At the bottom of my Wikipedia page is a tag that identifies me as an “American women novelist.” If I were a man, the tag would read “American male novelist.” My gender should have nothing to do with my career, and yet there it sits, tied to my profession, as if the male novelists and I work in inherently different fields.

But one could easily make a cynical argument that we do.

Studies have shown women’s books are priced lower than men’s, women’s fiction is reviewed less often, and published less frequently in literary journals. Even books about women are less likely to win prizes than ones about men. The fields that men and women run through are different indeed: one of them has a lot more rough spots and potholes.

Over the past few months, as I’ve been looking at large text corpora, I often found myself thinking about gender inequality in the writing world. I wanted to collect banned books by men and women for a machine learning project (I planned to train two text-generating models on the different corpora and place them in conversation), but while banned texts by men are fairly easy to find in the public domain, banned texts by women proved much harder to come by.

As I searched for banned texts on Project Gutenberg, which hosts over 58,000 texts that can be downloaded free of charge, I began to wonder how many of the books—banned or not—were by women. One estimate came from Wikidata, where information found on Wikipedia pages—such as a person’s name, gender, or occupation—is stored in a way that’s machine readable. I found about twelve thousand people (writers, editors, illustrators, translators) who contributed to the corpus.

In this subset, men outnumber women by over 5 to 1. Although gender is not binary, I look at the number of men and women because this is the information available, or estimable, using name-based gender prediction tools.

I’d come to Project Gutenberg to find banned books for my bots, but I started to wonder what they would learn about writing if they were trained on this entire corpus. I have read a number of studies that identify patterns in language that are associated with one gender or another.

Researchers from Aalto and Helsinki Universities compared fiction by men and women in the British National Corpus and found that men use first-person plural (we, us) while women use second-person (you and your) more frequently. Men overuse certain nouns (e.g., ‘man’), women certain verbs (e.g., ‘thought’) and intensifiers (e.g., ‘much’ or ‘very’). The researchers note that such differences might be due to the gender of the intended audience, not the author, but this distinction quickly becomes murky.

What makes a book appropriate for one gender or another? When only the girls were invited to author Shannon Hale’s presentation—a teacher later told Hale, “the administration only gave permission to the middle-school girls to leave class for your assembly”, she noted:

“I talk about books and writing, reading, rejections and moving through them, how to come up with story ideas. But because I’m a woman, because some of my books have pictures of girls on the cover, because some of my books have ‘princess’ in the title, I’m stamped as ‘for girls only.’ However, the male writers who have boys on their covers speak to the entire school.”

If the language we use reflects what is expected of us—or if women’s books are only expected to be read by women—the fact that certain words are more commonly used by one gender or another strikes me as a symptom of systemic bias.

Like when I ran several of the essays I’ve written about technology through two different gender prediction systems and was identified as male by both. I suspect there is an imbalance in the training corpus and that I was called a man because the system had learned from the work it knew that men use words and phrases like “machine learning” and “biased data.”

What makes a book *appropriate* for one gender or another?
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I found over two million words of what I called “banned man” literature just by following the links from a single list of banned books. After poking around for a few hours, I collected around 800,000 words of banned woman literature from the public domain. I’d wanted at least a million words for each bot. I decided to revise my original machine learning plan and look at contemporary work instead.

I turned to Smashwords, where some books are sold and others may be freely downloaded, depending on the author’s wishes. On this site, the gender-related glut and shortages were opposite the ones I encountered on Project Gutenberg. I noticed far more women than men offering their one-hundred-thousand-word novels for free.

At this point, however, my interest in gender and language had eclipsed my interest in bot chatter. I was reading papers about statistical tests to determine which differences in word usage are significant and wondering things like how I could get my hands on a really big corpus. This is how I came across the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 560 million words from 220,225 texts collected between the years of 1990 and 2017.

I found this corpus dazzling, not just because I discovered my own work in it, but because when I opened the list of included writers and began to scroll through the names of fiction authors (who represent just a subset of the work), I was struck—in a positive way. Was the corpus as gender balanced as it appeared? I wrote to Professor Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, who maintains the corpus, and asked.

“Actually, the ‘balance’ just refers to the overall balance between the ‘macro-genres’ (spoken, fiction, etc) in COCA. As far as gender balance in fiction, I’ve never really designed the corpus to do that,” he said. He pointed me to the work of Doug Biber and Jesse Egbert, who have written about how to make a corpus representative—which is not a simple matter.

I appreciated Professor Davies’s candor, but was left with my question and a long list of fiction authors. I ran the first names through a gender predictor and the estimated ratio of women to men was fairly even. Men contribute more science fiction, women more of what is labelled as “juvenile work.” But I was frustrated by the uncertainty of the estimates.

The names are not always parsed correctly, the prediction just a guess, and I couldn’t see the women working under men’s names—people like George Madden Martin, Max du Veuzit, Lucas Malet, and Henry Handel Richardson, to name just a few. The irony that women, writing under men’s name to be heard, can so easily escape a search for female writers made me melancholy. I wanted to know who was in this corpus. I decided to try matching the names to biographical records in Wikidata again.

Using Wikidata via a tool called OpenRefine I could match just under half of the subset of five thousand names I tried. Not all of the names matched the correct person. For example, Elizabeth Evans—who is the author of six books and the recipient of an NEA fellowship—does not have a Wikipedia page, but she was matched to another person with the same name. As I was interested only in gender, I accepted this match—it seemed reasonably likely that the gender would be correct. Of the matched names, forty percent belonged to women.

I abandoned this line of inquiry, but I was left with my questions: Who is included in our corpora? Who is not? Whose voice am I hearing? What story does it tell? For the English Wikipedia, according to the estimates I’ve seen, over 80% of the contributors are male. The story there—our history—is disproportionately about men, and the biographies of men outnumber those of women significantly (the latest estimate I’ve seen shows just under 18% of the biographies are of women). I suspect the 40/60 imbalance in my COCA gender estimate belongs more to Wikipedia than COCA, but I know nothing more than that I observed it.

In the case of Project Gutenberg, the work is primarily by male authors and any patterns in the language that belong to men are magnified by this imbalance. If male authors use the word “man” more often than female authors do—as the researchers noted in their study of the British National Corpus—having five times more male than female authors gives that word an even greater prominence.

For the English Wikipedia, over 80% of the contributors are male.
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I think about how imbalances in our corpora magnify bias, not just in subject matter (stories about male characters or biographies of men), but in the words we see and choose. The technologies we are using to generate text—from auto-replies to articles—are learning the patterns in the set of texts we give them. And these technologies, in turn, are not only writing for all of us, but imposing the patterns they’ve learned. Not all people who write (or read) about technology are men, but the story the artificial intelligence knows, based on the words and the associations made from its training corpus, says otherwise.

I would love if my gender weren’t tied to my work, or diagnosed and misdiagnosed by technologies that reflect the biases I work against every day. I am a woman. I am a writer. The 1500 words I’ve written here won’t swing the gender balance in any large corpus, but I’m putting them out into the world, and I hope they will be counted.

In just two days, our societal spotlight will turn to the Dolby Theater for the 91st Academy Awards. Silver-screen celebrities, filmmakers, and every “industry peon” in between will don their designed-to-be-noticed garb and take to the crimson carpet to celebrate another year of filmmaking.

And while the Oscars are an undeniably pivotal moment in movie history every year, this year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories. While many critics of the Awards wish to criticize the Oscars as culturally irrelevant, outdated, and plagued by insularity and elitism (not to mention plummeting viewership), nominations and wins have repercussions far beyond the glittering lights of the ceremony or the feverish clutching of a glinting gold statue.

Previously little-known directors find their names vaulted into a national discourse with nods from the Academy Awards; the historic and systematic exclusion of women from these nominations hobble the careers of women directors.

This year’s Academy Awards fails—again—to recognize the contributions of women for Best Director and other major categories.
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There are myriad examples of male white directors’ careers experiencing an adrenaline rush after their success in securing an Oscar nomination. Sam Mendes’ first film American Beauty (1999) won him Best Director and resulted in a series of major films including Road to Perdition (2002) and several James Bond movies.

Oliver Stone had directed movies with middling box office and critical success until he won Best Director for Platoon (1986) which launched him into the big leagues. In another instance, after getting several Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay for Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan went on to direct several other blockbuster and critically-acclaimed movies like the recent Batman trilogy, Inception (2010), and last year’s Best Picture nominee Dunkirk.

After being nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015, Damien Chazelle became a media darling and soon saw a Best Director win for La La Land; his star has definitely risen, directing the well-received First Man (2018).

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well. In a 2011 study of films between 2006 and 2010, IBIS—a major market research firm—found that best-picture-winning movies receive an average of $20.3 million after being nominated and another $14 million after winning. Also in 2011, Box Office Quant found that a Best Director win bumps up the movie by an additional $10 million.

While further studies about the recent financial impact of Oscar nominations seems long overdue, these studies suggest that Oscar nominations (and wins) have a salient impact on the bottomline and the future viability of filmmakers’ future projects. Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.

