How Actor Amber Tamblyn Created Her Own Role: Feminist Activist

Guest User February 19, 2020

In this episode we’ll hear how Amber Tamblyn went from being an actress to being an activist--defining her own role in the feminist movement--and how we can all play a role in leading change. Amber's book is called "Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution." It's part memoir, part manifesto, part call to action. We sat down together in San Francisco while she was in town as part of the release of her book in paperback.

Back in 2017, Amber wrote an OpEd for the NYTimes, called "I'm Done With Not Being Believed" in which she tells what happened when a well-known actor almost as old as her dad tried to pick her up when she was 16, and then called her a liar when she outed him on Twitter. This was before the Weinstein revelations, before the #MeToo movement caught fire and before Times Up, which Amber went on to co-found.

TRANSCRIPT. We do our best, please forgive or let us know any errors.

Lauren Schiller:

Do you remember there was an op-ed that came out a few years ago in the New York Times and the headline was, I'm done with not being believed. It was before the Weinstein revelations, before Me Too, before Time's Up. But just after Trump's grab them by the pussy tape. It was written by...

Amber Tamblyn:

My name is Amber Tamblyn, and I am an author, actress, director, producer. I am many things.

Lauren Schiller:

By the time Amber wrote this op-ed, she'd been acting for over 20 years since she was 11. You might know her from General Hospital, Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants, Joan of Arcadia. She also directed the movie Painted Black, and has published a novel and several books of poetry.

Lauren Schiller:

In this op-ed, She tells what happened when a well-known actor, almost as old as her dad tried to pick her up when she was 16 and then called her a liar when she outed him on Twitter.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so I wrote the piece which really looked at that exact idea, which was that I was really, really, really effing done with not being believed, with being told that my story was not going to matter, that it was always going to be, "Let's not believe her first. And let's believe him First," just because that's the narrative. That's the way things go.

Lauren Schiller:

After the piece came out, Amber attended a Hollywood party. She'd been to many times before, filled with bold face names.

Amber Tamblyn:

So many people in our industry, not only incredibly famous, but powerful, really powerful executives, women who run companies who I've never talked to who I would normally never really not have an interaction with, coming up to tell me how much that piece meant and many of them sharing some stories.

Amber Tamblyn:

That was the part that I didn't really realize... I mean, I knew that it had sort of set this fire on everyone reading it on social media and in that world. But that was a really powerful evening in which I sensed that something was coming.

Lauren Schiller:

And then in quick succession, we all learned about Harvey Weinstein, felt the full force of the Me Too movement, and saw the creation of Times Up of which Amber is a founding member.

Amber Tamblyn:

And now we've seen in so many ways, especially with these incredible silence breaker women who have come forward and testified and given their stories about what Weinstein did, but not only that, not only the violence, but the silencing and the stalking and hiring these companies to follow them and plant evidence against them and everything that's happened. You understand how far predominantly men in positions of power will go to keep us quiet and away from that power. So, to me it was it struck such a nerve and it just felt like an opening.

Lauren Schiller:

In the wake of all this, Amber wrote a book called Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution, which is part memoir, part manifesto and part call to action.

Lauren Schiller:

We sat down together in San Francisco while she was in town as part of the release of her book in paperback. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, the stories of how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:

Today we'll hear how Amber Tamblyn went from being an actress to being an activist, defining her own role in the feminist movement and how we can all play a role in leading change. We'll be right back.

Lauren Schiller:

I'm back with Amber Tamblyn. I'm curious about how you got into acting in the first place at such a young age. And how that shaped your view of yourself, your sense of yourself.

Amber Tamblyn:

This question has always been a very easy answer for me since I was very young. I had a stump speech that I was able to give. My dad who was in West Side Story, his agent saw me when I was in a play when I was very young and she said, "We've got to get her into acting."

Amber Tamblyn:

And I went on some auditions and I got a role when I was 11 on a soap opera. I had a stump speech version of that answer for a very long time. And I think it wasn't until I hit my own, to use the phrase Era of Ignition and my own sort of existential crisis that propelled me into the person I am today. Did that question become very complicated and require much deeper thought and explanation?

Amber Tamblyn:

Because I don't know when you are a child, if you are choosing to act, you're not making that choice to yourself. Adults around you are making that choice. And it's taken me a long time to think about what I lost in the course of that what you lose as a child who is not only working for a living and taking care of your family for a living, but also playing other people for a living, taking on the personalities of other people, telling your body on a daily basis from one part to the next. Today you're having a heroin overdose. Today you're raped. Today you've been murdered today. You're crying all day today. You're incredibly happy. It takes its toll.

Amber Tamblyn:

So I don't know how much choice really ever came into that part of it for me, but it's certainly been... it's a story. My story is not one I would change for anything in the worlds because it has produced the person that I am today.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, it's interesting all those roles that you just reeled off, none of them were of powerful women or girls taking charge or even, I mean, any of the roles that were sort of starting to see today. I mean, how did that make you feel about yourself? I mean and even did at the time how you felt about yourself? Or is it really only kind of in hindsight that you could reflect on that?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think as a young woman, I had many of the same frustrations that I couldn't pinpoint, or put a reason behind the way that many women do or have in their given fields in their industries. A sense of being emotionally extorted, a sense of having your value, not feel seen or utilized a sense of there is something greater for you. There is something bigger for you, a calling that you don't know how to manifest for yourself though it's there, it exists.

Amber Tamblyn:

That's universal. That is every woman's experience. That is my mom who's a retired school teacher of three decades. That's her experience. And my grandmother who was a piano teacher and vocal coach and it just every woman I know has had that at some degree.

Amber Tamblyn:

So I think it's, right now we're going through this really, really wonderful time in the entertainment business where things are not feeling like they're going as fast as they should be as far as change is concerned. But still at the same time, you are seeing an unprecedented number of women and people of color and voices that have traditionally been left out of artistic, cultural point of view, now becoming very much a part of that landscape both in television and film.

Amber Tamblyn:

Not as much as I would like and that many would like, but a lot more than before. And so there is a real... it's very bittersweet for me. because I went through a time where like the women who came before me, all of them were speaking out was really dangerous and where it didn't matter how good the movie is that you made or directed or poured your guts and life into and the reviews, how fantastic they were. It didn't matter.

Amber Tamblyn:

You were still going to be seen as less than, and therefore your work was going to be seen and valued as less than. But I think we're kind of in a different space now. I feel that. Again, with the caveat, not as much as I would hope, but we're getting there.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I'm learning is that change is just a lot freaking slower that I would like it to be. Sounds like you might like it to be as well, especially when you really start to recognize the problems and put your fingers on the problems. And then its like, "Well, what's taking so long? Why can't we just fix that right now?"

Amber Tamblyn:

Yeah, I mean Rome wasn't burned to the ground and built back up in a day and it takes a minute. It really takes a minute to... we're still in the phase of people trying to get on board. We are still in the backlash phase. You have to remember that we are literally dismantling something that dates back to the Bible, that dates back to Roman Empire to all the ways in which women have ever tried to gain access or use their voice for a platform or find themselves in a position of power and have found themselves shut out. We are trying to dismantle thousands and thousands of years of that and you can't do it overnight.

Amber Tamblyn:

It's just not going to happen and it has to be slow, and it's going to take time. And what I always say to people is the most important thing is that we practice patience and perseverance. Those two things together. Because what we can't do is get frustrated and back off and go, this isn't working, we're still getting attacked, we're still being silenced. These things are still happening and go be upset about that. I mean, you could be upset about it, but we have to keep moving. We have to keep pushing forward.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, in some ways, seeing the news that comes out every day about the latest egregious a front it is frustrating, but it's also a good thing, right? Because we weren't necessarily hearing about these things before on the front page of the newspaper.

Amber Tamblyn:

I'll give you a great example of that. That's actually really smart that you brought that up because for instance, even if you look at the Academy Award nominations this year in 2020 and with full transparency, I am one of the Academy voters. I was one of the many women and people that they brought in and this huge attempt to try to balance out their membership and make it more representative and diverse.

Amber Tamblyn:

And even still, you see no women directors nominated, you see women's sort of shut out and especially people of color shutout in major categories. But I think it's fascinating and says a lot about where we're at that the conversation about who was shut out was almost more loud and profound and took center stage over who would... who was actually nominated for the Oscars this year. And that's really not something that we have seen before.

Amber Tamblyn:

We've seen outrage here and there about certain things, but the fact that this took center stage, this became the conversation, says a lot and it's really important. That type of a pressure is very important.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. One has a vision of, at least when I was growing up like child actors and actresses flameout in their teens and twenties whether they succumb to drug use or alcohol or other forms of self-harm or other people's harming them. And you somehow were able to avoid that fate and in fact grapple with and then get on top of your situation.

Lauren Schiller:

And I'm curious you go into it in your book, Era of Ignition, but I'm curious to just hear how that self-awareness came to be and how you climbed out of it.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well, firstly I would say that it just didn't happen to me publicly. So I think one of the most difficult things to see with young actors and especially actresses, is when this happens to them publicly in their dealing with the combination of their privilege and their sense of having no identity, yet having to be responsible for an identity that that was given to them by a public when they are coming to terms with the realization that they have only been an object for a living at a time in which you are most delicately trying to create your central nervous system and your sense of self and your ID.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so that I think like my two books before this one was a book called Dark Sparkler, which looked at the lives and deaths of child star actresses. And that was a really intense and difficult exorcism for me, looking at all of those young actresses who had died. Again, either at the hands of stalkers or fathers or the things that they did to themselves. But it was an examination, not just of my culture but also I think the sense of my own need to die at a certain level.

Amber Tamblyn:

And not literally, but to have a... I have a real metaphorical death. I was craving an ending to this type of person that I had been for so long, which was not an ending of acting, which I've always loved. It's a great work. But an ending to the not having any control and to not being able to be the bigger version of yourself you had imagined. The person who controls her own content, who writes her own words, who interprets her own art.

Amber Tamblyn:

Those things were not available to me. As they are not for many women and in many different industries. And I think I had to go through my own version of that existential crisis to come out on the other side, which again is something I think all women go through, whether you're in your late 20s or early 30s. It is that Saturn Return, which I talk a lot about in the book.

Amber Tamblyn:

This idea, I call it in the book an Invisible Alphabet, where you are at A or B or C and you see that bright, glowing Z in the distance, but you have no idea how to manifest the alphabet in between. You just have no skill for it.

Amber Tamblyn:

And our culture doesn't give us a skill set for that. It really doesn't, if anything, it tries to keep women distanced from their own potential. So for me, I think it was about feeling like if I didn't come out on the other side, figuring out how to manifest that alphabet that bridge then I wasn't going to survive.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, this was an act of survival for me. And again, this is not me talking about a literal death. This is talking about, I don't know what I would have... where I would have ended up, who I would have been, what kind of career I would have had, if any had I not pushed through and done what I had to do, which didn't feel like a choice. It felt like an act of survival.

Lauren Schiller:

But you had the presence of mind to be able to step back and say, "This is just not working for me." And I'm trying to dig into that. I mean, I love the concept of the Saturn Return and I want to talk about that more because I feel like that happens... It just keeps happening. I mean, I'm older than you and I feel like I'm having that question right now.

Amber Tamblyn:

It's supposed to happen, by the way.

Lauren Schiller:

What is my Z, right? Like I've done all this. I've gotten... maybe let's just say I'm at... what's the middle of the alphabet? L.

Amber Tamblyn:

Like around your T. An S or a T.

Lauren Schiller:

So, just to try and understand how when you have that clarity or that recognition that you do need to start reaching for a different direction.

Amber Tamblyn:

I write again in the book about how much I believe that women have been taught from a very young age, from when we were girls to confuse instinct for anxiety. I think that's very real. And the pit in your stomach, the thing that makes you sick every day that makes you question and then we are just so used to putting that away, is the thing we should be listening to the most.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think there's a great Henry Miller quote that says, "All growth is a leap in the dark." And I believe that to be true at any age. And yes, it's true that a Saturn Return, this reconnecting with your new self and pivoting to whatever that new trajectory of your life is supposed to be happens on a cycle. And it's going to happen to me again and I'm going to be in my forties probably going, "What am I doing? What have I done? What is this life I have built?"

Amber Tamblyn:

And that's the journey. I mean that is the finding the joy in that darkness and the excavation of that darkness, not shying away from it is where I have learned to find power. I think that is what some people would call, "The leaning in." There is many different ways of looking at it, but I really think it's important for us, especially as women to find safety and comfort and growth from leaning into those dark, painful questions.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Leaning in started again kind of a bad rap, but it really is the right term because of-

Amber Tamblyn:

I don't know. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

... moving back from you really need to push into it.

Amber Tamblyn:

I don't know much about that or the author who wrote it. I know that it was controversial because I think it was also... it comes with that same cliché of like women can have it all, that's not really what the question is. The question is, are women allowed to be? Period.

Amber Tamblyn:

Are we allowed to be? And does that mean... and if we are allowed to be, are we supposed to be this version of ourselves? Are we supposed to sound like this version of ourselves? Are we supposed to act like this version of ourselves? Who is controlling the narrative of how women are allowed to show up in their own lives and be powerful?

Amber Tamblyn:

And that is the age old question that seems to at every level continue to be a huge underlying problem. I mean, we're even seeing it now in the 2020 elections still, this idea of who is electable, who isn't, who is trustworthy and who isn't. I mean the afterword in this book that I wrote in Era of Ignition, I wrote it maybe six months ago and when I read it the other night at the book release party for this.

Amber Tamblyn:

I did this wonderful in conversation with a journalist, Jodi Kantor. And as I was reading it, I had to pause and like address to the audience and say, "This is scary how relevant this is right now." And it will always be relevant and tell we are having those deeper, more difficult conversations about why this continues to happen, about why we can't even agree on a definition of what misogyny or sexism is before addressing how to fix it.

Amber Tamblyn:

We are putting... we are just continually putting Band-Aids over things instead of dealing with the wound.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, before we get too far away from this, could you explain this... Your concept of the Saturn Return? I mean folks can read the book but let's give them a little taste of what, what do you meant.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well, the argument that I make in the book and the title I should, I guess I should talk a little bit. The title really to me is talking about this condensed time of palpable rage and frustration that we are all feeling that has propelled us into uncontrollable action.

Amber Tamblyn:

This sense of we're not going to wait for permission anymore. We are going to do, which is very much what Me Too and Time's Up have done over the last several years. But the book really looks at my own trajectory and my experience going from being a child actress who felt very much out of control over her own trajectory in life, and felt like she had been pigeonholed into this one area in which she could only go into other people's rooms, step into the threshold of other people's art and interpret their work without ever having her voice be a part of that interpretation.

Amber Tamblyn:

And the book chronicles my experience, learning how to forget about that room and that door and just build my own damn house, and my own space and my own room in which to exist and be, which is dangerous and scary and doesn't always work. That's sort of the micro look of the book while looking at the macro, which is the world we're living in is sort of having its own Era of Ignition as well.

Amber Tamblyn:

It is also having this Saturn's return, this idea that every 20 to 30 years, we are coming back to a space of beginning for ourselves, which very much is without going into like a deep thing about astrology. And about the way planets are aligned. We can maybe agree, maybe not. It might be philosophical, it might be spiritual, but agree that each of us are uniquely born in the moment we are born, the universe and planets are aligned in a certain way.

Amber Tamblyn:

I am not so narcissistic and egotistical to say, "I know what those planets, what that any of that means." But I believe that each of us have a unique story to tell. And therefore some of that might have something to do with this idea that we... our subconscious and our conscious mind and our spiritual living come into this state of crisis at certain points in our life at very pivotal points in our life.

Amber Tamblyn:

And I think that the country is in one of those existential crises right now. And so my argument is to always... and in this book is to not be afraid of it, is to lean into the darkness as we talked about. And to go for what is most uncomfortable because that is how things are going to change.

Amber Tamblyn:

All these conversations that terrify you about race and white feminism and are men being canceled too quickly, anything that you can feel you are having a tough time with as a woman, as a man, as a non-binary person, no matter where you come from, it is good that this conversation is happening.

Amber Tamblyn:

It is good that these things are coming up and bubbling up to the surface so that we can address them and address them with fear. That's okay, but to not shy away and pull away from this change, which we have all demanded and now it's here.

Amber Tamblyn:

So we have to push forward and go through that. So the book looks a little bit both at how to move through the world in this change that we're in, in this momentum, in the chaos of it. How to resensitize ourselves to these very tough conversations in which we've wanted to just be numb and give a bland answer, an easy answer, but how to truly engage with people around us and in our communities and therefore truly engage with ourselves in our own lives and re stimulating who we are, and who we are allowed to become, what our trajectory means.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Well, you... I mean you did that so boldly and this is when I really first became aware of you in this Op-ed that you wrote in 2017. But this was before the Weinstein thing, right?

