Revolutionizing Science for Ourselves

   Protesters all over the US are putting up a great effort aimed at the ending police brutality targeted at blacks. I'm thrilled to see such efforts, but I only wish there was more attention to the uneasy role of science in this mess. For most of science's history, it was on the side of racism. I'm afraid that may still be true today.

    Gone are the days of phrenology (the psuedoscience that asserted the superiority of European races based on mostly imagined differences in head shape). The scientific community's recent embarrassment over James Watson is evidence we are moving beyond all of that. What we unfortunately have not moved beyond is a radically different prioritization of human lives. We are entering an era of euthanasia by neglect. The shape of research funding assures only diseases of the well to do matter. Diseases of the masses are viewed as sad tragedies, but are often much more simple than those of the well healed. In every category of disease, there are diseases which are essentially of the poor. Everyone knows many infectious diseases fall into this category. Therefore rich people have an easy out of claiming the poor have essentially infected themselves due to differing lifestyles they deem inferior. But consider a disease like sickle cell which affects predominantly African Americans and to a lesser extent Latinos. The disease is a simple genetic disease which maps to one single point mutation one one single gene. One in twelve of us African Americans are carriers for sickle cell trait. I assure you that if one in twelve senators were carriers of this genetic trait; research, screening and prevention would be amplified up to the point where sickle cell started dropping out of the American population.

    The recent University of Chicago trauma center protests illustrate our problems perfectly. For decades academic medical centers have been shutting down public hospitals and building up fancy research buildings to capture grant money from the NIH and private donors. Private donors can be such a significant source of money sometimes films are produced to educate them. I should know, I appeared in one such film about Parkinson's disease as myself- a young scientist. The film was shot in the lab I worked at in Columbia University blocks away from an epidemic of poverty and violence. I believe I was doing important research. I believe we must continue to look for a cure for Parkinson's disease and every other awful disease that causes suffering in patients...but I refuse to remain silent about the creepy priorities of academic science. These priorities reflect the heavy influence of an older generation peopled by scientists who thought nothing of running experiments on prisoners without consent and who still can't understand why the Tuskegee incident was not good science. They also reflect the priorities of big time donors. Such well healed donors aren't particularly concerned that they may be shot on their way to work (if they work at all). Anyone who has worked in an inner city hospital feels differently...that's one of the reasons you will see trauma surgeons , emergency doctors and medical students joining neighborhood youth in organizing for a Southside Chicago trauma center.

     At the end of the day, science is both a problem and a solution. Science is therefore the best tool that can be used to take a racist and classist regime apart in an objective way. It's also a tool that has always been easier for the wealthier to access and understand. The rise of the citizen scientist provides us with a unique opportunity...there is very little democracy about the way science funding flies around, and in the past that may have been a good thing. After all our past produced popularly supported eugenics programs among other horrors...but maybe we are ready to start a new kinder science; a science that is democratic in the sense that it weighs all human lives the same...a science that addresses the true needs of humans to support them instead of subvert them to support a profit motive...a science that embraces all of us in our diversity. Such a science would allow us to see we have hit a total crisis of Western science by our own measurements. Life expectancy has begun to fall in places where we have applied the full force of science to our existence....so we can no longer justify our methods by our ends. We need to do things very differently.