In terms of good old-fashioned capitalism, Oscar nominations have a huge impact on the box office returns of movies as well.
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When we look at the other half of the population however? The numbers are dire. No women—none—were nominated for best director this year. In fact, in the 91 years of Oscar nominations, only five women have been nominated, and two were in the last ten years. That’s approximately 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.

Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have won the award, and it’s no accident that her 2009 film, The Hurt Locker, focused entirely on the lives of men at war. Greta Gerwig made Oscar history in 2018 by being the fifth woman nominated, but only six women total won any awards in 2018; two were in categories of Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Women’s Media Center found that 2019 saw 75% of all behind-the-scenes nominees were men. The only category where women have fared worse is Cinematography, where Rachel Morrison alone has been nominated, for Mudbound in 2018.

Women have received just 1% of all the Best Director nominations in the history of the Oscars.
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And despite what the industry sputters and pontificates, it’s not for a lack of movies led by women directors. FF2, a media organization led by Jan Lisa Huttner, which has been tracking and publishing about the problem for years, notes that 2018 saw 260 movies written and/or directed by women. Many were lauded by critics with almost perfect Rotten Tomato scores. Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace received a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and has been nominated for several awards including Independent Spirit Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and others. It won two awards from the National Board of Review in 2019, but was completely shut out of the Oscars.

Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? also did very well critically, winning the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Supporting Actor, among other awards and nominations. The film did pick up two acting Oscar nominations, including Best Actress for Melissa McCarthy, as well as best adapted screenplay. Chloe Zhao’s The Rider topped many critic’s top ten lists for 2018 including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and others. For these three films, the Oscar campaign efforts ranged from a little for the indie The Rider and a lot for Can You Ever Forgive Me?  

Female directors have missed out on 91 years of Oscar nominations offering similar accelerants to their careers. Courtney Hunt directed Frozen River (2008)—which won many accolades including AFI Movie of the Year (2009)—and received two Oscar Nominations, but she didn’t direct her next major motion picture film until 2016 with the poorly received The Whole Truth.

Cash is king; hose bumps in dollars and critical recognition open up innumerable doors.
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Lisa Cholodenko’s film The Kids Are All Right (2010) won several awards—including Golden Globes’ Best Motion Picture for Comedy or Musical—but has not directed a major film until the forthcoming Toni Erdmann. More recently, Patty Jenkins directed Monster (2003) that garnered a Best Actress Award for Charlize Theron, but she did not have another major motion picture release until Wonder Woman in 2017.

Dr. Martha M. Laurzen of Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film points out:

“Being excluded from the race to be crowned king—or queen—of Hollywood directors has short- and long-term consequences. The first, and most obvious, is that these filmmakers miss out on the avalanche of publicity in the run-up to, and following, the Oscars.”

And this publicity can aid them in securing their next film.

In 2015, Dr. Darnell Hunt, the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, noted, “The Oscars set a standard. The Academy establishes benchmarks… An Oscar win increases likelihood for more alternative points of view, if they’re being rewarded.” And of course, this cycle is perpetuated itself when women and minorities are left out.

In the Women Media Center’s annual report, Jane Fonda, a co-founder, said, “A nomination for an Academy Award can open doors. With three out of every four non-acting nominations going to men, women, again, are missing that stamp of approval.” Not only were women not nominated for Best Director in this Oscar nominations round, WMC notes, women were not nominated for cinematography, editing, visual effects, or original score.

There’s been a lot of discussion about supporting the diverse voices in filmmaking but it seems to be just that—discussion. Institutions are not providing the resources—funds for filming, critical recognition, advertising dollars—to help non-white male voices find success on a national or even international scale. The Academy claimed to diversify its membership as a way to expand the nominations, but these efforts seem insufficient to garner real change.

Only five women have been nominated for Best Director in the history of the Oscars and two were in the last ten years.
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Part of the problem lays in the embedded structure of film criticism in the U.S. In a 2018 Thumbs Down report by Martha Lauzen, she found disproportionate numbers of male critics compared to their female critics: “Men comprise 68% and women 32% of all film reviewers.”

Moreover, the study found that women reviewers were more likely to review films with female protagonists than men: “51% of the reviews written by women but 37% of the reviews written by men are about films featuring at least one female protagonist.” However, Lauzen noted that: “63% of the reviews written by men, but 49% of those written by women are about films with male protagonists.”  

This skewed coverage and implicit bias impacts the movies getting pushed out to the award associations and the folks clamoring to the theaters—and the great wheel keeps spinning around itself. This broken system resides in a profound catch-22 wherein the industry desperate needs stories from and by more diverse communities, but the industry doesn’t reward these stories with awards, publicity or money, which in turn makes it more difficult to make them, so those same diverse voices shy away from trying to produce those films.

And of course, numbers for minority women are even more miserable—there are a host of more-than-worthy female directors of color—including Ava DuVernay for Selma (2014) and hard-hitting documentary 13th (2016), and Dee Rees for Mudbound (2018)—who have not been nominated. Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.

Other major categories also boast dismal stats for WOC; per WMC, Hannah Beachler is the first African American woman to be nominated for Production Design for her work in Black Panther. In fact, April Reign, now activist and former lawyer, started the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite in 2015 in reaction to the paltry nominations for minorities of color. Spike Lee credits her for his Best Director nomination.

Of the meager five Best Director nominations for women, none were women of color.
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Amid the sea of these disturbing stats, there are some small glimmers in the Oscar pool will be more equitable. Notably, minorities found success in recent Oscar nominations including Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther for Best Picture and Spike Lee’s nomination for best director for BlacKkKlansman. Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro won for best director and film last year for The Shape of Water. Perhaps this year will pave the way to more promising wins and more equitable award nominations; after all, despite the controversy of the Oscars, it’s still a hell of an accolade.  

To borrow a line from The Maltese Falcon, Cinema is “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Let’s make that true for all people.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a beloved feminist icon. Immortalized in numerous viral tweets and memes, she is endearingly referred to as “Notorious RBG” and a real-life “superhero,” Ginsburg has recently been the focus of the documentary RBG and the film On the Basis of Sex, released in May and December of 2018, respectively. Both are glowing portrayals of Ginsburg’s early career in the 1970s as a sex discrimination litigator.

During this period, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU and brought or participated in over three hundred sex discrimination cases and almost every major Supreme Court case on sex discrimination. This period in her career has made her so valorized that few understand the actual details of these cases and the sex discrimination legal standards that she left us with today.

The truth is that through the hundreds of sex discrimination cases that she litigated, Ginsburg systematically targeted and destroyed any and all affirmative action and public programs that favored women. Through her seminal cases such as Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975)—some of her most famous “feminist” legal wins—Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for federal, state, and local government entities; universities; and private institutions to create preferential policies for women.

Why would Ginsburg—who has become beloved for her viral feminist quotes—have devoted her pre-Supreme Court litigation career to destroying the preferential and affirmative action programs for women? White feminism.

Ginsburg ruthlessly litigated based on a white feminist legal theory called “anti-classification” theory, also known as “sameness feminism,” “sex-blindness,” or “anti-stereotyping” theory. Similar to the concept of color-blindness, sex-blindness is the belief that there should be no differentiation based on sex, even affirmative action and preferential policies. These white feminists, including Ginsburg, theorized that beneficial policies that differentiated on the basis of gender stereotyped women as weaker than men. Thus, they opposed these policies as sexist. It was an easy theory for white women to embrace, as sexism was often the only form of discrimination they faced, so the eradication of preferential sex treatment meant the eradication of their problems.

Ginsburg’s legal legacy is one that, against all reason, is predicated upon the inherently racist and classist belief that women should not receive any preferential treatment, at the devastating expense of the most vulnerable populations within the category of women who needed these preferential policies—poor, queer, and non-white women. Although it may not have been Ginsburg’s explicit intent to harm the most marginalized of women, part of the insidiousness of white feminism is that it convinces its believers that the white woman’s experience is the universal experience for all women, and that all women aspire to the social position of white men. In the end, it is not the intent, but the devastating impact that matters.

Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible...to create preferential policies for women.
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Propelled by this sex-blindness theory, despite intense criticism by non-white women legal theorists, Ginsburg’s supposedly shining period in the 1970s as a litigator for the ACLU was in actuality a period during which she strategically litigated hundreds of cases that targeted and destroyed any policy that benefited women over men.

In Craig v. Boren (1976)—one of her most high profile “feminist” wins that launched her to fame—Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of her male plaintiff that an Oklahoma statute that required men to be older to buy beer than women was sex discrimination against men, and thus unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), Ginsburg represented a white male widower before the Supreme Court and argued that Social Security regulations that permitted female widows but not male widowers to collect special benefits while caring for minor children was reverse sex discrimination. The court agreed, and she got the preferential Social Security regulation towards women abolished.

