Sexes | The Atlantic

The Daredevil Aviatrix That History Forgot

2020-03-04T14:57:13-05:00

Bessie Coleman wanted more out of life. Her parents were sharecroppers in rural Texas, and she had spent her childhood picking cotton and doing laundry for white people. It was 1915. Opportunities were scarce for African Americans—let alone women of color. If Coleman wanted more, she realized, she had to go north. She moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration and took a job at a barbershop. In her free time, Coleman began to read about flying.

She read about Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to earn a pilot’s license. She learned of the European women who served as combat pilots during World War I. Inspired by their stories, Coleman resolved to become an aviator. She applied to every flying school in the United States, but, because of widespread race and gender discrimination, she was rejected from all of them.

Coleman refused to take no for an answer. She found sponsorship from the black-owned newspaper The Chicago Defender, taught herself French, and moved to France. She earned her license from France's lauded Caudron Brother's School of Aviation in just seven months. specializing in stunt flying and parachuting. In 1921, Coleman became the first black woman to earn a pilot's license.

A new short documentary from PBS’s American Masters series revives the story of the daredevil aviatrix whom history forgot. The film, part of a larger series about pioneering American women called Unladylike2020, illuminates Coleman’s achievements through interviews and colorful animation.

“Like many Americans, the only woman pilot I had ever heard of was Amelia Earhart,” Charlotte Mangin, who produced the film, told me. “I certainly never imagined that a woman of color was able to obtain a pilot’s license in the 1920s, let alone take the country by storm as an aviator.”

What surprised Mangin most about Coleman, however, was the spirit of activism that the pilot brought to her flying shows. “She refused to perform in air shows where African Americans were not allowed to use the front entrance and sit in the stadium with white spectators,” Mangin said. “I can only imagine the courage and determination it took to be an activist in this way, at a time when discrimination and violence against people of color were rampant across America.”

At age 34, Coleman’s life was cut short in a plane crash caused by an engine malfunction. Ida B. Wells spoke at her funeral service. In 1929, Coleman’s dream of opening a flying school for African Americans became a reality when William J. Powell established the Bessie Coleman Aero Club in Los Angeles. The school educated and inspired many outstanding black pilots, including the Five Blackbirds and the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

Today, only 7 percent of all pilots in the U.S. are women; less than 1 percent are black women.

Bridging the LGBTQ Generation Gap

2019-06-27T16:17:19-04:00

The LGBTQ community is often referred to as a “family,” with the connotation being that it is a supportive, close-knit group of people. According to researchers, however, the analogy is particularly salient when it comes to another, not-so-positive aspect of families: generation gaps. More than 60 percent of LGBTQ elders report feeling an isolating lack of companionship; two in five feel disconnected from the younger LGBTQ community. (This is especially true for survivors of the AIDS epidemic.)

In memory of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the filmmaker Ivan Cash brought pairs of LGBTQ-identifying people of different ages together to explore their similarities and differences. His short documentary—a shorter version of which appears in Airbnb’s World Pride campaign—pairs older members of the community with younger ones. The conversations are intimate, revealing, and sometimes difficult.

“There’s been so much change in this community that we were keen to gather members of the community to discuss these different experiences and perspectives head-on,” Cash told me.

In the film, one pair struggle to forge a connection when the younger introduces himself as “he/him.” He asks the older woman about her pronouns, and she admits, flustered, that she doesn’t know what a pronoun is.

Another pair lament the existence of the gulf between them. “There’s a lack of trust on the part of the older generation to the younger one,” says the older woman. “We seem to believe that there’s nothing we can tell you, because you’re not going to listen.”

“That gap took away the conversation,” her younger counterpart says. “It took away the part where we can actually come together and talk about the issues of our community.”

Michael Adams, the CEO of SAGE, a research organization that advised Cash on the film, says that younger and older LGBTQ generations are “disproportionately fractured.”

“Wisdom isn’t being passed down between generations anymore,” adds Charlie Pitre Hoy-Ellis, a researcher on LGBTQ aging at the University of Utah. “The intergenerational gap is dividing the community.”

This gap can be attributed to many factors, according to the researchers Glenda M. Russell and Janis S. Bohan. Among them are “the radical discrepancy between the life of today’s LGBT youths and that of their elders when they were young, the pervasive age-segregation within LGBT communities, the extreme speed of change that renders today’s certainties tomorrow’s irrelevancies, and the very common … tendency for each generation to dismiss the other’s perspective.”

Over the course of the conversations in the film, it’s clear that the participants benefit greatly from expressing themselves and listening to others. “I think every single participant experienced a shift through these conversations,” Cash said.

Richard Haines, who participated in the documentary, told me that the experience was particularly emotional for him. He was paired with a woman, Leah, who is his daughter’s age, and their discussion triggered a painful memory.

“My daughter is 22 and came out a couple of years ago,” he said. “But when she was younger, she asked me if I was gay and I said yes. And for a moment, she kind of pulled away from me. It was kind of excruciating, and I wondered, What if she doesn’t love me? In my generation, growing up being gay was tied to a self-loathing—that if we say who we are, we will be loved less.”

Haines also appeared in clips from the branded version of the film, which Airbnb promoted across New York City. “On a personal level, to go from growing up closeted to my face on bus-shelter kiosks as a gay man ... it’s pretty extraordinary,” he said. “It sounds corny, but it is an honor to be that person—to have that opportunity.”

As for the generation gap, “it’s a challenge,” he said. “It’s an ongoing conversation that has to [continue] after Pride Month.”

Intersex, and Proud

2019-06-06T16:02:09-04:00

“It was like a bomb being dropped into our life.”

That’s Isaiah Ngwaru. He’s talking about the moment he and his wife, Betina, discovered that their child, Tatenda, was intersex. Although she had been raised as a boy, Tatenda had railed against the strict masculine norms in her hometown of Gutu, Zimbabwe. She wore high heels, dressed in skirts, and expressed a desire to change her gender. It wasn’t until Tatenda underwent an operation for a hernia, however, that her condition became medically salient to her parents—the surgeon found “something like an ovary” in the child’s body.

“I just knew it. I felt it in my gut. I’m a girl,” Tatenda says in the short documentary She’s Not a Boy, from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, premiering on The Atlantic today. “There’s no explanation more than that.” Robert Tokanel and Yuhong Pang’s film is a poignant and ultimately inspiring window into the life of an intersex individual. Like many intersex people, Tatenda struggles to assert herself in a world that is largely ignorant of, and often discriminatory toward, her identity.

Intersex is an umbrella term that describes a variety of conditions in which a person is born with sex characteristics that don’t conform to binary definitions of female or male. According to the United Nations, up to 1.7 percent of babies are born intersex—a figure that is roughly equivalent to the probability of being born a redhead.

“I was confused when I first saw the word intersex, so I went online to look it up,” Pang told me. “The more I learned about Tatenda and her backstory, the stronger I felt I wanted to make a film about it. Her courage and resilience in embracing her true identity and living with it in pride every day can really empower other intersex people who are facing similar situations.”

In the film, Tatenda’s father says he wishes that Zimbabwean society, which is extremely conservative on gender and sexuality matters, would understand “the nature of Tatenda.” But it’s not just Zimbabwe—in the United States, a lack of education about intersex conditions has caused a pervasive morass and stigma.

Pang says people often confuse the concepts of transgender and intersex. “Usually the first assumption people may have after learning that a person raised a boy grew up to be a woman is that they are transgender, but the reality is sometimes more complicated than that,” she told me. For example, many intersex individuals, such as Tatenda, are assigned a gender at birth due to their external genitalia. Only later in life do they learn that they have different internal sex organs or hormones, or a combination of male and female chromosomes (such as XXY). Some people live their whole life without ever discovering they’re intersex.

In many countries, including the United States, doctors recommend gender-assignment surgery for babies born with ambiguous genitalia. Many believe that these surgical interventions are driven by a fear of nonbinary bodies. “Corrective surgeries are medically unnecessary and can be physically and psychologically devastating,” Tokanel said. “The parents of children born intersex are often confused and frightened by the diagnosis and think they’re making the best decision for their child, but they’re totally unaware of the potential irreversible harm they’re causing because a doctor who is in a position of authority has told them to act quickly to avoid the stigma of being ‘different.’”

Many intersex people find that the stigma extends into the LGBTQ community. In one scene in She’s Not a Boy, Tatenda explains how she feels uncomfortable joining the Pride parade in New York City. “The queer community does a poor job of holding space and creating awareness and identity safety for intersex people,” Tokanel said. “Given that reality, many intersex people aren’t living publicly … Tatenda is a rare and brave example of a person who is willing.”

Tokanel and Pang found Tatenda’s story to be particularly resonant because of her supportive and loving relationship with her parents. “Despite all the discrimination against their daughter, Tatenda’s parents, Betina and Isaiah, were among the first few people that fully accepted her and even defended her in their community,” Pang said.

On the last day of filming in Gutu, Tatenda’s mother invited Tokanel and Pang to attend church services with the family. “She told us that bringing us to their church would be one of their proudest moments, because it would show people that Tatenda had made it through hard times and that people wanted to learn more about her because she was so special,” Tokanel said. “Everyone deserves that kind of familial love, but queer people don’t always manage to form those kinds of bonds with their parents.”

The film ends with a strong declaration from Tatenda. “I am a black woman, an immigrant, and an intersex woman,” she says. “That is something that is built automatically to destroy me. But from that, I rise.”

The 23-Year-Old Woman Who Pioneered Investigative Journalism

2019-05-30T16:25:29-04:00

“In my time, women usually had their life stories written for them. But I didn’t like the story I was given, so I wrote a new one.”

That’s Nellie Bly, the nom de plume of Elizabeth Cochrane. The story she wrote—in a newspaper in 1887, and, figuratively, of her life—would change the course of journalism in America.

A new short film from Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Glassbreaker Films brings Bly’s intrepid spirit to life. Nellie Bly Makes the News is an inventive and wildly entertaining account of the late reporter’s pioneering work in investigative journalism. The film’s director, Penny Lane, uses animation and a mix of documentary-style and reenacted interviews—drawn from primary sources, including Bly’s own writing and published interviews—to tell the story of a dynamic woman whose reportage is still being emulated today.

As a 23-year-old reporter in the pre-suffrage Victorian era, Bly became a household name for doing things women weren’t supposed to do. “Nellie was quite simply a great risk taker,” Lane told me. “She was so very, very daring. She wanted to do something great and to have an interesting life full of adventures, and she did that independently, without the support of a wealthy family.”

In the film, Lane presents Bly as an indomitable force. The director said she worked with Sammi Jo, the actress who portrays Bly, to bring out Bly’s impetuous nature. “We wanted her to have this audacity and braggadocio, but underneath that, the kind of sensitivity and insecurity that any young woman could relate to,” Lane said.

At just 16, Bly, dissatisfied with the coverage of women in her local newspaper, wrote an impassioned letter to the editor of The Pittsburgh Dispatch. He offered her a job, but her coverage was restricted to reporting on issues that specifically addressed women. “Women had no status in journalism when she started working,” Brooke Kroeger, Bly’s biographer, says in the film. “They weren’t in the newsrooms … The only roles for women were as columnists writing about society, about gardens, about fashion, about food.”

Bly soon found that her ambition far exceeded reporting on domestic matters. She took off for New York, where she persuaded her new editors at Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World to send her on a dangerous undercover assignment that would take her above and beyond the call of duty for journalists of the time. Over the course of 10 days in 1887, Bly masqueraded as a psychotic patient and was admitted to the most notorious mental asylum in New York City—the women’s asylum on Blackwell’s Island.

“The doctors and nurses did not care at all that I was perfectly sane,” Bly wrote in a harrowing exposé. “The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat trap. It is easy to get in, but once there, it is impossible to get out.” Bly’s piece sent shock waves through the city and ultimately led to increased funding to improve conditions at the institution. The enterprising tactics she employed in pursuit of the story came to be known as “stunt journalism” and earned Bly renown nationwide. Just a few years later, she would cement her place in history with a highly publicized travelogue of the record-breaking 72 days she spent circumnavigating the globe.

“Boldness goes a long way in changing the world,” Lane said. “Sometimes you have to will a new world into being.”

The Skeletons in Abusers’ Closets

2019-01-15T15:17:15-05:00

“I got in a fight with my wife and I slapped her,” says an unidentified male. After a pause, he adds: “I held her and punched the wall.”

The man, whose face is blurred to protect his identity, is speaking to a dozen convicted abusers seated around a table. They’re participating in a group therapy session, part of a state-mandated program for men convicted of domestic violence in California. Over the course of the year-long program, the men identify and reflect on the beliefs and attitudes that underlie their violent behavior.

The short documentary Group—a co-directorial effort from the Chapman University students Jack Mullinkosson, Ben Allen, Claire Cai, Meghan Wells, and Haley Saunders—observes the men as they undergo multiple weeks of the emotionally grueling therapy, in which a compassionate therapist challenges them to take responsibility for their actions and confront their ingrained notions of toxic masculinity.

Under the tutelage of their professor, Sally Rubin, the film students took a no-frills approach to the documentary’s complex subject matter. In the absence of flashy setups and editorialized interviews, the camera simply captures the men as they process their emotions and navigate personal growth. In striving for objectivity—inasmuch as that’s possible while creating a documentary—the filmmakers humanize their subjects. The men of Group come across as multifaceted individuals with complicated personal histories (many of them were abused themselves). They express a desire to change, although the process proves more difficult for some than others; a few men, in particular, display defense mechanisms and attempt to rationalize their abusive acts. Eventually, however, they demonstrate an openness to recognizing their fallibility.

Wells, one of the filmmakers, told The Atlantic that when she began working on the project, she struggled with it ethically. The idea that she was making a film about domestic abuse from the perspective of the perpetrators made her uncomfortable. “I didn’t like hearing some of their rationales,” she said. “I didn’t want any survivor to watch this and not feel supported.” This tension was also felt by some of the other co-directors. It resulted in many charged conversations and, in Wells’s case, some sleepless nights. “But I realized that while we know violence is bad, that doesn’t stop physical abuse from happening,” Wells continued. “Maybe we need another approach to get people to start talking about abuse ... the conversation needs to look at how we can stop the cycle.”

The filmmakers mentioned that they were surprised to witness a substantial change in the men’s perspectives over the course of filming the group therapy sessions.