Amber Tamblyn:

It was about two months before the Weinstein article came out, which is one of the reasons, and I chronicle this deeply in the book about how Jodi Kantor had reached out to me because so many women had after reading that Op-ed, and that's when I really understood that this was part of the zeitgeist, the rage zeitgeists and that it was bubbling and it was right under the surface. And all Trump did is like put the village idiots pin in it and it popped. And that's what happened. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

Yeah. Share with what the gist of the op-ed was. And I do encourage everyone who's listening to this to go back and read it. because it was, for me, going back and reading it again so prescient. I mean, clearly a lot of events were leading up to that moment, but I hadn't really seen or heard anyone just put a stake in the ground like you did at that time.

Lauren Schiller:

And then it felt like everything was cascading out of that in society, but then apparently also personally for you.

Amber Tamblyn:

So the short of that, op-ed came from a small Twitter exchange that happened online whereby I said something about James Woods picking up on me. The actor James was picking up on me once when I was 16. And of course, it became this huge firestorm. James Wood denied it, put out this thing in like the Hollywood Reporter or something. He was calling me a liar.

Amber Tamblyn:

And that was sort of the moment in which all of the James Woods's is before him. All of the men who have ever called women liars. For instance, most recently I would even look at Bernie Sanders essentially saying that Elizabeth Warren lied about this interaction they had. It is part of a narrative that women have always had to face. It is part of this idea that our stories cannot be trusted and therefore we cannot be trusted with power.

Amber Tamblyn:

It really is this logic that has been created by a patriarchal narrative and system that we live in. and it goes around and around and around and it chases it's disgusting tail. And so in that moment that was the survival thing that kicked in. That was the sense of I wasn't going to be quiet. I didn't know what the repercussions would be. And I reached out to my friend Roxanne Gay, the writer and I said, "Will you connect me with your editor at the New York times? I think I have an op-ed for them." And she did and that was it.

Lauren Schiller:

Again, even though it feels like this is so ingrained in our brains. at this point, I really, I had to go back and look at the chronology of things just to get the order of it right. So, your Op-ed comes out sometime in September.

Lauren Schiller:

The Weinstein story breaks sometime in October, a couple of weeks after that, Alyssa Milano tweets the Me Too hashtag, picking up on Toronto Burke's movement that was started in 2006. And then you got involved with a group of women and launched Time's Up in January of 2018. I mean that is really, I mean we talked about change being slow, but that's pretty rapid fire development.

Amber Tamblyn:

That is what I, the term I've coined called angronized, which when women get angry and organized and we were very angronized. That was mega propulsion of energy and being just fed up really, really fed up.

Amber Tamblyn:

And what the experience... and again, I will only speak for my own my personal journey with that was that women were getting in rooms together who had never really been encouraged to be alone in rooms together and talk in the entertainment business. You had very famous women like Reese Witherspoon, and that's not me speaking out of terms.

Amber Tamblyn:

Like she's been very much in front of this movement and, and a really wonderful proponent of change and you have America Ferrera and Natalie Portman and you had these women, then in the room with women like me who's not a huge movie star, but known in her own way, in a separate way. And then you had women who were also there, who were agents, who were assistants to agents, who were producers.

Amber Tamblyn:

You had women just from across the landscape and just... and nobody knew what to do. There was no roadmap for this which is what always makes me laugh when I hear people say, ‘Well, the punishment doesn't fit the crime." And my argument is always, well, who invented the punishment for the crime?

Amber Tamblyn:

And we don't know that yet. We are actually in the center of figuring out what fits what now according to this new world we live in. And you don't get to dictate it. And I don't get to dictate it. And this is a much larger than any one individual and certainly much larger than the feelings of men who have predominantly been the ones who are terrified of all that has happened, and been very scared and frustrated and angry about it. And, and have not had a sense of how they can help or how they can stop it.

Amber Tamblyn:

And to them I'm always like, ‘Well, welcome to feeling out of control," because that is how women have always felt. And here's where we are and things are changing whether you like it or not.

Amber Tamblyn:

No one is asking you anymore. So, my advice is always just get on board, get on board because this is the way it's going. And in that moment, it was this incredible experience. And it was messy. It was painful, it was a lot of crying. It was a lot of sharing of stories and revelations about people you had worked with, men you had worked with women you had worked with who were awful, who had taken care of predators, who had silenced women who had blacklisted actresses.

Amber Tamblyn:

I mean it was all just coming out. It was coming out everywhere and it was really a very difficult time, but it was making us feel alive. And from that place is where Time's Up was born was this idea of we need to declare something. But that declaration needs to be matched with an action.

Amber Tamblyn:

It cannot just be, "Hey everyone, we're angry. Here's a letter." It had to be paired with something which is where the time's up. Legal defense fund came from.

Lauren Schiller:

This is all taking place. This is actually women physically present in a room together.

Amber Tamblyn:

Yeah. There were meetings happening all over LA and in New York too. Just everywhere. Anyone that had a sizable house that could fit 30 to 70 women at any given time and there was no... nobody knew what the hell they were doing, and people's feelings got hurt. It was not great for a lot of the times.

Amber Tamblyn:

White women were just dominating the rooms. Famous white women were trying to lead everything and make everything about them, and women of color were not having their voices heard in those rooms.

Amber Tamblyn:

And this was... this is all important to say though, because it helped us work on this conversation, which has needed to happen amongst women. This is the micro, micro, right? This is the meta, meta, that it's not only just about systems of power around us and men who are in... who are dominating those systems of power, but it is about the, what I call The Susan Collins Effect. So it is about the women who are adjacent and aligned with upholding that white privilege and that power, who are also themselves equally as responsible. And part of the problem.

Amber Tamblyn:

Well we can sort of put down our defenses and examine that, we're still going to be a part of that problem. And so, we had to have a lot of really tough conversations. They're still happening. This is a huge, huge community building exercise that has been led with a lot of passion and pain. And people want answers and they want justice. And sometimes those things don't come swiftly or swiftly enough. But I think we are seeing as I've said, at least things are changing. At least they are moving. And that to me is something

Lauren Schiller:

I'm Lauren Schiller and I'm talking with Amber Tamblyn, whose book Era of Ignition is out in paperback now subscribe to the Inflection Point Podcast and make a contribution toward our production at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:

We're back with Amber Tamblyn, actress, director, women's rights advocate and co-founder of Time's Up. So what are you seeing that's changing that you're feeling good about?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think one of the most wonderful things I see is and again, I'll maybe I'll just speak for my industry because I think that's an important place to come from of what I know. There's a lot more engagement and conversation and public discourse and dialogue about women as directors, women running things, women being able to be the ones to green light, to decide the point of view, the narrative that's going to be told in a film or a TV show. My friend America Ferrera just executive produced a show called Gentrified which is coming out on Netflix.

Amber Tamblyn:

And you've got women like Janet Mock, trans women of color who just had an overall deal at Netflix, the first woman of color ever to have that there. And you're seeing sort of these unprecedented moves as far as whose voices are being able to be in the room, who is getting to be able to create content.

Amber Tamblyn:

You've got the Lena Waithe. You've got these incredibly powerful queer non-binary trans women, women of all kinds who are making huge strides in the business. And while it's still not enough, while you still look at for instance, I think the Annenberg Institute just came out with a huge... they come out with their annual Annenberg Institute study, which looks at gender inequality in the workplace and in our business and specific in the entertainment business.

Amber Tamblyn:

And you still look and there's still just low numbers. It's still something around like 4% for women directors and it's still really low. So there's still just a lot of work to be done. But I do see that changing in the business. I do see a greater need for women in writers' rooms, women behind the camera, women running the camera, women producing entertainment, all of those things. It's happening.

Lauren Schiller:

One of the many things that I loved about reading your book is that I felt like, I don't know if it was at the end of each chapter but definitely interspersed throughout each story, was what I the reader can take away from this and what I could go do to make a difference.

Lauren Schiller:

And some of the things that I pulled out from it are this idea of opening the door for others and offering access that others don't have. And the plus one-

Amber Tamblyn:

Isn't that great?

Lauren Schiller:

So could you elaborate on... I feel like those are all kind of mixed together, but you can parse them if you want. But could you elaborate on this?

Amber Tamblyn:

So plus one is something that came out of Time's Up which was an idea that we have in our business again, but it's been carried over into Time's Up healthcare and all kinds of different industries, where the idea is anybody at any level whether you're the most known powerful person or whether you feel you have nothing to offer does have something to offer.

Amber Tamblyn:

And sometimes that is often just access. For instance, I just talked about these Hollywood parties right? How much I hate going to them. Most people hate going to them. They really do. Except for this one Jeffrey Katzenberg party. But to think that I could squander the invitations that I get to an elite Hollywood party where you might be able to rub elbows with some of the most important showrunners, executives, people who are creating content is a privilege for me to have.

Amber Tamblyn:

And that is an access that I have always had. But I have never thought that that would be possibly interesting or important to anybody else. To a young budding writer, a young woman who came out of college you would love to be staffed on a show. The idea that I would squander that. And I think it took a long time for me to realize like that is one thing I have to offer.

Amber Tamblyn:

There are so many things I have to offer. For instance my novel that came out before this book called Any Man, a thing that I'd never considered before was book tours. I go on these huge 30 city book tours for a book. I get to read in front of these big amazing audiences. And I've never once considered taking, inviting someone to open for me or to read with me in that capacity.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so I did that on that book tour. And in every city, I put out a basically like an open call and said, "If you are a woman identifying, a woman of color. If you identify as a woman in any capacity. I want you to read with me. I want you to be able..." And I would give different women 10 minutes something like that to read with me during those shows in every single city.

Amber Tamblyn:

And it was awesome. It was great. I got to meet new writers, young women whose voices. My jaw was on the floor thinking, "You've never been published? I can't wait for the world to know your work". So it was also a gave to me as well getting to lift up people who would normally not have a platform like that.

Amber Tamblyn:

And I've asked that of other friends of mine who have done the same thing for me, who have been the Amy Poehler's of the world, the Roxanne Gays of the world women who are constantly giving, the America Ferreras of the world who constantly giving to other women around them, even if they're exhausted of doing one more favor, of one more help, of one more. Whatever that is are always there saying, "I get it because I always wanted someone to pull me forward and I'm going to pull you forward."

Amber Tamblyn:

And each of us has something to offer in that way. So, in the book I talk a lot about asking ourselves what we have to offer especially men. What do men have to offer? Even if it's something small, like we always will have something that we can offer. And we think that that doesn't mean anything but it actually does. Because one of the things we say with the plus one model is, you can't be what you can't see.

Amber Tamblyn:

And if you don't... if you have never been in the room where it happens, if you've never been in a pitch room pitching something or trying to get something sold, you don't know. And so the fear manifests itself into creating a closed off space for you where you don't want to go out and put yourself on a limb.

Amber Tamblyn:

And oftentimes if you are brought into that room, even just to be able to see how it goes, how a meeting goes, you might be surprised how much you could affect someone's life.

Amber Tamblyn:

So that's like one of the many things that I talk about in thereof of thinking about what each of us individually has, and not taking for granted the access that we have at any level. Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:

And that's I mean and it's another form in the business world of mentorship and advocacy and bringing others up along with you. something else that you address in the book is the concept of white feminism that white women, myself included. I will put myself in this very bucket have cringed at the notion of that there is even such a thing that we stand for all women.

Lauren Schiller:

And you actually break that notion up quite well. Can you speak to that and why you felt like it was something it was important to address?

Amber Tamblyn:

To me this is a very important thing to address because I think all of us need to own that term. And even though it is a negative of a pejorative term, it's something that we feel like we don't want to be. But the fact of the matter is we are. Every white woman I know at some form has used her privilege to not help somebody, to make things worse for someone, to protect themselves and their own feelings over those of someone who couldn't have that protection.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, I talk a lot about that examination. And again, for each of us if we are ever called in, that's a great by the way a great term that black feminist women use which is instead of calling somebody out, you call them in. I love that so much.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so if you are ever called in confronted about something that happened for us not to immediately become defensive, in the way that... in the same way that white women would really love for men not to be defensive when we speak our truth.

Amber Tamblyn:

And when we call in somebody and say this happened it was hurtful. Instead of becoming defensive to maybe take a moment, take a beat and think about what happened and absorb what the person is saying and asking of you.

Amber Tamblyn:

So, that chapter is really difficult because I talk about my own experiences in white feminism, and my own experiences as putting myself front and center in an activist world, and an organizing world and the privilege to be able to do that. And to consider though that maybe always our voices not necessarily the one that should be in the front and center of certain conversations, especially when we're talking about racism and things like that. And we should be amplifying and supporting women around us who have real experience with that.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think everything stems back in this book to the idea of letting ourselves be uncomfortable, of letting this chaotic moment in our culture in this time that we live in happen, let it happen. And it's okay to be afraid of it. It is okay to be terrified, to feel all the feelings you're going to feel of that discomfort, of that anger, of that frustration. But to never shy away from it and certainly to not to disengage from the conversation. That to me is the most dangerous thing.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, there was talk this year the Women's March recently happened. And there's always something bubbling up in the news about how badly it's managed or who's in charge and what's the point. And yet thousands and thousands of women still came out. Have you had any thoughts on the role of the March?

Amber Tamblyn:

I think that this is something that the world wants for women which is for us to tear each other apart and to fail. They want these movements to fail. We have to always remember that at the end of the day, the world we live in doesn't want this to succeed.

Amber Tamblyn:

It doesn't want the Women's March to succeed. It doesn't want Elizabeth Warren to succeed. It doesn't want any organization that is run predominantly by women. It doesn't want a fair fight to succeed. Stacey Abrams organization, you look at that and there are real palpable present ways in which our culture and the society around us tries to disband women and pull them apart and make them hate each other.

Amber Tamblyn:

That's what's happened in the entertainment industry for generations as well. This idea of you are always in competition with your sisters. It is not about who is the best for their work, who is going to get chosen that there is enough work for all of us. because that's never the case. There isn't. So it becomes this scarcity mentality of seeing other women as your severe competition in some way. And that can be said for organizing too.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think it's really important that the Women's March exists. I think it's really important what they did. Sarah Sophie Flicker, Paolo Mendoza, Melanie Stamp as well, Yadda Trabioso. They all went and did this last [Lastisus 00:41:42] dance in front of the White House. And there is nothing more powerful to me than angry women with these bandages over their eyes yelling these lyrics, and pointing at The White House and saying, "The rapist is you. The rapist was you. And it's not my fault. It's not where I was not how I dressed."

Amber Tamblyn:

And when you have this giant choir of women screaming that that's really cathartic, but it's also very moving and important and being able to March, being able to show dissent and to be able to show up and resist against these forms of government and this form of oppression and language is a Rite of passage for especially for Americans.

Amber Tamblyn:

And so to me it's important that the Women's March still exists in that capacity. I don't know what's going on for their future. I don't know much about the inside politics of that but I do believe it's important for women to continue to show up. Even when it's most difficult, even when we are ripping at each other's throats and angry and frustrated and feeling erased. I think we have to keep showing up for each other.

Lauren Schiller:

Well, so here we are. We had six female candidates running for the current election. We're down to two as of this recording.

Amber Tamblyn:

And the New York Times couldn't pick one. So they think both.

Lauren Schiller:

I'm kind of I'm like always the silver lining person. My take on that was yeah, that was kind of weird. But also, hey two for one. I mean they both got Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren both got some words behind them and in for the record.

Amber Tamblyn:

I mean I record I think it's fine. I think it's fine but I still just question that idea of one is not enough. One is not enough. One can't be trustworthy enough. One can't be perfect enough to do this work. So, I think that's a little frustrating, but it's also... we're just we're in a different world and whether or not Elizabeth Warren wins the nomination, that's my hope anyway. I'm a big supporter of hers.

Amber Tamblyn:

But if it doesn't happen, we are going to continue to have these conversations about sexism, about this idea of perversing women's narratives and leaning into age old deeply sexist propaganda.

Lauren Schiller:

Your book opens with you talking with your newlywed husband, newly wedded husband about the fact that you are pregnant and that you want to terminate the pregnancy. And as we sit here, the president of our country is speaking at the anti-choice rally that happens every year like a week after the Women's March. And you conclude your book talking about choice and Women's Choice and choices of women.

Amber Tamblyn:

I think we have to just forever push against the idea that that choice belongs to anyone other than the body in which that choice is being inhabited. Abortion is normal. Animals do it. Humans do it. We are a species that has a conscious mind. We have the ability to understand things in a way that other animals do not. And abortion is normal. Abortion is normal, abortion is normal, Abortion is normal, Abortion is normal.

Lauren Schiller:

More broadly speaking around this idea of women's choice, I mean what is your... what would you say your vision is for women? Where would you like the imagined future in your lifetime?

Amber Tamblyn:

So, I think the best way to answer that question is to sort of paraphrase Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which when she was asked how will she know when there's enough women on the Supreme Court, she said, "When there are nine."

