| | | An interview with author Jessica Luther about sexual assault and college football, fighting for abortion rights in El Salvador, and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | October 18, 2016 | Letter No. 56 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi, Lennys,
Well, here we are again. Another week closer to the elections, another week of not being shocked by the new stream of allegations against Donald Trump: the things he said, the things she said, the things everyone else said to defend the things everyone else is saying. Are you as exhausted as I am? I have begun obsessively thinking about Thanksgiving, wishing for it to get here. One, because that means the election is over and we have survived it, and two, because I am imagining myself blissfully passed out after eating turkey and mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. It's my current happy place.
While we at Lenny can't speed up time, I do hope that our emails put you in a happy place and that you can take a little time to read every week. Yes, it may seem like this world is bullshit, but there are still other good things happening out there, there are other battles being fought elsewhere in the world. It's not pure happiness, but at least there is some comfort in knowing that we, that all women, are battling together.
This week, Maggie Mertens talks to Jessica Luther, who wrote a book about the relationship between sexual-assault allegations and college football programs. Sometimes it seems like there is no point in denouncing rape culture, because of course everyone is against rape! But then you spend a week listening to people — listening to women, even! — discussing how it's OK to grab anyone by the pussy at whatever time. You realize that, my God, maybe no one has been hearing any of the outrage at all. It sure as hell feels that way when you read Lauren Bohn's profile of Morena Herrera, the El Salvadoran women's-rights advocate who is fighting for abortion rights. Abortion law in El Salvador is even more draconian than it is in Poland: abortion is illegal in all circumstances, and women who have miscarriages have been jailed (Lauren talks to a few of them as well). This is the future that certain candidates want for American women, too. Our bodies are a battleground and will continue to be so. Never forget that.
But not everything in this issue is designed to make you wanna go to sleep forever. The designer Prabal Gurung talks to us about how the New York fashion world welcomed him as a Nepalese immigrant, and how, after all this so-called talk of diversity, he wants every woman to feel like they belong in the fashion world, too. The actress Mary-Louise Parker talks to Leigh Flayton about the importance of kindness, something that's easy to forget in ugly times like these.
I also had the immense pleasure of talking to Allison Parrish, who has designed my favorite Twitter bot, the Ephemerides, which tweets out beautiful existential poems alongside raw images from outer space. Every time these tweets pop up on my timeline, they make me slow down. They remind me that we are so tiny, and the universe is so vast. They are humbling, and I am thankful for its existence. Just like I am thankful for Lenny and all the beauty and good that we all still put out into the world.
With love,
Laia Garcia, deputy editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Unsportsmanlike Conduct | | | | By Maggie Mertens | | |
Austin-based reporter Jessica Luther was raised a Florida State University football fan. Her parents were alumni, and as an undergraduate there she faithfully supported her team. When rape allegations were made against FSU's star quarterback Jameis Winston in late 2013, Luther's love of her team ran into her responsibilities as an independent journalist who covered sports and culture. She dove in, tracking every rape case or allegation connected with football players. She was particularly interested in the cases against college football players that were being largely ignored by the national media, all at a moment when campus sexual assault was being talked about more than ever.
The book she wrote after that exploration, Unsportsmanlike Conduct, published September 6, rationally explores the "playbook" that college football powers rely on when these incidents occur — "plays" like "Nothing to See Here," "The Shrug," and "Moving On" — and how the culture of college football is a microcosm of toxic masculinity and rape culture. Even as a journalist who covers sports and gender myself, I felt near constant shock reading Luther's descriptions of this systemic problem.
Since she finished writing the book, Luther has been continuing on the same beat, covering stories like the Brock Turner case, the sexual assault by a football player and subsequent administrative cover-up at Baylor, and the fallout from the Duke-lacrosse false accusation case. She has also started work on her next book, cowritten with ESPNw's Kavitha Davidson, How to Love Sports When They Don't Love You Back. I called Luther at home in August to discuss the intersection of college football and sexual assault, and whether any hope for change is on the horizon.
Maggie Mertens: In the book you describe the connection between football and masculinity as one of the roots of off-the-field violence perpetrated by some college football players. Could you explain how masculinity and football have become so intertwined, and how that plays into sexual violence?
Jessica Luther: There are ways that the language of sports makes women inferior. There's a reason that we have the phrase "You throw like a girl" as an insult. You get called a "pussy" if you're not doing well. There's always been an implication that to be good at sports, you have to be manly. Football is one of the most brutal sports that we have. So they're doing a thing that we code as masculine. And there are almost no women who participate in any part of the football process.
