April 19, 2010

Conversation about the IUD (intrauterine device) is limited and often based on a series of falsehoods.  I had never heard of a safe IUD until three months ago, when I was sitting in my kitchen with my boyfriend and his friend Emma.  Emma and I have both found oral contraceptives (the Pill) difficult.  We’ve both lost energy and felt less (which is worse, we agreed, than the more typical side effect of feeling more).  Plus, neither of us liked bearing the burden of taking the Pill.  It was not the problem of remembering to take or not take the Pill, but the sense of obligation.  If my partner does not have to take a pill that makes him unrecognizable to himself, then why should I?  It was this lack of feeling like ourselves, physically and emotionally, that led us both to the IUD.

Private doctors rarely recommend the IUD to women of the age group 18–26.  It is seen as a type of semi-permanent birth control for married women who have already had the children that they want.  This perception may explain why I thought that it was a defunct and unreliable form of birth control.

After telling my doctor about my partner, I asked her what she would say if I were her daughter.  She said, “Use condoms” but, barring that, “let’s go with the IUD.”

An IUD is a one-inch T-shaped device that sits at the cervix.  The IUD acts directly and exclusively on the uterus, making it uninhabitable to sperm. Strings (not felt by either partner during sex) come through the cervix so that the device is removable. An old brand of the IUD associated with high rates of infertility in the women who used them is largely responsible for the stigma the device carries.  However, it is wrong to assume that both types of FDA-approved IUD come risk-free.    The more traditional IUD (or ParaGard IUD) is made out of copper and can last twelve years.  A possible side effect for women who use this type is a heavier period (up to a 50% percent increase). The Mirena IUD locally releases a small amount of progestin.  It lasts five years, and one side effect is a lighter period (or a stop in periods altogether).

The IUD is looked down upon as a possible method of birth control in young women.  In some cases, that makes sense.  The IUD is not a wise choice for women at risk for exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STI’s).  Like the Pill, the IUD does not protect against STI’s.  If you aren’t going to use a condom in concert with the IUD, you should skip it.  There is also the question of fertility. For me, part of reproductive health includes fertility.  I take birth control now, but want a child later.  STI’s and IUD’s are a horrible combination for fertility.  Every STI that can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia), if contracted while using the IUD, raises a woman’s risk of infertility.  This is because the removal strings lead past the natural barrier between the vaginal canal and the uterus.  STI’s in the uterus are disastrous for reproductive health.

I am in a stable, long-term relationship. I felt that my partner and I could be responsible to the risks that come along with the IUD. I wanted to feel like myself: not apathetic about my body.  After telling my doctor about my partner, I asked her what she would say if I were her daughter.  She said, “Use condoms” but, barring that, “let’s go with the IUD.”  I chose the Mirena version, under the hopeful assumption that in five years my partner will be the one on birth control.  The IUD can be right for you, or not.  My only advice is to think about the IUD, talk about it with your partner, and take a serious dose of Tylenol Extra Strength before you go in.  It hurts.  This is no pap smear.  I vomited and had to wait an hour before going home.  Emma, too, felt light-headed and dizzy.  She also experienced the strange side effect of thinking her cervix had grown to the size “of a nose.”  But, as Emma told just a week after getting her IUD, “My cervix feels like a million bucks, and you can quote me on that.”

Hannah Zeavin is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

March 13, 2010

Every time I hear Kathryn Bigelow’s name, I remember Barbra Streisand’s face. At the Oscars this week, it was Streisand who presented Bigelow with her Best Director Oscar. Botoxed and smug, Streisand’s face brightened at the opened envelope and her lips opened to intone, “Finally, the time has come.”  Then she uttered Bigelow’s name, having successfully affixed a permanent preface.  The next day, news wires and film blogs would declare, “First woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow.”

I think Sunday night was great.  I always enjoy it when women win honors previously monopolized by men.  And the journalists who noted that Bigelow’s was the first female win in the award’s history did so appropriately.  Streisand’s misguided commentary, however, imposed a feminist story arc onto the win that undercut Bigelow’s personal accomplishment— and introduced a tension between progress in gender and ethnic politics.

