Justine Musk's Blog, page 28

the art of being an ambitious female

1

I was sitting with two male friends, whom I adore, at an Italian restaurant, when the conversation turned from my love life to the lack of female tech entrepreneurs and CEOs.

My friends – both of whom are founders and CEOs of tech companies – were quick to agree that women choose not to pursue that kind of life. "They see the stress and the hours we work," said one, "and they just don't want it. Especially once they start thinking about having a family."

"You can't put in the kind of hours required of a CEO or a start-up," said my other friend, "and be a good parent. You just can't."

Both men nodded sagely.

I found this ironic, since both of them were the fathers of toddlers. Were they declaring themselves to be bad parents?

Somehow I doubt it.

2

So it was with interest that I read about Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's comments to Charlie Rose the other night that women aren't ambitious enough to get into the offices and boardrooms of corporate power. Until women are as ambitious as men, says Sandberg, "women aren't going to achieve as much."

These comments drew ire and disdain and snorts of "Red herring!" from some women online (including a remark about how Sandberg is "out of touch").

Sandberg isn't denying that ambitious women face unique challenges. She recognizes that success and likeability are positively correlated for men – but negatively correlated for women. (And I couldn't help thinking that some of the online comments, by women, dismissing Sandberg as a mindless puppet for her male employers, were only feeding into this idea that successful women have no soul and questionable self-centered motivations.)

But she is challenging women to assume full responsibility for their own success – not because she's "out of touch" but because, as any Brian Tracy self-help book will tell you, that is what successful people do. They assume an internal locus of control – that their own actions determine their fate. Men don't have much of a problem with this ("we are awesome!"). Women, Sandberg points out, tend to attribute their success to external factors: to luck, or help from someone else ("who, little ol' me?"). They defer and self-deprecate and apologize and "shrink to fit". In an environment that judges you on the sense of personal power you project – or don't — this hurts us, and undercuts our chances for advancement.

3

I learned to "shrink to fit" in my last year of high school. English class: I had a passion and a talent for the subject, and I was kicking ass. Thing was, the marks on our assignments were public – posted with regularity on the back wall – and it became apparent that I was throwing off the curve, that the teacher favored me.

Looking back, I wish I could have just said to myself, I am awesome!, and shrugged it off.

But I wanted to be liked.

So I played myself down. Acted shy and embarrassed when the teacher asked me to read my work to the class. Took up as little space as I possibly could. Apologized.

Shrank to fit.

What we pretend to be, we have a way of becoming. By acting shy, insecure, uncertain, self-doubting – I became exactly those things, and carried them into adulthood. Once, when I remarked to my therapist that I had never "played dumb" as a teenager, she gently corrected me. "That was your version of playing dumb," she said.

So I think about that now: how I swapped a big chunk of self-esteem for my classmates' approval. I could risk being hated, or develop the habit of diminishing myself. It never occurred to me that there might have been a range of alternatives between those two options.

4

But I disagree with Sandberg. I don't think the question that we should be asking is, Are women as ambitious as men?

Because I think the answer is: Hell yes.

I'll say it again: HELL YES. WE ARE AS AMBITIOUS.

But…. how do we do ambition? How to be ambitious, when you're a woman, and those two things effectively cancel each other out?

That, I think, is what trips up so many of us.

And our ambition…gets eroded, dispersed, faded away, thwarted, deflected over time. Who were you, anyway, to think you could have that or be that? Time to grow up and get with the program. Be realistic. Good enough isn't good enough for you; if you can't do it perfectly, you just won't do it.

5

When a man is ambitious – and successful and powerful – he is leaning that much more into what it means to be a man.

But when a woman is ambitious, she cuts against the grain of her gender. You can't be ambitious and feminine, so you have to give up one or the other — or redefine them both, and invent yourself in the process.

A man is defined through his work, but a woman is defined through her roles and relationships to others: she becomes a shifting dynamic of wife, mother, lover, daughter, others, Other.

Ambition, however, is central to the self. It is that inner voice speaking up through your core. For a woman to honor that, to stay true to herself, to follow that voice wherever it leads her…means she has to pull away from what it means to be the angel of the house, the good girl, the nurturer and server and self-sacrificer who puts her own needs last, who learns to disconnect from that inner voice until it disappears in the internalized mass of the outside world, beneath the demands and expectations of others.

Virginia Woolf writes about how she had to "strangle the angel of the house" before she could write her great works.

Likewise, the ambitious woman has to kill off the 'good girl' — or she will get eaten alive.

An ambitious woman is a rebel and a trailblazer. She seeks to define the meaning of her own life and her own damn self – rather than be defined by others.

She comes to her own terms with womanhood.

6

The best indicator of a woman's future success isn't her IQ or GPA or the diversity of her portfolio: it's her choice of a life partner.

Whether he is genuinely supportive of her goals (and 'tolerate' does not equal 'support'). Whether he assumes his fair share of housework and childcare. Whether he's willing to be the stay-at-home dad. And if he is these things, chances are he is not the master of the universe type, with the wealth and prestige that goes along with that; chances are he's a rebel, just not the kind that comes with a motorcycle and leather jacket and sexy slouch, but a stroller and the willingness to be the only daddy at the mommy-and-me-classes (where, Sandberg observes, "the other mommies often won't speak to him").

But if you're a young and ambitious female, you might not know to look for this. You might, instead, gravitate to the celebrated princes of the culture, the so-called eligible bachelors, who are successful and tough-minded and work all the time and may or may not be capable of empathy, who offer a lifestyle but not necessarily a real relationship. Who pay lip service to the idea of equality until the babies arrive, and then take it as a given that you will of course sacrifice your less-valuable career and your economic independence because you can't put in that kind of workweek and be a good parent. And you realize that sure, you can maybe have it all — so long as you also do it all – and, hey, you didn't sign up for that.

6

Sheryl says:

"The problem is this; women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 Heads of State, 9 are women; Of all the people in Parliament in the world, 13% are women. In the Corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, Board seats, tops out at 15-16%…Even in the Non-Profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top 20%".

"We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment…Of married Senior Managers; 2/3 of the married men had children and 1/3 of the married women had children."

She offers 3 pieces of advice to women:

1. Sit at the table

2. Make your partner a real partner

3. Don't leave before you leave

She also delivered the keynote at Barnard College's 119th Commencement ceremony. Addressing approximately 600 members of Barnard's Class of 2011, she said:

"…never let your fear overwhelm your desire. Let the obstacles in your path be external, not internal. Fortune does favor the bold and you'll never know what you're capable of if you don't try."

