After the Storm

Last Monday, my husband, James, and I were alternately cowering in our apartment waiting for the impending storm and braving the winds and rain to walk down to the river and check in on the condition of the harbor. By midday, the river down the street from our apartment was already churning and the water lapping up as high as we’d ever seen it. At night we lay awake in our bed, listening to the sound of the wind and ambulance sirens, both relentless in their shrieking. From the river itself, we heard nothing.

The next morning, we walked back to the water’s edge and it was clear that river had been where we stood. Clear that while we had managed eventually to sleep it had dashed in and then retreated as quickly as it had come, leaving bits of styrofoam and seagrass strewn in its wake. In DUMBO, a four-foot high brown water mark tattooed restaurant windows and a small lake rippled in the remaining wind at the foot of Main Street. Park benches were covered with the same mess we’d seen further down the road. The power was out and so were the neighbors, walking among the debris to survey the damage.

In the days after the storm, the subways remained flooded and so my sister and her husband walked from the East Village across the Brooklyn Bridge and over the river that separates us. They set up shop in our tiny apartment and we tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy---a surprisingly easy task when there’s a wi-fi connection and warm drinks to be had.

The heartbreaking bit of course is what’s still happening in places where normalcy is harder to come by. In DUMBO and Red Hook and Rockaway and along the Jersey Shore and the Connecticut and Rhode Island coasts, there were lives and livelihoods and homes swept away with the rising tides. We’re such a fragile bunch, us humans---so reliant on the technologies that we’ve built and the infrastructure that buoys us. But as always happens after a tragedy, I am also astonished, astonished by our resiliency. If you're looking for ways to help, head here. 

Looking Forward: Looking Back.

Somewhere in a closet at my parent’s house is a journal I kept as a child. It’s orange. It has gold pages. There’s a painting of a cat on the cover. I don’t remember much of what’s written in it, save for the fact that I assigned each day a letter grade, a decision inspired by a book I’d read by Judy Blume. Days when friends came over, or when I managed to sit next to the older girls at summer camp, or any day on which a birthday party occurred received an ‘A.’ Bad weather, chocolate milk shortages at lunchtime, or having to accompany a parent on bank- or insurance-related errands merited a ‘C,’ or worse. Really bad days (missed soccer goals, botched trips to the zoo) were accompanied by a drawing, barely discernible, of a hand with the thumb pointing downward.

As must be the case with most children who like to write, I was given countless journals as gifts over the years. For whatever reason, this one was the only one I ever used.

Years later, in high school, I filled two large, spiral-bound books with what I referred to as my thoughts on “reality, rebellion, and rock ‘n’ roll.” I wrote extravagant, long-winded essays – all by hand, a feat I can hardly fathom now – on art, and music, and the meaning of life. I cataloged regrets, made lists of goals, and — because I was, in the end, a teenager — diligently made note of each and every movement made by the floppy-haired boy who sat behind me in math. (Taped to one page of the journal was a tiny balled-up clump of paper he threw in class one day, intending to hit the back of a friend’s head. It landed on my desk instead and I saved it, convinced its altered course was a sign.)

I found these journals — the cat one, and the two from high school — a couple of years ago as I packed up my room before moving to New York.

I read through each.

The one with the cat cover, filled with chicken-scratch entries that made me smile, went back on the shelf, where it remains today. The other two, whose pretentious ramblings I could barely get through without vomiting, went into the shredder.

 ---

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a group of MFA students about how hard — and how painfully embarrassing — it can be to read old work. I’m not sure what I was thinking as I destroyed page after page of those spiral-bound books, but at the time, I felt that the many hours I’d spent recording my thoughts were less important than the possibility of someone finding them. And judging them. And thinking that the words on these pages represented me.

I realize now that those journals were like marks on a growth chart. That I needed to go through certain phases in order to get better. That attempting to “cover my footprints” was unnecessary. But I’m still not immune to the urge to hide work I’m not proud of anymore.

However, now that so much of my writing is public, I no longer have the luxury of being able to rip up my work if I decide later that I don’t like it. The thought of this sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but the solution’s clear: my only choice is to write as honestly as I can. Then, there’s nothing to regret.

In college, I attempted to write a story about an artist in diary form. It contained two parts: one was a journal he wrote for his eyes only, and the other was one he wrote with an audience in mind, one he hoped people would find after he died.

I never finished the story, because I couldn’t keep track of the two voices. I can only hope that as a writer, I never have that dilemma myself.

The challenge ahead is to create a single voice; for better or for worse, an honest one, my own.

Lessons from a workshop...

Dear Clara,

Since we’ve been back in the US this past year, I have tried to remain mindful to use the time we have here for things that we wouldn’t be able to do abroad.  Part of that time has been allocated to friends and family, taking advantage of their proximity.  Part of the time has been dedicated to seeing the great United States – you’re still too young to remember your adventures here but I’ve taken lots of pictures and amassed all kinds of stories.  But part of the time I’ve stashed away for myself to get out of my shell and learn some of the things that inspire me, but that I haven’t been brave enough to learn more about in previous years.   And so, this past year has become the “year of the workshop”.

One of the things I’ve made peace with – at least for now – is that sometimes our professional lives can be rewarding in their own way.  We like well enough what we do, we have good colleagues, and it helps us to put our portion of dinner on the table.  It gives us a lifestyle, and it gives us worth in our day.  But what it might not give us is something more passionate.  And what our passions and interests give us, might not exactly fill those other qualities that our jobs provide.  So I’ve used this workshop time to help round out those creative interests that aren’t necessarily related to my professional life, but they are to my inspired life.  I’m nervous at these workshops, which are mainly related to photography or the creative aspects of my blog.  Before each one, I contemplate dropping out, and after each one, I’m always so glad I stuck it out, usually at your father’s insistence.  So after all of these workshops this year, here are a few of the lessons I’ve learned:

• The first step is signing up: This is the most intimidating part – signing up and sending the money.  Choose wisely, after all, resources will be limited by either time, money or both, but choose bravely.  One of my managers told me once that any job should make you sweat outside your comfort zone just a little bit, and I’ve applied the same principle to choosing learning outside of the job.  Push yourself a bit and you’ll be surprised how much you can learn.
• Be flexible: Chances are, the workshop won’t run exactly the way you expect it too.  Maybe it’s in a location you’re not used to, maybe they’re flexible on timing…just come with an open mind.  The whole point of doing something different is to do something different, right?
• Attend all the events: Sometimes workshops have a dinner, or a get together, or some other event associated with it.  If you’re going to know a new group of people for just a short amount of time, get the most you can out of it.  Do the events and don’t be shy.  Introduce yourself and get out there.
• Give yourself time to absorb: The great thing about workshops is that they usually fill you with lots of new and grand and big ideas.  Make sure to give yourself a little clean time after the workshop to let it all sink in.  You’re going to want to go in 34 directions all at once – don’t compromise the value of everything you learned by overloading social commitments or other things that start the minute the workshop is over.  Give yourself space to absorb the learning and plot out exactly what you’re going to do with it.  A few notes to yourself now will pay out great dividends later.
• Translate into your own voice: Sometimes when we see something by someone we admire at a workshop, we’re tempted to go home and recreate the exact same thing.  Re-creation is great for practice.  But the workshop’s intent was to teach you a series of tools so that you can create what you want out of it.   It’s still going to be up to you to apply them in your own voice and vision.  Don’t hesitate to stretch what you’ve learned into the direction that you need it to go to work for you.

All my love,

Mom

Big Love to New York (and the whole East Coast)

I’m feeling particularly homesick for New York today. With so many loved ones struggling through the hurricane aftermath (including Miya in Brooklyn and many of our beloved contributors all over the East Coast), it’s difficult to believe that I’m across the country and can’t do much more than obsessively scroll through photos and check in on friends and family through texts, emails, and phone calls. Sandy proved devastating to so many, but it reminded me that the fundamental beauty of New York City lies in its people.  New York is tough and New Yorkers are tougher; don’t let that deceive you though. If you’re going to cram over eight million people into a small island and its boroughs, everyone needs to get along. I’ve yet to visit or live in a city where people demonstrate more generosity of spirit than in New York.

Maybe it’s because New York is a city of transplants and all of us remember the first time we found ourselves on an uptown express train instead of the downtown local, holding back tears while wondering if daily life would ever feel easy. Then there’s the day you become a real New Yorker and offer directions to a band of map-wielding tourists or recent grad decked out in her interview best.

In that same spirit of generosity, everyone is lending a hand while New York wrings itself out. Even before Sandy made landfall, Facebook and Twitter exploded with offers to house evacuees. And after, those with power, water, or . . . booze opened their homes---offering charging to the powerless, grooming to the waterless, and merry-making to the stir crazy.

That's how I know New York will be just fine; after all, it’s full of New Yorkers.

Oh, and see you tomorrow (Jet Blue willing)!