The American Left: Lost in Space

   I recently sat at a table with young queer people discussing politics. I was moved by the honesty of this brave group of people. I gave them the respect of being honest back. I told them I think there are at least three problems with many leftists. The first problem is that they aren't particularly interested in equality, the second is that they are highly disorganized in a specific and problematic way by their antihierarchical nature and the third is that no matter how well intentioned, a lot of these people are clueless about the people they want to help.
   A surprising number of leftists are rather wealthy and interested in living well. These types tend to hang out in academia, the home of the left. Their decadence makes for a pretty embarrassing problem in their supposed support of poor people. Never the types to worry about reality they plod ahead in support of whatever oppressed people might need them...except that oppressed people may not need them because they are often just a counterproductive problem. Norman Finkelstein summed up the problem well when discussing BDS types. "..'Let's strike a more radical pose, let's try to be really radical and more chic' especially if you've got tenure..And so they start striking all these radical poses which have no connection with reality and they are so defeatist of the cause.'" While Finkelstein was speaking about the issue of Israel/Palestine this analysis could be applied to many issues of the day. Perhaps these academics would argue that they are moving the conversation to the left. There is a certain, albeit flawed, logic to this stance. This what I personally call the Miri Regev approach. Years ago when I was working with refugees in Israel from the horn of Africa, a debate broiled about them. Miri Regev, then a prominent Israeli politician of Morrocan descent, called refugees from Africa "cancer." When she later stood by her remark, and went further by apologizing to people with cancer she was so ridiculous and hypocritical that even mainstream Israelis were pretty embarrased. Unfortunately, her remarks were politically smarter than anyone would have guessed at the time. The national conversation shifted to the point where calling for indefinite detention of African asylum seekers became a nearly moderate position. I suppose the radicals of academia hope for the same effect if in the reverse direction. The most obvious problem this idea overlooks is that in America there is really no national conversation to begin with. Anyone curious about how totally vapid the American culture is has only to look at our universities. The increasing internationalization of Universities has led to students from all over the world competing head to head. And as a friend of mine who is a professor in a rather prestigeous institution told me, there are very, very few surprises. Basicallly Western European students tend to be on average brighter than Ivy leaguers like myself who in turn tend to be sharper than state school kids on average, and at the absolute bottom of the barrel are those who attend any type of retail college whether it be down-market i.e. for profit institution or upscale which is to say those quaint small private liberal arts institutions that are mostly the preserve of the lazy children of money. Being the product of public education himself, the good professor tries to blind himself to student origins when doing the grudge work of grading papers...but unfortunately, it seems that even this exercise over many years has produced so few surprises he can count them on one hand. Sadly if American academia is the zenith of our intellectual achievement, our cultural production may be the bottom. Perhaps so many professors were too busy dipping into the cess pool of popular culture by studying porn and pop music they lost track of reality. It's probably pretty easy to do if one believes that the sociology of Miley Cyrus is worthy of even an entire undergraduate course. Keeping things in perspective Beyonce and Maddona have inspired much more academic work. Unfortunately, none of this work seems particularly informed by empiricism, statistical analysis, logic or perhaps most importantly any concern for the common people these academics hope to analize by analyzing cultural production. Perhaps it is actually in moments of insight about the frivolous drivel they produce, that professors adopt radical poses.
   Let's take  for example the borderless world lovefest many radical leftists advocate. Many really radical leftists want no borders anywhere which would reflect the universal brotherhood of man. Never mind that globalization brought the world three separate slave trades, and now working conditions so brutal that workers are committing suicide conveniently out of sight of Western consumers. The borderless lovefest was never rooted in empirical evidence about what might help people, it is rooted entirely in ideology. In seeking to embrace universalism, academics conveniently forget what exactly the results will be for everyone except them. This discourse of universalism has become embedded even in mundane conservative thought. This is how you get the WSJ stating that a surge in international students is a bright spot for American higher education. A report by edububble.com points out a few of the problems with this. I think the problems are actually even worse than they write. I believe this based on actual experience as opposed to ideological "theories." I spent some time on the pipette wielding chain gang that is academic science before I left for medicine. While I do not have a good statistical analysis of all scientists as a whole, a stastical analysis of my second lab, and the ones down the hall from it- rather large ones- yields a few fascinating results. About 90% of the PhDs under 55 had married money probably in part to stave off the pain of trying to live in New York City on under $40,000 a year. Imagine the calamity of September 11th in my lab considering that just about everyone was married to a Wall Street lawyer or accountant. A nonzero percent of these people actually had sexual affairs with other people, presumably the ones they would have married if they had higher earnings...or more correctly they might have not married along with not marrying their current boring high earning spouse. Among the lowest on the lab totem pole were people like myself having conversations with each other about the impossibility of paying student loans not because we were unemployed, but because we were working in science. I had so much to look forward to- if I stayed on the laboratory technician route one day my pay might have hit $24,687 a year, and if I went to grad school I might hope to score a stipend of almost as much. According to my sister my family at the time was shocked by the state of my refridgerator. I guess they expected more from the first person in the family to ever attend a prestigeos University. They deeply dissaproved of the fact that I kept my refridgerator extremely empty except an ample supply of hard liquor. What I realize now looking back was that I wasn't unlike a proletariat of lore as described by Karl Marx. And I still am not today.
   I recently spoke with a fellow traveller who asserted we needed more equality in society. he said that garbage collectors should be more equal to doctors for example. I just couldn't agree more. Garbage collectors have pretty bright financial pictures compared to myself. Unionization and indespensability have worked out well for this work force. Garbage collectors are pretty much by definition local people. When I peruse ads for scientists, I understand why a lot of scientists are almost by definition foreign. The State University of New York's open positions near New York City offer a fascinating example. Midcareer specialized PhDs and medical doctors are offered under $40,000 and no overtime pay with the implicit understanding that they will work overtime every single week. This sad salary is actually in line with market results. These kinds of salaries are probably why my limited statistical survey of all the scientists I have worked with yields that most are foreign born, and partially foreign educated. Specifically foreign educated in  countries where science education is free. There is a word for the work these foreign scientists do in service of capitalism: Scabbing. Foreign and local scientists are pitted against each other in really sad race towards the bottom that ends near a point where they pay to work. Many American doctors I know have confessed to me that they worked unpaid for a year or more in order to get into the American medical system. A system that would then hand them shifts of up to 24 hours and expect them to be grateful the shifts were not 48 hours like the bad old days. I honestly thought things could get no worse, but recently I noticed all kinds of pay-to-work schemes cropping up. Even if you ignore this nonsense as the lunatic fringe of a weird hyper-capitalistic world, you can't ignore the facts that 9 out of 10 American doctors would discourage anyone from entering the profession, and more and more of us seem to be killing ourselves every year. Even if you gloss over the fact that about 10% of us have a substance abuse if not addiction issue, you can't ignore numbers like the female physician suicide rate (multiples of that of the general population).