We should never again shrink to fit. We should know our worth – and charge for it. We should take up as much space as we can, and know that the world is better for it. We should play bigger, dream bigger, love deeper, go for more money, more power, more meaning. We should put ourselves out there, and speak up, because when we tell our stories, we give others permission to tell theirs, and bring depth and diversity to the public discourse.

And to those who would look at us askance and say, who are you to aspire to greatness, who are you to be so selfish, we should say –

– we are fucking AWESOME .

10 reasons why pursuing your creative work is actually highly productive (+ not selfish or self-indulgent)

1. Carving time from your regular, 'productive' life to pursue a hobby or project that you're passionate about means that you increase your chances of being in flow.

Which I wrote about in this post here.

Long story short: flow is you in your element. It reinvigorates you. It wakes you up to new possibilities for yourself and increases your sense of well-being.

This is good for you.

It's also good for the world, because

2. Your happiness and well-being are contagious.

Human beings are wired into each other to an extent that most of us don't even realize. The mirror neurons in our brain enable empathy: we absorb and reflect what other people are feeling, and their moods influence our moods (which go on to influence the moods of others).

This is called emotional contagion.

And because of how we network off each other, you're more contagious than you know.

In their book CONNECTED, authors Christakis and Fowler show how we're influenced not just by our friends, but our friends' friends, and even our friends' friends' friends. What you do and what you say and how that makes other people feel ripple out along the invisible lines that link us to each other, just as the bad mood of someone you don't even know comes echoing down to affect your day.

When you are happy, you are healthier, more productive, better able to contribute to society. Imagine if you could cultivate all those benefits in yourself – and radiate them out to the people in your network.

The world becomes a better place.

3. You are less likely to tolerate other people's bullshit when your self-esteem DOES NOT DEPEND on their acceptance or approval.

Elizabeth Wurtzel expresses this rather nicely:

….I would argue that a woman is more likely to put the kibosh on her manhandling, leering boss if she has lots of things she likes to do, because there is something about loving life and yourself and your enthusiasms too much that makes it hard to put up with any idiot's crap. And the people most likely to be in possession of that quality known as joie de vivre are people who have insane interests, consuming passions, constant sources of enjoyment that do not depend on the approval of others….Women must learn…what it means to be besotted with something other than some useless bloke.

When you look to your creativity for a sense of your identity (you don't know who you are until you know what you can do), that means you are not looking to other people to define your worth. After all, as Eleanor Roosevelt so saucily put it, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

So developing your creative side increases your sense of personal power because

4. It deepens and strengthens your sense of who you are.

We are what we make. It was writing, for example, that helped me find my way back to myself when I made the mistake of giving waaaaay too much of my power to someone else (*cough*a man*cough*). I let that someone shape my sense of who I was – or more specifically, who I wasn't – according to what that person thought I should be (which had everything to do with that person's agenda serving that person's interests).

The result was a kind of amputation of self, a numbing-out. Reading through my blog and other writings, as well as the reactions they inspired, brought me back to enough sense of self that I could build on, reset, start again. Saying I'm happier for it is like saying I was happy to walk away from a car accident. What you feel, instead, is a deep shaken sense of relief — and gratitude for the second chance (or third, or fourth).

5. ….and knowing who you are allows other people to know you better.

We all want to connect. We all want to be recognized for who we are (and not the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the title on the business cards we do or don't hand out). But how can other people – including your friends and loved ones, including your own children – know you, the way they want and need to know you, if you don't express those deeper parts of yourself?

We are what we make. But are we making the right stuff?

6. ….which means you have a stronger personal 'brand'.

God, there's so much about personal branding these days. You're a brand, I'm a brand, soon even the family dog will have a brand. But all the douche-y associations with branding (bad branding) aside, the reality is that other people will react to you, choose or ignore you according to the mental imprint they form of you. Being known for something that you do (and are good at) outside of the way you earn your living can make your 'brand' more memorable.

Who would you rather talk to at a cocktail party: an accountant, or an accountant who moonlights as a jazz pianist?

When I was 17, I spent a year as an exchange student in Australia. I lived with four different host families, which means I had four different host 'fathers'. One had a passion for bonsai. He was often in his greenhouse, nurturing his remarkable little trees. Of all the people I met that year, twenty years on he's the one I remember the most (along with this crazy Belgian girl who liked to get us into trouble, but that's a different kind of blog post).

When I was a teenager, my own passion for fiction writing paid unexpected dividends when my school nominated me for a four-year scholarship to a highly competitive Canadian university. I had an erratic academic record (let's just say that I did not have perfect attendance). I wasn't valedictorian (the thought inspires laughter). I wasn't much of a joiner (the one time I tried out for and made a sports team, I quit when I discovered that all the mean girls were on it).

What I did do, was: write novels. And other things. I had so much practice under my belt that I'd gotten rather good at it. "Justine," my guidance counselor told me, "that's going to set you apart." And it did. It was, I realize now, my first lesson in the importance of differentiating yourself– which, in today's cluttered, noisy, post-consumer society, is not just important but necessary.

7. It opens you up to new people, ideas, and connections.

As Michael Margolis points out in his speeches and courses on 'brand storytelling' (ie: how you present yourself through your bio or your 'about me' page), your interests allow people (including, say, the potential employer interviewing you for your dream job) to find points of connection. Your passion allows you to open up new conversations with people, which brings richness and diversity into your life.

A less-than-obvious benefit of this has to do with the importance of weak ties. (Strong ties are your relationships with family members and close friends; weak ties are acquaintances, people you know only passingly.)

Sociologists have discovered that most new information (like the kind that would help you in a job search) comes to us through weak ties. People inside the same networks tend to know the same stuff. It's by linking – however casually – to people outside your usual habits, places and routines that you open yourself to new influences, new facts and forms of knowledge. This could end up changing your life (or introducing you to your life partner).

8. It makes you creative in other areas of your life, including your regular work.

Creativity thrives at the intersection of different disciplines and perspectives. The way to seem like a freaking genius is to take ideas from a field totally alien to your own, and find ways to adapt and apply them. Creativity, after all, is finding the unexpected connections between things: combining and recombining old ideas until you come up with something – original.

In the book THE MEDICI EFFECT, Frans Johansson suggests that the best way to stimulate the kind of creative insight that, you know, changes the game (what exactly is 'the game', anyway?) — is to educate yourself in a second discipline, something other than what you already do or what you're already known for.

When you pursue your creative work, you might regard it as something you're doing strictly 'on the side' – but you're opening the door on a dimension of ideas that just might find their way to the center of your life. In a good way.