“I believe in alchemy,” Mullinkosson, one of the co-directors, said. “I think that with the right spell, anybody can turn rocks into gold. We watched, week after week, as these men went from apprentices to expert alchemists, capable of the perfect transmutation of a destructive thought pattern into sustainable morality.”

Intimacy in the Early Days of Online Dating

2019-01-08T16:56:30-05:00

August 2011. Gus, a 19-year-old homeschooled Christian from Joliet, Illinois, is trawling Facebook. He’s just recovered from a debilitating bout of depression, and he’s looking for someone to talk to. Through an online personality test, he finds a match: Jiyun, a 20-year-old from Korea, who moved to New York City with her family for her brother’s cancer treatment. Gus messages her, and they begin chatting.

“I started to fall for him when I saw these tagged videos on Facebook,” Jiyun reveals in Nancy Schwartzman’s short documentary, xoxosms. “That was my first time actually seeing his face. I was like, ‘Oh, wait, he’s really cute. I like his voice.’” Jiyun found herself attracted to Gus’s innocence, living a secluded life in a small town. He was fascinated by her urban lifestyle and international background. Over the course of two years, their correspondence would bloom into a long-distance relationship, archived in instant messages and video-chat footage.

Schwartzman, who was originally connected to Jiyun through her niece, asked the young couple if she could follow the progress of their relationship. “I wanted to make a film about how romance was unfolding in the digital landscape,” Schwartzman told The Atlantic. “They were excited to participate. I saw the way Gus’s face would light up when he saw [Jiyun] … they were totally in love, and it read so beautifully on camera.”

“I’m experiencing this connection to you,” Jiyun types to Gus at 1:52 a.m. “It’s kind of confusing. I didn’t even know there was a term for it until I Googled it. ‘Emotional intimacy.’ I never let myself be this vulnerable. Do you think it’s surreal that we’re talking like this?”

Ten months later, they would meet in person for the first time. Schwartzman followed Jiyun to Chicago, where she trained her camera on the teenagers as they acclimated to each other. At first, the encounter is endearingly awkward. But soon Jiyun and Gus find their footing. After they part, they decide to make a commitment to each other.

“All I really need is one solid cosmic connection to somebody,” Gus confesses in the film. “I guess we’ll see where life takes us and hopefully we can walk the rest of life on the same road.”

Sadly, as with most first loves, Gus and Jiyun’s didn’t last. But Schwartzman believes there’s a place for relationships that never transcend the physical limitations of the internet.

“Maybe some relationships work better online,” Schwartzman said. “They can feel really supportive and romantic, and just enough of what you need. Maybe they don’t ever have to move offline.”

Men Are Socialized to ‘Act Inhumanely’

2018-10-25T15:43:37-04:00

Thomas Page McBee transitioned at age 30. In his male body, he “started to experience the world differently immediately,” he says in a video filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival in June. “I gained a lot of privileges and also lost a lot of connection.”

McBee, the author of Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man, goes on to detail how his experience of male socialization later in life afforded him a unique perspective on the internalization of masculinity. “When you look at Harvey Weinstein, you're seeing an extreme of a socialized behavior,” he argues.

Are Male and Female Brains Biologically Different?

2018-06-25T18:44:11-04:00

Updated June 26, 2018

Pop neuroscience has long been fascinated with uncovering secret biological differences between male and female brains. The question of whether men and women have innately different brains rarely fails to get people riled up. Just last year, the Google engineer James Damore caused an uproar after publishing a manifesto detailing the various ways women were biologically different from men.

But Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, says that anyone who goes searching for innate differences between the sexes won’t find them.

“People say men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but the brain is a unisex organ,” she said onstage Monday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic.

That’s a bold statement, and one science is divided on. It seems to depend on what exactly is being measured. For example, a large study in the U.K. found that many regions of men’s brains were larger than women’s, and that women on average had thicker cerebral cortices. What does that mean for how the brain works? Unclear. Another study found that “averaged across many people, sex differences in brain structure do exist, but an individual brain is likely to be just that: individual, with a mix of features,” as New Scientist reported in 2015.

But there’s no doubt that whatever their brains look like, behavior and school performance differences between men and women are strongly shaped by socialization.

Eliot said that Damore has a misunderstanding of neuroscience and that his letter overstated the role of testosterone in male and female bodies. While testosterone is linked to aggression, it doesn’t offer a universal explanation for male behavior. Eliot also said that everyone, regardless of sex, can be competitive or aggressive, but males and females might have different ways of expressing those traits based on social norms.

Eliot blames academia and the media in part for the cycle that leads to the ongoing argument over biological brain differences. Because most scholars know that any small statistical difference between men and women will make headlines, academics, desperate for funding and attention, often focus studies on gender disparities. “You go back to data, analyze it for sex, and if you find a difference, then guess what: You have another paper,” Eliot said.

She said that even scientifically indisputable differences, such as the oft-cited statistic that male brains are 10 percent bigger than female brains, don’t mean anything. All of men’s organs are bigger on average, but that doesn’t mean they function differently.

If scientists and academics were to begin with the premise that men and women are equally capable, Eliot said, their studies would result in radically different conclusions.

For instance, many, including the then–Harvard University president Lawrence Summers, have used a 1970 study that showed men outperformed women 13 to one on the math portion of the SAT to explain why there aren’t more women at the top of STEM fields. “People said brilliance in math is a male phenomenon,” Eliot said.

Of course, it turned out women were being discouraged from pursuing STEM. Once more programs were put in place to foster this type of learning, the ratio dropped to three to one, Eliot said, and is now on its way to closing.

“We live in a gender-binary world,” said Eliot. “The default assumption is that these differences are hard-wired ... But male and female brains are not much [more] different from each other than male or female hearts or kidneys.”

'It's Difficult for Trans People to Enter Public Spaces'

2018-04-10T14:23:19-04:00

It’s easy to take for granted the ability to move through public spaces without consequence. But for many marginalized communities, this simply isn’t the reality. “[People] say that we’re unnatural, that we’re perverted, that we’re not genuine people,” says a transgender woman in Cecilia Golding and Nick Finegan’s documentary, The Swimming Club. “It’s difficult for trans people to enter public spaces because their bodies are different—there’s prejudice,” says another.

The film follows members of TAGS (Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Swimming Group), a group of transgender individuals, in London, who swim together in a community pool designated as a safe space. “Swimming is what everyone should have the ability to do,” says Roberta, one of the founders of TAGS. For many group members, this is the first opportunity to self-actualize without fear of reproach for having a trans body. As one person describes it: “It’s like being a complete human being after being fractured for so long.”

After Finegan met Roberta at a techno party in London, he teamed up with Golding to make The Swimming Club. “Neither of us had picked up a camera before—unless you count an iPhone,” said Golding. The duo hoped their documentary would be more than a “fly-on-the-wall journalistic piece”; instead, they wanted to convey the emotional release that the act of swimming provides for the group. “This led us to discussions about the colorful kinetic underwater shots and close-up portraits of the swimmers in action,” Golding continued.

“From the moment of conception [of the project], both Ceci and I were very conscious of our presence as two cisgender filmmakers,” said Finegan. “We hoped we would function as a border-crossing between the marginalized voices of the swimming club and a wider audience that may have no prior experience of trans* and gender-non-conforming people.”

“Because of the way society sees us,” says a trans woman in the film, “a lot of us experience depression and anxiety. That’s not just because we’re trans—it’s because we just want to feel safe, and we’re not.”

The Problem With #MeToo’s Agenda

2018-02-16T11:14:05-05:00

What happens when a movement loses sight of its original goal? That’s what The Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan believes is occurring with #MeToo. In this new video, Flanagan argues that for the movement that was galvanized in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, “no problem was too small or too vague to be included, so long as a man was to blame.” If #MeToo is to succeed, Flanagan posits, it needs to refocus.

In 100 Texts, the Story of Love, Heartbreak, and an Unplanned Baby

2018-01-24T17:12:28-05:00

When Victoria Mapplebeck found her decades-old Nokia phone hidden in the back of a kitchen drawer, she was forced to relive a story she had worked hard to forget.

“I realized I’d unwittingly archived a three-year message thread between myself and my son’s father,” Mapplebeck told The Atlantic. “The story of our relationship unfolded in just 100 texts: how we met, dated for a few months, broke up, and subsequently dealt with an unplanned pregnancy.”

Mapplebeck’s short documentary, 160 Characters, is a poignant excavation of memory through technology. Over the three years that Mapplebeck and her son’s absentee father were in communication, conversation was increasingly replaced by text messages. Like an emotional archaeologist, she chronicles her former lover’s presence and makes his absence felt using only his digital remains.

“It felt like a digital hit and run,” Mapplebeck said. “I began this project with a personal story, but perhaps it also explores a universal story—one in which we increasingly expect more from technology and less from each other.”

For Mapplebeck, making a film so personal was an exercise in vulnerability and, ultimately, catharsis. “I didn't want to come across as a victim and neither did I want to cast my son’s father as a pantomime villain,” she said. “The situation we found ourselves in was complex. I'm sad about it and sometimes I'm angry.” Over the years, Mapplebeck has witnessed the psychological consequences for her son of his father’s decision not to be part of his life. “It’s been hard at times, but I didn't want the film to be overwhelmed by those emotions,” she continued. “I felt it was important to create space for viewers to come to their own conclusions.”

America's Deep Rift on Gender Issues

2017-12-05T12:00:00-05:00

The headline on the big new gender survey from the Pew Research Center begins, “On Gender Differences, No Consensus”— and that could have been the report’s entire conclusion, too. The survey, released today, reveals deep divides in Americans’ perspectives on gender norms, including by political affiliation:

Republicans appear to be more comfortable with traditional femininity and masculinity: Republican men are more likely to consider themselves “very masculine” than Democratic men are. Republican women are also slightly more likely than Democratic women to consider themselves “very feminine.” According to an earlier Pew survey, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to say that changes to traditional gender norms have led to a host of benefits, like success at work and and in marriage.

Pew Research Center

Democrats think gender norms can and should be shaped by society: Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say the differences between men and women are the product of societal expectations, rather than biology. And they are more likely than Republicans, by far, to say young boys should be encouraged to take part in activities that are usually associated with girls.
Republicans see a war being waged against boys: Fewer Republicans than Democrats say society looks up to manly men—perhaps because they are also more likely to feel the push for gender equality has already gone too far. Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to feel society is “too accepting” when it comes to women taking roles that are typically associated with men, and the same is true of men taking women’s roles. This mirrors another finding from this Pew survey: Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say we should do more to urge girls to be leaders. Meanwhile, a majority of Republicans say there is too little emphasis on leadership for boys, a sentiment only a third of Democrats agreed with. Most Democrats think we should do more to teach girls to stand up for themselves; Republicans are more likely than Democrats to think the same thing about boys. Among those who do feel society respects masculinity, Republicans “overwhelmingly say this is a good thing,” the Pew researchers write. Meanwhile, “Democrats aren’t convinced ... almost identical shares say this is a good thing as say it is a bad thing.”

Of course, the recent wave of sexual-harassment allegations in politics have shown that people of all parties are capable of mistreating women. But this Pew survey and others reveal how, even though society’s ideas about gender are changing rapidly, Republicans are less likely to endorse those changes.

A poll conducted by PRRI and The Atlantic between October 5 and October 9 of last year found Trump supporters were more likely than Clinton supporters to feel that society punishes men just for acting like men. In that poll, Republicans, conservatives, and Trump supporters were also far more likely than liberals, Democrats, or Clinton supporters to think that society was becoming “soft.”

Social-science research suggests gender beliefs are an inherent part of what it means to be a liberal or conservative. As NPR’s Hidden Brain team reported, Republicans tend to have a “strict father” view of the world, in which strong figures decide what is best for the family (or the country). Democrats, meanwhile, tend to support the “nurturant parent” model, in which parents (and leaders) “feel their job is to empathize with their child, to know what their child needs, and to have open two-way discussions with their child,” the NPR reporters write. Those fundamental beliefs might later map onto more positive views of masculinity, in Republicans, and more free-flowing ideas about rules for men and women, in the case of Democrats. In academic studies, people are even more likely to describe the GOP in masculine terms, and the Democrats in feminine ones.

The 2016 election revealed a desire for better wages and conditions for working-class people of both parties. But on cultural issues—including gender—there still seems to be “no consensus.”

Down the Rabbit Hole: The Surprising Tale of the Bunny Suit

2017-10-04T09:51:00-04:00

From its first issue in 1953, Playboy’s publisher Hugh Hefner sought to distinguish it from the sleazy sex magazines stored under the newsstand counter and sold in brown paper bags. He once explained that he chose a rabbit as the magazine’s mascot “because of the humorous sexual connotation,” but dressed him in a tuxedo “to add the idea of sophistication.” The models may have been nude, but the articles were written by acclaimed authors like Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, and Vladimir Nabokov and covered highbrow topics including “Picasso, Nietzsche, [and] jazz,” to quote Hefner’s introductory editorial. Even JFK read it.

Similarly, when he opened his first Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960, Hefner emphasized respectability above raunchiness—a preference widely noted by writers reflecting on his legacy following his death at age 91 last week. The Playboy Club was a supper club, not a sex club; jackets and ties were required. Though only men could be members—or “keyholders,” in Playboy parlance—they could bring female guests. The buffet offered crab legs and filet mignon, and entertainment was provided by the likes of Nat King Cole, Steve Martin, Aretha Franklin, Billy Crystal, and Sammy Davis, Jr.

One of the most iconic symbols of the Playboy Club was its waitstaff: a throng of women known, and dressed, as Bunnies. Much like the clubs themselves, the magazine whose name they shared, and the man who created all of it, the outfits worn by the Playboy Bunnies were a blend of provocative and old-fashioned. Since its debut, the Bunny suit—a strapless bodysuit paired with rabbit ears and a fluffy tail—has become a cartoonish cliché of female sexuality, serving as a visual punchline in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, The House Bunny, and a host of other rom-coms. But the Bunny’s erotic allure was as much of a tease as the stuffing that so often filled out the D-cups of her costume. Her skimpy suit promised further revelations that never came; her cuddly demeanor concealed the Bunnies’ intensive training, strict disciplinary policies, and astronomical paychecks. And if feminists are still arguing over whether the Bunny suit was constricting or liberating, it’s because it was designed to be both.

