Every Saturday night, I slipped into a sequined bra and booty shorts to hang suspended from a trapeze above the dance floor of a packed-out, 20,000 square ft., iconic nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles.
Then, every Monday, I went to work and hid my thrilling side hustle from the college students I taught. I wanted them to get excited about science without transferring their passions onto me.
I hated breaking myself in two. I craved sensuality and intellect, playfulness and thoughtfulness, fun and legitimacy — I didn’t want to choose. But like many women, I felt forced to decide.
Brains or beauty. Never both.
I’d felt this same anxiety about my conflicting sides in graduate school and throughout my professional career in the sciences, where prudishness was the norm and sexiness taboo. At university, I wanted to sing about whale migration and party on every fieldwork expedition, but the academic community equated sensuality with a lack of legitimacy, and my parents, teachers, and other authority figures labeled sexy girls as “bimbos.”