9. It's good for your brain.

Dude, learning something new is so good for your brain. It's like the old saying goes: Use it or lose it. The brain turns out to be far more plastic than we realized. It changes and grows according to the experiences we provide it. Learning something new forces the otherwise-lazy brain to generate growth and form new neural pathways that keep you sharp as you grow older (and older). One of the best ways to stave off Alzheimer's? Learn a new language. Or a musical instrument.

Your brain will thank you.

10. It makes you totally sexy.

I mean, c'mon. Being passionate about something – anything – lights you up with the kind of energy that attracts total supermodels. (I swear to God.) Which doesn't necessarily mean that they'll sleep with you. But they're more likely to consider it. Or at least to consider considering it.

You know what I mean.

one reason why you should give yourself permission to work on your badass creative project

If you feel guilty about taking time out from your life to pursue a personal creative project because you think you're being selfish (when you should be earning money instead, or cleaning the house, or serving your partner and/or kids in some way, or just generally being, you know, productive) raise your hand.

But what if creativity isn't something that should be looked on as an indulgence, an excess, or a special quality that a few lucky mysterious people are born with and the rest of us are not?

We tend to see creativity as something that belongs on the sidelines of life. People who live on the edges of society in order to make the creative life a way of life got tagged as 'bohemians'. The rest of us suffered our practical routines so that we could make some practical money.

I respectfully suggest that your creative work needs to come in out of the cold and assume its rightful place closer to the fire.

The creative work that you love to do and feel a passion for is the thing most likely to put you in a state of flow.

Flow is powerful.

When we are in it, we are working at our best: we are also learning and deepening and growing. Time takes on a different dimension. Self-consciousness disappears into our absorption with the activity.

The dancer becomes the dance.

We emerge from flow feeling rested and rejuvenated, like we just touched the bottom of some secret inner ocean and surfaced with gold in our hands.

(This, by the way, is why saying, "I have no energy left at the end of the day to pursue my creative project" is a kind of falsehood.

Being in flow doesn't rob you of energy, it gives you energy.

Which might be one reason why 'energetic' is a trait often attributed to extremely successful people. They tend to love what they do — which means they spend a lot of their worklife in flow — which enables them to work longer, smarter and better — which enables them to smoke their less-enthusiastic competition.)

Here's the thing. We tend to divide our life into different compartments, as if what we do in one compartment ('work') doesn't impact other compartments ('family life'). Anyone who's ever gotten frustrated or angered at work and then taken it out on a spouse — or been on the receiving end of that stress and frustration – knows that real life tends not to respect such compartments.

There's a lot of overspill.

So if you spend time happily engaged in your creative project, the benefits of that becalmed and focused and stimulated state of mind will move into other areas of your life, including work and family.

I'm reminded of a writer friend who was dragging her ass on the novel she was writing under contract, which wasn't the novel that she wanted to do. After some protest – "I don't have the time!", etc. – she promised to spend one day a week working on her pet project.

Lo and behold, writing the book that she wanted to write rekindled her enthusiasm for the book that she had to write. She made her deadline, felt good about the manuscript she submitted, and noted that writing itself had become a pleasurable activity again.

Passion has a way of kickstarting your soul, which makes you more effective not just in one little part of your life, but at Life.

are fiction writers screwed? part 2

Tell your story: your story is your truth and your truth is your power. Others need and want to hear it, as you need and want to hear theirs. — Gloria Feldt

In a recent blog post I suggested that fiction writers are screwed unless they come to terms with the art and science of (content) marketing.

Good news is, marketing isn't necessarily the contrived evil fake huckster needs-to-be-scraped-off-your-shoe bullshit that you might think (and one of the comments following the post pointed out that no successful writer manages to become successful without being relevant, which is accomplished through marketing).

In fact, it's possible you think this in the first place because marketing is a lot like plastic surgery: you only notice it when it's done badly. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is not to be like an oddly placed pair of overly inflated breasts.

So let's take a look (shall we?) at the definition of 'marketing' I was using, authored by one Marie Forleo –

Making an emotional connection to the people whom you're meant to serve



and take it apart piece by piece.

Making an emotional connection

And by this I don't necessarily mean a personal, one-to-one kind of connection (although of course that happens and it's lovely when it does). That's not scalable or sustainable. And just because someone likes you, or finds you charming or goodlooking or unbearably sexy, doesn't mean they'll pay money for your book — or even read you for free.

(There are lots of people I like – and some I even love – but I wouldn't read their books — if they wrote books, which luckily they don't — if you paid me.)

It's about what you stand for – what you come to represent in the reader's mind, as established through your platform, your use of social media – and whether or not that is relevant and meaningful to them.

Whether it resonates emotionally.

Simon Sinek writes brilliantly about this in his book START WITH WHY, which is geared to a business audience but is a worthwhile read for practically anyone. He stresses the importance of the limbic part of the brain (the middle part, sandwiched between the impulsive lizard brain and the justifying, rationalizing, impressed-with-itself neocortex).

The limbic brain deals with emotion – and also decision-making. (The neo-cortex only thinks that it's making the decisions, when really it's justifying and rationalizing the decisions that the limbic brain has already presented it with. Give the neo-cortex too much rope, however, and it will inevitably hang itself, hence the warning not to 'overthink' things.)

Here's the catch: the limbic brain is nonverbal. It deals in feelings and images, which is why we talk about gut feelings or hunches, or why we 'know' things without being able to put them into words.

An emotional connection is made when your limbic brain connects, or resonates, with my limbic brain. (Which sounds vaguely like something out of Doctor Who, but bear with me.) Another way of thinking about this is: your inner life meets up with my inner life, and they discover that they get along.

(This is, I think, the great misperception about confessional writing. Narcissistic writing is solely about the writer, which is why it is boring as hell. Confessional writing is also about the reader: the writer uses herself as a kind of gateway to a shared, universal experience and to find or make meaning out of it that is relevant to others as well as herself. But I digress.)

This is why, when you tell your story, you give other people permission to tell theirs. When you make the first move to reveal something about yourself, you'll find that other people quickly follow. It's an amazing thing.

(Think of what it means when you say something and someone else says, "Yeah, I totally feel you on that.")

What do you believe in?

What do you stand for?

How can you express those things, through blogging and social media, in a way that will attract your ideal readers?

the people whom you're meant

This part is key. First, notice how it's 'the people', not 'all people'. You can't emotionally resonate with everybody. We're so used to the idea of "the masses" (as in "must appeal to them") that we tend to find this counter-intuitive.