It’s easy to contribute to the relief effort in New York and other afflicted areas. To donate, visit the Red Cross, call 1-800-RED-CROSS, or just text the word REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation. Another way to make a huge impact is to donate blood. Blood supplies were severely depleted, but the need is as great as ever. Please consider scheduling a blood donation by visiting redcrossblood.org.

Frida Kahlo: Survivor. Communist. Mexican Icon.

Everyone’s familiar with Frida Kahlo’s face, at least as she painted it. The dark, somber eyes. The brightly-colored dresses. That inescapable unibrow.

But Frida Kahlo is much more than that famous face, with its ugly beauty and its unconventional emphasis on female facial hair. She’s also a fascinating figure who lived through some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting events, who was attached to some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting people. And on top of that, she really put the “pain” in “awesome painter.” (Sorry. A stretch, I know.)

Frida was born in 1907 in Mexico City, just before the Mexican Revolution, to an immigrant Hungarian-Jewish father and a Spanish-Amerinidian mother. She suffered from polio at a young age, resulting in a permanently withered leg. But the seminal painful moment in Frida’s life was in 1925, when she was in a horrific bus accident that left her with spinal fractures, multiple broken bones, a crushed foot, and, the one that gives me the biggest heebie-jeebies, an impaling by a metal handrail. She wasn’t expected to survive.

But survive she did—albeit with an enormous amount of pain that never really left her. She went on to have over 30 surgeries in her lifetime, the last of which may have left her with the pneumonia that killed her at age 47 (though it’s also speculated she killed herself).

Despite the immense pain that was to haunt her and characterize her relationship with her body—or maybe, in part, because of it—Kahlo went on to do great things. She began painting while in bed, recovering from the bus accident, starting with her most famous subject: herself. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she said, “because I am the subject I know best.”

At age 22 she married famed muralist Diego Rivera, who was two decades older and two hundred pounds heavier than her (!). Their relationship helped her to develop her own work, while also being one of those Hollywood-style tumultuous marriages with tons of affairs on both sides and even a divorce thrown in the middle (after which they remarried, each other). Frida, for her part, had affairs with many famous figures, both men and women, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Leon Trotsky, whom she and Rivera put up in their home after his flight from Russia. (Ironically, after he was assassinated she became a Stalinist.)

Meanwhile, Kahlo’s work was feted in New York City and Paris, and she was the first 20^th-century Mexican artist to be featured in the Louvre. I can just imagine her mingling in that most romantic of settings, 1920s Paris (think Midnight in Paris), at an art showing, being toasted by Picasso and Miró and Andre Breton, a Parisian anomaly in her long, bright, traditional Mexican dress.

But as it were, Frida rejected what she called those “artistic bitches of Paris.” Her heart remained in Mexico City, where she lived most of her life in La Casa Azul, the house she was born in (which today houses Museo Frida Kahlo-- a must on my world tour list!). She and Rivera were also involved in a movement called Mexicanidad, aimed at preserving an essential, traditional Mexican culture in opposition to the encroaching cultural dominance of “the West.”

Kahlo attempted to live this Mexican ideal in her dress, in the symbols and colors of her art, and, also, in her rejection of conventional beauty norms. In fact, it’s reported she even darkened her unibrow and mustache to emphasize a kind of pre-Columbian femininity— where in this case, pre-Columbian means “before tweezers.”

Because of this, Frida Kahlo remains to this day a shining symbol of feminism and Mexican culture, and her art and celebrity have been completely embraced by the mainstream. But it’s easy to overlook the ways in which Kahlo’s art, and life, were less about empowerment and more about suffering, about the visceral experience of bodily pain and the social and political difficulties of being a woman. One of her most affecting works, My Birth, was painted after her miscarriage, depicting a bloodied Kahlo-like head emerging from a woman’s body.

Additionally, it should be recognized that "authenticity" movements seek an essentialized, pre-modern, sometimes imaginary past; in this case, a pre-Europe Mexico. Kahlo's embracing of "authentic" Mexican culture must be understood as a kind of political statement, rather than a representation of the Mexico that actually surrounded her.

In my opinion, the complexity of her personal and political life and the tragedy of her experiences, as well as the diverse vitality of her influences—which range from street artists to Catholic votive paintings to images of disasters to pre-Columbian folk art—makes her work all the more fascinating. There's so much beauty in what she created. Beauty in the attempts at authenticity; beauty in the expressions of human suffering; and, perhaps most surprisingly, beauty in the ugliness. I'm not going to grow a unibrow out in solidarity, but doesn't mean I don't appreciate what that unibrow represented.

Not open for business

I'm a 33 year old woman who has no interest in having children. If your first reaction to that statement was something along the lines of, "Oh, just wait, you'll change your mind," or "You never know until you try it, " I beg of you: please keep it to yourself. You're not alone in having that reaction, and I've heard it a thousand times. The thing is, I won't, and I do. And it can make dating awfully interesting.

See, I like children. Hell, there are some children I even love. A lot. Like, stand-in-front-of-an-oncoming-train a lot. And so men are occasionally confused by what they see as conflicting positions. I talk about my friends' kids with love, admiration and excitement (especially when it comes to buying them books), but I'm not at all interested in populating a nursery of my own.

Three years ago, this wasn't an issue. I'd never be asked about my desires for marriage or children on a first, second or even fifth date. But now? Hoo, boy. People want to know what's up with my reproductive system like it's going out of style. Which, I suppose, it is. I can't have more than a few thousand viable eggs left at this point.

Case in point? A couple of weeks ago, I went on a solidly good first date with a guy we'll call John. He talked a bit about having had lots of lackluster relationships in his 20s (he's now 34), and about wanting to change that pattern now. He also talked about how all his cousins are married with kids, and how he feels a bit behind. At first, I was taken aback by all this marriage/baby talk on a first date (a woman bringing this up would, no doubt, be labeled as crazy and desperate as opposed to adorably open and honest), but I found it kind of charming. (I didn't feel the need to bring up my own stance on the first date, but I appreciated the openness.) I talked a little about my friend Miya's daughter, whom I adore, and about how my pregnant cousin Abby was almost to her due date.

On the second date, though? The man was couldn't stop talking about how "far behind" he is and how his life to this point has been a waste---all because he's not married and doesn't have kids. He talked about it a little. And then some more. And, finally, he wrapped up by launching into a speech about how he sleeps so much better when he sleeps next to someone, and let's go to a comedy club (despite my having said, repeatedly and that very evening, that I do not enjoy comedy clubs).

Obviously, this guy is a textbook version of oblivious. I made up a 7:30 AM meeting to get away at the end of the date, then steadfastly stepped away when he tried to kiss me goodnight, and still he acted shocked and led on when I sent him a (very nice) thanks but no thanks email a couple of days later.

And yet, he is a great example of an important point: women are not the only ones with biological clocks. When it comes to feeling subject to the whims of nature and the rules of society, we women are not alone. After all, we can't possibly have been the only ones enforcing the norms all this time.

So, let's make a deal. The next time a woman tells you she doesn't want children, pay her the respect she deserves and take her at her word. And when a man tells you he wants kids, pay attention and assume it's not just a seduction tactic. After all, when you're 33, you don't have time to spend on people who want your babies.

(original photo by velkr0 on flickr)

Lessons from Gone with the Wind...

Dear Clara, I just returned from a few days in Atlanta last week.  I don’t think there is ever any possibility of going to that city without thinking of green velvet drapes and feisty tempers.  Margaret Mitchell’s penned classic and Vivien Leigh’s spirited interpretation of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind will remain always one and the same with that city for me.  It might be an old story by the time you’re my age, but it will still be a true classic.  Here is what I’ll always remember from it:

• You can lose everything: At almost any moment.  Scarlett definitely knows a thing or two about loss, but in any story that spans a generation, I’m always taken by how privilege at the start doesn’t necessarily mean so at the end, and vice versa. We’re born what we’re born with, and some of us got it a little luckier, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.  Anyone’s fortunes could change either by circumstance or by their own foolishness---be prepared to mitigate against both.
• Sometimes you have to create from what you have, not from what you want: Scarlett’s dress that she fashioned from her drapes is probably the best example in this story, but you’ll find that she does this over and over again.  Sometimes, if not most times, we won’t have as much as we want . . . as new as we want . . . as different as we want . . . at the time that we want it.  But people who are most resilient and most successful look at what they have, and make it fit what they need, not what they want.
• Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect: When I read Gone with the Wind, I think I must have dog eared at least twenty pages of quotes and words to remember, if not more.  I was a great collector of quotes back in the day, and I think this particular one captures how much we have to be careful about expectations since then we are often disappointed. The one I remember most though, were Rhett’s words about mending what’s broken:  “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken---and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live.”  That quote did, and still does, make me nearly cry because I happen believe the opposite.  I think there is room for mending, and room for forgiveness, and I don’t believe that there are things such as permanently broken---but I think Rhett is just expressing the way that many people truly feel.  And you’ll come across people who believe in that strongly sometimes, and you’ll have to know when to keep fixing, and when to let it go because they will never see past the mend.  It's always best not to break in the first place, but we make mistakes, and not everyone will forgive us.
• People always come back: There is something uncanny about the way characters unfold in Gone with the Wind, and it mirrors life very much this way.  Even though the protagonists go through all sorts of changes and life takes them on many paths, they always seem to run together at different points in life.  Always appreciate people as though you’ll never see them again, because chances are, you will.  When you do, you will be glad that you left on good terms to pick up from; when you don’t, you’ll be reassured that you left with your best foot forward.