That all matters, because one of the things about sexual violence is — I feel like I always have to preface this with: I'm not a psychologist — it's a dehumanization of the person who is being violated. They're not seen as a fully human person. That's why you can do violence to them.
MM: One thing I found so bizarre were these "hostess" programs, where universities will set up the football recruits with the most attractive young women on campus as a way to sway them to choose their school.
JL: So you're trying to recruit seventeen- and eighteen-year-old guys to come to your school. No one can pay anybody, which is the normal way in our capitalist society that we convince someone to come work for us. So in order to lure them to campus, there's a handful of things that you do. You hire the best coaches, you tell them you can help them make it to the NFL, you give them ridiculous facilities.
The other thing they do is they position them as big men on campus and tell them, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, that access to women is one of the things they'll get when they come to campus. Coaches will do things like have someone Photoshop a picture of the guy they're trying to recruit on a magazine cover walking hand-in-hand with Beyoncé, or some other famous woman. And these hostess programs are definitely being used still, though there are kind of rules about it now.
The implication of all of this is one of your rewards is access to women. I'm not surprised, then, when it manifests in violence off the field against women.
MM: It feels like we're seeing more reporting on football players involved in these violent cases. Are we at a point when toxic masculinity and football are becoming more intertwined, or do we finally have the chance to break them down?
JL: We're having a real robust conversation about all of this finally, and I credit a lot of it to the fact that survivors are getting to be a part of it in a lot of ways that they probably weren't able to in the past. We have new mechanisms that allow survivors to tell their stories unmediated, through social media and blogging and YouTube. We're also having a very big cultural conversation. We're talking about Bill Cosby and Nate Parker and the Stanford swimmer and campus sexual assault, and sexual harassment at Fox News.
MM: You write about how we tend to hear about cases of rape and assault as they relate to football players — many of whom are young black men — but we hardly ever see those in charge, the coaches, the college administrators, the NCAA officials — who are often older, white men — held accountable. Why is that?
JL: Most of this is held in place by money. You can't talk about college football without talking about money, because there's so much of it.
And any time that we can position the black man as the person perpetrating a crime, we feel more comfortable talking about that as an individual case. On the flip side, we often get really obsessed with whether these usually anonymous women who report are lying. It's easy to redirect to either of those narratives.
And the system is all so tied together. The university administrator defers to the coach, the local police department often has connections to the athletic department, they care about the team, they work for the team, they're boosters, they're alumni. So they are invested in keeping these players on the field too. There's nowhere to go from there.
MM: I was shocked when I read about the coach from Vanderbilt, James Franklin [who had players involved in a 2013 gang rape; two have been found guilty], who was then hired by Penn State. Jerry Sandusky's Penn State! That just shows how this system does not punish those in charge.
JL: Yeah, I remember when I heard that James Franklin was on the short list to get hired at Penn State, I was very surprised — that's probably the nicest way I can say it — that a coach who had five players arrested, four who were involved, the fifth one was an accomplice and pled guilty to helping after the fact, is the guy you're bringing in to Penn State to replace the guy who replaced Paterno. Like, what do you have to do to not get hired?
MM: So what does change look like? Can we divorce football from violent crimes?
JL: I want to say yes. There are examples of football players who do the right thing and care very deeply [about this issue]. What would it be like if we just had teams of guys like that?
Then there's a question of, how do you get more women in? This is not just the sports or football question. Part of that is going to be pressure from the outside. There are women who could do these jobs right now.
MM: One of your final paragraphs alludes to that idea that understanding the problems more, if you care about the sport, it can make your heart hurt, but I thought, Well, that's where change begins.
JL: At Baylor, all the change that happened [an outside law firm's investigation after a football player was found guilty of raping a fellow student athlete led to the firing of the head football coach and the demotion of the university president] was good. Then early this year, a survivor came forward, and she wrote a blog post that went viral. That led other survivors to come forward. ESPN continued to do their reporting.
And then there were thousands of alumni who signed a petition saying they want the entire outside-law-firm report. That was a big moment. So much of what happened there was from the outside, from survivors and students and the media continuing to push, and then it was alumni coming together to say, "This isn't good enough."
When people start to rethink their relationships to the sport — that doesn't mean they don't get to enjoy it or watch it — but it might start to force change.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Maggie Mertens is a writer in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in espnW, TheAtlantic.com, Deadspin, and Glamour, among others. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Mother of El Salvador's Pro-Choice Movement | | | | By Lauren Bohn | | |
| (Photograph of Morena Herrera by Lauren Bohn) |
Thirty years ago, Morena Herrera was launching guerrilla attacks against a military-led government in El Salvador. She and her leftist comrades were incensed by an autocratic leadership that had ushered in sweeping inequality and a crackdown on civil liberties. As a commander and top military strategist, Herrera risked everything in a twelve-year war that left an estimated 70,000 dead.