Second, notice the word 'meant'. As in: a big part of this is kind of predestined. You already are who you are. You already believe what you believe. (It's just a question of how aware you are of either of these things, as well as your ability to communicate them.)

You can't just make this shit up as you go along, according to the whims of the marketplace, or your parents or teachers or spouse or drinking buddies or dog. It's not about what you think you 'should' do or be or represent. 'Should' doesn't resonate for long: it feels contrived, false, inauthentic.

To serve.

This last bit circles back to the whole idea of being relevant. How are you relevant to your true fans, your right people, your loyal readers? What value are you giving them through your blog, Twitter, videos, or other forms of social media?

Online, there's a great value placed on information – on the right information – which is why we value those who filter and curate it, who link to cool stuff on Facebook and Twitter. (After all, you are what you link to. Like anything else, links become a form of self-expression. What are you enabling your fans to express about themselves?) There's a great value placed on entertainment, on storytelling (in ancient days, it was the storytellers who were given the choicest bits of meat and the best places by the fire) – since stories give shape and context to our experiences, give them meaning.

Take your beliefs and express them in a way that creates value: provides information that helps others in some way.

This post, for example, serves as a tangible expression of my own deep beliefs — as a blogger, as a writer, as a person.

Know who you are. Communicate who you are. And then remember who you are so you don't lose your way….or your fans.

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badass creatives can change the world

I believe that you don't know who you are until you know what you can do.

I believe that education and false myths about creativity have distorted our sense of our own creative intelligence, which can't be measured in a tidy IQ score.

I believe that 'good girl syndrome' (and male equivalent) does a lot of damage: when we spend so much time trying to please others, we sacrifice ourselves in all the wrong ways. You can't be yourself if you can't speak your story. Yet truth itself is often difficult, messy, challenging to the status quo, and inevitably offensive to someone — qualities that are associated with the 'bad' or 'fallen' woman.

I believe that when you tell your story, you give other people permission to tell theirs. And we need that diversity of stories (and voices) — which is why sharing yourself can be a political act as well as a personal one.

I believe in the pursuit of excellence and mastery, so you can tell your story better than anybody else could ever tell it for you.

So I believe in the third option: being neither 'good' nor 'bad'…but badass. The divine feminine = the badass feminine, and not the Victorian 'angel in the house' crap which denies us our delectable full-blooded complexity, our strength, our desire to live out quest plots of our own outside of, or as well as, marriage-and-children.

I believe in fierce compassion.

I believe that my creativity is my identity is my spirituality, although the 'woo-woo' stuff gets on my freaking nerves. (Give me empirical validation. Ground me in neuroscience. Don't insult my intelligence.)

I believe that our childhood wounds shape both the 'why' of our life purpose and the abilities to achieve that life purpose. Both of which require some intense figuring-out and rigorous self-reflection. When we create according to that purpose, we can heal ourselves, others, the planet.

I believe that badass creatives will innovate the solutions that change the world.

are fiction writers screwed?

I was talking to a nonfiction writer who scored a book deal with a Big Six traditional publisher worth a cool quarter million. She said the same thing I've heard from other writers and agents: "It's all about platform now. Publishers are only interested if you have a platform."

She added, "Fiction writers are screwed."

Which echoed something a successful New York agent said to me a month or so ago: "I don't even know how you could launch a fiction writer now."

So maybe it's up to fiction writers (and other creatives) to launch themselves.

To, you know, get all entrepreneurial and shit.

Seth Godin refers to "author enterprises":

Authors of the future are small enterprises, just one person or perhaps two or three. But they include fan engagement specialists, licensors, new media development managers, public speakers, endorsement and bizdev VPs, and more.

No one has your back.

Sad but true. The author of today (and tomorrow) is either going to build and maintain and work with his tribe or someone is going to take it away.

We could bitch and complain about this, of course – and we do – but hey, it's not like it's ever been easy to succeed as a writer.

It just means that it's a different game now, with different challenges.

Used to be that the biggest challenge facing a writer (at least initially) was getting good and savvy enough to get published.

Now it's about getting good and savvy enough to break through obscurity and get an audience (and create enough "light and heat", as one ex-agent put it, to attract a traditional publisher, if you decide to go that route).

This involves marketing. Or unmarketing. Or content marketing. Whatever you want to call it. Enough to make a writer's blood run cold – after all, we hate this stuff.

We also tend to think we're above it.

But I was at a conference this weekend

(see, here's a picture of me at the conference)

where I heard Marie Forleo give this definition of marketing – or rather, good marketing:

Making an emotional connection with the people that you're meant to serve.



Maybe we can modify that a bit:

Making an emotional connection with those people formerly known as your audience whom you're meant to serve both as a writer and a storyteller.



So are any of us above doing that?

Does thinking about 'platform' and 'marketing' in those kinds of terms change your sense of them at all?

Only connect.

Online and off.

And maybe we're not so screwed after all.

I'm off to work on my fiction.

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perfection is a size 6 (now a size 4): ode to the Sweet Valley High books

This is a piece I wrote a year or two ago for a group reading at a bookstore: writers were asked to rave — or rant — about books from our childhood.

Soon we shall return you to your regular programming.

Also, you might note that the website is a little bit under construction.

1

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when MTV still played music videos, the young-adult Sweet Valley High series premiered its first book DOUBLE LOVE.

The year was 1983.

This, let us not forget, was the year of RETURN OF THE JEDI, so the same year that gave us Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield also gave us the Ewoks.

There's a lesson in that, although I'm damned if I know what it is.

2

Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are better than you.

They are golden Californian perfection, which looks like this: blonde hair, blue-green eyes, five foot six, wears a golden lavaliere necklace and drives a red Spider Fiat. They're also a perfect size six. As a ten year old, this was a valuable lesson to me: perfection comes in size six. Which of course is rather plus-sized today – in the updated re-release of the books, the twins are now a perfect size 4 (and they don't drive a Fiat, they drive a red Jeep Wrangler, because the books are progressive like that).

Their mother, Alice, is blonde and youthful and often mistaken for their older sister (like your mom). She's an interior decorator, so she has a career, but it's not like a hard-driving career where she might come off as all power-hungry and shit, it's about making things pretty and nice. Their dad, Ned, heads up a law firm.

The parents have the decency to be absent for much of the time, so the twins can compete over basketball players, get kidnapped, get sexually assaulted, date bad boys who drive motorcycles, fall into comas, date princes with psychotic mothers who lock them in castle dungeons, traumatize fat girls, date rich boys who drive sportscars, switch identities, and the like.

