Goodbye, Captain America

Today, reportedly, Captain America was brutally assassinated. Thus I feel warranted to write a eulogy for him instead of doing questions from Pretest Pediatrics. But alas, I did not know the Marvel Comics character very well, so I can do little more than title this entry after him.

I am not going to talk about politics per se, though I'm impressed at how marvelously (no pun intended) close this event comes to Libby's indictment. On the other hand, it seems like just one block coming down in a toppling torrent of the end of a bad Toggle game. If Captain America is a metaphor for American integrity and pride, most of my friends would have said he should have been killed off a long time ago. Am I going to get in trouble for writing this online? Really, I'm quite scared.

I got into a conversation the other day with one of my preceptors about how he felt very strongly that American's were perhaps the most arrogant and nationalistic people in the world. But I think we're a little bit more humble now. Is that a good thing? Is it necessary to botch things up royally every once in a while just to remind yourself that you can make terrible mistakes and are no better than the 'unenlightened,' unindustrialized, undemocratized countries you used to regard with pity?

This conversation followed a very interesting encounter we had at a well-child visit. Per usual, I had gone in and seen the patient and her parent, today it was her dad who was a recent immigrant to America. I had taken an intermittant history, done an exam, and come back to my preceptor to report that everything was well and good. Then we went in to see her and her dad together. After the real doc had looked her over and as he was getting ready to sign off, Dad suddenly stops him.

"I have a question, before you go. She's been doing a lot of Tae Kwan Do, she likes it very much. Isn't it true that if girls do things like that or sports that they will lower their female hormones?"

I was taken aback. I was offended. I was offended by so many different things all at once, I didn't know where to start. I was offended by his ignorance of biology. I was offended by the gender roles he was trying to assign to his daughter. I was offended that he wasn't more supportive of something his daughter was excelling at. I was offended that he didn't ask me! What? Did he think my low voice and hairy arms were from the six summers I spent in basketball camp? Or maybe he thought I'd have a smaller waist and bigger boobs if I was a kindergarten teacher and not a medical student.

My preceptor, without even showing the slightest raise of an eyebrow, turned to him. "The kinds of activities we think are healthy for our children is based on our culture and or values. I can tell you from a medical standpoint that I have no reason to believe that doing Tae Kwan Do will be harmful to her in anyway. I personally have encouraged both my daughter and son to try all sorts of sports, dance, and activities and my daughter happens to like baseball a lot."

"Baseball." Repeated the dad, thoughtfully. I worried that he might run home and cancel his daughter's Tae Kwan Do classes so she could join a baseball team.

"In America we tend to encourage our girls to do the same things as our boys, but that doesn't mean it's right."

Right? Of course it's right. Every one of the basketball-induced hairs on my body stood up. It had been so important to me all my childhood to be just as good as the guys. From weaseling my way into advanced math classes to working on my pitiful layups to forcing my parents to switch synagogues so I could read from the Torah like any boy could for his bar mitzvah.

A few days have gone by since and I've thought about this conversation some more. And I realize that in my own way I live by gender stereotypes just as strictly and ridiculously as my Tae Kwan Do master's father. For the longest time I wanted so much to be a tomboy. In elementary school I literally snuck passed kids I knew into ballet class, hoping they wouldn't see me. I failed miserably at sports, but tried so damn hard to be good at them. I measured my intelligence by how well I did on my math and science tests. I faked following football in college. I majored in neuroscience, not english. I went into medicine, when lets face it, I could have easily picked a career as a high school teacher. So much of how I've tried to define myself has been by an anti-thesis of what I think is feminine, because in my liberal perspective stereotypically masculine characteristics are better. And I'd be naive to think I use this lens only when I see myself... I have a tremendous amount of respect for my Mom for getting a PhD. I would get really pissed when letters came to our house addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Would I look up to her the same way if she had been a nurse? And why not? Because it's a "woman's job" or because it doesn't require as many years of training?

I've joked for a while now that there are four qualities I look for in a guy. (You get asked a lot about what your "type" is when you fling yourself at the mercy or horror? of blind dating.) He has to be (1) taller than me (2) heavier than me (3) hairier than me (4) smarter than me. But it's not a joke. Basically, he has to be more of a man than me. And somehow regardless of the evidence to the contrary and despite all the efforts of Ms. Friedan and irrespective of all the afternoons I sat around with my best friends reading Our Bodies, Ourselves and blatantly contradicting the fact that in all my "honors" classes growing up, the girls outnumbered the guys. I can't disequate intelligence with manliness.

So here's to your memory, Captain America. Maybe they will discover a long-lost daughter who can keep your legacy alive. Her name can be Hillary.