Finding joy amid double standards
I realize from the outset that my title for this piece is rather provocative. Any marginalized folks who have spent time in physics spaces know that double standards abound — tenured white men are allowed to throw temper tantrums while women, queer folks, and racialized physicists have to carefully watch our words for fear of our objectivity being questioned. It’s okay (and expected!) to talk about skiing or politics in the lab if you’re a white man. If you’re not, talking about those same things is a sign that you’re not really dedicated to physics.
From a day-to-day perspective, double standards suck. In fact, they’re a key reason that I left AMO physics for PER in the first place.
But this blog isn’t just about venting about the difficult parts of physics culture. It’s not enough for marginalized people to survive in physics, we have to learn to thrive. And since we can’t change physics culture overnight, we often have to find joy in the very parts of physics culture designed to humiliate us. (Not all of us have to stay in physics of course, that’s a personal decision. But for those of us who, for whatever reason, are determined to stay in a toxic environment, finding joy is the only way to say sane. I speak this largely from experience.)
I too used to deeply resent the double standards of physics culture. What ultimately made me quit doing so was that I had no alternative: it increasingly became clear to me that holding day-to-day resentments, no matter how seemingly justified, was destroying my mental health and eating away at my soul. Double standards in physics shouldn’t exist. I’m in no way excusing them, and it is our responsibility as physicists to do our part to dismantle them. They’re a huge contributor to our diversity problem, they allow harmful behaviors to go unchallenged, and they overall bring misery to everyone involved. To find joy in them is an intentional, radical act.
When I talk about finding joy in physics culture, I’m not talking about everlasting happiness. I’m talking about the perverse joy of the characters in Dr. Strangelove who perversely find their true selves amid unstoppable nuclear annihilation. I’m talking about how, in Camus’s words, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Yet this is how I’ve learned to love what I do.
And when I meet other marginalized physicists who are genuinely happy, I see over and over that our love of physics itself is really only half the picture. Learning to survive amid the contradictions of physics culture necessarily means mastering ourselves. (Or rather, the humility that comes from realizing that we can never fully master ourselves allows us to detach from the fleeting pleasures of capitalism and unlock the deeper joys that need not depend on circumstance.)
To constantly be held to double standards is exhausting. But it can also be exhilarating.
For too long, my response to double standards was to focus on the unfairness: Why should I have to do 10x as much work for 1/10 the credit? Why is white male mediocrity not only accepted but celebrated as the model for how a physicist should conduct themself? My focus on unfairness, though, only made me little different than my ultra-privileged peers. My conception of equity more closely mirrored entitlement than radical self-accountability. I craved the same unearned opportunities as my white male peers, and in so doing I learned to perpetuate the same physics culture that conditions acceptance as a physicist on externalization of the self.
Changing this perspective took many things. It took watching my greatest successes turn out to be failures, and my greatest failures turn out to be successes. It took learning the hard way that being multiply marginalized is absolutely no excuse for sh*tty behavior, even when circumstances seemed to leave me no other choice. And it took me truly grappling with what it means to decolonize physics as a multiply-marginalized white colonizer — for whom justice looks not like acceptance into the elite physics bro culture but loss of sovereignty over (and potential expulsion from) my own land.
Today, waking up and being a part of physics culture brings me joy. Not because I am always accepted in the space of physics, and not because I have any particular affinity for Bessel functions or partial differential equations. Not because I’m somehow “better” than my white male peers that throw temper tantrums in group meeting, for life has never yet had the opportunity to show them a different path.
Rather, I’m happy for the same reason Sisyphus is. Physics culture constantly shows me my weakness and holds me to a standard I will never be able to achieve. In so doing, I can put the myth of meritocracy aside and cease the rat race where I think getting one more paper published (or one more laser aligned) will someday allow me to find happiness. Capitalism says I will one day be happy if only I play by the rules. But real life doesn’t work that way: the moment I ceased striving for joy, I realized I had it in abundance all along.
