| |  | | | | June 28, 2016 | Letter No. 40 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi Lennys,
I am extremely uncomfortable in my own body right now. It's basically all I can think about. That's because I'm currently sharing my torso with an adorable uterus barnacle who, according to my obstetrician, already weighs over 7 pounds even though she's not supposed to be here for another two weeks. I know I mentioned in last week's intro that I am nine years pregnant, but I've been waddling around my neighborhood with an entire human weighing on my pelvis, feeling pangs of unbearable pressure radiating through my lower half like tiny electric shocks.
The way I'm feeling, though, is sort of appropriate given the theme running through this week's issue: all of these pieces are about women, bodies, and space.
Alexis Wilkinson, the comedy writer and director, has a funny and searing essay for us this week about learning to own spaces where her presence was "unusual, unwelcome, and occasionally even unprecedented." Alexis felt out of place as a black, straight-A student in her super-white high-school STEM classes, and when she first got to Harvard, the feeling remained. But when she became the president of Harvard's storied humor mag, the Lampoon, she started owning space — taking up room and calling the shots.
Then we have the designer Shoshanna Gruss, who tells us about why she started her eponymous fashion label: she couldn't find any clothes that fit her body properly, so she decided to make her own. Sarah Gouda writes a beautiful piece about how getting satellite TV — specifically, the Arab Radio and Television Network — helped her embrace the Egyptian immigrant culture of her parents. The arrival of Arabic soap operas into Sarah's family home changed their TV room from an assimilated American cultural space into "a site of exchange."
Next, we have a comic by Kate Gavino called Eyes Down Here, which is basically the perfect name for a comic about breasts. Kate has a family history of breast cancer, and she manages to somehow make her illustrations both delightful and potentially life-saving. Finally, our editor at large Mikki Halpin wants you to watch the new BBC America show Thirteen, which is about a woman trying to re-acclimate to society after being held captive for over a decade. What's special about the show, Mikki writes, is that it makes you think about the true meaning of being "free" when you're a woman in the world.
I'll be gone for the rest of the summer while I usher a new female person into our very imperfect world. I hope that she is able to have space for herself without having to fight for it. And I hope you get the space you all need to feel comfortable in your own skins and souls.
Xox
Jess, editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | Owning It | | | | By Alexis Wilkinson | | |
I spent a summer in New York during college living in a neighborhood called Borough Park, in Brooklyn. That's when I had the immense pleasure of getting my first (so far only, but let's not jinx it) urinary-tract infection. As far as I understand it, you get a UTI from not peeing after sex or not drinking enough cranberry juice, which made it absurd that I would get one, because I've done those two things simultaneously. I was furious at my urinary tract, and it was furious at me. This angry standoff went on for days. Not even a friend's insistence on calling me a "cutie with a 'uti" helped to improve my sour mood. After a fifth night of agony, I headed down to the emergency room.
The emergency room was a nightmare on a level that would've made Dante go "holy shit." Maybe almost a hundred people in a big open room. Beds were pushed so close together I could hear the woman next to me quietly praying in what I think was Armenian. I waited six hours to get painkillers or antibiotics, during which time my phone died and I learned far too much intimate detail about my neighbor's small intestine.
And then it got worse. When I finally got the routine antibiotics I needed, gathered my hospital-issued bag, and started to trundle off to the bathroom to change out of my paper gown, a man sitting near the bed next to mine got up and snatched the bag out of my hand. My own clothes. Out of my own hand. My own black hand.
I was stunned for a moment while he rifled through it. Apparently, the hospital issued us all the same bag for our clothes, a fact you could easily look around and see because we were all trapped together in this windowless hellhole. Yet he was convinced I had stolen his sick grandmother's clothing. Satisfied after picking through my undergarments, he muttered an apology before thrusting my clothes back at me. I went into the bathroom and promptly burst into tears.
What made that experience the particular worst was not having space or any ownership. I was half-naked, stacked nearly on top of other people in a strange part of town. I was stripped of everything that I owned and then when I finally managed to collect my stuff, someone immediately assumed I stole it. I felt personally humiliated on a level that took me back to the not-so-distant past.
I have strong feelings about space and things. At the worst times in my life, I haven't had a lot of either, and I think that's true for most people. People need space. People need to feel like they have some semblance of control over their environment. People need a place to belong.
