Study after study has shown that when women make more than men, women generally don’t want to marry them. And maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow. More drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.

– Tucker Carlson

My first thought when I saw this quote pop up on Twitter was “Tucker Carlson said something shitty, that tracks.” That’s Tucker Carlson’s job; to say nonsense in a way that sounds reasonable. I don’t give Carlson too much thought. He’s a conspiracy grifter who learned how to tie a Windsor knot after losing his job at CNN on account of being intellectually bested by a puppet. But, because he can string sentences together with grammatical (if not factual) clarity, he gets to be on TV and treated as a “serious thinker.” His recent series “War on Men” a vapid monument to meninist insecurity of which he is an architect, has mostly been laughed off, and rightly so. But part of his remarks last week sent a chill down my spine: he tied the rise of women in power to the socioeconomic fear around population drops. And I thought to myself “it’s coming.”

How do you know when a lie is going to get traction? If you told me at the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency that three years later there would still be media coverage about whether or not he was born in the United States, I wouldn’t have believed you. Why? Because it was a stupid, racist, theory devoid of fact. I was naive to social pendulum swings that follow a shift in power ownership, and the lies that drive them.

This has been a pretty good year for women, insomuch that life in a hellscape can be good. There are more women in positions of power than ever before. Conversations are happening between women and between men and women, realistic conversations about what a society built on the pillars of patriarchy and white supremacy does to a culture. And while it’s been uplifting and encouraging, I’ve kept my eye out for the pendulum swing, nervous about missing it before it hits me squarely in the jaw.

How do you know when a lie is going to get traction?
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It hasn’t been easy for those looking for a way to push back against women (well at least not as easy as it has traditionally been). Yes, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, but the support for Dr. Blasey Ford and outrage surrounding his confirmation was overwhelming. The amplification of angry voices from women across the country, united in their exasperation with patriarchal dictates, was visceral. Collective anger begets organized and energized movements, and action follows.

Attempts to pit Rep. “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me”, Ocasio-Cortez against House Speaker, “Do not characterize the strength I bring to this meeting” Pelosi have largely failed because both women refused to take the bait and instead focused on issues. Calls for civility after the Red Hen incident were met with an annoyed eye roll from anyone seeing children in cages on the nightly news. Even the recent faux pearl-clutching about Rep. Rashida Tlaib use of the word “motherfucker” faced a ton backlash and garnered almost no censuring from Democrats, except Sen. Joe Manchin (also the only Democrat to vote yes for Kavanaugh’s confirmation) and who the fuck cares what he thinks.  

With what seems like a strong female army at the helm of the resistance, and a smart social media presence pushing back against antiquated stereotypes, what is the response going to be? I tried to filter out any nonsense and focus only on things that I believed would have traction. Late in 2017, I filed something away in my brain that sounded so close to the justification for a quick march towards Gilead I was surprised someone said it out loud:

“This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring — I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country” – Paul Ryan, Former Speaker of the House

That’s right, ladies. The newest economic downfall is going to be all your selfish fault for not reproducing. (Sorry, I meant white ladies — but more on that in a moment). The problem with Ryan’s statement is that it’s not technically incorrect. Birthrates in the United States are the lowest they have been in three decades, according to the latest numbers from the Center for Disease Control. It’s also well below the replacement population rate. With elderly dependents outnumbering people in the workforce, the financial system will take a hit, and the structure of the economy currently has not adapted to social changes in the last several decades.

Also a “serious thinker,” but one with legislative power, Paul Ryan could helped the economy adapt. Instead, Ryan suggested he “did [his] part” because his wife had four children, putting their family above the national average in terms of birthrate. Because Paul Ryan doesn’t want to use the many tools at his disposal to address realities of parenthood and why cost is a preventative factor in having children, he wants to blame people not having babies for a weak economy.

And that, I believe, is the angle from which the weight of the pendulum will be pushed back. It has everything. It takes a complicated issue and boils the solution down to three words: Have More Babies. It places the blame squarely on a certain type of woman. You know, those ambitious bitches who don’t value family, who insist on having jobs or not getting married or using contraception. Now not being pregnant isn’t just a rejection of the duties of being a woman, it’s a rejection of civic duty. Suddenly, all these women in Congress would be better serving their country if they shut up and got pregnant. It has a nice socio-economic nativist ring to it. Have more babies! For America! Well, not all of you.

It takes a complicated issue and boils the solution down to three words: Have More Babies.
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Make absolutely no mistake, when Paul Ryan, Tucker Carlson, and every other conservative pundit talk about women needing to have more babies they mean white women having white babies. The maternal mortality rate for Black women is over thirty percent higher than it is for white women, and yet there is no War on Pregnant Black Women chyron on any Fox News Broadcast. The birth rate for first-generation Americans is higher than the generations that follow, but the White House insists that the crisis at the border is all of the brown families that want to become citizens.

Let’s take a look at why people may not be having babies. We don’t have policies to that to ease the financial burden of having children, like federal paid maternity leave, or policies that require large corporations to make childcare available to their employees. The cost of decent education is a preventative factor for people looking to expand their families, and people of birthing age are drowning in student debt. And the wage gap means women fear further financial punishment for choosing to have children. There also isn’t a smart pathway to citizenship, considering first-generation Americans are likely to have higher birth rates than second or third. Though we know how these pundits feel about immigrant children.

There’s also the issue of choice. Many people just don’t want kids, whether it’s because of their carbon footprint or their other priorities or just because parenthood has never appealed to them. Access to abortion is precarious, but it exists. Women can use contraception. The social stigmas around being child-free are beginning to be challenged. But instead of devoting resources to the issues facing those who want to have children, or working to create an economy that doesn’t rely on an ever-increasing birth rate, conservatives can conveniently blame it all on women.

Not everyone has the luxury of Rep. Steve King, using the world’s least funhouse mirror to mimic the credo of white nationalist David Lane. Or the overtly racist platform of family separation architect and (alleged) childhood glue eater Stephen Miller. No, some will need to take a more thoughtful approach when pushing back on a progressive movement.

Take a kernel of data, create a crisis around it, and make someone responsible for it. And if you’re smart, lay some groundwork first. Target the person you want to be held responsible and ask if they’re “likable” or “genuine.” Chip away first at their credibility and then at their intentions, while slowly introducing the crisis. Wait for others to start parroting your concerns about your target. And then, at the right moment, release the manufactured hysteria and watch the pendulum swing.

On the subway recently, while semi-purposefully eavesdropping, I overheard a woman telling her friend that she no longer needed her vibrator because she had a new boyfriend. Her friend laughed in agreement. I attempted to not make a judgmental face, lest I blow my cover. Not once did this woman mention that her new boyfriend was a rock star in the bedroom or that he was giving her the best orgasms of her life. She simply correlated the having of a boyfriend to the idea that she no longer needed to masturbate.

This sentiment wasn’t novel; I had heard this exact sentence multiple times from various women throughout the past decade of my life, and the idea has always struck me as odd and archaic. A satisfying sex life with a partner is awesome and a base level of what women deserve in relationships. However, a relationship is not a substitute for masturbation. This is not an either-or situation.

Women can have both. I’m unsure why so many women—and let’s be real, cisgender women in relationships with men— believe they can only be giving themselves pleasure when no man is there to do it for them. Men certainly don’t make declarative statements like this when they enter into relationships. Masturbating shouldn’t be viewed as a consolation prize to a partner. Women deserve to have healthy and satisfying sex lives no matter their relationship status.  

By sheer luck, I’ve had the pleasure of spending my life surrounded by women who own their sexuality and eagerly share the most intimate details of their sex lives. In high school my best friends and created a holiday dinner party where we got dolled up, cooked our best homemade appetizers, snuck in a bottle of wine, and gifted each other the latest and greatest vibrators that our high school budgets could afford, which is to say no one received a Rabbit. I was lucky to have a group of friends who never associated masturbation with sex with a partner.

