Two years ago, a pair of New York feminists, 23-year-old Nona Willis Aronowitz and her friend 22-year-old Emma Bee Bernstein, decided to drive across America to ask women what they thought about feminism. They are both daughters of big second-wave feminists, writer Ellen Willis and artist Susan Bee. Tragedy has since struck: Emma committed suicide last December. But Nona now has a blog for young feminists, and their book charting the views of the women they met was just published. It’s called “Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism.”
How did “Girldrive” come about?
In November 2006, my mother died. She was a very well-known feminist writer, who had a lot of feminist friends, and as soon as she died, all of her friends started reaching out to me, and it was a real whirlwind of feminism. It started to occur to me that this legacy was slipping through my fingers, or our generation’s fingers.
Then one day, a few weeks after my mom died, Emma and I, we were just having brunch, and I asked her what she was going to do after she graduated, and she said she wanted to take a road trip. And then it just clicked — this combination of self-discovery and pro-active research, and wanting to get answers about what feminism meant to our generation.
A lot of the women you interviewed were feminists but some were not. What do you think of people who reject the label?
There were two different types of women that said they weren’t feminists. One group were the women who harped on about the stereotypes — that feminists are man-haters, or radical activists. They were holding onto stereotypes, and it’s partly our education system’s fault and our culture’s fault, rather than their fault. That was really disheartening. So we tried to break down the stereotypes for them, we did insert ourselves into the conversation at that point.
Then there was a whole other set of women who knew a lot about feminism but felt marginalized by establishment feminism. They were doing really amazing work, they had a real working knowledge of how gender works in society, they had feminist awareness and they knew what they were talking about. So in those cases I couldn’t care less. If they have to put a qualifier on it and call themselves womanist or humanist, I don’t care, as long as they’re doing the work, as long as they’re aware of their surroundings, and as long as they’re having a conversation.
What are the differences between your generation’s experiences and your mom’s?
The second-wave movement was hugely successful but it failed in really addressing every woman’s issue. That legacy is still so alive: Almost all the women of color that we talked to had something to say about it; the same with some queer women too.
The road trip is part of a long American tradition. Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson did it, and on film, so did Thelma and Louise. Were you writing in response to that?
Most of these road trip tropes in the United States are about men. We weren’t men, but we were also not Thelma and Louise, we weren’t running away from a rape or a murder. We weren’t victims, we weren’t trying to get revenge on men, we were having fun. We were just trying to be the female counterparts to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, without all the misogyny. If you read “On the Road,” the only women in the book are whores or idiots, and we just wanted to be part of those late-night freewheeling conversations and have our own amazing experience without having to be these helpless women that were angry at society.
We were young women, we were 23. We weren’t going to be goody two-shoes. We wanted to show that this road trip was fun and it was a little reckless and we are a little irresponsible and we don’t have to be these perfect studious feminists. Feminists can have fun too.
It’s time for another does of Sarah Haskins. This week’s “Target: Women” tackles the serious topic of aging, and as long as your bladder problem isn’t acting up, it’s one you won’t want to miss. Be prepared to find out all about the ailments awaiting you over the hill, especially if you’re 29 (and er, blonde). Luckily there are lots of pills that will help you get through it. And happy birthday, Sarah! She turned 30 this month.
Two weeks ago, the UK’s Times Online announced, “women are getting more beautiful.” Science said so. The paper cited a study from the University of Helsinki which apparently suggested that women are in the grips of a “beauty race,” the ultimate aim of which is to be impregnated. Papers gobbled up the story — The Daily Mail even declared, “beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts.”
But here’s the thing: No one at the UK Times even interviewed Jokela, and he only found out his study was in the news after it was published. Not only did the media mangle the research, making it seem as though he exclusively studied women, but they also obscured some of its findings — for instance, hotter men are also more likely to have more children, though in different proportion to women, andit’s not the most attractive women who are likeliest to have more kids — it’s the second prettiest group.
Of course, none of the papers included men in the beauty equation (in fact, some papers actually reversed the findings, suggesting that as women “advance,” men remain “Neanderthal”). It’s a good reminder that even science can’t get in the way of the old lies the media is so fond of telling us.