I've often found myself in places where my presence is unusual, unwelcome, and occasionally even unprecedented. There's Wisconsin, where I was born and where I grew up excelling in math and science, which often made me "the fly in the milk" of all my lily-white advanced STEM classes. Not to mention that I was/am a girl. Have you ever had a male teacher kiss you on the head for getting a good grade? I have! It's about as fun and totally appropriate as it sounds. On top of that, my family moved around a lot, which made me feel rootless and insecure wherever I was, hyperaware of my surroundings, constantly putting my back against the wall so nothing and no one could sneak up on me.
Then came Harvard. No sweat, right? Time to get my back off the wall! I'll walk in there like I own it! Put my feet up on the couch where Mark Zuckerberg sat! Debate famous professors! Pretend I know what anthropology is! Act like a fuckin' Obama, damn it!
This is what I told myself I would do.
I did no such thing.
Instead, I sat on the floor. A lot. I didn't have much furniture my freshman year. In my own head, I crawled around Harvard on my knees just trying to find a little corner where I didn't feel massively uncomfortable. I wasn't supposed to be there. This is not my place. These aren't my things. That's just how it is and how it always will be.
I applied to the Lampoon, the 140-year-old humor magazine known for graduates like Conan O'Brien and B.J. Novak, looking for a place to be. I also was looking to prove to myself that I could earn some space, even at Harvard. It took a long time to feel comfortable even after I got on staff, even after I became president. One great incident involved myself and the former vice president Eleanor Parker meeting a male alum shortly after our election. It was the first time two women have simultaneously held the positions Eleanor and I occupied. He looked us up and down before remarking, with all sincere concern, "Well, it'll be difficult handling the finances of the place," as though this were 1950. Fun fact: I got my degree in economics. Parker got hers in organismic and evolutionary biology. I think our lady brains can more than handle a couple of spreadsheets.
Becoming president of an organization that old was surreal and gave me a weird high I can attribute only to a sense of ownership. Finally, after so much struggle and occasional bigoted remarks, I belonged somewhere. I could take my back off the wall and just have fun. I could make people leave if they made my place unsafe. And as I listen to the conversations about Harvard's penalizing of single-sex social organizations, potentially squashing all of final-club and Greek life, all I keep thinking about is space. Does this give more space to more people? Will this help people feel like they belong? Or does it just destroy the few spaces that exist at all, sweeping under the rug a bigger issue?
I graduated last year and moved to Los Angeles to write for the latest season of HBO's Veep. I have my own place here. I recently started writing for Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I have a seat at a writer's table. I direct! I call the shots on my set! I have a nice big room, a room my boyfriend will be moving into soon, a development that wouldn't be possible if I didn't feel so secure. Now that I belong in a space, all I want to do is share it with people I care about. Share the space and share that feeling.
And so I am here. And where I am is mine. I'm not going to crawl through a doggy door with my head down; I'm going to stroll through the front gate, and then once I get inside I'm gonna install one of those badass wheelchair open-button things that make you feel like a wizard. You, a guest, will support me or get the fuck out of my internal/external house. You will not snatch my hospital bag of clothes or my seat at the table or my dignity from me, because this, all of this, all of my life, all that I claim, is mine. I own it. I've earned it. And nobody can take it from me. Not without one hell of a fight.
Alexis Wilkinson is a comedy writer and director who lives in Los Angeles. | | | | | | | | | | | | No One Wanted to Dress Me. So I Started a Fashion Line | | | | By Shoshanna Gruss | | |
I developed early, which to a ten- or eleven-year-old is totally scary. I went to an all-girls school, so I was lucky in that way, although girls were not that easy on me. I was dealing with older girls saying, "You need to wear a bra," and I was just horrified. Even back then, I felt like there were these moms who thought I was too sexy, or sexual. I was like, "I was born this way; I didn't do this on purpose."
I would go shopping, and nothing worked on me, from age 13 until I started my line, really. I would walk through stores like they were museums. I thought things looked beautiful. The preteen clothing either didn't fit me at all or looked so overtly sexy that I couldn't get away with it. So early on, I realized I had to come up with my own style, that I did not have a trendy body, so trends were not going to be my friend. I had to figure it out.
Obviously, there was no Internet shopping. What existed in the late '90s felt very homogeneous in style. It was sort of 90210, Melrose Place styles, and the waifish Kate Moss look. Dresses had no shape. They all made me look kind of dumpy, and I had to have everything altered; and I had to do things like sew beads onto my bra because they would show through, and I wanted to make it look pretty and intentional. Especially with swimwear: I had all my bathing suits custom-made. My mom found this place. The quality was really just so-so, and they were insanely expensive, but at least I could wear a bikini that was sort of like a bra top, and a cute bottom, and I felt good in it.