How nice of Barbara to share “Bigelow’s award” with all of us womenfolk.  After all, as the aging star perfectly showed through her personal theatrics, this win really belongs to her—and everyone else with a vagina.  Why else would she distract us from Bigelow’s personal victory in the very moment of its announcement?  A woman of such understated demeanor could have no ulterior motive.

Yet despite Streisand’s selfless sharing, it is unclear how, exactly, this Oscar constitutes a feminist victory. It is wonderful that the industry has opened up from its explicitly sexist early days to allow talented women to rise to positions of power, the sort of positions that allow them to produce Oscar-worthy films.  However, the trends of the Oscars are not necessarily indicative of trends in the workplace: the San Francisco Chronicle reports that there were proportionally fewer women directing top-grossing films in 2009 than in 2008, dropping down to the same percentage as in 1987.  Nor does Bigelow’s win provide a heightened platform from which to fight for women’s issues (as, say, a presidential win would).  Further, this win does not set a precedent that allows more women to achieve, like Elizabeth Blackwell’s admission to medical school; it seems highly unlikely that whatever old boys’ club mentality keeps women out of directing will dissipate because of this award. 

Framing Bigelow’s win as a feminist victory was particularly ill-advised in this case, given that African-American director Lee Daniels was also up for the award.  Political movements—even those without mutually exclusive goals—will always compete. The resources at stake are scarce; there is only so much political will to go around.  And when every victory by a member of a marginalized group is a victory for the movement associated with that group, any competition between people who are not middle class white men takes on undue significance.  Daniels could have been the first African American director to win the award for his film Precious, so when Streisand declared that “the time has come” with a triumphant grin, we knew it had come down to the black guy or the chick.  Of course, only one of the “times” could have arrived, and Streisand’s ecstatic preface made it clear she was more concerned with a supposed “feminist win” than a “racial equality win.” And her posturing asked us to choose as well.  Obviously, the Academy was not choosing which cause it cared about more; it was judging the artistic work of Kathryn Bigelow and Lee Daniels.  To paint this award as anything more is both incorrect and unfair.

Next time, Barbra, let the woman speak for herself.

Alexandra Brodsky is a sophomore in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

By DAISY ATTERBURY

February 26, 2010

“Daisy,” my dad said one Sunday. “I need to talk to you.” He had the look he gets right before he agrees to go to a dinner party—his I-don’t-know-what-I’m-getting-myself-into face. As he fished something out of his pocket, I got a squirmy feeling in my stomach.  Maybe the citation for my car accident had come in the mail.

He held out his hand like a round, pink shell and I stared as his fingers drew back to expose the pearl: a condom.

I come from a family of Vagisil Christmas ornaments.  Gardasil magnets decorate our fridge. One low point of my life was in eighth-grade English class, when I whipped out a pen and Ellie Beckett, who sat to my left, shrieked, “It says VIAGRA! Your pen says VIAGRA!” Most parents don’t send their children to school with drug company paraphernalia, or interrupt dinner table conversations with penile diagnoses (via confidential phone calls). My physician parents missed the boat on normalcy.

Even though I’d known since I was six where babies come from—after receiving a thirty-minute “sperm” and “egg” explanation at the breakfast table—my dad still found it necessary to hold the Condom Talk. I think he looked upon it as a rite of passage—for him, not for me.

My parents had regarded my entire adolescence as one drawn-out sex talk.  They’d inject facts into unrelated banter as if this was the only college preparation spiel of any importance. When my friends were around, I dreaded the moments my parents would slip into Doctor Mode. My dad would, out of habit, slide embarrassing information into general conversation: “Hey Leslie, how are your folks these days?  Only three percent of couples using condoms correctly during the first year of use experiences condom failure. Is your dad still working on that house?”

Our family specializes in covert operations.  My mom visits our neighbor to “check in.”  (His Erectile Dysfunction Disorder causes him stress, I once overheard.)  My dad hides prescription drugs in his top bureau drawer.  A hard drive in the living room hosts the coital confessions of my small town.  It’s quadruple password protected.

“Daisy,” my friend Janice once said.  “Hey, um, can I talk to your mom about something?  It’s private.”  My doctor parents knew all about Janice’s boyfriend andthe pregnancy tests she’d taken the night before.  They’d gotten the blow-by-blow of the evolving relationship and the play-by-play of condom slippage.  I, however, only got the outline.  They always know and I always almost know.