  My best guess is that physicians are not in fact so special. It may hurt my ego but on some basic level I'm just another worker. We are in the same squeeze as every other American trying to slay the dragon of raising a family in relative safety or alternatively at least not be a financial drain on the family we were born into. Whether you are taking about surgeons or auto mechanics, you are talking about lots of sensible people who's work is directly tied to reality. Few people come up with lunatic theories in medicine or auto repair because they just won't work. There is unfortunately no such stop on the academic left. The delusional theories of leftist academics may work well to convince 19 year olds that their professor is really hip; but they aren't yielding results in the real world. Perhaps most embarrassingly, when those spouting such theories come in contact with people outside of the hallowed halls of the ivory tower, conflict ensues.
  I first started to catch on to the quiet conflict years ago after I befriended an elderly gay and lesbian brother sister duo. The pair were die hard progressives. They taught me about what is was like for them to be gay before it was hip or cool and mostly involved dire poverty in New York City punctuated by nasty ostracism and even condemnation by the medical community who dismissed them as mentally diseased. And then one day they talked about something even more interesting than that: they hate academics. At first I protested mentioning that I hold a terminatory degree, and I'm not that bad. "No...that's totally different...your a scientist..we hate academics..."Sadly, I realized the begining of the problem was the academic left's problems with science. For "real academics" science is just another discourse. One my ex-husband, who wanted to be an academic,  used to look down on me for working in even though he noticed I could do his work efficieintly even if it wasn't remotely close to my field. Editing his work introduced me to to the people he idolized up close and personal through their writing.  Consider the following commentary  " The Einsteinian constant [c] is not a constant, not a center. It is the very concept of variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of some thing-of a center from which an observer could master the field-but the very concept of the game." Lest you think C is an esoteric concept of quantum mechanics, I'll brush you up on the fact that C is a constant related to the Newtonian laws of gravitation as they apply in an updated understanding of space-time. Einstein's constant - THE Einstein contant ....
You could be forgiven for thinking the above drivel about c being the" concept of the game" was written by an undergraduate who smoked a lot of marijuana. It's actually written in the published work of Jacques Derrida. I guess I'm just bitter I can't become a world acclaimed academic by making claims that imply, among other things, that there is no gravity anymore. I actually want to knock my books off the table and watch them float into outerspace; but they keep falling down and hitting my feet.
   Unfortunately, so do the half-baked ideas of many academics. As academics strike more and more radical poses, they seem to do less and less of the boring quantitative work it would take to overpower the blatant stupidity of conservative idiots convinced there are no problems in our current economic and political systems. Sometimes the work is as simple as subtraction. I recently read yet another moronic David Leonhardt column about how student loans just aren't so bad. His reasoning was that the premium made by people with college degrees has never been higher. Of course, I thought, and that fact probably almost entirely reflects just how many people in the lower class are making just about $0 a year. Am I supposed to be glad I'm making infinite percentages of that $0 salary; or might reality dim my mood when I realize that my educational debt will effect every major life decision I ever make quite possibly until the day I die? At the last I checked NYTimes had not published my admittedly sarcastic equation laden talkback about this, and no one else had pointed out what I consider to be a mathematically obvious truth. Liberals frequently forget that one of the best tools for progress is as simple as documenting reality. You can argue opinions, but you can't argue facts. There is no reason simple citizens like myself can not accumulate data and use it to challenge government's official (and utterly nonsensical) narratives. Europeans, Indians, Israelis and Africans have all caught on to this. Citizen audits of issues as diverse as housing stock and sanitation issues have probably been the most powerful tool normal people have taken up to fight government negligence and de-development. While many professors were off striking radical poses for undergraduates, slum dwellers were carefully tallying up the functional toilets in their slums, and painstakingly amassing and analyzing data often teaching themselves statistical analysis along the way. In my own formerly impoverished now gentrifying neighborhood in Haifa people powered neighborhood groups found important satisfying roles for even people who claimed they just "couldn't do math." For example some headed ad-hoc committees which would visit neighbors when they went to the hospital. Such committees not only brought cheer to bed bound patients, they gathered extremely important qualitative data, that later informed our quantitative analysis on the effects of the smog producing mess of an oil refinery put smack in our city by our ecologically illiterate government. But in truth, I discovered that many people can do math if you patiently teach them. Some of my own research, which hinted that Haifa's babies may be born pre-polluted and therefore endocrinologically altered, was aided by the newly developed data skills of an unemployed historian and a part time cashier without whom I never could have crunched through the data on hundreds of prenatal ultrasounds in the city (at least not while working). They did such a good job I received a special honor for my work from my academic medical system.  Lest our Haifa Hadarist agendas get sucked into the ethnocratic policies of the day tearing our co-existance community apart, we actively, purposefully sought to include every subculture of our neighborhood from Ethiopian to Palestinian to Mizrachi to Russian to Ashkenazi. We were Haifaists protecting ourselves, and as to the Professors, we knew where to find them for some expert opinions because some were fighting right alongside of us. After all, they had to survive the city as well. I'm afraid American professors aren't living in the same cities or even the same planet as us the people.
  I recently tried to start a sort of citizen audit of childhood debt. I was keen on learning from groups beyond Israeli ones how this stuff gets done. Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to because some academic types actively sought to disinclude me. I'll save the story for a future blog perhaps not even written by myself. After all, I'm a humble stupid worker who according to some more radical people "know[s] nothing" at least according to one email I started reading on a Strike Debt listserv. I didn't bother to finish reading it, because I couldn't be bothered as I was busy figuring out when I would get paid for editing a paper about myocardial infarctions. I'll never fit into the lunatic left. It's rather ironic, and might even be understood under Freud's ideas about the narcicism of small differences; except that there is an unfortunate large difference. I actually suffer from the issues this lunatic left claims to care so much about, and many of their loudest voices do not. Maybe most people already figured out this weird scheme of radical pose striking out, and this is why they are quietly defending themselves in many corners of the earth.