* * *

According to Kevin Jones, the curator of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) Museum, Hefner originally wanted the club’s waitresses to wear short, frilly nighties inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies girls—the sex symbols of his youth. But, as recounted in Kathryn Leigh Scott’s memoir The Bunny Years, Playmate Ilse Taurins—who was dating the company’s promotions director, Victor Lownes—pointed out that all those flimsy layers would be impractical for serving drinks and lighting cigarettes. It was her idea to dress the waitresses as distaff versions of the magazine’s masculine logo. The rabbit became a Bunny, and an icon was born (and quickly patented—a first for a service uniform).

The first prototype—a satin one-piece worn over a prefab Merry Widow corset and paired with rabbit ears and a fluffy tail—looked too much like a bathing suit. A few snips of the scissors raised the leg opening, elongating the legs, accentuating the crotch, and removing any resemblance to swimwear. Hefner himself insisted on adding the criss-cross lacing at the top of the leg, said Jones, who has a Bunny suit in his museum’s collection. Though the laces were purely decorative—they couldn’t be untied or loosened—they revealed that much more skin, and suggested the tantalizing possibility of a wardrobe malfunction. A rosette name tag at the right hipbone and dyed-to-match satin pumps completed the outfit. But it was the addition of a man’s tuxedo collar, bow tie, and cuffs in 1961 that pushed the Bunny suit into pop-culture legend.

“Everybody has this idea that [the club] was very sexually liberated,” Jones told me. In reality, it was pretty tame—a place for flirting at most. So were the Bunnies. The wife of one keyholder declared the average Bunny to be “so darn nice and respectable, you’d even let your brother marry her.” Nevertheless, the blend of overpriced cocktails and underdressed waitresses proved to be a winning formula. Clubs multiplied like rabbits; eventually, there would be more than 30 Playboy-branded clubs worldwide, in addition to casinos and resorts.

In his 1963 book The Presidential Papers, Norman Mailer described the Bunny suit thusly:

a Gay-Nineties rig which exaggerated their hips, bound their waist ... and lifted them into a phallic brassiere—each breast looked like the big bullet on the front bumper of a Cadillac. Long black stockings, long long stockings, up almost to the waist on each side, and to the back, on the curve of the can, as if ejected tenderly from the body, was the puff of chastity, a little white ball of a bunny’s tail which bobbed as they walked.

It was a flattering if constricting design; Lownes observed that “the costumes took girls with even average figures and made them look like they had amazing figures.” His comment is telling; not all Bunnies were bombshells. The suit made the Bunny, not the other way around.

From day one, “the suit was a throwback,” Jones told me—to the 1950s if not the Gay Nineties. The fashionable silhouette of the 1960s was boyish, not curvy. Shapeless shifts and ballet flats may have been all the rage on the runway, but inside the club, it was perpetually 1953: hourglass figures, bullet bras, and three-inch heels. The only concessions to fashion were the Bunnies’ bouffant hairstyles, topped with artfully angled ears.

A group of Playboy Bunnies line up for inspection by Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy magazine, in the main room of the Playboy Mansion in Chicago. Hefner is inspecting the new improved fabric for the costumes. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

Early visitors to the Playboy Club picked up on its heady dynamic of naughty and nice. Newsweek called it “a Disneyland for adults.” Appropriately, the dress code for female employees was just as strict and detailed as the amusement park’s famously rigid sartorial standards. Everything was spelled out in meticulous detail in a Bunny Manual and enforced by a Bunny Mother, who inspected each Bunny from head to toe before her shift. Makeup and weight were closely monitored. Nail polish, jewelry, and eyeglasses were strictly forbidden, though hairpieces were encouraged. Cuffs and collars had to be starched and spotless; the rabbit logo cufflinks had to “kiss,” or face each other. Bunnies were responsible for buying their own (tax-deductible) satin pumps and having them dyed to match their suits and ears, which came in 12 different colors. “Our pair is really telling because it’s completely spattered with spilled drinks,” Jones said of the costume in the FIDM Museum. “They must have been replaced a lot.” Dirty shoes, laddered stockings, and other infractions incurred demerits, which could lead to a Bunny being fined or even fired.

Far from being exploited, the Bunnies “were really well protected young women,” Jones told me. They may have been eye candy, but they were meant to be (literally) untouchable. Bouncers kept tipsy keyholders from groping or grabbing tails. (The original yarn tails were replaced by fire-retardant fake fur by 1969 because “customers were always trying to light them,” Bunny Alice Nichols recalled in The Bunny Years.) Touching a Bunny was grounds for expulsion. And Bunnies were strictly prohibited from dating customers, entertainers, or any C-suite level Playboy employees. They didn’t need sugar daddies, anyway—they made more in tips in one night than a salesgirl at Bloomingdale’s could make in two weeks, according to Scott.

Indeed, the Bunnies’ bare, buxom image was always an illusion. The suit only came in two cup sizes: 34D and 36D. But those cups were equipped with pockets to facilitate stuffing. (In “A Bunny’s Tale,” her 1963 exposé for Show magazine, undercover Bunny Gloria Steinem recalled the club’s in-house wardrobe mistress telling her that “just about everybody stuffs” while shoving an entire plastic dry cleaning bag down the front of her suit.) Bunnies were not allowed to bend forward, lest their assets (or stuffing) spill out in a tawdry display; in any case, the suit’s tight, boned bodice would have made it uncomfortable. Instead, they were trained to perform a series of elegant, unnatural moves such as the “Bunny Dip” and the “Bunny Crouch” that allowed them to take orders and serve drinks without ever bending at the waist. Though their cleavage was served up on a satin platter, Bunnies were cinched in and covered up from the chest down, wearing sheer black Danskin pantyhose over flesh-toned Danskin tights, according to Jones.

History has conflated the Playboy Bunnies with the Playmates featured in the magazine’s centerfolds. Though Bunnies were not prohibited from posing for the magazine, few did; they were a different kind of animal. Bunnies were rarely seen in the wild, emerging from the clubs only for promotional events—at which they wore skirts and sweaters—and parties at the Playboy Mansion. (“Wherever Hugh was, it was a club,” Jones said.) The Bunny suit was meant to be appreciated in the exclusive environs of the members-only club.

The fact that a few suits have made their way into museum collections is surprising; they were considered property of the club and handed in after every shift for cleaning. Taking a suit home was punishable by a $500 fine. According to The Bunny Years, “only a few larcenous Bunnies out of the more than 15,000 women who wore the costume managed to leave Playboy with one as a keepsake. ... One Bunny wore her costume for her induction into the U.S. Air Force. Another walked down the aisle at her wedding in a white satin Bunny costume.” The FIDM Museum’s suit was donated by a former Bunny in the Dallas club, who managed to smuggle it out when she quit. “Technically, it’s stolen property,” Jones said with a laugh. The Met and the Museum at FIT obtained their suits directly from Playboy Enterprises.

Just when did the Bunny become a dinosaur? The club scene began to fade in the early ’80s, with the last of the original clubs closing in 1988. After that, Bunnies occasionally appeared at Playboy events, but “they were Playmates with Bunny ears on,” Jones said. The original Bunnies moved on to bigger and better things; the former wearer of the FIDM Museum’s suit parlayed her service industry experience into a career as a flight attendant. Former Bunnies Lauren Hutton, Debbie Harry, and Steinem found new jobs, too.

Stephen Florida Reveals the Dark Toll of Athletic Greatness

2017-07-04T07:00:00-04:00

In 2012, the NFL linebacker Jovan Belcher took his life in front of his teammates after fatally shooting his girlfriend. Months earlier, the Hall-of-Famer Junior Seau killed himself three years after retirement. They, like many other football players, showed symptoms of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. Signs of the disease are not exclusive to the sport (or to athletes). Last year, 12 former wrestlers filed a class-action suit against the WWE over the “long-term neurological injuries” they sustained as employees.

Such developments may dim, or at least complicate, the glow of triumph often promised to players in exchange for their bodily sacrifice. In his debut novel, Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash examines the dark side of this transaction through his eponymous character, an intensely competitive young wrestler at a college in North Dakota. Following Stephen through his last year in school, Habash questions not only the true cost of achieving athletic greatness, but also how masculinity—defined in part by vengefulness, violence, and stoicism—can drive men to behave in self-glorifying and self-defeating ways.

Stephen Florida begins in the aftermath of a struggle. “My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them,” the narrator says, setting the stage for a story centered on competition and the toll of a fight for survival. Though its primary subject is wrestling, the book is more a study of the manifold ways men relate to each other. It reads a bit like Chad Harbach’s coming-of-age story The Art of Fielding invaded by the characters from Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a novel obsessed with the absurd nature of manhood. But unlike Bolaño’s novel, Stephen Florida refuses to romanticize its male characters and their exploits, instead exposing the emptiness of their hunger for recognition. Where Harbach champions the camaraderie of a college-baseball team, Habash focuses on the individuality and isolation of a single wrestler.

Stephen Florida bluntly recognizes that its narrator’s relentless commitment to winning could lead to his death. Though talented, Stephen has never won a national championship and thinks about the title “every day, every hour, at least 20 times an hour.” This obsession shapes Stephen’s voice. He speaks with clipped intensity, his voice a deranged mix of puerile humor, bodily fixation, and the sort of phrases you might find pinned over locker-room doors: “Wrestling is, at its core, one passion set against another passion for the purpose of determining which is stronger.” Habash nicely captures the messiness of athlete slang—idiosyncratic and clichéd, philosophically blunt, and, despite its flights into sexism and homophobia, a language lunging toward tenderness. “Let’s go, sweet child. I’ll tuck you in,” Stephen tells a teammate before bed.

Intimacy and violence intersect throughout the novel. Sparring with a teammate, Stephen describes the “outgrown nubby flaps of skin all down his [teammate’s] spine,” a condition that disgusts opponents but attracts women in the library. The wrestlers are deeply familiar with each other’s bodies, yet reject the implications of getting so close. This is especially true for Stephen and his only friend on the team, a freshman named Linus. Their teammates make homophobic jokes at their expense because, in Stephen’s mind, they’re “the best two wrestlers on the team.” In the minds of the wrestlers, men can only relate as opponents or lovers, in approved or shameful terms.

The intimate friendship shared by Linus and Stephen does not fit within this simple binary. Though they are as close as lovers—and thus assumed to be gay—their connection is not erotic. Linus’s naivety, humility, and superior skills offset Stephen’s megalomania and ambition: “I am more enthusiasm than talent, so what happens if my enthusiasm is taken away?” Stephen wonders, in a rare moment of vulnerability. Though Stephen tries to assume a paternal role, Linus does the caretaking, buying Stephen sandwiches when he’s hurt and gifting him sticks of deodorant.

Romantically, Stephen proves rather inept, subverting the image of the athlete who attracts women easily. He briefly dates Mary Beth, a funny, intelligent artist who overlooks his asceticism and social incompetence. His affection for her is intense, awkward—not surprising for a college courtship—and his feelings, though genuine, seem compromised by the hypercompetitive logic of wrestling: “There have been ten billion women in the world, stretching, speaking, itching, laughing, eating, burping, and none of them have made the impression Mary Beth has made.” To Stephen, there is no better compliment than to be ranked number one.

A marked shift in the novel’s content and form comes when a midseason knee injury derails Stephen’s training, and he chooses a quick fix over a more thorough repair. The straightforward shape of the story’s first section crumbles in its second, becoming a fragmented collage of delusions and dreams. Here, Stephen goes from being lovably ambitious to dangerously narcissistic: He sabotages Linus, stands up Mary Beth, steals a truck, spies on a professor he thinks is a murderer, and trespasses at the home of the wrestler who injured his knee.

Stephen isn’t the only character in the novel struggling with destructive impulses. One player fluctuates between losing and gaining 40 pounds at the behest of the coach. An assistant coach sexually assaults a player. Stephen shadows an oil-field worker who spends his nights alone reading violent erotica. At the oil fields where he works for a day, Stephen gets reduced to a body: either a laborer or a lover to the man a career counselor has tasked him with observing. Stephen fills a similar role for a male professor who seeks to seduce him despite his objections. These men all share an inescapable loneliness intensified by a desire to possess what they want—in Stephen’s case, a championship—that on a larger scale hardly seems worth it.

The energy Stephen puts into wrestling chips away at his mental health, and following his injury, full scenes regularly give way to decontextualized thoughts. Stephen might watch a sparrow hop around in a parking lot, for instance, then say, for no apparent reason, “I smear myself all over the inside of my room.” His breakdown feels like the only appropriate outcome for a person stripped of his one defining quality. Wrestling, quite literally, gives Stephen his identity. His real name is Steven Forster, but his wrestling-scholarship letter was mistakenly addressed to Stephen Florida, so he took on the name. For Stephen, nothing matters outside of the sport: “I would trade my family and Linus and Mary Beth and all the kid friends I had growing up that I can’t remember anymore for a championship in Kenosha.”

Stephen’s mindset has its roots in the myth of the self-made man, in a culture that often excuses cruelty toward others as a necessary component of male genius. This sort of selfishness might drive one toward what are historically considered masculine aims, like honor or power. However, in the figure of Stephen, whose wrestling career is destined to be forgotten, Habash reveals the futility of athletic greatness, a goal that all but requires desensitization. “If you just buy into the craziness, you’re a lot better off,” Stephen says early in the book, speaking to wrestling, but also to the unobtainable ideals of manliness that help push him beyond his limits.

Stephen’s most prominent act of “buying in” is his decision to ignore how wrestling has destroyed his body. The novel rarely dwells on the potential consequences of wrestling through injury; rather, Habash glorifies certain aspects of Stephen’s sacrifice. This is not a shortcoming of the book, but an unfortunate byproduct of writing about athletes, who, throughout their careers, are often confronted with the kind of choice Achilles faced: self-annihilating glory or longevity? Even knowing what Stephen has endured, it’s easy for readers to root for his return to the mat—who would ever cheer for Achilles to choose a long, happy life? Stephen’s comeback cleverly forces readers to question their complicity as sports fans. Even readers keenly aware of how dangerous Stephen’s pursuit of the championship is might want him to press on, if only so that his suffering is “worth it” in the end.

