In Which a Blogger will Never Learn

What with all the excitement (well, it seemed exciting to me, maybe you live a life of constant breathless thrill and scorn such petty enthusiasm) of last week, this blog has come up in conversation a bunch of times this week. Certainly more often than usual. And an impressive number of people have said "hey, you should write a controversial Med-themed blog all the time, it'll be great!". Naturally one must dismiss any unworthy thought that this might be inspired by the fact that there can't possibly be that much blather to write about Med, particularly not that much controversy, and that this could be a STFU ploy. All my friends are lovely and would be unlikely to resort to complicated ploys to shut me up, especially since they could just stop reading if that was the go, so that can't be it. The point, though, is that this is Obviously A Trap. There's just no way that that could end well. As traps go, it's not even that hard to see: it's the social equivalent of a tunnel painted onto a rock face with a sniggering Coyote hiding behind a boulder, or a bowl of bird seed with an anvil suspended over it like the Sword of Damocles.

But! And here's the crux of the matter: the roadrunner always seems to end up ok, and since so many people, so much greater than I, throughout history, have failed to learn from their own (or others') mistakes, who am I to flout tradition? In short: here goes anyway.

This is not, in fact, meant to sound critical, of course, since again the subject under discussion is one rather tangentially related to the course, not based on it, per se. If this were a quality literary opus (or maybe a Jerry Bruckheimer film) I would say that it was "inspired by" the announcements between the lectures this morning, but that sounds a bit highfalutin' for my little ol' blog.

Between the two lectures this morning, we had 2 announcements, both of which were everything that is admirable and laudable and good. (Let's get this perfectly clear, yeah?)The first was an advertisement for the "Women in Medicine" Dinner, and the second of which was about leadership and indigenous health, which had a video beginning with a series of inspirational quotes (was going to make an "inspiration" respiratory pun, but what've you ever done to me to deserve such a thing?). To be strictly honest, I got the general gist of that announcement, but the details of its purpose elude me rather. Partly because I tend not to get involved in these extracurricular things (I should, I know, but I feel like I barely have time to sleep, so there you go. Maybe it's the 3.5 - 4 hours of commute every day? If I lived in Camperdown I swear I'd be a better person), and partly because I'm sick, so I'm not really absorbing information very effectively.

Let's take these announcements one at a time. I know that "Women in Medicine" things must be terribly useful, and that people must really feel that they're relevant to their lives, otherwise, why would they exist? Still, it confuses me. It's basically never occurred to me that in this country, in this day and age, my gender would stop me doing anything I jolly well want. Sure, I might not get into Surgery on account of failing Medicine, or because of not knowing which end of the scalpel goes into the patient, or because of alienating my colleagues and superiors so effectively that no-one will work with me, or whatever, but not because of being a female. Surely not? This is just not a limitation that had ever occurred to me, so I really don't feel like I need any "support" about it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe later in my career I'll come to see that this was all foolishly wide-eyed naïveté, but at the moment, I don't need to be inspired.

Maybe this is because of my privileged upbringing, or something. Well, let me rephase: of course this is because of my privileged upbringing. I live in a country, in a community, in an era and in a socioeconomic milieu in which the biases have tended to be in my favour. Check out my white upper-middle-class failure to grasp the issues, yeah? But my mother is a doctor, in a surgical specialty which interests her, and all the women in my family are well educated and clever enough to do what they aspire to do. Maybe it's also to do with having gone to an all-girls' school? In an exclusively-gendered environment, gender is irrelevant.

So all this "you can do it, even though you're a girl!" stuff says "because of the fact that you're a girl, your capability to achieve things is questionable, but try not to think about it, okay?" to me. I'm sure that my Very Insightful Feminist Flatmate Georgia would tell me that I have the wrong end of the stick somewhere in here, but unfortunately she's not here, so you're getting the unvarnished confusion: does anyone seriously expect me to worry that I'm too girly to make it in a career I'll be qualified for?

This is something that my Dad has definitely dealt with. People can certainly discriminate in a sexist fashion against male Obstetrician/Gynaecologists. We get it all the time. In fact, now I think of it, I've actually been on the receiving end(as both receptionist and daughter [Whoa! To clarify; not from him, but from people who ask questions like "What does your Dad do?"]) of more sexism directed at a man than at women. Maybe this explains my possibly-odd attitude. It's amazing the weird places people's minds go when you tell them that men can work with the female pelvic area in a professional capacity. Here's the thing: if it's worrying you, are you maybe sexualising something completely, utterly and indeed compulsorily asexual? If you are, you probably need to work on that before you see any doctor. Because it will certainly be a problem eventually. By all means feel a little more comfortable with a female doctor, whatever, but this thing where people look with suspicion on male Gynaecologists is infuriating.

Of course, I suppose the "women in medicine" issue may be be one of juggling maternity leave and motherhood and so on with careers, which actually is an issue with is gendered. And worth thinking more about, even. But still not relevant to me at this point. It's not like I can decide to "have my family" now and then get on with a career. Being as how I'm single, that would be a challenge, and were I not, it would still be rushing things a bit. So this is something which I (and most of us) will have to play by ear. Which is ok, because it's going to be a while before it starts being at all urgent, and in the meanwhile it's both impossible and counterproductive to try to hurry any of these processes.

Leaving all this gendering business aside, what possible issue could I have taken with an announcement which I didn't even listen to properly about leadership in indigenous health? Well, obviously, there are quite a lot of things, really, since this is what my Dad would call a "wicked problem", but not even I am stupid enough to try to thrash out those issues on a blog. It seems like our country has never yet found an easy compromise between a lack of interest in the indigenous community and paternalism, and the internet is not the place to try to nut that out.

What caught my interest here was one of the quotes, which is in fact from the Declaration of Human Rights. (Yeah, I know, how dare I raise my eyes so high? What sort of terrible person would think critically about such a document? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, my friends? It's terribly important to think critically about these things.)

This quote begins "everyone is born free" and this is the thing: no they aren't. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole point. If everyone were born free, we wouldn't need to declare that they were, just like we don't have to say "everyone breathes air". The whole issue is that there are people born in prisons and concentration camps, or born to slaves with their births recorded in stock books along with the livestock. There are people who never in their life have been even a little bit free. To declare that these people are in some special and mystical way free when they're born is to connive at their incarceration. Sure, it looks nice on a fridge magnet, and sure it makes people like you and I, who actually are free, but who are pettily annoyed by such trivial fetters as the need to earn a living and to hand in assignments and to cope with the morning peak hour on public transport feel a little better, but it is ultimately as hollow as all such phrases. It is no more meaningful than "No Pain No Gain" or "Sisters by Chance, Friends by Choice" or "Magic Happens" or whatever. It gives you a little warm glow to think about it, but it doesn't help.

I suppose it's fair enough, really. Even just semantically, a Declaration probably shouldn't say "Everyone ought to be born free and equal". So maybe it's fair enough. (Also, quite frankly, the second bit is clearly wrong too. "Equal" in the sense of being "of equal worth" or some strange sense of "equitable" maybe, but we are not, in fact, all equal as such. We're all different, and some of us are good at some things and some at others. I'll never be very tall-and-thin, and children born with Down’s Syndrome will never be allowed to do brain surgery. This, though, is just natural variation, and it's perfectly ok to placate ourselves, since we cannot change it, and must not try. The Freedom thing is different: we can change that.) Perhaps the Declaration is describing a Utopian future towards which we are meant to be striving?

Hmmm. I guess it's time to wrap this up, but the last rhetorical question is this: isn't it ironic that I'm so naïve about sexism and so over-sceptical about the Declaration of Human Rights? Go figure.