Teach your kids to be more than just "nice"

My friend J., a scion of that kind of enlightened Berkeley family with beautiful décor in the living room and magic mushrooms in the freezer, told me that his mom had taught him in no uncertain terms not to rape. Oh, like to be careful, I wondered?

Not just that, J. explained. She had literally sat him down and talked about consent. No Means No. I was impressed—California universities moving toward a “yes means yes” affirmative consent standard notwithstanding—because I hadn’t met any other guys who had told me about receiving such a direct, pull-no-punches lesson.

I’ve been thinking about that lesson a lot more now in the wake of the whole horrible Kavanaugh situation and the allegations of serious sexual assault that took place in high school and college. Some have responded by claiming that young men, or drunk men, can’t be held responsible for their actions, even though our society regularly chastises women for drinking too much or acting “provocatively” as if they are to be considered more agentive in the violations of their bodies than their violators.

The Kavanaugh assaults hid in plain sight, in carefree high school and college parties largely thrown by and for the benefit of privileged white boys. We’ve seen the yearbooks, the smiling faces, the prestigious names of their expensive prep schools. If we’ve learned anything from this cesspool of elites, it’s that becoming an ethical person is not as easy as looking like one. Your good name is not enough. Your good school is not enough. Your scouting badges and your volunteering and your church on Sunday—if all this “goodness” is just smoke and mirrors, a show to distract from entitlement and rapacity and avarice, fuck your goodness. Stop telling your kids to just "be nice" if that quality is so vague and general it elides the very real differences in power that affect all relationships.

Here’s what I mean: one generic piece of advice we frequently tell kids is “Be a good friend.” What if they’re the guy (or girl) in the room when their friend jumps on another person and tries to claw their clothes off? Loyalty might dictate silence: that was certainly Mark Judge’s take. “Bros before hos.”

Eschew the simple story. Teach your children that there are values more important than loyalty to friends and its attendant code of silence: compassion for the vulnerable, rejection of physical force to compel the submission of others. Tell them, early, that sometimes your friends will do things that are wrong. Sometimes it will fall on your shoulders to call them out (or call them in), sometimes to intervene and stop it. This is a harder conversation to have. But it’s a necessary one.

This conversation, or ones like J.'s "Don't rape" talk, are all too rare right now. When we talk with and about children, I think we want to imagine that they're in this realm of innocence immune to our grown-up problems of racism and classism and sexism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kids can say horrible, bigoted things to each other, and imposing silence in the name of innocence just makes it harder for children to come forward and confide in parents about their experiences. What would it mean if parents looked at their children differently: not just as potential victims but as potential aggressors? 

There are so many different meanings of “the Talk,” depending on which parents you ask. For some, this hardest conversation of all is explaining the mechanics of sex. “Where do babies come from?” For others, it’s a dispiriting conversation with children of color, particularly black children, about how to interact with police. In all its stripes, we are used to seeing “the Talk” as a conversation we have with the ones we love to keep them safe. It’s time to see it as something more: the conversation we have to make sure they keep others safe, too.

On Dressing Up

Jennifer Riches Photography

When I was little, my sister Adrianna and I would gigglingly sneak into our parents' closet to try on our mother's clothes. The closet was big enough that it was the kind of place more generous Dursleys would have given Harry Potter for a bedroom, the kind of place you could huddle in for hours and never be found. When I was by myself in my parents' drafty bedroom, watching NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams or Seinfeld re-runs at 10 PM, I compulsively closed that closet door--something about its gaping dark scared me a little, sitting on the couch in the cold.

But in the daytime, with Adrianna beside me and the lights on, the place was a museum of wonders. There were the big heavy sweaters that came down to our knees, relics of colder places. Maxi-skirts that made our little frames look like we were drowning in the fabric that pooled at our feet. Spare pillows and sheets we stuffed in our shirts so we could waddle around, laugh at our newfound girth, and declare ourselves "sumo wrestlers."

And the crown jewel of the closet: my mother's pale pink wedding dress with leg-o'-mutton sleeves, thin veil, and delicate lace gloves. It was folded up neatly in one of those clear plastic zip-up cases, the kinds bedsheets and comforters are sold in, and we eagerly unzipped the case and dug our hands into the gleaming satiny fabric as it spilled out like froth from a can.

I don't even remember how many times we played dress-up, how many times we played hide-and-seek in the thicket of clothes until our mom found us, how many times I longed for the day I would be tall and engaged enough to wear that pale pink wedding dress. There was something so alluring about all the costumes we put on, big as they were on our ungainly small selves. Maybe that allure was in the futures they represented--days and nights of solemnity or glamour that we, at six and eight years old, had never known.

