Lefties Have Rights Too

An Embittered Representative Has Her Say

by sarah hotchkiss

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I'm hunched over a crossword puzzle, spinning my pencil between my left fingers. "I didn't know you're left handed," a friend says, surprised and enthusiastic. If I had a nickel for every time someone said that to me, I could buy a shirt that says "LOOK HERE, A LEFTY" and spare everyone the trouble of commenting. It's okay, crossword friend, I tend to forget too.

I sometimes find myself strolling along, happy-go-lucky me when all of a sudden, wham. I'm confronted with the utter helplessness of my left-handed situation. Usually I'm holding a device of some kind—a can opener, for example—and it won't work. I can't figure out why until a friend grabs it from me and makes it function with perfect ease. Ah, I was using the wrong hand once again. When you start thinking about it.the world really is right-handed. Customs, languages, household tools, even handshakes are decidedly anti-left. Does the world hate us because we're different? Is hate too strong a word? Sometimes, I begin to think it may be the perfect word.

Mom, Let Me Out!

You've all watched your frustrated friend holding the scissors in her left hand. It's infuriating for me. I try and try again, but the paper just folds around the edges of the blades, maddeningly. Even using my right hand is useless. I have yet to find a single pair of scissors that will allow me to cut through fabric. A sure sign of left-handedness, are feelings of utter and complete dread associated with the question "Can you snip this tag for me?"

For most children, the graduation from sitting on the kindergarten floor to filling your own desk with useful school supplies is a thrilling day. For me it was a day of dread. I wasn't only missing functional scissors; I now had to contend with an even larger complication. Desks suck for left-handers. My high school desks were solid plywood, always on the right and firmly attached to the chair. I would sit in my seat like a contortionist. Not until college did I experience the special joy of left-handed desks. You can't image how tremendous it is to walk into a lecture hall and know that every single desk on the left end of a row is made especially for you. But in smaller rooms with moveable desks, I'm invariably relegated to the far back corner, easily identifiable as the only left-handed person in the class. A total freak.

Compounding the difficulty of sitting at desks is the inherent messiness of left-handed writing. This is not to say that I have sloppy handwriting. The very act of having my hand follow my pen across the page rather than precede it, leads to all sorts of smudging issues. I emerge from my classes after an hour of note-taking, my left hand coated in shiny graphite from pinky to wrist. Sometimes I'll walk around all day without noticing. It's the scarlet letter of my left-handedness, except no one thinks to bring it up in polite conversation. Almost every lefty I know writes "incorrectly," strangling the pencil with a grip of death, fingers overlapping awkwardly. We hook our hands over our writing, tilting notebooks to strange angles. Most teachers don't bother to instruct us with the proper pencil holding method.

Teaching me basic skills was a problem in other areas as well. Until I was three, I couldn't figure out how to turn doorknobs clockwise with my left hand. "It was great," my mom says, "you couldn't go anywhere or get into trouble. You were trapped!"

If I had ever held an interest in learning to play the guitar, I would most likely have had similar challenges. For some reason, I seem to want to play air guitar "backwards" (a.k.a. left-handed). I get made fun of. I bet no one made fun of Jimi Hendrix. Then again, he had talent to go with his left-handedness. Piano lessons proved to be more interesting to me as a child, but I still found myself fundamentally frustrated with the instrument. What kind of notes does the right hand play? Complicated quick ones. And the left? Boring old chords.

Raise Your Left Fist In Solidarity

When looking at data and scientific studies concerning the incidence of left-handedness in society, I often begin to feel as if the world is not merely right-centric, but actively trying to stigmatize and get rid of left handed people.

Life is hazardous for left-handers. Studies have shown than while left-handed people constitute 10-13 percent of the general population, this number decreases dramatically when looking at the age 50 and older group. Do left-handers die earlier? Do they stop answering surveys? Maybe the world is trying to silence the older lefty population. One additional theory posited by scientists is the danger of heavy machinery and the right-handed bias encountered in manufacturing and construction environments. Think industrial meat slicers, drill presses, band saws, textile machinery and production lines. One wrong move and there goes your left hand—maybe your life.