She simply correlated the having of a boyfriend to the idea that she no longer needed to masturbate.
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It wasn’t until college I realized this wasn’t the norm. During this time I had multiple women confide in me that they’d never masturbated, and for years I didn’t believe them. However, it’s been reported nearly 1 and 7 women have never masturbated in their lifetime, while 95% of men have reported masturbating. These uneven statistics give a clear picture of how women are made to feel about their sexuality.

It shouldn’t be surprising, seeing as we live in a culture that cultivates the idea that vaginas are inherently gross.  Most notably, we’ve been sold Summer Eve’s “washes” and douches, which have explicitly advertised the notion you can “fix” this gross/dirty vagina crisis. These products have been successfully mainstreamed despite the evidence proving douching can be harmful. The fear they are selling is working. In 2015, a study in Great Britain found that the majority of women have anxiety surrounding their partner’s perceived reaction to their body, and the fear surrounding their own bodies led to a discrepancy in overall sexual enjoyment.

Our lack of knowledge around female anatomy and sexual pleasure begins in the classroom. Only 13 states require sex education to be medically accurate, leaving the rest of country to teach whatever is deemed best practice at their school. Pleasure, consent, and LGBTQ topics are often lacking in these curriculums. In the school of pop culture we have celebrities such as DJ Khaled saying he wouldn’t give oral sex, despite believing a woman should be giving it.

Many of us grown up believing that keeping men sexually satisfied is our priority. Grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters have warned us that sexually dissatisfied men will wander. Examining this combination of societal constructs and constraints, it’s not surprising women don’t feel as comfortable seeking pleasure for themselves. Society wants women to fear themselves; it’s more profitable and ensures the patriarchy remains intact.

Right now, sex is still largely seen as for cisgender men. We center penetrative, heterosexual sex when we talk about and teach sex. To children, sex is defined as when a penis enters a vagina, as a means of reproduction, and we define the lack of having that experience as “virginity,” regardless of any other sexual activity. And there are still people who believe the clitoral orgasm is a lie, or that women don’t need or want sexual pleasure the same as men.

It shouldn’t be surprising, seeing as we live in a culture that cultivates the idea that vaginas are inherently gross.
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The fact is, masturbation is healthy and natural for everyone. It has a slew of positive side effects. It’s been proven to relieve stress, help you sleep better, boost your mood and relieve muscle tension. It can literally make you a healthier, happier person. But even if it didn’t, the act of masturbating— of understanding one’s sexual organs and being able to give oneself pleasure— is important on its own. The women’s movement wants equal pay, equal job opportunities, and access to safe health care.

We often discuss equality in relation to things we can see and count, how much women make per dollar compared to men, the percentage of women who hold congressional and senate seats, the number of female CEO’s, etc. While it’s more difficult to quantify female sexual pleasure, it doesn’t make it less important in the overall picture of equality. Women figuring out what they want sexually is just one of the ways for them to figure out what they want everywhere else in their life. By equalizing pleasure, women are prioritizing themselves.  

I hope that woman on the subway learns that having a boyfriend doesn’t mean she needs to stop masturbating. Masturbation is a way to helps us equalize pleasure and allow women to focus on their wants and needs, outside of a relationship. Each aspect of our lives that we take ownership of and view as having value brings us one step closer to general equalization across all platforms. By leaving one out we will continue to have inequality, all the pieces matter.  No matter what, women deserve healthy and satisfying sexual lives. This does not have to include a partner.

Even with a heavy video camera I couldn’t resist walking straight into the aggressive waves with her.

I was filming Jalobayu (climate in Bengali), Monica Jahan Bose’s collective performance piece, at Select Art Fair in Miami Beach.  The performance started indoors with a group of women who all quietly carried 216 feet of sari to a ritual site outside on the beach. After a series of symbolic activities on the sand, Bose eventually wraps herself in a red sari and enters and battles the ocean in a breathtaking statement on climate change.

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.  The sari is perhaps the real star of the show. But not just any sari. The sari she uses in the show is written on and worn by the coastal women in Bangladesh. “JALOBAYU juxtaposes women’s words and their worn saris against the backdrop of the rising ocean in Miami Beach,” says Bose. “The intent is to raise awareness of climate change and link Miami Beach to coastal Bangladesh, both of which face devastation due to climate change.”

Bose uses the sari—18 feet of unstitched handwoven fabric that is commonly worn by women in South Asia—to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet.
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I was trying to do the math on how Bose went from 18 feet of fabric to 216 feet for the performance, and found out the sari that was communally carried is made up of 12 saris worn for 8 months by 12 women from her ancestral village—Katakhali Village in Barobaishdia Island.  “Those saris were covered in woodblock and handwriting done collaboratively by the 12 women and myself back in 2013. After they wore them and used them, they were brought to the US and my daughter, Tuli, helped me sew them together to make this massive sari,” she explained. This just made me even more curious how she got the sari over to the states. “The worn saris were actually transported from the village to Dhaka by boat, and then my mother brought them to me in the US in her luggage.”  That same 216-foot sari has been in performances at DUMBO arts festival (called Sublime Virtue), (e)merge art fair DC (Unwrapped), and more.

Bose was born in Britain to Bangladeshi parents, and uses participatory installation, film, printmaking, painting, advocacy, and performance to speak to women’s experiences, recently around the disparate impacts from climate change. It’s part of a larger collaborative art and advocacy project called Storytelling with Saris. Bose’s maternal roots are in Katakhali, an island community in Bangladesh on the frontlines of climate change. She collaborates with a dozen women in the community who have acquired literacy and climate adaptation skills to share their personal stories. These women have lost repeated homes to cyclones.  

The idea is by seeing and hearing these stories, via saris, people in the US and Europe will be inspired to act on climate change.  “Americans are learning about climate change through the project and making written commitments on saris to reduce their carbon footprint in an act of cross-border solidarity. The U.S. climate pledge saris will be returned to Bangladesh and worn by the women of Katakhali.”  Storytelling with Saris engagements have taken place in California, Hawai’i, Iowa, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin in the U.S.; Dhaka and Katakhali in Bangladesh; Paris, France; and Athens, Greece. But of course the real power is connecting these stories back to the women’s lived experiences in Bangladesh.

The effects of rising sea levels disproportionally falls on the shoulders of poor, marginalized communities of color. According to a MercyCorps piece, one-third of the planet’s land is no longer fertile enough to grow food, but more than 1.3 billion people live on this deteriorating agricultural land. And they’re also the same communities facing more disasters than ever. The number of people affected by natural disasters doubled from approximately 102 million in 2015 to 204 million in 2016, although there were fewer natural disasters.

Women in these communities are particularly affected. We can see this in the climate survivors of Bangladesh Bose connects us with. Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries. One study also found that 90% of the dead from the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh were women. Women also at risk of sexual assault and trafficking after extreme weather events where they are rendered homeless.

Likewise, women’s leadership is also critical to addressing climate. The project presents and preserves women’s stories from a remote community (with negligible carbon footprint) that may disappear unless we take action. The project both informs and empowers them to be those leaders. One of the women in the community, Noor Sehera said, “Yes, it made us scared to hear about why the planet is hotter and why there is so much rain.  But we are glad to know, so that we can decide what to do about it. We have a right to know what is going on.”

Often under recognized in the climate change movement  is how artists are contributing to advance awareness of environmental issues.  Monica’s work around saris and climate change embrace symbols: the sari represents the female body, and women’s place in the world, and water speaks to life and renewal.  She also incorporates wind, sand, rice and water into the performance to represent cyclones, sea level rise, and the loss of heritage and food caused by climate change. They also reference narratives: Jaloboyu references the Indian myth of Draupadi, the eternal virgin who was married to five brothers, as well as the true story of Bose’s grandmother who was married at age seven and years later swept away by a cyclone.

