When I began to write a blog, I initially wanted to write about everything and anything existential. This sort of contextual freedom describes my other blog "Curbside Musing." La Femme, on the other hand, specifically concerns: The Woman.
As I was riding on an Amtrak train, I let my mind reflect on this topic and for some reason I recalled La Femme, the female albino rat I used in my behavioral psychology lab for behavioral experiments that involved reinforcement, punishment, etc. I called her La Femme for her daintiness. "Daintiness? a rat," You say? Let me explain. If you know anything about behavioral psychology, a common experiment is to train a rat to push a lever when lever pushing precedes a food pellet (reinforcement). The lever pressing behavior increases as food pellets reinforce the behavior. It took La Femme a really long time to push the lever down completely, BUT she did manage to gracefully tap the lever consistently while frequently balancing on one leg and raising the other behind her. I could not make this stuff up; it was adorable. She had finesse. Eventually she pushed the lever down, but it seemed to take a lot of effort. And after learning to push the lever down completely, it took longer for her than the other rats to push the lever down regularly. She was smaller than normal and perhaps her body did not have enough strength yet. She fell back to the gentle tap routine described earlier for a while. But after a few days of trials, she pushed down the lever completely and produced this behavior at a higher frequency than all of the other rats. My professor was a little tightly wound and a bit of self-proclaimed apostle of Skinner and Watson. He did not like La Femme because she was an outlier. Anyway, that's a little bit about La Femme. I'm not making a statement for animal activists here, but the reality is that after the experiments... the rats are put down. So this blog is dedicated to my dainty rat who was more than just a lab subject, but a personality-filled rat friend I liked to call La Femme.