I could tell that the condom had been out of its package for several minutes, because it was curled in my dad’s warm palm like one of those fortune-telling fish.  Moving head:  jealousy. Moving tail: indifference. Curling sides: fickle. Turns over: false.  It didn’t move and I couldn’t remember what that meant, so I looked up at my dad and raised my eyebrows.

He asked me to come and sit with him on the couch for a second, so I shuffled with my hands in my pockets while he strode with his hand outstretched.  He seemed to be proffering the condom to the flowered upholstery.  As we sat, he tipped his cupped hand in an attempt to drop the condom onto the square of couch between us. It stuck to his palm.  After a violent but futile shake of the wrist, my dad had to peel off the condom with his other hand. It was then that I remembered about the fortune-telling fish.  Motionless:  dead one. I didn’t say anything. I looked up at my dad and almost caught his eye, so I jerked my gaze down instead. There it was. I stared at the condom as I would stare at road kill: horrified, but unable to look away. I laughed nervously.

“Do you … know how to use one of these?” My dad said, gesturing at the translucent worm. I’m pretty sure that that’s what secret agents in movies say—about handguns.

“Yeah?” I shot back, though it wasn’t supposed to come out as a question. I shifted my position on the couch and the wooden legs creaked under us.

“You know that you’re supposed to leave room—”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Ok,” he said.

There was a long pause.

My dad opened his mouth as though he was going to say something more, but then clicked it shut again. Then he bent down and pulled a giant box from under the couch; he must have planted it there earlier. I didn’t even want to imagine what else Costco sold in bulk, because this was the biggest crate of condoms I had ever seen. On the label, a picture of a man holding a woman in his arms was underscored by the word “SPERMICIDE.“

I was so stunned by the size of the box that I didn’t hear my dad’s exit line. I looked up. He squeezed both pink fists at his sides and slouched out of the room.

I looked down at the Dead One in the shadow of the Condoms-In-Bulk tower. Curling my knees to my chest on the sofa, I felt like a patient who had received a misdiagnosis.My parents talked to friends’ children and children’s friends, concentrating on the intimate details of strangers. But I wondered what they guessed about me. In my house, sex was quantified—millions of sperm, one egg. Sometimes the very nature of their job was like a giant prophylactic, protecting them from the truth.

Daisy Atterbury is a senior in Yale College.

February 24, 2010

According to Rupert Murdoch, arbiter of our times, La Huff is a thief, a parasite, a content kleptomaniac.  But speaking at the Yale Law School on Monday, Arianna Huffington appeared quite capable of propelling herself entirely on her own momentum, oozing self-confidence on the day she announced the launch of HuffPost College. This latest section of Huffington’s eponymous news website will collate material written by students on “issues that matter to students,” culling its finds from the websites of college newspapers across the US.

It is this very pursuit of “aggregation” that so angers Huffington’s rivals.  It was little surprise, then, that in Huffington’s talk on “net neutrality,” she argued that aggregation plays a key role in opening up the internet, and encouraging citizen journalists. Echoing Hilary Clinton’s suggestion last month that “freedom to connect” be added to FDR’s basic four freedoms, Huffington defined “freedom to connect” as “freedom of assembly…in cyberspace.” Aggregation, therefore, facilitates assembly. It was in the same vein that she praised the power of citizen journalists, arguing that it is easier for governments to dupe or bribe a few reporters than it is for a whole nation of on-the-spot reporters to be so swayed. Apparently Ms. Huffington was not familiar with the phrase “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

Huffington’s celebration of citizen journalists, however, stems from a sound understanding of the weakness of the professional journalist. Huffington is keen to circulate the term “journalistic capture,” a new understanding of the ways in which journalists can become sucked into the world of those on whom they report– and end up colluding in the practice of covering up for the establishment. Huffington likens the process to “regulatory capture” on Wall Street, in which regulators develop vested interests in maintaining the financial institutions around which they operate. Keen to advance the web as a tool for journalistic and political emancipation, Huffington also called on the government to prioritize an increase in broadband access–currently only 60% of Americans have access to broadband. At the same time, however, she called for an end to the culture of anonymity on the internet– again, in the interests of transparency. Huffington also insisted that the age of pay-per-view content is over. In a heavy accent, she reminded the audience of her Greek heritage, invoking “my favorite Greek philosopher, Heraclitus” in her assertion that “we cannot step into the same river twice.”