Women disproportionately suffer the impacts of climate change because of cultural norms and the inequitable distribution of resources and power, especially in developing countries.
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One of the most impressive parts of her art is her ability to move across media and disciplines and incorporate science and policy into her work.  Her performance art makes a direct statement on the current state of climate change with the specific perspective of marginalized communities of color.  Since 2015, Bose has started making saris with women (and a few men) in the US, France and Greece as part of Sari Climate Pledge Workshops. The participants work on a sari with her for two hours while they learn about climate change and how women in Bangladesh are impacted.  She teaches woodblock technique and her participants make specific promises that will reduce their carbon footprint. The saris are first exhibited and then returned to Bangladesh for the women in her village to wear. 

While I will continue to be mesmerized by Bose’s ability to master so many different art forms and connect them to today’s issues, I’m most touched by how she’s been able to give a space for her community in Bangladesh to connect to this global issue. Like one of her participants, Zakia, said:  “Coming to the cooperative and working on the sari art and the performance is what I love most. We want to do more and more of it. It was the greatest joy of my life to be part of the performance by the Darchira River.” And that’s the only way we’ll ever be able to confront climate change—working cooperative with communities across the world.

From the top of Teletorn, the Estonian Television Tower, you can see Finland, just 80 km (50 miles) away. The water stretching between the two countries is dotted with islands where you can imagine hiding from the world and becoming the person you were always meant to be. Living in Tallinn, Estonia and doing stand-up comedy, I spent a lot of time island-gazing.

Across the Baltic Sea, just a bit out of view from the Teletorn, is the Finnish archipelago of Raasepori. An easy ferry ride from Helsinki’s downtown, the islands seem to belong to another time. Thousands of seabirds nest in the old-growth forest, maintained by Finland’s National Forest Service. The area’s rich history includes mining and Sammallahdenmäki, the first prehistoric archaeological site in Finland, with burial cairns from the Western Bronze Age culture in Finland.

Raasepori is a popular tourist destination, offering picturesque wooden villages and hiking, cycling and beaches. The appeal seems obvious. So when U.S. entrepreneur Kristina Roth, founder of Matisia Consultants, a consulting company on the 2015 list of 50 Fastest-Growing Women-Owned Companies Worldwide, learned from her Finnish fiance that one of the Raasepori islands was for sale in 2017, she bought it. And she planned to fill it with women.

Roth’s vision when she bought the island was to create a permanent home for the SuperShe Society, a project she started several years before. It began as a networking group and eventually included a lifestyle blog, events, and women-only retreats in luxurious locations like Bali. Roth was “bored out of her mind” by traditional women’s networking events and envisioned bringing together independent women for experiences that organically united them. Seeking an escape from a world filled with “tech bros,” Roth saw a chance to curate the peer group she’d always wished she had. Across the water in Tallinn, as I listened to men tell me after my comedy sets that they never thought women were funny but they guessed maybe I was okay, I could sympathize. But I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.

Finland has a strong feminist history: women gained the right to vote in 1906 and the 1995 Equality Act mandated a minimum of 40% of both sexes in all publically nominated bodies, which doubled the number of women serving in these positions virtually overnight. Businesses with more than 30 employees are required to have an equality plan and to implement measures to promote equality.

I found that the sort of community Roth wanted to build was only available for some.
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Equality is so prized in Finland, in fact, that Roth’s SuperShe island plan generated an investigation on the grounds of discrimination, with the Finnish Non-discrimination Ombudsman Jukka Maarianvara ultimately ruling on the 4th of June, 2018 that the island resort’s policy of serving only women was legal, and opening the way for the resort to accept visitors as scheduled. The notorious Finnish bureaucracy also challenged Roth, who complained that “[her] experience as an outsider and investor in this beautiful country led me to reconsider future plans,” as “[she’d] wasted millions of euros on [Finland]. [She] had planned to make future investments in the Finnish archipelago and Lapland, but at this rate it’s not happening,”

Roth persevered, and according to the tourism manager of Raasepori, Ville Vuorelma, in an email to me on July 4, 2018, they “are really glad that [Roth] has found the unique Finnish archipelago. The Island opened on the midsummer weekend [June 23-24] and I’ve understood it’s fully booked for a quite some time, so it’s probably difficult to organize a visit there at the moment.”

Beyond simply being a woman (which includes anyone identifying as a woman, according to interviews with Roth, a policy that doesn’t specifically address those identifying as non-binary), Roth has a vetting process for those who would like to visit, and she hand-selects each visitor. “The number one, number one thing that’s important for me is that you have an amazing personality — like upbeat, cool personality — because you’re on [an] island… That’s what’s going to make it fun and exciting for everyone.” For someone who was bored in the uniculture of the bro-tech world, this is an interesting stance to take. Research shows that selecting candidates by perceived “fit” typically results in selection of those who are like the selector; by the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests, and does it really sound fun and exciting?

Would-be SuperShes are invited to apply for membership through the website, with Roth personally reviewing each application. With an eye to seeing whether my own coolness credentials measured up, I applied for membership on March 14, 2018, and had my application approved April 2, 2018. In my application, I wrote that I was a stand-up comedian in the United States and Estonia and that I enjoyed making jokes for and with women and for that reason, a visit to the island would be restorative for me, all true.

However, a dazzling application didn’t mean I had immediate access to the island. Though Roth originally claimed that one-day trips to the island would be available for local visitors, as the opening date approached, no single-day options materialized. One-week reservations, at a cost of 4,000 euros ($4,669), proved prohibitive for visiting. From Estonia, with an average Estonian salary of 1,242 euros a month, a little jaunt to SuperShe would consume a quarter of the year’s wages.

By the report of one recent Super She, those visiting the island are varying degrees of successful, blonde and thin. Is that really the sole way an amazing personality manifests?
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They didn’t give up on me. On June 30, I received an email with an offer to take the last spot on a week-long retreat, saying it was “something wild” I could gift to myself. But alas, my budget could not accommodate the offer.

There is no question that putting money towards gender empowerment, including women’s networking groups, makes lives better for everyone. Women in male-dominated industries, like the “tech bros” Roth worked with, can be exhausted. (I should know: female comedians make up approximately 14.3% of performers and burnout is rampant.) We could all use some time on a private island, away from those who distract us or detract from us. It would be even better if there were interesting professionals there, with time to exchange ideas. But guess who can benefit most from mixing with powerful or connected women in leading fields?

Poor women.

Mentoring and being connected helps women get ahead, but most often it helps already privileged and connected women find more success. Arianna Huffington, for example, spoke at the Thrive conference in 2014, saying, “I have a group of women friends that I hike with,” Huffington told the crowd. “They were the first people I talked to about my dream of launching a blog called the Huffington Post, and one of them became my first investor.” (Huffington’s hiking buddy was environmentalist and multimillionaire Laurie David.) Women clearly yearn for this type of connection, if the 7,000 applications for SuperShe membership prove anything. But without any accommodations in place for those unable to pay 4,000 euros, this “women’s paradise” isn’t an exercise in feminist bonding. It’s a country club. Even Roth gets sick of it: most nights Roth heads to [her boyfriend’s neighboring island] for the night, returning before the SuperShes awake.

Opening a private island for you and your besties to party on is hardly a new concept; it’s only adding “no boys allowed” and calling it feminist that makes it remotely newsworthy. Positioning this as a step forward with “something to offer every woman” is borderline delusional.      

I don’t have any millionaire hiking buddies to invest in me or my comedy, unfortunately, and since the SuperShe retreat is out of my reach, it looks like I won’t be getting any soon. There are places to go in Finland for that woman-only support, though. I was lucky enough to experience it myself in March of 2016, when I attended Salin Comics Camp at Villa Salin. The Feminist Association Unioni manages the Summer House of Ida Salin, a villa once owned by a button manufacturer, and allows groups with a feminist bent to use the building for residencies and workshops. It’s not on an island, but there is a beach and of course, you can see lots of islands.