Amber Tamblyn:

And I think that that's just something for people to think about. And I think everyone will come away with a different feeling about that answer. Some people will think that means Ruth Bader Ginsburg wants men to be erased. Some women will understand that, that means we just want a seat at the table, a full seat at the table for a little while until things are balanced out.

Amber Tamblyn:

We want to know what that feels like to not be questioned. For that not to be a strange thing that only one voice, only one color of skin has been the only voice that has literally created this country. And so, I want people to think about that.

Lauren Schiller:

I love that. What's the best call to action that someone else has shared with you that you'd like to share?

Amber Tamblyn:

The best call to action. Oh, there's so many different things but I think that came from America Ferrera, who to me is just such an extraordinary human being and created this organization called Harness, and really has worked in these organizational spheres for a long time now and is a really brilliant mind. She's a great actress and a great producer and all those things, but she's a brilliant mind.

Amber Tamblyn:

I cannot wait to work for her presidential campaign someday. I'll do whatever. I'll wash your laundry. Just tell me what you want. I'll rub your feet. It doesn't matter. I'll do it. But I think there was in the frustration, a lot of the frustration that came out at the end of 2017 during that time when Time's Up was being formed and all of that and there was many women were feeling very much like they weren't being seen or weren't being appreciated for the work they were doing.

Amber Tamblyn:

I myself had some feelings around that. And I remember that America said, "If you are waiting for other women to give you a pat on the back and give you a reward for trying to change the world, you're going to be waiting a very long time," which is a simple thing to say but this idea of don't wait to be congratulated. You don't need to do that. You don't need permission to be angry about something and to go out and find out a way to do it.

Amber Tamblyn:

That tells me, go find three or four girlfriends that are your friends that you might have something in common that you feel like needs to change whether it's in your workplace, whether it's within your social community like whatever that is and start talking about it, and start talking about what each of you has to offer and to remember to not let your ego get in the way of that work, of needing to be front and center of everything.

Amber Tamblyn:

Sometimes deferment is the most powerful thing we can give, is to be able to step back and learn from someone else. I would say this again, it's always usually predominantly like America women of color. You can learn a lot from women of color, which just means step back and listen. Do more listening than you do the talking. But to remember that to not let your ego get in the way of it.

Lauren Schiller:

That was Amber Tamblyn, actor, director, poet and advocate for women's rights. Her latest book is Era of Ignition. I'll put a link to it and Ambers original op-ed on my website at inflectionpointradio.org. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:

That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, Radio Public, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to. Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org.

Lauren Schiller:

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Lauren Schiller:

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Gail Collins and the Adventures of Older Women in American History

Guest User January 8, 2020

Jane Fonda. Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Nancy Pelosi. Elizabeth Warren. Maxine Waters. Are "older" women taking over? By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18. And by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Listen to my conversation with Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and the author of the new book, “No Stopping Us Now. The Adventures of Older Women in American History” We explore how attitudes toward older women have shifted in America over the centuries – from the Plymouth Colony view that women were marriageable if "civil and under fifty years of age," to quiet dismissal of post-reproductive females, to women’s role as perpetual caretaker (even when she might need caretaking herself), to the first female nominee for president.

Lauren spoke with Gail on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco in October of 2019.

TRANSCRIPT: We do our best, please let us know any errors!

Gail Collins: My first book about women, was about women in American history. And we could not think of a title for it. Finally we called it America's Women, but that was so pathetic. The subtitle was 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines, which is a desperate attempt to make America's Women sound like a better title. And while I was doing that one, when I just came across a bunch of stuff that I wanted to go back and look at again. And one that sometime at some point along the way I came across was this letter from one of the very early colonists when they were first here, they were all guys. And so they're writing back to England saying, please send us some women. Please, please, please. And they wrote down their description of an ideal wife, who was a woman who was civil and under 50 years of age.

Gail Collins: So I thought, wow. And then I was wondering through some other point, I guess when I was doing, When Everything Changed and I ran across that famous hair coloring is from the early, the early seventies that said, you're not getting older, you're getting better. And I looked at it and the copy within that said, these days any woman over 25 is old. And I thought, holy moly. Wow. And you look right now and there's Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the gym and then running the Supreme Court, and everybody's applauding. I thought, wow, what makes all this stuff go up and down like this? And it seemed like a fun thing to look into.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller, and that is Gail Collins, New York times columnist and author of a new book called No Stopping Us Now: The Adventures of Older Women in American History. We spoke on stage for the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, in October of 2019. By 2034 there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18, and by and large, women are outliving men. So what might all these older women mean in terms of a possible power shift, historically speaking? Well, look at Jane Fonda. Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Look at Nancy Pelosi. My goodness, these women over 25, they're everywhere. And they're all in the book. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller: Gail's book covers American women from the 1600s to today, which is a lot of history to cover. So I started our conversation with a challenge. I asked Gail to give us the 60 second recap from the 1600s to today.

Gail Collins: May take two minutes, however.

Lauren Schiller: Okay, you get two minutes.

Gail Collins: There were two things. One was scarcity, as we've just seen. If you were the only women coming into some town in the wild west, really you could be 95 and they would be throwing themselves at you, and make no difference whatsoever. But the other thing that seemed to me such a big pattern, once I looked at it, was whether they had an economic role. Women who have an economic role are judged the way men are judged, and women who are seen as only mothers are pretty much out to pasture once their children are grown. And that was the great, great cosmic difference that I saw. And it came and went and came and went. And I won't tell you any more right now, because that's my two minutes, but we'll get back to it.

Lauren Schiller: No, you've got more time. Keep going. You talk about that with World War II, how everything really shifted.

Gail Collins: It shifted. You start look... Two seconds to the colonies. In the colonies wives were all farm wives, and they're growing vegetables, making candles, making... One woman, I just wove 33,000 balls of yarn this year. Just went on and on, the stuff that they could do, creating wealth. And everybody knew that the housewife was creating all this wealth, and young women wanted to come and hang out with them so they could learn how to do it. So at that period, it was a great period for being an older woman, then when everybody moved to the cities. And middle-class women had a much shrunken role that had nothing to do with economics. That was suddenly when, if your kids are gone, why are you still here? But it was very cruel and mean.

Gail Collins: And then as you go back and forth in history, whenever there's an economic call for older women, then they become very popular. And during World War II was the absolute perfect example. You had all the guys are gone and young women with children really resisted the idea of going to work. So there was everybody, a clarion call, and every all eyes turned older women. Here they are, Oh my God. And you suddenly, not just had Rosie the Riveter stories, but you had these stories about Josephine the 80 year old riveter. My God, is she great. And I remember reading one in a magazine at the time that was going around during the war saying, we were so touched today, we went to a restaurant and saw a 65 year old woman carrying a tray of dishes with a gleam of happiness in her blue eyes. I'm not sure about the glass, but that was the moment when women, older women, nobody complained about them at all. They were the heroines because they were doing all the work.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, with stories of how women rise up. I'll be right back with Gail Collins, who shares how economy shapes what men look for in a woman.

Lauren Schiller: Well, you tell a story in the book is about some guys you're interviewing in Connecticut about what they were looking for in a woman.

Gail Collins: Yeah. This was the humongous discovery that I made, somewhere along the way. My greatest thought was about the economic participation of women, and during... After World War II, the economy exploded, and everybody thought they could become middle-class. Everybody's going to the suburbs, they're getting their own houses, their kids are going to go to college, we're going to go on vacations. It was a humongous explosion of expectation for family life. And then the '70s came and all that... The oil... You remember a lot of you, I'm sure the oil boycott, the awful, awful economy of the '70s, and suddenly many, many, many families could no longer support the life they thought they needed to live with one income.

Gail Collins: And that was really the absolute change, because suddenly all the women who had been consigned to the role of mom and nothing else, were drawn back into the workforce. And younger women started thinking about what their role would be. And my favorite story about that period is it was actually later, in the late seventies or the '80s, but I was at a college in New Britain, Connecticut. And for some reason I'm talking to an entire room full of guys, and I do not know how exactly I got there, I was doing a woman's book tour, but they were lovely guys. And I said to them, what do you look for in a wife? And nobody was going to say to me, a really hot woman who I... So they all said, a really good personality.

Gail Collins: And I said, oh, that's nice. And then one kid in the back said, and a good earner. And they all said yes, oh my God, yes, and a good earner. Got to be a good earner. And I thought then, wow, this is a whole new vision. Guys really need their wives to be good earners, and women are being integrated into the economy in the same way. And they're going to get old in a totally different way.

Lauren Schiller: What's so interesting to me about that is that, why does the gender wage gap still exist?

Gail Collins: Very, very, very good question. It goes on forever too. One of the great things, after the invention of the birth control pill, suddenly the number of women in graduate school, law school, medical school skyrocketed because you could suddenly control and make sure you were not going to be getting pregnant and having a baby while you were doing your preparation for your career. Stupendous numbers. Now there are more women in law school and medical school than there are men. And the income and average of doctors and lawyers has dropped. What does this mean? It's a pattern that goes on and on and on and on and on. I believe we will overcome it at some point.

Gail Collins: Another problem is that women often like to go into the helping professions, which instantly, when you hear the word helping, you know they're not going to be making very much money. It's just... And because of that, they want to teach, they want to go and do work. They want to help out in different ways. And those are their income from those professions are not as high, and good for them. So a little bit of booth going on there.

Lauren Schiller: And then, right. And then when there is a male profession professionally teaching that women started to take over, it just, it happens over and over again. I just think it's bizarre that they want good earners, but they only want them to make, I don't know, 72 cents for every dollar they make.

Gail Collins: Not the husbands. I do not know anybody who believes more in equality of pay opportunity than the husbands of working wives. They are really for it, 100% yeah.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. So, older women do better when they can generate more money. That's one of the things that you told us. And women's power seems to fluctuate depending on what's happening with the economy overall, how much we're needed, but also who's got political power. Are those the two main drivers of where a women do or do not have power, is who's who is in charge politically, and how much are they needed economically?

Gail Collins: And the political part is very interesting, because you can't quite figure out where it goes with women. Women got the vote in 1920, and they had a vision of a new society that would be created with the women's vote, in which there'd be clinics for poor women and their children, there'd be all of these things happening to make society better, kinder, more woman-like in orientation. And none of it happened at all. Women voted like their husbands. Warren Harding was elected president instantly, and we got prohibition. That was about it. And so, voting by itself is not nearly enough to make a difference. You have to be an aggressive voter, which we're seeing more and more among women, that the women are inclined to vote differently from their husbands, their fathers, their brothers, everybody else. Much more than they were, say 10, 20, 30 years ago. And that's a real lever of power, and we'll see where that takes everybody.

Lauren Schiller: So can we talk about prohibition, since you brought that up?

Gail Collins: Nobody has said, can you talk about prohibition for a long time? I really love this. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller: Who here wants to talk about prohibition? Show of hands? Okay, we got one. We got one person who, okay, so we're going to talk about for you. But you talk in the book about how prohibition, while it was pushed by older women, was actually really bad for all the women, because of what it meant is that their husbands were not going to these elicit nightclubs and hanging out with the flappers, who are generally in their 20s. I had a bad backlash.

Gail Collins: The whole liquor thing was very weird, because it really did separate men from women. Before prohibition, one of the reasons women were so antagonistic to it, well one was that, truly, important neighborhoods, the saloons desperately tried to drag men in on pay day and take away all their money. So it was a legitimate, legitimate crusade. But beyond that, middle-class women didn't drink. And after dinner, and sometimes on weekends and whatever, their husbands and the men would go away places and drink and leave them behind. And it was a real division between the sexes, and women resented it and thought it was bad. And so, that propelled the way to, right along the way.

Gail Collins: And then there we were, and nobody liked it once it came. It really did not work out well at all. And it's true that then men off... Women, middle aged women, housewives, mothers, are not going to be going off to the speakeasy used to be hanging out and drinking. So if the men go, they are going to be meeting a whole new group of young women who are hanging out there. And women got very paranoid, housewives at the time. What the hell is going on? Where are these men going? And even if they weren't going anywhere, they were still looking at their husbands, is this going to happen? What's happening here? So it didn't work out nearly the way people thought it would.

Lauren Schiller: Well, there were, eventually, some good things that came out of women getting the vote, and women actually getting political power.

Gail Collins: I do not want to say this was not a good thing to do, by the way. But yeah, go ahead.

Lauren Schiller: That it was not a good thing to do-

Gail Collins: To give women the vote. No, it was really, really, really good idea.

Lauren Schiller: It was just a slow cook, right?

Gail Collins: It wasn't nearly the revolutionary moment that women thought it was going to be.

Lauren Schiller: But eventually, out of having women in power, we got social security, we got better labor laws.

Gail Collins: The New Deal. Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh my God.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. Let's talk about Eleanor Roosevelt.

Gail Collins: Eleanor Roosevelt I think had the greatest middle age of any woman in American history, by far. God help us, she's all over the place. She is visiting places that nobody else at the top of government has ever gone to, ever. To see poor black families, to see Appalachian families. She's going to see the troops overseas. She's driving around by herself. It was driving the Secret Service, so crazy that they taught her how to use a revolver. So there she's in her car with her revolver for going to see people in Appalachian. I just, Oh my God, what a woman. And because of her influence, and because of people who are hanging out with her and because of people who had begun to move into positions of power locally anyway, you got the New Deal women, like Francis Perkins, who was the person you most remember as being responsible for social security. So no badness at all in that development, I would say.

Lauren Schiller: I'd love to talk about the parallels in that moment in time, to the moment in time that we're experiencing now.

Gail Collins: Wow, okay.

Lauren Schiller: Well, just in terms of-

Gail Collins: There's Franklin Roosevelt.

Lauren Schiller: Okay. Not those guys. The women. We have a historic number of women in Congress now, and they're in positions to make a lot of change. And I think we all tend to get frustrated. Clearly we've got an issue in the White House that is preventing a lot of things from happening, but that we get frustrated with the pace of change. That why does it take so... Now we've got all these women, so how can we see more things happen more quickly, around education and health care and the so called more feminine interests.

Gail Collins: You really wonder if we had a different president, what this last election would have brought forward. But things are so crazy now that, just the ability to get up in the morning is about everything they can accomplish. And I find Nancy Pelosi very interesting. People complain constantly. Why isn't she doing more? Why isn't she doing more? But she is handling this thing that's happening now. I can't imagine anybody else doing, any guy up there that I've watched doing it, cannot conceive of them doing it anywhere better. You see the committee chairman, the guys, it's just not, they were not going to do any better than Nancy Pelosi. She's really controlled this thing, handled Donald Trump as well as a human being possibly could. And I like to think that's part of the future.

Gail Collins: And once we get past this time, will be very interesting to see what these very large number of women moving into Congress, although still a minority, and hardly any women governors, there's still a long, long way to go. Still, see what happens next. It's going to be great.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah, and they are, we were talking about this earlier, they are, the majority of women, are Democrats. There's very few female, Republicans.

Gail Collins: Very few. It's amazing how they could even manage to avoid having more women. It's just incredible. Gosh, darn.

Lauren Schiller: Imagine what could get done though if there were more women, Republican politicians?

Gail Collins: They do work until this recent unpleasantness of the last couple of years, the women in Congress worked together very well. They had their regular things they would do, they would do softball games together. They would go out to dinner together. They had their own special place where they would hang out, and they were capable of behaving in a much more bipartisan manner than the guys were. And if things had, I think the place where they did, I'd probably still, if they still get to do it, the place that they hung out was the Strom Thurmond Room. Which I just find so... The idea that Strom Thurmond gave his name to this, tickles me so. But once this passes, we'll see what happens. It's going to be a whole new thing for sure.

Lauren Schiller: I like the affirmative way that you just said, once this passes. All things must pass. Well actually, let's talk about you for a minute. You're a woman with power. You write this... You look at you, you're sitting on this stage in front of all these people.

Gail Collins: Thank you.

Lauren Schiller: I feel the glow of you right here. And you write your column every week for the New York Times, and you have the opportunity to sway a lot of public opinion. And do you, this is such a weird question to ask, but do you think in those terms, if I write this, and this happens? I have this power and how must I use it?

Gail Collins: Not exactly. My thing has been, I've been a columnist for a really long time, before the Times I was at the New York News Day and then the Daily News before that, and somewhere along the line in the Daily News period, I was writing a local column is about local government. And at that point, New York local government was so bad. Oh my God, it was terrible. And I'd write these columns every couple of days saying, oh my God, look what they did now. Oh my Lord, it's getting worse and worse and worse. And I would go on and on like that, trying to rile up indignation and fury.

Gail Collins: But after a while, I was thinking, oh my God, basically I'm causing people to get up and want to throw themselves out the window. There's got to be a different way to do this, where I can tell people what's happening, without depressing them mortally. So at that point, I tried to make the columns more fun to read. So that my goal has been, for a long time now, to just get people to know about stuff in a way that doesn't make them suicidal.

