I've said it before, so I'll say it again: Emily Graslie's "The Brain Scoop" is one of the warmest, slyest video blogs on the web. She's where I go to find out what museum scientists are up to — and right now she's at the Field Museum in Chicago, where she wanders from department to department, exploring, delighting, asking questions that you and I would ask if someone gave us a free pass to gawk our way through one of the great natural history museums in the world. So I was more than a little surprised to catch her recent post, a meditation on the mail she gets.
It turns out her mail is, well, troubling.
Many of the folks who write her, write not about the science, but about her body, her looks, her clothes, and do so without any apparent embarrassment. She's a science reporter who happens to be a young woman, and her woman-ness is the thing they focus on. The science, to her chagrin, often takes second place.
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