Tragic stories about mothers and drinking have been dominating the news lately, but they are particularly bracing for Rachael Brownell. A mother of three, she chronicles her battle with the bottle — and her subsequent recovery — in the recently published “Mommy Doesn’t Drink Here Anymore,” a slim and compulsively readable addiction memoir. Now 22 months sober, she talks to Salon about how white wine was a way to reclaim the lost freedom of adulthood — and why sobriety deserves to be glamorized.
As a blogger at Babble, you once wrote about the joy of cocktail play dates, but eventually you decided you were drinking too much.Can you take us through the evolution of your drinking?
Like a lot of people I began drinking in my late teens, and throughout my 20s I would usually just drink on weekends. Once I had my twins in my early 30s, I was a like a lot of people with new kids — I was a little more cut off, I was home more of the time, and I started to drink a little bit more then, and it became kind of a highlight of my day. So I’d spend time with them, and after they were in bed I would read and drink some wine.
And it wasn’t anything problematic for a while. I started by using drinks in the way that a lot of people use them — “Oh, it’s been a stressful day, I’ll just relax and I’ll enjoy some adult time and unwind.” Pretty soon it became, “When can I drink?” And I would drink earlier and earlier in the day, and it snuck into being my favorite part of every day.
How did you stopdrinking?
This is going to sound really obvious but the hardest thing for me about getting sober those first six months was the realization that I had become so dependent on alcohol. And so I found a 12-step group and I started going.
I had this whole span of time in the afternoons that had been filled with drinking a few glasses of wine. Now I had to do all the things I was doing usually — making the dinner and dealing with the kids — when I didn’t have my favorite stress reliever. So there was a period of time where I just had to come up with new things to do. It was incredibly difficult to find replacement activities. So much of my life — my writing life, my friend life, my social life — revolved around alcohol. I had to redo all of that and it took a long time. I could not have done it alone.
What would you say to mothers who tell you, “At the end of the day, I just need a drink”?
I wouldn’t say anything. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s a normal drinker who has a glass of wine now and again. People who are drinking more than they want to drink or people who are wondering about their drinking: Those are the people I’d love to say, “Hey, why don’t you look into it a little, or call a 1-800 number and try and see if you might have a problem.”
I just think it’s important for people not to be so ashamed that they can’t come forward and maybe ask for help if they need it. But I’m definitely not of the school of thought that all drinking is evil and people shouldn’t drink at all. There are perfectly reasonable ways to drink. I just didn’t happen to engage in any of them!
You were part of a mommy brigade that wrote about their martinis, and I’m wondering how you see that era now — do you regret glamorizing drinking?
I think I glamorized drinking to an extent — although I’m not sure I had that much of an influence! What I’m trying to do now to counter what I might have done then is to say, there’s another way. If drinking is all you’re giving yourself to relax … there’s a lot better ways to take care of yourself as a parent, other than just getting loaded. It’s not dour and grim, like, “I used to have fun and drink and now life is terrible.” It’s quite the opposite. I’d like to glamorize sobriety a little!
I was just muscling through, determined to be a good mother. But boy, I’ll tell you, that’s a grim little march. I think I’m a whole hell of a lot more fun to be around now.
According to the toxicology reports,Westchester mother Diane Schuler, who killed eight on July 26, had a bottle of vodka in her car and a blood alcohol level of .19. How do you feel when you see those headlines?
Of course it’s a total tragedy. There but for the grace of God go I, because any of us in the grips of our disease can make terrible, terrible decisions. It’s amazing to me those kinds of tragedies don’t happen more often. There are a lot of people with undiagnosed serious problems with alcohol.
Last month, when Kamy Wicoff launched the beta version of a networking site called SheWrites.com, she knew it was a good idea, but she may not have guessed quite how good. She Writes is an online community of female writers that works like Facebook: Anyone can join, and members can create groups, post work, and advertise readings and workshops. The forum features memoirists, biographers, erotica writers, bloggers and journalists, and it counts feminists like Elaine Showalter among its number. Within days of its launch, She Writes had several hundred members. Within a week it had a thousand.
Wicoff ran a real-life literary salon in London (along with her friend, the late Diane Middlebrook), and then another in New York (with Nancy K. Miller) before setting up She Writes. She spoke to Salon about the voracious response to her online forum, and why women still need a support site of their own.
Why did you choose to set up SheWrites.com now?