All my love,

Mom

Raziyya al-Din: Sultan of Delhi. Leader of Armies.

I’m never more inspired than when I’m spending my Saturday afternoons researching the most illustrious, the most extraordinary, the most awe-inducing women of world history, and of course I haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of subjects to write about. If I could, I would plaster my walls with pictures of these women: Eleanor of Aquitaine atop her horse en route to the Second Crusade. Emma Goldman slamming her fist on a pulpit as she addresses a hall full of factory workers. Sojourner Truth standing up in front of a crowd of hostile white men and skeptical white feminists to speak about her struggles as a slave and demand: “Ain’t I a woman?” It’d be like one giant wall of daily affirmations.

Raziyya al-Din (c.1200-1240) is another historical woman who was both excoriated (because she was a woman) and exulted (because she did stuff anyway). Born into Mughal nobility, Raziyya would go on to become the only female sultan in medieval India. Histories alternately refer to her as either Sultana or Sultan—let’s be clear that she preferred the latter, because a “sultana” technically referred to the wife of the sultan, and she wasn’t no sultan’s wife.

Raziyya’s father was Iltumish, a ruler in the Delhi Sultanate. The Delhi Sultans were a series of Muslim Turkish rulers based in Delhi who, through the medieval period, controlled much of north India. Iltumish and Raziyya, specifically, came from the first Delhi dynasty: the Mameluks, or slaves.

Iltumish recognized early on that his daughter was particularly well-suited for sultan-ing. She had accompanied him on many military campaigns and was ambitious, smart, and full of leadership skills. Thus he formally nominated Raziyya as his successor in preference to his many sons. (This makes me very well-disposed towards ol’ Iltumish. What a progressive guy!)

The problem: Despite the ostensible power of the Sultan’s throne, the elite Turkish nobles (always, always those unruly nobles!) wielded a disproportionate say in court matters, and they were not happy with Iltumish’s choice. When he died in 1236, they overrode his nomination and put one of his sons on the throne instead.

Fortunately for Raziyya, they soon saw the error of their ways. Her brother was incompetent and his conniving, ambitious mother made his rule even more unappealing. They removed him from the throne and gave Raziyya her due as the new Sultana Sultan that same year.

Raziyya, for her short term, proved to be a terrific Sultan. She was wise, benevolent, tolerant to Hindus, and adept at crushing rebellions when they arose. Like past YHWOTD Hatshepsut, she adapted men’s clothing, discarding the veil and dressing as a Sultan, I suppose, ought. Contemporary historians sang her praises, and eminent Indian historian Farishta remarked, “The men of discernment could find no defect in her except that she was created in the form of a woman.”

Her reign went well for the first couple years, but her appointment of an Abyssinian slave named Yaqut to a high office and her close relationship with him (speculation abounds that they may have been lovers, but sometimes I wonder, would the same speculation abound if she had been a man?) caused disgruntlement amongst those same unruly Turkish nobles. They eventually killed Yaqut and imprisoned Raziyya in a fort in Bhatinda, outside Delhi.

Raziyya was able to escape her imprisonment by marrying one of her captors (!) and the two of them marched on Delhi to recapture the throne. They were defeated by a dude named Balban, who would later become Sultan, and were unfortunately killed fleeing from battle in 1240.

Thus ended the short life and even shorter reign of Raziyya al-Din. But she was remembered fondly. Contemporary historian Minaj-us-Siraj called Raziyya “a great monarch, wise, just, generous, benefactor to her realm, a dispenser of equity, the protector of her people, and leader of her armies.”

What I’m reminded of when I read the singing of Raziyya’s praises, the apparent faultlessness of her Sultancy, is that—as Ta-nehisi Coates noted in an excellent, excellent essay on Barack Obama—minorities, including women, who rise to positions of power often have to be “twice as good and half as [insert minority identity here].” I’m not deeply cognizant of the social context of medieval India, but it’s noteworthy that the one of the only woman to emerge, victorious, from the margins of history in this period was, if the historians' language is to be believed, a perfect ruler and practically a man.

Obviously, that’s how they rolled back then---male sultans and all---and I get that. But even today, I think it’s a good reminder to not get complacent about the advances of women. There will be exceptions to every patriarchy, as Raziyya proves—but even with her boundary-breaking, the system remained intact, as it often does, even when briefly and occasionally challenged by extraordinary women. But at the very least exceptions like Raziyya can serve as inspiration and/or fodder for daily wall poster affirmation.

Bridget Jones Syndrome: The Female Disaster in Romantic Comedies

Recently, a piece in the Atlantic Wire criticized the pilot of Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom “The Mindy Project” with concern that it ends up reproducing “the most hoary of romantic comedy clichés, that in order for a high-powered female character to be relatable she has to be clumsy or bumbling.” There is a definite trend in the romantic comedy genre that finds our female protagonists overwhelmed, unable to juggle their professional, personal, and romantic lives. In Bridesmaids, widely hailed as a landmark in women-centered comedy, Kristen Wiig's Annie has a spectacular meltdown as her life falls apart around her. The story is sharp and smartly-written, and Wiig plays it well, but there is something a little alarming in her downward spiral over the course of the movie. We see her failing professionally (the closure of her bakery), personally (her jealousy of fellow bridesmaid Rose Byrne), and, of course, romantically (her hookups with self-absorbed jerk Jon Hamm despite the interest of totally decent good guy Chris O'Dowd).

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that Bridesmaids is a major step forward for women in pop culture in that it boasts an almost all-female cast with a female protagonist, female writers, and a potentially chick-flick theme that still transcends gender enjoyment. As to whether that needed to include a protracted and extremely unladylike bout of group diarrhea---I leave up to you. Toilet humor is a matter of taste.

When it comes to female disaster protagonists, my mind always goes to Bridget Jones, the queen of messy, disaster-prone, perpetually imperfect heroines. Bridget’s whole shtick—played with admirable wholeheartedness in the film versions by Renée Zellweger—is that she’s full of insecurities and unfulfilled goals, and that everything bad follows her around like her own personal Murphy’s Law.

Compared to the often flawless actresses who play even the most accident-prone characters in major film and TV roles, Bridget Jones is a bit of a breath of fresh air. She’s slightly overweight, her hair is never perfect (properly inverting the far less realistic always perfect paradigm), and she falls on her ass on what seems like a regular basis. Most of all, she’s obsessed to Austenian proportions with finding the perfect husband, while sabotaging herself with meaningless relations with men like Daniel (Hugh Grant).

Bridget Jones is like a fairy tale where, instead of being presented as the ideal, everything in her life is seen through her eyes as never measuring up to an ideal-- that ideal perhaps arguably being informed by other representations of women in pop culture. Despite her often pathetic self-presentation, we find that Bridget is actually a fairly successful career woman with plenty of friends and no shortage of men (and, in the sequel, women) who find her irresistibly attractive.

So when Bridget waddles as she walks—when she unknowingly covers her face in red blush—when she, during a live news report skydiving, inexplicably beats the odds and lands in the one pig sty for miles around—there’s an over-the-top, every-worst-fear-and-insecurity-come-true effect. It’s almost as if we’re seeing Bridget through Bridget’s eyes, with her constant attempts and failures to become the woman she believes she should be. That’s relatable, even if it’s often executed in an incredibly over-the-top manner. (And my disclaimer is that I don’t know that this was the intent of the creators at all; in fact, I think interpreting it this way gets us into some weird mimetic representations of reality territory as we unpack the layers of interpretation through which the "actual" story is filtered, including the narrator and the audience---but let's not go there.)

I’m not saying there aren’t problems with these roles. In particular, when Bridget declares that nothing is more unattractive than “strident feminism,” she represents a definite rejection of feminism that buys into the worst kinds of assumptions about what “feminism” actually means. Moreover, if the Bridgets and the Annies are the only types of lead female roles we see in major films and TV shows, we risk depicting all women as love-obsessed, marriage-prioritizing, perpetually-insecure-and-occasionally-inept 20- and 30-somethings whose role as wife and mother can’t help but take precedence over all other roles in life. And that's problematic, if only because such ideas tend to get recycled, reinforced, and potentially relived by real women.

Back to “The Mindy Project.” I admit that I’ve wanted to like this show since first hearing about it, though I wasn’t sure it would live up to its potential. Mindy Kaling is hilarious, talented, and simultaneously strong and (hyper)feminine. Even better, she’s a non-white, non-twig-thin heroine in a TV landscape that is, well, white and thin. The premise is promising: a successful OB-GYN obsessed with romantic comedies who believes, over-optimistically, that she could have her own rom com ending one day.

