| | | Alyssa Mastromonaco What it was like to be a woman in the Obama administration, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | March 21, 2017 | Letter No. 78 | | | | | | | | | | | | My Lennys,
This week's letter has me thinking about the issue of toughness. What makes a tough chick? When is toughness something to be applauded? When is it self-destructive? When is it a compliment? And when is it an insult, like you're a piece of meat too grisly to swallow?
Toughness was never prized in my house. My parents were determined to fight back against the bottled emotional reality of their respective childhoods, and so Grace and I were encouraged to express every emotion, to demand comfort, to ask for what we needed even if it made us seem like sniveling brats. Powering through — whether that meant staying in school after a fight with a bully or holding your pee on a long car trip — wasn't required or applauded. I am grateful for that, as it gave us an essential connection to our core needs that has often served us well. But it's also made me unable to tolerate cold movie theaters or cold bitches.
Once we hit the world, my sibling and I learned (sometimes the hard way) that you have to be tough. You have to make it through work with violent cramps, or gather yourself in the bathroom after an altercation with an emotionally destructive friend. You have to muscle into the front row at a Rihanna concert after a painful voguing accident. You have to survive a whole afternoon having split your fanciest slacks, vagina to butt-hole, on a day you're going commando (I knew I wore that sweater for a reason).
At this point, being called tough gives me a thrill. Powering through with a broken arm or a broken heart or an exposed vagina is a badge of honor. But knowing when collapsing is an act of self-love and when it's an act of self-immolation is a question that haunts me always. I don't have the answer just yet.
This past fall, I needed a reminder of my own powers of endurance, which felt frayed. And so I did what any logical 30-year-old woman would: I got a massive tattoo of skate legend Laura Thornhill tattooed on my abdomen. Laura was the first female pro skater to make a name for herself in a world dominated by boys with proudly displaced shoulder sockets and scraped-up knees. And she outshone them all, as Molly Schiot shows us in her interview with the luminary. Every time I look at my tattoo, it delights me. I took the pain like a champ, and I take the day like a champ, just like Laura would.
Looking for other toughies? Look no further than Alyssa Mastromonaco, a woman who rose through the ranks of Obama's White House and describes here just what it took to ignore the sexism that was often projected onto her by outsiders. Then there's my good friend Jessica Murnane, who refused to accept a doctor's recommendation that she have a full hysterectomy at 33 and instead completely changed her life and diet. How's that for gumption?
Nell Stevens is, without a doubt, my favorite debut novelist of 2017, and it's only March. Her book Bleaker House is the partly fictionalized story of Nell's journey to the abandoned, weather-beaten Falklands Islands, where she lived alone like a pioneer. Here, Nell talks about her anxiety concerning her voice as she embarks on a public life, and it's as funny as it is poignant. And last but not least, read about the radical journalists of Spare Rib, who refused to follow the tide of women's magazines and created their own literary activist culture in England in the 1970s. Starting your own publication, I can now say with minor authority, is not for the faint of heart.
All the radical women in today's issue remind me:even on the days you don't feel very brave, you are.
Skate on,
Lena | | | | | | | | | | | | To Bro or Not to Bro? | | | | By Alyssa Mastromonaco | | |
When I started my job at the White House, I was often told by outsiders that I did not have a job at the White House. The year was 2009, I was 33 years old, and after working for then-senator Barack Obama for four years, I had become an assistant to the president and director of scheduling and advance. I was nervous, of course — when I started, I had no idea who I was supposed to be as an executive-office employee. Occasionally I had no idea what to do, either. But I never had doubts about whether POTUS thought I was capable.
Reporters, though, seemed to have doubts about whether President Obama thought women in general were capable. In the first few months of the administration, rumors spread: that the West Wing was a "frat house," that Obama surrounded himself with a rowdy boys' club made up of beer-drinking golf buddies who prevented women from being visible or influential in the government.
This was kind of insulting, and very weird: The senior women in the White House had no idea who was telling reporters that we were having bad experiences in our jobs, since none of us spoke to reporters, and we weren't having bad experiences in our jobs. But after about a month of these stories, POTUS arranged a dinner with us so we could talk out our issues.
President Obama did it in good faith — he really didn't want us to feel uncomfortable or pushed aside. But the meeting was incredibly awkward. No one wants to feel like she's being babied, especially by the president. Those accusations of sexism were not the first time I'd thought about sexism at work, of course, but they were the first time working for POTUS that I had reason to wonder if the fact that I was a woman affected my standing with him.
