| |  | | | | January 24, 2017 | Letter No. 70 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
Welp, it's finally happened. We have crossed the threshold into a world we never thought we would live in. In my head, a snippet from The Lion King plays on repeat without my having any control over it. It's from a song called, fittingly, "Be Prepared." It goes: "A shining new era / is tiptoeing nearer," which is funny, sure, but also 100 percent not funny, if you think about that scene in the movie where Scar is detailing his plan to kill Mufasa and Simba and become king and the fact that it was inspired by the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
I know when I have previously written to you, I've talked about how the most important thing for me has been spending time with my community of friends. It's an escape from reality but also a reminder that there is still so much beauty and good in the world. This year, I want to be inspired by happiness, I want to let it guide me. While the new president and his pals go around shutting down everything we know to be good and necessary in this world, we should not let them shut us down as well. A friend recently posted a quote from Rebecca Solnit's Hope In the Dark, and it has stayed with me, reinforced the things I was already feeling: "Joy doesn't betray but sustains activism. When you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated, and isolated, joy is a fine initial act of insurrection."
And so in this issue we have a beautiful essay by Amy Silverman about watching her teenage daughter Sophie navigate life with Down syndrome and the surprising ways in which Sophie is maturing and becoming an independent young woman. It's particularly poignant, and a little sad, to read shortly after Betsy DeVos's hearing. She's Trump's pick for secretary of Education, and she doesn't seem to know a damn thing about IDEA, the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which helps students like Sophie get the quality of education every child deserves.
We learn about Ida Koverman, who worked as the executive secretary to MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, and whose huge influence has been largely swept under the rug, melded into the triumphs of her boss. She went on to become director of publicity at the studio, shaping so many of the movies we deem classics to this day.
Over at Lenny HQ, we love a good cult story (I mean, did you read our EIC's book Soulmates?), so we are delighted with Euny Hong's piece that delves into the scandal currently plaguing Korea's recently impeached president Park Geun-hye. This story has everything! Male prostitutes, a "celebrity" handbag line, and even a $3 million dressage horse. It's just too good.
And last but certainly not least, we have Alli Maloney interviewing period activist Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, and Hayley Krischer's ode to Juliette Lewis's stage presence as part of the band the Licks. Juliette has always been one of those strange, unusual women in film, and it's somehow comforting to know her talent extends to pretty much everything she does.
May we all always be so lucky, and may we feel the love tonight, and every day after that for the next four years … and beyond.
Yours,
Laia
x | | | | | | | | | | | | Brave | | | | By Amy Silverman | | |
My thirteen-year-old daughter, Sophie, has Down syndrome. With some assistance, she's kept up with her typical peers and is currently included in regular classrooms in eighth grade. Sophie's speech is really good, but she has fine motor challenges. Handwriting is tough for her; she still can't tie her shoes or ride a bike. She also can't button her skinny jeans, or do the buckle on her strappy wedge heels. Thank goodness for jeggings (although she'll only wear the expensive Lucky ones that look like real jeans). And those strappy wedges have a zipper down the back for easy off-on, which is convenient since Sophie insists on wearing them to school every day.
She wants to impress her boyfriend.
My teenage daughter still sucks her thumb and refuses to brush her hair, but she spends half an hour in the bathroom each morning with a giant leopard-print box full of makeup. She watches Peppa Pig and Saturday Night Live with equal enthusiasm, although her favorites are the YouTube tutorials about choosing just the right back-to-school supplies. Even though high school doesn't start for nine months, Sophie's ready.
Of all the things that have gone down with this Down-syndrome business — the surgeries, the orthotics, potty training at age five, hours of meetings to put her in regular classes at school and keep it that way — nothing has confounded me more than puberty, which has arrived right on schedule, and which Sophie has embraced with gusto.
Perhaps this is because of my own arrested development. I do not recall having a real conversation with a boy 'til graduate school. Wallflower was putting it mildly, and I was keenly aware of my status. I wore a frumpy, pale-brown shirtdress and clunky, wooden, it-was-the-end-of-the-'70s sandals to the eighth-grade graduation dance at my school, and I can still feel my heart pounding as I watched one of the cutest, most popular boys cross the room and stop in front of me (ME!) and ask me to dance. It was one of those slow-motion, underwater moments that seemed to last for days and that I'll remember forever. I said no thanks, positive it was a prank. I never did know for sure, and that's OK with me.
