark of the Louie “sitcom” style. It’s not a sitcom, it’s not a comedy show. It lacks linear storytelling, goes in sometimes strange, unusual and even sometimes boring directions – but the fact that it dares to do so is what makes it unique. There has been a good deal of everything from discomfort to controversy generated by the show this season (e.g. attempted rape, “This would be rape if you weren’t so stupid.”) and some meandering – but it’s Louie. It’s what I’ve come to expect, even if in expectation, I can’t predict anything. On a side note, Charles Grodin showing up as a doctor in Louie’s building has been highly enjoyable. “Enjoy the heartbreak while you can, for god’s sake! Pick up the dog poop, would you please?* Lucky son of a bitch, I haven’t had my heart broken since Marilyn walked out on me when I was 35 years old. What I would give to have that feeling again. You know I’m not really sure what your name is. But you may be the single most boring person I have ever met. No offense.” My final thought after returning from Budapest (apart from having noticed a plethora of coffeehouses – a dream for a coffee lover like me) was its continued clinging to a complete lack of service-mindedness, reminiscent of Communist-era eastern Europe. It may have improved slightly since I last visited Budapest in 1999, and it might not even be an eastern bloc thing so much as part of the mentality of the Hungarians (since people working in the services now would not have been that exposed to and trained in “customer service” of the past). Everywhere I went – and everywhere many of my colleagues went – we’d ask for something very normal (e.g. exchanging money at a money-exchange desk or asking a normal question in a store), and the employee(s) would give a short, uninformative answer and stare/glare at me (or whomever) as though I had just asked the dumbest question in the history of questions. How could I have been so stupid? In one coffee place, there was a sign by the cash register in English, which read: “We only accept euros” (and then something about the denominations of euros accepted). I found this misleading – it should probably have been clearer that they accept euros in addition to their own currency (the forint), so I asked about it (dummy!), and the barista looked at me like I had just dumped a bag of dog shit on the floor and just repeated the amount I owed her (in forints). (Incidentally my favorite coffee place – maybe due to its convenience in the place I stayed in the city during non-work-conference days – is Coffee Cat. Not the place that had the misleading “only euros” sign!) Sigh. The fun of traveling to different places.

everything's gone kuka - budapest

*everything’s gone kuka – budapest – another coincidence

Laughing at Language

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Whenever exposed to global forms of English (non-native English), I get to hear so much fun stuff.

Examples:

  • Sounds like: “We want to promote lunch excellence”. Should be: “We want to promote launch excellence.” Hey – lunch is important!
  • “Pollinize” rather than “pollinate”
  • “Leverage on” – no need for the “on”
  • “Nitties and gritties” rather than “the nitty gritty”
  • (best of all) “You should be working hardly”

 

Cold Peace: Off to Budapest

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Heading off to Budapest for work.

I can only think of two things about Budapest now – my last trip there as long ago as 1999, wandering around and random old people asking me questions, which I naturally could not answer – nem beszélek magyarul. I don’t know Hungarian – clearly. Who does, other than Hungarians or people crazy enough to take on the daunting, crazy task of trying to learn this near-impossible language? I had a weird hankering to learn the language in my university years, but it was not offered anywhere near where I lived – it’s not one of those languages that everyone wants to learn, right?

Secondly, I think of Hungarian music and poetry. Of music, I think back to letters and tapes (yes, old cassette tapes!) exchanged with my former penfriend in Budapest, Szilvia. I fell in love with the music (Muzsikás and Marta Sebestyén). It put me into my own sort of world, wandering through Seattle and its suburbs listening to something that was so inaccessible and unknown to most of the people around me. I do distinctly recall, though, when I went to the cinema to see The English Patient, and from its very opening moments, the gorgeous song (Muzsikás’s rendering) “Szerelem, szerelem” played – I knew from the first moment I would love the film. Bias.

And poetry… I wish I could read it in the original, but as written above, only Hungarians and lunatics (not that they are comparable!) can deal with Hungarian.

After All – Anna Hajnal
After all, what have I become?
The island Iceland in a blind fog.
Gliding in the far north.
I swim in mushy ice-water.
An ice-barrier surrounds me,
To protect me?
Protect, from what?
What boils in me darkly,
bubbling, swirling upward,
melting my thick cover:
the firmament may blanche
while being sliced upward to its lap
by a foaming, vapor-tressed head
ragingly crying: the geyser.

Life Sentence – János Pilinszky
The bed shared.
The pillow not.