In Califano v. Goldfarb (1977), Ginsburg represented yet another white male plaintiff, arguing that the Social Security Act’s allotment of greater survivor’s benefits to female widows than male widowers was unconstitutional. In her oral argument before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg explained why sex discrimination against men should be regarded the same as sex discrimination against women: “[A]lmost every discrimination against males operates against females, as well…. I don’t know of any line that doesn’t work as a two-edged sword, doesn’t hurt both sexes.”

The list is endless. In case after case, Ginsburg executed a strategic plan to target and destroy any and all preferential public or private policy that favored women over men. According to “Ruth Bader Ginsburg ‘s Equal Protection Clause: 1970-80” by Wendy Webster Williams, a final tally of Ginsburg’s cases revealed that 4 to 1, Ginsburg represented male (likely mostly white) plaintiffs over female plaintiffs. Ginsburg systematically litigated cases that were nearly identical in pattern to advance her agenda. She represented white male plaintiffs, alleged that a law or policy that gave preference to women was reverse sex discrimination against her male plaintiff, and claimed that this differentiation on the basis of sex was thus unconstitutional. She did this with the explicit goal of decimating preferential policies towards women, because she, as a white woman, held the white feminist belief that any distinction drawn between men and women—even in the form of affirmative action—meant that (white) women could never be seen as equal to (white) men.

Interestingly, On the Basis of Sex even chronicles Ginsburg as she litigates one of her male plaintiff cases to destroy a preferential program for women. In the trailer, Felicity Jones, acting as Ginsburg, proclaims, “If the law differentiates on the basis of sex, then how are men and women ever supposed to be equal. . . This is sex based discrimination against a man.” The film portrays Ginsburg as a heroine as she proclaims that men can be victims of reverse sex discrimination.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating. The legal standard that she created, called “intermediate scrutiny,” requires courts to review any law or policy that classifies on the basis of sex, even benign ones that preference women, with heightened scrutiny and an inherent belief that any classification, even ones used to benefit women, are invidious and harmful. Intermediate scrutiny is an extremely difficult burden for affirmative action and preferential policies to survive. Thus, Ginsburg, through the cases that she brought during the height of her supposed feminist career, not only eliminated existing preferential policies for women, she largely destroyed the possibility of future beneficial policies to women.

Numerous high-profile cases after the 1970s were brought and continue to be brought to take advantage of the intermediate scrutiny standard Ginsburg instated. These cases were brought in order to destroy programs beneficial to women. For example, in Miss. U. for Women v Hogan (1982), the Supreme Court, based on the heightened legal standard of scrutiny that Ginsburg set, ruled that the nursing school’s affirmative action admissions policy for women was unconstitutional and forced it to accept men as well. In JEB v Alabama (1994), the Supreme Court, based on the standard that Ginsburg set, ruled that women can not strike male jurors based on their gender, because this was supposedly sex discrimination against men.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating.
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How many universities, government agencies, employers, and public and private institutions have and continue to refrain from creating preferential policies to preferentially admit, hire, or provide more resources to women? How many women out there, especially marginalized women, would have benefitted from preferential policies throughout their lives? Across all public and private entities, across all industries, the ability to create preferential policies to benefit women has been forever restricted by Ginsburg.

The issue is that, while privileged white women like Ginsburg were eager to destroy preferential policies for women for the mere symbolism of being considered equal to white men—the poor, queer, and non-white women who desperately need these programs far more than white women were left stranded.  According to “Feminist Disagreement (Comparatively Recast)” in the 2008 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, white women legal theorists like Ginsburg believed that men could be victims of reverse sexism, and that the pinnacle of equality for women was not radically revamping of the structure of sex discrimination, but instead aspiring to be considered equal to white men. Ginsburg shaped the case law in a way in which affirmative action programs for women are all but eviscerated—all because privileged white women like Ginsburg chafed at the idea of being considered different from men and being given “special” treatment.

Ginsburg’s strategy of destroying existing and future potential preferential policies for women has been rightly criticized by legal theorists. Radical legal feminist and Professor of Law Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law regarding Ginsburg’s “feminist” litigation, “[M]uch of what has passed for feminism in law has been the attempt to get for men what little has been reserved for women.” Professor Judith Baer in Advocate on the Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Formal Equality, in Rehnquist Justice: Understanding the Court Dynamic wrote on Ginsburg’s sex discrimination cases, “So far men have been the primary beneficiaries of the new sexual equality doctrine. Ruth Ginsburg has given no indication that this outcome troubles her.”

Ginsburg’s disturbing legal history evinces a greater truth—middle and upper class white women like Ginsburg are able to advance to the upper echelons of society and obtain the privileges of white men that they desperately seek. According to Professor of Law Yxta Maya Murray in “A Jurisprudence of Nonviolence,” the white women who advanced this sex-blindness theory aspired to be thought of as equal to white men and attain the social and economic privileges of white men, which upper class white women eventually did—perhaps with little thought to the enormous harm that they enacted upon poor women and women of color, who faced other forms of violence and discrimination that would keep them from achieving equality with white men.

In her seminal article “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law Angela P. Harris wrote, “[I]n feminist legal theory, as in the dominant culture, it is mostly white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged people who claim to speak for all of us. Not surprisingly, the story they tell about ‘women,’ despite its claim to universality, seems to black women to be peculiar to women who are white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged…”

For decades, non-white women legal theorists have strongly criticized Ginsburg for gutting legally sanctioned affirmative action for women, and for her complete obsession with white women attaining the status of white men that has wreaked immeasurable harm on poor women and women of color. Black critical race feminist legal theorists such as Angela P. Harris, Kimberle Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig have long critiqued the brand of white liberal feminism that Ginsburg advanced as class-privileged, inherently racist, and harmful towards non-white, non-straight women.

Yet, few outside of the insular world of legal academia know of these critiques. The public continues to fawn over Ginsburg as our generation’s feminist icon as the poor, queer, and non-white women that were inevitably sacrificed by her white feminist ideals remain vulnerable targets of violence. Some of that is because most people aren’t reading through all her legal decisions, and the summaries, on their face, sound good. But perhaps the reason why these critiques remain obscure in the eyes of the public—while Ginsburg’s star continues to rise—is because the world is more than willing to love violent white women who throw non-white women, poor women, and queer women under the bus.

Ginsburg has become an enormous cultural icon, yet her brand of feminism is only beneficial to one type of woman—class-privileged white women. For the millions of queer, poor, and non-white women out there who have had preferential university admissions, healthcare, and public benefit programs inevitably snatched from them by Ginsburg and white feminist litigators’ work, we cannot afford to continue valorizing this brand of feminism. We do not have the privilege of being rich and white. We do not have the privilege of having our entire political orientation rest upon aspiring to be granted the same privileges of white men. We live at the crossroads of race, class, and gender violence. Who actually benefits from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy? Certainly not us.

Content warning for genital mutilation, medical trauma

When Jessica Pin got a labiaplasty at age 18, her consent form read, “excision of redundant labia.” Instead, the doctor cut off the entirety of her labia minora and performed a clitoral hood reduction she never agreed to.

Afterward, when she touched her clitoris, there was no sensation. Since then, she hasn’t been able to orgasm, or feel much of anything at all, without a vibrator—something therapists and doctors dismissed as normal or a consequence of her “not being in love.”

When she wrote to her surgeon about what happened, he said he’d given her what she asked for. But an examination from his colleague confirmed that the dorsal nerve of her clitoris had been cut, leaving scars.

She wanted to report her surgeon, but her psychiatrist warned her that the board would defend him and attack her. Plus, the loss of her sexual functioning combined with the backlash she’d received for talking about it had left her suicidal. By the time she felt mentally healthy enough to speak out, the statute of limitations had passed. The doctor went on to win awards and become president of the state medical association. And even after she got yet another examination from his colleague, her surgeon said the scars must have been from a different surgery (which she never got) or that she must have done it herself (which she didn’t).

The loss of her sexual functioning combined with the backlash she’d received for talking about it left her suicidal.
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When another woman, who wishes to remain anonymous until her case goes to trial, got surgery to repair a tear to her labia after a sexual assault, she told the doctor not to go anywhere near her clitoris. “The doctor decided they needed to remodel my entire vulva, without discussing with me or asking for my consent, thinking this was best and would improve the ‘appearance,’” she remembers.

Instead of the minor repair she requested, her inner labia were completely cut off, and the skin of her outer labia and clitoral hood were pulled inward, causing nerve damage. In addition to losing all sexual sensation and ability to orgasm, she developed “extreme burning sensations, sharp pains in my clitoris glans, shaft, up the inguinal nerves and into my cervix.” She now finds it difficult to walk due to the pain. She had several consultations with doctors who do reconstructive surgery for botched labiaplasties. “They told me it looks like FGM,” she says.

A study she conducted that is currently awaiting publication has identified hundreds of women who have been victims of botched labiaplasties. Their complaints include complete amputation of the labia, inability to orgasm, clitoral injuries, and labia minora stitched to their labia majora, clitoral hood, or vagina.