I wrote several of my favorite jokes at Feminist Comic Camp, and met women from across Sweden, Finland, and Estonia. I felt that special sense of comradery and that unintentional exhale of relief that comes from a situation where you feel kinship with everyone there, just as Roth envisioned.

Since the Comics Camp residency was free, including all meals, though, I was able to save for additional opportunities and staying in touch with the women with whom I connected. Roth is 100% correct when she says that spaces for women to connect are both needed and rare. It is simply a shame that they are out of reach for so many, and that’s no joke.

In a culture steeped in male violence against women, whether it’s physical assault or online harassment,  the concept of violent female revenge can sound exhilarating. Given the high rates of women murdered by male partners, and the simultaneously low rates of male rapists given jail time, it’s hard to not fantasize about a vigilante giving these men their comeuppance, or at least, a female figure that invokes the same fear in cis men that women face daily.

Feminists have been grappling with the complexities of these fantasies for decades. On one hand, it’s clear that more real-world violence is not the answer to a culture already poisoned by it, regardless of justification. But also, can we at least imagine unbridled revenge?!

The existence of, and potential for radical female violence is one of the many difficult subjects psychotherapist, author, and longtime feminist Phyllis Chesler tackles in her latest book, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women, The book itself traces Chesler’s journey from her Orthodox Jewish childhood in Brooklyn up until the present day, primarily focusing on her experiences during the heyday of the second-wave feminist movement. While it’s clear her writings come from a place of passion and respect, Chesler doesn’t shy away from giving a realistic picture of the movement’s in-fighting and the topics that caused derision between women vying for justice.

One of the most fascinating subjects in Chesler’s book is the movement’s division over the overtly violent rhetoric of Valerie Solanas, the woman who penned the infamous SCUM Manifesto and later attempted to murder Andy Warhol. In later years, a similar division would spring up surrounding the trial of serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a woman plunged into sex work as a teen, who later murdered seven men. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, was a convicted rapist Wuornos claimed she murdered in self-defense. Her narrative around the other victims shifted throughout the trial, regardless, the story of a serially abused sex worker reaping revenge on a violent man both enlivened and divided the feminist community.

Given the cartoonish conflations often made between feminism and man-hating, some feminist leaders, Betty Friedan in particular, did not support the notion of aligning with either Solanas or Wuornos, particularly because neither IDed as feminist themselves. Their anger was, let’s say, bad for the brand. However, Chesler and many others, felt empathy towards both women, kept an open dialogue with Solanas and later wrote the forward to a collection of Wuornos’ letters.

In conjunction with the release of her new book, I was lucky enough to interview her about how the feminist movement has evolved, why arguing is crucial to a movement, and the allure of violent female vigilantes.

Isaac: Do you think the internet has created greater understanding between feminists with different ideologies and priorities?

Chesler: I think if feminists of my generation had understood that people with ideas are always fighting with each other, and taking ideas very seriously, it would’ve helped. If you look at military history, you’ll quickly see that in every movement there was a falling out of line. What I never liked was incivility, or never speaking to someone again because you disagree on one issue. The ideological demand for saluting to one flag fully with your whole heart is somewhat totalitarian. We’re all going to have different priorities. Intersectionality is not new. We didn’t have a word for it at that point, we just understood that everything was related and that each woman chose her priorities.

I was thinking about how people talk about intersectionality like it’s a new issue. Looking at the history of feminism, the issue of intersectionality was always there.

Totally, but Kimberle Crenshaw had to coin the phrase for it to really enter the conversation on a mainstream level. Sometimes I’ll hear people condemn feminists for openly disagreeing, but I think disagreeing is fine, if only the women of my generation understood that. Sexism is like racism and homophobia, you have to actively try to unlearn it. Even if you’re a woman, you have to unlearn your own bias against women. We didn’t want to understand the “Mean Girl” stuff when I was younger, which is why I wrote about it in Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.

There were many feminists at the beginning, I was one of them, who said “we have to praise and uplift women because we’ve been kept down for so long.” But since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting. I think your generation is much more accepting of that truth. But my generation felt like our hearts would break if other women betrayed us right after we found the language for sexism.

Since there are so many differences between individual women, there will always be fighting.
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I was really fascinated with Betty Friedan’s desire to keep Valerie Solanas out of the movement because of her violent radical rhetoric. Would you consider Friedan’s concern an issue of respectability politics?

Betty wanted the feminist movement to stay above reproach, to have an impeccable image. Valerie was a legitimate lunatic. She was brilliant, the SCUM Manifesto is brilliant, but she was serious—she wasn’t kidding. So, Betty was horrified by it, she was afraid people would start believing the feminist movement was full of lesbians who wanted to kill men. But Valerie stirred our imagination because she was so out there, she was our outlaw. She wasn’t actually a feminist herself, she thought that NOW was a lady’s luncheon. In a sense she was right, because we weren’t breaking up buildings or rioting at NOW, but we also passed some important legislation.

I was also fascinated to read that a similar dynamic played out later with Aileen Wuornos, that feminists were divided about whether to support her trial.

Wuornos had a worse childhood, she had one of the worst childhoods I’ve heard about. Valerie, like Wuornos later, thought feminist interests were a form of social climbing, that feminists wanted to get famous off of her. I got involved in Wuornos’ case because I wanted to expand the Battered Woman Syndrome defense to apply to sex workers. I believed that she killed the first man out of self-defense. She inspired an opera, two plays, books, a movie. I wrote an op-ed about her because while she wasn’t the first serial killer, she felt different, women tend to kill husbands or children and we don’t hear about it as often. This was about killing a series of strange men, white men, adult men, that was never heard of. I wanted to check her out, I had to move a lot of pieces to get her to call me from jail. I called her and I said “Lee I’m from a feminist government from the future and we need you” and she was on board.

Lee wanted to sell her story and make money, she was a capitalist, and I was an abolitionist. I had nothing but compassion for her. It’s interesting that women, feminists, lesbians, were thrilled by this notion of an action hero. There was this sense that she died for our sins, that we secretly wanted to reap the same violent revenge on men but never would.

Totally. I think there’s a natural fascination with the idea of female vengeance. I’m curious, with your experience writing about mental health and violence, do you have any theories on why there aren’t more female serial killers of Lee’s caliber?

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers. This is a very powerful punishment. Oftentimes women who are traumatized and abused as children who may be violent take it out on other women or children. But they’re statistically less likely to go up against men violently, and if they do it’s just one, usually a partner.

Women often turn violence against ourselves, women who have been incest victims are often angrier at the mothers who couldn’t save them than they are at the father who raped them. They feel the mother who looked the other way, because she needed the support of the father. Women are very tightly controlled, we get treated as lesser early in life, and then we become surveilled and manipulated by the sexual harassment that is completely normalized everywhere.

When women kill in self-defense in a marriage or partnership, they go to jail. No one is visiting them, no one is marrying them like male serial killers.
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We’re still fighting for a lot of rights that you were fighting for in the 1970s. What is one thing you’re surprised we’re still fighting for?

One is obliged to undertake the struggle, but not to complete it. You do it for your lifetime, and then the other generations come and pick it up. That is, if feminist knowledge hasn’t been systematically disappeared—which it has. Sadly, I think that our inability to stop pornography, torture pornography, has increased the normalization of it. That may make me a feminist of the unfun kind, I like fun, and I have fun. But I think not pushing for greater regulation of the content of porn was a loss and it was a very divided issue because feminists feared censorship and feared an alliance with right-wing forces that were also against pornography. But in my opinion, that was a loss on my watch. I wish we could have stopped the sex slavery of children and women featured in certain venues of porn, on our watch that traffic has proliferated and been normalized.

What is one thing you’ve seen progress the most?

I think progress has been made with LGBTQ rights. I always thought being gay was like being an artist, very bohemian. There’s a huge improvement in lesbian custody battles and gay male custody battles.