Politics has a reputation for being hierarchical, patriarchal, and elitist for good reason: It's hierarchical, patriarchal, and elitist. But it isn't always. I ended up working for Obama for nine years in total, eventually getting promoted to deputy chief of staff for operations when Jim Messina, the man previously in the position, left to run the 2012 campaign. What I learned over those years is that bad things can happen to you at work for any number of reasons, and sexism is only one of them. Here's how I navigated that minefield.
1. Don't ignore sexism, but don't look for it, either. The beginning of the Obama administration was especially male because our number-one priority was addressing the economic recession, and most economists are men. Though I now try my hardest to avoid anything to do with calculations, at the time I often sat in on meetings in order to get a sense of how I should arrange the schedule so POTUS could best address the crisis. I frequently felt like I didn't fit in. For a while I thought that was because I was a five-foot-two woman who often wore a shirt with little hearts all over it. But then I realized it wasn't because I was a woman at all — it was because I wasn't an economist.
Other times, it was harder to figure out why my ideas weren't being taken seriously. Throughout my time in the White House, I had to go through a senior State Department official to get large expenses for the president's foreign trips approved. Every time we wanted to arrange something beyond your standard palace meet-and-greet or state dinner, this person would hem and haw over my budget, even though I'd planned many complicated trips before. "Now, Aaaaaahlyssssssa," he'd begin, "That's a LOT of money. [It wasn't.] Have you REALLY thought about how your BOSS [that's POTUS] would look if the cost were leaked to the Washington Post?"
For a while, I thought the official was being so smarmy because I was a woman. But then I looked at how he treated my male colleagues who were peers. The senior official was just as disdainful of the guys as the girls — because we were young. Unfortunately, there's not much of a happy ending here. It took five years before he trusted me, and then I left the White House.
2. Don't give the assholes any ammo. When someone is dismissive of your contributions at work, your best defense is a good offense. Come prepared for every meeting. Take notes. Be aware that you might have to repeat yourself or speak up to get your point across. Because I knew that State Department guy would question my budgets, I would always come back with concrete reasoning for my decisions. Our traveling expenses were almost always related to alleviating the pressure of Obama's popularity abroad: booking bigger and better venues kept more people from lining the streets and blocking our huge motorcade. I would eventually get my budgets approved, despite the regular annoyance.
3. Never do something at work that makes you feel uncomfortable just to fit in with the guys. Like many men in power, Barack Obama sometimes enjoyed unwinding with a game of golf or basketball. Because he would usually ask his male friends — who, because we all worked all the time, were also his colleagues — to accompany him on these sporty outings, people thought he was giving the bros more opportunities to get ahead in the White House. He wasn't — unlike certain other presidents, Obama never did work on the golf course. (And his golf trips weren't taxpayer-funded!)
While spending quality time with your manager sounds like a great opportunity to get to know him or her, and thus win some favors, I never felt upset about POTUS's golf outings. For one thing, I would never play golf. Faking it until you make it is helpful in most professional situations, but showing up on the green in a spanking-new golf skirt you had shipped overnight and then asking the guys to show you how to hold a putter is not going to win you any points, or be very fun for you. By the same token, I like to get mani-pedis with my girlfriends, but I would never, ever want to get a mani-pedi with President Barack Obama.
For another thing, POTUS was a good boss, and a good boss offers his or her employees equal opportunities to build a relationship. Though I never rode in a golf cart with him, I frequently traveled with POTUS, and we would have dinner and talk on Air Force 1 and Marine 1. Except for the whole "finding true love" thing, working for President Obama was kind of like being on The Bachelor: there were group dates and one-on-one time. He also gave me jewelry for my birthday once.
(If you assess the situation and realize you have a bad boss who excludes you from their inner circle based on gender or anything else, be aware of that. Decide if you think he or she is bad enough that you want to start looking for opportunities elsewhere.)
4. Finally, if another woman is experiencing legitimate sexism or any kind of unfair treatment, support her. Women are stronger in numbers. In the White House, we came up with a system for meetings: If a woman had a good idea and we wanted to make sure she got credit for it, we made sure to repeat her statement and attribute it to her. Sometimes it can be intimidating to speak up and easier to hang back, but there's no other way to stand out at work. Don't let sexism — either the possibility or the reality of it — psyche you out.