One day my mom bought a makeup set from a garage sale. It was like new, sparkling eyeshadows and blush and lipsticks attractively packaged inside a sleek black case that read "Bon Marché" on the front. The French sound of the now-defunct brand made the makeup seem even fancier and more mystic; I loved the sound of snapping it open and shut, doing it again and again. Adrianna and I added makeup to dressing up, rouging our cheeks and painting our eyelids until our faces looked like cheeky kabuki masks.

All this time, we had a saying, my sister and I: in a singsong voice, she would say to me, "I'm pretty and you're cute," and I would obediently respond, "I'm cute and you're pretty." The distinction meant little to me as a small child, but when I got to be eight or nine I started realizing that "pretty" meant my sister's thinner face and long hair. "Cute" meant my chubby cheeks and bowl cut. We stopped playing dress-up and putting on makeup when Adrianna started wearing makeup seriously, not for fun. When we'd put it on in our mom's mirror with what we'd scrounged from her Bon Marché kit, we knew we looked silly. We caricatured adulthood. Now, she tried to replicate it more perfectly.

In the hurt of rejection--it felt like my big sister was leaving me behind--I tried to distance myself from everything that Adrianna did. If she was going to be pretty, I would try for the fashion sense of a 13th-century hermit. (Once, I stole my dad's green wool sweater, wore it with a belt, called it my "tunic," carried around a butter knife as my "sword," and imagined that I was a knight.) If Adrianna was going to buy and wear makeup, I would avoid it religiously. (To this day, I have no idea how to use anything but lip gloss.)

It's funny to me, how puritanical I was. I disguised my undiscriminating opposition to everything that my sister did as simply being principle. My principles were simple. Aesthetic decisions were shallow, the choice to look "attractive" was unapologetically sexual, and sexuality was for someone else. I'm not sure where I got that idea--maybe it was all the Teen Vogue and Girls' Life magazines with cover headlines like "12 Things You Do That Guys Secretly Love" and celebrities posing like experts in the Male Gaze, images that nailed into my mind the idea that beauty and sex and giving up some sense of self were all intertwined. I didn't want to be a pretty girl, I wanted to be my own girl.

As I grew older, those puritanical opinions moderated and eventually I shed them altogether--mostly, though, because I started having crushes (like this one). I used Chrome's Incognito mode to read Wikihow articles about how to flirt. I sometimes flipped through the shiny pages in Vogue and Harper's magazines at the airport and wished for actresses' made-up faces. I still didn't brush foundation onto my face or paint color onto my lips, and there were days I went to school without brushing my hair, but gradually I began to understand the idea that you would want to be attractive.

Part of it still felt like a betrayal of principle, though. I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember, and the idea that some accident of birth fated me to spend more time thinking about the color of my lips or the length of my lashes than any of my guy friends irked me. I watched talks like journalist Tracey Spicer's "The lady stripped bare" at TEDxSouthBankWomen that exhorted women to waste less time on appearances, and read books like Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal-Care Products Endanger Your Health...and What You Can Do About It that centered on the negative health ramifications of makeup. So it surprised me a little when I took my sister's side one night, in an argument with my mom.

Wearing makeup, my mom said, was anti-feminist. How could my sister call herself a feminist?

I replied that trying to regulate the personal choices of women would be the real anti-feminist thing to do.

My mom looked unconvinced and I figured that the argument would surface again some other time. And it did. We were watching Saturday Night Live and my mom caught sight of musical guest Nicki Minaj in a very tight, very neon color-blocked dress. There was a deep V, almost down to her stomach, and the hem of the dress hit upper thigh.

"Why would you wear something like that?" my mom asked.

"Uhhh...because you want to?"

"Why draw attention to yourself that way?" she persisted.

I protested that the language of women "drawing attention" to themselves when they choose to wear revealing clothing is embedded in patriarchal norms that see women as culpable in their own objectification, with ultimately disastrous consequences--everything from middle school girls being subjected to sexist and unequal dress codes because they'll "distract" boys, to rape survivors being told they were "asking for it." Nicki Minaj should be able to wear whatever she wants: it's our choice to look, or look away.

I said all of the above in a very fast voice.

My mom looked at me skeptically. "Some people definitely do "dress up for boys.""

No shit, I thought. You're saying 'some people' like I've never done that. But it's also well-documented that women dress up more for other women. It's incredibly heteronormative to assume that, when a woman is dressed in a revealing way, that it's only for men's benefit. I think people, regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation, tend to appreciate beauty (or hotness, or sexiness). Ultimately, regardless of who will see them or where they're going, sometimes some people just enjoy dressing up. They may feel a sense of aesthetic empowerment related to their own evaluation of how they look, not what anyone else thinks of them.

