viviopsis asked: What advice would you give to someone who's seriously interested in human sexuality/feminism and is about to go to college next year, in terms of the short term (college itself) and the long term (grad school, getting a job)? Also, I love reading your blog & admire your work! :)
I’m not an expert by any means and have only ever worked in the real world for a year (during my time off from college), so everything I state below should be taken with a grain of salt. I’m also probably the last person you should ask for academic and/or career advice. I say that because if I wanted a career in the traditional sense of the word, then I wouldn’t have written a very public blog about sex; and if I wanted to go to graduate school, then I probably would have undertaken a more “serious” topic for my senior thesis. (Instead, I wrote about virginity.)
Disclaimer aside, it makes me really happy whenever I meet or hear from young people who unabashedly identify as feminist, sexually radical, or queer. It took me so long to realize that my opinions on gender and sexuality were, in fact, a political stance — a quite radical one, at that. So it always blows my mind that there are 18-year-olds running around with an incredible comprehension of ideas that took me years to process.
I majored in sociology, which is, at least on paper, much more marketable than women, gender, and sexuality studies (my minor). At Harvard, the sociology department has no classes on sexuality at all. Gender is also rarely discussed beyond the education/wage/employment gap, so instead of reading Simone de Beauvoir, I was trying to interpret statistical models with numbers I didn’t understand. If you want to talk social construction and challenge the validity of the gender binary, you’re pretty much relegated to the Pink Ghetto of women’s studies. By the time I realized this, however, it was way too late to change my major. Besides, gender and sexuality research is not generally taken seriously in academia, will not get professors tenure, and rarely constitutes an actual department. (At Harvard, WGS is a committee that cannot even confer PhDs.) Is that fair? Not at all. But though feminist scholarship is incredibly interdisciplinary and highly relevant toward more established academic fields, employers will still think less of you if your transcript has the word “sex” or “women” as a major heading. I made a compromise with myself by choosing the oh-so-practical major of sociology and taking WGS classes on the side. Then for my senior thesis, I combined the two by analyzing social norm formation using the concepts of virginity and premarital abstinence as case studies.
Coming out of sociology at Harvard, some people go to graduate school; my best friend went to law school; and acquaintances have entered corporate fields like consulting.But I’ll be honest: a sociology degree is still kind of a joke. Don’t get me wrong: I love my liberal arts education, but without the fancy Ivy League label, sociology majors have a tough time on the job market competing alongside peers who studied economics and political science. And while I would sooner kill myself than go 9-to-5, it does not pay to be a professional feminist or revolutionary.
I’m in a weird position right now, because people are constantly asking me for my post-grad game plan, and the truth is that I don’t really have one. I know how I’ll primarily be making money (by freelancing), but I’ll also be juggling random side projects: a book proposal, Feminist Coming Out Day 2011, and a new website on gender issues. Some of those projects might succeed, or they might not (as is more often the case), so I can’t really say where I’ll be a year from now. My friends, on the other hand, nearly all entered a graduate program or took a job that they intend on working at for two to three years. They have annual salaries, and in some cases, bonuses. I will literally not even earn half of what they do.
Of course, there is always the option of working for a larger foundation or non-profit. These organizations might not be as radical as their less established counterparts, but the trade-off is that you get health benefits, vacation days, and the assurance that your job will still be around a year from now. Just don’t go into this type of work with any illusions about what you’re doing. You may want to save the world, but the reality is that change is extremely incremental and that the current funding structure for non-profits is dependent on grants from foundations that make their money by exploiting the same people you’re trying to help. (For more on this topic, read The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.) In other words, doing “good work” and even charitable work is rife with contradictions.
So the best advice I can offer is to maintain a healthy balance between your ideals and your realistic needs. I wanted the legitimacy of a sociology degree (just in case I’d need it), so I gave up WGS. I wasn’t willing to compromise when it came to my senior thesis, so I wrote about an unorthodox topic. I do not want to take a 9-to-5 job but the trade-off is that I will be extremely, extremely broke — and at some point, if it’s not getting better, then I’m going to have to stop freelancing. Am I kind of terrified of what the next year will bring? Absolutely. But I’m also excited, because there are just so many unknowns. For most people, there’s a set path and predictable outcomes. I think it’s a great privilege to not have either.
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