Because it was the soonest that I could get it up and going! Every woman writer I know, whether she is just starting out or has written five novels and been nominated for the National Book Award, is in need of some new ideas and fresh sources of support. Writers have been getting dwindling advances and less and less of what they need from publishers; at the same time they are being asked to do more than ever before, to market, to promote, to brand, angle, to blog, and all on their own dime.
I know how much is expected of authors even if they publish with a major house. I also know, however, that many authors have become extremely skilled and expert in this new marketplace even if they’ve done so begrudgingly. Why let all that knowledge effectively go to waste, to die when an individual author’s book reaches the end of its publicity life cycle? She Writes was founded on the psychology of abundance. More is more. None of us has anything to gain by withholding what we’ve learned from each other.
The idea behind She Writes is to share our knowledge, to aggregate and harness the information each of us has hard-earned, and make it available to our community in an organized, efficient way that will make all of our lives easier. Why should every writer have to reinvent the wheel every single time she publishes something new? Why not help each other out so we all have more time to write, and write well? She Writes also makes it possible for writers who live outside of New York to find each other locally, to form writing groups, salons and form other offline relationships that writers, who work in isolation, really want and need.
How does the site work?
At its most basic level, the site functions a lot like Facebook – which is nice because it’s very intuitive for new members as long as they are familiar with social networking. Writers can join and make a page where they can upload book covers, post excerpts, blog, post events, import existing blogs, start discussions with other writers, join or start groups based on genre, region, or anything else they fancy (there are more than 80 groups already on She Writes), friend people, and seek out professional and artistic support.
A crucially important part of She Writes, however, will be our She Needs Help section, which we are building out now. We will be hosting webinars from the best in the business on everything from “Twitter for Writers,” coming up next week, to fiction workshops, offering vetted, top-quality services to authors, including editing, event production and marketing help, and organizing a grass-roots network of She Writes salons all over the country and the world to support and host our writers when they publish and tour.
As of now we have members in all 50 states and 71 countries, after just four weeks. The potential for growth is enormous.
Why focus on women?
Women write important books, they are published and they are powerful, but at the same time women who write are still treated as “women writers” and not as writers, period. I would say to my sons — you are welcome to join She Writes (all men are welcome) — but as long as it remains true that a book about a man coming of age in New York can be considered a literary work, while a book written about a woman coming of age in New York will almost certainly be labeled chick lit and given a pink cover, as long as the major literary prizes are almost always awarded to men, and the editors in chief of the major literary magazines are almost all men, and as long as 85 percent of the bylines on our Op-Ed pages are written by men, women need to band together and organize in an effort to have our contributions taken more seriously.
Women are no longer on the outside of publishing banging on the door and to get in, but women continue to be excluded from the kind of status that men are granted by default.
Don’t male writers need support networks?
I am sure male writers are also in need of networks and new ideas when it comes to publishing and promoting their books. The problems in the current publishing model are deep and widespread. But all you have to do is ask yourself what it would mean to start a network called He Writes and the answer to this question is self-evident — men do not start from a point of being labeled and pigeonholed by their gender. Until they do, it’s hard to imagine a need for a group that specifically supports their efforts.
In the UK a few years ago, a group called Fathers 4 Justice, dedicated to making sure divorced men got access to their children, kept getting into trouble. One member threw condoms full of purple flour at the then Prime Minister Tony Blair in the House of Parliament; another climbed onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace dressed as Batman. The men’s behavior did nothing to suggest they were responsible fathers, and while they publicized their cause, they also got on everyone’s nerves (there’s a US wing too, by the way).
Something similar could be said for antimisandry.com, an online forum dedicated to “curing feminist indoctrination.” (Misandry is the term for hatred of men or boys.) Amanda Hess recently offered her own analysis at the Washington City Paper blog The Sexist, but in short: The site blames the world’s ills on a toxic combination of feminism, the media and the government. It sees feminism as “the radical notion that men are not people.” (The Oxford English Dictionary, meanwhile, defines feminism as “advocacy of the rights of women based on the theory of equality of the sexes.” Hmm. I prefer the latter.)
What’s striking about Anti-misandry.com is its irrationality, its anger and the self-pitying tone of the posts. If the world is against you, that’s sad. But feminism isn’t anti-men. Anti-misandry.com, on the other hand, sure does seem anti-women.
