The Last Word On Nothing

Ann:  May I introduce my friend and colleague, Sharon Weinberger. She once wrote a book about her trips to the world’s various nuclear test sites and it sold reasonably well, probably to boys.  But recently somebody else’s book, The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold History of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, hit the best-seller list, and Sharon told me she was possessed by the Great Green God of Jealousy.  That’s a well-known side effect of having written any book ever, but I think in this case it’s more complicated.  Dear Sharon, can you explicate?

Sharon: The Girls of Atomic City is clearly an appealing book so I don’t begrudge the author her success.  But in this case, I think my jealousy is about her ability to connect with female readers. I write on science and national security, and when I look for examples of books in this area that seem to have crossed the gender barrier, I find books that are about family life or wives of scientists. Another recent example, perhaps, is the Astronauts’ Wives Club, which chronicles the wives of the men who had the “right stuff.”  This goes back to the issue you raised of gender in scientists’ profiles: why do journalists ask scientists who are women about their childrearing habits? Perhaps we need to ask another question: why do we see women gravitating toward books about childrearing habits?

Ann:  Because our stupid binary culture can’t handle anything more complicated?

Ann:  But you’re not giving up, are you.  Aren’t you writing a boy book right now?

Sharon:  Yes, it’s a history of DARPA.*  And the majority of it is going be about men, because men have dominated the agency for so many years (that may now be changing, at least at the level of director–the current and previous directors are women). I worry this means that the vast majority of the reading audience will also be men. That bothers me on principle. I would like women to read this book, both out of vainglorious self-interest, but also because I see no reason why DARPA, as a topic, should only be interesting to men. Here you have an agency that has been involved in many seminal projects of Cold War and post-Cold War history: nuclear test detection, counter-insurgency in the Vietnam War, and Arpanet/Internet, just to name a few.

Ann:  I’m sorry, I have to interrupt you.  I’m stuck back on the Astronaut Wives Club.  I’ll try to be polite here: it sounds like Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which Gert notably says is about “the wives of geniuses I have sat with” and she didn’t mean Alice sat with the geniuses, that was Gert’s job, but with their wives.

Sharon:  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a book about astronauts’ wives, or being interested in astronauts’ wives, but the question for me is really: how do you get more women to read the books about the space projects, Pentagon technology, or other major science subjects? Do we have to write about family life, and if we do, are we somehow assuming that women will only read a science book if it talks about raising children? So, let’s get beyond the Finkbeiner Test to a new question: How do you get women to read books about science/technology/national security without writing about how hard it was for the wives to cook/clean/raise children, etc.?

Ann: Oh, I’m supposed to know the answer to that?  How about a book cover with a pink Pentagon on it?  No? Ok.  What do women want to read?  The literary/fiction cliche that women tend more toward the local and specific and personal, while men tend toward the national and general and abstract?  Pisses me off just writing those words.  But still, what could you say about those DARPA guys that would show their localities/specificities/personalities?

Sharon: Well, then you get into another problem area. Some readers — often men, though not always — gripe about writers who put too much “personality” into science writing, as if somehow science operates in some perfect vacuum unaffected by scientists’ personal lives, biases, or human interactions. So, let’s bring this discussion back around: are we doomed to write “boy books,” that focus on “boy” things, like missiles and aircraft, and “girl” books that focus on family and cooking? Personally, I’m not convinced that we need to write the “Eat, Pray, Love” of science books to interest women. Why, for example, shouldn’t women read about the JASONS and want to become a JASON? Why shouldn’t they read about DARPA and want to work for it?

Ann:  Because as you said, DARPAs and Jasons both are mostly boys.  And no girl would want to hang out with boys and get cooties or more likely, be reminded every single goddam minute that she’s a girl.

Sharon: I’m afraid I very much disagree with you on this. I think girls do want to be JASONs, and they want to be in DARPA, they just don’t always know it, so we need to get them to read about it.

Ann:  We disagree on many things, Sharon: putting Jason in all-caps, taking assignments in Gaza, writing about mind control, buying sparkly shoes.  But I interrupted you again.  You were saying?

Sharon:  That women are reading The Girls of Atomic City or the Astronauts Wives’ Club doesn’t mean they dream of growing up to be wives of scientists, it just means that somehow we’ve created a cultural gap. Maybe the “boy book” phenomenon is a symptom rather than a cause, but I think it could also be part of a larger problem of how we, as a society, promote the sciences to women–or don’t promote it as the case might be.

Ann:  But we’re not really talking about the women-in-science problem, we’re talking about how to get girls to read the boy books we write. Should women develop men’s tastes in defense and hypersonics and test ban treaties?  Sure; you and I did.  But why couldn’t we also tell those male readers who complain about too much personality that they’re wrong?  Because they are.  The parts of a scientist’s personal life irrelevant to the science (childrearing, lack of tailoring) should certainly be left out.  But I know a Nobel Prize winner whose science gets more interesting when you know how much he had to want it before he could do it.  Let’s have a Revolution!  What shall our new rules be?

Sharon: Yes, women should develop men’s interest in defense, hypersonics and test ban treaties, for the same reason that women should be — and are — interested in medicine, politics and world affairs–because these are issues important for our entire society, men and women included. It’s important to be interested and involved in these issues because that’s part of being an engaged citizen.

Ann:  Ok if you’re not going to proclaim the Rules of the Revolution, I will:

• Women should read and write about national, abstract, scientific/technological issues, no excuses.

• Men should read and write about feelings, motives, relationships relevant to science, no excuses.

• The best popular books include all the above.  No excuses.

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*DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the name alone could your blood run cold.

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Sharon Weinberger is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a columnist for BBC Future. She has been:  an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow, reporting on the Pentagon investment in social network analysis; an International Reporting Project fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), looking at nuclear smuggling; a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a Carnegie Newhouse Legal Reporting Fellow. She has written for, among others, the Washington Post Magazine,Slate, Nature, Discover, Financial Times, and Aviation Week & Space Technology.  She speaks a lot of unlikely languages.

Photo credits: National Media Museum, via Flickr; Shutterstock