Contrast this with Sophie, who has no problem FaceTiming a boy fourteen times even after he's broken up with her. And get this — it works. The other day we were out running errands, and she looked at her phone, sighed happily, and said, "Sam texted me. He loves me and we're back together."
(By the way, Sam does not have Down syndrome. He's a pretty typical kid with a soft spot for mine. I'd be worried, except their time together is limited to lunch in the crowded cafeteria, or "dates" at Peter Piper Pizza, chaperoned by both his mom and me.)
I reached for the phone and confirmed:
Sophie: Boyfriend and girlfriend?
Sam: Sorry, I can't talk right now.
Sophie: It is fine. Boyfriend and girlfriend?
Sam: I do love u so much be my girlfriend.
Sophie: Yay.
It's like she's a witch (in the best possible sense).
Sophie's older sister shares my awe. Annabelle, 15, goes to a fancy charter school where she dances en pointe and reads The Iliad and Howard Zinn. Her idea of a fashion risk is pink Converse instead of white. On Saturday nights she stays home and bakes cookies, and at this rate is probably not going to have a serious conversation with a boy 'til she's in her twenties. Annabelle and I are constantly shaking our heads with envy at Sophie's ability to navigate her social world in ways neither of us can.
Most nights, Sophie falls asleep next to me on the living-room couch, and I stare at her long eyelashes and tangled hair and wonder how this tiny kid is doing so well. Sophie was born with the heart defect that about half the people with Down syndrome have, and she rocks the giant scar that makes its way halfway down her chest. She's hypertonic, meaning she's too flexible, and also meaning she's able to do the splits anywhere, anytime. (And she does.) She's often totally socially inappropriate — she has no problem marching into the nail salon with a ukulele, ready to serenade the other customers, or picking and choosing who she'll sit with at lunch in the school cafeteria. After much speculation, I've decided it's simple: Sophie does not give a shit what anyone thinks of her.
At a time where other kids are self-conscious and miserable in their own skin, the teachers report that Sophie's got her hand up in every class, ready to take a stab at the answer. I sent her nanny as a spy to the first junior-high-school dance; word came back that Sophie was the only girl dancing, out there boogying with several guys she knew from math class. The other girls stood against the wall, glaring, but guess who was dancing with boys? Sophie had the last laugh — even if she didn't realize it — because Sophie doesn't care. She doesn't know enough to.
Sophie sees what she wants — a spot on the cheer squad, a position in student government, first place in line for lunch — and she goes for it. Tell her no, and she'll just keep asking, until fourteen FaceTimes and who knows how many texts later, you're her boyfriend again.
Long after I've peeled her off me and shoved her in the direction of her bedroom each night, I stay up and worry about Sophie. What if she decides she wants to have sex? She's pretty sheltered; there's almost always an adult with her. But where there's a will there's a way. What happens when her boyfriend really is done being her boyfriend; will there be another one? Will Sophie hit a glass ceiling — maybe in high school, maybe before that — where the other kids won't talk to her, even if she's wearing a cheer uniform? Even if she calls a dozen times?
Turns out, Sophie worries, too. "Mama, I don't want to have Down syndrome," she told me the other night as we pulled up to our favorite Chinese restaurant. I turned off the car and we sat for a few minutes.
"Oh, Soph, I know, sweetie," I said. She's been saying this since she was eight. The first time happened to coincide with her introduction to Special Olympics. Sophie had never spent much time around adults with developmental disabilities; I think she had culture shock — her own culture — and started wondering what it meant to belong to this club. Over the years, she's mentioned it from time to time, and I've struggled to respond, wondering when it will officially be time for therapy. "Can you tell me why?"
"No," she said, dipping her head shyly. "I wanna be like you."
"No, you don't," I thought to myself, fighting the urge to say it out loud. I've learned that it doesn't work to tell Sophie that I get where she's coming from, that I don't like being short or bad at sports. This is different.