I went to UCLA and graduated in 1997, and while I was in California, I worked in a boutique called Tracey Ross. It was the coolest boutique at the time (though nothing in it fit me). Sure, there was Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue, but there were very few independent lines. There was no Scoop back then. There was no Intermix. There was, like, Tocca, and Anna Sui, and, obviously, Betsey Johnson, but it wasn't the array of designers that it is today.
While I worked at Tracey Ross, there were a lot of young girls who came in to show Tracey their designs, and sometimes she would buy them, try it out, give them a shot; I know this planted the seed in my head. I guess I had envisioned that to have a clothing line you needed $100 million, and factories, and a thousand people working for you, and then I'd see these girls who had these cute ideas, who had made some samples, and then they did a production of maybe 30 pieces, 40 pieces, 100 pieces.
As I stood in the store, day after day, I wanted to be able to help women feel beautiful, and celebrated, and not walk through a store wondering: Why doesn't anyone want to dress me? So I moved home after graduation, and one day that summer I just had this epiphany: Why don't I start a line of clothing that is more inclusive of more women's bodies? I know what's not out there, and I know what I want.
It was the perfect recipe to start this. The line was to address many different body shapes, by making sure dresses were bra friendly. I used boning or unique design construction to do so. More than anything else, I was thinking about woman bodies as I designed.
I did an internship in a factory for a few months and learned the trade, then I came across a place called Total Control. What they did, it was all in-house, they had pattern-makers, they had production people, so everything was done in one place. That was how I started. I found a multi-vendor showroom and bartered with and borrowed from everyone. In the showroom, Bloomingdale's had come to see a different line, but they also saw my line, and they liked the concept, and they thought they'd try it out.
When I launched, the fashion industry's response was entirely negative. It was this: "She knows nothing, less than nothing." I was coming off of dating someone super-famous, so there was a ton of cattiness from regular people too. But not from the buyers. The buyers took it really seriously, and even more so because it sold.
And it sold really well. We shipped November 1998, and it was Black Friday, and I think we sold 68 pieces that afternoon in New York alone, at the Bloomingdale's there. That's not what a normal sales day is for someone like what I was at that time. We were in ten stores that November, and then 70 by spring of 1999, and then 150 by the next year.
Then, when we launched swim, in 2000, which was two years after the dress line, it was such a much bigger success than the dresses, and it hit such a nerve because we sold tops and bottoms separately. It was the first time any bikini line did that. We did A through triple-D, which nobody in the contemporary market was doing. I remember sitting down with Bloomingdale's, or Saks, and they're like, "We're not selling these as separates, it's crazy." I said, "You don't sell a bra and underwear as a set, why on earth would I? Just try it, I'll take back every piece if it doesn't work." And it did, it sold. Now, I think, almost all bikinis are sold as separates.
The conversation around fit and bodies is totally different than it was when I started. It's different. It literally is a different world. There's more ready-to-wear that people are really going to wear, and I think that there is less of the anti-woman fashion. But to this day, I'm defensive about women's bodies. I'm defensive about my own body. Because people still say things like "Boobs are in this year," or "Athletic bodies are in," or this or that. It shouldn't be in or out. What about everyone else who doesn't have that body type, they should just wait until their body type comes into style? You're born with basically who you're going to be, and it should all be inclusive, all the time.
—As told to Jessica Grose
Shoshanna Gruss is the founder and creative director of Shoshanna. She lives in New York City with her three delicious kiddos. | | | | | | | | | | | | What's On TV | | | | By Sarah Gouda | | |
I watched an obscene amount of television as a child. It's literally impossible to overstate the magnitude of my consumption — cumulative years of my life have been spent slack-jawed in front of glowing boxes both big and small. There is nary a '90s show that I haven't seen: The Secret World of Alex Mack, Seinfeld, Animaniacs, the entire TGIF lineup. I'd gorge on it all. My parents, in their immigrant innocence, just didn't bother much with enforced hour-limits or PG-ratings approvals. So long as I got good grades, I was free to rot my brain in any manner I saw fit.