Impressively, Habash traces Stephen’s increasing derangement without resorting to clichés. The novel is both funny and authentically creepy, and even as his mental health and relationships deteriorate, Stephen remains consistently surprising, accessible, and engaging. Stephen Florida’s grim portrait of ambition led astray captures how competitiveness and masculinity can unravel those who blindly follow its codes. In Habash’s world, to man up is to break down. The growing number of stories about real-life athletes suffering similar crises has made that idea especially—and regrettably—timely.

Why Don’t More People Consider Competitive Cheerleading a Sport?

2017-05-02T16:00:42-04:00

In one episode of the reality-TV show Cheer Squad, four members of a competitive-cheerleading team sit on blue mats at their gym discussing a common problem they face. Their all-girl squad, known as Cheer Sport Great White Sharks, is a two-time world champion—but they have a hard time getting respect for it.

“You know what my biggest pet peeve is with cheer?” 16-year-old Nubs (the team goes by their nicknames) asks the group. “Everyone just doesn’t think it’s a sport.”

“People think we use pom-poms and dance around,” her teammate, 17-year-old B.H., chimes in. “That’s so different from what we actually do.”

“I’ve been asked, ‘Who are you cheering for?’ I’m like, ‘no, no, no,’” Nubs laments.

During the series, the team is training for the biggest and most prestigious event of the season, the Cheerleading Worlds competition (this year’s three-day contest in Orlando, Florida, ended Monday). As the girls hint, but as few viewers might know, squads like the Great White Sharks don’t perform at school football or basketball games. That more visible kind of cheer is known as collegiate, or sideline, cheer, where the primary purpose is to support other sports teams. Instead, the Great White Sharks are All Star cheerleaders. Though similar in some ways to their sideline counterpart, there are a couple of crucial differences. Highly trained All Star teams—mainly made up of, but not limited to, 11- to 18-year-olds—belong to private gyms and aren’t attached to any school. Their top goal isn’t to support another team, but to win competitions, which is one of the main criteria that determines whether an athletic activity is a sport.

And yet, as the Great White Sharks’ frustrations indicate, All Star cheer often has a difficult time being taken seriously. Some of this dismissal has to do with the fact that cheer is one of the rare predominantly female sports. Plus, both sideline and competitive cheerleaders maintain a hyper-feminine appearance (heavy makeup, short skirts, bedazzled spandex uniforms, and styled hair) during routines. But people also tend to lump both types of cheer together—despite the fact that All Star cheer has gained traction in recent years as a sport, and schools don’t tend to label sideline cheer as such. Though it’s still occasionally mistaken for its sideline counterpart, competitive cheer has nonetheless emerged as a powerful rebuttal to the decades-old belief that cheerleading can’t be a sport.

* * *

Competitive cheer is relatively new compared with its sideline cousin, which has been around since the 1880s but only opened to women in the 1920s. Now, 97 percent of all cheerleaders are women. The national governing body of competitive cheer, the United States All Star Federation (USASF), was founded in 2003 to establish safety regulations and competition standards, and to certify coaches. The next year saw the formation of the world governing body, the International Cheer Union. Competitive cheer’s popularity has since exploded: More than 1,000 teams—again made up of mostly young women—competed in February at the 2017 National Cheerleading Association’s All Star National Championship.

Though sideline and All Star share some of the same skill sets, they’re now performed for nearly reverse purposes: sideline mostly to entertain, with the possibility of competing if a team is talented enough, and All Star mostly to compete, with their historical role as entertainers always in mind. “Collegiate cheer is based on crowd appeal. All Star cheer is based on skill-building,” said Kenny Sampson, the host of the podcast Cheer Talk Radio, who has been coaching at All Star gyms for about 15 years, told me.

High schools and colleges, as well as the National Collegiate Athletic Association, don’t recognize cheer in general as a sport, indirectly—but powerfully—influencing how All Star cheer is perceived. In 2012, a federal appeals court ruled that schools cannot sanction cheer squads as official athletic programs—the most recent court decision on cheer’s standing as a sport. In that particular case, Quinnipiac University tried to eliminate its women’s volleyball team in order to fund its competitive-cheer squad, which the judge said was “too underdeveloped and disorganized to be treated as offering genuine varsity athletic opportunities for students.” The court cited Title IX, the law that prohibits gender discrimination by educational institutions that receive federal funding.

“[Cheer] does not reach the criteria according to Title IX that every other sport also has to reach for the NCAA to qualify it,” explained Deborah Slaner Larkin, Chief of Special Projects at the Women’s Sports Foundation, referring to school-based, not All Star, programs. “There is no structure for competition, minimum financial support, and there aren’t consistent divisions.”

Under Title IX, schools that receive federal funding must give male and female students equal opportunities to play sports, but not necessarily the same sports. So by adding a mostly female cheer squad to its athletic roster, a school can cut another, perhaps more expensive, women’s team—as Quinnipiac tried to do. And so for women’s sports advocates, the issue often isn’t so much that cheer can’t be athletic, but that schools may use it as an excuse to exclude women from sports dominated by men.

As a result, unsanctioned sideline cheer squads at schools can’t give their female members the same benefits as traditional women’s sports teams. If those squads were sanctioned, they’d likely be taking funding away from other teams. Amid all this, All Star cheer has emerged as an appealing third option for young female athletes seeking a more structured, athletically rigorous, and competition-oriented activity. It’s also seeing major strides in its broader quest for legitimacy: Last December, cheer received provisional status as an Olympic sport, which is the first step toward its official inclusion in the Games. In other words, this next decade could see members of squads like Great White Sharks facing off on the biggest athletic stage in the world.

* * *

All Star cheer has been slowly distinguishing itself from its school-based counterpart for over a decade. Sampson explained that in 2004, for instance, competitive routines still used recognizable “Go Team!”-type chants, which were phased out in the following years. The elements of both sideline and All Star cheer routines remain the same—from pyramids to the familiar pike and spread-eagle jumps—and each uses the same two positions, flyers and bases.

But in All Star cheer, these skills must be mastered at the highest level. All Star cheerleaders must be gymnasts, too, capable of pulling off advanced stunts with impeccable flexibility, balance, and synchronization. “I think it would be very difficult to argue that tumbling, stunting, competitive cheerleading is not a sport,” Ellen Staurowsky, a professor of sport management at Drexel University who specializes in gender equity, told me. “There’s high risk-taking. They’re getting thrown in the air ... It’s undeniable that we have very serious athletes that are very serious about competing.”

All Star teams have two to three practices a week, each lasting up to three hours, according to Sampson. Some young women have three to five additional hours of classes to build their stunting and tumbling skills. That’s nearly 15 hours per week on top of their regular school responsibilities. Which is not to say that sideline cheer isn’t challenging—collegiate cheerleaders can be highly skilled and sometimes even compete, but their squads’ primary aim is ultimately to root for another team.

Not so with All Star cheer. Peyton Mabry, a 19-year-old student at Texas Christian University, cheered as a flyer with Cheer Athletics, probably the best All Star program in the country. It has won 20 gold medals at Cheerleading Worlds competitions, the most of any gym; this year it won the silver medal in the senior large co-ed division. “You can think of [Worlds] like the Super Bowl of competitive cheerleading,” Mabry told me. Like many of her All Star peers, Mabry is a social-media celebrity: She has more than 584,000 combined followers on Instagram and Twitter.

Competitions consist of different teams performing rehearsed routines usually lasting two minutes and 30 seconds before a panel of judges—similar to, say, a gymnastics event. The goal at competition is to ensure that every stunt, tumble sequence, jump, pyramid, and dance move is flawless, which requires precise coordination. “If one person is missing from the team, then a stunt group can’t stunt, and the pyramid can’t go up. There are three people under me that I have to trust not to drop me,” said Kennedy Thames, a flyer with the Rockstar Beatles. Thames is only 16, but she practices three or four times a week and typically participates in 10 competitions a year.

Competitive cheer is not only strenuous, but also dangerous. “It’s an adrenaline sport. It’s rough,” Sampson explained. All Star cheerleaders often say what they do resembles more conventionally male-dominated sports, like football and hockey. “If something goes wrong, someone could end up in the hospital,” Sampson said. He added that All Star comes with one serious downside: “It’s obscenely expensive. Between private lessons, competition fees, uniforms, and travel, it can be anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 a year.”

That level of expense puts girls who want to cheer in a tough position. They can either join their school squad and potentially miss out on opportunities they might have on an official sports team (like funding, experienced coaches, and practice time). Or they can deal with the exorbitant cost of an All Star gym and make the most of those extensive resources.

Cheer as a whole is still one of the few athletic activities where the majority of teams are women-only (one equivalent might be gymnastics or ice skating, where women are more likely to become famous). But given the uncertain position of sideline cheer, it’s easy to see the appeal of a private All Star gym—a space dominated by female athletes that also adheres to the same demanding standards as any traditional sport.

As a result, competitive cheer’s popularity continues to grow with participants and spectators alike. There are currently 4.5 million registered athletes worldwide who are part of the International Cheer Union, and the International Olympic Committee’s interest in cheer comes in part from its “high youth appeal.” Cheer still has two and a half years of provisional status before it’s eligible to apply to become an official Olympic entry, which means it wouldn’t make its debut until after the 2020 Games in Tokyo. But if the petition is successful, the Olympics will be cheer’s biggest opportunity yet to showcase its potential for athleticism—and to defy the outdated notion that it can’t be a sport.

Should Acting Prizes Be Gender-Neutral?

2017-04-12T13:23:35-04:00

This year’s MTV Movie & TV Awards will feature a whole host of unusual categories. Online voters will decide the “Best Kiss,” as they always have, and the “Best On-Screen Duo,” but they’ll also weigh in on the “Best Fight Against the System” (Get Out, Loving, and Mr. Robot are among the options) and the “Best American Story” (where contenders include Transparent and Moonlight). Still, the most newsworthy change for this year’s awards comes in the most routine category: the acting trophies, which will no longer be split up on the basis of gender, but simply given to the “Best Actor in a Movie” and “Best Actor in a Show.”

“We have to constantly be pushing ourselves to not only respond to culture but lead it,” said MTV President Chris McCarthy in a CNN interview announcing the change. “If we’re going to do an award show that celebrates content, why would we not modernize what that looks like?” Though some might raise an eyebrow at the reduction of television and film to “content,” McCarthy said he was listening to MTV’s young audience in making the switch. “They don’t see those lines in the way that generations in the past have,” he said. “So we wanted to take those down. They felt really antiquated.”

It’s a question that has come up for bigger awards ceremonies, too. The Billions star Asia Kate Dillon, who identifies as gender non-binary, recently sent a letter to the Television Academy questioning the gender-specific designations of the Emmys’ acting categories, unsure of whether to submit in Best Supporting Actor or Best Supporting Actress. The Academy immediately responded, noting that any actor can submit themselves in either category for any reason, and assuring Dillon that the Emmys do not enforce or investigate that choice in any way.

“What I learned through my research is that the word ‘actor,’ specifically in reference to those who performed in plays, came about in the late 1500s as a non-gendered word,” Dillon said in an interview with Variety. “It applied to all people, regardless of anatomical sex or gender identity,” while “actress,” in origin, specifically refers to female performers. Though Dillon expressed great satisfaction at the Television Academy’s prompt response, the question of what “Best Actor” should mean in the 21st century remains a pertinent one.

It’s fairly easy for the MTV Movie & TV Awards to do away with gender designations, because those nominees are decided by the show’s producers (though fans vote on the winners). This year’s movie category is equally balanced between male and female performers, with three apiece, while the TV category has four women and two men nominated (in “Best Comedic Performance,” however, five out of seven nominees are male, while there’s only one woman—and one Demogorgon—nominated as “Best Villain”).

But what would be the impact if the Emmys, or the Academy Awards, totally did away with gender distinctions for its acting prizes (which, in both cases, have existed since their inception)? The Grammys long ago dropped this distinction (in 2011), but are helped by the fact that they hand out trophies to performers in 84 different categories. The Oscars only have four acting awards (lead and supporting, male and female), with five nominees for each category. In an industry still rife with institutional sexism, where male stars still dominate the amount of lead roles available, it’s easy to imagine wild gender imbalances from year to year, even if the lead and supporting categories were expanded to 10 nominees.

Since the Oscars don’t provide statistics on votes for their nominees every year, there are few examples to go off. The Screen Actors Guild Awards do not use the term “actress,” but are still gendered, instead awarding trophies to the “Best Male Actor” and “Best Female Actor” in leading and supporting roles. A more useful example is the Television Critics Association, which gives awards for “individual achievement” in drama and comedy to one actor every year.

The TCAs started handing out acting trophies in 1997, when Andre Braugher and David Hyde Pierce won for Homicide (drama) and Frasier (comedy) respectively. Since then, 15 of the 20 drama awards have gone to men (Edie Falco, Julianna Margulies, Claire Danes, Tatiana Maslany, and Sarah Paulson being the exceptions). The comedy category has been slightly more balanced, with only 13 out of 20 going to men. There have been signs of improvement in recent years—women have won three out of the last five drama and comedy awards—but the disparity is hard to ignore.

The chances that the Oscars or Emmys would do away with gendered categories in the near future seem extremely remote. When handing your nominees to a large group of anonymous voters, it’s tough to exert much control over the outcome, and there’s the very real possibility that men would end up dominating the slates. If so, separate acting categories could perpetuate the simplistic idea that male performers are simply better than their female counterparts. But some might argue that gender-neutral categories could be worth unbalanced nomination lists if they shed more light on Hollywood’s deeper systemic problems—including far fewer speaking roles for actresses and the dearth of female directors. Whatever the big ceremonies decide to do, MTV’s rules change and critiques like Dillon’s suggest the issue will at least demand wider attention in coming years.

Not Wanting to Be a Token in Tech

2017-03-24T09:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Two readers are very wary of hiring practices in Silicon Valley that strongly take gender into account. Here’s Sally:

This article [“Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?”] refers a couple times to people saying that hiring women or minorities may “lower the bar” as some kind of evidence of bias. But usually when people say that, they are referring to using gender as a criteria for hiring. When you do that, you have to give less weight to technical merit.

And indeed, towards the end of the article, using such criteria is advocated. Whenever you set a “goal” (i.e. quota) that 40 percent of your workforce should have quality X when X has nothing to do with your ability, you are going to get people with lower-than-average ability. What’s worse, you have a situation where those in the company with quality X have less ability than those without that quality, which only reinforces the stereotypes about those people—which is unfair to those Xs who are competent.