The twins have a brother named Stephen. At one point Stephen dates a black girl, and this is very daring and audacious of him, before he decides that the differences between them are just too, y'know, different, and so it would never work out.

3

When you're ten, and then eleven, when you're on the trembling cusp of adolescence, you look for clues and cues to tell you how to be: what's desired and acceptable. The Wakefield twins present you with your options.

You can be a good girl or a bad girl.

If you're a good girl, you're like Elizabeth. You're serious and responsible and hardworking and sweet and loyal and just not particularly interesting. She's the smart girl, the scholar, so she does supersmart things like write a gossip column for the school paper (in the new series, she writes an anonymous gossip blog and edits the school website. Because the books are progressive like that). On the cover of DOUBLE LOVE, she has her hair primly pulled back, is looking at you with disapproval, and wears a sexless yellow sweater. Her morally superior nature is further demonstrated, if in some way that I don't quite understand, by the fact that her best friend is named Enid.

In DOUBLE LOVE, her good girl nature is rewarded, because she's the one who gets the guy. The guy's name is Todd and he plays basketball. These are his two distinguishing features. (Somewhere, in some alternative universe, the book ends with Elizabeth releasing her inhibitions and straddling Todd the basketball player with a riding crop while Todd snorts cocaine off her left breast, but in this universe they just go to the prom. Or something. They don't even meet any teenage vampires. These books happened before teenage vampires.)

4

Jessica is the bad girl. We know this because the cover shows her with mussed-up hair, an edgy denim jacket, a come-hither gaze and ready-for-anything smirk. Except Jessica isn't really a bad girl because she doesn't do drugs and she doesn't have sex and she's not working class,like this other girl Tricia. She fears her brother Stephen might be dating Tricia (this is before Stephen dates the black girl). Except Stephen is actually dating Tricia's angelic sister, so phew! — everything ends happily there, until the angelic sister dies several books later of leukemia or something, but whatever. Jessica lies constantly, exploits her sister's good nature, cheats, uses people for her own ends, tortures fat girls, accuses Todd the basketball player of sexually assaulting her because she's pissed off that Todd would rather date Elizabeth than her, and stuff like that. Jessica, you see, is a straight-up sociopath. But this is okay because she doesn't actually have sex, which means she's not a slut (like Tricia). She's also massively popular, and popularity is good for your soul, and she's a perfect size six. I mean a size four. So we can forgive her in the end and give a wink and a smile and say, Oh, Jessica! That's just your silly sociopathic nature!

And they live in the world of Sweet Valley, where the sun always shines, where the rich kids are total snobs (except for the nice rich girl who dies of a cocaine overdose, because Drugs are Bad), where girls compete for boys the way girls are biologically programmed to do, at least according to The Bachelor and those other very fine reality shows, where the boys can't help but attempt to date-rape their attractive classmates but the girls never press charges or anything and it's forgotten soon after, and where everybody is white and thin and heterosexual except of course when they're not and freak people out. Being overweight is kind of okay because you can lose the weight and transform yourself from social pariah to Homecoming Queen, like this one character Robin does. Being gay, or of color, is a bit more problematic. (One character snipes to another, "I can't believe she's dating him, he's so ethnic and working class").

So if you're gay, or of color, you should live somewhere else.

5

These characters are happily devoid of intellectual concerns, never pondering whether or not there is a God or what they should do with their futures or even if they'll have a future before global warming turns the world to soup. They go shopping. They go to parties. They go on dates. This confused me a bit when I was young, because I went into high school also expecting to go on dates, but that was being phased out. Instead, you were described as "going with" someone, which means you were boyfriend girlfriend, which means you could make out and nobody would call you a slut. Now, of course, there's this whole thing about "hookup culture" and giving boys blowjobs, because blowjobs don't count as 'real' sex, but 'hookup culture' doesn't exist in Sweet Valley. There, a blowjob is kind of like a unicorn: this mysterious mythical thing that nobody really believes in.

But what I learned from the series was that you could be a good girl, like Elizabeth, or a bad girl, like Jessica. Bad girls have all the fun, but they don't get rewarded with the marriage material like Todd the basketball player. Also, bad girls aren't so bad that they actually have sex. You can dress sexy, and act sexy, but it's kind of like a game of pretend, or a performance, like when your younger brother dressed up as a squirrel in his third-grade play. He's not really a squirrel. He's just teasing.

Jessica seemed like the powerful one because she was sexy. It would take me years to learn that although it's fun to have the sexy, it's not like the sexy translates to true power. It doesn't change social policy or get you into the corporate boardroom unless you're sneaking in there to have sex with the CEO on the conference table. Not that I ever did this, but you get my point. If sexy was powerful, then Dick Cheney would be popping diet pills and wearing fishnets. But he is not.

Elizabeth isn't sexy, because although sexiness is kind of good, sexiness is also bad. It gets you into trouble with those boys who want to date-rape you in their cars after they take you to the Dairi Burger. Is it possible for a girl to be compassionate and smart and sexy? Is it possible for a girl to be good and bad? The universe would possibly implode if this happened. You can be sexy and dumb and glamorous, or asexual and smart and boring. What you can't be, however, is complex.

Thank you, Sweet Valley, for teaching me what it means to be female. For teaching me about rich boys and basketball players and sororities and lip gloss. For teaching me that girls, even twin sisters, should compete for guys, because guys are such a limited natural resource. And that there is no problem on this planet that can't be saved, in the end, by your own massive popularity. Oh, and that you shouldn't take drugs because drugs will kill you dead.

I'm really glad, Sweet Valley, that you're moving on to teach these lessons to the new generation of young girls who will look to you as eagerly as I did for such cues and clues and messages. Because it's not like they're reinforced by the larger culture or anything. It's not like those messages get beamed at them over and over from the television and the movie screens and the advertising they see all around them. Maybe that was the case when I was ten, but things are different now. Girls know they are prized for who they are inside, that they matter, that boys should treat them with respect and not as random booty, that competing in the Hotness Olympics is ultimately a trap that sets you up to be dismissed or discarded. They know that they can go on to have full, dynamic careers and won't have to 'choose' between work and family because of things like excellent maternity leave programs and flex-time and universal daycare and husbands who share the childcare and housework. They know that they can even run for President without getting flak for their hairdos, because it's not like any of us are put in our place through our appearance anymore. Except in you, Sweet Valley, so may you live forever.

perfection is a size 6 (now a size 4): ode to the Sweet Valley High books

I am busily moving, unpacking, and writing non-blog-related material, so today I am repurposing an entry from my old Livejournal. This is a piece I wrote a year or two ago for a group reading at a bookstore: writers were asked to rave — or rant — about books from our childhood.