I would love to be able to say there’s been a proliferation of women’s thinking and artistry, quantum leaps. And yet it’s also been disappeared in my own life time, some of the most radical voices from the late 60s and early 1970s stopped being taught by the 1980s. When I ask younger women about Mary Wollstonecraft, Joan Stewart Mill, Matilda Gage, if you don’t start with that you’ve got nothing. There’s a couple of major historians of women’s—Mary Beard, Eleanor Flexner, when I discovered them I was so excited. We didn’t read Sojourner Truth, we read African-American men, we read maybe Virginia Woolf and George Elliott.

Not all changes are made by going on the street, that’s an important expression, it’s theater. Real change can be made that way, a lot of change is made in boring meetings and courthouses.

Looping back to the gendered culture of violence, and its effects on mental health, do you think the conversation about mental health has evolved and moved in the direction you were hoping?

We’ve moved away from institutionalizing people, but now we leaving them on the streets homeless. So, two extremes, both bad. I don’t know if my pioneering work that made a difference in the beginning is still being taught in medical school. Do battered women now understand that they’re battered? Yes. Is it understood that abuse causes PTSD symptoms? Yes. Do we have good services for rape victims and battered women? No. We pioneered the conversation about rape, there are rape kits now. The conversation about rape is more understanding and pro-woman, but rape victims are still seen as a drag. There’s this attitude of: “other people have dealt with this, why don’t you be quiet.”

We now understand a lot more about Trauma and Recovery—coincidentally the title of an excellent book I reviewed in The New York Times. The author, Judith Lewis Herman, dignified women’s mental illness by beginning the book with the combat veterans who were WWI shell shocked, and linking their manifestations of PTSD to incest and rape victims. Our work collectively began to give more dignity to women who have anxiety, insomnia, flashbacks, who are self-destructive. The same destroy their own cases in court because they can’t trust themselves. Is there more sympathy and understanding? Yes. Is there enough? No. I think one important progress is there are more memoirs by young women writing about their mental health experiences and their eating disorders, which are often intimately connected to sexual abuse. There are now feminist therapists, there are lesbian feminist therapists, there are lesbian therapists of color. It’s a good thing, but it’s still not enough.

I got my first tattoo when I was nineteen. A small pink and white lotus on my left hip that represented purity, spontaneous generation, my new found independence and, above all, that I was hopelessly in love with a heavily tattooed Buddhist who I wanted to take me seriously. I don’t see him anymore when I look at the tattoo. Instead, I see myself at nineteen, fresh to New York and so overwhelmed with so many new feelings and emotions that I needed something to permanently remember them. It’s nice to think of it that way.

I also think of the experience getting the tattoo. It was done at a small shop in the East Village by a man who lived in Vermont most of the time, who rolled his own cigarettes and could not have been less interested in chatting with the young woman on the table under his needle. The only time Vermont spoke to me directly once we started was to yell at me to stop moving; because of the location of the tattoo it tickled intensely, and I was stifling a laugh but my body wasn’t quite cooperating. Pretty quickly the friend with me noticed I was on the verge of tears and asked Vermont to give us a minute. We went outside so I could take a few deep breaths while holding my pants up with my hands because I couldn’t button them over the partially tattooed skin. I went in, my girlfriend leveled Vermont with her eyes and he completed the tattoo, all of it in silence.

“I hear so many stories like this. If not once a day at least a few times a week,” says Jessica Dwyer, tattoo artist and co-owner of Nice Tattoo, a woman- owned tattoo shop in Brooklyn. ”People will be happy with the tattoos but not the experience and it’s basically just a permanent reminder of that.”

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Women have played a huge role in the history of body art, but remain underrepresented in the culture. In the early 19th century tattoos became a way for women to take part in circuses and freak shows. Billed as “The Tattooed Lady,” these women were able to assert a financial autonomy not otherwise available to them at the time. In her book, Bodies of Subversion, The Secret History of Women and Tattoo, Margot Mifflin catalogs many of these forgotten stories. Women are so intertwined in the history of body art, Mifflin argues, the Women’s Movement of the mid 20th century is what revived the declining tattoo industry, while removing some of the stigmas of tattoo culture as hyper-masculine and delinquent.

In the ‘70s, women coming from the art school world would teach themselves how to tattoo as a way to make a living and expand the idea of what makes a true canvas, adding new styles and aesthetics to an otherwise stagnant industry. Tattoos also served as a form of protest, with women looking to distinguish themselves from mainstream society or, as famed artist Ruth Marten recalls, recently divorced women who wanted to commemorate their new freedom.

The Women’s Movement of the mid 20th century is what revived the declining tattoo industry
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However, Vyvyn Lagonza, still considered one of the early design innovators in the industry, noted how once the novelty of having a young woman in the parlors wore off, her colleagues became increasingly dismissive of her work and watched as less experienced male artists moved ahead of her in the field. Shop owner Danny Danzl “couldn’t be bothered to fix Lagonza’s broken machines,” Mifflin writes “but he did find time to lovingly inlay them with fake glittering jewels.” Women in the tattoo parlor were one of two things: an adornment, or a nuisance.

It was thirteen years before I got my next tattoo. Throughout that time I had several themes that piqued my interest (some of which I am forever grateful I didn’t get) and would bring my ideas to different shops. Each parlor I walked into the artists, always men, gave me the same response: If I wanted all of the lines I would be committing to a much larger piece, the small delicate lines I envisioned were impossible and if I really wanted this tattoo, I would have to get it done their way. It was a choice between getting a tattoo I wanted but not the way I wanted it, or not getting it at all.

“A lot of tattoo artists do have that holier-than-thou arrogance. And at the end of the day, we’re in a service industry. Yah, you’re an artist but you’re doing art for somebody,” Dwyer says when I relay the story to her. “A lot of times it feels like a club, and you’re made to feel like you don’t belong in it. People will say something can’t be done because they don’t want to do it.”

Last year, I found myself working with several women with the exact style of tattoos I had been told were basically impossible. Clean, thin lines, negative space, pointillism instead of shading. When I asked they were all going to the same studio, Welcome.Home. Located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn the shop, I was told, was run by women who gained a following through word of mouth and Instagram. By the end of summer, I had three new tattoos.

Based on a 2012 Reuters poll women made up 59% of people getting tattoos. Instagram and Pinterest have certainly cracked the club open a bit, but the industry as a whole still has an air of hypermasculinity and exclusivity. That has a lot of women, and others, heading to places like Welcome.Home and Nice Tattoo for a more inclusive and relaxing experience. Both studios have a living room feel. There’s no front desk so consultations take place on couches, and plants and minimalist art hang on the walls instead of tattoo flash art. The music is usually more soothing and at a lower volume, and artists book out extra time per session so that clients don’t feel rushed and can take breaks if needed.

Instagram and Pinterest have certainly cracked the club open a bit, but the industry as a whole still has an air of hypermasculinity and exclusivity.
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One of the through lines I found when researching different women owned shops was that this sense of community and comfort was front and center in their mission statements. San Francisco’s Black + Blue, which was founded by Idexa Stern in 1995, started as a safe space for women in what was a predominantly straight white male-dominated industry. Originally employing only lesbian artists, in 2005 as the constraints of gender and orientation became looser in the public discourse, Idexa began to change the shop’s original mission. “We didn’t need a ‘women’s space’ we needed an inclusive space,” she says on the studio’s website.

In Minnesota, Jackalope Tattoo, a women and queer-identifying run studio, echoes the same sentiment in their mission statement. “To empower others to be their very best, brightest, most creative selves. To try that one thing you’ve always wanted to try, reach for that huge goal because you know you can, and do it all with a fabulous smile and sense of self that radiates confidence. Jackalope Tattoo is more than a tattoo shop, it’s a family, and a way of living.”