Personally, I’d much rather companies focus on treating their female employees equally than worry about increasing the number of female employees. But that’s just me.

It’s also Carla Walton, a ~~female~~ engineer in HBO’s Silicon Valley:

More of Carla vs. Jared here. This next reader has an outlook and attitude similar to Sally’s:

I’m a senior tech executive in Silicon Valley who happens to be female. I also have a male name, which makes initial introductions interesting. (“Oh, I thought you would be a man...”) If it matters, in addition to leading an R&D technical team at work, I’m on [the board of a computer engineering department], and a startup advisor [for a prominent venture capital firm].

I have a lot to say about this article. On one side, I am burned out on the “women in tech” topic. I want to be included/recruited because I totally kill it and always bring my A-game—and never ever ever because I am a woman.

Being a token mascot isn’t a respectable job. In my experience, the women who vocally wave the “I’m a woman in tech!” banner have shitty or non-existent technical skills. I could tell numerous stories about women who are using that banner yet they can’t write a basic if-then-else statement, let alone spell A-P-I. It makes it harder for the rest of us.

One topic that wasn’t covered in the article is the additional pressure that successful senior women leaders have to inherit sometimes. Their male colleagues dump the gender gap on them to fix, and ask them to make the culture more inclusive. This places further burden on women leaders to carry the load for the up-and-coming females.

I have to say, true male champions and advocates are the key to fixing this quagmire. Many men say the right supportive things, but the decisions they make on who they promote or hire say otherwise. The male champions, who stand up for their female peers, who consistently demonstrate creating an environment that is conducive for women—they should be promoted into senior leadership.

One last ah-ha: I’ve never been hired or promoted by a woman—only men. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t many women senior enough to make those decisions, or if I just was pulled towards male-dominated roles. But in 15 years of my tech career, the woman manager who had every reason to promote me did not. One month into her maternity leave, her male colleague promoted me because he figured out who was totally killing it.

Please don’t publish my name, but I’m happy to discuss further if you’re writing a follow-up. I’m knee deep into AI apps for holographic data conversion and don’t have time for another “get more women in tech” side project. Plus I need to stay employed. Bills, yo! :)

If you have a different experience than hers or Sally’s, or disagree with their views on gender in hiring, please drop us a note: hello@theatlantic.com.

Becoming ‘Everyone’s Little Sister’ to Deal With Sexism

2017-03-22T15:00:00-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

A reader with a Ph.D. in physics has been working in the tech industry for many years, but she’s struggled to cope with the huge gender imbalance at the start-ups she’s worked for. She feels she can’t fully be herself—or a mother:

When I entered the office for my interview, I saw every head in the glass-enclosed conference room pop up and look over at me. I’ve trained myself to have a sort of small, permanent smile plastered on my face, and I hoped, as the room was looking me over, that my smile looked natural, approachable, and genuine.

That is the persona I’ve settled on: Approachable and genuine. Everyone’s little sister.

In that way, I can inhabit a special place, still allowed to be feminine, someone everyone roots for but no one is sexually attracted to, or intellectually threatened by. Everyone wants his kid sister to win. Everyone will defend his little sister from bullies.

Sure, you may forget she is a girl; you may leave her out of some things because you forget about her; but you are not going forget her all together. And you certainly aren’t going to want your friends to sleep with her.

Every face that turned my way that day was a male face. At this late-stage start-up, the engineering office had never had a woman in a technical role work. I know, because at the end of my interview I asked: “There is no right or wrong answer, but I was curious. Are there any women who work here?” No—aside from the office admin—but they sincerely hoped to hire more women.

I accepted the job because I was desperate. The start-up I had previously worked for had failed to “start up” and they stopped paying their employees. I hoped, during my tenure at the new start-up, that I could push for more women to be hired and that I could make the office a better place for them to work.

Being the only woman at the whiteboard isn’t an entirely new experience for me. Earning my Ph.D. in Physics, the field wasn’t exactly overrun with women, but at least there were women. I learned in graduate school how to be everyone’s little sister—how I need to repeat myself over and over again, and then send an email, to get my point or idea across. I learned to let the guys yell themselves hoarse over a problem, take notes, and come back with the answer. Even when you have the answer, they still might not listen to you. But I learned not to take it personally.

At one research internship, I was put at a desk at the opposite side of the building from the rest of the all-male research group. I was given three pages of handwritten notes and told to get to it. The other intern, male of course, was placed with the group and worked side-by-side with the others on projects.

Towards the end of the internship, my adviser, who was only a few years older than me, took me out to lunch, and proceeded to proposition me, even though I had only been married a few weeks earlier. I learned that, perhaps, I dressed too nicely. Wore too many skirts and dresses. I learned that men early in their careers don’t necessarily know how to communicate with their female colleagues. It is a skill you have to learn.

So at my new job, I had a bit more experience under my belt (since I now generally only wore pants to work). I had learned what to expect, and how to better navigate the workplace. I had learned that you will be expected to open the door when the doorbell rings, to wash the office dishes and clean up the office kitchen. (Not that others won’t, but that obviously you, the woman, will do these things.) I learned that if a man comes in and shakes everyone’s hand, he will not shake yours; that you will be expected to answer the phones so that it “seems like we have a receptionist.”

When I recount my workplace adventures, I find myself saying “Everyone is very nice, but …”. And to give my boss credit, he is fantastic mentor, who knows how to communicate with everyone on his team. He is observant and approachable. When, for some unfathomable reason, the topic of discussion in our company chat room was “Should Pregnant Women Be Allowed To Make Their Own Decisions,” he put a stop to it and reprimanded the instigators of the conversation.

I, as Everyone’s Little Sister, am able to selectively dish it back to everyone. But not all the time. I have to pick and choose my moments. And it’s exhausting. And maddening.

My blood is still boiling about comment a colleague made a few weeks ago, saying “I fully support paid maternity leave, but you have to admit, pregnant women are a huge inconvenience to businesses.” And even though my company offers four months of paid maternity leave, I know I can’t stay here if I want to have a baby with my husband. I cannot be pregnant here—I know, because one morning, a coworker mimed to us what happens in a miscarriage, saying “miscarriages only happen to certain types of women.” I know, because if my shirt is a little too thin, and it’s cold, and my nipples peak through, people will stare at my breasts. (Now I add extra padding to my bras to prevent this from happening.) I can only imagine how they would handle a pregnant woman. I know, because there is no closed-off room in this open-concept, glass office to nurse a baby. I know, because in the two years I’ve worked there, they haven’t hired any women in the office.

Diversity is not important to them. So I need to go. To someplace bigger, where there are more women around. Where I have some more protections and some more anonymity. Because it is pretty damn hard to be Everyone’s Little Sister when you are just wanting to be yourself.

Why Female Cannibals Frighten and Fascinate

2017-03-13T10:23:00-04:00

“Go on—eat it.” With these words, the 16-year-old vegetarian protagonist in Julia Ducournau’s Raw is urged to consume meat by her older sister and classmates at her new veterinary school. When Justine (Garance Marillier) refuses, her sister Alexia forces the meat into her mouth anyway, in a violent and bloody hazing ritual. The incident triggers within the pretty, shy, and brilliant student a sudden and overwhelming desire for flesh—namely, human flesh.

With the arrival of this stunning French drama, released in the U.S. last Friday, the strange archetype of the female cannibal seems to have entered the zeitgeist. Much like the leads in the new Netflix series Santa Clarita Diet and the 2015 Polish film The Lure, Justine is compelled by a hunger that’s both deviant and truly dangerous. In Santa Clarita Diet, Drew Barrymore plays a sweet suburban cannibal, and The Lure, like Raw a festival favorite, stars two young people-eating mermaids. (That both unusual foreign films garnered enough interest to secure U.S. releases this year is remarkable.)

Having spent the last five years studying the female cannibal (an admittedly odd subject even in academic circles), I’ve been fascinated by how the subject has gained more mainstream visibility of late. While the female cannibal isn’t new to pop culture, she’s relevant in ways that go beyond shock value, by capturing ever-present social anxieties about gender, hunger, sex, and empowerment. These new works center on women who, in addition to eating humans, negotiate and subvert expectations for how women should look and behave. They’re motivated by physical hunger but also by sexual desire, making them an extension of the femme fatale—the beautiful woman who deceives and ensnares men. In eating flesh, characters like Justine simply redirect this fear from the metaphorical to the physical. There’s a persistent stereotype that women will “suck men dry”; well, these ones will literally devour you.

For decades, cannibal women have appeared in a range of film genres. They’re often portrayed as literal monsters—because it’s much easier to accept a person eating someone if viewers are told they’re actually a demon, like the titular uber-babe in Jennifer’s Body (2009). But there are plenty of examples of human women who charm and eat men, with an early example being 1970’s Die Weibchen, which is set at a women’s health spa where men are meat. There are also cannibal horror-comedies, such as 1973’s Cannibal Girls and 2009’s Doghouse. People-eating turns up in horror-dramas like the 1989 cult film Parents and Jim Mickle’s 2013 remake We Are What We Are; in both films, the mothers knowingly prepare food for their families using victims their husbands kill. The horror genre is rife with female cannibals, with particularly graphic examples being Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001) and Marina de Van’s In My Skin (2002).

Like many of those films, Raw isn’t exactly easy viewing. It’s likely many people first heard of Raw from a spate of headlines declaring the movie was so gruesome that some audience members needed medical attention. (As The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw bragged in the headline of his review: “I didn’t faint … ”) While the carnage in Raw is harrowing, it’s specifically designed to help illustrate Justine’s dark evolution. The scene where she’s peer-pressured into eating meat by both her sister and her classmates is one of many that harken back to other coming-of-age stories. A moment in which Justine’s class is drenched in blood, for example, recalls the infamous prom scene in 1976’s Carrie. Ironically, this peer pressure opens up a space for Justine to question society’s expectations about eating, and to embrace her abnormal cravings.

While the premise of Santa Clarita Diet is obviously inspired by the horror genre, it’s really a family-centric black comedy that aims to shock with over-the-top gore. Barrymore’s Sheila Hammond is a middle-class, 40-something realtor living with her husband Joel and their teenaged daughter Abby. After Sheila dies in an absurd scene featuring more vomit than her body could’ve possibly contained (just one instance of gleefully offensive content), she reanimates with an enthusiasm for life and commits to a new high-protein diet of human meat.

The Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Lure is strikingly different from Raw and Santa Clarita Diet in both tone and style. The fantastical horror-musical follows two beautiful mermaid sisters with entrancing voices and a hunger for humans who take to land to perform at a seedy nightclub. Unlike Sheila and Justine, both everyday women who turn into something frightening, the sisters Golden (Marta Mazurek) and Silver (Michalina Olszanska) are non-humans who can pass for mortals (just add water, and their shiny, massive tails are revealed). The film draws from Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” and emphasizes the ghastliness of the original fairytale—beneath the glitz there is horror and a profound sadness. With their fine looks, Golden and Silver embody the common warning that beauty can conceal danger. Golden’s sharp teeth first emerge when she’s in her mermaid form in the bath; their purpose is revealed when she effortlessly seduces a man whom she devours.

It’s significant that the grotesqueness of these women’s eating habits—their proclivity to gorge on human flesh—is rendered through beautiful bodies. Portrayals of female hunger in visual culture more broadly are tangled up in social expectations about how women manage their bodies, expectations shaped in part by fad diets, targeted advertising, and celebrity culture. Eating is thus not just about nourishment, but also about appearance. It’s why when celebrities admit that they like fast food, too, or that they don’t like dieting either, they seem relatable in a way that can feel carefully orchestrated. When these “rule-breaking” women happen to be gorgeous, their rebelliousness becomes that much more appealing.

Similarly, the attractiveness of Sheila, Justine, Golden, and Silver gives them a kind of permission to engage in less socially sanctioned forms of eating. Their appearance helps shield them from judgment about their shocking behavior, whether their feeding is played for humor or horror. These women’s voraciousness when they handle meat—with their hands, gnawing, covered in blood—reinforces the idea that the act of eating itself is unsightly, if not repulsive.

In Raw, the scenes where the sweet-looking Justine eats meat are sickening in their impressive realism. Santa Clarita Diet, too, regularly emphasizes the fact that the boundlessly cute Sheila is eating not anonymous meat, but actual people with distinguishable body parts, like her snack-bag of fingers, as well as her ubiquitous travel cup (swapping out the popular wholesome green smoothie for blended meat). It’s horrifying, too, when The Lure’s lovely Golden rips apart her food: Her remorselessness suggests she still views humans as flesh to be eaten, unlike Silver, who’s earnestly pretending to be one of them.

Unlinked from food, hunger can be a metaphor for other things, most often sexual desire, and it’s not hard to see a connection between the carnivorous and bedroom appetites of these cannibals. In Raw, Justine experiences a sexual awakening alongside her newfound hunger for humans. Since Justine is a virgin, her nascent teenaged sexuality is portrayed as dangerous for potential partners. She’s plagued by a heady combination of feelings, hormones, and needs that she cannot understand or control—yet another salient theme in teen-centric films. What makes Raw so notable and poignant is that it doesn’t approach Justine’s feelings in a patronizing way. She isn’t drawn as a silly, immature girl, but as a carefully realized character whose motivations have very real consequences for those around her.

Santa Clarita Diet in particular is heavy-handed with its fixation on sex: In its opening scene, Joel unsuccessfully tries to initiate sex with his wife and sighs about her reluctance. But death supercharges Sheila’s libido, to the point where her constant demand for sex becomes a source of jokes; she insists, for instance, that even the Target sign is erotic to her. What saves the portrayal from veering into borderline-judgmental treatment of female desire is that Sheila remains picky even in her lust: Her sleazy co-worker’s disturbing attempt at seduction means he becomes her first human meal.

Silver, who appears as a teenager like Justine, becomes infatuated with a human man, Mietek, and experiences the powerful feelings of first love. And like Justine, Silver’s desire is so strong that she’ll do whatever it takes to be with him, despite Golden’s warnings. When the selfish Mietek says he only wants to have a sexual relationship with a human, Silver makes the drastic choice to undergo surgery to become human. Silver captures the way a woman might bend to societal pressures and change herself to please a lover, whereas the more violent and flesh-hungry Golden is sure of who she is and cannot understand her sister’s willingness to give up her body.