Soon we shall return you to your regular programming.

Also, you might note that the website is a little bit under construction.

1

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when MTV still played music videos, the young-adult Sweet Valley High series premiered its first book DOUBLE LOVE.

The year was 1983.

This, let us not forget, was the year of RETURN OF THE JEDI, so the same year that gave us Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield also gave us the Ewoks.

There's a lesson in that, although I'm damned if I know what it is.

2

Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield are better than you.

They are golden Californian perfection, which looks like this: blonde hair, blue-green eyes, five foot six, wears a golden lavaliere necklace and drives a red Spider Fiat. They're also a perfect size six. As a ten year old, this was a valuable lesson to me: perfection comes in size six. Which of course is rather plus-sized today – in the updated re-release of the books, the twins are now a perfect size 4 (and they don't drive a Fiat, they drive a red Jeep Wrangler, because the books are progressive like that).

Their mother, Alice, is blonde and youthful and often mistaken for their older sister (like your mom). She's an interior decorator, so she has a career, but it's not like a hard-driving career where she might come off as all power-hungry and shit, it's about making things pretty and nice. Their dad, Ned, heads up a law firm.

The parents have the decency to be absent for much of the time, so the twins can compete over basketball players, get kidnapped, get sexually assaulted, date bad boys who drive motorcycles, fall into comas, date princes with psychotic mothers who lock them in castle dungeons, traumatize fat girls, date rich boys who drive sportscars, switch identities, and the like.

The twins have a brother named Stephen. At one point Stephen dates a black girl, and this is very daring and audacious of him, before he decides that the differences between them are just too, y'know, different, and so it would never work out.

3

When you're ten, and then eleven, when you're on the trembling cusp of adolescence, you look for clues and cues to tell you how to be: what's desired and acceptable. The Wakefield twins present you with your options.

You can be a good girl or a bad girl.

If you're a good girl, you're like Elizabeth. You're serious and responsible and hardworking and sweet and loyal and just not particularly interesting. She's the smart girl, the scholar, so she does supersmart things like write a gossip column for the school paper (in the new series, she writes an anonymous gossip blog and edits the school website. Because the books are progressive like that). On the cover of DOUBLE LOVE, she has her hair primly pulled back, is looking at you with disapproval, and wears a sexless yellow sweater. Her morally superior nature is further demonstrated, if in some way that I don't quite understand, by the fact that her best friend is named Enid.

In DOUBLE LOVE, her good girl nature is rewarded, because she's the one who gets the guy. The guy's name is Todd and he plays basketball. These are his two distinguishing features. (Somewhere, in some alternative universe, the book ends with Elizabeth releasing her inhibitions and straddling Todd the basketball player with a riding crop while Todd snorts cocaine off her left breast, but in this universe they just go to the prom. Or something. They don't even meet any teenage vampires. These books happened before teenage vampires.)

4

Jessica is the bad girl. We know this because the cover shows her with mussed-up hair, an edgy denim jacket, a come-hither gaze and ready-for-anything smirk. Except Jessica isn't really a bad girl because she doesn't do drugs and she doesn't have sex and she's not working class,like this other girl Tricia. She fears her brother Stephen might be dating Tricia (this is before Stephen dates the black girl). Except Stephen is actually dating Tricia's angelic sister, so phew! — everything ends happily there, until the angelic sister dies several books later of leukemia or something, but whatever. Jessica lies constantly, exploits her sister's good nature, cheats, uses people for her own ends, tortures fat girls, accuses Todd the basketball player of sexually assaulting her because she's pissed off that Todd would rather date Elizabeth than her, and stuff like that. Jessica, you see, is a straight-up sociopath. But this is okay because she doesn't actually have sex, which means she's not a slut (like Tricia). She's also massively popular, and popularity is good for your soul, and she's a perfect size six. I mean a size four. So we can forgive her in the end and give a wink and a smile and say, Oh, Jessica! That's just your silly sociopathic nature!

And they live in the world of Sweet Valley, where the sun always shines, where the rich kids are total snobs (except for the nice rich girl who dies of a cocaine overdose, because Drugs are Bad), where girls compete for boys the way girls are biologically programmed to do, at least according to The Bachelor and those other very fine reality shows, where the boys can't help but attempt to date-rape their attractive classmates but the girls never press charges or anything and it's forgotten soon after, and where everybody is white and thin and heterosexual except of course when they're not and freak people out. Being overweight is kind of okay because you can lose the weight and transform yourself from social pariah to Homecoming Queen, like this one character Robin does. Being gay, or of color, is a bit more problematic. (One character snipes to another, "I can't believe she's dating him, he's so ethnic and working class").

So if you're gay, or of color, you should live somewhere else.

5

These characters are happily devoid of intellectual concerns, never pondering whether or not there is a God or what they should do with their futures or even if they'll have a future before global warming turns the world to soup. They go shopping. They go to parties. They go on dates. This confused me a bit when I was young, because I went into high school also expecting to go on dates, but that was being phased out. Instead, you were described as "going with" someone, which means you were boyfriend girlfriend, which means you could make out and nobody would call you a slut. Now, of course, there's this whole thing about "hookup culture" and giving boys blowjobs, because blowjobs don't count as 'real' sex, but 'hookup culture' doesn't exist in Sweet Valley. There, a blowjob is kind of like a unicorn: this mysterious mythical thing that nobody really believes in.

But what I learned from the series was that you could be a good girl, like Elizabeth, or a bad girl, like Jessica. Bad girls have all the fun, but they don't get rewarded with the marriage material like Todd the basketball player. Also, bad girls aren't so bad that they actually have sex. You can dress sexy, and act sexy, but it's kind of like a game of pretend, or a performance, like when your younger brother dressed up as a squirrel in his third-grade play. He's not really a squirrel. He's just teasing.

Jessica seemed like the powerful one because she was sexy. It would take me years to learn that although it's fun to have the sexy, it's not like the sexy translates to true power. It doesn't change social policy or get you into the corporate boardroom unless you're sneaking in there to have sex with the CEO on the conference table. Not that I ever did this, but you get my point. If sexy was powerful, then Dick Cheney would be popping diet pills and wearing fishnets. But he is not.

Elizabeth isn't sexy, because although sexiness is kind of good, sexiness is also bad. It gets you into trouble with those boys who want to date-rape you in their cars after they take you to the Dairi Burger. Is it possible for a girl to be compassionate and smart and sexy? Is it possible for a girl to be good and bad? The universe would possibly implode if this happened. You can be sexy and dumb and glamorous, or asexual and smart and boring. What you can't be, however, is complex.