Cold Peace – György Petri
In the absence of peace, your plain man’s mind might think:
there will be war. There being no war,
your learnèd mind would believe:
this is now peace. But it is and will be neither.

On Hope – Sándor Petőfi
Man, what is hope? …a horrifying whore
Who doles to everyone the same embrace.
You waste on her your most precious possession:
Your youth, and then she leaves without a trace!

Logbook of a Lost Caravan – Gyula Illyés
Only the compass, keeping hope alive,
Stuttered on, uttering its paralyzed
Directions; with something somewhere beyond
To which to respond.

And for another long day
We struggled ahead through desert sand.

Then to the edge of stone cliffs
Covered with hieroglyphs.

Line after line, incoherent, they read –
Wrinkles on some mad forehead.

An ancient age
Struggled there in desperate tones –

With nothing more to say –
And only the wind moans.

Sand in our eyes. Between sweating fingers, and
Ground between teeth, sand.

We slaughtered the camel who knew the way…
Had our last meal today.

The Shapelessness – Ágnes Nemes Nagy
The shapelessness, the endlessness.
I almost fall before I cut away
My statement from the timelessness.
With sand I wall a bucketful of sea
Against a waste of nothingness.
Perpetual indifference should be
Intolerable to consciousness.

Agonia Christiania – János Pilinszky
The daybreak is still far away
With its rivers and blowing winds…
And I put on my shirt and suit
Buttoning up my death within.

The Dark Fates – Dezső Kosztolányi
The fatal sisters – death and cards and woman-
Stand sadly on life’s torturous road.
Inscrutable veiled destiny, what secret,
Meant for me, do your robes unfold?

Be you a witch, a fairy – never mind –
You’ll be my lover for a hundred nights.
I’ll find you in my Friday of misfortune,
To lay my worried forehead on your knee,

And pray to you for help, in exultation,
Pray for the word, the meaning, for the key.
My life is slow: enhance it, multiply it
With burning fevers, hotter still than hot!

So secret is this treasure-box – unlock it,
Make it let fall the hard, unyielding local!
Allow fast spinning then to every spindle,
Show, brilliantly transfigured, to my mind

Life – from the cradle to the coffin dwindle,
And, touching fate with fairy – gentle fingers,
Allow the thread of my slow life unwind.

Glassworks – Margit Mikes
The temperature is zero below
On the kitchen window the snow
Sticks in flower patterns;
Memory and fantasy together bring
The illusion of a white spring.
As I search for some matches,
A water glass shatters in the cold.
My breath catches.
What a painful shriek, a piercing sound:
A dangerous transformation of matter.
As I turn around
It clatters to the ground
And a cylinder of ice rolls out.
Before it was clear water, refreshing potion,
Now, in this temperature
It has become a miniature
Frozen ocean.

You transparent, dead glass
Our fate is the same.
Indifference engulfs us.
The tears that gushed
One my face freeze;
The pain numbs,
In the frozen vice of apathy
My heart is crushed.

The Rest is Grace – János Pilinszky
Fear and dreams
Were my father and mother –
The corridor was
My unfolding landscape.

This is how I lived. How will I die?
What will my destruction be like?

The earth betrays me. She hugs me close.
The rest is grace.

“Everyone has AIDS!” – When Did AIDS Become a Punchline?

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I watch an undue amount of television and films and have begun to wonder: when did it become okay to joke about AIDS? And when is a joke a joke too far?

When did AIDS stop being a histrionic soapbox issue in one isolated, “very special” TV episode (à la Designing Women) or a story arc for a regular character (à la Life Goes On and its Chad Lowe character “Jesse” – which actually handled it pretty well – but didn’t that show have enough going on with an economically strapped middle-class family rearing a Down Syndrome kid, an overachieving nerd kid and a late-in-life, unplanned pregnancy, among other things?).

Back in the early days of the crisis, which rightfully terrified every person conscious and alive at that time, we did not see a lot of gay stories on TV (we know of course that all AIDS stories were not gay stories, but the dearth and lateness of mainstream stories can be placed squarely on the fact that network television was not the semi-gay-friendly place it has now become), but there were some exceptions – Designing Women had a particularly poignant episode guest starring a very young Tony Goldwyn (yes, yes – President “Fitz” Grant from Scandal).

AIDS showed up in pop culture now and then… but when did it become okay to joke about it?