Lauren Schiller: It seems... So far so good. I chuckle every time I read one of your columns, even though what you're conveying is just so horrible underneath.

Gail Collins: We're getting the votes in now, we have a contest now named the worst cabinet member. Many, many votes are coming in, I've got to tell you.

Lauren Schiller: Well, let's talk about what it means to be old. This is a question that's in question, right? This, a certain age-

Gail Collins: And not argue about your age, now. Lie about it, now that we have Wikipedia. You're just stuck. Whatever age you are, you really are for sure.

Lauren Schiller: I feel like there's no good answer to the question, how old are you? Or you look younger than I thought you were, or you look older than I thought you were. That used to be a compliment, but now not so much.

Gail Collins: No, I'm 73 by the way. The story of it.

Lauren Schiller: Well, okay, so one of the things that you... That I found in the book is that in the 1950s only about 3% of the population was over 65.

Gail Collins: Very tiny bit. And then the amount has just, I trust your numbers because I've completely gone blank on them.

Lauren Schiller: I got them from somewhere.

Gail Collins: But it was tiny. And it's exploded. And one of the reasons I think it's so important to talk about women maintaining careers, and men too, in their later years, is because there's going to be so many of us very soon. This world is not going to be able to support us, unless we do more earning on the side to try to keep things going a bit because it's just... And the number of people over 90 is skyrocketing. Most of them are women. And it's going to get more and more and more so because thank you, the medical profession.

Gail Collins: Which by way, doing history, I have to say, teeth. I think back about history, oh my God, there were no teeth. Nobody had any teeth. They found the body of a woman at Jamestown just a few years ago when they were digging around, and she was about 30 years old, and she had five teeth. That was all. So when I think about history, I do wonder off, and I'm sorry, I just changed the subject completely. Every once in a while I think, my God, teeth. Oh my Lord in heaven. This is so amazing. We've all got our teeth.

Lauren Schiller: Well there's been a lot of medical advancements since-

Gail Collins: Even more profound than that, but I just-

Lauren Schiller: We'll get to plastic surgery, and all the other stuff in a few minutes. Hair dye. I know that's not a medical procedure, but. So is retirement passe now? Is that not a thing anymore? If people... If 65 was the retirement age-

Gail Collins: Well many people do retire at 65. And to be fair, many, many people look forward to retiring at 65. It's not like the entire world is out there saying, let me stay in this job for another 10 years, this is what I really want to do. But the vision that when you stop doing, if you stop doing what you were doing when you turn 65 or whenever, that you're then going to go home and sit around is, I think, really passe. There were just so many things people are doing now. There's so many people who are working as volunteers. There's so many people doing community service. There's so many people who are just going out and doing things they always wanted to do, take a boat around the world or whatever, that they couldn't do otherwise. But that's the vision. The thing is that you don't have that sense of, okay, we're done now, we're going to go home and it's all over.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah, because you get to be sticking around for another 30, 40 years.

Gail Collins: Damn straight.

Lauren Schiller: We've got to come up with a good routine. It's also in this time, it seems like a great opportunity to get involved in, say, some activism. Right? And thinking about women throughout history who have been involved in activism, and bridging that gap between the younger activists and the older activists, how those two worldviews might come together or push apart. And that's something that you talk about.

Gail Collins: Can I tell my Elizabeth Cady Stanton story?

Lauren Schiller: Yes.

Gail Collins: This is one of my favorite stories. This is before the civil war, and women in the North were the ones who were very, very conscious of the evils of slavery, I think, more than the men were there. They were very into the idea that it was a woman's issue, because you're talking about families being broken up, and young girls being at the mercy of slave owners, and became a very passionate issue. But you couldn't go out and talk about it in public, because the idea of women speaking out in public was just not accepted. They would throw stones at you, they would burn down your auditorium, they would call... They thought that you were all promiscuous if you were to speak out in public, you were a harlot. That was the thought that was going around, and so nobody did it. You really did not have any women getting out. Even African American women who wanted to speak out against slavery were really discouraged by their communities in many parts of the North.

Gail Collins: So Elizabeth Cady Stanton is right there in this point and she's dying to go out and talk about this stuff. So she suddenly announces, well, I'm going to come out, because I am a grandmother, gray hair, looking dumpy, wearing frumpy clothes here. I am a grandmother. I'm going to come and talk to you about grandmother things, our boys and our home. And I'll throw in a little bit about slavery, maybe, and a little bit about women's rights. And I've got ideas about divorce for forum that I made. And she got away with it. And she went around the country giving speeches all the time, sleeping over night in railroad stations when she couldn't get a train. Playing cards with soldiers on her way from one town to the other. She got away with it all because she presented herself as a grandmother, and her friends saw this going on and suddenly they started writing odes to menopause. Oh happy day we get to go out. This is all great. And it was a great liberation, and it was liberation through gray hair, basically.

Lauren Schiller: So the menopause thing comes up a lot, for obvious reasons, but that it either is going to make you sex crazy, or sex neutral or completely be the beginning of the end. Can you talk about some of the things that you learned about the change?

Gail Collins: Doctors didn't discover a menopause until the 1800s. Did not occur, and they didn't care. When they did discover it, they instantly decided that it was terrible and it led to your death, or insanity or something. It was just, it was never a popular. And when doctors did start to think about it, they started to think about ways to avoid it. They started with chimpanzee glands, allegedly at least, injecting women with a chimpanzee glands to save them from menopause and keep going. And of course that didn't work, but you did, as time went on, get to what led to a hormone replacement therapy, which for 20 years, it was the absolute thing that was going on in this country. Tons and tons and tons of women were doing it. And that was all about eliminating the evils of menopause.

Gail Collins: And it took all that time, really until they realized that hormone replacement therapy was bad for you, and you can't do it anymore for a long periods of time, before people were really willing to sit down and talk about, well, hey, this is a normal part of life. You can just do that and move on, and everything is fine. It was a bad moment for the medical profession that went on for a long period of time. But I think it's pretty well over now. It's been a long time since I've heard anybody say, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, my life is over. It's been forever.

Lauren Schiller: I just hear, oh my God, I'm going through menopause, I'm sweating all the time.

Gail Collins: That one does still come up, I've got to say. That's true.

Lauren Schiller: Well, okay, so on that topic, the amount of work,

Gail Collins: I'm sorry, guys, whoever's out here, it's just-

Lauren Schiller: Hey, you know what? It's just, it's part of the package. There's also, I love all the stories about hair dye, and the reactions to women who dyed their hair, that the horrible dye that was actually available when it first came out. And even today, women of a certain age, or women who are going gray. Have to make this vital decision. It's a life, it's really a life altering decision. Am I going to dye my hair?

Gail Collins: Well my friend, Nora Ephron said, that the history of women superseding the limitations of age was not about feminism or about better life through exercise. It was all about hair dye. I was just totally into that idea, and I grabbed it. Because it really is in many ways true, that if you have the choice of deciding whether or not you're going to go gray, and either one is a perfectly logical choice. It does create an end to that whole idea that there's a particular point in life when all women go gray, and that's a marker, because clearly, two thirds of the women are not having that marker anymore.

Gail Collins: It was a 10 year period, I think it was from the beginning to the end of the '60s, but maybe the '70s, when the first time that women could, that was really easy to do hair coloring. You could do it at home. It was easy to go to a hair shop and get it done. 7% of women used hair coloring at the beginning of that decade, and by the end, they had to take hair color off American passports because you couldn't tell anymore. You had no idea what color people's hair really was. So it's just eliminated. It's a big thing.

Gail Collins: And in the early days, women, first of all was against the law in many States, allegedly, to dye your hair. Or at least they tried to pass a law. State legislatures will do anything, basically. And there was a long period of state legislatures talking about banning, or making it illegal to dye your hair, because the theory was, you could trick people into marrying you, trick men into marrying you by looking younger than you really were. A, the dyes were so terrible then that nobody would have been fooled anyway. And if you use them, your hair would fall out, or you get mercury poisoning. It just was not a reliable thing to do for anybody. But there was this paranoia on the part of state legislatures and people, guys in general, that somehow women would be able to trick you into thinking that they were much younger than they really were.

Lauren Schiller: There's got to be a politician who just had a terrible experience, and he was like, I am not letting this happen to any of my other male friends.

Gail Collins: State Senator, Fred. And he told everybody about it, it was horrible.

Lauren Schiller: I was also thinking about, I can't remember if this is in your book or not, but the quality of mirrors used to be not that good.

Gail Collins: Right.

Lauren Schiller: And if you've ever stayed in an old house or whatever, and you try and do your makeup, pluck your eyebrows, forget about it. So, but as the quality of mirrors got better, I'm guessing, that also intersected with the proliferation of magazines, and all of these different ways that you could beautify yourself, and all the makeup that was available to do it with.

Gail Collins: It's absolutely true and it was very fast, that suddenly this all turned over, and women went, hey, this could happen, that could happen. And then once it became possible, every magazine in the entire universe was warning you, if you don't use that, or that or blah, you are going to look like such a hag. You will never be able to go outside again. There was one ad I really loved. It was from I think the '40s maybe the '50s, in which a young girl is saying to her mother, mom, you're looking so young these days, because of blah, blah. And mom looked really young because she had exactly the same face as her daughter in the ad.

Lauren Schiller: In addition to the epiphany around the mirror. I was also just thinking about how much, these magazines, many of them, especially as the years went on, were run by women, and women perpetuating these beauty standards, which were, are, impossible for most real people who don't have Photoshop or a stylist and to make a person and a fitness trainer and yada, yada, yada to actually live up to. And that it has caused... And you can see I'm wearing lipstick, I get my hair cut just the other day, but that it has caused us women to spend so much time and money worrying about these things, and also being judged by them, and that it has been perpetuated, in a sense, by other women, women who had the possibility to change the way we think about ourselves.

Gail Collins: It's a great business. And I worry about cosmetic surgery, that the places at which it goes to. Crazy lengths, and you just see poor women cutting themselves up every year to try to look more and more young, and I find that very disturbing. But I have to say I've gotten used to the cosmetic thing. And I see a lot of guys who I just think, well, if you had the opportunity [crosstalk 00:32:21]. It's not my biggest worry, anyway, in the cosmic scheme of things.

Lauren Schiller: Coming up, Gail Collins tells us her adventure to becoming the first woman editor of the editorial page of the New York Times.

Lauren Schiller: Join our supporters by making a tax deductible donation at inflectionpoint.org, and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller: We're moving away from hair dye and makeup, and all of that, into the civil rights movement.

Gail Collins: Fantastic.

Lauren Schiller: Where women did, when they went to march, dress quite beautifully, and wear their hat and their lipstick and you even have a story about lipstick and suits.

Gail Collins: The Women's March for Peace, in particular. That was the first really anti war anti nuclear proliferation movement, that was created by middle-class housewives. And their idea was, that if you marched around wearing a shirtwaist dress, and maybe even a mink coat and high heels picketing the White House, that you would confuse people, and then they cause them to think, maybe mothers really do care about these issues, and it's not really the three crazy people down the street. And it worked, to some extent. And for a long time, younger women in the movement, were always being yelled at for not coming in with the right clothes on and stuff like that, because they thought that was a really important part of the story.

Gail Collins: Can I just tell one civil rights thing that-

Lauren Schiller: That proceeded, that was leading up to the civil rights... Yes, go.

Gail Collins: The thing about the civil rights movement that... I thought so much about the trajectory of African American women, which was different because they were working all the time, mostly as domestics. But when you got to the civil rights movement, when we think about the civil rights movement, we think about young people getting killed or risking their lives down South. And then we think about Martin Luther King, and all the other men who were leaders. But if you look at, say the beginning of the movement, the first person that most Americans heard about was Rosa Parks, who was a middle aged woman. And then that gave birth to, when she refused to go to the back of the bus, that gave birth to the Montgomery bus boycott, which was really the thing that caused America for the first time to think, what's going on? For the first time, really focus in on this.

Gail Collins: And the Montgomery bus boycott was organized by middle aged black women. They were the ones who had been out in the community forever doing social work, helping people, taking care of stuff that was going on, working on the schools, registering people to vote. And they were the ones that had those kinds of connections, who could go right in there and organize people very quickly. And nobody gave them any credit. And Andrew Young said that it was because it was, they were too much like their mothers, so they therefore it didn't want to do it. But nobody has celebrated the work of older black women in the civil rights movement nearly, nearly enough.

Lauren Schiller: And he specifically said that about Ella Baker.

Gail Collins: Yes. Ella Baker was my hero. Oh my God.

Lauren Schiller: Tell her story.

Gail Collins: Ella Baker was a great organizer in the civil rights movement, and she started out, and she spent her most heroic years working with young people, black and white in the South, trying to give them a vision of community organizing that didn't involve just having a big strike and that everybody goes away. But organizing the whole community so that people are able to take up the cause themselves, and set their own goals. And it was hard to do, because of course the kids wanted to come in and...

Gail Collins: But she spent her great years working on that kind of organization, and she would spend all of her nights on trains going from town to town, sitting, listening all night long to young people talking, trying to help them by listening to them think about ways to move forward. They called her their Gandhi. She did this when she had terrible asthma, and all these kids smoked the whole night long. She would sit there with respirators, listening to them with an oxygen mask on, listening for hours and hours and hours and hours, patiently, to these kids talking in order to help them to move forward. I think she's the great unsung heroine, hero, of the civil rights movement forever.

Lauren Schiller: Ella Baker was a middle aged woman who went and hung out with young people, and helped them rise up. But sometimes, the young people don't necessarily want the old people around.

Gail Collins: Don't trust anyone over 30.

Lauren Schiller: Exactly.

Gail Collins: I must admit, I was in college for that. We actually did trust many people over 30, people who are professors, men and women, and our lawyers. But it was just so cool to say that, that you just did for a while there.

Lauren Schiller: We would say in high school all the time to our parents. You wrote in your book, it was about the 1950s. In the 1950s, the Population Reference Bureau was a research book that warned that the country could be taken over by elderly women, since their numbers were increasing so much faster than that of the men in terms of voting power, ownership of land and corporate equities. The US could be seen on the road toward a geronto-matriarchy, control by aging females.

Gail Collins: Ready to go. Okay.

Lauren Schiller: What happened?

Gail Collins: Worse things could happen in the world. I can name one right now really fast. And part of it is, went with women's suffrage, and why it didn't work out the way you expected, is that women's interests are so intermingled with their husbands, their sons, their brothers, that it's very seldom that you see for any prolonged period of time women separating themselves from men and saying, we're just going to do this on our own. It's just not going to ever happen. And that was part of it. And the whole women, older women, taking over the world thing, which I'm looking forward to, has clearly been a lot slower than some people might've expected. But I think that's just paranoia. There's just a ton of that out there. People being, statisticians and poll takers, becoming paranoid about stuff that they didn't need to become paranoid about.

Lauren Schiller: Remember the statistic about people over 65 being such a small percentage of the population. So apparently, by 2034, there will be more people 65 and older than there are people under 18.

Gail Collins: The population is just exploding all the way up. And as, I think I said before, the answer to that, one of the answers is that older people are not going to be able to drop out anyway, even if they want to. They're going to have to chip in there, do stuff to help keep the rest of the country going. It's our responsibility, for heaven's sake. You just can't let these things slide and say, I've done mine. I'm gone. This is all you. That's one of the reasons I just see this incredible change, and what's going to be happening.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. You'll probably tell me that it's always been this way, but there is a movement around activism for mothers, and often, mothers in their forties whose kids are old enough, they're at school and they have time available to push forward things around ending gun violence. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that... Okay, ending gun violence. Yes, thank you. I'm thinking specifically of Shannon Watts for Moms Demand Action, and then Moms Clean Air Force is a great environmental group, but Mothers Against Drunk Driving is the first one that I have a memory of. And just thinking about these women who are old enough to have a skillset, and a focus and something that they want to see change, and not just go along with the status quo. That is such a huge asset to our country.

Gail Collins: It's always been this way No really. But there've been so many people like that who have talked about that throughout our history. Jane Adams was the famous leader of the first social work movement, really, among women in this country. And she worked until she really was almost ready to die, and wrote many articles as she got older about how older women were getting back in there and they were doing... It was all volunteer work, but it was very serious volunteer work in their communities. They were starting women's clubs that everybody thought were, oh my God, they're going to be writing papers about Julius Caesar and his wife's dresses or whatever, it's going to be really silly. And very fast, they went from, we're going to do study groups to, we are going to do prison reform. We're going to go and help working women in working class, working women. We're going to do stuff to pasteurized milk, for God's sake.