It’s unclear how common incidents like these are, but they’re common enough that there are discussions on online forums dedicated to botched labiaplasties, as well as doctors who specialize in correcting them. One of them is Michael Goodman, MD, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the California Northstate University School of Medicine, who estimates that “well over a thousand” women suffer from botched labiaplasties each year. This number will likely grow, as labiaplasty is the world’s fastest-growing cosmetic surgery, seeing a 45% increase in 2016 alone.

They told me it looks like FGM.
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Pin thinks this problem is more common than we realize because many victims are afraid to speak out. “Things got a lot worse for me when I started trying to talk about it and decided I needed to stand up for myself,” she says. “That’s why I suspect women who are harmed stay silent. The worst part was the gaslighting, victim-blaming, lying, and minimization.”

One reason labiaplasties get botched is that OB-GYNs don’t have an adequate understanding of the labia or clitoris, says Goodman. “OB-GYNs are both ’women’s surgeons’ and supposedly experts in vulvar and vaginal anatomy. They are trained to perform ulvovaginal procedures but receive absolutely no training in plastic procedures on the vulva,” he explains.

“While a board-certified plastic surgeon will not dare to perform a labiaplasty unless his or her residency program includes labiaplasty and genital anatomy in their training program, an (untrained in plastics) OB-GYN will think, ‘Well . . . how hard can it be? I am an expert in the vulva! Just cut it off and sew it up.’” Much of the issue could be solved through proper training in medical school and residencies, he says.

The Sexist Science Of Female Sexual Dysfunction

Paul Pin, MD, Chief of the Division of Plastic Surgery at Baylor University Medical Center, often trains residents who’ve been taught nothing about clitoral anatomy, and he’s never seen clitoral anatomy in plastic surgery journals. This means that many doctors who perform labiaplasties don’t even understand the body parts they’re operating on. Jessica’s doctor had only performed two labiaplasties and received no training in them.

Vulvar anatomy is also woefully absent in textbooks. After poring through medical books, Jessica has only been able to find the nerves and vasculature of the clitoris illustrated in two—Williams Gynecology and Williams Obstetrics—and even these didn’t have accompanying descriptions. Anatomy books include “very little detail about clitoral anatomy—certainly less than the penis,” confirms Paul Pin. “The real nerve supply to the clitoris is almost universally absent in textbooks.”

No one even knows how many of these procedures are done, much less what the outcomes are.
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Another problem is that doctors who offer labiaplasties are not held accountable for providing the procedure safely, he adds.

“Most labiaplasties are done in doctor’s offices under local anesthesia, in non-certified operating rooms. No one even knows how many of these procedures are done, much less what the outcomes are. Professional societies should demand their members report their numbers and their outcomes to insure patient outcomes.”

But the issue goes deeper than lack of training or oversight. Underlying the erasure of vulvar genitalia from textbooks, journals, and medical schools is a societal neglect for female sexual pleasure and health. Many people still describe vulvar genitalia as the “vagina,” neglecting the clitoris and other sensitive external parts. In sex ed and biology classes, people learn about the role of vulvar anatomy in reproduction, not its potential for pleasure. As feminist author Peggy Orenstein put it in her TED Talk, kids “learn that boys have erections and ejaculations, and girls have periods and unwanted pregnancy.”

It’s this view of women as baby-making or man-pleasing machines, rather than human beings with their own desires and needs, that colors medical education. “For most medical students, the great majority of sex-ed-related learning has to do with reproductive anatomy and functioning, not pleasure,” explains sexologist Carol Queen, PhD. “The clitoris isn’t really directly relevant to this, and so the ‘inner workings’ (uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes, etc.) often get more attention.”

As such, many women and gender variant folks themselves don’t learn the importance of the clitoris—or that the labia can also be sources of sexual pleasure. “I didn’t know my body or understand the significance of lost external sensation because I thought the magic was supposed to be inside the vagina,” says Jessica.

What A Fake ‘Female Orgasm’ Statistic Says About Gender Bias

In a society that considers women’s primary role in sex to be pleasing men, injuries that do not affect their ability to have penis-in-vagina intercourse are trivialized. “Female sexuality is objectified in the way it is approached. The vulva isn’t well described as an actively functional apparatus, which it is,” says Jessica.

“Do you think men would go to urologists who didn’t know the nerves and vasculature of the penis? Obviously not in a million years. But for some reason, women are comfortable with doctors who approach their vulvas as if they are non-functional, inanimate objects. ‘How vulvas work’ is not a subject of much consideration because women are ‘complicated’ and ‘emotional,’ not sexual.”

Compounding this problem is an overall neglect for sexual pleasure in the medical field, and a denial of the fact that pleasure is part of health. For example, women who don’t experience adequate sexual arousal may suffer from painful sex, which could lead to medical problems, Queen explains.

Queen believes surgeons should be required to inform their patients that, even when they’re performed properly, labiaplasties remove sensitive tissue and could result in some loss of sexual sensation. The same goes for hysterectomies, she adds. “While it can absolutely be medically necessary, it is often the case that patients aren’t informed that sexual sensations may change, and historically, doctors didn’t focus on retaining fully functional neurology when they removed a uterus.”

If vulvas got the same standard of care as noses, I’d be happy.
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When Jessica has written about her botched surgery, some have questioned why she got a labiaplasty in the first place, and implied that she was asking for it by going under the scalpel. But while she acknowledges that unrealistic beauty standards led her to get the surgery, she points out that other forms of surgery are held to higher standards, regardless of the patient’s motives. “If vulvas got the same standard of care as noses, I’d be happy,” she says.

Ultimately, if people learned about and valued women’s sexual anatomy and pleasure, fewer people would be getting labiaplasties, and those who did would be able to get them more safely, says Queen. “It’s not just that doctors need pleasure-inclusive sex education as part of the medical curriculum,” she says. “Everyone needs sex education that honors the fact that most people want sex that is pleasurable.”

It’s 3:20 a.m. and Jocelyn Richards* and I are meeting for coffee in an abandoned shipyard — her choice. I’m nursing my cold-brew, wondering if she’s going to show, when there’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and there she is — hiding in the shadows.

Dressed casually in a tattered sweatshirt, the hood pulled up to match her hooded eyes, Jocelyn has made it apparent why she’s so successful in her field: you never see her coming. Her face is natural, her fingernails bare except for neat crescents of blood, blurring, as she nervously drums the splintered shipping container we sit on. She’s jittery, even though I’m the only one with coffee!

“Thanks so much for meeting me,” I say. “Can I just start by saying how refreshing it is to see a woman in this business?”

Jocelyn offers a terse reply. A grunt, actually. She’s not the chattiest, but, hey, it’s her actions, not her words, that brought me to our shipyard meeting this morning.

“When you’ve kidnapped your latest victim and you bring them home, tie them up, and pull the burlap sack off their head. Are they surprised to see a woman standing in front of them? Do you ever feel like they’re holding their breath, waiting for a man to enter the basement?”

“Maybe,” says Jocelyn, as she starts to file her incisors with a nail file. In a career like hers, looks are everything. Like most women in demanding positions, Jocelyn’s appearance determines how seriously people take her: it decides whether or not a victim will scream when they see her coming; whether or not she’ll get the leading role in someone’s nightmare; and whether or not her legacy will live on in campfire ghost stories and Lifetime dramas.

“In your position, the element of surprise is so important for your success. You have to surprise your victims, keep them on their toes, trick them into your van, but tell me: what do you do to surprise yourself? How do you surprise…you?”

I search her face, waiting for an answer. In a career so focused on other people, Jocelyn probably needs self-care more than anyone.

Jocelyn picks at the shipping box, wedging splinters of wood under her short nails. She stares at me with cold, hard eyes, probably impressed with how good of a question I just asked. “I surprise myself…with who I choose next.”

“I love it,” I say. And I really do. How great to have so much autonomy over where your job takes you.

I sat down with the most successful female serial killer in the business to talk clear skin, carbs, and creating success in a male-dominated field.
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“Do you ever think about taking a break from it all—the hours, the stress, the constant travel—to start a family? I can’t even imagine what it’s like dating in your field. I mean, where do you even meet someone?” I say. Family hasn’t come up yet, but it’s well-known that behind every successful woman is an overbearing mother asking for grandkids.

“I have kids. Or, I should say, had,” she growls, her breath sultry with the potent smell of meat. There’s a small red speck on Jocelyn’s chin, perhaps a droplet of blood from a long workday.

“You have something on your chin,” I say, pointing to the speck. She raises her fingers to wipe it away and, just like that, I feel like an old friend: one girlfriend helping another, like we’re drunk at the bathroom sinks together, saving each other from wardrobe emergencies. She licks the blood off her finger with a swipe of her tongue and a smile, her sharp incisors winking. A smile meant for me—her ally.

Now that we’re so close, I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. I’ve been dying to ask, and it’s clear that Jocelyn has been dying to answer.

“How often do you think about the wage gap in your career? How do feel knowing that there’s a man out there doing the same thing as you, but still getting feared more from his victims?” I ask, my felt-point pen poised above my Moleskin. But the only answer I get is silence.