Alyssa Mastromonaco is the former deputy chief of staff for President Barack Obama and the current president of global communications for strategy and talent at A+E Networks. Her memoir, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, is out this week from Twelve. | | | | | | | | | | | | Speaking Lessons | | | | By Nell Stevens | | |
The Voice Coach lives in a tall pink house on Highgate Hill. When she opens her front door to greet me for the first time, she steps back, hands pressed to her heart, and gasps. "Oh, you came." Her expression is that of a mother receiving an unplanned-but-hoped-for visit from a grown-up child. "Nell," she says, still not stepping aside or asking me in, "you are here."
I am here. I am here because I am worried about my voice and have decided I need professional help. My first book is about to come out, and in a few months' time I am due to record the audio version. I have had enough traumatic experiences hearing recordings of myself to know action is required. The weedy, high-pitched noise I seem to make in place of talking like a normal person needs immediate correction. An actor friend recommended Vivian, a woman in her 70s who used to teach voice at one of the big London drama schools and who now takes private clients. I called her and explained my situation, and now, well, I am here.
She leads me into a book-lined room where the cat-to-chair ratio is about two to one, dislodges the occupants of a couple of seats, and gestures to me to take one.
"Let's do a role-play," she says, settling herself beside me. "Let's pretend that you are on a train, and the conductor is coming, and you've lost your ticket. I'm the conductor. I want you to explain to me what has happened."
"Right," I say. I stammer my way through a long-winded explanation about how and where and why I might have mislaid my ticket. "I definitely paid for it. I had it just now. I'm so sorry. I just don't know what I've done with it."
"Right," says Vivian, when I have run out of apologetic steam. "Listen very carefully to me, darling. I need you to understand that there is a bit of I'm-frightfully-sorry-I've-mislaid-my-ticket-please-don't-be-angry-with-me in your voice at all times. You speak like a lost little girl."
"Sorry," I say.
"Exactly," she says.
Later, I am on all fours on Vivian's rug, lowing like a cow in labor. "Huh, huh, huh."
"Darker! Lower! Broader!" she bellows. "More!"
After that, I lie on my back, staring up at the ceiling, imagining that I am looking at the open sky, and saying, "I want to find my voice; I want to find my voice; I want to find my voice," while Vivian prods me somewhere near my ovaries and says, "From here. Your voice is in here. Not up there. Not in your throat. Here."
Later still, she asks me to read a section from my book, which is a memoir, and then stops me after about half a paragraph. "But, darling, do you even know the main character of this book? Do you love her?"
It's awkward. Maybe she thinks it's a novel. "It's a memoir," I say. "It's about me."
"Oh, darling, I know," she says. "But do you?"
I leave the pink house after my first lesson feeling deconstructed. I wander into a café in Highgate Village and momentarily forget how to speak altogether. I stand at the counter, mouth hanging open, for an excruciating moment of silence. Then, an entirely new voice comes out of me and says, deeply, raspingly, "Americano, please."
I am shocked by the sound I just made, and this must show on my face, because the man behind the counter says, "Are you sure about that? You don't look sure."
"I'm learning how to speak," I tell him.
He presses his lips together and widens his mouth in a gesture that implies an acknowledgment that I've said something and no interest whatsoever in learning what I meant by it. He moves off to make my drink and releases a jet of steam from the espresso machine.
For the rest of the day I sound like a pubescent boy, the pitch of my words veering from gruff to falsetto as I try to alight on the voice that is actually mine. "Is this my voice?" I ask my reflection. "Is this?" In the mirror, my face is a mask: familiar but blank, giving nothing away.
"You sound different," says my friend Gabrielle when I meet her for drinks in the evening. "You sound like Margaret Thatcher."
"Oh, God," I say. "That's awful."
"Oh, wait, no, it's OK," she says. "You sound normal again now."
"It is such a problem with young women," Vivian sighs. "You're taught to be so unobtrusive, so unthreatening, so you all speak as though you're nine years old. I had a client who was CEO of a huge company, and she couldn't get anyone at work to listen to a word she said because she sounded like Matilda."
"Matilda?"
"Matilda. Roald Dahl. 'Sometimes, you have to be a little bit naughty!'"
"Oh."
"And you, darling, use your voice as a disguise. Your voice says you haven't written a book, wouldn't dream of it, just want everyone to be comfortable. But your bio says otherwise, and it's time to admit it. You are a writer. You are not a child. You are the mother of your characters, and when you speak, you must speak from your womb."
