Friday, December 3, 2010

Cheerleaders for science

At the USA Science and Engineering Festival there was a group of women cheerleading for Science. All of them are professional scientists and cheerleaders:



I have thought about blogging about it, but there are so many posts about it, I figured I could find someone who said it better than I would (especially because I've never been a cheerleader), and, thanks to the interweb, I did!

Please see this post by Andrea Kuszewski. I'll highlight this part:

"How does this relate to cheerleaders and sexuality and science? In short, the people that have a problem with women displaying their sexuality or scientists showing their fun, flirty side need to just get over it. As humans, we are sexual beings. Just because we may be serious as hell about the science we study, does not mean we gave up our sexuality and traded it in for a "license to practice science" badge.

Suppressing our sexual nature just because some people engage in maladaptive behaviors and have unrealistic expectations surrounding our sexuality is the exact wrong way to handle this issue. We need to keep on being who we are, sexual beings and all, and make those people deal with the fact that it isn't going away. They are the ones being maladaptive in their thinking, so they are the ones who need to change." 

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