Particularly with the second episode, I think we’re seeing the potential for delightful subversion in this premise. While echoing romantic comedies, and realizing that many women do, indeed, enjoy them and emotionally engage with them, it nevertheless acknowledges the illusory quality of those same tropes that most TV and film for women are based on. I enjoyed a moment in the second episode when Mindy meets a guy (Seth Meyers) who turns out to be an architect (see this dead-on Cracked article on stereotypical movie occupations). “An architect? No one is an architect in real life!” scoffs her ornery male coworker (and likely eventual love interest---yes, I still expect a lot of tropes to play out in the expected way).

Along similar lines, when we see Mindy meeting her now-ex-boyfriend (played by Bill Hader) in an elevator, she is thrilled to find their interaction playing out like a rom-com movie scene, down to her hair falling out of her ponytail as she bends over to help him pick up papers. Fast forward to their breakup several months later and one of those "hoary clichés"---Mindy giving a drunken speech at her ex's wedding. It's a playful mix of acknowledging and unsettling these clichés that, I think, gives "The Mindy Project" its potential and simultaneously gives it a chance at commercial success on a major network.

Let's not forget that every protagonist requires weaknesses—otherwise, they’re completely uninteresting and unrelatable. We should of course acknowledge that women, like men, have insecurities, and that, yes, we occasionally against our better judgment geek out and feel awkward and feel ugly and make bad relationship decisions. What’s important is that we realize that these insecurities might be, at least in part, due to fairy tales fed us by Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan and other romance-centric ideals of modern womanhood. And that the post-rom-com female characters---your Annies, your Mindys---should be more than an amalgamation of weaknesses and failures. As fun as she is, one Bridget Jones is enough.

Sojourner Truth: Ex-Slave. Activist. Hardcore Feminist.

A few months ago, sci-fi writer John Scalzi published a blog piece that went viral entitled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. In this article, he attempted to make “privilege” understood to an audience of gamer geeks by translating it into their own language—basically, that SWMs go through life on the “easy” (or “very easy”, depending on your game) button, while various minority identities increase your life’s difficulty setting. “The player who plays on the ‘Gay Minority Female’ setting?” he writes. “Hardcore.”

Our Historical Woman of the day was not, to my knowledge, gay, nor from an era that would necessarily self-identify as such, but I’m pretty sure she was still living life on one of the highest difficulty settings possible. Sojourner Truth was black, she was a woman, and she was born a slave. She lived a life that spanned from a childhood on the plantation to the difficult Reconstruction years following the Civil War. And today, due to her lifelong campaign for both African-American and women’s rights, she has become a symbol for the intersectionality of race and gender—how minority identities can overlap and how struggles can be experienced both separately and in tandem.

She was originally called Isabella “Belle” Baumfree; she changed her name to the (beautiful and rather inspiring) Sojourner Truth decades later. Belle was born into slavery on a Dutch New York plantation around 1797, and spent a childhood being shuffled from owner to owner, separated from family, mistreated by the masters and mistresses of the estates, and marrying a much older slave to whom she would bear five children, though there’s speculation that some were fathered by her white master. All part of the common experience of being a slave woman in America; but that doesn’t diminish its tragedy.

In 1826, an emancipation law was pending in New York—within a year, Isabella would likely be freed. However, she took it upon herself to exit the evil institution a little early. She took one of her children and literally walked off the plantation, finding refuge with a Quaker family and escaping the slave life forever. Later, she fought in court for the recovery of her other children, one of whom was illegally sold to a Southern plantation, and won. This was only the beginning of what was to be a long and fruitful activist career.

What Truth may have been most famous for, not unlike the firebrand anarchist Emma Goldman, was her public speaking. Illiterate throughout her life, she nevertheless had a remarkable gift for language and, from the 1840s onward, went on several speaking tours with both women’s rights groups and abolitionists.

Her most famous speech was apparently entirely improvised. At a women’s rights convention, at which Truth had agreed not to speak in order to avoid making harmful associations between the “Negro” cause and the cause of women, it happened that several men were shouting down the beleaguered women speakers. “Women expect rights? They ask us to help them down from carriages and over puddles!” cried Manly Man #1. “Women can’t even do manual labor!” exclaimed Manly Man #2. (I’m guessing at their names.)

Sojourner Truth couldn’t hold it in anymore. She marched up onto the platform and launched into an impassioned counterattack.

“Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gave me any best place—and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen ‘em most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ain’t I a woman?”

Truth then pointed a bony finger (according to her histories, something she was fond of doing) at a nearby preacher, and demanded, “Where did your Christ come from? . . . From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.”

The crowd erupted in cheers. The manly men were publicly shamed. The white feminists who had objected to her speaking felt guilty. (Or so I like to imagine.)

If this all sounds a bit too good to be true—if it sounds like the ending of a '90s family movie—it may be because, it’s not entirely true. Sojourner Truth holds the transcendent rank of symbol in our histories, particularly feminist histories, and symbols often diverge from reality. Much of this speech was recorded by a white working-class woman named Frances Gage, who even wrote it in “plantation dialect” (see above quote, replace every “the” with “de” and “children” with “chillern,” etc). Historians have noted the potential motives of contemporary white feminists for uplifting Truth to the status of symbol: her rootsy plantation background was an ideal metaphor for the need for women’s own emancipation, and her illiteracy meant she could do little to contest the narratives of her white recorders.

Yet I like to think there was at least some truth in this landmark piece of feminist expository, even if it wasn’t quite as movie-scene-y as all that. There are many recorded instances of Truth’s resounding voice echoing through convention halls and touching the hearts and minds of all who attended. She spoke alongside Frederick Douglass—famously asking him “Is God dead?” as he enumerated the injustices being committed daily against the American Negro—and diffused tense situations with unruly, antagonistic crowds—another potentially apocryphal story arises in which she bared her breasts to an Indiana audience who questioned whether she was really a woman. (Probably because she was six feet tall and deep-voiced. And she also had the balls to challenge men.)

She even staged some proto-public transit sit-ins in Washington, DC, storming onto the “white” segregated horse-drawn carriages and challenging the conductor to throw her off. The by-this-time somewhat elderly woman ended up in a scuffle with one driver, whose company she later successfully sued. Hardcore.

Sojourner Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan after the Civil War, where she advocated for a Reconstruction that would address the injustices done to black America by slavery—which, by her estimation, could never be fully forgiven, but at the very least the government could begin to make amends. She died in 1883, roughly eighty-five years old, fighting for this elusive justice to the very end.

Despite the nearly insurmountable challenges set out before her, and whether or not some of the accounts about her are apocryphal or idealized, the former Ms. Baumfree built a life that became an inspiration to every seeker of social justice of the last 150 years. It's hard to imagine the difficulties she faced in her life; her status as both black American and female American, not to mention former slave, informed her experience and drove her impassioned demand for equality and justice in an often ugly American century. And so Sojourner Truth, like her name, embodies a struggle that continues to inspire, that continues to matter, that we are still fighting today.

An Ode to the Female Cop: Benson and Prentiss

Of the weighty Law & Order franchise, Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is the only female protagonist who really takes the lead. Other detective pairs which include females—Gorem & Eames, Logan & Wheeler, both of L&O: Criminal Intent—have a decided focus on the quirks, quips, and leadership skills of the male half. Female D.A.’s are frequent, but less protagonist-y. Olivia is by far the most prominent female hero to emerge out of Dick Wolf’s vast TV empire.

This is likely because SVU is like the “special episode” spinoff of Law & Order---it deals with, as the intro states, the “particularly heinous” crimes of sexual and physical violence against women and children. Accordingly, SVU has become the only one in the franchise to give equal, if not more, weight to a female investigator.

What’s interesting to observe is the ways in which, as a woman occupying the often masculine-associated role of NYPD detective, Olivia Benson both transcends and, conversely, highlights her gender at strategic moments. Like many female cops on TV, Benson isn’t, well, girly. She often wears her hair in short cuts. She dresses plainly. She even has kind of a low voice (not a huge thing, but we’d definitely be noticing if her voice was high-pitched and/or squeaky).

Yet very much of her character remains defined by her gender. As noted, it would seem that it was a deliberate choice to place a woman at the forefront of SVU because of the fact that it deals with crimes against women and children. Olivia is extremely sympathetic, touched deeply by each case she comes across and concerned deeply for each victim. She’s the one who sits and talks to them in a soft voice, coaxes out difficult-to-speak-about details, and gently advises that they take the stand to testify and put this or that bastard away for good. These all fall into line with "traditional" ideas about women's strengths.

And of course, the two lead detectives—Benson and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni)—occasionally regress into tired gender role clichés. Olivia is sensitive! Nurturing! Gets emotionally involved in her cases! While on the other hand, Stabler is hot-headed! A tough guy! Gets physically involved in his cases—as in, he almost beats up dirtbag suspects in the interrogation room! The show tends to make up for this by having Benson and Stabler be both well-written and well-acted, but there is the occasional moment when you pull yourself out of the show long enough to go: “Really?”