Freed of so many “normal” inhibitions, these cannibal women are also free to—in the parlance of female empowerment—truly become themselves. In Raw, Justine revels in the autonomy she has at her minimally supervised new school and develops an independent identity. After developing a taste for human flesh, she continues to test the boundaries of what’s acceptable, enthusiastically pushing past even the most debauched behavior of her peers.

The cannibal mermaids in The Lure are also forced to consider how their identities change outside of the sea, and in proximity to their food. Golden and Silver play at being human, living with a family of singers and working at the nightclub. But Silver goes against her true nature and decides to live among those she’d otherwise eat, finding empowerment via choice. Though Golden doesn’t seem to understand, she remains on land out of love for her sister.

Meanwhile, Sheila, after her transformation, appears to be driven solely by her id: She buys a Range Rover, goes out dancing, and remorselessly murders for food. Except for her people-eating, Sheila 2.0 is all-around better. Her husband is thrilled by their revitalized sex life, her enthusiasm suits her career, and her neighbors suddenly befriend her. Sheila’s teenage daughter is the only character who expresses concern, wondering if her mother can still feel love. Cannibalism thus serves as a metaphor for Sheila’s liberation: By “dying,” she’s released from the boredom of her previously formulaic life as a woman trying to “have it all.” In many of these cases, characters draw power from indulging in what might be humanity’s biggest taboo—and having crossed that line, they’re less afraid to cross others.

Cannibal women in pop culture continue to reflect deep and persistent social fears about female autonomy. The physical danger that characters like Justine pose to those around her aligns with the belief that women’s bodies should be monitored and regulated—an idea that plays out in debates about issues like reproductive health. The way Justine is shamed by her classmates echoes how sex, bodies, and desires are often marked as sources of embarrassment. Sheila, too, is initially mocked for her increased libido, which eventually becomes a source of fulfillment.

On the surface, these characters still reflect stubborn stereotypes—they’re beautiful, manipulative, and deadly. But they also turn these traits around to offer an image of resistance to society’s demand that women keep their appetites under control. If viewers can get past the stomach-churning sight of a girl biting off a boy’s lip or of a woman munching on human fingers, they may find themselves empathizing with such acts of liberation, however symbolic or messy.

In Germany, Parents Can Sue the Government for Failing to Provide Child Care

2017-01-10T10:11:35-05:00

You’ve had a baby—congratulations! Now, when will you be returning to work? For most parents, their answer depends on the arrangements they can find for child care—this is especially true for mothers, who, despite many changes to society over the past century, remain primarily responsible for childrearing across industrialized nations. The difficulty of securing daycare varies drastically country by country.

In 2013, Germany declared that every child over the age of 1 has the legal right to a space in a public daycare facility. This past fall, while America’s election unfolded, Germany’s highest court took this mandate one step further: It ruled that parents may sue for lost wages if they can’t find a place for their child in a public daycare center. This decision came in response to three mothers who filed a lawsuit declaring that authorities neglected to create the necessary daycare slots required by the 2013 ruling. Because the mothers couldn’t find a child-care center with any openings in their hometown of Leipzig, their lawyers argued that they were unable to return to work after giving birth, resulting in a loss of earnings. Chief Justice Ulrich Herrmann ruled in the mothers’ favor on October 20. (Stay-at-home parents, by contrast, wouldn't have damages to recoup because a lack of child-care availability hasn't resulted in a loss of wages.)

This law may seem crazy to Americans, but it follows as a natural development from Germany’s long history of offering governmental support for families, and its more recent history of encouraging mothers’ paid employment. By contrast, the American system, which considers families a private matter, looks crazy in its own right when compared to much of the globe. The U.S. has some of the most overworked parents, the lowest public commitment to caregiving, and highest rates of maternal and child poverty of any western industrialized country.

The court’s decision is part of a broader conversation taking place in Germany and around the world about who is responsible for the care of children in an age when two out of three mothers work outside the home in economically developed countries. In the case of Germany, the government’s decision to offer high-quality, low-cost, universal daycare helps to spread the expense of childrearing across society, suggesting that it is not parents’ job alone to either raise children themselves or contract it out and pay for that service themselves. (Germany’s public child-care system is state-subsidized and its operation is decentralized, so parents’ contributions are set by the regions and vary according to family size and income.) Germany’s approach is not merely some charitable effort to help families; it also comes with real economic gain, as child-care availability is known to have a positive impact on women’s employment decisions.

For Germany, the idea that the government has an obligation to provide childcare for young children is part of a recent shift. The cultural and legal assumption in Germany has long been that mothers’ main commitment should be to their children, as evident in the outdated adage “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (“Children, Kitchen, Church”), which intimates that women’s place is with their children, tending to the cooking, and at church. Combining work and family for German women was explicitly discouraged for decades by policies that reinforced a traditional gender division of labor, including extremely generous maternity leave (up to three years), generous tax breaks to single-earner families, short school days, and public healthcare and pension systems that automatically granted insurance rights to an economically inactive wife of a working husband. In essence, these policies encouraged women to stay home and care for young children, and the government provided mothers with material supports to make this possible.

But since the mid-2000s, Germany has been forced to reconsider this breadwinner-homemaker model. The country confronts a low fertility rate, labor shortage, and gender-equality mandates from the European Union. How might a nation tackle these three related dilemmas? By supporting women who work. This means that mothers alone cannot be responsible for childrearing.

Along these lines, in 2007, Germany initiated a major shift toward a new “sustainable family policy” model that promotes mothers’ continuous employment, invests heavily in early childhood education services rather than giving cash to families, and generally endorses a dual-earner family model—a striking break from the previous policy regime. Whether the intentions stem from pronatalist, economic, and/or feminist motives, the court decision in favor of the Leipzig mothers signals to German mothers that they can and should be able to return to work after giving birth, and the government has a duty to facilitate their entry back into the labor market. By providing universal public child care, and giving parents the legal right to sue if they can’t access this service, it sends the message that the answer to “who should care for children?” is, in part, the government.

The German example serves as quite the counterpoint to America’s current approach to this question. Securing daycare in the U.S. is, to be blunt, a nightmare. The U.S. has no universal child care prior to the start of elementary school, which begins around age five. Even then, there is no universal program once school lets out. Without a public option the vast majority of families have to find private solutions. (The limited federal child-care and early education provisions like the Head Start program are largely means-tested for the poorest citizens.)

Families that must turn to the market find vast differences in the cost, quality, and availability of care. These disparities are chronicled in The New America Care Report, which finds that full-time center-based daycare runs an average of $9,589 a year for children ages 0 to 4 in the U.S.—higher than the average cost of in-state college tuition—and costs much more in dense urban areas. Until as recently as 2013, there were no national regulations governing quality of service, staffing, or health codes for daycare facilities, and, as a result, the options were all over the map, both in terms of standards and outcomes. The sociologists Julia Wrigley at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Joanna Dreby at The University at Albany SUNY found that the death rate for infants was seven times higher in home-care settings than in daycare centers. The lack of regulations for child-care standards means that wealthier families are able to provide safer, higher quality environments for their children than lower-income families.

The U.S.’s laissez-faire approach to child care also creates dramatic disparities across the socioeconomic spectrum with regard to mothers’ labor-force participation. Both wealthy and poor women often face child-care difficulties and inflexible workplaces in the United States. But their options to resolve these problems couldn’t be more different. Higher-income mothers can more easily leverage their resources to pay for (safer, better, more reliable) child-care solutions, while poor mothers cannot. Higher-income mothers are also more likely to be employed in occupations that offer job security and policies like paid maternity leave or employer-sponsored child care. Given the prohibitively high cost of daycare, lower-income mothers may leave the labor force in order to care for their children themselves. Sociologists have documented how detrimental these job turnovers following childbirth can be for mothers because they tend to spur a “downward spiral” in occupational achievement and lifetime earnings. Limited access to child care hampers economic growth more broadly because it inhibits parents’ ability to participate in the paid labor force.

The U.S. economy relies on mothers to work outside the home and to raise the country’s next generation of citizens. Mothers do so with with no reliable child-care system and few other federal family policy benefits. The lack of public support for mothers’ caring labor introduces what Nancy Folbre, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Paula England, a professor of sociology at New York University, call the “free rider” problem. The benefits of mothers’ childrearing spread widely across society (to employers, colleagues, neighbors, friends, spouses, their future children), yet mothers bear a disproportionate share of the costs. England, along with the sociologist Michelle Budig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found that mothers literally pay a price for childrearing: Women experience a seven percent wage penalty for each child they have. The size of this “motherhood penalty” varies for women depending on factors such as race, age, marital status, and number of children. The penalty also exists cross-nationally, and is smaller in countries where cultural attitudes are more favorable towards maternal employment.

Universal child care helps resolve the free rider problem. Countries like Germany socialize the cost of childrearing so that mothers alone don’t bear the brunt of the responsibility, and therefore the penalties. The recent court ruling indicates that, at least in Germany, this support is a right, not a privilege.

Child care was on the national agenda in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Secretary Hillary Clinton and President-elect Donald Trump both outlined tax-relief plans to reduce child-care costs for American families. Clinton, who made supporting working families a cornerstone of her platform, proposed to cap the cost of child care, guarantee paid family leave, and institute universal Pre-K for four-year-olds, among other measures. Trump proposed far less in the way of universal supports to families: primarily, a new income-tax deduction for child-care expenses (something that won’t help the neediest families) and paid leave for mothers but not fathers.

Whether these policies come to be or not, women in the U.S. are nevertheless a long way from having the legal right to sue for lost wages like their German counterparts. But should Germany’s efforts pay off in the form of a healthier economy, Americans may want to look to its example and see what can be replicated. What they’ll find is not just good wages and a strong education system, but also a cultural belief that when women work, it can’t also be solely their job to raise the country’s children.

How Wall-Mounted Changing Tables Enabled Moms to Leave the House

2017-01-07T09:30:00-05:00

The baby bottoms of Americans born before the 1980s likely never touched a diaper-changing station in a public restroom. Prior to the ’80s, when parents, and mothers in particular, went to shop or go out to eat, they usually had to fold themselves into the back of a car, balance their wriggling infant on a toilet seat, or crouch on a dirty bathroom floor to change their child’s diaper.

In the decades since, changing tables have grown more common, but they still can be hard to find, especially for dads. That is slowly changing: Last fall, President Obama signed a bill that will require all bathrooms in buildings controlled by the federal government to provide baby-changing stations, including in men’s rooms.

The placement of changing tables may seem like a minor design decision, but their availability relates to shifts in the larger patterns of care and work. Over the last 100 years, the availability of changing tables has tracked remarkably closely with trends in American parenting. The history of the device—as well as its future, as hinted at by that new law—is intertwined with the increasing number of dual-income households and the popularity of products designed with parents’ convenience in mind, as well as some of the most important recent changes in how Americans spend their days.

Well before parents came to expect publicly-available changing tables, many mothers simply limited their activities away from the home, in part to avoid uncomfortable diaper changes. It was this response that inspired an early and surprising champion of changing stations: the power-hungry, domineering New York urban planner Robert Moses. Before Moses—the man who would be immortalized in Robert Caro’s 1974 book The Power Broker—oversaw the creation of a network of highways, the United Nations building, and numerous public-housing complexes, he made mothers’ lives easier. On a weekend stroll in 1914, the labor advocate and sociologist Frances Perkins told Moses that mothers have to trudge home from Central Park every time their baby’s diaper needs changing—their time in a splendid public space was being cut short. A young and visionary civil servant, Moses imagined diaper-changing stations dotting New York’s parks, enabling mothers to enjoy more uninterrupted time outdoors.

Moses’s diaper-changing rooms—the first of their kind—became available on New York’s Jones Beach starting in 1929. But it would take decades for these changing stations to become common features of public restrooms, and what eventually made the need for them more pressing was a number of shifts in family norms. A half century after the new rooms appeared on Jones Beach, more mothers held jobs and the number of single parents and dual-income couples had risen. Working mothers, short on time as they were, needed to be able to take their kids with them when they ran errands. In 1999, Nate Klatt, the marketing coordinator for Koala Corporation, which produces changing tables, summarized what was happening for the automotive trade magazine Ward’s Dealer Business: “High divorce rates, working parents’ guilt over not spending enough time with their kids and high-priced child care have conspired to make children active sidekicks in the parents’ social lives.”

These sidekicks started joining their parents at malls, restaurants, and airports, but such spaces weren’t equipped for them. As parents—particularly mothers—spent more time outside the home, they needed a place to change their baby, who was more likely to be perched in a small stroller than stretched out in a pram that was large enough to allow for discreet diaper-changing.

This was the very problem Jeff Hilger, a medical-device salesman and father living near Minneapolis in the mid-’80s, found himself facing. He and some friends came up with the idea of a fold-out device that could be mounted to a wall, letting parents take care of messy business while on the go. They called it the Koala Bear Kare Baby Changing Station, and sales took off as businesses came to recognize the value in accommodating children. As an L.A. Times reporter noted in 1990, “This is the new world of retailing, where the diaper bag meets the shopping bag.” Realizing that convenience for parents would let them spend more time, and thus money, businesses like McDonald’s and Target soon snapped up wall-mounted changing stations.

These changes spawned a number of other products that catered to on-the-move parents who had kids in tow. The breast pump came onto the market at around the same time, as did more-advanced car seats. Gone were the stately and spacious prams that once transported babies around the neighborhood; instead, parents started wheeling their kids around in compact strollers or strapped their babies into a Snugli, a carrier that sits on parents’ chests and lets them carry their kids around as if in a kangaroo pouch. With a Snugli, parents could keep their infant physically close, even while walking around or running errands.

These innovations reflect a change in how parents spent time with their children, according to Paula Fass, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of The End of American Childhood. In the 1980s, parents were moving in two directions at once: They spent more time on leisure activities, but they also sought to maximize the time they spent with their kids. Parents, Fass says, wanted “the child to be able to fit comfortably into their new lifestyle. Instead of adapting to the child by staying at home, you have the child become part of the pattern.” Devices like the wall-mounted changing table and chest-strap infant carriers made on-the-go caregiving convenient.