I used to think that there was shame associated with wanting to look a certain way. I don't think that way any more. It's only when people feel that most or all their power is drawn from aesthetics--especially when women feel this more than men--that we have a major problem. To combat this, amazing young women have launched petitions to get magazines like Teen Vogue to stop Photoshopping their models. The company Aerie launched a campaign called "#AerieReal" featuring photographs that hadn't been retouched. Celebrities young and old have posted Instagram shots sans makeup. Any and all efforts to celebrate beauty in all its forms, to emphasize that you don't need makeup or Photoshop to look wonderful, are a welcome departure from the typical "you aren't good enough" media message bombarding young girls.

When I was younger and I dressed like a hermit, on some level it was because I had resigned myself to that idea: I wasn't good enough. That there was no hope for me to be pretty, so why even try? And at some point in early teenagehood--thirteen or fourteen--that switch just flipped. Yes, maybe it started with boys telling me I was pretty, and yes, maybe it started with dressing up for them too. But at some point I realized two things: your beauty doesn't have to be for sexuality, and your sexuality doesn't have to be for other people.

Ask me if dressing up and wearing makeup is anti-feminist, and I'll remember posing and picture-taking with one of my roommates in freshman year. We'd try on dresses like runway models and wear finery to dinner for no reason. Once we posed in our sports bras after a run, flexing our arms for "gym selfie"-type photos and sending each other sultry Snapchats. Say we did it for each other, sure, but on some level we also did it for ourselves.

Ask me if dressing up and wearing makeup is anti-feminist and I'll remember playing dress-up in my parents' closet with my sister. Were we anti-feminist, then, at six and eight? Did we set women back, by delighting in pretty things, painting our faces and falling giggling into heaps of clothes? I don't think we did it then.

And I don't think we do it now.

Lily Allen and pop culture feminism

Note: the following includes profanity.

The activist Fannie Lou Hamer once said, "Nobody's free until everyone is free"; yet many movements treat their causes as issues within neat self-contained bubble wrap packaging like so many Fig Bars from Costco. (The moment my dad opened the box and realized that there was a plastic baggie for every 2 fig bars was incredulity concentrated.) Take examples from history--

• The movement for African-Americans' suffrage split, controversially, apart from the movement for women's suffrage. 
• Some questioned the fact that Martin Luther King, Jr. pushed as much for international peace as much as he did for civil rights at home. 
• Many historians point to second-wave feminists' alliance with LGBT-rights activists as a reason why Americans, onboard with feminist advances but still wary of gay rights, failed to overwhelmingly support the ERA. 

There are others, but those spring to mind immediately.

In truth, though it may be politically convenient to do so, attempting to separate movements that all seek to promote justice just doesn't work. Even worse: setting them in opposition to each other. And that's what brings me to a certain British chanteuse with a sleek black ponytail and the controversy erupting over her new single, "Hard Out There." 

I remember when I first heard Lily Allen. I was a preteen who still made lip-sync videos with her older sister, and aforementioned sis started blasting "Smile" on the computer. This was back in the day when the F-bomb still made my ears perk up in surprise. 

"What's that?" I demanded.

"Just listen," she said in obvious glee. "It's such a good song. Watch the music video, it tells the story."

And so I watched Lily Allen's narrator give a cheating ex revenge diarrhea (not shown onscreen) thanks to laxative tablets and coffee. It was pretty damn satisfying. Her other songs--"The Fear," with its criticism of conspicuous consumption, the realistic and human portrayal of female sexuality in a relationship in "Not Fair," "22"'s discussion of ageism and women--can all be interpreted in feminist lenses.

And then came "Hard Out Here." Its bountiful twerking and balloon letters seem to poke fun at pop culture icons Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke. The events at the beginning of the video show a cause-and-effect of an entertainment industry, and public, that pushes unrealistic expectations for women's bodies--Lily Allen on an operating table, undergoing liposuction while a villainous manager clucks disapprovingly about how she let herself "go so far" (gain so much weight). The trend continues, but with the introduction of several new characters: twerking African-American dancers, who provide the foils to Allen's "Don't need to shake my ass for you 'cause I got a brain" persona. 

Some choice lyrics:

"If I told you about my sex life, you'd call me a slut

When boys be talking about their bitches, no one's making a fuss

There's a glass ceiling to break, aha, there's money to make

And now it's time to speed this up 'cause I can't move in this space

Sometimes it's hard to find the words to say

I'll go ahead and say them anyway

Forget your balls and grow a pair of tits"

It's unapologetically profane, challenges the slut/player double standard, and even uses "glass ceiling" for probably the first time in a pop song that's received over 2 million views on YouTube.

So what's the problem?

This: by setting herself apart from a gaggle of nameless, voiceless background dancers, Lily Allen isn't changing that pop paradigm of fully clothed white males (holla, Robin Thicke) singing with gyrating close-to-naked women behind them -- she's only switching out the Pit Bull or Robin Thicke or Justin Timberlake and replacing him with Lily Allen. 