When you think about treatment for HIV and AIDS – and the awareness of it – it has advanced further and faster than advances in almost any other disease or illness. I’d attribute it to the persistent, loud demands of won’t-take-no-for-an-answer activism from an hitherto marginalized community of gay men who were disproportionately affected by this epidemic. We can all thank them – even if, as one characterization of the crisis puts it, we have ended up in a “complacent” or “indifferent” place in society with regard to what is now a treatable illness.

But does this advancement mean that all of societal perception has shifted? Does the tempering or perceived neutralization of the threat and the almost-distant memory of the devastation AIDS once caused in the western world mean that we have reached a stage where we can laugh at it? Young people today (I know I sound elderly starting a sentence that way) did not live through the fear and terror of those early years and thus don’t feel the same limitation or deference to the topic’s seriousness. It’s seen as a “developing-world issue” if it is thought of at all. Taking that into account, is it possible for some of the humor to be intelligent analysis or satire of the place we are with the disease – or with other things in society when held up to it? And where is that line? What happens when someone crosses it?

A woman named Justine Sacco found out the hard way, as she completely failed to walk the tightrope when she tweeted something that went viral and was widely seen as completely inappropriate and in horrible taste. (Her Tweet read: “she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”)

“Despite Ms Sacco only having around 200 followers, the message quickly spread to online news organisations, with social media users around the world expressing their disgust.

The irony of a supposed public relations expert tweeting such an insensitive comment, and the fact it could not be corrected during a 12-hour flight without an internet connection, meant the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet was soon trending on the social media site.”

Apart from being a perfect example of displaying very bad judgment, it is also a perfect illustration of the viral nature of social media and why we have to be careful.

But pop culture is… well, popping with all kinds of increasingly frequent joking references to AIDS. From the parody of the popular musical Rent in Team America: World Police with its “Everyone Has AIDS!” song

to the South Park play on the different meanings of the homophones “AIDS” and “aides” (which reminds me of my days observing TESOL/ESL courses; one afternoon one of the teachers discussed acronyms and had used AIDS as an example – later in the lesson, although on a different topic, she introduced the word “aides” and asked the perplexed class, “Do you think Bill Clinton has aides?”).

What prompted this entire train of thought on the subject, apart from watching the heartwrenching HBO treatment of The Normal Heart last week, was my marathon-viewing of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer, and an episode in which Amy’s boyfriend announces he has AIDS (humorously summarized here). Seeing it almost shocked me because I was not sure whether to find it funny or not. I think Schumer stayed on the right side of the humor because she was not actually laughing at AIDS but was shining a light on a lot of different issues, ranging from hypocrisy to the awkwardness of conversations in which you feel a certain pressure to accept or agree to things that you need time to process, regardless of what they are (but when put on the spot, it is not like you know what to say, so when the boyfriend asks if his having AIDS is a dealbreaker, she nervously, awkwardly chimes, “No, it’s great!”).

The question, though, cannot really be answered universally – where is the line?

Collection of Political Incorrectness

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Sometimes many years pass between having contact with people. So much time passes, in fact, that when your mind’s Rolodex (and yeah, old-style folks like me have a mental Rolodex rather than some slick electronic device or database) hits upon someone from the past, good or bad, it does seem like such a length of time has passed that it is unlikely you will ever talk to them again.

One such person, for me, was a friend/roommate I had in Iceland about 15 years ago. Our lives have moved forward in very different ways, and after about 2004, we did not talk much – a few times between 2004 and 2008. But I moved to Norway and I don’t think we had so much as one conversation after that.

Tonight, he was sitting in the airport in my hometown and rather randomly thought of me after all this time and gave me a call. Nice to catch up, of course, but the point of all this (and this is something I had sort of forgotten about him – this unintentional humor. Not unintentional humor of the Road House variety. Unintentional humor that he is fully in on/understands, i.e. he does something silly, sticks his foot in his mouth and immediately gets that whatever it was was not smart… but he can laugh about it).

During our call, he was sitting in the airport talking loudly, saying, “All the cashiers at the burger place are Asian women. I think they found something more they could do than just work in massage parlors.”

Then there was a pause, and he said in a very serious, matter of fact way, like he was going to change the subject, and say something like, “I learned you have to take a little subway to get to the other terminal.” But instead he deadpanned, “I just learned that I cannot say things like that out loud.”

I burst out laughing so hard and could not stop, imagining the disapproving dirty looks people were giving him for his loud, unintentionally racist commentary. HAHAHAHA. Too much.

Not that racism of any kind is funny – it was imagining the setting – this guy oblivious to everyone around him, saying everything that came to mind – kind of the danger of mobile devices. People tend to forget to censor themselves.