An online support-community for left-handers proclaims, "Presented with ubiquitous right bias in the physical world, a left-hander or ambidextral has two options: (1) to learn to use the tool in a right-handed fashion (awkward and inefficient at best), or (2) to learn to somehow hold the tool backwards so that it can be manipulated with the left hand (often dangerous)." I try to avoid power saws at all costs.

As if our shorter life span didn't diminish us enough in the right-handed world, we must contend with attacks from religious groups as well. In many cultures the left hand is considered unclean and unfit to use when touching food. In Buddhist Thailand it is incredibly rude to receive a gift with your left hand rather than your right. And Christianity has long been strongly biased in favor of the right hand. It is the right hand that gives the blessing and the right hand that makes the sign of the cross. According to the Nicene Creed, Christ sits "at the right hand of the Father." Lefties love to tell horror stories of "Sister Mary Margaret" rapping their small knuckles with rulers. Sadly, these stories are based in fact. Nuns persisted in punishing children for writing with their left hand well into the 1990s. Only the influence of Satan would cause children to be left-handed, thank you Roman Catholic Church. This leads to an important point. Joan of Arc, reportedly a lefty, was burned at the stake back in 1431. Was it for her religious beliefs, her handedness, or the influence of Satan on both her handedness and religious beliefs? Think on that one.

If you're an atheist and don't take stock in the RCC, you can always find reason to be wary of lefties in good hard science. I've never thought of myself as a particularly violent person, or really violent in any way at all, but apparently there is an unfortunate relation between left-handedness and a predisposition towards violence. A 2004 study by Charlotte Fauriet and Michel Raymond of the University of Montpelier II in France argues that before the modern age of long-distance weapons, left-handed people would have been at an advantage in hand-to-hand combat. Why? Because of the surprise factor. I suppose it would go something like this: "Where'd that left fist come from? It caught me totally off guard. It was like, out of left field or something."

Because the violent left-handed people of ancient times would have been more likely to benefit from their inherent advantage in fighting, these violent genes have been passed down through the generations. The researchers found a positive correlation between murder rates and the percentage of left-handed people in several traditional societies: the more left-handed people, the higher the homicide rate. The researchers argue that left-handers are not more violent than right-handers, but that violent left-handed people are more likely to be successful (in a Darwinian sense) than violent right-handed people.

Let's look at the historical evidence: Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Julius Caesar and Fidel Castro were all left-handed. But then again, so was Mahatma Gandhi and so is Big Bird. I see this theory of violence as merely another attempt at demonizing my people. Charlotte Fauriet and Michel Raymond probably rap their left-handed children's knuckles.

Religion, science and power saws are nothing, however, compared to almighty influence of language. If you need any further evidence that left-handers are trampled in the dirt of historical privilege, look no further than the dictionary. Right, meaning correct or good is derived from the fact that around 90 percent of the population is right-handed. Left comes from Old English lyft (weak). In Latin right and left are dexterous and sinister, respectively. The French gauche (left) means "awkward" or "clumsy" in English, whereas droit (right) becomes "adroit." Si injust!

Better Than You

Regardless of the social stigma, frustration and danger attached, there's a certain cachet to being left-handed. Everyone seems to believe in the theory of left-handed geniuses. Look at Benjamin Franklin, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe and Christian Slater. Think of the output from these minds. Have you seen Pump Up the Volume? Genius.

The bottom line is we'll always think that we're better than right-handed people, because face it—we are. The world hates us and yet we persevere. You "normal folks" never have to suffer through the trials and tribulations of being the minority. Every day we face a world that favors our least dominant hand and makes us adapt in ways that are completely taken for granted by our more adroit companions.

There should be some sort of amazing college scholarship for left-handed people. If there isn't one already, I'm sure Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick (both lefties) will come up with one. It's time to start taking the left-handed underprivileged minority seriously. We've been trapped helplessly behind doorknobs, suffered the injustice of smudged writing and been laughed at while playing air guitar. We have the real-life struggles and embarrassing childhood stories that put us above and beyond the right-handed masses. We are better than you.

SARAH HOTCHKISS B'07 is a left-handed genius who picks strings with the devil for change on 66th and 6th.

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