Beyond relating to victims, Olivia has a more explicit connection to their ordeals---she herself is the product of a rape. And in one episode, Olivia goes undercover as an inmate at a woman’s prison where a guard is suspected of sexual assault, and she herself is attacked by the guard before she's saved by her team. In this case, she becomes a “special” victim herself, a situation that only she, and not Stabler, could place herself in (by the way, I'm not sure if that would ever happen in real life---a cop going undercover as an inmate? I don't know, I get all my skewed criminal investigation knowledge from these shows.)

In this last phenomenon, I’m also reminded of Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) from the crazy addictive serial killer show, Criminal Minds, which follows the work of an FBI behavioral analysis unit as they profile horrible, twisted rapists and murderers before they strike again (usually just in the nick of time to save the latest victim!). The subject matter is equally dark and grotesque, if not more so, than SVU, and the victims are, again, often women.

(There’s a whole subconversation to be had about the depiction of violent and sexual crimes against women as entertainment, and whether it is or isn't made more acceptable by the fact that the shows so clearly depict right and wrong and underscore the significance of such crimes—but that's for another day.)

There are three regular women on Criminal Minds, who tellingly remain at about fourth and fifth position in the cast photo phalanx (see picture)—yet they are important characters with a lot of screen time and subjectivity. Prentiss, like Benson, is a strong woman with minimal “gendered” qualities, a downplayed wardrobe, and a tough exterior. Yet she and J.J. (A.J. Cook) are often the ones who must “coax” a victim or bereaved family member, using their special lady powers to put people at ease.

In an episode where there is an outbreak of a deadly strain of anthrax, it is Prentiss and J.J. who we see struggling with the ethical quandaries of maintaining public silence about the disease in order to protect the greater good (which the men don’t seem to have a problem with). Prentiss fights the urge to notify a woman who lives across the street from their diabolical scientist suspect that she and her children may be in danger. And J.J. has a small emotional crisis about her own young son and the fact that, ethically, she can’t do anything to protect him in advance, because she has “inside knowledge” that the public doesn’t. The "mother" role often, overtly or subtly, plays into the female cop experience on these shows.

Prentiss, like Benson, has also used her gender to her advantage when dealing with suspects. In the interrogation room, she has flattered and flirted with sociopaths who tend to open up when faced with worshipful female attention. (These scenes are always a little sickening.) Meanwhile, Benson and Stabler have played on gender dynamics by playing roles when interrogating misogynists: Benson plays the bad cop who comes down hard on the guy, while Stabler winks and nudges—“women, right?”—and makes the guy think Stabler sympathizes with his woman-hating ways.

All in all, both shows produce interesting perspectives on the quandaries and ambiguities of gender in a fictional workplace that privileges traditionally “masculine” qualities; yet they often still reproduce traditional ideas about women's skills and perspectives. Benson and Prentiss are tougher than your average female character, but we don’t lose sight of the challenges they face and the separate circumstances they sometimes find themselves in as women, which is good. While there are clichés—the Benson-Stabler dichotomy, for example, or the repetitive "mother" theme—overall I think the net result of having heroines like these can only be positive in terms of female representation on TV. I mean, that is, if you can stand horrifically violent and disturbing plots.

This Mother's Work

I'm more than happy to introduce a special guest contributor this week: my cousin Michelle. As children, we spent summers, holidays, and many a weekend together. Now, as  adults, we unfortunately see each other much more sporadically, as Michelle currently lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Program Director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative in Azerbaijan. Impressive, huh? Michelle writes about her mom here. My aunt, or "Annie T" as we call her, holds a special place in my heart, too.  She and my mom were night and day, but as sisters-in-law, they shared a deep respect and love that bypassed any and all differences. Personally, I'll be forever indebted to my aunt, for the love and support she has shown my sisters and I since my mom died. Clearly, commitment to family was one thing my mom and aunt shared in common. And with that, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did.

By Michelle A. Brady

There’s a picture, stashed away somewhere in a drawer or closet at my parents’ house in Rochester, of my mom and I relaxing in our bathing suits and inner tubes at my grandparents’ old cottage in the Finger Lakes.  It’s the summer of 1982 and I’m five years old.  I haven’t seen the photo in awhile but I remember that we are smiling and laughing.  A couple months later, that September, I carried the picture with me to my first day of kindergarten.  I cried the entire morning, missing my mom, and feeling perhaps, that our five years of intensive mother-daughter bonding were about to end.  Years later we would recall that day and joke, because as an adult it seemed I was always eager to get away.

Over the years my mother and I have laughed and cried together, shopped, danced, and traveled together, and yes, at times yelled and said hurtful things to each other.  Despite our ups and downs and growing pains, I am forever indebted to her for one thing in particular, because without it I would not be the woman I am today.  This one thing she gave me above all else was the example she set as a working mom, laboring tirelessly along with my dad, to provide a better life for me and my brother.  That example, and the values it instilled in me, has made all the difference in my life.

I never thought it weird that I had a mom who worked full time.  From kindergarten onward, my mom went back to work, remaining at Eastman Kodak Company---along with my dad---until retirement many years later.  I stayed with baby-sitters and at after-school latch key programs and, quite honestly, never thought twice about it.  In fact, I have positive memories of using these morning hours at the baby-sitter to watch cartoons: G.I. Joe, Jem, and Transformers, in particular.  I ate snacks in the afternoon at latch key and finished my homework while waiting for my mom to pick me up.  And when I was older, I’d arrive home to an empty house and immediately call my mom to inform her I’d arrived safely and that yes, of course, I would get started on that homework right away!

Having a working mom, though, often proved to be a major lesson in organization and planning ahead.  When I was in junior high, my dance lessons really took off.  This required cross-town transportation to dance class right after school, in order to be dressed in my leotard and tights with hair pulled back by 4 p.m.  More school days than not, my paternal grandmother was tasked with this responsibility.  Like any doting grandparent, Grandma Kay arrived on time everyday in her Cutlass sedan, smoking a cigarette and carrying a Wendy’s large chocolate frosty, because every budding ballerina needs some carbs before a workout. Hours later, my mom would arrive at the dance studio with dinner and a ride home.  I would often collapse into the seat, sweaty, exhausted, and not too happy with her efforts to catch up on the day.  Yet she paid for the classes and costumes, supported me at competitions and recitals, and even joined a mother-daughter tap class to spend more time with me.

While my mom was busy with my dance lessons, my dad was similarly busy with my brother and his hockey and lacrosse activities.  During the winter season---which is excruciatingly long in Rochester---my mom would often cook chili on Fridays, a low-maintenance meal that could simmer all day and be ready when we arrived home late after my brother’s hockey game.  In typical pre-teen fashion, I didn’t appreciate this practical dinner choice in the least; in fact, I hated that chili. So one Friday, knowing my fate for dinner, I “came down” with the stomach flu at school.  This, of course, required my mom to leave work early and pick me up at a school.  She was calm and quiet as we drove home, seemingly concerned about my well-being.  But within just a few minutes of questioning, my mom had me confessing that no, I was not actually sick; I just didn’t want chili for dinner that night.  In hindsight, I’m sure my mom didn’t appreciate having her work day interrupted like that, but she never said a word to me. And I never did eat the chili again.

So many of my childhood memories are connected in some way to my mom, and especially, to her role as a working mother. When I look back on it all now, as a 35 year-old single woman, living out my dreams halfway around the world, I realize the extent to which it has affected me. My mom gave me the example of a working mother who handled stress at work and paid the bills at home; a mother who cleaned the house and organized everyone’s schedules; a mother who was tough and forceful when necessary, and equally conciliatory and compromising; a mother who did all of this while remembering every detail and splitting responsibilities with my father in a gender-equal way.  Above all else, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of organization, multi-tasking, and motivation, and along the way, saw the rewards of goal-setting, hard work, and investing in education.

I haven’t told my mom nearly enough how much I appreciate the example she set for me.  So I will tell her now, and then again the next time I see her in person.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me what is possible, and for selflessly paving the way for me to realize my dreams.

Hildegard von Bingen: Composer. Mystic. Nun.

The other day, Google ran a Doodle in honor of 19th-century composer/pianist Clara Schumann’s birthday, and it took me back to my days as an undergraduate music major. Yes, it’s true—before I was Miss History ‘n’ Pop Culture, I was studying to be a composer. I switched gears, but I still harbor a deep passion for music, and I still play piano. Mostly show tunes.

Anyway, I was reminded how, in my music history studies, of the dozens and dozens of important names we learned, there were maybe three female composers that came up. There was Clara Schumann---wife of Robert Schumann. There was Fanny Mendelssohn---sister of Felix Mendelssohn. But the one who always stood out for me—maybe because she stood entirely on her own—was Hildegard von Bingen, a Benedictine nun from the twelfth century who wrote, of all things, monophonic morality plays. Fun!

Saint Hildegard (she was “equivalently canonized” earlier this year) was another one of those historical women who seemed to do it all, with the added benefit of living an uncommon 82 years in medieval times. She was born in 1098 in Germany, and as a teenager, she was instructed in psalm-reading by the head of a local Benedictine community. When the woman died, Hildegard was elected the new head.