My sister and I held dominion over the TV in our family room. When our parents entered the space, it was understood that the kids would retain ownership of the controller, of deciding what to watch. In exchange, we knew to not interrupt my father as he and his friends smoked shisha in the garage. We didn't dare walk through the living room while my mother knelt down on her prayer rug — doing so would sever her direct line to Mecca. Sure, we crossed these invisible borders occasionally, but precautions were always taken: one of us stood as lookout while the other rummaged through my mom's dresser drawers of old photos, searching for clues to her and my father's life in Egypt, before we ever came into the picture.
To look at our house, you'd never know such boundaries existed: ours was the cacophony of objects and scents and language that occurs when you stuff two worlds into one home. The exterior looked like every other house in our suburb of Cincinnati, but inside it was chaos. Oriental ottomans stacked with Amelia Bedelia books stained with greasy fingertips. I was sharply embarrassed by our disorder; the sparkling sterility of my classmates' homes always reflected our foreigner's ineptitude back at me.
In the eye of our hurricane was our stupidly large TV. Everything stemmed out in relation to that garish piece of furniture: empty Lean Cuisine containers, hairbrushes, and math work sheets. My sister and I spent years doing our homework in front of the TV, studying the Seavers and the Winslows as if they were our next-door neighbors. We studied those people too, but in some shaken way the families on the screen felt more trustworthy than the ones down the street. It was TV families who gave us access to their most private moments, who showed us how a "normal" parent responds to first dates and caffeine pills and Thanksgiving meltdowns. They were all encrypted manuals. Somewhere in them was the raw information on how a person should be.
Though the kids ruled the remote control, we weren't always watching alone. My parents searched inside the TV like that, too, to some extent. In summer, we'd all watch The Wonder Years on Nick at Nite, my mom teary-eyed at Kevin's coming of age. She'd been only a little older than him when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, and here, finally, was something she understood: Kevin Arnold, the epitome of American boyhood, had experienced the space mission in much the same way she had across the world in Alexandria, Egypt. Our 54-channel cable package was our most useful tool in making sense of the America that seemed to exist everywhere but inside our home.
And then, in 1999, when I was 12 years old, my parents did something that upended our entire dynamic: they switched to satellite. I'd left for school at eight as usual, my brain sedated by a morning serving of Bobby's World reruns, and returned home to find the saucer sticky on our slanted, suburban roof. Turns out, an auntie had told my parents that if they switched to Dish Network they could get A.R.T. (Arab Radio and Television Network) beamed into our family room at any hour of the day. A bit of Egypt in Ohio.
This was bad. Switching from cable to satellite disrupted the rhythm of my tiny life. Gone were my scores of memorized channels — along with the hard-earned knowledge of which shows to alternate between during commercial breaks. Lost was my sovereignty over our home's only reliable television. Previously uninterested in even entering our wood-paneled family room, my parents were now blending into the furniture. My mom loved the soap operas that aired during the month of Ramadan. They were terrible, overacted messes, but they gave people something to talk about at iftar, the breaking of the fast.
I had never seen my parents like this before, so immersed and fluent in what was airing on our screen. My mom would watch those soap operas while clinging to the phone, occasionally letting out a squeal to her best friend in Philadelphia — a fellow MD she'd grown up with in Alexandria. She seemed to plump into a teenage girl in those moments, which irritated me. Perhaps it was the rattling effect of seeing my mother as something other than caretaker, perhaps it was that I was missing the episode of Fresh Prince of Bel Air where Tom Jones surprises Carlton, an episode that I'd seen at least 13 times.
But eventually my anger at their invasion withered into resignation (like it always does). I don't remember how it happened, but pretty soon I was just as invested in the Ramadan soap operas as my mom. Both my sister and I became the ones who gasped in horror as Ahmed professed his love for Leila who loved Amr whose wife Yasmine was dying. Lured in by the warm familiarity of the television, I was fascinated, rather than demoralized, by the culture that I thought prevented us from achieving true "Americanness." These shows transformed our family room into a two-way tunnel, transporting information about where we stood and the roads that had gotten my parents here.
At first with timidity and then with a ravenous hunger that surprised me, I began to ask questions about Egypt, about where we came from. Whatever was on the screen — whether Arabic or American — became my jumping-off point. Was there prom in Egypt too? Did you make breakfast in bed on Mother's Day? Did you have a Mother's Day?