On the day after the UK voted to leave the European Union, I, like almost everyone else I know, go on Twitter and vent some heartbreak. Xenophobia and nationalism have won over reason, and my country seems suddenly ugly to me. As I walk around London that evening, I realize I am looking at other people suspiciously, wondering which way they voted. A German friend calls me in tears: "They don't want us here. They hate us."
A couple of days later, I look at my phone and see that someone has replied to one of my sad Brexit tweets. "@nellstevens," writes the stranger, "you are an arrogant cunt #brexit #wewon #getoverit." It's Twitter, I know, and there is guaranteed to be a degree of venom directed toward any political opinion. I have friends who are journalists who deal with it on a daily basis. And yet, still, I'm unsettled by this droplet of hostility; I'm on edge: people, strangers, are angry and antagonistic.
When I go to my voice lesson later that day and say "Hello," Vivian swoops down on me.
"My darling," she says. "Who has attacked you?"
She can hear the contents of my day just in the way I greet her. I don't bother to dispute the fact that I do feel attacked. "It's stupid," I say. "It's just that someone called me an arrogant cunt on Twitter. It's not a big deal."
"You have retreated into your little-girl voice, asking the world for protection."
"Have I?" I say. I try to adjust my tone to something deeper and more authoritative but end up back at Margaret Thatcher.
Later, when I am reading aloud from my book, she stops me mid-flow in a chapter about loneliness and says, "Remember to speak from your womb, darling. Give it to me from that arrogant cunt of yours."
I think about the stranger on Twitter and attempt to feel sanguine and strong instead of unsettled and self-conscious. I try to imagine that I am forming the words in a private, powerful place and then releasing them into the room. I have written a book and I am proud of it and I am the mother of my characters and I am speaking, now, from my arrogant cunt.
Something happens to my voice, then: it sounds clear and low and unrecognizable, and when Vivian hears it she looks up and beams, and I'm so disconcerted that I lose my place on the page.
"That was it," she says. "Just then. That was your voice."
Nell Stevens has an MFA in fiction from Boston University and lives in London. Her first book, Bleaker House, is on sale now. | | | | | | | | | | | | A Life Change That Saved My Uterus | | | | By Jessica Murnane | | |
Food and Me.
We've had a complicated relationship over the years. I've joined Weight Watchers five times. I've eaten Lean Cuisines exclusively for a month straight (it worked for my skinny friends!). I've tried the intuitive-eating thing, but my intuition kept telling me to eat another bag of Sour Patch Kids. I've been gluten-free and then sugar-free and then a gluten-free, sugar-free vegan. And I was chill-free during them all.
I'd always end up giving up on everything I tried.
It wasn't until I was faced with getting a hysterectomy at 33 (I have stage four endometriosis) that my relationship with food changed forever. As a last-ditch effort to save my uterus, I decided to try a whole-foods plant-based diet. This wasn't exactly my idea. After a friend found out that I wanted to move forward with the hysterectomy, she did research and found information about the relationship between endo and whole foods. She sent me a link to a website outlining a plant-based-diet plan that could help with my pain and symptoms. The first thing I saw in this plan was all the foods I couldn't eat, AKA all my favorite foods. Panic set in at the very thought of attempting this. There was no part of me that wanted to try this stupid thing.
Aside from the fact that candy, cheese, and fun were not on the approved list of foods, I think a lot of my resistance came from just being plain tired of trying. Over the years, I had tried everything to feel better. I went through multiple surgeries, tried yoga, experimented with legal drugs and not-so-legal ones, and even went to therapy because of my depression caused by my pain. Nothing worked. And if this diet was so great, why hadn't any of my doctors told me about it? I had zero faith that the diet would work, and whatever-is-less-than-zero-faith that I could actually stick to it. But I had nothing to lose, and if my friend had gone to the trouble to find this diet for me, the least I could do was try.
To my surprise (I'm still surprised), it actually worked. After weeks, my symptoms and pain started to fade. And after a couple of months, I felt better than I ever had. I never got the surgery.
You would think, after all that, I'd be celebrating the fact that I didn't have to get a hysterectomy. Nope. I was still worried about never getting to eat fondue again. I was angry that I had to change my diet, and I hated my body for everything it was putting me through. But I also couldn't deny that my new way of eating was working. I finally had to decide what was more important: me or the food. It was hard, but I finally chose me.