For the gazillionth time, sitting there in the car, I wondered what it would be like to be in that body, in that brain, to see the world how Sophie sees it. Sophie looks for the good in people — and finds it. When the rest of our family is fed up with my curmudgeonly father, she's still climbing up on his lap, looking for a cuddle. "You picked the best husband," she tells me often. "You are the best sister I ever had," she tells Annabelle. She's right. She also asks for what she wants — and she usually gets it, whether it's a solo in choir class or a bagel that's toasted just enough. I wish I could give her the one thing she wants most of all. But I can't. I looked her in the eye and told her I wished I could be like her, explained why — that she is brave and real. She smiled and reached out for a hug; I know she didn't believe me.
Amy Silverman is a Phoenix-based journalist and the author of My Heart Can't Even Believe It: A Story of Science, Love and Down Syndrome, published in spring 2016 by Woodbine House. Find her at myheartcantevenbelieveit.com. | | | | | | | | | | | | The President & The Ghost Whisperer | | | | By Euny Hong | | |
When South Korea elected Park Geun-hye as its first female president in December 2012, I was pretty amazed; until 1990, Korean law did not allow women to be head of the household or have equal inheritance rights. And yet just 22 years later, they had a woman president. I really thought the worst fate awaiting Park was that people were going to make sexist remarks or criticize her hair or clothes. Ha. If only.
Little did anyone know at the time that three years into her term, Park would face impeachment for her involvement in perhaps the most delicious corruption scandal of any developed-world democracy in recent memory. This may be the first time that a president's misdeeds had no apparent benefit to the president at all. There was no Machiavellian intent on her part, no trysts with interns. Don't get me wrong — there was hella sex and money involved, including $70 million worth of extortion, a $3 million dressage horse, and a gigolo from a male brothel — but Park was not the beneficiary of those. The reaper of those rewards was Park's "friend" and confidante of four decades, a Ms. Choi Soon-shil (Choi being the family name, not the first name).
Park's fatal flaw was not greed or sex; rather, it was a lifetime of loneliness, early exposure to a cult, and an addiction to a very strange, very bad woman.
Choi Soon-shil had no educational or professional qualifications other than being the daughter of a famous cult leader, yet she had in her slavish thrall the president of one of the world's largest economies. And that's what the Korean public can't forgive. It's not the corruption and cronyism that bothers Koreans so much — Korea's seen much, much worse. It's that Park has made herself into a world laughingstock.
Koreans used to have a very protective view of Park. She was Korea's Caroline Kennedy, the eldest child of a slain president. In fact, both Park's parents were assassinated. Her father, Korea's longest-serving president, Park Chung-hee (who brought the nation from poverty to riches during his rule from 1961 to 1979), was shot dead in 1979; Park's mother was killed in 1974 in a botched attempt to get at her husband.
You could say that Park's downfall began after the death of her mother. The following year, in 1975, when she was 23, Park was approached by Choi Tae-min, Choi Soon-shil's father and the founder and head of the Church of Eternal Life. Choi Tae-min claimed that Park's deceased mother had been visiting him. Google Choi Tae-min and the first images that pop up are photos of Rasputin, the Russian mystic who was thought to have hypnotized the last czarina, Alexandra.
Choi's "church" was a strange amalgam of Fundamentalist Christianity and the ancient Korean occult practice of shamanism — basically, witchcraft. A few pig-burnings and séances later, Choi Tae-min was controlling Park in an attempt to get at her father.
In a diplomatic cable unearthed in 2007 by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Embassy in Seoul wrote that Choi "had complete control over Park [Geun-hye]'s body and soul during her formative years and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result."
Choi Tae-min died in 1994, after which his daughter became the center of Park's universe.
The full extent of Choi Soon-shil's mental enslavement over Park first came to light on October 26, 2016, when a Korean news outlet called JTCB got a hold of Choi's Samsung Galaxy Tab, which had evidence of Choi's marking up and commenting on one of Park's important presidential speeches. Very stupidly, Choi reportedly tried to claim the tablet belonged not to her but to her aforementioned male prostitute friend Ko Young-tae. There were just two problems with that claim: (1) Choi's tablet was full of her own selfies; (2) Choi's drawing attention to Ko led to the latter's being apprehended by police. And boy, did he have stories to tell them.
For one thing, the speech found on Choi's tablet was not a one-off occurrence. In his official statement, Ko referred to Choi, bizarrely, using the honorific title of "hwejang," which means "CEO." As in, "The CEO's favorite thing was correcting speeches. If some problem arose over one of her changes, she'd yell at the responsible party." This prompted the investigators to dig deeper. And the deeper they searched, the more apparent it became that President Park consulted Choi on many major political decisions and shared classified information with her.
