on wisdom

Over the weekend I read The Book of Negroes in the backyard and got a wicked sunburn on my already pretty damn brown shoulders and got me a fine education about Black Loyalist originations and reimmigration from and to Sierra Leonne. I recommend that book like I recommend nothing I have read since maybe the Pornographer’s Poem. Masterpiece of blood and guts and the absolute gorgeousness of literacy.

Then I cracked open my other Friday noontime purchase from Westminster Books, Elizabeth Pisani’s “The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, brothels, and the business of AIDS”. And yes, its one of those shock-value titles to tweak the entertainment potential of a fat hardcover tome on epidemiology and officialdom, exactly the same foes Mary Roach addresses in her non-fiction sex-sci adventure, “Bonk”. So espoused to her investigative journalism into the underfunded international departments of physiological sex research, Ms Roach volunteers herself and her poor but obviously devoted husband to go into an MRI while, er, bonking. Now Dr S volunteered herself for an MRI back in March for a mutual friend’s psych study, and she emerged from it uncoupled and extremely traumatized by voluntary claustrophobia. I don’t know how many atavan Roach could take and still be conscious enough to orgasm, but I can’t see how she wouldn’t need plenty. That said, I thought Roach was a bit of an exhibitionist (ahem, which I love), and a bit of a loon (also pretty endearing). I got through her book. It was kind of like following the easy prose of Liz Gilbert except the traveling companions wore lab coats.

Pisani is of course taking some cues Roach earlier caught: to be reviewed by the likes of the G&M and Salon (and promptly land on bestseller lists), be cheeky enough to sound interestingly naughty, be friendly enough for the science to sink in, and convince your reader you are embedded (Roach took the bed part very seriously). I wanted to read Pisani’s book because I am very, very critical of the overfunding of “health” budgets, whether they be government departments or university allocations or “non-profit” fundraisers. So if she has a story to tell about how this or that health department received a gazillion dollars in aid for AIDS and all they did with it is pass it back to the donor country in consultant or whatever fees, or spend it to study costs, or bleed it to big pharma who are already rich on our impotence…well, that sounds like the kind of dirt I like to roll in.

Pisani begins in a flippant tone about how as a young teenager she was brought by businessy parents to Hong Kong and she just loved learning about the sex culture and checking out the girlie bars and drinking cocktails, and it inspired her to learn Chinese and live in Asia working for Reuters. Huh? You loved being fifteen and going to girlie bars?

As I will get into, I feel a lot of kinship with Pisani, and that is probably what pisses me off about her. When I was a young teenager (younger than 15) I was brought into a very sexualized foreign culture, I was prodded with sexualized language all day long in school and all evening long at the local beach, and I was literally poked with erections when I went out anywhere without my family. This did not inspire me, this almost destroyed me. I did not think this was neat or exotic, I thought this was depraved pederasty.

As a result, I am about two pages into The Wisdom and I suspect Pisani of being a big fat liar. Then she decides to go to grad school and finds herself in epidemiology, mostly unawares as to what the field of study actually is. Which is where I was in 2004 when I knew I wanted to study how sex was manipulated to sell drugs, and I knew economics was too dry a dismal land to get that saucy. And then she recounts her embarrassingly green reaction to an introductory lecture covering case-control vs cohort studies, a greenness I also felt hearing the schpeel on day one of my last degree. She says she tells everyone she studies “sex and drugs”, which is what I, obviously, said. Hearing of my thesis plan, more than once a biostatistician would chime in “and rock and roll” to add an extra nugget of canned humor to my laboured wit.

So Pisani is a liar and her prose came in a can and I’ve been there before but she actually got a PhD and I didn’t. Probably I am jealous that she enjoyed her oversexualized adolescence while I got scarred, and she got published while I got a sunburn reading in July. But that’s not what this post is about. What I really want to get to is who the hell is she writing for? Yes it’s absurdly narcissistic, but I should be her obvious reader, right?

When I started my job in the civil service I stumbled into the most astoundingly hysterical universe of inefficiency and pretentious urgency. I laughed at the poise of authority taken by my “superiors”…I mean, telling me what to do while you fondle your lapels…you HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING, right? Wrong. For a bit. I mellowed (I forgave their hunger and my own righteousness) and they all got used to me, but it was not so long ago that my forehead was in an angler’s knot I was so confused by the waste of energy that is contemporary government.

Pisani begins the actual AIDS-related part of her memoir/epi pulp with a description of UNAIDS in the mid-1990s, when the frantic alarm of the urban eighties deaths had worn off and the Stephen-Lewis-style pandemic was not yet foretold. The UN epi office got staffed, politically correctly, with people who really had their nose to the ground, who were in the thick, who walked the streets: a flamer in a Jean Paul Gauthier tee. (I think Pisani is serious in thinking this limp image will work for me. It won’t. My supervisor back in the ole’ Southern Ontario epi department runs Fashion Cares, wears head to toe Gucci, and is the most aggressive and cutthroat professional academic you ever saw straddle the piggy banks of WHO and CIHR). No faery dust. No tokenism.

She compares the happy go lucky gay colleague to the inertia of acceptably defining the homosexual for UN analyses. Not “gay”. Not men who have sex with men. Not males who have sex with males. XY + XY +/- HIV? Back again, repeat. Forget finding decent data in the genderbent thicket of Bangkok, what are you going to call it once you’ve got it?

So I realize that situation is academic, pedantic, semiotic, and, like, super annoying. In Halifax I worked on a study about economic inclusion of lone mothers, and we spent an eon arriving at lone mothers in lieu of unwed, single or pathetic wench. KIDDING. We also had to justify focusing on mothers in lieu of parents. But the point of the language yoga was that justification: why does the mother matter? BECAUSE OF GENDER AND POWER. Why exactly do some men who have sex with men not want to be called gay? Hmmm…same reason.

My mother worked for an AIDS org almost ten years ago, when we were newly back from the aforementioned sexualized country where gender and power blazed openly in rumshacks cramped with lazy ass men and grand hotels staffed entirely by black uniformed women working double shifts. Mom came home one day pickled over this men-who-have-sex-with-men “bullshit”. I could not understand why my infinitely compassionate mother cared what some guys wanted to call themselves. Like, what the hell does that really have to do with you? But what mom brought to the label was rage that her peers were starting to lose their health to the dishonesty of “men who have sex with men”: married women were getting infected because their husbands were hiding sexual practices, and, preferences. Now in her fifties, my mom has similar disgust for men who leave their wives for (oh god it is true) their secretaries. My mother has no patience for men who behave with the self-interestedness of little boys.

In The Wisdom, I fear Pisani will actually skip the ugly that she advertises sticking her fingers into the eyes of. She is certainly avoiding the ugly of her own memoir. She is now going back and forth to Kenya to steal weekends with “the boy” she really likes. Roight, because international Reuters journalists who live on kirsch in Geneva and paper their office walls in doctorates date BOYS.

There is a difference between being accessible and being insulting. Pisani is so terrified of her own power that she is debased to ignoring mine.