I look up from my pad and just like that, she’s gone. She’s disappeared into the shadows of the dockyard, leaving me with chills and a lingering disappointment that #MeToo didn’t come up more in the interview.

*the subject’s name has been changed to protect her identity

Liberated from the “feminine care” aisle, you take a little pink box into the bathroom. You remove the device from its packaging, urinate, and wait for those tell-tale pink lines. As an expectant parent, everyone will wonder, girl or boy? Pink or blue? Because when it comes to the color pink, whether used traditionally, humorously, or ironically, pink remains emblematic of the double X chromosome. It is associated with babies, little girls, femininity, softness, and superficiality; hence the “feminine care” aisle’s pink palette.

Pink is associated with genitals, sexual intercourse, and sexuality. While the pink packaging on that pregnancy test don’t tell you if you are having a boy or a girl, they do tell you one thing: pink is a physically charged color. Pink is a sex symbol.

In the 1980s, with the advent of prenatal testing, parents quickly became fixated on their child’s sex (or really, their genitalia), and this foreknowledge fueled existing sexist color coding. In 1985, Luvs introduced pink and blue disposable diapers that featured slightly different padding for “boys” (in-front) and “girls” (in the middle). Prior to 1900, most infants in the United States wore white clothing, regardless of sex. These white ensembles signified a child’s age, while colorful accents were often based off of a child’s physical characteristics—brunettes wore pink; blondes dressed up in blue.

With the twentieth century’s infatuation with colorful baby clothes, the emphasis shifted from age to sex. As the blogger “Distracted Daddy” wrote in a post on his daughter’s all pink outfits, “hopefully once she is no longer a baby and any stranger can guess her gender at forty yards away, we can move on from this color.”

Pink, as a color in fashion, first appeared in the French royal court of the eighteenth century. From the Palace of Versailles this color spread throughout the Western World and was regarded not as an infantile color, but a “courtly and royal” pigment appropriate for clothing elite men and women alike. Ascending the throne in 1715, Louis XV’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, cultivated pink as her favorite color.

In her portrait by François Boucher, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, is at her toilette in the act of “pinking.” This facial flush, usually associated with sexual arousal or intense emotion is, however, painted on—Madame Pompadour’s compact of blush and powdered brush reveal that her appearance is cosmetic and manufactured, however desirable. 

Following the synthetic production of very bright, almost garish pinks, pink became a color at home in both “high” and “low” culture. Costume designers throughout the 1950s and ‘60s utilized pink in musicals as chromatic eye-candy, outfitting the sexually confident female or traditionally feminine woman in pink clothing.

The 1957 romantic comedy Funny Face, features a stalwart magazine editor directing “women everywhere to ‘think pink.’” In addition to handbags and shampoo, “think pink’s” song and dance sequence included an homage to Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767), with a slow-motion shot of a girl on a swing dressed head-to-toe in—you guessed it, pink.

A positive pink theory was studied in the Baker-Miller experiment. Baker-Miller, a shade of pink created by mixing red and white, was painted in the holding cells of naval facilities in 1970 by the biosocial researcher Alexander Schauss. Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression. Centuries later, scientists and social historians remain obsessed with pink’s capacity to activate the human psyche, or produce psycho-emotional responses.

Also known as “Drunk Tank Pink,” the experiment showed that the color lowered prisoners’ heart rates and decreased physical aggression.
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Hollywood’s infatuation with the potentiality of technicolor was one part of larger national sentiment; America was “in the pink” with postwar prosperity, giddy that the war was over and ready for some serious shopping. The same year Funny Face premiered on the silver screen, Hollywood’s bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, purchased “the Pink Palace,” complete with a ceiling-to-floor pink shag carpeted bathroom. But Mansfield wasn’t the only celebrity being enveloped in pink. Singer, songwriter, and actor, Elvis Presley, not only wore pink suits, jackets, and trousers, he also drove a pink car and slept in a pink bedroom.

Sex icons, both male and female, were channeling pink’s promise of prosperity and positivity. When asked why pink, Mansfield reflected, “because it made me happy.” This “pink effect” materialized at a party celebrating Mansfield’s pink swimming pool, in which she filled it to the brim with pink champagne.

Within that year, An Affair to Remember starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr premiered in cinemas with a pink opening title sequence and a featured specialty cocktail: pink champagne. The film begins with Grant and Kerr on a cruise from Europe to New York, and despite being engaged to other people, they decide to have an affair on board with all the characteristics of pink champagne, “fun, light, and enjoyable.”

But even with the nation’s collective intoxication with this rosy hue, pink was, and remains, a divisive color with contentiousness, coloring newspapers throughout the mid-twentieth century.

In 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, a blue-blooded Broadway star turned politician, would go head-to-head against Richard Nixon for a seat on the U.S. senate in the state of California. During the political campaign—due to her close ties with communist sympathizers within the movie-industry—a San Jose newspaper reported that if Douglas was not exactly red, she was “decidedly pink.” Pinko quickly became a noun for someone soft on communism.

Throughout the election, Nixon’s team printed damaging propaganda in opposition to Douglas on pink paper. These “pink sheets,” along with Los Angeles Daily News’ printing of the nickname “Pink Lady,” colored Douglas’ political career. Tricky Dicky famously declared that Douglas was, “pink right down to her underwear;” his off-color comment positioned pink as both a political pejorative (communist sympathizer) and illicitly sexual.

In 1991, Susan G. Komen handed out pink ribbons to runners in the New York City Survivor Race. The ribbon, designed by Evelyn Lauder of the Estée Lauder Companies in collaboration with an editor at Self magazine, was influenced by HIV and AIDS organizations’ red ribbon. That same year, 1991, the Visual AIDS Artists’ Caucus created “The Ribbon Project.”

The artist driven organization had tried to stay away from colors traditionally associated with homosexuality, but in Germany, male sex workers were referred to as Rosarote, which literally translates to “pink-red.” This colorful nickname was also the inspiration behind the pink triangle assigned to gay and lesbian inmates in concentration camps during World War II.

Over the years, the connotation of pink with the sexually transgressive has been reclaimed by activists (queer and straight), into a symbol of resistance. Yet, Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues: How Breast Cancer Culture Undermines Women’s Health sees pink as a reinforcer of  “the notion that breast cancer is a danger only because it threatens women’s sexual identity and men’s access to their breasts.” 

Breast cancer’s pink ribbon not only defines it as a woman’s disease, it emphasizes notions of traditional femininity as it relates to the female body, specifically the nipples on a white human female’s breasts. As Gemma Tarlach writes, “nowhere, perhaps aside from Hooters, is the equation more ingrained than in the breast cancer industry…woman=breast=pink.”  

This juxtaposition of pink’s association with heightened femininity and underlying sexuality was embraced in “millennial pink.” The early 2000s saw female empowerment books employ pink in their cover art at around the same moment women were being taught to wear pink on Wednesdays.

This “ironic pink” attempted to extract the sugary sweetness of Malibu Barbie and replace it with the girlboss attitude of the Plastics from Mean Girls. Despite the rebrand, millennial pink’s not-for-little girls-ness carries with it the color’s storied sexual past.

On January 21st, 2017, 500,000 men and women, young and old, walked in The Women’s March on Washington, D.C. Throughout the day, news channels and social media sites broadcasted images showcasing the diversity of the march’s participants, but the photos also captured the movement’s clearest demarcation of empowerment and protest: the color pink. The leading article of clothing that contributed to this “pink effect” was the Pussyhat.

When asked about the pussy hat’s signature color, co-founders Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman, said, “wearing pink together is a powerful statement that we are unapologetically feminine and we unapologetically stand for women’s rights.” But not everyone felt the choice of pink, or the “pussy hat,” was the ideal icon for the Women’s March. Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak wrote a public address to her “sisters,” stating, that the “cute and fun” color threatened to trivialize women’s issues

In an effort to belittle President Donald Trump’s proposed Southern border wall, a group of interns at the architecture film Estudio 3.14 created 3D renderings of the wall. The “Prison-Wall Project,” allowed the public to see just what Mr. Trump’s “big,” “beautiful,” and “physical,” wall might look like. The designers’ concept? A bright pink wall that doubles as a prison.

As the President stated that Mexico will pay for the wall, the designers’ model pays homage to the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, most known for his pink-colored geometric buildings throughout Mexico. Barragán once referred to his pink floorplans as “architectural stripteases.” At Estudio 3.14, the pink design is not only nationalistic, its color undresses the American dream. It is the embodiment of Trump’s wall in all “its gorgeous perversity.”  

Pink, as a wall, or a mark on a pregnancy test, is a contentious line carrying alone within it the diacritical distinction pink/blue. Girl or boy. As the beauty expert Eve Nelson wrote in her novel, Take It From Eve, “while it’s true that she [a female infant] cannot actively appreciate a pink ribbon…these things set the mood.” This belief in the formation of a feminine personality from early childhood exposure to pink, was condemned throughout the uni-sex era of the 1970s by mothers who viewed the gendered clothing of their early twentieth century upbringing through the lens of second-wave feminism. Despite these anti-pink crusaders, pink’s stereotypes remain salient, even when contradicted in practice.