Thank you, Sweet Valley, for teaching me what it means to be female. For teaching me about rich boys and basketball players and sororities and lip gloss. For teaching me that girls, even twin sisters, should compete for guys, because guys are such a limited natural resource. And that there is no problem on this planet that can't be saved, in the end, by your own massive popularity. Oh, and that you shouldn't take drugs because drugs will kill you dead.

I'm really glad, Sweet Valley, that you're moving on to teach these lessons to the new generation of young girls who will look to you as eagerly as I did for such cues and clues and messages. Because it's not like they're reinforced by the larger culture or anything. It's not like those messages get beamed at them over and over from the television and the movie screens and the advertising they see all around them. Maybe that was the case when I was ten, but things are different now. Girls know they are prized for who they are inside, that they matter, that boys should treat them with respect and not as random booty, that competing in the Hotness Olympics is ultimately a trap that sets you up to be dismissed or discarded. They know that they can go on to have full, dynamic careers and won't have to 'choose' between work and family because of things like excellent maternity leave programs and flex-time and universal daycare and husbands who share the childcare and housework. They know that they can even run for President without getting flak for their hairdos, because it's not like any of us are put in our place through our appearance anymore. Except in you, Sweet Valley, so may you live forever.

vixen, temptress, slut: the art of telling old + new stories about women

If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories.

If you want to change a culture, change the stories. — Michael Margolis

1

I don't know her name and I've never seen her face.

But she haunts me.

Gang-raped in a mobile home on the edge of a small Texan town.

18 boys and men arrested, including two star athletes at the high school. Someone filmed the assault on his cell phone and showed it around (a student reported the video to a teacher, who contacted the police).

At a town meeting held to supposedly "discuss concerns about the case", people expressed outrage.

Toward the girl.

Slut. Vixen. Asking for it.

Out to ruin the lives of our men!

(The girl is eleven years old.)

"After the meeting, many in attendance told reporters that the girl had consented to the sex.

"She lied about her age. Them boys didn't rape her. She wanted this to happen. I'm not taking nobody's side, but if she hadn't put herself in that predicament, this would have never happened," said Angie Woods, who lives in Houston but grew up in Cleveland."

One speaker asked the crowd to contribute to the defense fund for the accused. No one suggested donations for the rape victim, be it for legal or medical or therapeutic expenses.

If these men are presumed innocent until proven guilty – remember that 'innocent' and 'guilty' are used here as legal terms, and not actual factual truth – the question surrounding a rape victim seems to be: Just how guilty is she?

2

There is a story that our culture likes to tell about women.

They use their sexuality to lure, exploit, and ruin men, whether forcing them from the Garden of Eden or the high school football team. As Jessica Valenti points out in her book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's character and moral worth are determined not by what she does but what she doesn't do: have sex.

Her virginity is her innocence.

Lose her virginity, she can no longer be presumed innocent.

Unless, of course, she's married (or in a monogamous relationship).

She is made legitimate – "an honest woman" – through a man, and if that relationship ends, so does her honesty.

Out to ruin the lives of these men!

A man marries an angel, and divorces a golddigger.

3

When a woman's moral character is conflated with her sexuality – preferably the heterosexually appealing, young and nubile kind, that sexily rides the edge of being sexy enough to be appealing but not so sexy that you're too sexy, because then, even if you're still a virgin, you're just a slut – and if that is what she gets judged and evaluated by, and she knows it, what is a girl to do?

A boy might want to have sex with her, and she might want it too. He has something to gain — and she to lose. Unless he's willing to jump into an instant monogamous relationship (thus valiantly protecting her from the perils of evil sluttery), their interaction can become a kind of game, a sport, a battle ripe for conquest: sex is the prize extracted from the woman's body.

The traditional "rules" of dating go something like this:

If you let a guy sleep with you too soon, he has no other reason to hang out with you, which means he will never call you back, which is a bad thing, because now you won't get to marry him.

And this has nothing to do with him, whether or not he's an asshole, or whether the two of you would have been even remotely compatible in the first place (really, what are the odds?), or the messages he absorbed growing up about how a girl who puts out, especially too soon, must be immoral, guilty, suspect and untrustworthy – vixen, temptress, slut. No no no, the problem is solely and completely that you slept with him without timing it correctly. Ergo, you are no longer worth anything — certainly not worth getting to know.

4

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves inform our history, our social norms, our beliefs, our interactions with each other. They establish a framework for our culture that we tend to accept as unquestioned truth. But a culture is not about what is objectively true; it's about what a group of people have agreed to believe in order to get along and share a reality.

We could (for example) tell a different story about sex, one that emphasizes the fact of mad mutual attraction, of the chemicals the brain releases during and after in order to promote human bonding. Instead of saying that friendship must precede sex (which is, admittedly, never a bad idea), we could add that sometimes it comes after sex; sex itself is the glue that keeps people interested in each other long enough to actually learn about each other, perhaps even venture into the deep ragged edge of true emotional intimacy (not for the faint-hearted). But in order to tell that story, we'd have to tell a deeper, underlying story that values women not for their hymen but for brain and heart and soul, action and accomplishment — none of which changes whether she sleeps with you on the first date, the thirty-fifth date, or never.

But we tell a story about the battle of the sexes: those who conquer and those who are conquered, girls who are pure and girls who are not, girls to sleep with after you marry and girls to sleep with before you marry someone else. Boys will be boys, after all (innocent until proven guilty), and so the girl must dress and act in a way that protects both him and her from his own desires (that he's somehow not fully responsible for in the first place).

The battle of the sexes.

Language frames thought frames perception frames reality: sex as war: woman becomes a natural resource to be claimed, tamed, opened and mined for gold. In places like the Congo, mass rape serves to murder the soul of a people. You have to kill a man to truly kill him, but raping a woman is enough, her worth taken, her self so disposable that her own family or village will refuse to take her back. She is alive, and yet dead to them.

So the story goes.

5

What if we told a story that didn't rank the genders, but stressed instead our interdependence, even as we all have the right to be the heroes of our own lives (instead of supporting players in someone else's)?

What if we looked at our society not as a collection of individuals, but of relationships that influence each other? Hurt someone with less power than you, hurt the system, hurt yourself: actions ripple out in a way that ripples back to you.

What if we told our sexuality as an expression of our humanity, and not an annihilation of it, that men and women both must value and safeguard?