Now the 60-year-old titan is fighting another war as the matriarch of the women's movement in El Salvador. She is the founder of the country's first feminist organization and the president of the Citizen's Group for the Decriminalization of Abortion.
"I didn't think I'd still be fighting for equality in 2016," the curly-haired titan said with a sigh while lighting a cigarette at her home in Suchitoto, the country's cobblestoned cultural capital. During the war, the town was nearly ravaged, and thousands fled.
Women were part of the country's armed insurgency from its inception. Women made up around 30 percent of the members of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a coalition of left-wing groups revolting against the government. Though the movement was hardly a feminist utopia, Herrera says the front gave women a sense of agency they had been denied in a society that saw them only as mothers and wives. Women proved to be successful guerrillas, as they were less likely to arouse suspicion and often went undetected when executing operations.
The civil war ended in 1992 with UN-brokered peace negotiations. An amnesty law was enacted, granting impunity to both sides for war crimes committed. FMLN transformed into a left-wing political party, which came into power in 2009. But many feel that the once-revolutionary group has been slow to tackle the country's vast gender inequities.
"Some of us thought that as soon as the war ended, we'd all have rights," Herrera said. "But we soon learned that the struggle continues."
Plagued by inequality and poverty, El Salvador is the most dangerous peacetime country in the world, per capita. The small Central American country has the highest rate of femicide in the world and one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Latin America. In 1998, abortion became illegal and criminalized in all cases including rape, incest, and those in which a mother's life is at risk (it had previously been legal if a woman's life was at risk as well as in cases of rape and of fetal abnormality). The country's powerful Catholic Church and pro-life lobby enthusiastically backed the new law and still wield significant influence among a vastly conservative population. On October 11, the FMLN introduced a bill in congress that would bring the abortion law back to its 1998 provisions. But without support from minority parties — many of which are conservative — the bill is unlikely to pass.
Herrera has been a perennial target for the country's misogynistic vitriol. Over the years, she has received countless death threats and is vilified almost weekly in local media.
"They can try to hurt me all they want," she said while walking to a local women's center that she helped establish, the first of its kind. "Nothing scares me anymore."
When 33-year-old Maria Teresa Rivera was released from prison last May, she could barely recognize her twelve-year-old son.
In 2011, Rivera's mother-in-law found her in the bathroom almost unconscious and bleeding heavily. She had suffered a miscarriage, but staff at the local hospital reported her to the police and accused her of having an abortion. She was sentenced to 40 years in prison for aggravated homicide.
El Salvador's draconian abortion laws and the criminalization of those who assist with abortions have created widespread paranoia, if not a witch hunt, in which women who have had miscarriages or other obstetric emergencies are suspected of having abortions.
Rivera is one of seventeen women, known as "Las 17," who were sentenced to up to 40 years in jail following reported miscarriages between 1999 and 2011, most on charges of aggravated homicide because their fetuses were ruled as viable. According to Herrera's Citizen's Group, which has petitioned for their pardons, a total of 25 women are now in jail.
"In this country, the rich eat the poor," said Rivera, noting that all the women who have been wrongly accused are lower-class Salvadorans. "We are forgotten."
When Rivera was released, Herrera was at the courthouse waiting for her. She counts it as one of the happiest moments of her life. But the women didn't celebrate for long. The country's attorney general soon announced his intention to appeal the decision. Herrera and lawyers say there is a high likelihood that Rivera may be sent back to prison.
"I grew up in orphanages," Rivera said, with tears filling her eyes. "I don't want my son to have the same life.
But outside Herrera's vibrant network, there's little sympathy for Rivera or others still languishing behind bars. At a recent rally for the country's right-wing party, known as Arena, many harangued Las 17 and called for Rivera's imprisonment, calling her a baby killer and murderer.
"It's simple: Life begins at conception," Arena parliamentarian Ricardo Andrés Velásquez Parker explained after the rally. Abortion charges currently carry a sentence of 2 to 8 years, but Parker recently introduced a motion to increase the maximum sentence to 50 years, the same sentence that aggravated homicide carries.