Before that, some foggy anxiety had stopped me from asking the questions on my own. And like so many immigrant parents, mine never really offered up the answers. But still it confuses me. Why had I always been so hesitant to show interest in the country I only narrowly missed calling home? Maybe it was that I was so preoccupied with blending in to my own surroundings. Or maybe to ask would have been to admit ignorance about the very thing that defined me to the outside world.
However slowly, I began to uncover an almost desperate desire to belong to the place my parents would always consider home, in the broader sense at least. The Arabic TV shows didn't grant me that coveted sense of belonging — I don't think I'll ever feel fully "Egyptian," whatever that means — but they tricked me into embracing our cultural chaos. They turned our family room into a site of exchange. There, we could interpret and reinterpret our different but entwined existences, rot our brains, and wonder about each other in peace.
Sarah Gouda is a writer living in Chicago. | | | | | | | | | | | | Eyes Down Here | | | | By Kate Gavino | | | |
Kate Gavino is the creator of the blog and book, Last Night's Reading (Penguin Books). | | | | | | | | | | | | Lenny Recommends: Thirteen | | | | By Mikki Halpin | | |
Ivy, the heroine of the new five-part BBC America series Thirteen, isn't freed by a prince, like in fairy tales about female captives. The anti-Rapunzel, she simply emerges from the house where she has been kept prisoner for over a decade — pale, barefoot, and tentative — and then runs like a frightened animal to the nearest pay phone to call for help. We learn very little about her life in confinement. Thirteen, which originally aired in the UK in February and March of this year, gives us a survivor's story set firmly in the present. The series never looks back, though as Ivy interacts with her family and friends, who have known her "all her life," they quickly realize that is only half-true. Taken at 13, then kept for 13 years, she is now 26. They need to deal with the current Ivy, not the Ivy they remember.
This Ivy is wary, shy, manipulative, and defiant. Her lips wobble and she has trouble making eye contact. She sometimes sounds like a typical teenager, demanding a phone and to see her onetime boyfriend; when her mother won't let her, a tantrum ensues. "I've had sex!" she yells, the words knifing though the air. She doesn't call it rape. When holes in her account of the abduction and the years she spent locked in a basement emerge, the police and her parents begin to question everything she says. As soon as there are discrepancies in her story, the issue of consent creeps out the window. Just like assault survivors everywhere, once Ivy "admits" to something outside the traditional victim's role, her abuser is seen as less culpable.
Ivy's list of betrayals before, during, and after she returns is long. She is not the only person keeping secrets. Her parents have divorced in the interim, but they don't tell her. Her teen boyfriend is married, but he removes his wedding ring when they meet. Her father had given up on the idea that she might ever return. Her sister questions whether she is really Ivy. The police, at first her saviors, begin to investigate her. Every time Ivy's anger flares at these discoveries, the more she resists the stereotype of a timid victim and the idea of happily ever after.
We're in a moment where there are several kidnapping narratives running through popular culture, whether they're used for dark humor, as with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, or for a more serious emotional punch, as with the Oscar-winning Room. And, of course, the female captive is a mainstay of our most beloved myths and fairy tales, from Persephone to Tiger Lily. What sets Thirteen apart is not only its exclusive focus on Ivy's life after she escapes, but the way it acknowledges that all freedom is relative.
I haven't been through a horrific trauma, but I've definitely — like most women — come up against infuriating societal expectations about how I should live. In a way, Ivy fled a certain kind of safety when she came out that door, leaving behind a world where she had lived half her life, one where all the rules were set and understandable. She left this kind of demented haven for a situation (a situation called life!) where she has to constantly make decisions, often while doubting her instincts, and then defend her choices to the people around her. I feel like I go through this every day, although on a much smaller scale. The show is about Ivy's freedom, but it made me realize that there isn't a lot out there about what it's actually like to be a "free" woman.
Thirteen stars Jodie Comer as Ivy — you may have seen her in My Mad Fat Diary (another British show I am obsessed with, which you must also see). She barely seems to breathe throughout the series, and I often found myself holding my breath as well, feeling Ivy's constant worry about pleasing those around her, who have almost become her new captors. But Ivy is a survivor, especially as the events of her new life play out. Thirteen is a psychological thriller with my favorite kind of heroine: one who makes you cheer when she triumphs, cry when she is shattered, and nod understandingly when she fucks up. I don't think I will be rereading "Rapunzel" in my adult life, but I am super-psyched to be watching this show again.
Mikki Halpin is Lenny's editor at large. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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