This is not what feminism should look like!

I consider myself a sort of feminist. I'm the kind of feminist hanging my head in embarrassment over what feminism looks like right now. Feminism looks like Emma Watson, a 24 year old actress and clothing model,  posing in Elle to celebrate her UN appointment to promote feminism. Feminism looks like skinny blond women taking their tops off to expose their breasts while wearing wreaths of flowers and make-up. Feminism looks like upper class cis-gendered straight white women living in palaces talking about how difficult it is to balance ordering around their servants, and time with their doting husbands. Feminism looks like an endless discussion of the potential rape of one single college student at UVA, when rape has been used as a war crime on a mass scale for the last 5000 years. In short feminism looks like a bunch of narcissistic navel gazing of approximately two to three percent of earth's population; not a fight for the rights of the 51% of us that are female. 

A lot of the #Himforher campaign is the kind of sad drivel that has many women of very different perspectives all pretty uncomfortable. There is no reason on earth men shouldn't be overjoyed about this kind of feminism. They are really the only people who have been liberated by it. They can now enjoy less pressure to support families financially, a lot more available sex with fewer requirements, and; perhaps most importantly, a sense of moral superiority for being "feminists" due to looking at Emma Watson modeling clothing smaller than my underwear even when she is not in fact modelling underwear on that particular day.

See this image?

That's UK politician Nick Clegg who admitted to sleeping with "no more than 30" women in an interview with the press. To his credit he didn't then beat his chest and declare it a victory for England over France, and the entire middle east. Also to his credit, he's exactly correct. This is what a feminist looks like, and that's a big part of the problem.