"When you have an abortion, you are committing aggravated homicide. You should spend up to 50 years in prison. Period."
| (Left to Right: Rosa Esmerada Garcia, Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, Maria Teresa Rivera. All photographs by Lauren Bohn) |
On a recent Friday afternoon, I visited Ilopango, El Salvador's women's prison, where most of the 25 wrongly accused women are serving time. I met 32-year-old Teodora del Carmen Vásquez, one of Rivera's best friends while in prison, who has already served 9 years of her 30-year sentence. She delivered her baby stillbirth at nearly nine months.
"We have no rights," Vásquez said as a prison official assigned to accompany journalists held up a voice recorder while closely monitoring the time. Inside the prison's gates, Vásquez is known as "Helen" because when she first entered, she was afraid to use her real name for fear of assault or worse from inmates who had heard about her case and didn't believe that she had miscarried. Prison doesn't guarantee a safe space, with little tolerance among women for those who have had or been accused of having abortions. Luckily, Vásquez didn't experience the harassment she anticipated, and she now tells her story to some, though she has still kept the nickname.
"When I get out of here, I want to study law," she said, before retiring to a room shared by 22 women, some of whom sleep on the floor. Her family is so poor that her ten-year-old son can't afford to make the three-hour commute from the countryside to visit her, so she sees him once a year. "I want to fight for us."
Herrera says El Salvador's strict abortion laws, coupled with an almost nonexistent national sexual-education curriculum, have fueled one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in Latin America.
"Look, I know how it feels to get pregnant and be scared," says Herrera. She is the mother of four daughters, three of whom are from different fathers. During the war, three of her partners were killed successively, leaving her a single mother while on the battlefield. "Women need to have options, and they don't."
Since 2000, Herrera and colleagues have unsuccessfully pushed for a sexual-education program. In 2008, the church blocked a manual for teachers, created by the education ministry, from being used to teach sexual health in schools.
"Our hands are tied," says Mirian Gonzalez, a coordinator at the Ministry of Health, acknowledging that current laws and the country's general conservatism often hinder the ministry's attempts to provide education and access to women. "We have to follow the law."
At a maternity clinic outside San Salvador, 16-year-old Rosa Esmerada Garcia restlessly tapped her feet while waiting for a medical exam. She's due any day. When the teenager began showing, she dropped out of school. She says her principal beat her. Now, she sells tortillas with her family to make extra money. Last month, her boyfriend, the father of their daughter, abandoned her.
In the beginning, Garcia didn't want to keep the baby. But she grew up in a staunchly Catholic family, and abortion was out of the question. She had heard about girls who had used misoprostol, a drug prescribed to treat stomach ulcers, to terminate their pregnancies (in countries where abortion is legal, misoprostol is used in tandem with the drug mifepristone for medical abortions). But at $200, the medication was off limits to her, as it is to many others in a nation where the average monthly wage is $300.
"I'm happy now that I'm having a baby," she said as she rubbed her belly, almost as big as her tiny frame. "But I don't want her to have this life."
Claudia Emera, a health worker at the clinic, says that 60 percent of the women who come to the center are teenagers, some as young as 13 years old. And of those, 20 percent actually want to be mothers. Herrera believes unwanted pregnancies have led to an uptick in suicides among teenage girls, a trend she hopes to stem with targeted workshops in several municipalities.
"They're sad and, in some cases, depressed," says Emera. "They don't feel they're in control of their own lives."
At the women's center, Herrera shuffled between meetings while greeting the scores of women who come on any given day for workshops and camaraderie.
At one end of the center, draped in bamboo shoots and festooned with portraits of Frida Kahlo, a psychologist led a sexual-education workshop for teachers from across the country. Downstairs, domestic- and sexual-violence survivors gathered for a training on how to counsel fellow women who have endured abuse. More than half of all Salvadoran women say they have suffered some form of violence in their lives. Over a quarter of these women were victims of sexual or physical violence.
"This is a country where women are silenced," said 27-year-old Christina Muria, who has been a counselor at the center for the past three years. "Poverty is high, and everything seems to be against you … Whenever I think about giving up, I just remember when I was ten and hiding in the closet as my mom was abused. I know I have to keep going."
As Herrera walked down the hall, Muria reached out to hug her.
"She's the reason we're here," said Muria, smiling shyly. "She first taught us that we can be more than mothers, than wives, than girlfriends."
Herrera blushed and shook her head. "We're all just sisters in the fight. I won't be free until we all are free," she said, still uncomfortable being in the spotlight even after years on the front line. "And that might not be for a while."
