Already immunized!
Naomi Wolf is giving us the benefit of her multi-disciplinary expertise again.
No it isn’t. We know people have immune systems, but immune systems can’t knock out a novel virus all by themselves.
Ah yes, the sinister conspiracy to slow and stop a lethal pandemic by vaccinating people. Bill Gates should be building luxury golf resorts instead!
Does anyone else in the English-speaking world use the word ‘immuni[s]ed’ to mean ‘in possession of an immune system? No? Just her, then?
Is this the ‘death recorded’ person? Does she ever get tired of talking about stuff she knows nothing about?
I came to the comments to get the “death recorded” jokes going, but I see Rob has already started.
How anyone can ever be a pedant after that fiasco is beyond me.
And talking that way while using “Dr” as her title. It gives it way too much credibility if people don’t realize her doctorate is in English literature. Now, I don’t have a problem with people who have doctorates using doctor in approved places, but you shouldn’t use it on social media unless you are, like, a medical doctor. Most people do not know the difference, and this sort of BS makes it dangerous. She has no more credibility on immunization than Kermit the frog, but she might be taken seriously by people who don’t know the difference.
Must be like “minoritized” (and I’m glad my spell check thought that was a misspelling)…
I really can’t imagine how she’s willing to keep talking in public after the blunder at the heart of her PhD thesis/book was exposed in real time on national media. I would have just sunk into the ground and never uttered another word if that had happened to me. And I understand the book based on this research is being reissued and expanded, or something (I remember reading something recent about it) with even more easily-identified egregious errors; she apparently expresses sympathy for and outrage on behalf of men sentenced for being gay, when a quick search of contemporary legal records indicates they were actually sentenced for assault, or bestiality…as with the behaviour and public statements of TIMs and trans ideologues, decades of effort on the part of activists to separate homosexuality from sexual deviance is being destroyed by people who are now happy to equate the two. (I’ve mentioned to lots of people that working with 18-19c legal records is a challenge, and they’re not always straightforward and easy to understand, but when I’ve used them I actually had the genius idea of consulting and getting help from experts to make sure I was reading and understanding them correctly, before including findings in my own work.) I don’t know what the process would look like but if I were an administrator at her university I’d have done whatever I could to rescind her doctorate.
And I agree with Ophelia–it’s completely bizarre to see this. The Beauty Myth was huge when it was published–it had a significant effect on the lives of probably millions of girls and women. I remember carrying it around when I was reading it, and maybe half a dozen women, strangers as well as one of my closest friends, poured out their guts to me about how it had helped them see the abuse and manipulation they’d internalised all their lives. I have to thank her for the help she provided to all those women, at the same time wondering what happened to her. Possibly such early success made her feel like all her thoughts were innately perfect and therefore she didn’t need the same rules and rigour that other people need when they research and write.
@4 ‘you shouldn’t use it on social media unless you are, like, a medical doctor’
I disagree with this. Women tend to hide our qualifications in public and social settings, which leads men, and people in general, to underestimate women’s abilities and expertise in general. A couple of years ago (?) a woman started a campaign for women to use their titles in social media, and I was on board with that–I noticed that it really did make the expertise of women much more generally visible. Wolf seems to be one of those exceptional scholars who’s happy to use her title to deceive people by writing as a presumed ‘expert’ about things she doesn’t even have a basic understanding of, but I think that’s unusual/exceptional. Also, I think you probably know that medical doctors are the latecomers to the use of the title ‘Doctor’–it’s not for PhDs to concede the social use of the title to medical doctors.
It’s quite sly to use the honorific “Dr” in a setting where it doesn’t apply, with the exception being medical doctors, due to common usage. The average layperson, when presented with someone referring to themselves as “Dr. So-and-So”, is going to assume that that person is a medical doctor. So I agree with iknklast@4 on that one, guest@7. In fact, PhD’s misusing the honorific to imply expertise where there is none helps to lead laypersons to disregard us as somehow being “not real doctors”. I don’t know how common that practice is, but it does seem like every media personality who has a doctorate of some kind engages in it.
I wouldn’t introduce myself as “Dr. Garnett” in any situation other than a professional meeting of computer science theorists (not even among those with a doctorate in English, even though I consume and reconsume English literature like some kind of language-starved animal!), and even then I probably wouldn’t do it. I cannot, in fact, remember the last time I used it in the last 20 years, although I certainly introduce colleagues to newcomers that way, e.g. “Joe Newcomer, meet Dr. Smart, she published a rastlefarberfloop variation of that algorithm that you mentioned that you’d like to investigate”.
That being said, I’m glad to see that Naomi Wolf is continuing to reinforce my long-held belief that anyone who is non-humorously using the honorific on social media is most likely a complete crank.
@8 I appreciate your position, but have a think about the situation from a woman’s perspective.
@guest #7: “Also, I think you probably know that medical doctors are the latecomers to the use of the title ‘Doctor’–it’s not for PhDs to concede the social use of the title to medical doctors.”
I’ve seen this asserted a few times, always without evidence, but it’s just plain wrong. The use of “doctor” for medical practitioners dates back to the middle ages. There are plenty of literary examples – Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch comes to mind, and so does Dr Watson. Also Palmerston’s last words (1865): “Die my dear Doctor? That is the last thing I shall do.” Ph.Ds, on the other hand, are a recent innovation in the Anglosphere. Harvard awarded its first in 1873; Oxford in 1917 and Cambridge 1921.
No-one I know who has a doctorate would expect to be called “Dr” in a non-professional context, and indeed neither would my friends who are medical doctors. They would regard it as pretentious.
The use of the term doctor for ‘a learned person’ long predates its use for medical practitioners and the first doctorates were awarded by Padua and Bologna universities in the late medieval/early Renaissance period. They were usually awarded in the fields of law and philosophy not medicine.