I should mention---Hildegard had been having these visions ever since she was a child, which she often described as in terms of bright lights. Modern-day physicians would attribute these “visions” (and the visions of many other medieval mystics) to migraines, hence the light sensitivity, which, all in all, is a perfectly satisfactory explanation. But I’d caution against getting too wrapped up in modern scientific understandings of things; for Hildegard, these visions were real, as they also were for many of those who surrounded her. And their very “realness” was the impetus for many of the great things she accomplished.

It was at age 42 when Hildegard had THE vision, the first one that would serve as the divine inspiration for her work. “A burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind,” she recorded. “God told me, ‘Write what you see and hear.’” And, in the Middle Ages, when God talked, you listened.

From then on, Hildegard was a writing fiend. She would produce a book on theology, two books on science and medicine, over seventy musical pieces, and go on four speaking tours of Europe. She did this all while recording her visions and managing her convents. Notably, she also held regular correspondence with kings and popes and important dudes like Abbot Suger, not easy guys to impress.

This story, I think, illustrates what she was able to achieve very well: In 1148, Hildegard claimed she had been commanded by God to move her nuns to a new location near the town of Rupertsberg. The monks over her head refused, wary of the expense and the loss of personnel. Hildegard then took to her bed, struck sick, too weak to move. Her sickness was, of course, attributed to her failure to follow God’s divine orders. Eventually, the abbot agreed with this interpretation and granted her permission to move to the new site, overruling the monks, and Hildegard got what she wanted. And within a few years, the Rupertsberg convent became so popular they needed to build a second convent just across the Rhine River to accommodate demand. Hildegard managed both.

It’s been noted that, despite her gender, Hildegard didn’t quite jibe with modern feminist ideas—that she sometimes spoke ill of women, associating them with weakness in accordance with dominant ideas of the time. Unlike her male contemporaries, she didn’t toot her own horn when it came to her musical talents, considering herself a mere vessel for the voice of God. (Note: This wasn’t an idea particular to Hildegard or women, however; Jorge Luis Borges notes that writers of antiquity such as Plato considered the poet nothing more than a “fleeting instrument of divinity.”)

But Hildegard’s attitude needs to be placed in its appropriate context, as do her migraine-visions. In fact, they’re kind of related. Much of Hildegard’s power was derived from her claims to legitimate communion with God; this was an incredibly effective means to personal agency in the Christian-dominated paradigm of medieval Europe. Her visions, her orders from heaven, her illnesses were tools from which she could carve out an autonomous space, provoke action from male higher-ups, and, ultimately, leave her mark on music history, religious history, and medieval history, something so few other women were able to achieve.

This is not in any way to say that Hildegard’s successful maneuverings within the system were planned or intentional. But it’s worth noting that, of the privileged few medieval women from the lower (read: not queen) classes who show up on the historical record, a large number were saints and mystics. There was no feminism in 1150. You did what you could.

In honor of St. Hildegard, who according to Wikipedia celebrated a birthday on Sunday (happy 914^th!), I recommend listening to one of her lovely compositions, like Spiritus Sanctus or O vis aeternitatis. Though solemn and ordered by today’s standards, for her time she was very original, breaking many of the hallowed rules of music theory to write soaring vocal lines and even (gasp!) switching modes in mid-song. For perspective, mode-switching didn’t become a la mode until five hundred years later.

Kinda makes you want to go join a medieval convent, doesn’t it? Or at least write a pretty song with a hurdy gurdy in it. I might just go do the latter.

Ladies Night

It feels funny to write about “women’s issues.”  I’m not even convinced I know exactly what that phrase means.  It calls up images of tampon commercials and bra-trashing protests at beauty pageants.  But I just finished watching the first night of the Democratic National Convention and it seems clear to me that women are a critically important demographic to the Democratic party and essential to winning the country.  As ambivalent as I am to acknowledge this fact, I think we do have special interests and issues that concern us, specifically.  And as such, I am not ashamed to say that I ardently support our President and would like to see him re-elected, come November. Both sides in the political sphere have sought to appeal pointedly to women during these conventions and I both appreciate and resent this.  A prime example is that the parties scheduled dueling speeches by Ann Romney and Michelle Obama in an attempt to increase the draw of their husbands.  On one hand, I think it is quite a statement about the important function of a political wife, that every great man has a woman behind (?) him.  But you can also see how this is somehow insulting – Why does she need to be behind him?  Why must she be relegated to addressing more domestic issues and talking about feelings?  Why do we need a “woman’s touch” to “soften” a man?  Why aren’t men allowed to look powerful AND empathic on their own?  I have so many of these questions, as I know you do.

I have struggled over the past months to understand how any woman would feel included and respected in the Republican vision for America.  I also watched the Republican National Convention and found myself trying to look into the eyes of the women in the audience — as the camera periodically panned to them — to see what I was missing.  What allows these women to ignore the way their leaders are working to suppress their very humanity?

Positions on broader issues like healthcare, general economic disparities and the social safety net are certainly applicable to women, but there are ways in which the Republican party is working to drag just us decidedly backward.  Here is just one example from this past spring  involving a new law in Virginia requiring women seeking abortions to undergo intrusive ultrasounds.  The particular cognitive dissonance of supporting a party platform that includes eroding your own reproductive rights seems incredible to me.  Not to mention the way that Republican state and national leaders have stood in the way of remedying the 23 cent per dollar gap in pay that women continue to experience.

It’s more than a little surreal that in 2012 we are still and again concerned about an assault on our freedom to make basic health decisions.  At the DNC, NARAL Pro-Choice President Nancy Keenan described the stark policy differences between Democrats and Republicans on this issue.  In elections past, the Republican platform has been officially against reproductive rights for women, while some less socially conservative members of the party would still quietly note that they were pro-choice.  These party members were essentially left to their own devices, especially if it was politically expedient.  This year, Republicans have upped the ante and changed the philosophical stance and the actual language of the platform — they are now zealously anti-abortion and make absolutely no exceptions to this, even for rape or the health of the mother.  I know a few political pundits who find this development astounding in its signaling of how far right the party has traveled.  Quite obviously for us, it is deplorable because it assails the basic rights of women in a way our generation has never seen.

In the world of behavioral assessment, it is widely held that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.  For example, in evaluating an individual’s level of imminent dangerousness (either to themselves or others), a heavily weighted factor is always whether that person has engaged in dangerous behavior previously.   If the answer is yes, the level of risk is increased and you climb down another branch on the decision tree.  Looking back on the past few years of Republican leaders introducing and enacting legislation that chips away at women’s rights, it is imperative that when they simply describe their party as being for and about women, it cannot distract us from the facts on the ground.  You can learn more about reproductive rights in each state here.

There are legitimate conversations to be had about how effectively this president has served our country, ways in which Democratic leaders could clean up their act and in what ways many people in many positions of power have let us down.  One might disagree with the assessment of history, the economic theories or policy prescriptions of one party or another.  But there can be no question which party supports women’s rights.  This is not a personal or professional analysis, this is something about which Republicans make no bones — they do not endorse a woman’s right to make her own health decisions and it is right there in their platform.

This is a call to action.  This election is going to be close.  Make sure you are registered, tell your friends and loved ones and get out there and vote.

Emma Goldman: Anarchist. Lover. Public Speaker.

It’s my second conference presentation. Ever. I’m seated between two other women—one, a PhD candidate at a tony East Coast institution; the other, a full professor and virtual expert on my topic. We were placed in the largest of the four conference rooms, and it’s mostly full. Curses. I thank the conference gods we’re allowed to sit during our speech. And that I brought a PowerPoint. ("If you'll all just take a look at this shiny picture instead of at me . . .")

Public speaking has, throughout my life, been the bane of my academic existence. As the hour of reckoning approaches, my stomach inevitably begins to dance and my palms get sweaty. I totter between the conviction that everything, as it always has been, will be fine, and the terror that this, yes this, is the time when I will finally, completely go to pieces in front of a large group of people. Maybe I’ll forget the words and do a dance, or worse, run from the room. (Fight or flight.)

I’ve always admired women and men who are gifted public speakers. There’s such an element of performance to it: a combination of confidence, conviction, and drama. Remembering my own shortcomings in these areas, of which I am painfully aware, I love to look up to this particular historical woman of the day for inspiration.

The incomparable Emma Goldman was born and raised in the Russian Empire, in present-day Lithuania, to an Orthodox Jewish family. In 1885, at the age of sixteen, she emigrated to the United States—already a veteran of a radical student circle in St. Petersburg, her political career would take root in the midst of the labor and anarchy movements of urban America.

It’s difficult to enumerate all the causes Goldman fought for: anarchism, socialism, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, free love, birth control. She sought to address the social evils that resulted from a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing America, as around her the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the robber barons got like super crazy insane stupid rich. Today this struggle, while tiresome, seems timeless; in the late 1800s and early 1900s, I imagine that it was also terrifying. The America we know---messy, diverse, capitalist, benevolent, unjust---was being born, and these struggles were its birthing pains.