It’s not just a better way to treat clients, it’s also a better business model in the current political and cultural climate. Since the 2016 election and prevalence of the #MeToo movement, many are going back to the idea of body art as a form of protest. In early 2017 over 100 women and men lined up to receive tattoos outside of Brass Knuckle Tattoo in Minneapolis. They were all there to get Mitch McConnell’s now infamous dismissive comment about Elizabeth Warren, “Nevertheless, she persisted” permanently etched on their body, with the days proceeds going to a local organization that supports pro-choice women in politics. Most of the shops I researched were booked for months ahead of time, with either return clients or new clients who were compelled to come in because they heard the spaces weren’t intimidating, and the artists were as interested in the experience as much as the art itself.

While I would rather cut off my arm than have to think about Mitch McConnell daily, I understand the reasoning. Few, if any, women and queer people get through life without carrying the scars of societies projection about our bodies. Tattoos represent a choice, something we can put on ourselves that express our own ideas about who we are. Even if you’re getting a quick tattoo, the ability to assert control over what you see, and society sees, is an act reclamation and exertion of body autonomy.

“I want to have a safe space for everyone,” Dwyer says towards the end of our interview, “I get a lot of straight people and gay people and trans people. Tattoos are not for one type of person anymore across the board. Everyone’s got tattoos, everyone.”

Tattoos represent a choice, something we can put on ourselves that express our own ideas about who we are.
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Before opening Nice Tattoo, Dwyer liked the shop she was working at and had no plans to leave. When approached about opening a new shop she wasn’t convinced until her business partners talked about the kind of inclusive, women run, comfortable studio they wanted, and she realized that she couldn’t pass the opportunity up.

“I want people to know when they come to my shop they’re getting a safe experience, a pleasant experience, and a comfortable experience. I want them to have the experience I wish I had had.”

Compared to this type of welcoming, all-embracing mentality, the notion of the tattoo industry as an exclusive club feels antiquated. Exclusivity as a pillar for any business model has always baffled me; what do you actually gain by leaving money on the table? And when it comes to something as personal and permanent as body art, what value is there in making clients feel more vulnerable than they already do? It’s that distance and vulnerability so many new shop owners understand, either through their own experience or from hearing stories from their friends and clients. The rise in women owned tattoo shops isn’t just an extension of the industry, it’s a reaction to it; creating a new space instead of fighting for what is offered. A club with open membership that people are lining up to be a part of.

“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.

If someone told me 15 years ago I would be writing about how much sex I wasn’t having, I would’ve laughed in their face. By the time I was 21, I had racked up sex partners in double digits and boasted numerous sex adventures.

In my mid to late twenties I acquired a journalism career, a husband, and two babies. Also, a dwindling sex drive. To be clear, I didn’t hate sex. I liked sex. I really enjoyed sex with my husband. We just weren’t doing it. To admit this out loud to anyone felt like the ultimate embarrassment, so I privately scheduled a series of medical tests, hormone labs, and vaginal examinations. I wanted answers. I wanted cures.

A lower libido is acceptable when you’re six weeks postpartum, but any longer is medically and socially unacceptable. There were seemingly only three valid explanations for my disinterest in sex: 1. I was a selfish wife 2. There was something wrong in my marriage 3. There was something wrong with me, medically. At least, these were the messages I received through the Facebook comments section when I first wrote an article about it. I also received many “thoughts and prayers” in my inbox from those who thought a lack of sex was a terminal illness. People took an intense and bizarre interest in how much sex I wasn’t having.

A lower libido is acceptable when you’re six weeks postpartum, but any longer is medically and socially unacceptable.
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In the end, all tests came back “normal,” but I couldn’t let it go. Why wasn’t I enthusiastically rumping like a screaming beastie in the night? I turned to Google and discovered Female Sexual Dysfunction.

According to a 2016 study in the Sexual Medicine Reviews, 40.9% of premenopausal women around the world suffer from Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD). The symptoms include: low libido or lack of sexual desire, diminished vaginal lubrication, painful intercourse, and decreased arousal. That means almost half of women have a sexual dysfunction. Given how widespread FSDs supposedly are, are this many women really suffering from sexual dysfunction, or are their “symptoms” not symptoms at all?

In contemporary sexual culture, it seems the line between dissatisfaction and dysfunction is increasingly blurred. Women with any level of sexual decline or discontent have been cleverly convinced they are defective and need treatment. As such, feminists and clinicians have started to question the possibility that FSD was constructed by pharmaceutical companies through inflated epidemiology and our culture’s sexual illiteracy.

Take my situation as a new mom. Years ago, sexologists would’ve classified my waning lust as a typical postpartum-related sexual decline, but the criteria for FSD makes it a full-blown disease. A temporary stress-related sex decline is now a sickness. A prescription drug side effect causing low libido is now a disorder. Age-related vaginal dryness is pathologized. Dissatisfaction with your partner is now a bona fide medical illness. Lack of interest due to fatigue, work obligations, and child-rearing all fall under the FSD umbrella.

In contemporary sexual culture, it seems the line between dissatisfaction and dysfunction is increasingly blurred.
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“While we are consistently deprived of useful, relevant, and meaningful information about women’s motivations for sex, how sex works from a pleasure perspective (and not a reproduction perspective), and the tools to manage the anxiety associated with the discomfort we feel about discussing sex, we are left open to interventions that reinforce big pharma, false narrative of “normal” and not pleasure, connection, sensuality, or eroticism,” New York City based therapist, Cyndi Darnell, says.

Despite it being 2018, American girls and women are still left in the dark about their own sexual health. Currently, only 24 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education and 34 states and the District of Columbia mandate HIV education, according to the Guttmacher Institute. It’s important to note, these sex education programs vary widely in instruction and content. Some states require abstinence to be stressed (without receiving information on contraceptive methods). A number of states require negative information about sexual orientation to be included. Some require the instruction to emphasize the importance of only engaging in sexual activity within a marriage.

As a child growing up in the ‘90s in New York I had access to sex education. I learned to be terrified of having sex (thanks to loads of AIDS hysteria) and I could recite all medical terms for male genitalia. But I couldn’t locate my clitoris. I didn’t know anything about pleasure, masturbation, or female orgasms. I didn’t know sex could exist outside of penis-in-vagina penetration. I didn’t know that across cultures, relationships, sexual orientations, and identities there could be different types of sexuality. And I sure as hell didn’t learn about consent.

I learned to be terrified of having sex and I could recite all medical terms for male genitalia. But I couldn’t locate my clitoris.
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With sex education still largely lacking in accessibility and information, no wonder flocks of women think a difficulty on the sexual radar is a full-blown medical problem. They’re combining what they learned about sex in school, what they learned from their parents, and what they learned through media portrayals of heteronormative sexuality. Additionally, women and men have internalized commercial marketing schemes which promote adventurous, anything-goes, heterosexual sex as the gold standard, while stigmatizing anyone who doesn’t look “sexy” enough and anyone who doesn’t orgasm a certain way. In fact, straight women are less likely to orgasm, because their partners are more likely to insist on penetrative sex, and ignore other erogenous zones.

“We have become a society more adept at watching sex than talking about it or doing it in ways that are satisfying for all involved. The tendency is presently to consume it rather than create it,” Darnell says. “The further removed we are from its meaning and purpose in our lives, the more likely we are to feel awkward and dysfunctional – and thus open up erroneous diagnoses designed to reinforce a performance “standard” rather than a fulfilling exploration based on mutuality and eroticism.”

Because of this “standard” women are likely to feel sexually inadequate. But, no worries, there’s a little pink pill for that ill too.

Unlike Viagra for men, which concentrates on the genitals, Addyi, or “pink Viagra” as it’s nicknamed, focuses on the brain. A bright pink slogan in block letters on the home page reads, “Your Brain May Be Working Against You When It Comes to Sex.” Call me crazy, but when my brain tells me I shouldn’t have sex, it probably means I shouldn’t have sex. I thought we were all supposed to be saying “no” to sex we don’t want?

Not only is the company’s message concerning, so is the disease it claims to be treating. According to the website, Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD) is characterized by the following criteria: your desire for sex has decreased, your decreased desire for sex has persisted for six months or more, or your decreased desire for sex is bothering you. It’s pretty obvious that these “symptoms” are extremely broad, and as such, widely open to interpretation. It appears the drug’s maker, Sprout Pharmaceuticals, is good at expanding their definition of dysfunction in order to cast a large net on those even mildly affected.