The Pink Tax, named after the color of products that are marketed to attract women and girls, refers to the price difference for female-targeted commodities compared to male or “gender-neutral” goods. On average, products for women or girls cost seven percent more than comparable products for men and boys. The Bic pen “For Her” is just one example of this prevailing sexist consumer culture. Designed for women, with a comfortable rubber grip for “female hands,” the pen demonstrates pink’s complex cultural history built, in large part on, sexual biology.

This “pink double-standard” found adoring fans in the American animated television series Jem and the Holograms. By day, Jerrica Benton was the owner of a music company, by night, she was Jem, lead singer of the Holograms. On television and on toy shelves, Jerrica and Jem wore pink.

Within the show’s narrative, pink linked Jerrica and Jem’s secret identities, and boldly showed pink as a color like none other—an innocent, yet honest representation of pink’s dualism in art, fashion, cosmetics, politics and pop culture. This notion of a color having two sides (natural and unnatural, virginal and virile, or male and female) was parodied in a 2005 Robot Chicken episode where Jem, dressed in her iconic pink wrap dress, is caught using a urinal in the men’s restroom.

As a color frequently found in flowers, alcohol and sweets, quartz crystals, a setting sunscape, genitalia, skin tones and discoloration, pink’s connotations take inspiration and innuendos from the physical world—it is a color with physicality. The use of pink as a current political statement in response to our contemporary government or as the latest trend, draws upon the versatility of pink’s associations, it’s intrinsic connection to the human condition, and its ability to arouse our sense of smell, alter our outlook, tantalize our taste buds, evoke our childhoods, or elicit a sense of touch.

It’s truly an outrageous color.

The allegations against Brett Kavanaugh have been careful to include not only his age at the time of his alleged assault, but the fact that he was a student at Georgetown Prep. Assaults are a pandemic in our culture today, but his alleged actions speak beyond toxic masculinity and the general rape culture that holds all women hostage today. Brett Kavanaugh is a symptom of something worse. He is the fullest expression of elitism blended with misogyny that is cultivated and groomed at private, all-male institutions like Georgetown Prep.

I know because I went there.

I was proud when I was accepted as a freshman. I loved that the school dated back to 1789—  just two years after the signing of the Constitution—making our school older than modern France. Coming from a brand new public school, I marveled at the marble columns of the chapel that was built with an anonymous donation during the Great Depression.

It is a potent brew of pride that is heady stuff for a 15-year-old, and it meant the world to me to be included. I was coming from a public middle school in rural Maryland, and I loved my teachers and had an incredible education, but I had been bullied every day for my bookishness. I believed Prep’s story about itself—I was so excited to be a part of such a noble institution of scholars and athletes “committed to justice.”

As part of our orientation, we were told what an honor it is to be a “Man for Others.” I was in awe of the access to power being a Prep grad might secure for me.

I remember Justice Scalia spoke at our annual Father-Son Dinner. We sat in the gym and feasted on steak as he addressed us. He pointed out that he attended Xavier High School, which was still in our network of esteem and familiarity as a Jesuit school like ours. He laughed about his decision in determining the course of the election of George Bush over Al Gore, and said “Well, I got that right,” to thunderous applause. Brett Kavanaugh worked for George Bush during that very campaign.

I wonder at what point in his career Brett Kavanaugh felt that he would someday serve on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was two years ahead of Justice Gorsuch at Prep. They would have passed each other in the halls. Did they already feel confident even then that would rise to such prominence?

As a teacher now , I truly believe in the power of the growth mindset. Rather than telling a student “you are smart” or “you are good,” you should praise the effort a student invests. My education at Prep had a different tenor however. Teachers offered intermittent, lukewarm constructive feedback on our behavior, but the general message of the school was that we were already fully actualized as “Men for Others.” Largely by virtue of our parents’ being able to pay the admission ticket, we were Prep students. We were the best. We hated our rival schools and looked down on everyone else.

Kavanaugh was two years ahead of Justice Gorsuch at Prep. They would have passed each other in the halls. Did they already feel confident even then that would rise to such prominence?
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No one should walk with the certainty of their own innate goodness, least of all unformed, adolescent boys. As many lessons as we learned about how special we were, we learned even more from the lack of response to our worst behaviors.

I remember a young woman who substituted for my English class weeping as she erased “I want to fuck Ms. ________ in the ass” from the blackboard. If the boy who wrote it was disciplined, I never heard about it; his actions were never condemned. I also remember our class president getting elected on the slogan “Bleachers,” because he had “fingered” a girl beneath them. Before big games against rival schools, the “Boosters” (an elected group of cheerleaders who would get the fans going before and during games) would paper the hallways with posters with such slogans as “Beat the Pagans” when we played schools that were not religious, and “Hoya Saxa,” etc. One popular poster was a cartoon of a rabbit’s head that on closer inspection revealed a woman parting her legs. It would appear alongside other posters praising certain players or generally hyping the team. It served no other purpose and had no other meaning.

When you believe you are superior and untouchable, the least moral commit heinous crimes. The same lack of accountability that led to the rampant abuse finally being called out by the #MeToo movement, the rape of children in the Catholic Church by priests, rapes in the military and abuses by the police force—these all stem from the same corrupting sense of superiority.

I don’t think a day went by that I didn’t see a penis scrawled on a chalkboard or a desk. Everyday in the hall I would regularly see guys punch each other in the groin. I would often find myself doubled over in pain having just been punched out of nowhere. On two separate occasions I was choked until I almost blacked out. This was normal, everyday behavior. That is the culture enabled by the dangerous and passive permissiveness of “boys will be boys.” I have never been a fighter and in truth, I’m not particularly quick with words. I had very little defense. The idea of telling a teacher never crossed my mind. I’m not even certain who I would have told.  

When I was a sophomore, I was taught math by a very old priest. He was a big fan of the football team, and he would let football players sleep in class because they needed rest. He hated me, presumably for my lack of athleticism and my preference for extra-curricular activities which he deemed unmanly. He made a point of telling me that, “we get men ready for college, not art.” A student chimed in in agreement that “if I didn’t like it, I should just leave.”

No one should walk with the certainty of their own innate goodness, least of all unformed, adolescent boys.
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On another occasion, when I took exception to his taking additional points he’d taken off of one of my tests, he called me a “pussy” and punched me in the head.

I wonder how Kavanaugh, a star athlete at the school, would have been treated. I wonder what he would have said if he had been in that class with me. The image of his yearbook page that is now circulating indicate that he was inculcated in and upholding of this same cruel and misogynistic culture.

We did not have a comprehensive sexual health education at Prep. Freshmen were required to take physical education, and we had a rigorous program of units on weightlifting and other sports. One day out of every class cycle, we met with a coach who styled himself as “Doctor.” There was no textbook or curriculum. He simply shared amusing anecdotes and gave us words of wisdom such as:

“Boys, the first time you have sex, you’re not going to last long. So you should probably be drunk so you’ll last a little longer.”

There were high fives around the room. Everyone laughed. There was no discussion of how to use contraception and there was certainly no attempt to discuss what consent was.

During freshman orientation at college, I remember we were having a water balloon fight. I had gotten to know a student named Charles, and I picked him up and went to throw him in the kiddie pool of water and balloons. He cried out for me to stop, and he looked so upset and scared, I realized that I had crossed a line and I needed to rethink how to interact with other men. I felt awful—I saw in Charles a brief glimpse of the hurt and humiliation I’d felt throughout all of high school.

As an educator now, I am horrified at my memories of high school. It took me years to learn about healthy sexual relationships and healthy relationships in general. I worry about how our failures of education are perpetuating rape culture. The  statistics for sexual assaults are staggering. One in five women will be raped in their lives and more than 90% of sexual assault victims on college campuses do not report the assault. We spend more time articulating the honor code and investigating claims of plagiarism and cheating than we do the health and safety of our students, especially that of the girls and young women attending our schools.

At all-boys’ schools, when students stand shoulder to shoulder with their classmates and hear that they are called to greatness, they also internalize the absence of women from their position of privilege and power. Women are not part of the club. They are separate. They are for conquest; they are for dating; they are for marriage. Women are not peers. Some boys graduate and go on to unpack and unlearn these lessons. Others find new clubs with guarded access. They join fraternities. They go on to business schools and law firms and seek out institutions with disproportionately more men than women. Look at the gender breakdown of boardrooms everywhere. Look at the Supreme Court.

The question of the quality of sex education is vital for our schools now, and also in considering what education our current leaders have had. Has Brett Kavanaugh ever attended a course on sexual health? When would he have learned about consent? I don’t believe he learned about it at Prep. I wonder what curriculum he might have had at Yale. The world is different now than it was in ‘70s and ‘80s yet we are letting men with largely unchanged attitudes from those decades literally pass judgement on cases that define our lives and our society.