Lauren Bohn is the GroundTruth Project's Middle East correspondent based in Istanbul and the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted. Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women's Media Foundation. | | | | | | | | | | | | Twitter Poems from Outer Space | | | | By Laia Garcia | | |
I spend an extraordinary amount of time on Twitter. It's where I get my news, where I commiserate with the rest of the sane world while watching political debates on television, where at least once a week, I fangirl out about something great Seth Meyers did on his show. I have made so many friends on Twitter that it's basically like a Cheers that exists only in the digital realm (and has no booze). Twitter is its own universe, full of troll accounts, celebrity accounts, and bots, which are accounts programmed to do their own thing without a human being, which is basically what they told us the future would be like. Humans hanging out with bots, living in perfect harmony.
Some bots are funny, like the "Florida Man" bot that tweets out all the bizarre news that comes from America's wang; some are weird, like the bot that tweets out every color (with a swatch); and some are unintentionally existential, like the beloved Horse_ebooks.
A few weeks ago, though, I discovered a bot called the Ephemerides, which tweets out raw images from outer space taken by probes like the Voyager, accompanied by a computer-generated poem. The text of the poem is culled randomly from books on astrology and the deep ocean. The resulting tweet is almost always a beautiful and real depiction of what it's like to be a human being living in this vast unknown universe. Like, for example:
| (twitter.com/the_ephemerides) |
| (twitter.com/the_ephemerides) |
I soon found the woman responsible for my latest cyber obsession was Allison Parrish, a teacher in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU Tisch (the program's tagline is "A Center for the Recently Possible," which sounds like something out of a Charlie Kaufman movie). The Ephemerides is one of several bots she's made — other favorites include Modernart_exe, which tweets the names of made-up works of art, and BrainTendencies, which tweets out "common and pernicious randomly generated cognitive biases that prevent YOU from making rational decisions." She also created a cool board game called Rewordable, where you make words out of syllables instead of letters, for when you're ready to take your Scrabble obsession to the next level. Talking on the phone with Allison opened my mind to a whole other world of art and a new mode of thinking about language and technology and the future.
Laia Garcia: What came first for you, an interest in technology or an interest in language?
Allison Parrish: I think they both happened so early that I can't really distinguish between them. I've been doing computer programming since I was a little kid. I got a computer for Christmas when I was five, and I started doing computer programming then. I think I knew I was in love with language when I read The Hobbit, in like fourth grade, because Tolkien does all this wonderful weird stuff with language, and that's sort of the thing that set me off down that road.
LG: What was the first Twitter bot you built, and how did that idea come about for you?
AP: The first one that I built was Everyword [a bot that tweeted every word in the English language], back in 2007. It was probably one of the first Twitter bots ever. People were still investigating what we could do with this API (or application programming interface) that Twitter bots have.
At the time, I was a graduate student where I teach now, at ITP and I was taking a class on how to make computers do weird stuff with text. They were talking about a project called Every Icon, which is this project that's very quickly going through every possible [design that can be made on a square grid that is] 32 by 32 pixels, [using just] black or white pixels. I had this cheeky idea: Well, if someone can make every "icon," I'm going to say every word on Twitter, and it went on for seven years. It's really more of this cheeky grad-school project. What is the simplest thing I can do to get a laugh out of somebody?
LG: You've since made many other bots, but the one that made me reach out to you is the Ephemerides. It's poetic, which is obviously part of your intent, but whereas other bots are usually funny, this one is very sad and poignant. How much of that attitude or feeling is part of the code that you write, or is it just a result of the randomness of it?
AP: Yeah, that's a good question and I don't know. Satire is one of the things that computer-generated text and other computer-generated stuff does well, because satire at some point is just mimicry. Like, the joke is that that genre of art or that social practice is just so predictable that I can make the computer program do it.
There's a resistance to the lyrical when it comes to highly formal work — in any genre, but especially in poetry. When you think of Kenneth Goldsmith, for example, or Dada poetry, where it's really about process rather than the output, you usually don't associate that with something that can feel lyrical, that can feel like it's personal, that feels like it's emotional. You're supposed to just appreciate that process just because it's clever and not because it's beautiful.
I don't think that's the limit on the emotional palette of computer-generated stuff, and that's what my art practice and my research has been about for the past couple of years, thinking about the other things that computer-generated text, specifically, is good at. Is it possible for computer-generated stuff to evoke these other emotions, to get away from cleverness and satire? Not because I don't like cleverness and satire, but because I'm interested in making those things available to people who work in the genre to see what can be done with those things. I think one of the things that computer-generated artwork is really good at is vertigo in the face of the infinite.
LG: "Vertigo in the face of the infinite." That's amazing.