Ko has not admitted to a sexual relationship with Choi — those claims came from Ko's brothel coworkers, who said Choi was Ko's regular customer for years — but Ko did receive expensive watches and other pressies from her. At the very least, it's safe to say that Choi considered Ko a confidante, which is just as weird as President Park's considering Choi her confidante. It's a chain of stupidity in which each person gets country-running advice from someone less qualified, all the way down.
If you need proof of Choi's closeness to Ko, a Korean governmental inquiry panel was convinced that Ko had enough inside information on Choi that they grilled him in December 2016 about Choi's activities, as a way of digging up dirt about Park. It is unknown whether Park knew the precise nature of Choi's relationship with her faithful male companion. But what is known is that in 2013, Choi duped the president into accepting a crappy gray handbag from an accessory line Ko started (using money from Choi, some claim) called Villomillo. Park was thus unknowingly giving free publicity to her useless friend's favorite prostitute's second-rate bag company.
Choi was privy to a lot of sensitive information. And not just information, but money: it turned out she extorted some $70 million from Korean companies, leveraging her closeness to Park. She even got $3 million out of the vaunted Samsung, which she used to buy a dressage horse and special riding classes for her daughter, Chung Yoo-ra. Chung, who was arrested in Denmark on January 2 for overstaying her visa, is a piece of work as well. In 2014, she reportedly posted the following statement on her Facebook page: "Blame your own parents if they don't have the ability. Don't point fingers at us if your parents don't have what it takes. Money is also a form of ability."
The scandal has reached the highest levels not just of politics but of Korean business as well. On January 16, South Korean prosecutors announced that they were seeking to arrest Jay Y. Lee, the heir apparent and de facto head of the entire Samsung empire (his father, chairman Lee Gun-hee, is in poor health). The Korean legal authorities claim that Lee gave a $36 million gift to one of the many "charities" Choi was using to front her bribe collection business.
Some in the anti-Park camp say that there's a lot more at stake than just stupidity. Professor Minsoo Kang, a Korean-born author and historian at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, told me, "This is actual corruption, incompetence, and anti-democratic, quasi-dictatorial policies that really border on treason. This goes way beyond her stupidity; it's about her complicity." He cites one example of such complicity that is ill-covered in the Western press: a list compiled during Park's administration of blacklisted left-leaning artists, comparable to McCarthy's list. "This is a throwback to dictatorship." Though Park has consistently denied the existence of such a list, the Korean minister of culture confirmed on January 9 that the blacklist was very real.
So how does an educated, quintilingual (she speaks Korean, English, French, Chinese, and Spanish) political scion with an electrical-engineering degree (surprise!) end up relying on such a clown as Choi? The only reasonable answer is that the president seems to have felt that she could rely on literally no one else. She became an adult orphan under horrific circumstances. And her reliance on the Choi father-daughter duo created an insoluble rift between Park and her two younger siblings, who tried and failed many times to separate her from the Chois.
As for why Park didn't do the obvious and turn to the many political allies her father had built over the years, one can only speculate. Certainly even the least competent of them would have given her better advice than Choi Soon-shil did.
If I had to guess, I'd say she has a fundamental mistrust of Korean politicians, rooted in her father's 1979 murder: he was killed by a member of the Korean government. The assassin was Kim Jae-gyu, who at the time was the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, it is very much worth mentioning that cult leader Choi Tae-min may have indirectly contributed to the death of Park Chung-hee. During his official testimony, the assassin Kim stated that one of his reasons for killing Park was the latter's inability to control his own daughter — to separate her from Choi Tae-min's seditious influence.
Sadly, this all smacks of a very typical cycle of abuse. A stronger mind (Choi Tae-min) takes advantage of a weaker mind (Park Geun-hye after her mother's death). The abuser separates the victim from loved ones. The loved ones cry foul, leaving the victim to defend the abuser, growing ever closer to the latter and ever farther from her own family and friends. And finally, the cheese stands alone. Except, of course, for the horrible parasite pervading it.