This represented a departure from the way mothers used to plan their days. Fass says that mothers used to “literally [stay] at home with their children.” While they cooked or cleaned, mothers would put their kids in the playpen or let them play outdoors. In the 1980s, “Women not only went out to work, but they engaged in a whole lot of other activities that took them outside of the home, to which they felt comfortable—increasingly comfortable—bringing their children. And that’s true with fathers too.” In other words, there came to be more and more spaces where parents spent time with their children.

But even as diaper-changing stations have done a lot to help mothers operate more flexibly outside the home, they haven’t done much to alter the traditional division of child-rearing labor. A changing table is much likelier to be found in a women’s restroom than a men’s restroom. This imbalance keeps fathers from taking care of their children while out and about, and poses an everyday challenge to men in same-sex partnerships.

Changing tables’ absence from men’s rooms harkens to an earlier time, when fathers were usually responsible for fewer of the everyday tasks of parenting. Yet mothers and fathers have slowly moved toward parity in housework and childcare, and some surveys have suggested that young Americans increasingly expect parenthood to be an equally-divided endeavor. As one New York state senator who has advocated for equal access to changing tables wrote in 2015, “If we expect fathers to bear more of the burden of child-care, we must ensure that public accommodations reflect this new normal.”

This gender disparity has led local and state politicians to propose legislation around changing tables, in places like New York state, Honolulu, and California. In 2015, the Californian actor and investor Ashton Kutcher drew attention to the absence of changing tables, lamenting in a Facebook post, “There are NEVER diaper changing stations in mens [sic] public restrooms.” He drafted a Change.org petition calling for Target and Costco to install changing tables in men’s restrooms. It garnered over 100,000 signatures.

The new federal law that Obama signed, the Bathrooms Accessible in Every Situation Act, follows this momentum, requiring changing tables in men’s restrooms. But the law only applies to federal buildings, like post offices and courthouses, which comprise just a tiny fraction of public restrooms. As the social landscape continues to shift, the physical landscape still has catching up to do.

Women Know When Negotiating Isn't Worth It

2017-01-06T05:00:00-05:00

One of the most common explanations for the gender-wage gap is that women simply don’t ask for higher salaries, while men do. The idea that one should “always negotiate your salary” is standard college-counselor fare. In a blog post about the gender wage gap, the U.S. Department of Labor suggests women “aim higher and negotiate better” as one of the possible remedies.

And at first, it seems innocuous, right? Negotiating is one of the few ways workers in today’s economy can secure better salaries and benefits. Women, the thinking goes, should do it or risk being ground up by the merciless gears of capitalism. Or, you know, make at most 93 cents to the dollar.

Women do tend to negotiate less than men do, and some researchers suggest that’s because they justifiably fear they’ll violate societal norms of demure, communal female behavior—and be punished for it. (As one study depressingly found, “Perceptions of niceness and demandingness explained resistance to female negotiators.”) So how should women proceed? In a new paper in NBER, three economics and management researchers find that advising women to “always negotiate” might not be in their best interest—because, it seems, women seem to already know when negotiations won’t work out in their favor.

For the study, the researchers matched people in pairs, with one representing the employer and one the worker. At the start, the workers contributed either $20, $15, or $10 to a pot of money (the amount was determined by their performance on a math problem), and the firms contributed either $25 or $20. The researchers randomly assigned a “default wage” for the worker—either $4 less than they contributed, $2 less, exactly what they contributed, or $2 more.

The worker-employer teams were entered into one of two types of negotiations, all performed over instant message without revealing age, name, or gender. In the first condition, the worker could choose whether to negotiate their salary, and in the second, they had to negotiate, even if they didn’t particularly want to. Either way, they knew both parties would be penalized $5 if they failed to reach an agreement.

Both genders were more likely to choose to negotiate when their “suggested wage” was $4 less than their contribution—in other words, when they stood the most to lose from not negotiating. When they were forced to negotiate, men and women didn’t differ in their success, with both male and female workers netting a gain of about $0.66.

When given the choice, though, the female participants didn’t opt to negotiate as often as the men did. That might at first seem to support the idea that “women don’t ask” for more money or better benefits, and that’s why they don’t receive them.

But the data from the “choice” condition revealed what was really going on: Women were avoiding the negotiations they knew would not end well for them. The likelihood of women losing money tripled if they were forced to negotiate, rather than given the option. “By opting out of negotiations, women are avoiding substantial financial losses,” the study authors write. “That is, women know when to ask.”

Unlike women, men were not particularly likely to opt out of negotiations that they would probably lose. Thus, being forced to negotiate was neither bad nor good for the men, but it was bad for women, says Christine Exley, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who co-authored the study along with Muriel Niederle of Stanford University and Lise Vesterlund at the University of Pittsburgh.

We don’t know from the study why this happened. Did the men like negotiating a little too much? Were the women more psychologically attuned to the potential costs and benefits? Since the “firm” participants couldn’t discern the gender of the negotiator, the typical explanations for gender disparities, like the backlash effect or the double bind, are ruled out here. Catherine Eckel, a behavioral economist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study, said the study suggests one reason for women’s success in negotiating in the real world could be that the ones who negotiate are the ones who are already good at it. Those who aren’t, don’t, and if they were forced to, they wouldn’t necessarily nab the same career gains.

Still, women who practically never negotiate should probably not take this study as evidence they shouldn’t bother trying. In this study, the overwhelming majority of women negotiated when they were at risk of losing money. What’s more, the negotiation experiment was more transparent than a real-life salary discussion. As the study authors explain, they made clear what the worker risked by not negotiating, but “such a benchmark may not be available in many negotiation settings; women may shy away from financially beneficial negotiations if they undervalue what they bring to the table."

Instead, Exley said the results could be a word of caution about the universal call for women to always be more aggressive in their negotiations. That school of thought suggests “all of you women who aren’t negotiating, you should negotiate, too, because we are all doing so well [in negotiations],” she says. But “the women who are choosing not to negotiate would have lost had they entered the negotiation.”

Linda Babcock, author of the popular book Women Don’t Ask, which details the “high cost of avoiding negotiation,” praised Exley’s findings as “solid.” She said the study points to the importance of negotiation training. “Negotiation skill is not something you’re born with, but can be taught” she said.

Eckel, at Texas A&M, meanwhile, said it’s also worth examining other reasons for the gender wage gap, rather than blaming women for not driving a hard enough bargain. “If there are gender differences, why does that mean we have to fix the women?” she said. “Maybe we can change the situation, the rules of the game?”

Being Trans, and an Immigrant, Under the Trump Administration

2017-01-05T04:00:00-05:00

The Immigration and Naturalization Officer told me my documents were “not acceptable.”

When I presented him with my state ID and name-change documents, in a cavernous room with gray walls, lit flat by fluorescent lights, the INS officer, a gray haired white man, told me: “We need proof from a doctor you’ve had your operation.”

I socially and legally transitioned the same year George W. Bush came into office in 2001, the year I also became eligible for American citizenship, the year the September 11 attacks made it harder to be an immigrant, let alone transgender. A documented immigrant from the Philippines, I went to Immigration and Naturalization Services early that year to change the name and gender information on my green card, a necessary step for me to naturalize and claim a U.S. passport as a woman. I brought my hard-won Massachusetts State ID, social security card, and name change documents, all reflecting my new name and gender.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the officer concluded, loud enough so that everyone around could hear. A federal employee might get in trouble for using slurs to refer to clients, but there were no repercussions for using “sir” to refer to a trans woman, as several authorities did during my transition process. “There’s nothing I can do here.”

It didn’t matter that a state agency had ratified my womanhood. And I suspected from the look on the officer’s oddly smooth, unsmiling face that he wouldn’t sympathize with the fact that I was planning to have reassignment surgery in Thailand, but didn’t want to travel there with male documents while presenting as a woman. I was one of the privileged ones who wanted and could afford the surgery to define my gender as legible to federal authorities, and yet I needed first to endure the embarrassment of male documents to do it, the prospect of presenting multiple people with my male passport while appearing to be female, at a time when there was so much more intolerance against transgender people than there is now. (Asked for comment, a representative from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, one of the successor agencies to INS, said that "due to privacy concerns, USCIS can't discuss the details of individual immigration cases," and cited current USCIS policy, updated in 2012, stating that proof of sexual reassignment surgery is not required to update permanent resident cards for transgender people.)

In the wake of Trump's election, transgender Americans are scrambling to obtain U.S. passports and other federal documents that reflect their gender. Many of them have only been openly transgender during a relatively affirming Obama administration and have no idea what to expect from an administration hostile to LGBT rights. People who have not undergone this process have no idea how terrifying it can be to be alone as you meet gatekeeper after gatekeeper who could deny you services and humiliate you at any moment without consequence.

As someone who tried to obtain those documents during the last Republican presidency, I anticipate that transgender Americans may not simply face legal obstacles, but also the possibility that the people charged with providing federal services may openly despise them, and feel no compunction in expressing their hostility given the president’s own antipathy towards minorities.

It’s unclear whether Trump would keep the current passport rules adopted by the Obama administration in 2010, under Hillary Clinton’s direction as secretary of state. Trump has already indicated he would rescind Obama-era directives barring discrimination against trans people in education and health care, and is in favor of leaving trans-related matters to individual states, a principle that if applied would leave transgender people legally unprotected in many parts of the country.

Rather than requiring surgery, the 2010 rules only ask for a doctor’s letter stating that a trans person has undergone “appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.” This change has had significant practical effects for transgender people, especially for those who live in states that continue to require surgery to amend legal identification.

But just as disturbing as rescinding trans-affirming rules, and even more likely, is the possibility that federal employees in charge of processing trans people’s papers will be free to express their transphobic sentiments without consequence, or even refuse to enforce trans-affirming rules, given that their own president has disparaged minorities at whim. As many marginalized groups who have interacted with state authorities can attest, rules on paper mean nothing when the people in charge don’t intend to enforce them. Obama set an example of inclusion, not only with his regulations, but in his words and actions. Given Trump’s example, I have no faith in federal authorities treating minority groups, and transgender people in particular, fairly or respectfully during his administration.

After my own experience with the INS in 2001, I endured the indignity of going to Thailand with my male Philippine passport in 2002 to get reassignment surgery. I could have gone back with the doctor’s note that ratified my womanhood afterward, but I found myself too traumatized to go through all the steps necessary to become a U.S. citizen, to have to face all those people and endure their judgment of my gender identity alone, not knowing if I would even get what I wanted, under a Bush administration that was particularly unfriendly towards everything I am—trans, immigrant, person of color.

So instead, I didn’t leave the country for nearly a decade, too scared to go back to the INS, and just as scared to travel as a man. I missed my brother’s funeral in the Philippines in 2005 because I didn’t have my papers in order, and yet I still couldn’t bring myself to risk the hostility of federal authorities. It was not until after the rules changed that I was able to naturalize in 2012. I still found myself needing to go back to the INS with a pro bono lawyer, even though I was perfectly capable of following the procedures on my own and had no arrest record—a straightforward case. But I needed the lawyer there, to know there was someone on my side, in case the officer refused to follow the law, or to treat me with a modicum of respect.

This time, a black woman greeted me when I came to the counter with my lawyer, and asked me to hand her my papers through a glass window. She didn’t need to be reminded of the law, and she maintained her pleasant smile as she read through my file and understood that I was transgender, and I would be filing for citizenship soon after changing the information on my green card. She wished me good luck as she handed back my papers. A few months later, I would traverse another cavernous room full of cubicles, to go before another INS officer for my naturalization test, and her light Russian accent comforted me as I realized that she too probably came to the U.S. as an immigrant. I capably answered her U.S. civics questions, like the names of my current senators and the definition of a constitutional amendment.

“One last thing, and I’m sorry to have to ask you this,” she then said, and I held my breath, expecting her to compel me to clarify my gender history. It’s not supposed to be their business, nor should it form any basis about their decisions about my citizenship. But I know from experience that people who control my future as a trans person, whether medical or legal, psychological or economic, have the power to ask me whatever they want, and it’s easier to sacrifice my sense of privacy and dignity over being denied the practical needs they offer. So I was prepared to answer her curious questions about my life, my transition, even my genitals, just so I could leave that office with naturalization papers that bore my name and gender, hoping that I wouldn’t need to deal with hostile authorities prying into my private life again.

“You have a literature degree so it’s kind of embarrassing, but you have to prove that you can write in English,” she continued as she leaned over her desk. She then took out a form and asked me to write in a rectangular box, “I live in the United States.”

I wonder if other trans and immigrant applicants getting their green cards and passports in their desired gender will still be treated this way, as equal human beings deserving of respect, regardless of their status or gender identity.

Initiatives have popped up like the Trans Relief Project to help trans citizens to get the necessary funds and guidance to get or update their passports and other federal documents. But trans people will certainly continue to interact with state and federal systems under Trump. If the population at large makes its support heard for the lives and dignity of trans people, whether through large actions like protests and rallies, or personal gestures of support, it can empower them to fight for their dignity and fair treatment. It might also convince authorities that they cannot mistreat minorities with impunity under a Trump administration.

Understanding the Women of Pedro Almodóvar’s Movies

2016-12-29T09:00:00-05:00

In Julieta, the latest from Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director has created his most restrained film to date. This, he admits, was by design. In order for him to properly adapt three of Alice Munro’s stories from her 2004 collection Runaway, he had to strip away what had become his recognizable moves. And so, Julieta features no singing, no hard-to-follow plotlines, and, no outrageous characters to offer comic relief. What remains, and what makes it an unmistakably Almodóvarian drama, though, is its commitment to exploring women’s stories—or rather, women’s suffering.

From his breakout screwball comedy Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) to his late-career melodramas of strong-willed protagonists, Almodóvar’s films find humor and beauty in female hardship. With Julieta, he’s centered an entire movie on a woman’s loss: The eponymous character is first unable to move on after her husband dies in a boating accident and later has to cope by herself when her only daughter leaves their shared home unexpectedly. Spanning several decades, the film marries Munro’s keen attention to the quiet lives certain women lead with Almodóvar’s flamboyant style. Moments of still reflection in Munro’s words become beautifully art-directed scenes that look like stylish tableaux vivants.