Gail Collins: So this, this has been a movement that comes and goes and comes and goes, but I think it's coming again now you. Do really see, although I talked to Anna Quinlan about that, who's been working for Planned Parenthood for a thousand years, just the rock of Planned Parenthood, and she said that she finds now that's so many older women are still working, that they're volunteers, more and more, tend to be younger women who are trying to get college credit for it or something like that. Which is a very weird and strange thought that never occurred to me before, but I'm just putting it out there. Because if Anna Quinlan says it, it's probably true.

Lauren Schiller: Yeah. And those interns should get paid. Well one of the things that I, the main thing that I explore on my show, is how women rise up. So since you've studied 400 years of women rising up, is there an answer out there? Could we just put a nail in it?

Gail Collins: There are many, but I can tell you one from your very own life. When people ask me a lot, how did you get to be the editorial page editor at the Times or whatever. And the answer is basically-

Lauren Schiller: First woman.

Gail Collins: First women, there were some before me, but they were all guys. There were many before me, but they were all guys. And I have to tell you this, as totally in passing, and I'm sorry I'm getting off the subject, but at the Times, there is a room where the editorial board meets and they do all their deliberations and discussions. And when I was around, there were pictures on the wall, it was in the old building, of Henry Raymond, who was the first editor and editorial page editor and a few of the other really famous editorial page editors. And of course they're all guys, and I used to, once in a while, if I was feeling really sassy, I just go in the middle of the day and I'd say, guys, I've got your job. It just knocked me out. I really just always enjoyed it, always enjoyed that.

Gail Collins: I wanted to tell a story that has, I was talking so much about how the economy changed what happened with women and everything else, but it was also the women who changed what happened with women. Women who filed lawsuits, and who went on strike for equal opportunity, and they were almost never the people who got the rewards. At the times, the women who, was before I got there, but the day that I think the publisher or the editor, it was while back, posted a thing saying we have three new openings for editors. Any guy that's interested should just come over here and apply or something like that. But whatever it was, it just drove the women crazy because they had all had desires. They had hopes and dreams of becoming, say foreign editor, or national editor or whatever. And they were all getting shunted away to assistant travel page editor or whatever.

Gail Collins: And they were so angry, and they fought, they started fighting and protesting and threatening lawsuits and terrifying the management, until all these changes were made. And I guarantee you right now, the New York times is the most diversity conscious place I have certainly ever worked. They're very, very conscious of that. But this change, when it happened, didn't help those women, because they had been spending so much of their lives fighting for this stuff that they were like... They'd been... She was the travel editor, or travel deputy for 15 years. What the hell? We're not. And they were older, and they'd gotten in everybody's face. So they were thought of as a pain. The people who got all the rewards for people like me, who walked in right after that. And we were the ones who got all of the opportunities.

Gail Collins: And I know so many of these women. And the thing about them that just knocks me out is that they weren't bitter about it. They were so happy that they had done something that had opened up these opportunities. When I got to be editorial page editor, they were thrilled. None of them ran around saying, I could have done that, for God's sake. I didn't have the chance. It's not fair. And that to me is the definition of a great heart. Somebody who takes joy in somebody else getting the thing they fought for that they didn't get. And that's what these women were like. And I never pass up a chance to talk them.

Lauren Schiller: That's it. That's the answer, right? We help each other step up.

Gail Collins: You help each other.

Lauren Schiller: So when I first got the book, I thought to myself, No Stopping Us Now, is that ironic or sincere? But I feel like by the end of reading the book and this conversation, I think it's our rallying cry.

Gail Collins: It is totally sincere. I just look at the history, and when I think that I got to live through the point in history that changed the entire way women survive in western civilization. That changed the role of women, the role of men relating to women that had gone on forever. It changed in my lifetime and I got to see it happen. How can you not be optimistic when you think about something like that?

Lauren Schiller: Could you feel it? Could you feel it as each change happened? Obviously as a little baby, you're maybe not feeling things, but as you as a tween, and then in your twenties thirties and so on?

Gail Collins: I was really completely out to lunch about it. I had gone mostly to all girls schools and so, and they were Catholic schools, so really the male thing did not enter the equation a whole lot at all as you were coming along. And then when I was in college, we were having the free speech movement, and it was a very open movement and I felt fine about that. So it really wasn't until I got to graduate school, and there were a lot of other women organizing around women's issues. And I had no idea, and there were, there were no women faculty members in the graduate school where I was at UMass at that time, but it had never occurred to me. I was so stupid, and so dumb and I'm just every day thankful that when I was there, I ran into all of these amazing women and on and on throughout my life. They were all always way ahead of me, and it was just a privilege to come up behind them and learn stuff from them.

Lauren Schiller: That was Gail Collins, New York Times columnist and author of No Stopping Us Now, speaking with me live on stage at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. I'll put a link to Gail's book on my website, inflectionpointradio.org, where you can also find future events by clicking on the events tab. I'm Lauren Schiller, this is Inflection Point, and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller: Today's program was produced, in part, by the generous donation of Ellen Olsen in honor of her late mother-in-law, Margaret Nicholson, a woman Ellen says, was way ahead of her time.

Lauren Schiller: That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcasts, Radio Public, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review, and subscribe to the podcast.

Lauren Schiller: Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible, monthly, or one-time contribution, when women rise up, we all rise up, just go to inflectionpointradio.org.

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Speaker 3: Support for this podcast comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Candace Bushnell–Is There Still Sex in the City? Live On Stage

Lauren Schiller November 6, 2019

Candace Bushnell gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week to soak in the stories of the women--and men--of the 90s television culture-changer "Sex and the City". Candace has written a number of books since then and her newest book is called "Is There Still Sex in the City?" This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have an on-stage conversation with Candace Bushnell, hosted by INFORUM at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Bushnell kicked off the evening with an update about what she’s been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk--friendships, love, loss and dating over 50.

TRANSCRIPT: To err is human. If you find an error, let us know.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode, Candace Bushnell.

C Bushnell: Like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City. And there were some surprises. One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive and it does go both ways. Yes it does.

Lauren Schiller: Now that's a driveway moment. Stick around.

C Bushnell: At one point, I had this idea for a TV series where the women were going to run, it was a brothel, but it was for other women and they were going to employ these younger guys because there were so many young guys who, I don't know. And I thought the idea was really kind of interesting, but everyone's like, "No." But you know, I had a lot of wacky ideas about what I was going to do with all these stories and this material. And I really went back to the structure that I used in Sex and the City which is, it's really fiction written as journalism as opposed to journalism written as fiction.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up and that was Candace Bushnell. Yes, that Candace Bushnell who gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week and soak up the stories of the women and men of Sex and the City. She's written a number of books since then. She's a prolific writer and now she's out with a new book. This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have a conversation with Candace on stage hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Candace kicked off the evening with an update about what she's been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk. Here she is on her new book called Is There Still Sex in the City?

C Bushnell: Is there still sex in the city? Yes. Yes, but less. And everybody's having less, including the millennials. They're having the least of all. Well, we'll talk about that later. This is not a sequel to Sex and the City, but it has different characters. But the inspiration for writing it was the same feeling that I had when I started writing Sex and the City. And when I started writing Sex and the City, the feeling was really like, this is uncharted territory. Writing about single women's lives in the city and the mating and dating rituals. And at the time we thought, oh gosh, this only happens in New York city. But it turned out that it actually happened everywhere. Now back in the mid nineties, I was a woman in my mid thirties and I felt like being single was really like a feminist kind of statement and it meant that you were kind of willing to break the rules and pursue your own dreams instead of maybe necessarily pursuing finding a man.

C Bushnell: And what's so interesting to me is that 20, 25 years ago, if you were a single woman in your mid thirties, people really felt that there was something wrong with you. Now, and I think partly thanks to Sex and the City, people just think you're normal. And so I think that's a bit of a triumph. But when I was writing Sex and the City, I felt very much like an outsider. And like a lot of my Sex and the City friends, I did end up getting married and I guess I found my Mr bigger and also maybe my mister was a little bit younger. And most of my friends also ended up finding their Mr big, their Aiden, their Harry or maybe even their Steve. Now all you guys, you know Sex and the City, right? Okay. Because I don't want to be like, people are looking at me like who is she talking about?

C Bushnell: And then something happened and I personally ended up getting divorced when I was 52. And so that was kind of the end of my, what I thought would be happily ever after because I really didn't think about it that much. And my first instinct was to run away. So I ran away to Connecticut, I started riding horses and then I had two other girlfriends who they didn't have children and I decided to do what women are always saying that they're going to do when you're younger. We're all going to live together and we're all going to live close by and we will be like the golden girls. And honestly, for six months it worked.

C Bushnell: We went to the vegetable markets, farm stands, we made dinner, we had one friend of mine Sassy, she came up with any excuse to have a party and wear hats. And I sort of thought, okay, this is going to go on forever. But then a whole bunch of my other friends ended up getting divorced. And what happens when women become single again? You go to where the other single women are. So all of a sudden, all of these newly single women, all in their 50s came to Sag Harbor, which I call the village in this book. Now when I got divorced, I really thought I did not want to date at all. I really felt like I've already done this. I've already done the reproductive cycle where I got married, I was in love, this and that, and then it didn't work. Why am I going to attempt to do it again? Isn't there's something better than we as women can do now that we're in our fifties besides looking for men?

C Bushnell: Okay. The answer was pretty much no. Because all of my friends and women who I know wanted to start dating again. And once again, and it's not just dating, but it's also reinventing your lives. And so once again, it felt like this is really uncharted territory because they are women who are dating again, they haven't dated for 20, 25 years. And things have really changed. And the other thing that happens when you get somewhere in your fifties is that there can be a feeling of invisibility and there's a question of are you still relevant? Children leaving the nest, careers may end, all of that kind of stuff. So there's also that struggle. But like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City and there were some surprises.

C Bushnell: One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive. Okay. So 50 something guys, and I know there are men in the audience like, "I'm not like that." We're not really brought up to think of somebody in their 50s or 60s as being attractive and being like a potential sex partner. And it does go both ways. Yes it does. And one of the things that one discovers is there are younger guys who are interested. That's another story. And then one of the things that you do is okay, guys your age aren't interested. They're interested in younger women. So why not try to beat the odds by going for guy who's older? Maybe dating a man who's 15, 20 or even 25 years older? Which is fine except that given the fact that you're now middle-aged yourself, that means that man who could be 70, 75 or even 80.

C Bushnell: You wouldn't think that there would be a large contingent of men out there at that age who are dating. But when you think about demographics and how so many of the boomers are now in their later years, it makes sense that there's a crop of 60, 70 and even 80 something men out there acting like they're 35. I personally encountered one of these men at a party given by a married couple in their early sixties, and they decided to just get it over with and invite all the newly 50 something single women. I don't know how many of you guys have been in that situation. And then they would invite a couple of eligible guys who they could dig up.

C Bushnell: So there were lots of 50 something single women there and two or three of these senior age players or SAPs. These are older single men of means, meaning they have enough money to add it to their list of attributes and are often still employed in a lesser version of the high powered career they once had. At some point during the evening, I must've talked to one of these men because a few days later, Ron, the host of the party contacted me to let me know that out of all the 50 something women there, and I was in my fifties then, now I'm 60, he wanted to let me know that a fellow named Arnold had picked me out of the bunch to ask me out. Now, Ron was very excited about this and he was suddenly very impressed with me that I could attract a guy like Arnold because Arnold, he said was a big deal and everybody really admired him.

C Bushnell: Arnold played Ivy league football and he was once an oil man and a newspaper magnet and all the Park Avenue hostesses were always inviting him to their parties. He was sought after. I thought I remembered the guy. A tall, thick battleax type who was definitely older, too old for me I decided. "How old is he?" I asked. "He's a little bit older than I am," Ron said. So that would make him like 68. The thing is these guys often lie about their ages. They fudge somehow forgetting about that truth revealing device called the internet. Sure enough, when I Googled him, Arnold turned out to be 78 and that made him much closer to my father's age than mine. My father was 83, Arnold was just five years younger, but they couldn't have been more different. My father is very conservative and Arnold apparently is not. According to Ron, Arnold used to be somewhat of a notorious wild man at Studio 54. And even to this day, Arnold still has much younger girlfriends. The last one being 42.

C Bushnell: "I don't know how he does it," Ron said. I wanted to tell Ron that I didn't want to be the one to find out. And so I tried to say no to this fix-up. Peer pressure however, is one of the things that I hadn't counted on in middle age, and when it came to dating, it turns out there was a lot of it. My friends kept reminding me that it was good to go out and it was really good that someone had finally asked me out, when was the last time that had happened? Of course I should go. What's the harm in it? And besides, you never know. Of course the problem with you never know is that so often you actually do know. I knew or I was convinced I knew that I was not going to date a 78 year old man, no matter how wonderful he was. What if he fell down? I didn't spend my life working this hard to end up taking care of a strange older person.

C Bushnell: But every time I tried to explain this to people, I realized how ageist and judgy and anti-love hopeful I sounded because I didn't know. Did I? I didn't know what was going to happen. What if I fell in love with him, in which case his age wouldn't matter, right? Plus, I didn't want to be that creature. And you know that shallow woman who cares more about practicality than the blind illusions of love. Plus, as Ron reminded me, I must feel so honored than a man as powerful as Arnold wanting to spend time with little old me. In preparation for the date I went to my friend's Sassy's house and we looked at photographs of Arnold on the internet. His photos would have back about 35 years. He'd been a big man and rather handsome. "Oh honey," Sassy said, "he could turn out to be absolutely wonderful. You must keep an open mind."

C Bushnell: And so arrangements for a date were negotiated. We could have gone to a restaurant in my town, but Arnold really wanted me to see his house, which was in another town about 30 minutes away. However, he offered to pick me up and take me to his town and then I can always spend the night at his house if I needed to. And he would be really willing to drive me back to my house in the morning. A sleepover with a 78 year old man I didn't know? I don't think so. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and that's Candace Bushnell reading from her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City? We'll take a quick break and when we come back, I get to ask her a few questions. Inflection Point is a listener powered independent production. I hope you'll consider supporting us with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller: I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm talking with Candace Bushnell, whose new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? We spoke live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Arnold. So-

C Bushnell: Yes. You know-

Lauren Schiller: You didn't spend the night I take it.

C Bushnell: I'm sorry?

Lauren Schiller: You didn't spend the night. He showed you his bed. He really tried hard.

C Bushnell: I mean, the thing about ... actually, I really made it funny and I worked hard to make it funny. He was really, really sexist, like shockingly so, and really quite oblivious and very entitled. Like one of the first things he showed me was his bed, which was 20 years old or older and he shipped it from California and he said, "I had a lot of really, I've had a really lot of good of sex on that bed and I expect to have a lot more." And I was like, this is just too much. He was, yeah. I mean it's-

Lauren Schiller: I want to know why your friends were so invested in you meeting with this guy.

C Bushnell: Well, I think it's something that we as women do, we want each other to be taken care of and it's still somewhere in the back of all of our minds, even though it really doesn't happen. That somehow the mail is going to be the protector and you'll be okay if you're partnered up. And I do, I think as human beings, we tend to feel that way. The problem is that they're looking for a relationship that's really just about fulfilling their needs.

Lauren Schiller: But it seems like from reading the book, what was so exciting to your friends about this guy is that he had a little bit of money and he had a little bit of power.

C Bushnell: Yes. Exactly.

Lauren Schiller: And so it seems like at this point in our cultural history in this moment that we're in right now, that maybe that would become less important, but yet it's still lingering on. What do you see happening with all that?

C Bushnell: I think it's still lingering on, but what's frustrating of course is that men like Arnold are not ... I don't know. I mean it's not what a lot of women are necessarily looking for and powerful men, they like to enjoy their power. And for powerful men, often part of that is a certain amount of sexual freedom. And that was Arnold.

Lauren Schiller: He was raring to go.

C Bushnell: He was raring to go. And I think, but that's the other thing that's very shocking, but it won't be shocking to any of the men here.

Lauren Schiller: Are there any men here?

C Bushnell: But when you start dating again ... there are men here, I saw them already and they're like, ah-

Lauren Schiller: Just checking. Okay.

C Bushnell: They're like, "We're going to kill her."

Lauren Schiller: Is Arnold here?

C Bushnell: They want sex immediately. It's like really? But I find though also when I talk to women who work in like old age homes and that kind of thing, they're like, "It's really a problem. These men, they want to kiss you, they want to do all of this and it's just not appropriate."

Lauren Schiller: Do you think it's just, you get into your seventies, I mean, neither of us are there yet, but like let's just cut through the crap. Let's just get to the sex. I mean is that maybe part of what's going on? Who knows?

C Bushnell: No, no, I don't think so. I think that this is somebody who that's how he operates. He has these certain things that he's going to tempt you with. Like he had this little pool and he was like, "You could come and swim in my pool any time." And I was like, "No." No. On the other hand, the thing that makes these situations so tricky is if the guy had been like incredibly attractive and all of that, that might've been something that I wanted to hear. So that's unfortunately human nature.