AP: You can see that a lot of computer-generated art has this as a theme. I don't know if you're familiar with No Man's Sky, for example. It's a video game [that] basically generates an entire galaxy for you. You can land on every planet, there's alien species of animals on every planet, and the idea is that it just feels vast. That's kind of what I was trying to do with the Ephemerides.
[The emotional aspect] was an intentional part of what I was trying to do. But of course a lot of that comes from the source text that I used. Obviously if I did the same thing with Charles Dickens and Dr. Seuss or something, the poems would look very different.
LG: Was there a lot of fine-tuning once you built it and had it create the first poem?
AP: There's always tweaking in that process. I think with this particular project a lot of the tweaking was with the way it was treating language. The bot is not always perfectly grammatical, but that's OK. I was trying to minimize that too, to make it feel a bit more seamless. But ultimately I'm OK with it feeling glitchy. It brings out the texture of the poems.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Laia Garcia is the deputy editor at Lenny. | | | | | | | | | | | | Fashion for All | | | | By Prabal Gurung | | | |
I came to America sixteen years ago, knowing no one and bringing nothing but the hopes of pursuing my passion to become a fashion designer. In my homeland of Nepal, I was constantly told how different I was, a reminder that I did not fit the mold of my all-boys school. America gave me the opportunity to be my truest self — a creator — and the fashion industry gave me the home I needed to see my dreams realized.
Fashion is my language of choice. It is how I share my passions, my views. And the fashion industry, which has provided me with nothing but love and support for the past seven and a half years, has enabled me to make people think and to change a few minds by using my platform to be an activist for causes I care about. It has allowed me to make clothes that don't just hang on a hanger, but are also tools for opportunity and empowerment, for the women who make them and the women who wear them. In my short career, the industry has allowed me to advocate for my organization Shikshya Foundation Nepal, which brings complete education to children in my homeland. I am grateful to be able to do what I love.
Despite the opportunity and potential that I see in this industry, many others look at the fashion industry as being fake and frivolous. For me, it has been anything but; I see it as my mission to introduce new terminology into the language of fashion and reshape the common understanding of the industry and the women we dress.
As I reflect on the current situation in our country, a country that runs rampant with the othering of certain groups, I can't help but feel we are missing the point. This is supposed to be a country of acceptance, a country that is proud of being a melting pot of cultures. If I, a boy from Nepal with no industry or family connections, was welcomed into this country and accepted for my unique point of view, then shouldn't we provide the same courtesy to others as well? Shouldn't this feeling of inclusion extend to the women our industry serves? If fashion is a celebration of each of us, then all of us, not just those who fit society's ideal of beauty, should be celebrated.
Last winter, I was at a trunk show in Palm Beach — showing a collection to women in an intimate setting with our retail partners is one of my favorite parts of my job. I remember there was a curvier woman, amid a sea of sample-size ladies, who looked at and touched the samples with such a deep longing and desire for them. I encouraged her to touch them and even try them on, yet she could not bring herself to in fear that they would not fit, and therefore she still felt like an outsider looking in on the other women dressing up.
Not long after the trunk show, I sat on a panel that discussed issues around diversity on the runway. Our industry was being lauded for supposedly coming such a long way — our runways are more racially diverse than ever and have begun to habitually feature models who are transgender or gender-fluid. A woman from the audience raised the question of size, or rather the apparent lack of size diversity, pointing to a major hole in our industry. Our panel gave a dismissive "We'll eventually get to you …" response, then moved on, as though the strides we had already made by being diverse in other ways made it OK to ignore the majority of American women.
As someone who was always seen as "different," I am well acquainted with the feeling that my needs were not mainstream enough to be met by society. I know what it feels like to be slighted, and I'm embarrassed that we as an industry have overlooked hundreds of millions of women.
Since the beginning, we have made our clothes available from a size 0 to a size 22; however, it is only the zeros through eights that get picked up by the retailers and hang beneath the chandeliers and above the marble floors on Fifth Avenue. Our goal has always been to create a luxury brand with a soul. We are striving toward becoming more sustainable; we pride ourselves on our social responsibility and accomplishments in Nepal; and above all, we want to be inclusive.
Soon after my experience at the diversity panel, I had seen a bus bearing Lane Bryant's "I'm No Angel" campaign. I realized that while some people were talking about body diversity as something that "we'd get to soon," others had already figured out how to turn a desire into action.
Realizing that it takes more than one to create a conversation and a movement, and understanding that I alone don't have all the answers, I decided to partner with Lane Bryant on two special collections celebrating women of different shapes and sizes, to give them access to luxury without compromise and to bring plus into the mainstream fashion industry and conversation. These women, like all women, deserve to know the feeling of getting dressed with excitement, joy, pride, and poise. It is their narrative to pave, and I wanted to be able to give them a beautiful space, full of options, offering something new, as so many have dictated the few colors or styles they should be wearing.