Feminism actually could be about making the world a better place for everyone: men, women, children, elderly, Latino, Native American, Asian, straight, gay, trans, differently-abled and so on and on. In the end we are all in this together; except me...I'm planning on moving to Mars. Beam me up Scottie?

A New War?

    Shots have just been fired at the Israeli embassy in Greece. Last night one of my Israeli friends noted that recently a Palestinian politician died in a protest, and one way or another we will probably pay for it in yet another war. It's as predictable as the annual Macy's white sale at this point. We have a semi-annual war.
     Sitting in Cape Town today, I'm a bit insulated from the day to day grind of the middle east. I'm able to imagine a new middle east. Like South African society, if we ever get to peace in the middle east, there is going to be a lot of truth and reconciliation that needs to go on. At the end of the day we may never even get onto the same narratives. The middle east is a patchwork of intermixed tribes and groups in conflict. Our current alliances are comical if you think about them logically. Kurds and Hezbolla. Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Muslims. Alewites and Druze. None of the alliances being built currently are stable or based on true common interests. Every human is a unique person with similarities and common interests that cut many different ways. The armed tribalism of the east is a recipe for an unsustainable mess. It seems as if there is an obvious solution: building peaceful societies based on our common human goals...but taking a bad society apart is the easy part. Breaking up things is easy. The question is how do you put them back together again.
     Everyone could agree we want peace although peace in and of itself is a pretty hollow word. Peace prevailed at times in many slave societies. Even at the most extreme level of opression and human misery peace is possible. But what kind of peace? Peace, in and of itself, is not really a worthwhile goal. Sustainable peace must be our mission. Human history shows peace will not be sustained under conditions of dramatic inequality whether it is of wealth, political rights or access to resources. I fear we may be headed to an additional war. Sadly, I don't know how we can be more at war. The US has been bombing the middle east for the last decade. The whole region simmers...and to the South  on the African continent wars in Africa produce more refugees than the entire world seems able to absorb. The world currently has 15 million refugees and about twice as many internally displaced people. For most of them the world already has come apart. The only positive I see in a coming war is that maybe the rest of us can develop a higher level of empathy.

Eric Garner Protests

I am happy to see there has been press coverage of the reaction to the murder of Eric Garner. Kudos to my amigos at JREJ and all other organizers of protests. A clip from JREF:  http://vimeo.com/11372

A special shout-out to the future doctors of America...you made me proud to wear the white coat again http://www.pnhp.org/news/2014/december/whitecoats4blacklives-health-care-workers-stage-nationwide-protests-against-polic

The Eco-village Organic Fruit Loops

On the bus to Cape Town I sat next to the whitest African I have ever seen. He was day-glow white with blonde hair. So fair that at 17 he was already beginning to wrinkle up. I wanted to get back to Western culture based conversation after the disappointment of having met a Sangoma (a witch doctor). But Sangomas, I have now begun to understand are among the saner folk in this land. My blonde cultural cousin spent the entire ride telling me about his spiritual visions, talking to the dead and other worlds. His mother had been thrown out of the local church, but it wasn’t a problem because he had a self taught spiritual guide he met at an electronic gaming store. After a day in the mountain listening to a tribal witch doctor talk about drinking the blood of a slaughtered goat and throwing bones to heal, I was now talking to an educated Westerner about healing with energy and spirituality. At least the witch doctor had a bunch of bones he threw around, so in some way his diagnostic method was related to the real world.

I couldn’t get off the bus fast enough. I thought it I went to a hostel inside an eco-village I would meet interesting intelligent concerned citizens of the world. As it turned out the village hosts the same bunch of wierdos many very cheap hostels have. A bunch of drifter men, social misfits sometimes painfully unaware of how they apparently have earned no place in society. They all imagine themselves to be leaders of something. Let me explain by walking you down the hall. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Namely me.

Room number twelve is Richard. I met him in the kitchen and he asked me what I did. After admitting I was a medical doctor he informed me that I knew nothing about nutrition. He then proceeded to lecture me on how based on one paper written by a dentist he knew more about nutrition than I did. His nose lifted so high I could literally see into his nostrils, he told me he had been in charge of many doctors in an NGO. “Which NGO?” “A highly, highly influential one.” So why was the head of an NGO at this backpackers eco-lodge I wondered…”What is the NGO called?” “Well, it no longer exists…” I wondered if his superiority complex was informed by being a white South African.

Across from him lives Brianna, one of the few female residents. She is 32 and has already survived throat cancer and gangrene of which there is no medical evidence because Jesus has healed her. She has no need for doctors because G-d heals everyone who just prays for it, or so she says. She also notes that South Africa was better under Apartheid without adding one important phrase: for white people like me.