Lauren Schiller: Right. But what's interesting about, I mean we don't need to totally overanalyze Arnold for a guy but-

C Bushnell: No we don't. Because everyone's like, "We want to talk about this today." We don't even know who Arnold is and you probably won't even be in the TV series.

Lauren Schiller: But just that he expected that something would happen with sex and you, and like no matter what, like maybe, I mean I know he picked you out of the crowd at the party and everything, but that you maybe were more discerning.

C Bushnell: Well, one of the things that he said was that he asked how old I was, when I told him how old I was, and I think at the time I might've been 57 or 58. He was really shocked and he said that he had just upped his age group to maybe include 50, but he wasn't really thinking that that would be somebody who was like 58. And he made it very clear that ... because I think at a certain point I got so pissed off at him and I was like, "Why do you think women have sex with you?" And he said, "Because I buy them handbags."

Lauren Schiller: Oh my God.

C Bushnell: And this was a real thing. I mean this is another thing that I hear a lot from men is that they are hypersensitive, a lot of them and maybe rightfully so or they're incredibly aware of the power that money can have over women. And I do hear men complaining about things like women just want money from them and women just want them to buy things for them and this and that. And to a certain extent there are women like that. So that was Arnold's set up.

Lauren Schiller: Could you imagine a future where the power dynamic is totally reversed?

C Bushnell: Yes, I could. Although I don't know what makes me say that.

Lauren Schiller: And would that actually be better? I don't know.

C Bushnell: But you know power is it's about money really. But I know there's personal power, which is the power to get things done and make things happen on your own. But men, they exercise a lot of it's economic power over women. Economic and educational and access.

Lauren Schiller: Well, it was really fun reading the book and I mean it just, I want to say it starts with a bang, but it actually it starts with a bang. I'm just going to put it there and I'm ... not like that kind of bang. Okay. It's an action packed to beginning. And anyway, I got about 10 pages in and then I was like, "Wait a second, is this a memoir? Is this fiction?" And then I looked and it says fiction. So, talk about how it's constructed.

C Bushnell: We're calling it auto fiction because it's a lot of autobiographical elements of my life in a fictionalized setting with fictional characters. But yes, I mean there are a lot of things that that did happen to me in the book and a lot of very poignant things because the other side of all of this is that your 50s is a very different time than your thirties. In your thirties, you are not generally, I mean you can be hit with all of these life altering events, but it's not the same as being in your 50s or 60s when you're hit with a certain amount of loss.

C Bushnell: And that's one of the things that's a big difference. In your thirties, you're looking up, up, up, and you know you're going to move forward. You're going to ... maybe you're already in a relationship and you're raising children and you're doing that into your forties and your career. Everything's going up. And then when you get into your 50s, things can kind of go ... And you know there, a parent will probably pass away. A friend will probably die unfortunately. And so while I was writing the book, my father actually did die while I was writing the book and one of my best friends took her life. So it's an interesting experience. And I talked a lot with my editors. Like originally I had one editor and he was like, "It's just supposed to be funny. We don't want death." But it's like that is such a part of people's lives at this time. And it's one of the things that shapes this period and it changes you psychically and psychologically. And because it does, it can be an opportunity for growth.

Lauren Schiller: We had a chance to talk before we sat in this room and one of the things that we were talking about is that, well, just like your editors were saying, "We want it to be funny. We don't want any death in the book." That there's not great role models out there for how to process the death of a parent or a friend or even prepare for it.

C Bushnell: That is true. And you know, I mean one of the things that's really different in the last 50 years, maybe the last 30 years, I think it was like in the mid 1960s or maybe even 1970 or 75, 76% of the population over 50 was married. So that was pretty much everybody was married unlike today where it's 50% of people are single, maybe even more people. So when these things happen to you, they happen to you in this in a sense, in the comfort of your own home. And it's happening and you tend to have like relatives and people who have dealt with this, people are there.

C Bushnell: You still have a partner, you've got a family, you're probably in the same house that you've lived in for a long time. Today when these things hit you, that is not necessarily true. You may be single again, chances are you may be living on your own, you may have moved, you may be getting divorced. There are a whole bunch of things that happen that don't really insulate you from these situations. And I think that's one of the things that that makes these things a little bit tricky.

Lauren Schiller: While you're writing the book, you lose your father, you lose your friend. How did you process those events and then, I mean, was writing the book a way of processing them or did you have to kind of go through it and then figure out how you were going to write about it?

C Bushnell: You know, I kind of had to figure out how I was going to write about it kind of while it was happening. Like I went to see my father, I knew he was going to go and I was like, "You know, the reality is if you're a writer, as Nora Ephron said, 'Everything's copy.'" I mean, I hate to say it, but I was just very, tried to be very aware of my feelings, et cetera, and tried to process them in an adult way, which means not having a breakdown and figuring out, I mean that's really what this time is about. You know what? At 50 you're an adult and you have to be. You kind of do.

Lauren Schiller: You kind of want to have the breakdown though.

C Bushnell: I just do. Being an adult is not necessarily being busy all the time. Being an adult is being able to stand back, assess the situation, take your ego out of it and figure out what is the best thing to do, how to move forward in a way that is the most humane and kind to everybody around. And it's a time when you have to kind of reach down and figure out how to move on. And it's hard. I mean there were a lot of times when I was writing this book when I was like, I was depressed writing the book. But as I was writing the book, I also felt something was lifting. And when I've looked at that U-shaped curve, the realities for most people, the bottom of that U-shaped curve, it is in your fifties and then things kind of start to go up again.

C Bushnell: So it was this personal journey for me through my fifties and it wasn't always easy. And I do, you know, I have friends who are ... I've seen people in a lot pain and I've ... this is also a time when you see that some people just, they can't get it together and they just can't make it. Men and women. So for me, this is something to explore and to write about.

Lauren Schiller: Well, in that, and one of the things that you've written about consistently is friendship and female friendships specifically. What role does friendship or has friendship played for you in coming through those kinds of hard times?

C Bushnell: I think it's what it always is. It's like people being there for you. I mean, I had like one friend who she just decided, she's like, "I never turned down a funeral." She's like, "I'm going to them all. I'm going to figure out ... I'm figuring out how to do this." And it's like you got to show up for your friends in a different way. At one time maybe you were showing up with dating advice. Now you're showing up with soup. I don't know. But yes, it's again, another time of finding it's for a lot of people it's like reconnecting with people who you were friends with before you got married and had kids. Because when you have children, your friends tend to be the parents of your children's friends. And if you end up getting divorced, all of these things are changed.

Lauren Schiller: This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller talking with Candace Bushnell. When we come back, the Mona Lisa treatment. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point with a live on stage recording with Candace Bushnell for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival that we recorded the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Do you want to talk about the Mona Lisa?

C Bushnell: Oh gosh, yes. Well, first of all, it's a laser that ... and I know some of you have heard of this and they use it to restore elasticity and et cetera into your vagina. So it's a laser, but it's for inside and it's ... yes, they put it in your vagina and it works like lasers work. I mean it's just, it's skin. Okay. So it makes sense that it might work, but I want to preface it by saying that it's something that it's so easy for us to make fun of. The idea of women pursuing something, I don't even think it's sexual dysfunction, but something to enhance their sexuality or whatever. And there are basically three things for women and there are 77 products for men. So let's start with that.

C Bushnell: So it's actually could be a good thing. But what happens was I was thinking about doing it and it costs $3,000, but I thought if I'm going to do it, I only can do a before and after. So I have to find someone to have sex with before, and get the treatment done, because how am I going to know? I don't know.

Lauren Schiller: You don't think you'd be able to tell?

C Bushnell: I don't know. I'm making that up, but I don't know. Probably yes, because-

Lauren Schiller: I would hope for a $3,000-

C Bushnell: Well, I first heard about it, I heard about it from my gynecologist and then I brought it up at lunch with this guy, like have you ever heard of this? And he literally went pale, but he said, "My wife got it." And he said, "She's divorcing me and she's gone off with a younger guy." And this, I was like, "Wow." I heard the story about 20 times from other people of the same thing. So I thought that was very interesting of women actually leaving their husbands when, and really just being rejuvenated or whatever and saying, "Hey, I'm going to go out there and I don't feel like giving this up." So-

Lauren Schiller: Well let's, while we're on the topic, let's talk Tinder because you did a whole event experiment with [crosstalk 00:38:29].

C Bushnell: I did a Tinder experiment and-

Lauren Schiller: Everyone know what Tinder is?

C Bushnell: Yes.

Lauren Schiller: I'm just making sure.

C Bushnell: How many of you have gone on Tinder?

Lauren Schiller: Oh, show of hands.

C Bushnell: It's all the young women and it's a guy.

Lauren Schiller: Oh, you met on Tinder? No. Okay.

C Bushnell: You could meet on Tinder. I mean Tinder there are no filters or anything like that and people make their own choices. So, but I discovered an app like Tinder, it really is a game. It's designed like a card game and you know the app doesn't care if you meet somebody or not. It just wants you to be on it and stay on it. But what I found interestingly with Tinder, and this is something that I feel like I'm hearing it more and more out there from guys, and I think the thing that was most interesting about Tinder was how many men, first of all thought that the other men on it were absolutely horrible. And when men think like other men are bad, you really should pay attention because normally they cover up each other's bad behavior.

C Bushnell: And the other thing was how quite a few guys said how much they hated themselves when they were on Tinder and how it brought out like the worst sexist sides of their personality where they really just felt women were objects. And it was really interesting to talk to these guys and get their take on it and it's not heartening. And I ended up also talking to a lot of 25 year old women in their twenties who are on Tinder and they talked a lot about their frustrations and their biggest frustration seem to be with the quality of the men that they were meeting. So hello, maybe you shouldn't go on Tinder. And I thought, I mean I'd heard women complaining about dating before. Dating's never been easy, but it was really like the first piece I did for this book. And it was very eyeopening how much more negative women had become about dating and men.

C Bushnell: And I just heard like a lot more anger. I mean look, there are always women out there who are they're having a great time. It's all working out for them and they have it all together. But you know, a lot of women didn't and they insisted that the guys that I was going to meet on Tinder were going to be maybe not what they said, that they would have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and that a lot of them would use drugs, and that they were really unreliable and that this sort of thing. So I went on Tinder. The first thing that happened was Tinder set my age range for who I would be attracted to based on my age. I couldn't lie about my age because I didn't know I wasn't skilled enough on Tinder. And so it matched me up with, there were like two guys over the age of 58 and they were both like smokers.

C Bushnell: So I set the age, I was like, "What's going on?" I set the age range. I was like, "Okay, I will say 22 to 32 and see what happens." I got tons and tons of hits, so many hits and I really was like, "Wow." And people were writing really nice things. And I was like, "Those girls are so wrong." And then I matched with this guy who, he was 33 I think, and everyone kept saying, "Oh, he's a real man man." He had a beard and a lot of hair.

Lauren Schiller: Sure sign.

C Bushnell: And so we agreed to meet up, we met up and he told me a lot about like Tinder and how all the horrible guys were on it and this and that. And he was a vegetarian and the only place we could go, I could find to go was like a hamburger place. But he was like, "Don't worry, I'll deal. I'll just eat French fries." So I was like, "Okay." But it was interesting. It was fun. We kind of ... it was friendly and he seemed like a really nice guy. So then he asked me out again and we went to see this really cool downtown play and I was like, "Hey, this is like groovy. It's great. This guy's really cool." And then he asked me out again and I was like, "I really shouldn't do this, because I'm not going to date anybody for a story."

C Bushnell: And I wasn't really interested, but he asked me to go to this Shakespeare play in Brooklyn. So I thought, Well, why not? Am I doing anything else? I should go. So I was crossing the Brooklyn bridge and of course I couldn't help but think about that scene in Sex and the City when it's Miranda and Steve, they're going to meet on the bridge. And I was like, I'm crossing the bridge, maybe something's going to happen. Isn't this nice? Like I'm going to prove to everybody that you could meet a great guy on Tinder.

C Bushnell: And so I get there and everybody's pairing up and going into the theater, and then they're ringing the bell. And I didn't have the tickets, supposedly this guy had the tickets and he didn't show up. So it was an expensive taxi ride there and back. It was like $40 each way. And I was like, what's, you know. And so I texted him and I said, maybe we got the date wrong or something like that. And I didn't hear from him for two days. And then I got a really, really long text that said I am so, so sorry. I lost track of time. I took MDM PD do, some kind of new designer drug and I don't know what happened, but I tried to drive my car, I was arrested and then I was put in a 48 hour hold and it went on. And I was just like, he turned out to be exactly what the Tinderellas had said I would find. And I really thought Tinder, it's like Vegas, it's the house. It always wins.

C Bushnell: And then I was going to this black tie event and I saw this woman outside and she was really beautiful and she was smoking a cigarette. And I was like, "Wow, someone's still smoking a cigarette." I used to smoke. So I was like, I'm just going to go near the cigarette smell. And I just started talking to her and she was incredibly attractive. She was tall, blonde, she was maybe 32. She seemed like she had it all together. And so I decided to ask her about do you go on Tinder? Now I forgot to mention she was Russian.

C Bushnell: And she was like, "Yes, of course I go on Tinder." And I was like, "But why? You're so beautiful, you certainly don't need to be on Tinder." And she was like, "It's when you go on Tinder, you get more Instagram followers. It's all about Instagram." And I was like, "That's it." So there you go.

Lauren Schiller: And this is why millennials are not having as much sex obviously.

C Bushnell: Well, I don't know if anybody watched this. You know, there was that Lisa Ling thing about pornography and its effect on young men. And again, there were a lot of young men on there who were really very distressed about this constant use of porn and how they become addicted and how it affected them psychologically and how difficult it made them to find real women attractive and how it wasn't ... and how being around real women made them very nervous, very uncomfortable. They didn't know what to do. And again, like how they really, really did not like themselves.

C Bushnell: And I mean, I think that, and that's something that I hear. And I heard this when I was writing this Tinder pieces well from guys about how it's impossible for them to avoid pornography and how they get so much pornography, whether they want it or not, and how it's affects them in a negative way. And that's definitely, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, porn is such a big money making industry that we are never going to get a straight answer on it. I promise you. I'm not a fan of porn. I think I know too much about it.

Lauren Schiller: I'm just thinking about how women in their fifties and up are depicted in the media and in movies and in our culture in general. And how we can start to see a shift toward that being, we're not just irrelevant. It's-

C Bushnell: Yes. Well I think that is-

Lauren Schiller: New world.

C Bushnell: It's really, I mean, it's changing so much because I feel like the Sex and the City woman who to me, I mean, to me the Sex and the City woman is a woman who's my age. I'm 60, but it's about really it was a change that happened in the late seventies and the early eighties. And it really happened because of feminism, the pill. Also women's magazines at that time were really very important and they were just seminating information to regular women out there about things that you could have that you could never have before. And one of them was an orgasm and the other was a career. And-

Lauren Schiller: And that ladies and gentlemen is having it all.

C Bushnell: Exactly.

Lauren Schiller: Forget everything else.

C Bushnell: And in the late seventies and eighties, there was a huge influx of women into the workforce. This has happened a couple of times in the 1920s, for instance, but then it always, women end up going back to the home. And it happened at that time. And that really made for a lot of changes and it was a group of women who they were going to go out there and do something that their mothers hadn't done. They were going to try to have it all. It was really like the first generation of women that were encouraged, told that you could have it all, that you could have a family, you could have a career.

C Bushnell: So this is not a group of women who are shy violence. This tends to be a group of women who they're used to challenging the status quo and they're used to going out there and changing things and changing perspectives. And this is really the same group of women, but they're older. And they're not going to go away. So I do think-

Lauren Schiller: So now's the time to show up. They're showing up.

C Bushnell: Yes. Yeah. I mean I do think it's a different time.

Lauren Schiller: That was Candace Bushnell speaking with me live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Candace's new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? I'll put a link to it on my website influctionpointradio.org, where by the way, you can find future events by clicking on the events tab there. I'd love to see you. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller: That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter at laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go. inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host. Lauren Schiller.

Author Jennifer Weiner Writes a Radical Beach Read

Guest User July 17, 2019

The times, they are a’changin’. This week on Inflection Point, I talk to author Jennifer Weiner, about her newest bestselling book “Mrs. Everything”.

The story is loosely based on Jennifer’s own mother, Fran, who got married, had four children and ultimately came out as a gay woman after Jennifer and her siblings were out of the house. Spanning two sisters’ lives from the 1950s to the night of the 2016 political election, the story raises questions about who is really making women’s choices about our own lives...are we? Or our system? How did we get where we are, and how do we move on from here?

Jennifer shares the facts behind her fiction, what it takes to write a good sex scene, what hasn't changed since #metoo started and how the personal becomes political. We spoke at Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival on June 22, 2019 in Berkeley, California.

Eve Ensler and the Radically Transformative Power of Apology

Guest User June 19, 2019

Stress warning: This episode contains conversation about sexual assault and violence.