Such appeals to her Greek roots form a key element of Arianna Huffington’s glamorous image, an image to which feminists have responded with mixed feelings. Certainly Huffington cares about female enterprise: two years ago she was standing at the same platform to open the Women’s Leadership Initiative conference, when she talked with feeling about the need for female role models and mentoring. Yet she has been accused throughout her career of using highly traditional, invidious forms of female power. As a college student, she invited British intellectual Bernard Levin to give a speech at Cambridge, seduced him, and spent her twenties being introduced to literary London on his arm. When the relationship ended, she left for America and married a billionaire, produced his children, and later divorced him, receiving a settlement that has funded her political projects ever since. According to the narrative of her detractors, even her constant references to her Greek allegiances serve to confirm her role as the exotic feminine. Three different contemporaries of hers at Cambridge have told me that “she arrived at Cambridge speaking English with a slight Greek accent– by the time she left, the accent had become overwhelming, because she discovered that men liked it.”

Huffington’s defenders argue that such carping comes from those jealous of her success– and she has indeed been successful. It is the fact of this success that most discredits those who would seek to dismiss her as someone who has charmed her way to the top: the extraordinary success story that is the Huffington Post was created when Huffington was a single mother, and is fueled entirely by her own creativity. The fact of her power in the world of the internet strikes a blow for women in the masculine culture of the technological industries. One blast of her phenomenal energy is enough to convince even the most skeptical observer that she is quite capable of earning her own success. The very accusations against her entail such traditional misogyny that it is hard to tell whether they are valid critiques of Huffington for conforming to misogynist expectations, or merely expressions of entrenched prejudices.

Kate Maltby is a senior in Yale College. She is a staff writer for Broad Recognition.

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Margaret Katcher is a junior in Yale College.

April 2009

This March I found myself in Texas. Big whoop, lots of people live in Texas. As everyone was sure to remind me, there are ranches in Texas bigger than my home state of Rhode Island. Yet given the “everything’s bigger in Texas” average girth I saw, I’m not sure that more land means room for more people. A few southern beauties were so big I thought they might try to secede themselves. But I digress. I wasn’t sure how I was going to fair in this dip spitting man’s world. I’m more pro-choice than pro-meth and knew the acronym LGBT long before the NRA was anything recognizable. Oh well, what’s the worst that could happen? I get shot for trespassing by a whiskey-logged farmer? At least it would be an entertaining obituary. So off I went into the wild red yonder.

As we drove to the ranch we passed a nearby store’s sign that read only “LIQUOR GUNS.” I liked this place already. Immediately upon arrival the shirts came off and the guns came out– literally. This wasn’t a Gold’s Gym gun show. With more malicious intentions than Madoff in a synagogue (too soon?) our blood-thirsty-for-Bambi eyes scanned the hills, hoping that some unlucky animal might venture into our rifle’s sights. Having had no luck with our genocidal raccoon hunt that morning, we instead set our sights on the can-laden fridge. Breakfast hadn’t been served yet, but hey, we thought, it’s noon somewhere, right? The thing I love about Texas is that people who would be shipped off to all kinds of counselors in other parts of the country (i.e. me) aren’t much different from all the other crazies. I was a fugitive on the run from the AA team lurking back north. Perhaps it was this discrepancy, or the bottles of dip spit littered around, or maybe it was just that I had a shirt on, but I suddenly realized that I was outnumbered: seven Southern, Republican boys and… me, happily none of the above.

The smacking sound of Rowan* packing a dip shook me from my, ahem, daze.

“Well don’t hit it so hard, it’s not your wife!” Dwayne* called out.

The only girl, I admittedly laughed the hardest at this witticism. Clad in a Dixie bikini, drinking before noon, getting called a gringo on a regular basis by four half-Mexican boys, and firing back with plenty of slurs of my own, I wasn’t sure that I was in a position to be calling Dwayne’s comment offensive. I suppose it begs the question of what should you do. I’m a shoddy feminist. Generally speaking I’m a pacifist too though, and my contribution to “world peace” and “one love” this summer will be… dove hunting. Let’s see how many birds of peace I can rain down with a shotgun.