But with this choice, I still needed to like the food I was eating. So I got to work and taught myself to cook. I practiced a lot. I failed a lot. But I was determined. I wasn't just cooking for me, I was also cooking for every woman who had to make this kind of change too.
And now here we are, six years later. I have a plant-based cookbook (?!), am still choosing me, and can't imagine eating any other way. Good food changed my life. I'm hoping it can help change yours, too.
P.S.: this granola really makes the transition way easier.
Crunchy Chunky Granola
Makes 4-6 Servings
1 cup raw walnuts
1 cup rolled oats
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 cup unsweetened flaked or shredded coconut
1/4 cup real maple syrup
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 cup coconut oil, melted
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. In a food processor, pulse the walnuts until they are broken up, but not to a fine meal — you still want chunks. Add the oats and salt and pulse 10 to 15 times to break up the oats a bit; again, you want to make sure a lot of the oats are still intact.
Transfer the oat mixture into a medium bowl, and stir in the coconut, maple syrup, and vanilla until combined. Add the coconut oil and give it another couple of stirs. Press the mixture onto the prepared baking sheet.
You want to make sure to spread it as evenly as you can, keeping the mixture together and not creating big holes where you see the parchment showing through (this will create the chunkiness).
Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, until the edges are slightly browned. Remove the pan from the oven and let it cool for at least 15 minutes. Don't touch it! After the 15 minutes are up, break up the granola with your hands into whatever size chunks you love. Store it in an airtight container for two to three weeks.
Jessica Murnane is a podcast host, women's-health advocate, and the author of the cookbook One Part Plant. Visit her website for more. | | | | | | | | | | | | The New Woman's Magazine | | | | By Molly Davy | | | |
On a recent trip to London, I walked past newsstands throughout the city, some of which have stood in the same location for centuries, and I imagined an England of the 1970s. In place of a 2017 issue of The Daily Mail, with a cover featuring a reproduction of Kylie Jenner's latest selfie, you might have seen this daring magazine cover: a close-cropped image of a woman clutching a lacy pillow with a satisfied smile, with an accompanying headline that read: "The Liberated Orgasm … Make a New Year resolution to have one!" Whether you were enticed by its possibilities or repulsed by its vulgarity, it surely made some impression on you. Above it, sharp serif letters spell out Spare Rib. The magazine's name refers to the Bible creation story where Eve is formed out of a rib of Adam, a small indication of the humor and frankness that would be central to the next twenty years of feminist publishing.
Reenforcing its tongue-in-cheek title, Spare Rib's tagline, "The new woman's magazine," was a call to revolutionize representations of women in media, and it echoed the intentions of founders Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe to have a publication that was both accessible to the masses and challenging in its feminist criticisms.
Spare Rib began to assemble in a time when (and in rejection of) archaic laws such as the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, which required British women to have a male co-signer for mortgages. While a revision to the act was instantiated in 1964, giving married women slightly more financial freedom, it was written with the expectation that women would depend on their husbands for income in the form of allowances, and did not include protection or recognition for independent, working women. Violence against women was also at the forefront of feminist thought at this time. Another sanction from 1895 by the City of London made it illegal for a husband to beat his wife between a set amount of hours during the night. This bylaw was put in place less for the safety of the woman and more for the convenience of the neighbors subjected to the loud noises it created.
Some of the women who became involved with Spare Rib had previously worked for the underground and offbeat publications Oz and Forum. By working in the alternative press, they had hoped to find a more accepting environment than the conservative, male-dominated offices on London's Fleet Street, which was the home of The Times and The Sun. These women soon found the counterculture itself to be exclusionary and were hired more often for office positions in support of men than as writers and editors.
Like many publications geared toward social movement, Spare Rib launched with a manifesto. The believed the feminist movement could not progress without "…pushing a strong political line, by discussing the obscure dialectics of liberation, or by necessarily avoiding humour." All three declarations firmly countered some of the biggest criticisms of the women's movement at the time: that its actions were too aggressive, its rhetoric too elitist, and its supporters too uptight.
Even with Spare Rib's decidedly revolutionary bent, it did not shy away from more mainstream stories, about relationships or homemaking, but they were juxtaposed with articles about health, psychology, sexuality, and work. Having women write these articles differentiated the publication from its counterparts of the time. The existence of these wide-ranging articles on women at work, feminist education, and even knitting patterns provided a platform for questioning old ideals and an encouragement of new possibilities.