Writing for the feminist online magazine Píkara, the Spanish critic and author María Castejón Leorza negatively reviewed Julieta, arguing that in its stylized depiction of suffering, it contributed to what has become Almodóvar’s signature sensibility: the glamorization of pathos and victimhood. To her, this is an element that merely repurposes the latent misogyny of Spain’s patriarchal society. Castejón Leorza’s complaint against Almodóvar is not a new one. Already in 1992, for example, the film critic Caryn James had written a scathing appraisal of the director in The New York Times. Arguing that his films can leave a bitter aftertaste, James posited that while he creates strong women characters, he “then takes away their strength; there is a definite trace of misogyny lurking beneath his apparently fond creations of women.”

As Castejón Leorza’s critique of Julieta suggests, the intervening 24 years have only given those looking at his films from a decidedly feminist perspective more reason to be suspicious of the director’s otherwise lauded work. What’s often missing in these discussions is an engagement with the Spanish director’s sexuality, a factor Almodóvar has been reticent to discuss but that is nevertheless central to his artistic sensibility.

To talk about Almodóvar’s gay sensibility, or what the queer critic and University of Michigan professor David Halperin describes in his book How to Be Gay as “gay male culture’s exuberant portrayals of extravagant, flamboyant, hysterical, suffering, debased, or abject femininity,” is to confront head-on two complementary cultural anxieties: sexism and homophobia. Both of these crucially intersect when gay men respond to and celebrate a defiant femininity, one they see as their own.

The intersection between gay male culture and melodramatic femininity is at the heart of Almodóvar’s 1999 film All About My Mother. It earned the director some of the best reviews of his career—as Armond White wrote in his New York Press review of the film, the director’s “gay male identification with women frees him to do his best work.” The Oscar-winning movie is centered on a young queer artist, Esteban, whose death sets the plot in motion. It is Esteban’s fascination with cinema that opens the film (he’s watching the Bette Davis classic All About Eve with his mother) and his diva adoration that leads to his untimely death (he’s struck by a car while trying to get an autograph from the actress playing Blanche DuBois in a Spanish theatre production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire). The film may not have been as explicitly autobiographical as Almodóvar’s later Bad Education (2004), but it nonetheless corralled many of his most famous themes and images—he even borrowed an organ-donor conversation at a hospital following Esteban’s death from his earlier film The Flower of My Secret (1995).

In referencing Williams’s famous play, Almodóvar showed himself to be keenly aware of the pushback gay artists face when romanticizing women’s suffering. Williams’s treatment of Blanche has as often been critiqued for its sexism against her as praised for its sympathetic treatment of her struggles. Depending on how you read the play’s ending, where the former Southern belle is whisked off to an insane asylum after her sister Stella refuses to believe the rape allegations against her own husband, Blanche can emerge as a tragic figure that lays bare a culture’s misogyny.

Here, after all, is yet another woman punished by a man who takes it upon himself to teach her a lesson. Or, she can stand as another instantiation of that misogyny; as a character, she’s still subject to a man’s whims, in this case Williams’s. Thus, Blanche can, in the literary critic Kathleen Margaret Lant’s words, be an example of the way Williams “draws on the most heinous and trivializing myths about woman and about rape that inform our culture.” But the relationship between a gay male playwright and his victimized female protagonist is further complicated by its porousness: As Williams playfully, if earnestly, asserted on more than one occasion, “I am Blanche DuBois.”

Such pronouncements reveal the way vivid, female characters like Blanche (see also: Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly and Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles) could function as a way for gay artists to express themselves. Without, that is, explicitly impressing their homosexuality on their work—which, given the censorship of mid-20th century mainstream American art, was sometimes necessary. As the film critic Molly Haskell put it in her seminal 1974 book From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies, there’s the sense that these women worked to exorcise something that wasn’t about “real” women to begin with. Williams’s women, she wrote, “are as unmistakably a product of the fifties as they are of his own baroquely transvestised homosexual fantasies.” Her language rankles in 2016 for the implicit homophobia it signals if not outright endorses. Haskell did help, however, to point out the outdated elements of the cross-gender identification that Williams came to define—incompatible not only with the awareness of women’s cultural representations in the late-20th century, but also with the increasingly visible fight for LGBT rights that followed the Stonewall riots of 1969.

This is why Almodóvar, who came of age in what Haskell herself called “the Age of Ambivalence,” can still find himself the subject of critiques like those of Casterjón Loerza. His campy melodramas and his histrionic leading ladies, following in Williams’s template, seemingly efface the female experience even as they exalt it.

While some critics would like to see this gay vision of femininity trail off into history, it is very much alive today. Take Ryan Murphy: The successful television writer and director has elicited decidedly strong (and often well-deserved) negative reactions to his treatment of women in his shows, including American Horror Story and Scream Queens, and his upcoming project looks to be a provocative entry in this long tradition. Feud may well be the perfect distillation of the fine line between exposé and exploitation that characterize many gay men’s interest in divas: The anthology show’s central premise (based on the book Best Actress by Jaffe Cohen and Michael Zam) is the feud between larger-than-life icons Bette Davis and Joan Crawford on the set of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Here is, as Lant might argue, another example of a male creator drawing on toxic myths about female rivalry. With Feud, and to borrow a Crawford line, these women—already in some ways best recalled via snappy catchphrases like “Fasten your seat belts! It’s gonna be a bumpy ride!”—would seem to risk being solely remembered as the type of name not used in high society outside of a kennel.

Still, writers like Manuel Puig and John Rechy saw in such starlets an unrealistic performance of femininity they could tap into as a way to fight back against society’s contemptuous ideas of effeminacy and homosexuality. Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Buenos Aires Affair are paeans to the power gay men drew from female stars, while Rechy’s Marilyn’s Daughter was a celebration of Monroe, the epitome of the outlaw sensibility the Chicano writer has always championed. Those oft-shamed moments of gay boys lovingly devoted to outsized divas, their work argues, have a power of their own, shattering as they do contemporary ideas of gender and orientation.

Almodóvar’s filmography rests on this same conviction. Even when creating his own female protagonists he alludes to those divas that have come before, deploying the strength they exuded onscreen. In 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, for example, Carmen Maura’s character Pepa, who spends the film unsuccessfully trying to drown her sorrows in a sleeping pill-spiked gazpacho, is a voiceover actress tasked with dubbing Joan Crawford’s lines in Johnny Guitar. Penelope Cruz’s prostitute-turned-actress Lena in 2009’s Broken Embraces uses the same pseudonym as Catherine Deneuve does in the film Belle de Jour when visiting her clients. As if to further make his point, Almodóvar has Lena wear a red blazer reminiscent of Pepa’s signature look during the climactic moment when she finally leaves her wealthy and controlling husband for good.

With these cinematic references, Almodóvar’s films repeatedly return to the liberating power of performing femininity, an argument best epitomized by characters like Bad Education’s glamorous drag queen Zahara (played by Gael García Bernal) who gleefully upend gender and sexual norms. Like many of Almodóvar’s protagonists, Zahara is marked by a tempestuous past, one she’s escaped by embracing her seductiveness, directing its power against the men in power who once wronged her.

As female filmmakers continue to wrestle their narratives and representations away from the male imaginary, the efforts of gay male artists interested in women’s stories might feel, to some, like yet another example of men framing female-driven storytelling. But Almodóvar’s stories, focused as they are on mothers, sinners, sex-crazed maniacs, vengeful domestic abuse survivors, drag queens, sex workers, grieving daughters, pregnant nuns, drug-addicted actresses, and everything in between, ultimately emerge as an iconoclastic and deeply empathetic celebration of womanhood rooted in the Spanish director’s own sexuality.

Even, or especially, when creating long-suffering women like Julieta, Almodóvar is putting himself in her place. There’s a clear attempt to evoke and model the empathy he feels for his characters, even when he lets viewers know that it’s all too perfectly art-directed to be taken as reality. At the end of All About My Mother, a red curtain comes down. The screen is filled with a dedication: “To Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider ... To all actresses who have played actresses, to all women who act, to all men who act and become women, to all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” Almodóvar, with his work, both leans into the critical conversation around his portrayal of women, and subtly subverts it. For him, to be a woman is to be an actress, a definition that is at once unfashionable and radical.

When Women Run Companies

2016-12-27T10:28:00-05:00

The past year may have been a tough one in many respects, but there was one measure in which the country made some progress. 2016 marked the year in which there were the most women ever heading companies in the S&P 500. That’s according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, which tracks the number of women CEOs in both top U.S. and European companies.

To be sure, the number is still pitiful—out of 500 companies, only 27 have female CEOs, but it’s a sign of a good trajectory, up from 2015, when it was 22, and from 2009, when it was 18. S&P 500 companies, on average, add one female CEO a year, the report said. Among the women who head S&P 500 companies are Mary Barra of General Motors, Shira Goodman of Staples, and Debra Cafaro, who has been the CEO of Ventas, a real estate investment trust, since 1999. Women have also made in-roads in other forms of corporate leadership: About 17 percent of board members for Fortune 500 companies were women in 2013, up from 9.6 percent in 1995. And though the number of female executives at big companies is still small, it has increased in recent years.

At the same time, there are more women in the workforce than ever before—73.5 million, or 47 percent of the labor force, up from 29 percent in 1945, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As more women climb to the tops of corporate hierarchies, will their being there help other women advance?

Academic evidence suggests that the answer is yes, to a degree. In particular, women who are high-performing and already successful tend to see their prospects improve under a woman’s leadership. In one study, for example, a group of Italian researchers looked at the compensation of individual workers at big Italian manufacturing firms between 1982 and 1997. They found that female leadership had a positive effect on wages for women in more senior roles (and, as it happens, that firms with more women leaders performed better).

What causes this? The study’s lead author Luca Flabbi, a professor of economics at Georgetown, told me that he believes that women are better than men at reading other women and assigning them to the jobs commensurate with their experience. When a female executive replaces a male executive at a firm, she can better see the talent of senior women and put them in positions that match their talent. Since this is a better fit for these women, they do better work, and enhance the firm’s performance. “She puts them in more productive positions, and she is right, and that’s why the performance goes up,” he told me.

Another study looked at the role of women on corporate boards and found a similar effect: The higher the share of women on corporate boards one year, the more likely the company was to hire women executives in the following year, the study’s authors, David Matsa, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northewestern, and Amalia R Miller, an economics professor at the University of Virginia, discovered. This may be because women know each other through professional networks, and when there are women at the top—say on a corporate board—they help refer women to positions that otherwise might have been filled by men, Matsa told me. The increase also could have been because women discriminate less against each other, and hire them for executive positions, he said.

This same dynamic has been identified again and again. One report on 21,000 firms from 91 countries by the Peterson Institute for International Economics concluded that having women on the board increases the ranks of women executives. (It also found that companies with women on the boards tend to be more profitable than those with just men.) And a study of New York City advertising agencies over a 13-year period found that when an agency has more female managers, more newly-created jobs are first filled by women. “Women’s desire to create distinctiveness is stronger when they work with others who are similar to them,” the authors, Lisa E. Cohen and Joseph P. Broschak, write. This finding may indicate that there may be room in women-headed companies for ambitious women to create new jobs that hadn’t already existed.

But while women who are top performers may benefit under women’s leadership, women who aren’t very good at their jobs may not. In a 2015 study, Berkeley researchers Sameer B. Srivastava and Eliot L. Sherman found that some women actually have worse outcomes under female supervisors. They looked at five years of in-depth data from a 1,700-person firm in the information-services industry, and found that most female managers had no effect on the wages of women below them. Yet drilling down into data, they found that some lower-performing women who switched from a male supervisor to a high-performing female supervisor had a lower salary the following year than men who made the same switch. This may be because the supervisor feels threatened by the worker’s poor performance, and worries she may be implicated in it. “Female managers, perhaps responding to collective threat, appeared to act in ways that amplified, rather than diminished, the gender wage gap,” they write.

Similarly, Flabbi’s study of Italian manufacturers found that females at the bottom of the wage distribution received lower wages when a female was in charge of the company. Women at the bottom of the wage spectrum may have benefited from male CEOs, Flabbi told me, since they are lumped in with other women and assigned an average woman’s wage, which is higher than the wage they should receive. But a female CEO can come in and read these women’s capabilities more specifically, and reassign non-productive workers to even lower jobs, because she can see that these women will not be assets to the company, Flabbi said. This indicates that women who aren’t good at their jobs will see pay decrease under a woman leader.

Norway provides a good testing ground for the patterns these researchers have identified. In 2003, Norway passed a law mandating that the boards of public companies comprise at least 40 percent women. A study of Norwegian and other Scandinavian companies after the quota took effect found that the quota improved salaries for women in the top five percent of the earnings distribution. But there’s no evidence that the quotas had any effect on women lower down in the companies, nor that the companies hired more women. They also found no evidence that women were inspired to go to business school, pursue business careers, or delay having children to “fast-track” their careers once they saw more women in the boardroom. “In the short run the reform had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the newly appointed female board members,” they write.

Still, regardless of their gender, workers may see better working conditions and fewer layoffs under women. That’s because women leaders may do more than male leaders to avoid laying people off, another study by Matsa and Miller found, this one of companies affected by Norway’s quota. (They did find that, as a result, this made companies less profitable, in contrast to many of the other effects of women leadership.) In yet another paper, Matsa and Miller looked at women-owned businesses in the U.S. and compared them to other business during the recent recession, and found that there were fewer workforce reductions in the women-owned businesses. That study also found that female-owned businesses were less likely to use contract employees and temp workers than male-owned companies were. They have two hypotheses about why women leaders may treat their workers differently. First, women may be more empathetic than men and thus less willing to cut people during slow periods. Second, women might be more patient than men and more willing to wait through slow times, knowing that when the economy rebounds, they’ll have the need for more employees once again.

This is perhaps not surprising. A survey of U.S. companies found that women leaders have different priorities than men do, Matsa said. “U.S. female senior executives attach the greatest importance to what they describe as the ‘communal’ aspects of the workplace, such as working relationships, customer quality focus, and communication. By contrast, male senior executives are driven more by personal reward factors, such as career development and compensation,” Matsa and Miller write.

As a recent series of essays published in The Atlantic argued, the workplace is still a notoriously tough place for women, who have to balance family and career while encountering sexism and still trying to grow in their careers. That there are more women at the top may not provide much solace to women trying to figure out how to make a go of it in the corporate world. But the evidence suggests that it should.