Here's what comes next for the country: The Korean Constitutional Court gets the final decision as to whether to make the impeachment official; most likely, Park is out and the nation will have snap elections. The odds are in favor of the next president being left-wing candidate Moon Jae-in. This would make Korea one of the few first-world democracies whose government is going in a liberal direction rather than an alt-right one. The ostensible lesson here is that if you really want to drain a swamp, you have to first have an intolerably embarrassing president. Ahem.
Euny Hong is the author of The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture (Picador 2014) and Kept: A Comedy of Sex and Manners (Simon & Schuster 2006). | | | | | | | | | | | | She "Damn Near Ran the Studio" | | | | By Erin Hill | | |
When I first started working in film production, I remember being told — by both colleagues and Variety's special "Women in Hollywood" issues — that women did not participate in much of film history except as actors or, more rarely, as screenwriters. According to this apocryphal mythology, women were pushed out from behind the camera in the 1920s — when movies became big business and studio managers adopted hiring practices of major industries such as banking, where powerful women were not the norm — until equal-rights activism brought them back in the 1970s. I wrote my book, Never Done: A History of Women's Work in Media Production, to show that, far from being absent from production, most women simply weren't documented as part of it because they did "women's work," which was — by definition — insignificant, tedious, low status, and noncreative.
In the golden age of Hollywood, as "script girls," negative cutters, researchers, inkers, painters, seamstresses, secretaries, and so on, women could be found in nearly every department of every studio, minding the details that might otherwise get in the way of more important, prestigious, or creative work (a.k.a. men's work). Though their names might not have appeared in the credits, individually and collectively, they made vast contributions to film history, from the only roles open to them at studios built on their low-cost backs and scaled through their brushes and keystrokes.
Ida Koverman was such a woman. As executive secretary to MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer from 1928 to 1951, she was one of thousands of women who administered the offices of studios' major personnel, looked after their personal lives and emotional needs, and contributed to production as their lieutenants. As one executive put it, Koverman "damn near ran the studio" in her role as gatekeeper, delegator, and shaper of administrative solutions.
Koverman had been executive secretary to the Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover presidential campaigns, and so in politics she outranked even Mayer, acting as lobbyist and expediter in securing his access to the innermost GOP circles and even the Oval Office (during Republican presidencies, no Hollywood figure visited the White House more frequently than Ida Koverman). Yet like all women at that time, she was held back by the bounds of acceptable femininity, which dictated women's dress, behavior, and the type of work they were assigned. These gender norms underwrote employers' implicit expectations that the women they hired use "natural" feminine skills in ways beneficial to management, such as by absorbing unwanted emotions, charming clients (while charmingly fending off their sexual advances), and cheering male colleagues on while minimizing their own contributions. Of course, playing this feminine role didn't come naturally or effortlessly to women at all. It was work, and the price of entry to a workplace men regarded (and often still do) as theirs.
For Ida, in her 40s when she came to MGM, this meant playing the mother to what L.B. liked to call his MGM "family," a comfort to homesick stars and a stern-yet-caring enforcer of the boss's policies. Privately, Mayer depended on her for the same firm, matriarchal guidance. It was to Ida that L.B. turned with questions about which glass to raise or how to address visiting dignitaries. She drew upon her experience with Hoover to give Mayer much of the refinement he developed over the years, even persuading him to quit his habit of digressing during his speeches. She accomplished these feats by managing her own status relative to Mayer's — advising him in politics, offering constructive criticism of his mode of address without challenging his importance as a spokesman, and exercising her power without showing interest in its outward trappings. When asked by GOP members to run for Congress, Ida refused.
Koverman often used her influence in service of stars she persuaded Mayer and his executives to sign. In the notable case of Judy Garland, rather than addressing the actress's future head-on with Mayer as a male executive might have, she was limited to subtler means, choreographing his emotions to achieve her own creative ends. According to screenwriter Frances Marion in her autobiography, Off With Their Heads, Ida came to her in despair one day. "'The Boss has lost interest in Judy. Whenever I suggest her name for a small part in a musical, all he says is, 'Stop bleating! I'm running this studio, not you!' Her lips were tight-pressed for a moment. 'But I'm not giving up! I'll never give up! Somehow I'll manage to get his interest back to Judy again.'" Ida, knowing L.B. for a sentimentalist, had Garland learn his favorite sad song and sing it for him one afternoon when he was alone and depressed. "'You'll never leave our studio,' said Mayer when she finished, the sob in his voice matching Judy's." (Sadly, according to Marion, Mayer then ordered Garland — an insomniac — be given sleeping pills and "that stuff they use to pep you up in the morning," as Ida's face paled with anxiety.)