I’m not a total pharma hater, I benefit from modern medicine in many life-saving ways. I’m also all for sex positivity. I support clinicians and researchers investigating women’s sexual problems. I love scientific and technological advances just as much as anyone else, but there seems to be several key elements missing from the conversation about women’s sexual health. You can’t claim to care about women’s sex lives and welfare, whilst ignoring crucial and omnipresent social and political components which form our sexual health. In our culture we are abused, we are raped, and we are shamed. We don’t have full body autonomy. Those facts alone might make us less inclined to have sex. Then there are the biologically natural hormone fluctuations a woman goes through in her lifetime which play a large part in our sexual response.

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“There are hormonally driven cycles that women go through that drastically affect our sexual health,” says Dr Sherry A. Ross, women’s health expert and author of She-ology. The Definitive Guide to Women’s Intimate Health. Period. She cites a woman’s menstrual cycle, pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, perimenopause, and menopause as a few examples. While she believes FSD is a real medical condition, her approach to it isn’t solely concerned with organ functionality, physiology, or ability to orgasm, like much of the mainstream and newslike medical literature on the subject. She’s concerned with the big picture of a woman’s health.

“The daily stresses of work, money, children, relationships, and diminished energy are common issues contributing to low libido in women. Other causes may be depression, anxiety, lack of privacy, medication side effects, medical conditions such as endometriosis or arthritis, menopausal symptoms such as a dry vagina, or a history of physical or sexual abuse,” Ross says. But often, we’re not not having sex because there’s something wrong with us, but because there’s something wrong with society.

Looking at the social contexts through which women live and have sex is crucial to the research of women’s sexual health and treatments. Equally important is an intersectional approach to studying sexual experiences of people who are LGBTQ and gender nonconforming, which big pharma and their little pink pill are not addressing.

No one will deny that there are absolute medical issues impacting women and their sex lives that should be investigated and treated. Vaginismus, vulvodynia, endometriosis, STDs, and fibroids, all can cause painful intercourse and make women abstain from sex. Prescribing “pink Viagra” isn’t going to effectively treat or heal those conditions. It just makes the women suffering from them consent to more sex. Sex they might not really want to have.

When pharmaceutical companies hijack the narrative about women’s sexual health and attempt to make a universal or standard version of it, we all lose. We lose our freedom to say “yes” to sex, and we lose our right to say “no” to it. We lose our sexual power. We might even lose our sex drive.

These days, my fantasies about sex have nothing to do with pink horny pills. Instead, I fantasize about my daughters demanding pleasure and enthusiastic consent from their future sexual partners. I look forward to a self-determined sex life for me and my sisters, full of empowerment, connection, and exploration.

I want to clarify that “middle school” is not a topic that I willingly return to. For me, middle school was a time of bubblegum caught in braces, hormone-charged crushes, and embarrassing growths of every variety. It was also a time when my school first began tackling that universally blush-worthy topic: the human body. I recently spoke to a few of my male friends about their middle school sex education. And honestly, what the hell were they learning?

At my school, the boys were segregated from the girls when the time came to broach the puberty talk. I asked my male friends about sex education because I wanted to know what went on in their separate room. In the “girls room,” we talked about menstruation and were given little period packs filled with tampons and illustrated pamphlets. According to them, the boys had discussed puberty, sexual feelings, and morning erections. The school tailored the talks to the students’ anatomy. In the same way that I didn’t learn about penises and what happens to them in the morning, the boys didn’t learn about vaginas and what happens to them every month.

There were other differences, too. In the room I was in, unlike in the “boys room,” we didn’t talk about the normalization of sexuality, as if the absence of erections cancelled out the possibility of sexual feelings. I, and the girls in the room with me, didn’t talk about sex or dating in a classroom setting until three years later, when all eighth graders had to take a mandatory health class.

At the time, I didn’t think much about the gender separation, and it made sense that we were put in different rooms to discuss the issues that affected us. Like most everyone, I’d been taught from a young age that periods happen to girls and boners happen to boys—a reductive, cisnormative view that, among other issues, erases and stigmatizes the experiences of transgender children. Associating menstruation exclusively with girls can be particularly damaging to trans boys, who may already feel uncomfortable with their periods.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand other ways, too, in which this enforced segregation can have negative impacts. For instance,I was embarrassed buying tampons when my cashier was male. I didn’t like talking about my period around guys — although I would shamelessly use “period cramps” as an excuse not to participate in gym class (you could almost see my male gym teacher visibly shudder when the word “period” was mentioned). I internalized that periods didn’t just happen to girls, they were not to be acknowledged around men.

My discomfort discussing my period around men hinted at a broader question: Would I still be embarrassed if boys had been present in the room when I learned about menstruation?

I internalized that periods were not to be acknowledged around men.
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I believe that the answer is no. Segregating boys and girls during sex education sessions contributes to a culture in which periods are seen as taboo to talk about with men, or indeed in public at all. During my middle school experience, the physical separation of the girls and boys created the impression that periods are a topic to be discussed solely among women. It is this physical separation which directly contributes to a culture of stigmatization around the topic of menstruation.

The concept of separation leading to stigmatization also works in reverse: Stigmatization leads to separation. In certain communities, cisgender girls and women are required to live in a hut outside of their villages while they are menstruating. In India, for instance, the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups banish menstruating women outside the boundaries of the village for the duration of their periods (Kaur, “Banished for menstruating: the Indian women isolated while they bleed”). Last year, in Nepal, an 18-year old girl died of a snakebite that she sustained while isolated in a “menstruation hut” (Bhandari and Nashar, “Shunned During Her Period, Nepali Woman Dies of Snakebite”). In India and Nepal, women are placed into dangerous situations because of menstruation’s stigmatization.

The shame associated with menstruation also plays a part in religion. In traditional Jewish and evangelical Christian communities, a woman who is on her period is untouchable. According to Chapters 15 to 18 of Leviticus, if you touch a menstruating woman, you become “tum’ah,” or “impure.” The notion that menstruation is impure highlights its stigma. The enforced, unseen boundaries of menstruating women from those around them transforms internal stigma into physical separation.

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The twinned relationship between separation and stigmatization exists because of cisgender male aversion to menstruation. From a young age, boys’ lack of education about the topic leads to discomfort and even prejudice. In 1986, when Dr. J. Brooks-Gunn and Dr. Diane Ruble analyzed the reactions of college-age cisgender men and women to menstruation, they found that men, who had an inferential understanding of menstruation rather than an experiential understanding, believed that periods were more debilitating than women did. The male participants also believed that periods affected women’s “moodiness” more than the female participants. These viewpoints feed into misogynistic tropes about women: they’re moody or “hysterical;” they won’t work as hard as a man on the job because of their “debilitating” periods.

Since the 1980s, there have been a host of other studies that have confirmed that the way men and women perceive menstruation is different, and that men see periods more negatively. In 2016, three decades after the study conducted by Brooks-Gunn and Ruble, Tamara Peranovic and Brenda Bentley found that when male respondents were growing up, they saw periods as “taboo,” and shrouded in secrecy. This impacted their openness to discussing periods as adults, and led them to believe that periods were a “woman’s problem.” Similarly, Brooks-Gunn and Ruble’s study posits that the difference between how cis women and men see periods is due to information asymmetry. Interestingly, certain male respondents in the Peranovic and Bentley study were “dissatisfied with the education they received” about periods.

From a young age, boys’ lack of education about the topic of menstruation leads to discomfort and even prejudice.
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From my own experience as a teenager, I gathered that periods are seen as “dirty,” and are considered a “dirty” topic to talk to men about — my gym teacher’s wince was enough to teach me that men don’t like to think about menstruation. But why should that be the case? Menstruation is a natural function that affects half of the world’s population on a regular basis.