The use of the title ‘doctor’ for physicians is far more recent and still confined to a small number of mostly Angloshere cultures. (I speak as someone with a PhD in medieval history.)
That said, I completely agree that using ‘Dr’ in a social media context when discussing something health related, when you are not a medical doctor, is misleading and irresponsible.
@Jo Fawker According to the OED, the first recorded use of “Doctour of Phisyk” was in the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, c1405, which places it firmly in the late medieval/early Renaissance period. There are doctors in King Lear and Macbeth. One of the founding members of the Royal Society, Timothy Clarke, “proceeded” to DM at Oxford in 1652 and was “incorporated” MD at Cambridge in 1668. Pepys referred to him as “the Doctor” in his diaries. Perhaps to a specialist in medieval history that is recent but to most people it is not. And maybe it is Anglospherical but that is where we are.
Nevertheless the use of the term to refer to ‘learned men’ or ‘teachers’ (from the Latin docere – to teach) still predates the use of the term ‘doctor’ for physicians. An good example would be the ‘Doctors of the Church’ (Doctores Ecclesiae) a term which enters official church terminology in the 13th century, though the term was used much earlier.
Early references to physicians as ‘doctor’ are usually colloquial rather than official, exceptions and not the norm.
I’m well aware of the Doctors of the Church but none of them held a Ph.D and I’m not sure of their relevance here, though was interested to discover – I like to check facts – that their numbers continue to swell and there are now 30 of them, three having been added in the last ten years. Anyway, I have shown that “Doctor” was used as a professional title in England for hundreds of years before the first PhD was awarded in the UK, and that is the point I wished to make and I have made it to my own satisfaction, if to nobody else’s.
Moreover early uses of the term ‘doctor’ for physicians appear alongside a cultural shift in which physicians were increasingly seen as ‘men of learning’ rather than as more lowly skilled professionals (as they frequently were in the middle ages).
The term here is usually a colloquial honorific designed to confer on them the status of ‘learned men’ and would have been understood as such in that context.
Richard, yes – there are many more now (depending on which branch of the church you are considering.)
I do get your point. The point I’m making (with great pedantry I’m sure) is that the term doctor was initially conferred on the learned. Its use for physicians is later and came about through an increase the in the perceived status of the physician and the wish to include physicians amongst those considered learned.
Doctorates act as an official means of confirming ‘doctorhood’ not as prerequisite to a cultural understanding of the term ‘doctor’.
guest, I can see your point, and as a woman, and a Ph.D., I do use my title in situations where it is appropriate and/or necessary. I don’t believe it is pretentious for someone who is teaching in a college to ask their students to call them “Dr. So-and-So”. I think it is doubly important when you are a woman, because students will disrespect women instructors given the slightest excuse for doing so. I have experienced first hand the change in my students once I no longer let them call me by my first name. Many of them still do, which is more than irksome, because most of them are in awe enough of the males that they will not call them by their first name, though many of them prefer that. There are, by the way, zero Ph.D.s among the males who teach at our campus; at this point, there are a substantial number of Ph.D.s among the women, perhaps testament to how difficult it is for a woman to get a teaching job at a university.
But if we use it on social media (of which I am no expert, because commenting on this blog is the closest I come to social media), then we should possibly accompany it with some sort of indication of what our doctorate is in, at least if we are going to comment on medical issues. It is highly misleading for Dr. Wolfe to be giving advice on vaccinations.
I will admit I have used it to imply on a couple of occasions, such as when my insurance was rejecting a claim they should have paid. When I wrote a letter back to explain why it should be paid (and I do actually have experience and expertise in the field of health insurance; that was my first professional level job), I made sure to sign it Dr. X. The approval of the claim arrived five days after I sent the letter.
I don’t teach any more, so don’t use an academic title in an academic setting–and I don’t usually use it at conferences or talks, unless the other (male) speakers are using theirs (you’ve no doubt noticed the classic ‘I’d like to introduce Dr A, Dr B, Dr C [all men] and Miss D’–or even better, ‘and Mary’). I use it outside of academia when I want to be listened to or taken seriously, and in situations where unattractive normal middle-aged women are typically ignored and dismissed, in hopes that it might boost my visibility slightly. I also use it in ‘Mrs, Miss or Ms?’ situations–in forms etc. I prefer not to put in a title, because who needs it? but if they require one they’ll get Dr.
When I was younger I had a lot of respect for people who avoided using their titles and other status markers, and to some extent I still do. However, this false humility is only viable for men. A man who runs a company or heads a department who introduces himself as ‘Jim’ knows full well that the person he’s meeting is fully aware of his status, and is even more impressed that he chooses not to make it explicit. A woman who does the same is treated at face value; a woman with status who introduces herself as ‘Jane’ is just Jane. (I have both watched this happen and learned this lesson the hard way.)
I do completely agree that, particularly now, it’s incredibly deceitful and irresponsible to opine about medical matters and use the honourific ‘Dr’ if you’re not a medical doctor. I wouldn’t think that needed to be said but apparently it does. (I joke when I use my title ‘I’m a real doctor but can’t help you if you have a heart attack.’)
Guest #18. I completely agree with your points here. My experience as a female academic was very similar.
I’m not currently working in academia (though hope to return) and don’t use the title ‘Dr’ in informal settings. If asked for my title though I usually say ‘Dr’. That is my title. In some contexts I’ll use ‘Ms’ if it seems more appropriate or would be misleading to use ‘Dr’.
I think someone should look into this…maybe “doctorate recorded” didn’t mean what Naomi Wolf thought it did?
Ha!
Good one, Skeletor. I bow to your superior comic instinct. You won the internet for today.