Spare Rib boasted bylines from many women whom we now consider to be authorities in their field in the early stages of their career, like the groundbreaking feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, writing about the shocking amount of work by women artists stored in the basement of the National Gallery in London. Writer and activist Alice Walker made several contributions throughout the years and was featured on the cover several times. There were also features on musicians Tracy Chapman and Sinéad O'Connor, in the final issues of the 1990s.
But perhaps more important was the writing focused on personal narratives by regular women. There was an article written by mothers from Northern Ireland about the difficulty of socializing children in a public space while in the midst of The Troubles, providing an important position on motherhood within current social contexts that had likely not been considered seriously before.
These perspectives by women readers from around England and beyond influenced the decision to make Spare Rib a collective, and by 1973, the editorial masthead had switched from featuring its founders, editors, and production people, to a non-hierarchical model, which resulted in a collaboratively written editorial each month. These efforts were in the hopes of including as many female voices as possible, giving priority to women who faced setbacks in previous attempts in writing and journalistic pursuits.
But that's not to say that Spare Rib was a perfect publication. Very much a product of the 1970s women's movement, it was not as widely devoted to intersectionality, the way a magazine with the same intent would be today. However, its failures are also its greatest strength. Its legacy is a bound archive of an evolving revolution, one that worked out its problems through publishing them. The comprehensive feminist themes of sexuality, race, religion and spirituality, and reproductive and mental health were all read through a British feminist perspective, which grounded them specifically and locally to a readership in the United Kingdom. Moreover, in the instances when Spare Rib's circulation extended outside of the UK, it provided a new perspective, one that might have contributed to a wider global context for readers, while embodying for them a model of activist self-publishing.
In addition to twenty years of magazine publishing, Spare Rib also published several books, most notably Women's Health: A Spare Rib Reader in 1988, which functioned as a British equivalent to America's Our Bodies, Ourselves, which had been released more than a decade earlier. In 2015, The British Library, home to Spare Rib archive, announced an initiative to digitize all issues. They are now accessible to the public.
My time in London ended with a march in solidarity with the Women's March in Washington, DC. After a turbulent American election season and similar anxieties in the UK post-Brexit, I found myself overwhelmed by the congregation of so many different people behind one issue. I had lost my faith in the possibilities of unity, but the legacy of Spare Rib claims it back for me. It exists as an archive of the hard work of past generations that provide a foundation to build on today while being a testament to what still remains unfinished. It provides a model to create space for thinking women, something that continues to feel daring and radical. It's a reminder of our responsibilities to ourselves and others: a call to action to continue to make room, to move our ideas onto the page and out to the streets. I've returned to the United States as "the new woman": ready to make news, to get to work.
Molly Davy is a writer. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. | | | | | | | | | | | | Laura Thornhill's "Complete Freedom" While Skateboarding | | | | By Molly Schiot | | |
The expression "If you can see it, you can be it" would have gotten a lot of LOLs from my eight-year-old self in 1988. I grew up with zero female role models; instead, my heroes were Tom Cruise in Top Gun, Rob Lowe in Youngblood, and Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa. I was the only girl in a skateboard club called Skate Nash. I had swagger but didn't know how to reconcile what it meant to be the odd girl out. Twenty-eight years later, I came across a photograph from 1976 of the pro skater Laura Thornhill, doing a 360 spin in green Vans with knee-high socks, her hair fanned out almost perfectly. I couldn't help wondering how my life would have been different if I had seen this image in 1988, if I'd known that girls can do it, too.
Laura was one of the first women to receive recognition in the sport. She was there in the 1970s, skating alongside the "Dogtown" crew. In 1976, she was the first female centerfold in Skateboard Magazine's history (not the nude kind, but the riding-a-22-foot-pipe-in-the-Arizona-desert kind). When that same magazine ran a poll for "Most Popular Skater," she won, edging out Tony Alva, one of the most recognized skaters of the time, by more than 300 votes. Her vintage signature model skateboard is on display at the Smithsonian. It would be amazing if we lived in a world where people knew Laura's name, (or Patti McGee or Peggy Oki's names), like they do Tony Hawk's, and hopefully this interview helps, even just a little.
I talked to Laura about growing up as a skateboarder, and where she sees the future of the sport going.
| (Left: Todd Friedman, Right: Warren Bolster) |
Molly Schiot: What was the eight-year-old you doing?