And for kicks…

About other people I have not seen in years – but in this case keep up with on social media – a former colleague recently posted an article, “I Have Dwarfism and It Shouldn’t Be Awkward to Talk About It”. The article delves into the subtle and not so subtle forms of discrimination people with dwarfism may face beyond just that general awkwardness people feel talking about it – or talking to them about it, rather.

Good article, and it brought to mind an unrelated news article I had seen a few days ago. The writer of the article on dwarfism stated, “I often think that it’s a good job the Metropolitan Police don’t operate a policy of ‘size profiling’. If they did, life would be constantly interrupted by being stopped and searched, mistaken for someone else who wasn’t me; they just fitted the description: white, male, and under 4’6”. To be clear: this is not about dwarfs like myself being more likely to commit crime than average height people.”

In the news article I read, a woman asks a gas station clerk for help because her boyfriend (who is outside the store) has terrorized and abused her. How the aforementioned dwarfism article, though, sprang to mind is because it states, “Dean (the gas station attendant) looked out to the car and saw a familiar face. He didn’t know the name, but he knew the man. He says it was Mark Francis Valucus. Valucus is especially distinctive because he is small; 4 feet, 3 inches.”

After reading the dwarfism article, I wondered if the store clerk actually recognized a ‘familiar face’ or, like the guy in the dwarfism article posits, “all people with dwarfism look the same”.

Dentistry, tooth meat and oral health: Your pain is nothing to me

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Lately I have had a number of conversations about dentistry and the whole fun tooth-and-gums thing. Maybe I think about this more than many thanks to my childhood spent in dentist chairs and the mouthful of problems I have always had. Probably for these reasons I am not scared of dentists or the frightening-sounding procedures they want to do. Everyone I know seems terrified of the ominous “root canal”, but for me, the root canals I’ve had have provided nothing but relief, even if getting one is not the most comfortable thing ever.

One of the free online courses I signed up for and never actually participated in was something called Intro to Dentistry. Why would I sign up for this? To practice DIY dentistry in my barn? Still, I can’t explain why these things are so fascinating to me. I don’t literally want to dig around in people’s mouths, but I love the idea of knowing about the various teeth and teeth ailments that afflict people.

Always want to know too many different things – ever the dilettante. After talking with someone about his mouth/gum problem and how much pain he was in, I came back to the question of whether men and women feel pain differently. I contemplate often how little pain men seem to be able to withstand comparatively speaking – and I don’t know if it is physiological (they feel pain differently, they feel different kinds of pain differently) or psychological (they feel more compelled to complain about it – and that is not always true but usually is – or what?). Just when I think maybe they can’t handle pain, they volunteer themselves to participate in a boxing match – which must be painful in its own way. But then adrenaline kicks in and they must not feel it – or feel it in the same way as they feel a toothache. A toothache is a singular misery, but the rush, excitement, testosterone, adrenaline,

But if this is true that men are just reporting such agony and pain, how can it also be true that women report feeling more intense pain than men? Not that any of this is definitive – the science of it is pretty much non-existent and can be influenced by so many factors – also the science in the cited article is based a lot on self-reported perceptions of pain.

Hard to say for sure, but the science seems to say that women are more sensitive to pain – but not necessarily doing anything about it or being vocal about it. I suppose it depends – but in my experience, the women who complain most about pain are usually hypochondriacs (or seem to be).

“…male and female bodies don’t process pain the same way. If a man and a woman each place their hands on a hot stove, different parts of their brains will activate. In 2003, researchers at UCLA discovered that the cognitive, or analytic, region of the male brain lights up, while the female limbic system, the brain’s emotional headquarters, springs into action

So does that emotionally charged limbic response mean that women are merely making a louder fuss than men over the same amount of pain? Not quite.”

I just have trouble matching up how most women I know behave when in pain against how much pain they report being in and how men behave when in what seems like minor pain. Not only are women perhaps in more intense pain, they are certainly reticent and stoic about it. It seems. I know I am making generalizations and have no qualifications for saying a word about any of these matters, really.

What I am a bit more qualified to throw my irritation around about, though, is words. And one word that has haunted me since I first arrived in Norway is the word tannkjøtt – literally “tooth meat”. Yes, this refers to the gums. But come on – tooth meat?! I remember just having arrived in Norway, feeling completely upside-down and out of place, staying at a friend’s house, turning on the tv and understanding barely a word of Norwegian, and hearing this one improbable word I did pick out immediately. A commercial for toothpaste or something, a confident dentist coming on the screen blabbing away about “tannkjøtt” health.