We are proud to offer a wide range of designs that can take these women from the boardroom to the ballroom, and to a weekend off duty in between. We are showing everything we have in our runway collections — versatile dresses, beautiful chunky knits, billowy skirts, and architectural jumpsuits. Inspired by Paris, the collection boasts wonderful styles in romantic tones of midnight, sky, snow, rouge, garnet, and blackberry, not unlike the palette of our recent fall collection.
Because I'm committed to offering clothes for every aspect of a woman's life, I've also launched Prabal Gurung Sport, in collaboration with Bandier, to offer fitness wear from an extra small to a double extra large. I am inspired by and admire woman of all ages, shapes, sizes, and color, so why not design for them?
We are at a turning point in our industry, a fork in the road where industry leaders have to make a choice: do we stay on the path we know and continue to design for the same women, or do we instead try a new approach? We have spent countless years understanding, admiring, and appreciating some of the women in our world. It is now time to get to know and respect the rest.
Prabal Gurung is an award-winning fashion designer born in Singapore and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal. He launched his eponymous collection in New York in 2009, and his designs have since been worn by First Lady Michelle Obama and the duchess of Cambridge, among others. He will be launching a capsule collection with Lane Bryant in March of 2017. | | | | | | | | | | | | Talking Books, Plays, and Kindness With Mary-Louise Parker | | | | By Leigh Flayton | | |
Mary-Louise Parker has won a Tony, Emmy, and two Golden Globes since she started acting professionally three decades ago, but she's a writer at heart. Her book Dear Mr. You, in which she writes letters to the men in her life — both real and imagined — was published in 2015 to widespread acclaim and New York Times best-seller status. In this collection of essays, she addresses a former teacher to whom her "use of sexuality [was] offensive"; the unfortunate cabdriver who picked her up when she was seven months pregnant, having just learned her partner had left her; and the dying man she met at a party with whom she had a brief but unforgettable friendship.
We met near her house in Brooklyn, but the café was crowded so we grabbed coffee and retired to her place, an art-filled and airy house that she shares with her two children. Along the way, we talked about writing and music (we were walking along Dylan's Montague Street, after all) and the Hillary Clinton fund-raiser she had attended the night before. It was easy to forget that I had watched her for years in The West Wing and Weeds, and in Angels in America, and that I had first seen her way back in 1991 in the movies Grand Canyon and Fried Green Tomatoes.
Now, as she returns to Broadway for the first time in three years, costarring in the two-character play Heisenberg, an unusual and ambiguous love story — a nod to the titular physicist's uncertainty principle — this lifelong writers' groupie has a literary following of her own. Inside her bedroom, with a boudoir draped in female nude photographs, we spoke about aiming for kindness in a mean-spirited world, the random people who find their way into our hearts, and all that's contained in the last word.
Leigh Flayton: What's different since your book came out?
Mary-Louise Parker: I feel a bit more like myself. I feel I have a place in the theater. I feel connections to people there, and if I'm sitting at a table of theater people, I feel very comfortable. I don't feel that way necessarily in Hollywood. I feel like a bit of an outsider; not in a horrible way, not in a painful way. I just feel a bit apart, and not entirely comfortable. I always felt very comfortable around writers and very excited to just be able to have a conversation. Like when I first met Mark Strand or James Galvin or Elvis [Costello]. That's exciting to me, and I think it's always who I was.
LF: You exhibit so much kindness to your subjects, and to yourself as well. There's a lot of forgiveness. In "Dear Movement Teacher," your teacher made no secret of his disdain for you, but you reconciled and wrote, "It would have been so sad if I had spent all those years and never reintroduced myself. I would have missed out on all of your special wisdom, not to mention the thrill of the view up there on the high road."
M-LP: He really gave me that by letting me change his mind about me. He could've stayed closed. That door could've stayed shut. It's a lesson that I have had to learn 75,000 times subsequently. Would that I could have only learned it that one time! I wanted to write these little tributes, and I wanted them to be positive, and I wanted them to be about gratitude, and I didn't want there to be indictments. They're little valentines. They're just a bunch of thank-you notes, really.
LF: In an interview with Electric Literature, you said the book is "how we sift through our memories. It's funny, the people that remain." That reminded me of a Carson McCullers book. Have you read her work?
M-LP: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my top three favorite books.