* Names have been changed to preserve character’s respectability. My dignity, on the other hand, is scarce as a hen’s teeth.

Molly Whitehouse is a sophomore in Yale College.

April 2009

A woman in a swimsuit stands on a diving board. Sleek and muscled, she secures her swimming cap and prepares herself to jump. Taut, strong, ready, she awaits an internal gunshot, some cue to start. Bang! She dives. She moves, slick, sleek, through the water, crisp, cutting through the waves of the pool, flying, past the speed of sound. She’s magnificent, she’s powerful, she’s sixty if she’s a day and she’s moving better than I can at 21.

“She needs Beauticontrol!” my aunt screams behind me. “Her body is okay but her face is a mess!” I stare at my aunt in disbelief. This woman has the body of an 18-year-old cheerleader. She’s fantastic, fit, active, and healthy. And all my aunt can think about is her skin care regime.

To be fair to my aunt, however, that is her field of expertise. My aunt sells make-up and skin products for a living—that is, in fact, what Beauticontrol is: a brand of makeup and skin products made of natural materials and heavily marketed to Latin American markets. She’s actually really good at it, my aunt, she’s earned a huge amount of money for her family, and she’s one of the most successful saleswomen of this product in her area. On many levels this has been a deeply empowering career for her. She’s gained a huge amount of confidence, she controls her hours and her earnings, she’s lost weight, and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.

Whenever I visit her, my aunt showers me with body scrubs and eyebrow pencils, while my mother is given anti-aging creams and wrinkle fighting concealers. Well-meant as these presents are, they always strike a dissonant note in me as I stare at them, sitting innocuously in my medicine cabinet. My aunt thinks she is giving me a kind and considerate gift, the sort any young woman would adore. She thinks she has given my mother a valuable and joy-inducing product that will help her fight age, the common enemy of women over forty. I know she means well. But I can’t help but be troubled by these presents and their implications. When my aunt looks at these things, the lip-gloss and the eye shadow and the firming serum and the foot lotion, she sees all the things that will help me be my very best self. When I look at them, I wonder if she’s telling me I need the help.

One of the things that has always struck me as positive about Yale is the lack of vanity among its students. It’s not uncommon to see a classroom or lecture hall full of students in sweatpants and pajama bottoms. In fact, it would be more uncommon to see a room full of girls in skirts and heels. And I always thought that that was a good thing, a sign of an environment that valued intellect over appearance, that placed more importance on the interior then on the exterior. Isn’t that a part of feminism? Disregarding the vanities associated with femininity, discarding the frivolous and menial pursuit of some exterior aesthetic being, and placing them aside in favor of true intellectual exploration? That sounds right, doesn’t it? If the pursuit of beauty has been one of the traditional millstones hanging around the necks of all women, then surely to pursue beauty in that way now, in the face of female emancipation and the feminist movement and Hilary Clinton and all those Dove ads…

The beauty industry feeds us pages of ads and hours of commercials showcasing products that will improve our faces, highlight our eyes, plump our lips, hide our wrinkles, destroy our pimples, and having done so, improve our quality of life. (All that in a mascara? Sign me up!) But we at Yale, surveying the land from atop our feminist high horses, should laugh at these wonder drugs and the women who pursue them as we trudge around the campus in our aged sweatpants and sneakers. That’s the feminist thing to do, right?

Well the thing is, my aunt makes more money shilling face cream than her husband does consulting for a bank. She put a down payment on a new house with the money she made in a year of selling margarita-scented glitter spray and brown sugar perfume to her friends and relatives. She may yell at commercials, movies, and even women on the street and try to get them to buy her potions and gels, but she also has her own business and in a matter of years has become the primary earner of her family and an example of a successful Latina business woman in her community. And the other thing is, when I use her little shimmery gifts, I don’t feel less intelligent or capable; I feel put-together, strong, attractive and energetic. Her highlighter does the work of a cappuccino without the calories. I participate more in my classes, I feel better about myself, and I’m more motivated to do my work efficiently. I don’t feel anti-feminist, or like I’m playing into a heteronormative construct. I feel good.