This week on Inflection Point, I talk with Eve Ensler, award-winning playwright of The Vagina Monologues, about her new book “The Apology”, in which she writes in the voice of her father to apologize to herself--from him-- for the years of sexual and physical abuse he perpetrated upon her.

You will be blown away by Eve’s resilience, by her self-knowledge, by her strength of character, and by her deep well of compassion and empathy. Her ideas for political and social reform, as well as her profound insights into the human soul, make her a true radical, and radically empathetic.

This week, we discuss the anatomy of a true apology, and the transformative power that apologies hold for the apologists themselves and their recipients. We discuss why punishment never leads to rehabilitation. We discuss the roots of abuse, and how we can start shifting the paradigm.

A must-listen for anyone frustrated at the lack-luster apologies precipitated by the #MeToo movement. A must-listen for anyone infuriated by the Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford cases. A must-listen for anyone who needs to apologize for something. A must-listen for anyone who has ever needed an apology, but didn’t get one.

I also spoke with Eve in October of 2016, about a year before the #MeToo movement took off. Her words were prescient and I encourage you to listen to that conversation too.

If this conversation is important to you, please support our independent production with a tax deductible donation. Inflection Point is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.

Photo courtesy of The Commonwealth Club of California. Photo by James Meinerth

The End of Human Trafficking May Begin with Radical Empathy - Julia Flynn Siler

Guest User May 22, 2019

In 19th Century San Francisco's Chinatown only 1 in 10 people were women, and most of them were forced into prostitution, trafficked by criminal tongs. In today’s episode, meet the Scottish sewing instructor Donaldina Cameron and the women she collaborated with and helped escape from sex slavery between 1870 and 1930. This week on Inflection Point: Julia Flynn Siler talks about her new book The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Prepare yourself for bomb scares and bubonic plague quarantines, court cases and crowdfunding efforts. Join us in what is, ultimately, a conversation about standing up to a broken society, and how women can help women rise up.

Recorded at the Bay Area Book Festival in May 2019 as part of their Women Lit programming.

How Radical Change Happens - Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl

Lauren Schiller March 13, 2019

Times like these call for radical ideas.

But is being a radical a positive thing? And if so, why are so many radicals seen as dangerous?

In the first episode of the new season of Inflection Point: RADICALS, we’ll define what it really means to be a radical, look at some of the lasting change radicals have made throughout our history, and examine how those ideas went from unthinkable to mainstream.

I invited RAD WOMEN series’ creators Kate Schatz and Miriam Klein Stahl to talk about how to spot a radical, because if anyone knows what a radical looks like and what it takes to be one, it’s them.

Support the production of Inflection Point with a monthly or one-time contribution!

And when you’re done, come on over to The Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small, daily actions.

Miriam Klein Stahl and Kate SchatzPhoto by: Casey Orr — Miriam Klein Stahl and Kate Schatz
Photo by: Casey Orr

How Lena Wolff Connects Art and Activism

Guest User March 4, 2019

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I had the pleasure of interviewing artist Lena Wolff at the Sarah Shepard Gallery in November, 2019. We discussed the relationship between art and activism (such as works like her now iconic “United Against Hate” poster), Lena’s creative process, inspirations, and more. The transcript, which includes photos of Lena’s work, is below (edited and condensed from the conversation).

TRANSCRIPT:

Sarah Shepard:
Welcome everyone and thanks so much for coming out. Today, Lena is joined with Lauren Schiller, the creator and host of Inflection Point, a nationally syndicated public radio show and podcast from KALW and PRX that focuses on how women rise up and their quest for equality.

Lauren Schiller:
All right, thanks you guys, you gals for all coming out and being part of this conversation. So why don't we start by hearing more about what we’re looking at in the room. I mean, usually when I go to a gallery, I have to figure it all out for myself and we now have this opportunity to actually sit with the artist to hear directly from you about how you came up with this show. And I’d like to know more about the meaning of the show title, ‘Patterns & Spells.’

Lena Wolff:
Hi everyone.

Audience:
Hey Lena.

Lena Wolff:
Hi! First, I just want to say, I'm so happy to be talking to you Lauren. I'm such a fan of your podcast. It's on KALW and the show is great – and if you haven’t heard it already, go ahead and listen!

Lauren Schiller:
Thank you.

Lena Wolff:
I love it. There are so many fascinating interviews with women who are doing all kinds of amazing work in all different areas, really all areas.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Including Miriam [Klein Stahl].

Lena Wolff:
Yeah, Miriam was interviewed on the podcast! That was great.

Well – about this show, I’m working with a lot of different mediums here. All the pieces are talking to each other but still it was hard to come up with a title for the grouping of work as a collection at first - to pin down a few words that summed up the intersecting themes.

I’ve been working with quilt patterns and repetition of these patterns across different mediums for a long time. This began with a very intentional desire to tap into this legacy of quilt making and a lexicon of shared patterns that have been passed down and adapted for generations in our country. I wanted to walk in the footsteps of these makers who came before me and make work that felt less individual and more part of a collective body of iconography.

When I first got into this, it wasn’t easy for me to understand the patterns because I'm not naturally inclined towards geometry. (I actually got a D in geometry in middle school!) Part of what led to the drawings here is having to draft the eight-pointed star over and over again to get to this pattern, the Golden Dalia, to understand how it worked. Then, I began to manipulate the drawing after I understood it. Now I've been working with variations of the eight-pointed star for almost seven years, but I didn't actually turn the drawings into anything I exhibited until this last, I don't know, a couple years ago maybe. They were initially just a means to get to where I was going in other mediums, in collage and sculpture. And then I started falling in love with the drawings by themselves.

Lauren Schiller:
How does the title of the show tie in to this?

Lena Wolff:
The word ‘spells’ came up when thinking about how patterns captivate and mesmerize us. How you can, you know, feel hypnotized when looking at patterns. It’s connected to our attraction toward patterns in nature. Pattern recognition was really essential to our evolution as humans, so we’re naturally attracted to them. And so, I was thinking about how we get thrown into this spellbound state through patterns, but then I was also thinking about feminists and women and ideas about ‘witchiness,’ and how we can participate in these actions that change politics and culture, which we can claim as a witchy thing for fun but really it's more practical.

This artist Nathaniel Russell made a drawing after the election of Trump that said ... Miriam do you remember exactly? It was like, "Calling All Witches, Hex on White Supremacy, Curse on Trump." And then Kate Sweeney [of the bands Magic Magic Roses and July] a member of Future Chorus later wrote a song for us ‘Calling All Witches.’

So this idea of casting spells to change culture, and patterns as having spellbinding potential, those two words together represented most accurately what the work is about.

Lauren Schiller: Patterns and Spells

Lena Wolff: Yeah

Sarah Shepard:
Do the 8 points in the star have special significance?

Lena Wolff:
Well I kind of came upon it accidentally because it’s the basis of the Golden Dahlia pattern. The 8-pointed star was the way to get there. But then I also think, just the star in general, it can be read as a symbol of American democracy – a symbol of our ideal of democracy.

But what I love about the quilt patterns, or any geometric pattern really, is that infinite variations can be adapted from a single pattern, which is what happens in nature all the time. I think I just ended up getting caught in that pattern. It’s the one that just keeps on giving, it's just keeps on going.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, can you tell us a bit about the process of your craft in terms of, I mean, it's so interesting because you've got three dimensional pieces and then you've got these flat pieces. And I mean, clearly meticulous attention to the details. So, take us inside your studio. What happens when you sit down with the paper or the wood?

Lena Wolff:
The thing I've be doing the longest out of all the work here are the collages. To make these, I paint the papers with gouache, watercolor or acrylic, and then each foreground element is cut and glued down individually to the surface of the paper.

That piece right there [points to ‘Quilt for the Future’], is made up 42 squares, made individually and then assembled together like a quilt when mounted for framing. This process actually makes for kind of awkward studio visits because I usually just have piles of cut and painted paper everywhere. Painters have their beautiful canvases on the wall, and all their cans of alluring paint. With me, all you see are these scraps of paper everywhere. I just have paper, everywhere! I mean, even when Sarah [Shepard} saw this piece progress I remember she looked at it and was like, "Oh." [everyone laughs]. And part of it... Seriously, no, no it's not even that, you didn't even mean to! But part of it was that she just saw these unconnected squares taped to the wall that were probably kind of starting to fall off and very flimsy looking. So….it's hard to see what's going on until they're actually complete and assembled.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Which is actually probably ... I mean, does anyone in this room quilt? So, it seems to me, I mean I don't quilt, but I have someone in my family who does. And so you do see fabric scattered everywhere-

Lena Wolff:
Right. You see a mess.

Lauren Schiller:
and then the composition comes in and out of focus as the design comes together. So, I imagine it's similar. Do you quilt?

Lena Wolff:
No. Well, actually I have, but I'm not an expert at it. I was once invited to be in this quilt show with all these quilters who I love, the project is called Piecework Collective and they put on an independent quilt show every year. I was invited and I had a total panic attack because I actually don't know how to quilt. I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try." And so, I tried to make this quilt and then I knew that technically it was not going to compare to what they were doing, because they're SO good. I ended up sending a wood star piece to New York for the show.

Audience Member:
Can you talk a bit about how historically, women have done the practical arts, the applied arts - quilting and embroidery and decorative arts as a way to channel their creativity.

Lena Wolff:
Oh, for sure.

Audience Member:
In a way that was safe, because the more direct kind of art processes were more for men. I always feel a little ambiguous about it because I love and admire so much craft made by women, but it seems there was a limit to how much personal expression could go into it.

Lena Wolff:
Well, I think that women really actually did end up putting their personal self into it. So many unique and idiosyncratic quilts have been made - really so much quilt work is phenomenally bizarre and unique! People really put themselves into it. And then so many quilts were made that address history - quilts made during the Civil War with pictorial images of specific battles, and then quilts made as fundraisers during the war, and also autobiographical quilts that trace a person's life. So, I definitely think women have always been artists through textiles when they weren’t allowed to participate in other art forms.

I always want to uphold that tradition rather than ever putting it on a different level with all the other, you know, art forms. I love being a part of the tradition of quilt making and claiming it absolutely as art. It's absolutely art.

Audience Member:
I think there’s a documentary called Anonymous Woman that talked about a lot of these quilt pieces.

Lena Wolff:
It’s true that women may not have always been given credit for what they made. There might not be a name on a quilt the way a painter would sign their painting. That’s true of women stories throughout history unfortunately, we don't have as much attribution to specific women for their work.

Lauren Schiller:
Do you want to tell us the story of one of the pieces that we're sitting here looking at?

Lena Wolff:
Sure, I’d love to talk about Quilt for the Future. I started working on that one in January 2019, so I worked on it for close to a year. It probably wouldn't have taken take me that long if I'd known all the symbols and images I wanted to use from the start. Part of what took time was figuring out what I wanted to include. Also, I'm like a crazy person when it comes to color, and I think I spent a month working on the color for the background.

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Miriam Klein Stahl:
She had about 40 shades that to me looked exactly like that, but to her, she would look at them and see a difference, but to me it's like, "Is that not all the same blue?"

Lena Wolff:
They were really different! In the end the color is made from maybe 2-3 layers of watercolor with a bit of gouache, so there’s some nuance and it’s not totally flat. The piece originated from looking at American sampler quilts from the 18 and 1900’s. These sampler quilts were basically block quilts with different images appliqued into each block. Many were put together around a theme, some with all nature imagery and sometimes they were thematic in other ways. In this piece, I’ve combined images from a historic sampler quilt with my own.

To me, the stars generally represent the idea of American democracy, although the way they can have a patriotic connotation makes me feel uncomfortable – so to me I’d rather think of the starts as symbols of democracy. The plant images reference the natural world. The radio tower was one of the last images I added. I was so glad that I’d waited eight months to finish the piece because I didn’t land on that until the very end! The radio tower symbolizes free speech and I love public radio, I listen to it all day long. The triangles are for queer culture, the hand is for generosity, open borders and hospitality. There’s the more modern symbol for equality, a justice scale, and a square with an arrow pointing to justice, like emphasizing justice.

The vases are for gay culture, the bee for sustainable agriculture, the pitcher for water, a harp for music, the scissors for craft. This square here is a simplified form of a quilt pattern called ‘housetop.’ The little five-patch cross is for healthcare, and then there's just the kind of galactic—the cosmic images, which I'm working with in different pieces throughout the show. To me these universe images are this overarching reminder to keep things in perspective, like remembering we're on a single planet in a larger solar system, in a galaxy, in a universe that is one of many potential universes. Especially during these hard political times, I want to think about the bigger context of our place in the wider scheme of things. And I like reading up on physics for lay people -it’s comforting compared to politics.

Lauren Schiller:
So some of the things that you referred to in there, for example pointing to justice, you’re reminding everyone what we’ve got to focus our attention on. We actually first met through activism and then I was introduced to your art, I think it was like months later. And you told me that you had actually separated those things out mentally at one point, like when you were really thinking about what you needed to do as an activist, art took a back seat. But then you brought them together.

Lena Wolff:
Well, what happened immediately after the election of Trump is that I felt I could only make work that was directly responding to what was going on. This article came out by Chimamanda Adichie, an essay she wrote after the election called ‘Now is the Time to Talk About What We Were Actually Talking About’ and the point of it was really that we can't be obscure right now about what we stand for. It's critically important to name what is wrong and what we're going to do about it.

The first piece I made in 2017 was my banner for the Women's March. It’s the only thing I made that January and I love it so much. It was really big and I had this big heavy stick that was way too heavy to carry around and then-

Miriam Klein Stahl:
I carried it.

Lena Wolff:
[laughs]. Yes…but ha - you know, I felt like I absolutely had to respond to what was going on in no uncertain terms. So, a lot of my work after the election focused on this. Then in 2017 I formed Future Chorus for my de Young residency. We sang songs for the political moment. Not the usual protest songs from the past, but punk and pop songs with a poetic relationship to the moment we're living in. I spent a long time organizing that and didn't make as much studio work for a while.

Lauren Schiller:
Miriam has been our third guest!

Lena Wolff:
Yeah. She's a good third guest!

Lauren Schiller:
I mean, do you want to talk about how you work together as artists? Miriam is also an artist and an activist, and you're a couple.

Lena Wolff:
We’ve started more parallel work since the election also. We've shared the studio now for over a decade. We work side by side.

Last year Kimberly Johansson of Johansson Projects asked us to be in a two person show. We'd never shown our work side by side like that. And it was so weird how there were so many overlaps that I hadn’t actually noticed before! Even how we cut paper. Miriam makes beautiful paper cuts, silhouette paper cuts and there's such a connection to my process there. Anyway, it's been really nice in the last year to have more overlap with what we're doing and to be recognized together for what we do -for our life together, not just our work individually, that's been really new.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Well, and this proclamation was for the two of you in Berkeley and for your work.

Lena Wolff:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Do you ever steal each other's scissors?

Lena Wolff:
Yes, and our Exact-o-knives!

Miriam Klein Stahl:
“Don’t use the fabric scissors on paper!” [everyone laughs]

Lena Wolff:
Yeah, exactly.

Miriam Klein Stahl:
But I need a workspace that's about this big [gestures to a small space], and so I can really work anywhere. When Lena was creating the show, I just stayed out of the studio because she needs a big space to think and work because like she said, she has paper everywhere! I'm happy to be on the floor, on the kitchen table, anywhere.

Lauren Schiller:
And that's how you stay married.

Lena Wolff:
That's how we stay married.

Lauren Schiller:
Keep it up.

Lena Wolff:
We know how to share space!

Lauren Schiller:
How are you feeling about art and activism connecting now? I mean, is there room to be a little more obscure or did we still need to be more direct.

Lena Wolff:
Well I mean, with abstraction or something - you’d never want to say to a musician ‘you can't make music without words now, that’s too irrelevant!’ In the same way, there is a place for abstraction in visual art. It’s important to celebrate the world that we live in and everything we can see with our eyes and what we’re able to hear. That's really important too. But I couldn't only do that right now. I would feel irresponsible if I was only working with abstraction. Even, you know, I think there's room to be totally abstract in your artwork, but then maybe you're doing activism in another way. I think we just have to participate right now, and there's lots of different ways to do that, there's no one way to do it.

Audience Member:
What motivates you to make art? What is your driving force?

Lena Wolff:
That's my mom!

Lauren Schiller:
Wait, this is your mom?

Lena Wolff:
Yeah.

Lena’s Mom:
Lena made art as soon as she could get her hands on paper and a pen. I mean, she was always drawing, always putting blocks together in certain forms, or she would look through slides…we had slides back then.. and she'd look through them and compare…I don’t think it was really a choice.

Lauren Schiller:
Do you agree with that?

Lena Wolff:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I think making art has always been healing for me. It’s how I channel everything that I take in, and the world around me.