Down the hall lives Professor Chapel. Professor Chapel is only here because it’s difficult to concentrate on his work when he is in fancy four star hotels. Or so he tells me. He is a visiting professor at the most elite science universities in America. He prefers to be a visiting professor so he can take time with his research you see. Perhaps this is why he has not bothered with a wife or husband or children…more time for his important research no one has ever heard of.

Next door to Professor Chapel lives Sandy. According to the front desk woman Sandy came in and explained he was living on his trust fund and needed somewhere to stay for the moment. Sandy is however not just a trust fund baby. He did at one point have a real job. He was a paramedic. According to the front desk lady everything was going well with his visit until his brother Dan showed up and started living in the same room. Dan is a track marked skinny guy with a sense of fashion that can most charitably be described as ironic. Soon after Dan came money started going missing from the front desk. Perhaps to throw everyone off his scent Dan is constantly mentioning how he comes from a rich well placed family of doctors.

Across the way lives Jack who wants to learn Hebrew from me because he is Jewish or Christian depending upon who and when is speaking. He came for a Hebrew lesson and spent the entire time complaining in English to me about how he suffers from a disease that has turned him into a rock in a river, tumbling, tumbling down the stream. The disease has no name, but everyone has it. He’s convinced the cure is in the bible.

Yesterday the Professor invited me to coffee. I thought perhaps we would discuss science. Apparently he is an expert in the lost “sciences” of the Nazis. When I told him I was Jewish he said he didn’t realize, but now looking at my nose he could see it. He then went on to ask me questions about Jews and intelligence.

Over a beer last night the front desk woman and I pondered if we were inside a mental institution, but just hadn’t been told about it. What we are actually inside is the froth of our system, or the run off depending upon how you look at it. Either our society is so decadent it frees people to be as crazy as they can or it is so impoverished it has no use for many men. These men, and they are mostly men, have detached from anything approaching a normal lifestyle…but are somehow unable to simply go find a shed in the country and plant some food. Instead they have taken up a sort of parasitic lifestyle strangely free from the society they depend upon. But perhaps the same could be said of me. None of these people seem to want a scientist around. Perhaps I need to just go find some land, and start farming. 

Gerontophilia Rejected; Sisters Move On Alone

  In my travels I keep running into single women over forty. As I am facing a thirtysomething birthday, alone and single, in eleven days, this is very interesting to me. What all of these women have told me is that they are alone because the reject what one calls "gerontophilia." The possibility of dating men as old as their fathers. Evolution or society or some combination of the two tend to favor age disparate relations for many women. But many women would prefer to be alone than slip into bed with someone worried about having (another) heart attack in the process.
  If you look around at thirtysomething women dating men you see some pretty disparate relationships. You see a lot of highly accomplished competent women dating men who are barely hanging on. When one friend of mine who was a brilliant university researcher began dating a part time drummer with a drug problem and a son he could never afford the 40$ bus ticket to visit, I openly questioned what was going on. 'On what planet do these two people even meet each other?!' I kept asking. Apparently, all over this one. The Chinese call the phenomenon A1 women and D4 men. If you are a leftover single it is usually because you are an awesome woman or a sucky man.
  I often wish someone had explained how to negotiate these realities to me. I  recently have been having nightmares and fits of stress when aawake at the prospect of growing old alone. I must note I have found one website interesting and helpful. Gateway-women.com focuses specifically on childlessness, and the woman who founded and runs it, Jody Day, claims she has moved on to happily ever after all by herself. Women who have managed to do this are heroic. The nasty way society treats us is not apparent to those without partners and children. It is the assault of a thousand details from nasty comments, and social exclusion to legal marginalization.
  What I have discovered in my conversations with many single women, is that actually we got that way because we were true and honorable. Ironically, it is married women who often took the easy dishonest way out. Obviously, not all married women are guilty of anything less than true love. But many are. Some faked pregnancies. Some faked attraction to richer men. Some just wanted someone else to support them, or fix their problems. Some pretended they were perfect until the ring went on. Some got pregnant on purpose then claimed it was accidental in order to get married. Some stole their husbands from other women. Some claimed doing a few hours of housework was so draining they needed a man to make most of the money. And so on and so on...Speaking to my older single sisters, I'm getting a much more realistic take on what really happens, as opposed to the myth of crazy defective women ending up alone. I am actually starting to be proud to be a single woman.