That's not a feminist victory, because equal rights--breaking that glass ceiling--isn't just Lily Allen's movement. It's those twerking ladies' movement, too. Intersectionality isn't a pop culture buzzword, but maybe "Hard Out Here" can help it become one. (As Geek Feminism Wiki defines it--"Intersectionality is a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. Third Wave Feminism, especially, thrived on the concept of intersectionality in order to redefine Feminism as inclusive. The concept first came from legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 and is largely used in critical theories, especially Feminist theory, when discussing systematic oppression.")

I still like Lily Allen's songs. I think that it's difficult, if not impossible, to be a perfect advocate for anything. Simply by pointing out societal issues as bluntly as she does in her music, she's leaps and bounds ahead of most pop stars I can think of. In fact, I'm grateful for "Hard Out Here"--because it's started a conversation about race and feminism, and it reminds us all to remember those words--nobody's free till everyone's free. 

Not even you, Lily Allen.

Somewhat Haphazardly-Organized Thoughts on Girls and Leadership

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, gave a TED Talk a while back, which I watched; I was impressed with her poise and interesting opinions (but then again, which TED speaker doesn't have those qualities?)  Her talk helped answer a very important question: why we have too few women leaders.

I would like to challenge, however, the widely held idea that since girls aren't becoming leaders as a result of naturally being less boastful, entitled, and commanding than most boys, girls need to start assuming those qualities in order to become CEOs. (That's paraphrased). This does, however, seem to be the idea-- girls don't speak up enough, take the lead enough, boast enough.

As Sheryl Sandberg pointed out, when girls try to be commanding, it's called bossy. When a girl boasts about her personal appearance or her latest work, it's being a show-off, etc. (This is all speaking in very general terms, mind you. If you haven't already watched Sheryl Sandberg's speech, do, otherwise the rest of this will be confusing). So we need to stop criticizing girls for the qualities we praise in boys.

On average (according to Sandberg) most men tend to brag about their own accomplishments and negotiate for raises far more aggressively than most women (I can tell you about people for whom this generalization does not apply, my parents being essentially the reverse of that description); when asked why they are successful, men (keep in mind the generalization here) will say that it was because of their accomplishments and hard work, whereas women will say they got lucky or they were helped along by amazing coworkers, etc. And society tends to dislike women who will buck the trend and assertively negotiate for a raise.


This is all statistically supported and that is the general trend. So what is it that I disagree with in Sheryl Sandberg's speech?

The problem I see with this is that I felt the underlying message is that women need to be more like men in order to succeed in what is still a men-dominated area (business). It needs to be okay for women to brag, to ask for raises, to be aggressive. Sandberg focused more on making society accept women when we do those things; rather than changing our expectations of what a CEO should do.

My thinking? Don't we need more CEOs who don't fly out the window with a golden parachute?

Don't we need more people in the world to stop talking about themselves and start thinking about others?

Don't we need more people who thank others profusely?

It's time we stop saying that girls need to change, and adopt those behaviors; it's time to say that boys could learn from girls. CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement, rather than us trying to change girls in order to fit into the common mold of what we think a CEO looks like. I give speeches quite a lot about how often negatively-portrayed behaviors common to children (i.e., impulsivity and naivete) may be positive behaviors in some situations, leading to unfettered imagination and problem-solving.

Maybe these often negatively-portrayed behaviors statistically common to women are positive things. We all love people who give credit to others for their success. Companies would probably do better with CEOs who didn't blow their own horn and ask for ridiculous salaries and new yachts every year.

In her talk, Sandberg shared an anecdote of her college European Intellectual History class, where her classmate Carrie avidly read the original works in Latin and Greek and attended all the lectures; Sandberg read them in English and attended most of the lectures; and Sandberg's brother read one book out of twelve, went to a couple of lectures, and received last-minute tutoring from Sandberg and the highly studious classmate before taking the test.

After coming out of the test, they asked each other how they did. Carrie, the undoubtedly most prepared of the three, said (quoting from the speech here), "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I [Sandberg] say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." "You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything."

To me, Sandberg's speech went on to emphasize why society should make it possible for girls to have "I got top grade in the class" behavior.

My point is that the bragging brother should take a dose of humility, instead.

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By the way, I totally agree with Sandberg's point that we need to stop demonizing girls for taking the lead in business/political/etc. situations. I'm not saying that girls shouldn't be confident. However, I'm saying that we need to change our expectations for CEOs (aggressive, assertive, etc.) from the current definition to one that more closely matches the best qualities of girls and boys. So--let's stop trying to get girls to change. Let's focus on changing our society.