Lauren Schiller:
You’ve mentioned in other conversations the difference between patriotism and democracy, but what’s your thinking around the connection between art and freedom?

Lena Wolff:
One of the great privileges we have as artists or makers is that we can work with any materials we want to within reason and we get to work with whatever subjects we’re interested in. We have this freedom, and even in countries without freedom of expression there can still be ways around that artistically. In any case, we have this great privilege. I’m able to enjoy my freedom as an artist and affirm my humanity through art. Knowing this makes me concerned for the freedom and the humanity of other people. Knowing that there are people who can't assert their freedom or their humanity through art, either because of oppression or just because they don't have what they need, that concerns me. My draw towards art making and how I care about the state of the world, it’s all connected, these two things are part of the same feeling.

Lauren Schiller:
What did you mean when you talk about the difference between patriotism and democracy?

Lena Wolff:
Ooh, I mean, I just don't really believe in nationalism. Nationalism is so dangerous. Patriotism is dangerous, but democracy is what we need. I mean, it’s something we haven't really seen yet, something we say we believe in as a country, or that we are, but we're not, not yet anyway.

Lauren Schiller:
And I mean, does anyone have conflicting feelings when they see the American flag? I mean, is that kind of what you're referring to -

Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah. Especially right now. I mean, probably always

Lauren Schiller:
You were telling me also about this new exhibit happening in Amsterdam. I mean, you should tell the story and it will make sense about why I'm bringing it up. Just be vague, go ahead. But it's about symbolism and the influence of symbols on culture.

Lena Wolff:
Right. So, it was just after I finished ‘Quilt for the Future’ with all of these symbols. I was in the car listening to NPR and heard a story about an exhibition that just opened in Amsterdam that focused on Nazi iconography. And just to begin with, there's a question like, is that a good idea? Is this problematic by itself? All of a sudden, I was just thinking about that image of the swastika and how much weight it carries. How it symbolizes one of the most horrific things we can possibly think of, and how powerful the image is, in an awful way.

And it made me wonder if we could we ever create an image or a set of images that are the opposite of that, like would that be? Can we make or contribute to creating symbols and visual culture that is the opposite of the swastika, but also as powerful. So just that idea of the power of visual symbols was really resonating with me.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Which I mean, so some might say, "Well, that is the American flag." Right? And then you're ending up with this one symbol that represents one thing for all people that represents different things.

Lena Wolff:
Yeah, no. That's not what I'm thinking.

Lauren Schiller:
I'm not trying to put you in a corner, I'm just like wow, what are the implications of one symbol?

Lena Wolff:
Right. Yeah! Making the show I really was working with a collection of symbols, and then this idea about how can we use symbols to generate what we want to see in the world

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. I mean, that comes back to this idea of how art can change society and how it can spark cultural imagination. And I mean, what is your point of view on how your art might ... I mean, your wish for how art, your art, all art, can play that role in terms of pushing for social change or creating ripple effect of social change for the better?

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Lena Wolff:
I mean, I think we can definitely influence culture through the images that we generate. I brought the posters series that I worked on today - the United Against Hate posters that we made during the fifth white supremacist rally that was going to come through Berkeley.

Ahead of this, I’d had the chance to talk to the Mayor [Jesse Arreguin] about the idea of enlisting artists to make banners for the city about what we stand for right and what we stand against. He was like, "Great idea!" Then, he called me maybe two weeks before the rally maybe, in June 2017 and said, "Lena, do you think you could make a poster for us?" So, I called my friend who's a graphic designer, Lexi Visco, because I’m actually not a graphic designer. We sat down and we busted these out in a few hours together. Then, It was so amazing to see them everywhere at the rally a few weeks later. 20,000 were printed for Berkeley before the rally, and another 20,000 were printed for Oakland, along with huge banners of the image that hung from city hall. The posters were in almost every window I could see, and then almost every other person was carrying one the day of the counter-protest. That was incredible. That felt incredible.

Media organizations wanted to interview us at the time, but we made them anonymously. Miriam was actually getting death threats because she had worked on these pro -choice license plates. So, she was being trolled and I also just felt like it also wasn't important for us to put our name on them. It just wasn't important. Like, they were public service announcements. Now 200,000 of them have been printed for various cities combined in the Bay Area and they’re still visible in windows all over the place.

Then Lexi and I made the VOTE! for Democracy poster series (these are also for the taking afterward!) We did this series in English and Spanish ahead of the 2018 of the midterms and printed 20,000 of them. Then we got funding and shipped them to over 15 States and they were all over the place.

Using nice colors and a good image helps. People really want them! Having this collaborative relationship with Lexi who a really strong designer too, that made it possible

Lauren Schiller:
Tell us about the All For One For All piece.

Lena Wolff:
Okay. So this is based on the embroidery piece on the wall. The text has a double meaning. All For One For All is about how endless variation can be found within a single pattern, like in nature, but then it’s also is about a social philosophy of desiring more equality. It’s a call for more equality in the world. And then the embroidery piece was made into a polymer letterpress edition for this show and they’re being sold as a fundraiser for Spread the Vote. I had an edition of 40 printed, and Sarah [Shepard] was like, "Of course we'll do that." So it's so nice, we're doing this through the exhibition, the fundraiser for Spread the Vote.

Lauren Schiller:
They could be yours.

Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah, 100% of the sales go to the organization.

Miriam Klein Stahl:
What is Spread the Vote?

Lena Wolff:
They work to give IDs to voters in States that require an ID to cast a ballot. They’re also doing a lot of other work on the ground, but that's kind of their main thing.

Voting rights and voter engagement is where I'm putting my energy with activism this year. Because really, the more people that we enfranchise to vote, we're going to win. He [Trump] didn't win the popular vote. We're going to be able to vote him out if we can get more people involved. And guess what? Then we can vote people in who actually represent us. And there's so many cool people out there. It's such an opportunity. But we are up against centuries of voter suppression, especially within communities of color. That's really serious, and so to me, that's the battle right now.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, there are six States that I think need these posters. From what I understand.

Lena Wolff:
There's so many good organizations too, Spread the Vote is just one of them. There’s also Vote.org, Reclaim Our Vote, Fair Fight, Mi Familia Vota, Four Directions and Woke Vote – they’re all totally great. There's just, there's a ton of them.

Lauren Schiller:
Well let's learn a little bit more about you, you and your backstory. I mean, we have your mother here, so I guess we can just ask her all the questions. [Laughs]

Well, I'm trying to think about the best way to ask this question. As I’ve built my podcast I've had to find my own voice, which obviously I need to have conversations with people every day. But when I'm trying to think about how I want to express myself or get a point across, there's something weird about sitting in front of a microphone and suddenly having to do that, like not just in a conversation one on one. I don't know why that is, it just is. So, I'm wondering if in terms of finding your voice in your art, whether there was ever a time when it was like Lena over here, and then Lena, the artist, or trying to connect those two people together, or have they always been the same person?

Lena Wolff:
I think the same person.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah

Lena Wolff:
I don't know. I really found a home in San Francisco. I just have to say that it felt really comfortable when I came here as a young person and that made it easier for me to find my way as an artist.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. What does that mean? What's the environment that someone should look for if they want to feel confident?

Lena Wolff:
Well it was a really gay culture and filled with just a lot of people who were really stepping out of constraints. Like making art in the street and working from folk art, and illustration so kind of less confined by older ideas of what art is supposed to be. And I was surrounded by people who were breaking out and making whatever they wanted to make. And so, I had a lot of peers who were inspiring and totally great.

Lauren Schiller:
What has your experience been in terms of being a woman and being in the ‘art world?’ I'll put that in quotes.

Lena Wolff:
Well, I guess you could just say I've been really ..[pause]…I have been supported by other women as an artist. Women have held me up.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah

Lena Wolff:
For the most part. A few rare men have exhibited my work, but not that many. [shout out to Andrew Berg of Smallworks!]

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. So held you up like—

Lena Wolff:
Just exhibited my work and wanted to work with me.

Lauren Schiller:
Where's the men?

Lena Wolff:
I mean, that's the truth.

Lauren Schiller:
So, you're not alone with that.

Lena Wolff:
Mm-hmm.

Lauren Schiller:
We actually—Miriam and I have talked about this too, but if you look around at museums—although you're going to be in the Oakland Museum, Miriam, so congratulations to you! But the percentage of women who are exhibiting in museums is much lower than those of men.

Lena Wolff:
You know those statistics that the Guerilla Girls put out there in the 80s with their text pieces, it's basically the same right now. I mean, I think since Trump, there's been more of a concerted effort amongst curators and arts professionals to be more inclusive with the LGBTQ community, with people of color. I think there really is, but it kind of took this biggest asshole in the entire world being a president for that to happen, which is sort of like, really? But it is, I think that there is a shift happening.

Lauren Schiller:
Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, Sarah Shepherd here. Thank you for opening this gallery.

Sarah Shepard:
Yeah.

Lauren Schiller:
So how do you measure success as an artist? How do you decide ... Well, I mean I guess there's so many ways I could ask that question. How do you decide when a piece is done? How do you decide that you are feeling fulfilled by your work? How do you decide that this is how you want to make a living? I mean, there are all different ways of measuring success. How do you think about it?

Lena Wolff:
Well about when a piece is done I just know it, then sometimes I push things too far and other times I really know when something needs more work. The hardest part is when you go too far and ruin things.

Miriam Klein Stahl:
I pick them up out of the trashcan and use the pieces.

Lena Wolff:
I throw away a lot of work! Yeah, but actually when we were driving over here I was going over things with Miriam for the talk because I'm not always so comfortable with public speaking. But we were talking about this question about when we feel successful and Miriam said, "Well, when I’m in that flow place when I'm working and I forget about time and place, that's such a good feeling." But I do feel like maybe the work I'm most proud of is just the more anonymous work, like the United Against Hate posters and the VOTE! posters. Like the work that maybe helped, I don't know, gave voice to our outrage and drive as a community to address what’s happening politically. And then, a lot of of my work from the earlier days with plants and animals are in hospitals around the country. Sometimes I get emails from people, usually relatives of patients saying, "I just sat by your piece today. My brother's here and he's dying. Your work helped me find a moment of solace today and I wanted to thank you." And that just makes me feel..[pause].. well, it feels great. It feels like, okay, if I can make work that makes people feel a little better sometimes, or somehow makes our cities feel a little better, that's what I want to do.

Lauren Schiller:
Great. Thank you.

Audience Member:
I was just looking at those geometric pieces up there and I noticed that they're kind of beautifully perfect, with this perfect symmetry. But then just maybe a line missing in a few of the pieces and I wondered why?

Lena Wolff:
Well I love working with repetitions of certain patterns, but I also like to create slight imperfections in the pattern, especially when working with something more linear. I'm always trying to play around with that a little bit, seeing where adding a line or leaving out a line makes the piece more interesting. I've made plenty of things where I’ve added too many lines and they look horrible. Even weirder, sometimes even a single added line can throw something off and the feeling is wrong. I mean there's only--I can't even count, six up there. I think I went through at least 25, and then selected the six and threw out the other ones, because I had just done something that didn't work to my mind.

Screen Shot 2020-01-30 at 11.00.51 PM.png

Audience Member:
Sometimes patterns can be so perfect, it feels confining.

Lena Wolff:
Yeah.

Audience Member:
But then you leave that line out and there's a little escape.

Lena Wolff:
I definitely struggle with it because you can tell I do actually like symmetry. I feel relaxed by symmetry, and so having moments where there's asymmetry, it's important that I can play with that a bit. Because I can err on the side of being a little bit of like a perfectionist or something or get a little, I don't know what. I'm not going to use any word. I'm not going to pathologize myself.

Audience Member:
Do you use a ruler?

Lena Wolff:
I do, with the quilt pattern drawings. I want the points to connect!

Lauren Schiller:
I was actually curious about this star piece with the lines [points to Expanding Star]

Lena Wolff:
Even with that piece, all the strips are different widths. They’re milled that way, so they’re not the same. I could have made them the same and evenly spaced them out. That's something that my brain would maybe want to do--but they're purposefully a little wonky – a little imperfection in the pattern that is overall symmetrical.

Lauren Schiller:
Do other folks have questions?

Audience Member:
Well, two things. One's a statement, one's a question. I was in LA last weekend and I went to see Pattern and Decoration in American Art at MOCA.

Lena Wolff:
Oh yeah. I'm dying to see that show.

Audience Member:
I think you would love it. But I'm wondering, I mean, I feel so lucky to both to admire your work and I also love that I also admire your values. But I often come across artists where I don't honestly like their values or their personal story. So, I'm wondering how you deal with that because for me, it's very conflicting, whether it's a musician or a visual artist, it's hard because I have real feelings about it.

Lena Wolff:
Miriam and I talk about that a lot, like the Picasso problem. [Audience laughs] Yeah. It's, I don't know. It’s hard, what do you do with it? Miriam and I have been saying lately, I think we're over it.

Miriam Klein Stahl:
I don't have a problem with just being over it. Like I don't need to ever see a Woody Allen film again.

Lena Wolff:
Yeah. Morrisey too, has gone totally crazy,

Miriam Klein Stahl:
Oh, that was just painful. I loved the Smiths growing up, but Morrisey is such a jerk now.

Lena Wolff:
All of a sudden, he’s a racist Brexiteer, it's so weird. All of a sudden, he's gone crazy.

Miriam Klein Stahl:
At some point you just have to say no.

Lena Wolff:
Yeah. Especially when there's so many artists where you can take in the whole package and feel like, "I love this. This is great."

Audience Member:
Can you talk about Patterns & Spells and how your work in this show speaks to politics, as well as just your values or place on the planet? Do you think there's also some underlying message around technology or craft and the very handmade quality of your work? I'm curious about that-

Lena Wolff:
Maybe it's just, technology is absent.

Audience Member:
Absolutely.

Lauren Schiller:
Well, you are using a ruler. [Audience laughs]

Lena Wolff:
I am using ruler sometimes!

Lauren Schiller:
That's a great question. I mean, it is sort of like an activist act in and of itself. This work can exist in any world, with or without technology. I don't know if that's the nature of your question, but-

Audience Member:
I think so. I mean, we're so steeped in technology now and there's this calmness and anonymity of what you're saying around craft and quilting and heritage. I feel that in these pieces. It’s really a very different experience then some of the art—some of the visuals that we see today, that have become more and more technologically advanced

Lena Wolff:
Yeah, I definitely want to maintain an intimacy with materials and to work with my hands. That's an important part of it. It's so relaxing. And it just feels really human. I like cooking a lot too. I like to garden.

Lena’s mom:
This is part of the culture we need to create to deal with climate change. I keep thinking about how my father lived over a hundred years ago and how much more simple it was, how much better for the planet.

Lena Wolff:
I definitely like working with natural materials, humble materials - paper and wood and thread and cloth. These natural materials that are all interrelated -the way the wood pieces are cut for marquetry is so similar to how the paper is cut for the collages, they're so connected.

Audience Member: There’s something age-old and timeless about it.

[conversation moves to info about current fundraisers for important campaigns]

Sarah Shepard:
Yes, thank you all for coming. It’s great to see all your faces and get to talk to you Lena, thank you. Enjoy the work, enjoy your day.

Gloria Steinem & Favianna Rodriguez at the Castro Theatre

Lauren Schiller February 27, 2019

This special episode features my live conversation with activist, writer and feminist organizer, Gloria Steinem and Oakland-based artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez.

The legendary Gloria Steinem is the author of several best-selling books, was a founding editor of and political commentator for New York Magazine and a founding editor of Ms.

Favianna Rodriguez’s art and collaborative projects address migration, economic inequality, gender justice, and ecology. Favianna is also the Executive Director of CultureStrike, a national arts organization that engages artists, writers and performers in migrant rights.

Gloria, Favianna and I spoke on stage at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco on February 21st, 2019 as part of Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival.

Gloria’s book of essays--now in its third edition--and the occasion for our conversation--is called “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions”--and there is no better or more timely theme! In this conversation we talked about the ongoing fight for equality, how much has changed--or not--since Gloria wrote those essays between the 1960s and the 1990s...and how to create the future we envision!

This live event was made possible in part by EO essential oils bath and body care products and of course, my home station KALW in San Francisco, and PRX.

How tyrants rise to power, "The Story of Roger Ailes" filmmaker Alexis Bloom

Lauren Schiller January 2, 2019

Fox News has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to silence women who were sexually harassed and assaulted while working there. The story of former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes’ rise to power and eventual downfall is the story of enablers: people who are willing to look the other way when a predator abuses people, and who are willing to step in and muzzle the victims he leaves in his wake. This story is still happening every day. How do tyrants win such undying loyalty from others? And what will it take to refuse to stand by and let powerful men get away with anything they want? I spoke filmmaker with Alexis Bloom, who directed the documentary, “Divide & Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes.”

TRANSCRIPT:

Inflection Point

Hosted by Lauren Schiller