From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sat Mar 09 2002 - 06:48:18 MST
Samantha Atkins:
>Really? I don't think so. Nor do I think that we today need kowtow
>to anyone in scientific and engineering fields. It is true that an
>overly male energy pervades a lot of the professional world but I
>don't think that means that we have to compromise that much in order
>to do our work as we believe it should be done. Dagny Taggart was
>far more complex than "black and white" for whatever that is worth
>and is the least likely fictional person to commit suicide.
It looks like I didn't explain well, and I think that you might be
reading different things into what I said, Samantha.
Cowtowing?, not sure how it's spelled, is not what I meant.
It's not realistic to expect a woman scientist to act like a man
scientist. She has different approaches and different strengths,
and usually it requires alot of energy to make her voice heard among
the din. And it's reasonable to expect her to be making large life
decisions, choices, compromises, and fighting more than what's
comfortable, with regards to how to have a family at the same time
of having a work passion. All I'm saying is that a female scientist
(character and real life) _should_ be experiencing uncertainties and
despair at times, and to also have goals and wishes that are nothing
to do with science, so why not have the character display that
reality? The Ellie character was not a lifeless robot, and most
woman scientists are not either.
I only chose Dagney Taggert because the previous poster said that he
was disappointed that the Arroway character wasn't as strong and
uncompromising in the movie as in the book, so I chose the most
uncompromising character I could think of: Dagney. I don't think a
Dagney character in real life would do well in the last generation's
scientific arena. She would leave the world in some form (which she did)
Sorry.. dropping it now. The topic makes me really really tired.
-- ******************************************************************** Amara Graps, PhD email: amara@amara.com Computational Physics vita: ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/ ******************************************************************** "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
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