Ida also championed Clark Gable, whose screen test was deemed disastrous by executives. She refused to accept defeat, reportedly exclaiming, "That's the trouble with this business. It's the men who pick the stars and the women who react to them." She ran the same test for female employees, and their landslide vote in Gable's favor won him a contract. Gradually, Ida became known as "the woman to see" to influence casting assignments. After Mayer's ouster in 1951, she was made director of publicity, a position she held until her death in 1954. She was reportedly the only woman executive whose advice male stars respected. Her colleagues called her one of the greatest women of the industry. Yet today she is all but forgotten.
Women's success in feminized fields had little to do with innate characteristics of their gender and everything to do with their individual talents and collective determination to succeed in any job they could get. They would have been equally accomplished in directing, producing, and cinematography, given the chance. When I hear dismissive explanations for women's stifled progress in integrating male-dominated production fields today, I recognize subtle reworkings of the same timeworn logic about women's natural, inborn skills that dictated the "proper place" of Ida Koverman and her peers, women like assistant story editor Kate Corbaley, the only person whose taste in scripts and books MGM trusted, and Alfred Hitchcock's assistant Peggy Robertson, who did everything for the director from finding projects to supervising scripts. If history has taught me anything, it's that women's proper place in a business they helped build is anywhere they damn please.
For more, check out Erin's book, Never Done, here.
Erin Hill is a professor of media studies. She teaches film history and contemporary Hollywood courses at UCLA and Santa Monica College. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Power and Glory of Juliette Lewis | | | | By Hayley Krischer | | | |
In which Lenny writers recommend a cultural phenomenon they hold dear.
Once, I was the lead singer in a rock band. There were three guys and me. We weren't very good and literally only played in the guitarist's basement. The basement walls were covered in paneling, and because of squealing feedback from the mic's proximity to the amp, I had to stand in an adjacent room with the door halfway open, staring at a large portrait of President John F. Kennedy. I should have seen it as foreshadowing that my only audience was a dead president, but I kept on going, because it was 1992 and I was 21 and it seemed that every woman was in a rock band except me. So I churned breakup poems into songs because I had real shit to say and flung my head and body around behind that door. We practiced for about two weeks until my bandmates told me that I was no Eddie Vedder. "No one wants to see a girl thrashing onstage," my guitarist said.
I wasn't trying to be Eddie, I explained. I was Janis Joplin in "Cry Baby." I was Patti Smith doing "Gloria." I was Pat Benatar in "Promises in the Dark." I was Wendy O. Williams without the chainsaw. I was Kim Gordon. If I had known about Kathleen Hanna in 1992, I would have wanted to be her too. They were women with agency. My band members wanted me to whisper into the mic like a light, airy flower. My guitarist even suggested I fake an English accent. I was young. I was intimidated. I didn't know how to say that rock, and the sexuality of rock, isn't owned by men. So I left.
But recently I came across a video of Juliette Lewis performing with her band the Licks. It was a performance at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles in 2015. She's in a tight white suit with fuchsia eye makeup running down her cheeks; her torso contorts, and during a guitar solo, she springs up and down on her knees like a pogo stick. In another song, the jacket has come off, and, covered in sweat, she swipes her hair forward and back, twisting and gyrating and kicking until it's time to sing again. The woman does not stop. Though I'm 45 years old now (and Juliette herself is 43), the 21-year-old inside of me wishes that I could have performed with that kind kinetic energy all those years ago. She's the kind of rock star I would have wanted to be.
I've never seen Juliette and the Licks live, but, watching videos on YouTube and following her on Instagram, I feel inspired by her madness. At the Reeperbahn Festival, she bounced around the stage with sexual ferocity, wearing jeans and a bikini top, egging on the ladies to shake their hips, or if they were too shy, their chests, or if they were too shy, their tongues. In Cologne, she propelled her body through a wild performance of "Proud Mary," jumping up and down like a kid on a trampoline.