LF: You'll like this, then. In The Ballad of the Sad Café, she writes a passage about the lover and the beloved: "A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon, two decades past." Your book captured that essence so well, about who you chose to recall.
M-LP: That is so beautiful. I have not read that book. I have to read that book.
LF: You wrote about family, friends, and loves, of course, but also that awful argument you had with that cabdriver when you were pregnant … I still think about a guy at the New York Public Library I saw years ago, who was backlit, walking toward me. He never even saw me.
M-LP: I love that. Don't you wonder, Why that person? Why that moment? You had an awakening.
LF: I saw the writer Pico Iyer speak once, and he said the last word of anything worth its salt encapsulates the whole thing. For instance, the last word of The Great Gatsby is past. Slouching Towards Bethlehem is fire. The Glass Menagerie is goodbye.
M-LP: [Gasps] It is?
LF: I went through your essays: "Dear Daddy" is ocean. "Grandpa" is sky. "Father Bob" is kindness. "Former Boyfriend" is not. "NASA" is up. And the last word of the book …
M-LP: Will.
LF: The last line is "Just write. Keep writing. Promise me that you will."
M-LP: I changed it at the last minute. [It was] anything. "Write anything," and then I went back and looked at what [my father] said to me that day, and I couldn't quite remember, and I tried to hear his voice, and I heard "will."
LF: That's your son's name, too. Can we say, for the record, that I made Mary-Louise Parker cry?
M-LP: Yeah, please. Seriously.
LF: In Heisenberg, not to spoil anything, but the last words?
M-LP: The last words are thank you. You just blew my mind in about 75,000 ways.
LF: What attracted you to Heisenberg?
M-LP: It was the writing, and it came at a moment when I thought, I don't know if I want to even do theater anymore. I'd just done a play, and I felt like I hadn't done a play in three years, which is the longest I'd gone without doing a play in the past 30 years. Somehow, within those three years, it seemed to be forgotten that I ever did a play. I was met like a TV actor coming to do a play for the first time. I spent the first six years of my acting life in a corset, doing regional theater. The disconnect for me was really upsetting. Everyone has a podium now; everyone has a platform. It's just a very mean-spirited world, and it becomes about the result, and it becomes about the reaction to the result, and that's not interesting for me. I'm too thin-skinned to withstand it.
LF: And the culture is so coarse; people feel entitled to be armchair critics and awful.
M-LP: It's the new sport; they're their own Olympics.
LF: Which is why I like the kindness in your book.
M-LP: That's partly why I wanted to do that. I had to learn that also. I wrote one thing in Esquire once and I saw it and I was so ashamed. I wrote something snarky or bitchy. It wasn't even that bad, but I really felt like there's no reason to do that.
LF: So we won't see you roasting anyone on Comedy Central anytime soon?
M-LP: I couldn't. Someone asked me to do that recently, and I said I'm sorry, I don't think I could write anything mean like that. I mean, I could, but I don't really want to.
LF: Speaking of kindness, the essay that nearly killed me was "Dear Man out of Time," about the terminally ill man with cancer with whom you had a brief friendship.
M-LP: I loved him.
LF: The line: "We were such a nice surprise, you said, and a reminder that things could still keep popping up." It's wonderful to keep reminding ourselves that things can keep popping up.
M-LP: The actor that I'm working with now (Denis Arndt), this is one of his biggest moments.
LF: Heisenberg is his Broadway debut, right?
M-LP: Yeah. He's 77, and he's wonderful. Aside from that, we're having this amazing experience together, regardless that it's on Broadway. Honestly, I would do it at Macy's. I would do it in the alley.
LF: I'd love to see it in Macy's or in the alley! And then there's "Dear Oyster Picker," about your father. Obviously, every essay means something to you, but that's kind of off the charts.
M-LP: He loved books, he loved to read, and he loved poetry, and it's perfect and it's excruciating that because of that I have the book — because of him — and that he can't read it. I wouldn't have written it if he were still alive, probably. It wouldn't be what it is. There would be no "Dear Oyster Picker," and that moment of me running out of the house going to find oysters.
Then, what was interesting about that piece was it really became genuine. I really did begin to envision [an oyster picker], and I really did realize, Oh, wow, when I've had oysters I thought they just come to your table. I didn't realize what someone had to endure in order to get them to that plate. And I didn't know the metaphor of that and what that person did for a living. And how like my father that is and how romantic they are and how beautiful they are and how there are just a million metaphors — the oyster itself. They are everything that is my father to me.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Leigh Flayton is a New York City–based writer, editor, and playwright. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | | |
No comments:
Post a Comment