Goldman typically sided with the underdog, railing against the inequalities of American society and the injustice of those in power. Her fights met with various degrees of success. But whatever her cause, one thing you could say about Goldman: she could speak.

Her speeches were famous, or infamous, depending what side of turn-of-the-century politics you were on. She toured the country giving her special brand of fiery talks that indicted the industrialists, the politicians, and the very structures of capitalism, and incited the working class, the women, the underprivileged to action. As writer Vivian Gornick puts it in "Love and Anarchy" (Chronicle of Higher Education 58:10):

“[Goldman’s intensity] was midwife to a remarkable gift she had for making those who heard her feel intimately connected to the pain inherent in whatever social condition she was denouncing. As the women and men in her audience listened to her, a scenario of almost mythic proportions seemed to unfold before their eyes. The homeliness of their own small lives became invested with a sense of drama that acted as a catalyst for the wild, vagrant hope--especially vulnerable to mean-spirited times--that things need not be as they are.”

We are in an election year. If you’re like me, you’re probably a little tired of hearing political speeches. (But how about that Clint Eastwood, right? Heh.) Without pointing any fingers, we’re seeing candidates who purposely downplay their past achievements if they don’t align with the party platform. Candidates whose views are “evolving” instead of just straight up existing, who must avoid certain subjects so as not to stir up segments of their voting base.

Emma Goldman wasn’t a politician. She was, perhaps, more of a rabble-rouser. But her career is incredibly inspiring because for everything she spoke about, she believed. Her passion was singular, unparalleled. Indeed, one of Goldman’s major complaints about fellow anarchists and revolutionaries was their diminishing of the individual within the mob and their privileging of the intellect over feeling. For Goldman, the individual was everything-- her anarchist utopia involved the liberation of the individual, not just the collective. It wasn’t all about politics. In fact, she had an active sex life and threw herself wholeheartedly into her romances, most notably with fellow anarchists Alexander “Sasha” Berkman and Ben Reitman. She didn’t just speak, she lived. (If you don’t believe me, read a few of her love letters. Wow! She’d put modern romance novelists to shame.)

Goldman built a decades-long career out of her activism, so of course, she had her fair share of trouble with the police. She was suspected of being involved in at least two assassination plots, including President McKinley’s, though it’s unlikely she played a role. It wasn’t until 1917, however, that her “treasonous” positions on World War I and the military draft finally made her United States residency untenable. She was deported to Russia, where she witnessed and quickly became disillusioned with the Revolution. She spent only two years there before moving on. After spending time campaigning against the fascists in Spain, she finally settled in Toronto, where she died in 1940 at the age of 70, a long, rewarding, and, in my opinion, incredibly well-spent life behind her.

My speech is over. I hand the microphone off. I’m pretty satisfied with how I did—I enunciated, I made eye contact with audience members, I didn’t stumble or stutter. I got my message across. Most of all, I didn’t run from the room in a panic. The full professor to my right congratulates me; she tells me I had some great material, but I could work a bit on my dynamics and volume. I’m no Emma Goldman, but I'm getting there.

Lessons from a conference...

Dearest Clara,

We’ve been on the go a lot, both with and without you, these last few weeks.  Most recently, I was in New York again, but this time for a conference.  I seem to have a lot of those---some for my day job, and a lucky few just for my own interests.  Conferences can be a little intimidating, a bit like the first day of school.  And when those presenting and attending are people whom you’ve long admired and want to learn from, you always wonder what your place is.  You wonder if you will be brave enough to talk to people.  And you’ll always wonder what you’ll say as you work up your nerve.   These are the things that have helped me in these kinds of events:

• Bring lots of business cards: It’s a great way to break the ice and it’s a great way to have something to talk about.  And bring more than you think you’ll need---you’ll give them about because you meet people, because you have to leave one with your luggage, because you’ll want to leave behind your contact information, or enter to win something.  Just have lots---I promise you’ll use them.
• Know something about those speaking: They took the time to prepare a presentation, so take the time to prepare and learn something about them.  That way, if you have the opportunity to meet them or sit next to them at part of the event, you already have a few things you can go to when making conversation.
• Remember most people---even if they don’t show it---are just as nervous: Don’t be intimidated.  Everyone else is outside of their comfort zone too.  Introduce yourself, bring others in if you see they want to be part of the conversation, and don’t sweat it if a conversation doesn’t go the way you planned.  Try to be an even more friendly and approachable version of yourself, and be inclusive.
• It’s okay to take a break: Sometimes conferences and events can become overwhelming---they’re full of people we don’t know, and hopefully new ideas we haven’t seen.  It’s tough to be always “on,” and the days can become long.  It’s okay to duck out for a few minutes into a corner or quiet space, or even take an hour back at the hotel to decompress and reset.
• Go to more than one! Believe it or not, these things get easier over time, and when you’re a repeat visitor, you always know someone too, which makes for smoother sailing.  All of the sudden, you become the person that others come to see.  A few events a year where you’re exposed to new people and new ideas are good to stimulate your own ideas---choose wisely but make the investment!

Now back to the sessions!

All my love,

Mom

No, it's not a compliment

I think about street harassment nearly every day, because I am harassed nearly every day. This is the reality for women who spend a decent amount of time walking around outside---even more so for women in densely populated urban centers. And I live in Manhattan, so . . . yeah. Nearly every day. Most days, the harassment is mild. A smacking of the lips as I pass, a low whistle, an obvious up-and-down with a creepy, slow nod at the end. These are the days when I think that hey, maybe it's all in my head. But then there are the times I'm followed, or told to smile, or surrounded, and I know that the milder stuff is just in a different place on the spectrum.

And before you go telling me that this is all a compliment and I should be grateful for the attention, a few things: anything that makes you feel threatened is not a compliment. Any time someone reacts to you ignoring them by calling you a bitch or a slut or a whore---all of which have happened to me---that's not a compliment. And trust me when I tell you that this happens to nearly all women, no matter what we look like. (I have lost nearly 100 pounds in the last year or so, and the only change is that instead of being called a fat bitch when I ignore men who harass me on the street, I get called a slut. So creative!)

No, it's not a compliment. It's a power play. It's a way of reminding women of what we already know: our bodies are public property, and are vulnerable to violation at any moment. (And before I hear the cries of misandry and, "Well, then, how am I supposed to approach the ladies at all?", let me cut those off at the knees with this handy, dandy guide.)

The good news is that I finally feel like this is something people are talking about. The fabulous Hollaback blogs started the conversation. You can submit your street harassment stories to them---along with photos, if you've got 'em---and trust me when I tell you that the support you get from your fellow commenters will be tremendous.

And in the if-you-don't-laugh-you-have-to-cry-because-it's-so-apt department, we have The Onion's recent post, entitled "Weird, Area Woman Wasn't Harassed Today." Let's just say they get it, proving once again that satire is this era's truest form of news. I don't want to spoil the punchline, or anything.

Chiming in from abroad is a new documentary from Belgian filmmaker Sofie Peeters. Peeters interviewed harassers for the film, which explores not only the impact of the behavior on women, but also the particular class and social issues at play. She found that confronting the men and listening to their stories led them to show her a greater deal of respect; that said, women shouldn't have to confront the men who threaten them in order to be able to walk down the street without feeling victimized. But, you know, progress is progress, however small.

It's pretty awesome knowing that all of this is out there. But it hasn't really changed my experience a whole lot. Just the other night, at about 10:30, walking from 84th to 86th Street on Broadway (a "good," if quiet, neighborhood), I was harassed three times. Once by a man who walked up behind me and whispered, "Sexy baby," once by a man telling me, "It doesn't hurt to smile," and once by a man who simply looked me up and down and licked his lips. I suppose I could have confronted them, but in the moment, it always seems safer to keep walking.

I hope my friends' daughters are never able to say the same.

Photo: Henry Tonks, Woman Walking on Sand, ca 1910

What August Means Now

By Carrie Allen Tipton For those invested in academic pursuits, August marks time like no other month. It speaks of newness and transition in a way that other folks more readily associate with January and its resolutions, or October and its changing leaves, or March and its budding limbs. August’s gift (or curse) of hyper-awareness of the passage of time blesses (or afflicts) tiny kindergartners no less than aged professors. Whether you are on the making or receiving end of a syllabus or book list in the upcoming educational year, the month delineates for all school-oriented persons the End of Something and the Beginning of Something Else.

As a student, this weird blurry month, neither fully summerish nor yet fully schoolish, meant shopping for clothes, finding color-coded folders, looking for the precise metric specifications of binders stated on the supply list, searching for a new and cooler (is there such a thing?) lunchbox. In the university years there were the added tasks of purchasing football tickets and meal plans. After many years of dutifully carrying out these sorts of instructions, I became a professor and began giving them to others. The road to this position was long and many times I have questioned whether it was, in that extremely charged yet vague term which indexes a host of existential presuppositions, “worth it.” Suffice it to say that it required many years of very long hours of single-minded focus and a willingness to live below the poverty line for the better part of a decade. Fine. It was over now, and I was professoring. In this new capacity, my old friend August meant screening books for readings lists, determining test schedules, building online class modules, anxiously checking electronic enrollment in the hopes that a course wouldn’t be canceled, dodging onerous committee work, applying for travel funding, and plotting out research goals.