We've internalized the absence of women from their position of privilege and power. Women are not part of the club. They are separate. They are for conquest; they are for dating; they are for marriage. Women are not peers.
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Court cases demand that crimes be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and institutions like Georgetown Prep have honed their ability to cast shadows for almost three centuries. I will never know exactly what happened to some of the victims at my school, and we will similarly never have conclusive evidence proving guilt. That is no accident. We learned implicitly which victims were not valued by the community and therefore expendable.

The new teacher here only temporarily? Graffiti desks in her room with threats of sexual assault. The librarian who just wanted to create a quiet space for study? Mock him every day and make his life miserable. Attack the isolated and the vulnerable, but be sure to do it when there are no witnesses. It’s safe to do anything in front of your classmates and your Prep brother, of course—they will always have your back and laugh about it later.  All the while we were confident that we were “Men for Others,” confident in our goodness and the promise of great futures.

The burden of proof should not be on the victim, but sadly it is. While the legal system remains imperfect and we cannot hope for immediate change, surely we could stop rewarding alleged predators and abusers. We don’t need to know whether or not Kavanaugh is definitively guilty of any one of the many allegations being leveled against him now.

He is not a man for others; he’s a man for other men, and the women of our nation deserve better.

“That respectful bow that #NaomiOsaka gave to Serena Williams at the presentation ceremony…that’s Japanese culture for you. An athlete and a lady. Maybe it’s time for Serena Williams to take some lessons.”

I blinked in disbelief at this Facebook post from a woman friend in India, but it found an echo across the world, especially here in America, in the wake of Osaka’s win and  Williams’ loss at the U.S. Open. We decided we could tell two of the world’s greatest athletes about the conduct of cultures, the comportment of ladies, and who exactly needs to school whom.

The controversy raging around Williams and Osaka has made many casual observers  think they are experts on tennis, umpiring, and sportsmanship. But we’ve also been weighing in on something we already have down pat—prescribing women’s behavior.

What is more disconcerting this time around is that we’re pitting two women of color against one other. Tennis is a spectator sport, but here the gaze is heightened; what transpired last Saturday was ultimately not just a game, but a spectacle of two brown, female bodies vying for glory in a sport that has been historically white and male. As if on cue, white male Australian cartoonist Mark Knight delivered an image of Serena Williams as a gigantic, fuming baby with an unruly Afro, stamping on her racket while the umpire, Carlos Ramos, asks Naomi Osaka, “ Can you just let her win?” Look closer and you will see that Osaka is drawn as a tall, skinny blonde, looking up at Ramos with both poise and a childlike innocence. Composure, here, is not for brown skin.

It’s easy to think that, because Osaka is a woman of color, racism and sexism are not at play. But when my friend and others refer to Japanese culture, what culture are they comparing it to? What ‘culture’ does that Facebook post conjure up for Serena Williams, one might wonder. What we leave unsaid speaks volumes about our beliefs. Naomi Osaka has a Japanese mother and a black, Haitian father. She holds dual citizenship in America and Japan and is a New Yorker.

Why don’t we credit her Haitian background as making her gracious?

Osaka’s victory has pushed Japan to both redefine and articulate what it means to be Japanese.  “Her soul is Japanese,” a Japanese spectator told The New York Times. “She doesn’t express her joy so excessively. Her playing style is aggressive, but she is always humble in interviews. I like that.”

This isn’t the first time that a Japanese woman has been admired for being “demure,” no matter that here she is being crowned a world class athlete and would be forgiven for whooping it up a bit. As is so often the case with controversies around race and gender, what happened with Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka tells us more about who we are, not them. This year’s U.S. Open tells us who we want our women and people of color to be.

Leslie Jamison—author of The Empathy Exams—wrote in the New York Times earlier this year: “The sad woman often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage.”

Jamison is white. Her essay went viral, tapping into a growing national female rage—albeit a non-violent one—that’s been swelling since the Trump election and the staggering revelations of #MeToo movement. We can barely come to terms with white women’s anger, so how do we begin to find empathy, let alone support the rageful tears of a black female athlete?

What do we discern from Maria Sharapova’s words in her autobiography for Serena Williams’ behavior in the locker room after she was defeated by Sharapova in the 2004 Wimbledon final? Williams had let go, “guttural sobs, the sort that makes you heave for air, the sort that scares you…I got out as quickly as I could, but she knew I was there,” Sharapova wrote in Unstoppable: My Life So Far. Elsewhere in the book and in interviews, Sharapova has spoken of Williams’ “thick arms and legs,” and refereed to herself as “the skinny kid who beat her.”

Sharapova often spoke of being intimidated by Williams on the court. Fair enough. But the white imagination has an ongoing history of looking at even the most vulnerable moment of a black body (Serena was sobbing in the locker room!) and still feeling like a victim. The #sayhername campaign led by scholar-activist Kimberle Crenshaw is painfully poignant in describing phenomenon; the black female body has been struck dead by the white man’s fear—again and again and again—yet somehow it’s the white man who lives in terror.

Whether or not Sharapova taps into the white imagination in thinking of Williams’ sobs as animalistic, she certainly taps into the collective imaginations of gender and beauty— “thickness” as masculine or unattractive, skinny as feminine, desirable.

When we shrink away from a black woman’s guttural sobs, how could we be expected to lean into her rage?  We can’t, or at least we won’t. Let us not forget that Sandra Bland was pulled out of her car, tased, and arrested to later die in jail because she “mouthed off” to a man in power.

You shouldn’t trust me to explain tennis. I have never played a sport in my life. But I am a brown-skinned woman who has faced the consequences of mouthing off, with my family in India and at my job in the United States. I heard something in the voice and saw something in the body of Texas state trooper Brian Encinia when he dragged Bland out of her car ( “You seem irritated,” he said, clearly warning her that she had no right to be irritated, leave alone angry).

I heard the same coiled anger from the umpire Carlos Ramos on Saturday. Countless women and even more women of color know this man’s voice and feel his body language in our bones: smile, submit, be grateful to be here.

Male tennis players like John McEnroe (the prince of rage on the court),  Blake and Andy Roddick have spoken in support of Williams’ claims of sexism ,and said that they have said and done worse and gotten away with it. Yet, greater in number are those who will protest that all we are demanding from Williams is “sportsmanship,” and that the queen has fallen from grace for her own “childish” and “bratty” (the gentlest terms borrowed from the best of Twitter) behavior. I ask them to consider that racism and sexism do not show up in a vacuum without a complicated and painful history.

The sight of Williams weeping and pleading with a white female and white male referee (“This has happened to me too many times here!”) raises the specter of too many racist images to even count. Williams was crying out against a cumulative history of punitive consequences; we should hear in her cries the silenced voices of history.

For instance, earlier this year, Inside Tennis reporter Bill Simmons asked Williams if she was “intimidated” by Sharapova’s “model good looks.” He said he had waited 14 years to ask her this question, prompted by observations of the two women’s looks made by none other than Donald Trump in 2004 after Sharapova defeated Williams at Wimbledon.

A white man egged on by another white man to ask a black women—one the best athletes on the entire planet—to discuss how her face and body compares to that of a thin white woman. It’s racist, grotesque, predictable. And it adds up. That Serena Williams shows up on the court a whole and graceful athlete after a series of such abuses should leave us in awe. But, ah, Williams was grossly wrong to point to sexism last Saturday.

The New York Times brought in tennis great Martina Navratilova to get us to calm down and examine Williams’ behavior. “What Serena Got Wrong,” said the headline. And the subhead—Just because the guys might be able to get away with it doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.

What Ms. Navratilova—and others who come in with such simplistic rhetoric—should also know is this: as tennis great Billie Jean King pointed out on Twitter and later in the Washington Post, just because penalties are also handed out to male players doesn’t mean they aren’t handed out to women more often. Further, men who misbehave are not just allowed to, but rewarded for it, sometimes being given endearing titles: Andre Agassi was called “l’enfant terrible” of tennis. No such cute French terms bubble up for Ms. Williams.

Williams and Osaka dared to play. But we don’t get to sit back and enjoy that; there is no naked glee for the marginalized. We were given the spectacle of our women in tears. Like millions of women succeeding at the workplace and apologizing for it, Osaka apologized to the crowds for defeating Williams. And Williams did what many women do at the workplace. She recovered from her own disappointment and took care of her young female colleague. Williams asked the crowd to stop the booing; she asked the stadium to celebrate Osaka. She embraced her and looked genuinely happy for her victorious opponent.

But the spectacle demands that we see a black body in rage, not in repose, and a docile, demure woman set against her to make her rage all the more appalling. It doesn’t matter if that’s not who these women are. These are the roles we want them to play.

