Page 328 - The Love Hypothesis

the most popular and controversial accounts on Academic Twitter. The

Scottish shepherd’s cousin is a closeted men’s rights activist who sends me
a dead possum in the mail and rats me out to his insane friends, and I get
fired.

No, thank you. I love my job (and possums) too much for this.
I created @WhatWouldMarieDo during my first semester of grad

school. I was teaching a neuroanatomy class and decided to give my
students an anonymous mid-semester survey to ask for honest feedback on

how to improve the course. What I got was . . . not that. I was told that my
lectures would be more interesting if I delivered them naked. That I should

gain some weight, get a boob job, stop dying my hair “unnatural colors,”
get rid of my piercings. I was even given a phone number to call if I was
“ever in the mood for a ten-inch dick.” (Yeah, right.)

The messages were pretty appalling, but what sent me sobbing in a
bathroom stall was the reactions of the other students in my cohort—Tim

included. They laughed the comments off as harmless pranks and dissuaded
me from reporting them to the department chair, telling me that I’d be

making a stink about nothing.
They were, of course, all men.

(Seriously: Why are men?)
That night I fell asleep crying. The following day, I got up, wondered
how many other women in STEM felt as alone as I did, and impulsively

downloaded Twitter and made @WhatWouldMarieDo. I slapped on a
poorly photoshopped pic of Dr. Curie wearing sunglasses and a one-line

bio: Making the periodic table girlier since 1889 (she/her). I just wanted to
scream into the void. I honestly didn’t think that anyone would even see my

first Tweet. But I was wrong.

@WhatWouldMarieDo What would Dr. Curie, rst female

professor at La Sorbonne, do if one of her students asked
her to deliver her lectures naked?