Laura Thornhill: I was such a friggin' tomboy. I was a die-hard rollerskater. Every Friday, Saturday, and any holiday, I was at the roller rink. I'll never forget the first time I saw urethane wheels, and it was revolutionizing the way that the guys that worked at the rink could skate around. It was the cool new thing. I hadn't even seen them on skateboards yet. But I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and there were some boys that lived next door, these six little boys, and they had a beater skateboard, and they would leave it on their front porch and I would always steal it. I'd keep it for a day or two, and I learned how to kick turn and go up and down my driveway. I'd go up the driveway and up the sidewalk to the house and back, and I loved to skateboard.
It was called a Black Knight. It was a small wooden one with really archaic ball-bearing wheels and clay wheels. If you hit any little tiny pebble, you were flying. You were going to eat shit. I just started riding because it was another athletic thing to endeavor into. For me, it wasn't like I was seeing other girls do it. It was just something I wanted to do. The area I moved to, it was all hills, and it was great to just ride. Then that first issue of Skateboarder Magazine came out, and there were a few pictures of girls in it. I saw that and I went, I want to be in this magazine. I'm going to be the best.
MS: Historically, women have faced a lot of backlash when they try to join male-dominated sports, but it seems that your experience in the world of skateboarding was different. Why do you think that was?
LT: I don't know, maybe it was just the newness of it, it was just seen as something cool and fun. I know that over the course of the past several decades, girls have fought to have their space, to be recognized, and to have equal prizes and pay. It's so unfortunate because my past and history with the sport was so drastically different. I don't know if it's just the way the culture shifted, and skateboarding became more of a boys' club. I think there's a lot of companies that are paying guys a lot of money to represent their product and there's a lot of companies that are only favoring a very minute sector of the girls that are out there skating. Is it the way they dress? Is it the way they look? Is it the style in which they skate that [makes the companies] choose who they want to support and pay to represent their product? There are so many girls out there that are blowing the guys away on any given day at any skate park across the nation.
MS: What advice, based on everything that you've learned, would you give your seventeen-year-old self?
LT: Be true to yourself and try to honor who you are, and be authentic in pursuing the things that you feel passionate about. Looking back over the course of my life, sure, there's many things I would change if I could, but overall I've had an amazing life. I have amazing friends and family, and I've experienced unbelievable things. I always followed my intuition, and it led me to amazing places.
MS: You don't skate as much anymore because of an injury. Back in your skateboard days, what did it feel like to be on a skateboard?
LT: After I dislocated my elbow, I just really lost my edge. It was 1978, and I was skateboarding at the opening of a skate park in Montebello, and I borrowed Stacy Peralta's skateboard and went and did a run, came back and did a kick turn to stop and hand it back to him, and when I did that, the board slid out and I fell back, caught myself, and fully popped my elbow out. It stuck out straight. It was bad, and I was never the same after that. Even after it healed, I dislocated it three more times after that and just locked it back into place. It changed everything for me.
But what did it feel like? Oh my God, it was just the best. It was total self-expression and freedom. You're controlling that board. It was pretty unlike anything I had ever experienced. The only thing I could compare it to at that time when I first started skateboarding was riding a bike. I'll never forget when I first started riding on dirt as a kid. We had these trails in Texas that we would ride on that are essentially just some wheel-track trails, and that was pretty fantastic and free. Something about it is just complete freedom, and the opportunity to express yourself in that freedom of movement and flow and flying down the street, flying down the sidewalk, flying over banks of the different skate spots, whether it be a reservoir, a pipe, a pool, or just a big perfectly black-topped-asphalt vacant neighborhood that hasn't been built on yet, which was La Costa in San Diego. I would sum it up by saying complete freedom.
Now I continue to stay active. I am an avid skier. I'm heavily into cycling. I mountain bike, I hike, I trail run, I do yoga.
MS: That's a beauty of an answer. If there are people reading this that are on the fence about getting a young girl a skateboard for their birthday or a holiday, what would you say to them?
LT: Absolutely. Just do it. If that's what they're into, give them every opportunity to migrate to whatever it is that is going to help them express themselves. Follow the path of something that's an individualistic outlet like skateboarding is.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Molly Schiot is a director in Los Angeles and just had her book come out celebrating women pioneers under the sport umbrella. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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