Writer Damon Young calls this the weight that black Americans carry, which robs them of their big moments. The pictures of both Williams and Osaka in tears reminded me of another moment in which black winners were denied the pure, dazzling moment of celebration in the spotlights, sashaying to center stage, awash in applause and uproarious cheers, the way white victories often are. I thought of the moment at the Oscars two years ago, when Moonlight won for Best Picture and some confusion over cards handed the spotlight for a moment to La La Land. By the time the black stars and filmmakers of Moonlight arrived on stage, the story had shifted, the lustre dulled. Sure, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway made a mistake. It could have happened to anyone.

But you see, it happens to some people more often than to others. Some of them stay gracious. Some don’t—they fall from grace.

Women! They are both everywhere and nowhere. EV (clap emoji) ER (clap emoji) Y (clap emoji) THING (clap emoji) and yet nothing (shh emoji). Very prominent in current cultural conversation and somehow never in any of our marketing meetings. What we’re trying to say is, what even is a woman? Is this a woman? No, it’s a bare coat rack? Hmm, really makes you think.

POSSIBLE TAGLINES FOR WOMEN

Women: Not men but it’s fine!

Women: [Insert full lyrics to Katy Perry’s “Roar”]

Women: You gotta have ‘em! [Italian chef kiss gesture]

Women: Confidence in motion (Oh wait, that’s the slogan for Subaru. Oops.)

Women: Man, I feel like a Women!

PURPOSE OF WOMEN

(Can anyone help fill in this section? Should we ping Kathy in Sales for her input? Maybe something about how women are pure and special but also powerful? Is that even doable? Will finish later or remove altogether.)

LOGO FOR WOMEN

Women, as a whole, are so hard to define in a single image. Is it because women don’t exist as a monolith or is it because there are no women on our company’s executive board? Who can say? Our logo must encapsulate all women without excluding any women whose buying power we care about. Think Jennifer Lawrence or Emma Watson. Like, cool and white but also attainable and mostly white? It’s important our logo be small and take up no space but be sexy and noticeable when it removes its glasses and ponytail. It will have boobs but in a feminist way, if that makes sense.

COLOR PALETTE FOR WOMEN

Women don’t just come in pink anymore. They also come in light red, fuchsia, blush, holographic slime, and Instagram’s “pretty” filter. And is “flower crowns” a color? We’re hearing “no” but we think that should be open to discussion.

TYPOGRAPHY FOR WOMEN

Our primary font will scream, “online shopping pyramid scheme but make it empowering.” Our hand lettering style will be the kind that says, “My teachers gave me more compliments on my penmanship than thorough critiques of my essays.” Oh and probably lots of quotes in Helvetica.

ICONOGRAPHY FOR WOMEN

Shoes, makeup, and jewelry are essential but they must be paired with a well-known feminist icon. It’s not pandering if it’s Empowering, am I right, ladies? Some starter ideas:

• Rosie the Riveter but her fist is holding a small yet sensible clutch
• An Audre Lorde quote written in a lipstick shade called “Fresh Brazilian”
• That picture of Marilyn Monroe standing over the grate photoshopped with a speech bubble that says “Wage gap!”
• Stilettos with “Gloria Steinem” written all over them which cost $10,000

GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN OUR WOMEN BRAND STYLE GUIDE

Feminism: This is when a woman does a power stance but in an unthreatening way. She is also a #GirlBoss, which is not to be confused with a regular boss (male) or a Boss Baby.

Audre Lorde: She’s a feminism who does a lot of good quotes which are hopefully in the public domain.

Stilettos: Very tall shoes that make women look large but in a sexy way, not a scary way. Stilettos support the body weight on what is essentially a shoe heel carved from dry spaghetti. They defy the laws of physics. (Yaaas, Women in STEM!)

Gender Equality: While you won’t find this phrase anywhere in our style guide, you also won’t find it in most major countries around the world. So, if you think about it, we’re really being on-trend.

(clap emoji): A way for women to be loud without actually making any noise. It’s (clap emoji) about (clap emoji) time (clap emoji)!

In the age of #MeToo, what does it mean if he insists on ordering for you?

Huy Phan/Unsplash

By Liz Posner

I n January, at the tail end of a storm of accusations of sexual misconduct by powerful men in Hollywood, Babe.net published an account by “Grace,” a woman who went on a date with actor and comedian Aziz Ansari and later described it as the “worst date of her life.” Many critics of the article derided one detail in the article that must have seemed important enough to the writer to include: “After arriving at his apartment in Manhattan on Monday evening, they exchanged small talk and drank wine. ‘It was white,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get to choose and I prefer red, but it was white wine.’”

To suggest that Grace’s lack of control over the wine they drank foreshadowed Ansari’s later abusive behavior indeed seems a bit trivial. But on closer inspection, and amidst #MeToo conversations about how so many men get away with exercising control over women, maybe this detail deserves more serious examination. It can be argued that men who choose what their dates eat and drink without first asking them what they prefer play into a wider gender power imbalance in dating. In the cases of some men, it can even be a sign of more dangerous behavior.

The ability to select what they want to order in a restaurant is a freedom most women take for granted. Historically, women sat silently in restaurants while their male companions ordered for them. As Chowhound writes, “The first female restaurant-goers would not have dreamed of ordering for themselves. Women began dining out for pleasure around the 1840s in the United States… Before this, public eating establishments consisted of taverns, inns, and men’s clubs and did not cater to women. Well-bred women always had a male companion who ordered their dinner.”

To Raise A Feminist Son, Talk To Him About Aziz Ansari

Men continued to order for women long after the 19th century. In a Quora chatroom from 2015, a woman said it was her boyfriend’s habit to order for her on occasion, and she wondered if it demonstrated “controlling” behavior. One respondent explained that this was normal male behavior until fairly recently: “I am almost 70, and when I [was] first starting dating, it was normal for a well-brought-up young man to order for a woman.”

Some self-proclaimed “old-fashioned” men still insist on ordering for women, especially early on in the courtship. Men may do this out of a sense of chivalry if they’re more familiar with the restaurant than their date and consider themselves the host. “He likes to order for people,” Zadie Smith wrote in her profile of Jay-Z for the New York Times’ T Magazine after the two dined together. “Apparently I look like the fish-sandwich type.” Jay-Z, whose most popular songs include references to misogyny and violence against women, has talked publicly about his struggles with his alpha male identity, including infidelity in his marriage to Beyonce. By no means does Jay-Z’s habit of ordering for women mean he is a bad man, nor does it imply that any man who orders for women at restaurants will necessarily exhibit toxic masculine behavior in any other capacity. But all of these actions fall under the umbrella of exhibiting male control.

Women who have been on these kinds of dates share stories amongst themselves, usually alongside the question “should I be bothered by this?” There are also some frightening stories about women whose partners insist on ordering for them at restaurants, or exercise control over their food choices in other ways. Reddit is full of such food-control stories, including one in which a man actually snatched a plate of potato salad out of his girlfriend’s hand after restricting her to a carb-free diet, claiming it was for her health. Or another about a man so controlling he “freaks out” when his girlfriend eats candy in front of him. Both women describe their partners as nutrition-obsessed, but their partners’ actions have negative impacts on their relationships, as well as the women’s relationships with their own bodies.

In a piece for Refinery29 on the topic of food control, Kathryn Lindsay writes that according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline, some red flags for abuse are “jealousy of your friends and family, isolating you from them, controlling your finances, as well as making demeaning comments, shaming you, or pressuring you into sex. Food control is not necessarily a warning sign of abuse, but it could be a symptom.”

Although man-who-opens-the-door-for-woman gets much more debate among feminists about whether or not he is sexist, man-who-orders-for-woman perhaps deserves more scrutiny. It is 2018, and surely, women should be asserting control over what they eat just as they seek to speak and be heard without being silenced, and have control over their finances and general autonomy over their own bodies. We can draw a direct parallel to reproductive rights. Controlling what a woman eats implies a desire for dominion over her body — the same kind we’re still seeing conservative men proclaim in the abortion debate.

Control over women’s bodies is a theme on the political right; in the past year alone, the Trump administration has insisted on detaining pregnant undocumented women and blocking teenagers from having abortions, while conservative legislators are doing everything they can to make it impossible for poor women to safely abort their pregnancies, even going so far as to deny women who are raped the opportunity to terminate the pregnancy.

Ordering for women at restaurants may seem like a chivalrous gesture. But unless the man has the woman’s consent, it’s just another degrading gesture pulling us back to a time when women did not make such decisions for themselves.

Of course, not every woman has a problem with men who chose their meal for them at restaurants. In a piece titled “Is Ordering For Your Lady Friend Low-Key Sexist?” Helena writes for xojane about the phenomenon: “In the long list of potentially chauvinistic stuff I’m cool with cute guys doing, ordering an entree for me during dinner is one of them. It’s weird and old-timey and therefore sort of sexy in the same way that suede elbow patches can act as an aphrodisiac. But chauvinism done sexily can only work if the dude doing it is in on his own joke.”

It’s clear that even for those women who aren’t seriously bothered by men who do this, it’s hard to deny there’s something creepy and paternalistic about it.

This story first appeared at AlterNet, and is republished here with permission.

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