Think Pink! or why I wear an apron to work instead of a lab coat.

I'm on assignment to write about sexism in the profession. My thoughts about this subject touch on a lot of other things I'm kicking around right now, about knowledge and power and labor and professionalism; this post can't possibly cover them all (stay tuned!). But I thought it might generate some fruitful dialogue.

So let's start here: a commenter on the "Another Person's View" post remarked that "cookbook acupuncture equates to mediocre acupuncture." Now, this same person will probably laugh at me - I’ll go ahead and say “patriarchy” right now, so they can just tune the rest of this out - but I want to genuinely question why calling something "cookbook" is understood and accepted as an automatic dismissal. I expect that, if you yearn to belong to the great boy’s club of four-star chefs (yes, I mean this as a metaphor), you can’t admit to using cookbooks. But if your job is to make sure your family gets fed (which is after all a vitally important job that gets done ALL THE TIME, and we know by whom), ain’t nothing wrong with a good cookbook. Furthermore, recipes that get to print generally go through rigorous testing beforehand; most are steeped in tradition and embody plenty of theory. And moreover, their transition from print to plate involves skill, artistry and intention on the part of the cook.

A lot of this is classism: the age-old status breakdown between intellectual work and physical labor. It’s also sexist. I’d like to make the argument that a lot of why CAN pushes people’s buttons is not just its explicit economic analysis, but also its implicit feminist analysis: I think CAN members, as a whole, are not in denial that acupuncture is a pink collar profession. And the reason we’re not in denial is that there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sure, we have advanced training (so do RNs and Librarians), which separates us from the working class status of many pink collar professions such as waitressing. But we are a service industry. We take care of people. We work with our bodies as much as with our minds, yet the work isn't brutal enough to constitute a men's guild (like firefighting, construction, or policing). We don't have enough science on our side to "harden" the profession in the eyes of MDs (studies which show that 80% of what doctors do is not “evidence-based” are not to be dwelled upon).

I took a rough tally of the member directory for CAN, and it looks as though the membership is about 2:1 women to men (I counted all the people whose sex wasn't obvious to me by their name as men, so it might be a little higher). I think my graduating class at ACTCM had a similar sex breakdown, and I’m guessing that’s true for the profession as a whole (if anyone actually has statistics on this I’d be grateful). But if I tallied all of the titles on Chinese Medicine published to date in English and checked the sex of the authors, I wager I'd get something close to the opposite ratio (if not more skewed towards the men - again, I'll let someone else do the math on this, and please correct me if I’m wrong). This would indicate that the voice of authority in our profession is predominantly male, whereas the majority of practitioners are female.

I have several thoughts on why this might be. For one, I think that as a general rule, women in our culture are trained to be aware of other people’s needs, and to be caretakers; and I think men are trained to be aware of rank, of their power position relative to other men. (I realize of course that caretaking can be a power ploy, but it doesn’t tend to pay very well.) This training explains why so many of the aforementioned authority figures in our profession seem to be concerned with being accepted by establishment forces (medical, financial, governmental). CAN’s analysis of the profession, and suggested solutions, don’t involve us fretting over this kind of acceptance. And this is the only online acupuncture community I’m aware of that gives props to the hard (pink collar) work done by receptionists and office managers - indeed, without avenging angel Lupine, CAN would not exist.

It’s like CAN’s red fist got put in the washer with all of the white lab coats, and stained everything pink (in more ways than one!); and all the bleach in the world isn't going to fix it. Certainly we all enjoy a lively debate about relative merits of various techniques and treatment strategies, and what the classics really say, but in the meantime the baby is crying in the other room, and you know whose job it is to pick up the baby. If the professional leadership doesn’t start picking that baby up too, their paternity is going to get called into question.