The way that sex education is organized depends on the state. Each state decides on its own sex education policy, and bills concerning sex education have to pass the state legislature. Currently, 24 states and the District of Columbia require public schools to teach sex education, and 33 states and the District of Columbia require students to receive instruction about HIV/AIDS. Decisions on how to actually approach sex ed, however, are mostly left up to individual school districts. It’s difficult to ascertain how many schools segregate puberty talks, or whether schools are even offering puberty talks.

Despite this, parsing the psychological literature about male and female attitudes towards menstruation demonstrates that men and women usually do not receive the same information or education about menstruation. Negative male attitudes towards periods, therefore, are largely down to information asymmetry or lack of male education on the topic.

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It’s time to de-segregate sex education so that cis women no longer feel embarrassed about a natural, biological process. What’s more, de-segregating the sex education space should work both ways. Girls should learn about sexual feelings and male puberty in the same ways that boys do. That way, natural cis male experiences, such as voice drops during puberty, are less likely to be ridiculed by those who do not understand the biological underpinnings of the phenomenon. Demystifying the human body contributes to an open culture in which questions are encouraged and bodies are no longer seen as a source of shame or embarrassment.

Those who favor gender segregation during sex education claim children will feel more comfortable asking questions about their bodies if they’re separated from children of the opposite sex. This viewpoint, however, not only enforces the idea that one should only be comfortable talking about one’s body around those of the same gender, but excludes the experience of transgender and nonbinary students. Educating children about sexual education in the same space ensures that nobody feels misplaced or excluded.

For those who feel this is sure to cause embarrassment, there are strategies. Some schools offer an anonymous question service where students have the opportunity to write their questions on a slip of paper for teachers to answer at the end of the sex education session. Sex ed teachers can hold office hours for students to ask questions they may not feel comfortable sharing with a group. Using these strategies, nobody has to feel embarrassed asking a question, and students of all genders can hear the answers.

The conversations we have with children affect the adults they become. Periods are nothing to be embarrassed about, and if students of all genders were taught about menstruation at the same time, women might not be so uncomfortable discussing their periods in front of their male counterparts — and men might not be so uncomfortable hearing about it.

So, when teaching students about sex education, let’s tackle the body’s processes in a more inclusive way. That way, middle schoolers can focus on the truly embarrassing things in life, like pimples and parents.

I said two words — vagina and sex,” says Anshita Koul, “and everybody in my home town, including my family, was shocked.”

Koul was talking about her participation in Queens of Comedy, an India-based reality show for female comedians. “At least I have an equation with my family,” she adds. “There is always dialogue, even when it gets really awkward.”

On social media, though, it was made clear to her that she had crossed an invisible line by joking about her sexual frustrations in a long-distance relationship. Her largely Kashmiri audience on Instagram and YouTube was surprised and shocked to see her speak about her private life.

“There is no sex education in school,” she explains. “So talking about it is a big deal.”

Especially when women are doing the talking.

Female comedians being underrepresented and heavily content-policed is, of course, hardly limited to India. But there are some distinct circumstances in the country, including a censorship board that often influences what women can do onscreen–and who can make the jokes.

Movies in India need to be certified by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which contributes to reduced female representation, particularly when a woman’s sexuality is not created for the male gaze. Most recently, we saw this with the banning of Lipstick Under My Burkha, a black comedy on sexuality and oppression, which was released to worldwide acclaim but was heavily delayed and censored in the country in which it was made.

In light of these regulations, the internet has become an important vehicle for female comedians to be heard, even when their humor falls outside the bounds of conventional acceptability. Because there are no official censorship guidelines for video-streaming websites, online platforms are finally bringing about a way to tell women’s stories that are not conceptualized and approved by men.

This lack of censorship is happening at a time when more people are accessing online video content than ever before. In the past two years, high-speed internet connections on smartphones have become affordable for a large section of the Indian population. In 2017, India had more than 300 millionsmartphone connections and over 80 million users for video-streaming applications. The market was valued at $280 million in December 2017.

This proliferation of smartphone usage has been a boon to women in particular, providing them the autonomy and privacy they often need to access boundary-pushing comedy online. And that comedy, in turn, is expanding at an exhilarating rate.

In December 2016, Amazon launched Prime Video in India and signed up 14 stand-up comedians to create original content for their platform. When a talk show host asked a panel of comedians about the complete absence of women in the line-up, the men suggested that it was simply a result of women not having one hour of content.

It was a while before the lone woman on the panel, Aditi Mittal, got an opportunity to speak. Mittal was later offered a stand-up special by Netflix, which she titled The Things They Wouldn’t Let Me Say. Her routine included sets on buying bras, street harassment, and breast cancer awareness.

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Mittal is among a growing cohort of Indian women connecting to an increasingly-online savvy audience. For her part, Queens of Comedy’s Koul has focused on changing the narrative of her hometown of Kashmir, which is largely only in the news as a contentious flash point between two nuclear neighbors — India and Pakistan. In her comedy, Koul talks about the region’s street food, Kashmiri slang, and most parents’ deep desire to turn their children into engineers. One of her more popular videos is a satire on the excessive attention given to a son-in-law when he visits his wife’s home.

Another groundbreaking comedian is Prajakta Koli, who runs a successful YouTube channel called “Mostlysane” with over 1.3 million subscribers. Koli creates content about dating, grooming, drinking, and college examinations.

Most of the material is simply a funny view of everyday life, but Koli comes out strongly in support of some causes. Last year, in June, she released a music video called “Shameless” that begins with the protagonist in the prison of body shaming. The song has been viewed over 3.5 million times.

A popular video by “Girlyapa,” meanwhile, offers a lighthearted take on periods in a country where menstruation is associated with a number of taboos. Conversations about periods are almost non-existent in most homes, and women are expected to hide their “condition” from the men in the family.

On International Women’s Day last year, Girlyapa also released a video about a girl telling her conservative mother that she isn’t a virgin. In the past year it has been viewed over 6 million times. Girlyapa’s video would have been deeply contentious if it had aired on television, or if the conversation had appeared as part of a mainstream movie.

Tellingly, major production houses are now starting to cash in on the action, too. The Y-films subsidiary of Yash Raj Films — one of the largest and most profitable Bollywood movie companies in India, which has made immensely popular movies propelled by female propriety and “family values” — recently released a comedy called “Ladies Room” online. The video features two female protagonists battling plumbing, pregnancy, policemen, landladies, bosses, and career changes in a series of six restrooms.

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And it’s not just unknown performers who are changing women’s comedy: Well-known celebrities are finally getting involved as well.

In July 2017, a short film written by Radhika Anand and Akanksha Seda and uploaded on YouTube featured three women who regularly appear in Bollywood movies. Titled Khaaney Mein Kya Hai (What’s for lunch?), the video uses the allegory of cooking to describe sex and desires. It has been viewed more than 6.7 million times in the past year.

Most significantly of all, this openness online has seemingly inspired more provocative content in mainstream Bollywood. In February of this year, Pad Man, inspired by a social activist who introduced low-cost sanitary pads to his Indian village, was released theatrically on Valentine’s Day, starring Bollywood A-lister Akshay Kumar. One of the promotional events was a campaign on social media where celebrities posed with a pad — an attempt to help people shed their awkwardness about menstruation.

These are all important steps forward, though as Koul is careful to point out, “Our conditioning is so deeply ingrained. It is not going to change overnight. But talking about it and being open to change are good beginnings.”

Meanwhile, female comedians push on. On Queens of Comedy, Koul and her fellow performers joke about about body hair, creepy attention on the street, religious stereotypes, unfair laws, body envy, sex-ed for suicide bombers, and more. Many of the episodes have quickly racked up half a million views on YouTube, including those with dark and controversial content.

Producers, Koul says, have informed her that the program may be censored on TV. But that won’t stop it from reaching a wider audience, for one simple reason: Online, the content will appear entirely unedited.