Last week, I finally convinced my mother that I was too old to go to the pediatrician (it was getting embarrassing to sit with girls my age and their children in the waiting room). She agreed that I could just see my Harvard doctor for now, and in the meantime pick a random doctor at home to see once for some insurance thing. The doctor I went to was an old woman with an old woman secretary. When I arrived, the two of them were bundled up, shoveling the walkway with their little stooped backs and papery hands. I was intrigued: how did these two old women, the doctor a wrinkled woman of color and the secretary a blue-haired old white lady, end up running this practice by themselves everyday? When did my ancient little doctor go to med school? Were they two early feminists?
Perhaps they once had been, but I was caught off guard – even frustrated – by how much they fell short of my retro-feminist expectations. The first question the doctor barked at me was “Where do you go to school”. I answered, “Harvard”. She glanced down at the forms I had filled out in waiting room, and then looked back at me, frowning: “If you go to Harvard, why are you on birth control?”
I’m sure any woman would be aggravated by this comment. But after leaving our campus’s environment of sexual assault discussion and quasi-mandatory feminism, and after the release of the CDC’s recommendations for “pre-pregnant” women, after the months and months of vitriolic political discussions that prove abortion to still be debatable legal issue, I was so freakin’ frustrated. How can I leave a campus so aware of feminist issues and stumble into a world where the things I’m passionate about – feminism, erasing sexual stigmas and stereotypes – aren’t even grounds for consideration? It’s confusing and frustrating and disarming. It’s as if all of the discussion we have here on campus, and all of the active change we try to ingrain, doesn’t even trickle out of the Harvard bubble.
What my doctor seems to have meant by her comment was that women who go to Harvard are intelligent women with respectable, successful futures ahead. Intelligent women who have respectable futures ahead do not have sex. Or, on the other side, only stupid women with no aspirations have sex. Straight from my female doctor’s mouth, I received an affirmation of a stereotype that promotes inequality and victim blaming and slut shaming and all of those things that I sometimes optimistically think are disappearing.
My doctor is obviously an educated woman herself, who went to college and had high aspirations. So how can she still think like she does? When I left her office I felt like I had run straight into a wall. That wall was built by her words and my friends at home who got mad because I said I was a feminist and my brother who laughs when I get riled up about the gender pay gap and the CDC who thinks I’m pre-pregnant and magazines that tell me I need to be empowered and the PC that thinks they can’t let women in the building without assaulting them at the door. By my father, who thinks the murdered woman on the news who went home with her murderer at a nightclub was a “slut”. By my good friend, an amazing athlete who says she only wants to have boys because girls are “annoying” and not good at sports.
But I’ve since taken a breath, because when faced with people like my doctor, I guess that that’s all you can do. I know that wall she slammed my head into isn’t really there, and that I can let myself think it’s there, because that’s when it will start to exist. All of these things that make the wall are my fuel, not my fire blanket. They serve as affirmations that the way I live my life, and the things I am passionate about, are necessary. Affirmations that the world still has some changing to do, and that the things I spend my days and my classes thinking about (I’m a joint concentrator with English and the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality) are really really worthwhile. Here at Harvard, we are privileged for maybe the last time in our lives to be around a community of like-minded people who are eager for change. It is with this community that I can discuss the wall. It is through it that I can hope to eventually crush it into itty-bitty little pieces and feed them to the sky.