What if we retold the Adam and Eve story to express a different truth: about how human beings are wired, not for lounging around fruit trees all day, but challenge and meaning? What if the snake was a wake-up call to the adventure of the human experience, and when they left the garden she wasn't walking behind him. They were side by side, hand in hand, knowing that each would be lost without the Other.

If the boys and men accused of raping this eleven year old child had grown up within the context of these other stories, these alternative stories, would they still have allegedly done what they allegedly did?

There's a Hopi American Indian proverb:

Those who tell the stories, rule the world.

If we want a different world, perhaps we need to tell different stories.

What story are you participating in, right now? Are you contributing to it, rebelling against it, or seeking, in your own way, to transform it?

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vixen, temptress, slut: the art of telling old + new stories about women

If you want to learn about a culture, listen to the stories.

If you want to change a culture, change the stories. — Michael Margolis

1

I don't know her name and I've never seen her face.

But she haunts me.

Gang-raped in a mobile home on the edge of a small Texan town.

18 boys and men arrested, including two star athletes at the high school. Someone filmed the assault on his cell phone and showed it around (a student reported the video to a teacher, who contacted the police).

At a town meeting held to supposedly "discuss concerns about the case", people expressed outrage.

Toward the girl.

Slut. Vixen. Asking for it.

Out to ruin the lives of our men!

(The girl is eleven years old.)

"After the meeting, many in attendance told reporters that the girl had consented to the sex.

"She lied about her age. Them boys didn't rape her. She wanted this to happen. I'm not taking nobody's side, but if she hadn't put herself in that predicament, this would have never happened," said Angie Woods, who lives in Houston but grew up in Cleveland."

One speaker asked the crowd to contribute to the defense fund for the accused. No one suggested donations for the rape victim, be it for legal or medical or therapeutic expenses.

If these men are presumed innocent until proven guilty – remember that 'innocent' and 'guilty' are used here as legal terms, and not actual factual truth – the question surrounding a rape victim seems to be: Just how guilty is she?

2

There is a story that our culture likes to tell about women.

They use their sexuality to lure, exploit, and ruin men, whether forcing them from the Garden of Eden or the high school football team. As Jessica Valenti points out in her book THE PURITY MYTH, a woman's character and moral worth are determined not by what she does but what she doesn't do: have sex.

Her virginity is her innocence.

Lose her virginity, she can no longer be presumed innocent.

Unless, of course, she's married (or in a monogamous relationship).

She is made legitimate – "an honest woman" – through a man, and if that relationship ends, so does her honesty.

Out to ruin the lives of these men!

A man marries an angel, and divorces a golddigger.

3

When a woman's moral character is conflated with her sexuality – preferably the heterosexually appealing, young and nubile kind, that sexily rides the edge of being sexy enough to be appealing but not so sexy that you're too sexy, because then, even if you're still a virgin, you're just a slut – and if that is what she gets judged and evaluated by, and she knows it, what is a girl to do?

A boy might want to have sex with her, and she might want it too. He has something to gain — and she to lose. Unless he's willing to jump into an instant monogamous relationship (thus valiantly protecting her from the perils of evil sluttery), their interaction can become a kind of game, a sport, a battle ripe for conquest: sex is the prize extracted from the woman's body.

The traditional "rules" of dating go something like this:

If you let a guy sleep with you too soon, he has no other reason to hang out with you, which means he will never call you back, which is a bad thing, because now you won't get to marry him.

And this has nothing to do with him, whether or not he's an asshole, or whether the two of you would have been even remotely compatible in the first place (really, what are the odds?), or the messages he absorbed growing up about how a girl who puts out, especially too soon, must be immoral, guilty, suspect and untrustworthy – vixen, temptress, slut. No no no, the problem is solely and completely that you slept with him without timing it correctly. Ergo, you are no longer worth anything — certainly not worth getting to know.

4

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves inform our history, our social norms, our beliefs, our interactions with each other. They establish a framework for our culture that we tend to accept as unquestioned truth. But a culture is not about what is objectively true; it's about what a group of people have agreed to believe in order to get along and share a reality.

We could (for example) tell a different story about sex, one that emphasizes the fact of mad mutual attraction, of the chemicals the brain releases during and after in order to promote human bonding. Instead of saying that friendship must precede sex (which is, admittedly, never a bad idea), we could add that sometimes it comes after sex; sex itself is the glue that keeps people interested in each other long enough to actually learn about each other, perhaps even venture into the deep ragged edge of true emotional intimacy (not for the faint-hearted). But in order to tell that story, we'd have to tell a deeper, underlying story that values women not for their hymen but for brain and heart and soul, action and accomplishment — none of which changes whether she sleeps with you on the first date, the thirty-fifth date, or never.

But we tell a story about the battle of the sexes: those who conquer and those who are conquered, girls who are pure and girls who are not, girls to sleep with after you marry and girls to sleep with before you marry someone else. Boys will be boys, after all (innocent until proven guilty), and so the girl must dress and act in a way that protects both him (and her) from his own desires (that he's somehow not fully responsible for in the first place).

The battle of the sexes.

Language frames thought frames perception frames reality: sex as war: woman becomes a natural resource to be claimed, tamed, opened and mined for gold. In places like the Congo, mass rape serves to murder the soul of a people. You have to kill a man to truly kill him, but raping a woman is enough, her worth taken, her self so disposable that her own family or village will refuse to take her back. She is alive, and yet dead to them.

So the story goes.

5

What if we told a story that didn't rank the genders, but stressed instead our interdependence, even as we all have the right to be the heroes of our own lives (instead of supporting players in someone else's)?

What if we looked at our society not as a collection of individuals, but of relationships that influence each other? Hurt someone with less power than you, hurt the system, hurt yourself: actions ripple out in a way that ripples back to you.

What if we told our sexuality as an expression of our humanity, and not an annihilation of it, that men and women both must value and safeguard?

What if we retold the Adam and Eve story to express a different truth: about how human beings are wired, not for lounging around fruit trees all day, but challenge and meaning? What if the snake was a wake-up call to the adventure of the human experience, and when they left the garden she wasn't walking behind him. They were side by side, hand in hand, knowing that each would be lost without the Other.

If the boys and men accused of raping this eleven year old child had grown up within the context of these other stories, these alternative stories, would they still have allegedly done what they allegedly did?

There's a Hopi American Indian proverb:

Those who tell the stories, rule the world.

If we want a different world, perhaps we need to tell different stories.

What story are you participating in, right now? Are you contributing to it, rebelling against it, or seeking, in your own way, to transform it?

follow me on twitter