There are no backup singers — it's all Lewis. Her lungs, her voice. She drags you, kicking and screaming, into another musical dimension that's part Spinal Tap, part daredevil, part marathon. In an interview, Lewis said she "approaches music like an athlete," which is no surprise. Song after song, her performances are an exhausting feat, her head, hair, and body contorting with (dare I say it?) the stamina of Beyoncé in concert.
Women of a certain age are not meant to work the stage as if they've swallowed the spirit of Mick Jagger in tight football pants circa 1981, as Juliette Lewis does. Aging rock stars are expected to cover up. Yet Lewis started her rock-music career when most male and female rockers are retiring. She is playing a reversal of fortune with her body. I want to prop her up like a statue and bow down to her wardrobe of hot pants. Really, she's got a pair of tight gold ones, some American-flag bike shorts, and a white pair with a thick, black, exposed zipper that runs the length of her pelvis. This woman moves her ass without inhibition, free of arrangement and control, and her pants go along with it.
My favorite of her outfits, though, is her Evel Knievel–inspired jumpsuit. It's a white cat suit with a blue V down her torso, lined in red ribbon and decked out with white stars that run from her shoulders to her navel and then down the sides of her legs. When I was a kid, Evel Knievel was a star, someone I idolized because he jumped fourteen buses with his dirt bike. Now I'm 45 and Juliette Lewis is someone I idolize because at 43, she jumps raging into a mosh pit, swings her microphone around like a big dick, and holds hands with her fans, seeming like she never wants to let go.
Now when I'm in the car singing, I imagine myself playing guitar once again, but this time I'm on a small stage. I'm a manic performer with hair swinging in my face, sweat dripping down my cheeks. I bounce up and down to the music in this imaginary performance, tearing across the stage, sharing the mic with my female guitarist, all because of Juliette Lewis.
Hayley Krischer is a freelance writer living in New Jersey. She has written for the New York Times, Marie Claire, Talking Points Memo, Salon, the Hairpin, and more. | | | | | | | | | | | | Period Policy | | | | By Alli Maloney | | |
On the first day of 2015, lawyer Jennifer Weiss-Wolf dressed as Wonder Woman and submerged herself in the ice-cold Atlantic as part of an annual invigoration ritual with friends. It shook her spirit, as intended, but not with nearly the force she would meet that night while uploading pictures of her costume to Facebook, where Weiss-Wolf noticed a post from sisters named Emma and Quinn Joy. They were collecting menstrual products for a food pantry in her New Jersey community.
"A lifetime of reproductive-rights and women's-health advocacy, and I swear, I'd never given a second thought to periods as part of policy activism," Weiss-Wolf, 48, said. She took to a search engine and discovered that in the United States, most states tax menstrual products as luxury items, creating a disadvantage for low-income women that reinforces period stigma.
Legislators and journalists before her who had noticed damaging economic effects of the "tampon tax" and attempted to call out the injustice had met with little success. Ten years prior, Suzi Oppenheimer of the New York State Senate had tried to introduce menstrual-product sales-tax legislation that saw no real pickup. Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti had made the case for free tampons in August 2014 and in turn received all the whining imaginable.
Weiss-Wolf kicked her research into high gear. At the end of January 2015, she wrote a guest post about menstrual equity on Nick Kristof's New York Times blog. In the surrounding weeks, Al-Jazeera featured a story about bleeding while homeless, and The Nation ran another about reproductive health in the NYC prison system. Then, in April, a woman named Kiran Gandhi purposely eschewed a tampon to run the London Marathon and finished the race with blood streaming down her legs. Attention to the issue blossomed, with some strategic help.
A menstrual-mad Weiss-Wolf crafted a petition, aligned with media to put tampons on magazine covers, and collaborated with lawmakers to push policy change, producing what became known as "the year of the period" with help from a handful of international activists. Since that cold swim two years ago on New Year's Day, she's advised Gloria Steinem, Hillary Clinton, and the White House about the issue. So far in 2017, eight states have tampon-tax bills introduced or in the works. Periods Gone Public, Weiss-Wolf's book about the rise of the menstrual equity movement, is expected in September. She just launched a nonprofit, Period Equity, and the organization's art and design work was done pro bono by the iconic Lenny fave Paula Scher.
For Lenny, Weiss-Wolf detailed her journey from a park bench in Brooklyn on an overcast day.
Alli Maloney: Why are periods having a media moment?