For twenty-eight years, then, some version or other of me was essentially still Going To School every fall, and August meant what it always had: a physical and cognitive return to the educational premises. And then all of a sudden this year August stopped meaning anything like it once did. In late spring, I became pregnant with our first child. Let me, as I used to say to my students during lectures when an idea required further explanation, hit the pause button here. If this were an academic article, you would now be treated to a lengthy footnote about how I’d always hoped that if I ever had a child, I could stay home with it until it was school-aged. This was a simple and uncomplicated desire that could afford to remain simple and uncomplicated as long as it was theoretical. While there was no viable life-partner in the picture, such a decision was lodged (like so many of my academic ruminations) in the realm of abstract thought, and so it stayed for all of my adult life until I met my future husband two years ago, a mere year into my professorial career. And based on my longstanding desire, prior to our marriage, we agreed that I would stay home with the wee ones if wee ones ever materialized, at least in their early years. I would try freelance writing, editing, and perhaps some online teaching.

It would make a lot of sense, we figured, since I was quite unhappy as a professor and earned proportionately little money for my trouble. Pace Anne-Marie Slaughter, whose insightful article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic, but the thought of trying to have it all has always seemed to me quite exhausting. I just wanted some of it, and the part of it that I wanted changed as I walked through different seasons of life. So the decision was in place long before the baby ever was. It was still abstract and simple and uncomplicated, until the day in early April when two drugstore tests set the pre-arranged plan into motion. As I began the process of disentangling myself from a tenure-track job at my university, I felt liberated from unfulfilling employment, eager to spend the fall months prior to the baby’s arrival immersed in my beloved writing, and proud for being willing to run screaming from the ivory tower after three years of soul-searching that showed it to be an ill fit for me. I still do feel those things, and harbor no golden nostalgia for the frustrations of the career path I left. But what I do harbor is a giant question mark about who I am now, especially while my daughter is still an “inside baby,” and who I will be in the remaining months of her gestation, and who I will become as she emerges, and how we will become something together. Abstraction, simplicity, and lack of complication are rapidly eroding as I find myself in the midst of a new kind of August, and I have had to learn all over again what it means this year.

So far it has meant knowing, for the first time in my life, the months spanned by peach season, and that early August represented the final window of opportunity for capitalizing on the soft round spheres. I made a peach ricotta tart and did not make a syllabus. It has meant starting yoga classes, in the middle of the day, to help with my achy joints and to communicate with my girlie, my changing positions a sort of Morse code telegraphing her to be strong and peaceful and that I will try to be strong and peaceful for her. I sat in a roomful of people with legs crossed on rubber mats and did not sit in a roomful of people in pre-semester meetings. I measured for and ordered drapes and marched through Ikea looking for mounting hardware. I put up sheer taupe curtains in our living room and did not put books on an office bookshelf. I wrote and wrote and wrote and did not aim to produce a single article intended for a peer-reviewed journal. I am not sad, but August is feeling weird.

An entire book has been written about the difficulties and joys of either combining motherhood and academia or leaving the latter for the former, so I should have known that August wouldn’t sit right this time around. Reading Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life assured me that I wasn’t crazy for feeling dazed disorientation as I walked out of the halls of academia into the blazing sunlight of other paths. Of course it made sense that I was losing my emotional footing in the bright light of August, which every other year meant that I should be walking into the university instead of away from it. I still can’t see quite where I am headed and am only accepting, day by day, what this August means. To borrow the phrase of an incomparably greater wordsmith, T.S. Eliot, “in my end is my beginning.” August has always at its heart represented new beginnings for me, and although something large and weighty has come to an end, many other things have now begun. And when I think of this, I think that perhaps, after all, this August is not so very unlike the ones that have come before.

Why You'll Never Be Good Enough: Bodies in Magazines and Media

When someone compliments me on my appearance, I don’t believe them. OK, not all the time—but sometimes. I fully realize that this is reactive and silly, and I know that my occasional lack of confidence can be especially irritating to my boyfriend, who compliments me more than anyone else—why can’t I just take it? What, do I think he’s lying? Analyzing my instinctual reaction, in conjunction with the discovery of this recent study by University of Nebraska – Lincoln professor of psychology Sarah Gervais, I realized that often, a positive impression of my overall image triggers a negative array of thoughts, each little thought corresponding to a single part of my appearance that I don’t like. That single part is measured against an abstract composite ideal of female beauty and, invariably, falls short. Loop back to brain: “How can this compliment be true in light of this [clearly imperfect body part/feature]?”

Gervais's findings are intriguing, and while the headlining statement—Men Are Seen as People, Women Are Seen as Body Parts!—is a little sensationalist, there rings some truth in this statement. The images of women and women’s bodies that inundate us in the media—be they celebrities, fashion models, or disembodied legs/lips/torsos—are perfect. More and more, they converge towards a singular, mythic body that is flawless, without fault, and unworthy of a single criticism. What this does for women who don’t have that body (read: pretty much everyone, including most celebrities and fashion models) is inconclusive, but I’m willing to bet it's pretty negative in the aggregate.

Recently, former Us Weekly editor Janice Min wrote about her struggles with the unrealistic post-baby weight loss expectations that she believes are culled from media representations of celebrities. She realized that, when she had her baby, shedding pounds at celebrity-rate was close to impossible, especially considering the coterie of assistance most celebrities have at their disposal (trainers, dieticians, stylists, money). Jezebel was correct in pointing out the irony that this was coming from an Us Weekly editor—and not just any editor, but the one almost principally responsible for making post-baby weight loss celebrity stories in-demand over the course of the 2000s.

Considering Min's complaints (and her resulting diet book “for real women”), I’m stuck on a quote from a Daily Nebraskan story on Gervais’s study. According to both Michael Goff, senior lecturer in advertising at Lincoln, and Jan Deeds, director of the Women’s Center, media is merely a reflection of our subconscious objectification of women and not its cause. “Advertising doesn’t do anything magical with that (process),” Goff says. “It just exploits it.”

This feels like incredibly wishful thinking. If advertising isn’t the cause, that implies its blamelessness. Then what is the cause? Society? The dominant culture? The male hegemony? Is not advertising a part of society, a part of culture? It is certainly one of the most visible, most visual, and most recycled elements of our culture. How can the images that it continues to reproduce be blameless in our construction of gendered images and, consequently, our own self-image? If anything, these things are cyclical, absent of a singular “root cause”. I’d like to lay at least some of the blame at the feet of ad execs and women’s magazine editors.

I’ll end on this note. On “Project Runway” this week—an exploitative reality show that provides a window into the image-obsessed fashion world and uses stick-thin, pliable models and that I nevertheless absolutely love watching—the designers were challenged to create looks for “real women” who needed a makeover. Ven, a 27-going-on-50-year-old male designer with, let’s be honest, a bit of a paunch, was dismayed that he got the “largest” woman, and complained to anyone who would listen about how it was so unfair that he, a designer of women’s fashions, should have to work with proportions like these. When Tim Gunn asks what size his client is, Ven rolls his eyes and says, “I don’t know—a 14?!” Then he describes her proportions as “off.”

When we create an impossible ideal, and when that ideal is hammered into our consciousness by the fashion world, by magazines, by celebrity photo shoots, and—very often—by post-production manipulation, we all end up being “off,” and we all feel it. If advertising and pop culture are a reflection of our values as a society, then our values as a society are also reflections of our intake of advertising and pop culture. The cycle is end-able.

YWRB: Truth

By Amanda Page I will always choose truth.

Even now, years past slumber party angst and antics, I prefer the subjective, nuanced, very dangerous truth.

In my youth, truth was confession. I'd offer up my flaws, my mistakes, my humiliations. My sin from simply being human---those were the only truths available. Certainly, I was full to the brim with that type of truth.  I had plenty of that type of truth to spare. I believed in offering it up, chasing it away, making it leave my body through my mouth and be judged by others. I didn't want it as my own.

As I've aged, I've witnessed maturity in my truth. My truth is no longer an open wound. It has healed, slowly, through years of claiming itself. My truth is owned. I do not borrow it. I simply believe it.

It differs in eyes that aren't mine. If I were to offer it up, then you might see a shade darker or lighter than what I insist is present. There is such a thing as a true red, but I might think it's crimson while another chooses firetruck or candy apple. If I decide my true red is the red of flames and fire, then that, my friend, is the truth I choose once again.

The truth doesn't expose us. It doesn't excuse us or even explain us.

We don't need a game to reveal it.

Although, the game might build a friendship. It might offer insight into someone unexpected. It might twist your truth until you see it take a different shape. It's still your truth.

Dare to own it.