And the other thing is that as I looked around Yale’s campus I began to realize that while the women around me may be wearing sweatpants, those sweatpants were designer-brand, and paired with cashmere sweaters and lip-gloss. Even when they are most casual, Yale women are as obsessed with appearances as those at say, Florida State. Certainly very few women I meet here are comfortably identifying themselves as a feminist or would categorize their clothing and make-up choices as feminist or anti-feminist.

It is the unconsciousness of this that most bothers me. Susan Lori-Parks posits that race is always a performance. I would add that gender might well be a performance as well. If this is the case, then cosmetics are included in the costume. Cosmetics make up part of the mask with which we play the part of “female” or “woman” or “girl”. And it’s important to be conscious of those roles as you play them, to understand what image of women you are participating in as you get ready in the morning. This to me marks the line between what we do because it makes us feel good and what we do because we feel like we ought to.

A friend of mine says that men feel more comfortable with women who dress according to their prescribed gender role– that is, women who wear skirts and dresses and articles of clothing traditionally associated with femininity. However, it has been my experience that whenever I don an outfit that doesn’t include an elasticized waistband, I make most of my male peers uncomfortable. They twitch in their seats, they squirm, they dart their eyes from my face to my décolletage and back again, and they have trouble speaking in complete sentences. They don’t seem to be able to deal with someone who can look good and think at the same time. I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but if Beauticontrol can give my aunt a career, give me confidence, and give the arrogant men of Yale College a challenge to their concepts of female intelligence being disproportionate to female attractiveness… well, sign me up.

But I still think the swimmer in her sixties doesn’t need a goddamn thing.

Leah Franqui is a senior in Yale College.

April 2009

When I decided to leave South Carolina and go to Yale, I knew there would be a little culture shock. I knew about the ugly stereotypes other people had about the South. For the most part, I have found it easy to shake off the snide comments and jokes, the misperceptions and misunderstandings. But there is one aspect about the rest of the country’s perception of the South that really gets under my skin: the perception of Southern women.

Ask most self-respecting feminists if they consider the typical Southern woman as strong, assertive, and independent and they will probably snicker. One conjures up images of dainty Southern belles in antebellum hoop dresses or sorority girls eagerly searching for their future doctor/lawyer/banker husband. From my two years living in the North, it seems to me that the common perception of a Southern woman is of a passive, weak, and dependant air-head; women who allow themselves to be objectified and who even enjoy taking subservient roles to men. I couldn’t disagree more with this concept.

I love southern women. Most of the women I grew up around were Southern. Although my mother is from Mexico, she embodies all of the most important qualities of what I consider a Southern woman.

Some of the strongest, confident, and independent women I have ever known have been from the South. My grandmother was born and raised in South Carolina. Yes, she loved cooking. I sincerely believe one of her favorite things was cooking biscuits and gravy for her grandchildren on Saturday mornings. She did, indeed, value the idea of Southern hospitality. However, no one who knew her would have ever dreamt of calling her dependant or passive. Far from it. She founded her own business and ran it for 30 years. She was active in local politics and devoted much of her time to a veteran’s organization. When she found retirement boring, she took up dancing. She did the things she wanted to do, and she did them on her time.

In my experience, my grandmother was the rule, not the exception. The Southern women I know are smart. They solve problems and resolve disputes. They are funny. You could cut yourself on the wits of some of the Southern women in my family. They are independent and assertive. A Southern woman will not hesitate for a moment to tell you exactly what she wants and when she wants it.

Are there some women in the South who might conform to some of the negative stereotypes of Southern women out there? Sure. But what are we really talking about here? Women who are never able to fully develop themselves as people because of repressive social norms? A culture that gives men unfair advantages in education and the workplace? Unrealistic and unhealthy body images as a result of the portrayal of women in the media? These are problems that women all over the country are faced with. To generalize such a large group of women is wrong. It is also not in keeping with the feminist and progressive spirit, one of openness and fairness, judging each individual on merit and ability. Not on gender, race, orientation, or socio-economic background. Certainly not on geography.

Steven Harvey is a sophomore in Yale College.

April 2009

My sink: female
My guitar: male
My couch: male
My amplifier: female
My desk: male
My bible: female
My microwave: male
My mandolin: female
My Scotch tape: male
My Scotch: male
My computer: female
My stapler: female

Henry Grabar Sage is a freshman in Yale College.