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf: What really kicked this off was Kiran Gandhi's marathon run. She's a young Indian-American woman [who] ran the London Marathon free-bleeding as a matter of practicality. She woke up that morning, had her period, and [not using tampons or pads] seemed to be the safest way to run. She wrote a blog about it, and it went viral.
As I've been doing my research, I'm finding there are lots of ways periods infiltrated the public discussion that just didn't catch on. In 2015, this chorus of voices — whether it was writers, reporters, hashtag activists, bold in-person activists doing fairly rebellious things — converged. We all do now, but none of us knew each other at the time.
It's hard to put the words great and Donald Trump together, other than his own saying, but [he] made his unfortunate comment about Megyn Kelly bleeding out of "her wherever" when he didn't like her line of questioning about his history of sexism during a debate. That became the catalyzing force of the media's real willingness to talk about it. We had already coalesced enough at that point that we were able to take advantage of it as if we were this joined force.
It was a good idea whose time has come. Why 2015? Whether swimming as Wonder Woman had anything to do with it, I don't know.
AM: When you noticed the unjust "tampon tax" laws, you started a petition and persuaded Cosmopolitan to cosponsor, then ensured that it caught the attention of policy-makers. When the coverage wasn't there, you wrote op-eds. What's the boldest move you've made?
JW: It's all equally bold and pragmatic at the exact same time. I'm at this great age of 48, where I'm old enough to not have a whole lot of pride. I don't worry too much about what other people are thinking.
I'm a lawyer by day for a think tank that's affiliated with NYU Law School. We focus on achieving legal change through a combination of policy advocacy, legal advocacy, and litigation, and elevating public dialogue. I started thinking very carefully about why there wasn't a policy agenda focused on managing menstruation. Anybody who is low-income or vulnerable, whether they're homeless at the moment, or incarcerated, or relying on public benefits, how could it be that we're not thinking of menstruation as part of their reality when we're making policies and laws?
I thought to myself, Who needs to read this? I decided that was New York Times columnist Nick Kristof.
I sent [a pitch] to him cold and was thrilled to get a response that he'd be willing to publish my essay. I ended up publishing three pieces with him that year. I kept writing about it. I'm not, or was not at the time, a professional writer. I guess when you start with Kristof, people take you a little seriously, like you're a writer. The bold things that I've done are just to assume that this idea is good enough and important enough, that there's nobody too important to be asked about it.
Fifteen states introduced "tampon tax" legislation in 2016. Three actually saw it through. Four passed it. California passed it, too, but [it was] vetoed by the governor.
AM: Menstrual equity is a phrase that you coined that's now repeated by the media and Congress. It goes beyond the cost of sanitary pads and period-shaming. What is it and why is it critical?
JW: The ability to participate in society for people who menstruate necessitates that they have the products they need to manage it. You can't be a productive student if you're sitting in class, either bleeding on your chair or worrying that you're bleeding on your chair. You can't go to work if you're bleeding down your legs. You can't walk down the street. If we acknowledged the reality of women's bodies, we might actually have different ways of doing things, including our policies. We make value statements with the laws that we pass.
AM: When leaders call asking for your advice on menstrual equity, what do they want to learn?
JW: They really want to know what's the most effective way to talk about it, the least polarizing way. In doing this, nobody's looking to be a crowd shocker who's throwing tampons across the legislature floor — they're looking to actually educate. They're going out on a limb in doing so. It shouldn't be that in 2016 talking about something as old and natural as periods is like a big fuckin' deal, but yet it never happens, right? It's partly because women haven't been at the table, making the rules.
AM: You said this activism has made you a "whole woman." What did you mean by that?
JW: It's not like something I'd been sitting on for a lot of years and wondering about; it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was this Facebook flyer. Ever since that day I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. For me, it's actually just understanding enough about how the political process works that I can combine the skills that I have, that are true to myself, to make a change.
It's changed everything for me. It's not just this newfound confidence in what I think it takes to advance policy change, but now it's the knowledge that it works. I can share this message with others and they can join. I have two daughters, and it's changed their willingness and openness to think about their own menstruation in their lives, in their friends' lives. It's made them see that anyone can be a part of the change process. Again, it's not one person making change. They just saw me do all this shit and thought, Oh, I can do that too.
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