| |  | | | | December 12, 2017 | Letter No. 116 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
My body hurts. In my effort to preempt the January wellness rush, I tried a new fitness class over the weekend. I figured that, if I didn't like it, then I wouldn't be one of those mid-January quitters — you know, because I quit in December. The next morning, I was so sore, I could hardly reach a lip balm on my nightstand without wanting to curl back in on myself. (And I'm not out of shape — I go to yoga three times a week!) I spent the day like I spend most Sundays now: under a faux-fur blanket, generally avoiding any interaction with the world (and also trying not to move).
Besides 2017 bringing me this job, which I love dearly, it's been a pretty weird year (to put it lightly) — a year that has let me justify not leaving my couch for several days. But on Monday at Lenny HQ, fellow associate editor Tahirah mentioned how bleak 2018 is looking with the new tax bill and all. Could it really be worse? I hadn't really considered that. However apocalyptic the world has felt this year, the only thing we can do is live day by day.
Instead, I'm thinking about the things I do have control over: my own mind and body. I went to a second fitness class — the manager of the studio even sent me a personal welcome email — and while I'm not sure I'll keep it up in the New Year, I know it's working today.
Here's what's in this week's issue:
—Maggie Lange writes about the power that using beauty products created for horses has brought her.
—Olivia Clement profiles playwright Jocelyn Bioh, who's exploring colorism with School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play.
—Historian at large Alexis Coe is back with her column on primary sources. This time, she's exploring a letter First Lady Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, defending one of their black servants from prejudice.
—The Lesbian Cattle Dogs return to howl at the moon.
—Finally, Casey Johnston interviews computer programmer Ellen Ullman. Spoiler alert: she has some amazing advice about enduring hardships in order to break down career barriers.
I hope you're enjoying the last weeks of 2017, Lennys! Or at least living for today.
Xoxo,
Molly Elizalde, Lenny associate editor | | | | | | | | | | | | Horse Power | | | | By Maggie Lange | | |
A horse tail-swoosh is the animal kingdom's answer to the middle finger, the hair flip, and the eye roll in one gesture. It says watch out for me and don't test me. In an attractive way. It's instinctive, defiant, effective, bodily, and aloof. It isn't just a warning, it accomplishes the swats and flicks. It's form and function and fuck-you. At this time of too many battles to fight and a sea of wrongs to growl at, I want to very much embody the horse tail-whip.
It started with my nails. I met a wrangler with an excellent manicure in Wyoming who told me that it was horse-hoof polish that keeps her nails strong. She uses Gena's Hoof Lacquer, a quick-drying top coat with a high gloss whose label says "the trainer's choice." It's an acetate, alcohol, and formaldehyde resin, an intimidating mixture that is ready to do hard work. It layers on a hearty protective layer that smoothed over brittle ends and wasn't cheesy-shiny either. I didn't do a control test with my nails before this hoof lacquer, but they do make a way more satisfying clack sound when drummed on a desk.
More, more, more! My mane, my energy, my muscles: so many components of my form seemed suitable for equine treatment. I began a Google search for more horse-specific, human-suitable products. I now get targeted advertisements that want to sell me stable blankets for wintertime horse care. What initially appealed to me about a *beauty* product made for horses is that it should be resilient, weather-resistant, and capable of dealing with sweat, work, and dirt. I'm getting images of Lady Godiva and centaurs. The animals are tough and forceful, and also shiny and gorgeous.
Mane 'n Tail has been a famous cross-species beauty stronghold for as long as I've known about horses and horse girls. Long interlude: the horse girl is a type of adolescent particularly obsessed with horses, Thoroughbred books, braids ( if you'd like some source material, here's a Tacocat song called "Horse Grrls"). I found an elevated Mane 'n Tail option called Gallop with glossy metallic packaging and promises to enhance color for specific breeds. It's very lathery and leaves a delicate shimmer. I used the one for chestnut and palomino horses, and it brought out whatever gold-blonde summer glow was still left in my hair. The instructions are to apply directly to a wet coat with a brush or by hand, though in the shower works great for human people.
It has been my hunt for an animalic, leathery, hay perfume that has me feeling my most equine. Something that smells like the aroma described in this diary entry from Walt Whitman's Specimen Days in America called "Clover and Hay Perfume," where the "the familiar delicious perfume fills the barns and lanes" and there are "long, glossy, dark-green plumes for the great horseman, earth." First reading this, I fully accepted the thesis that earth is a horseman, and then I fully desired summer smells of green, smoky woods. This is often a unisex scent, like the Smell of Weather Turning by Lush, which has nettle and hay. My favorite was the known enfant terrible of perfumes, Bandit by Robert Piguet. Bandit is made with "dark animal notes and aggressive leather accord." Whoa, and yes. That's what feeling like a horse should make you say. It's a whole orchestration of a smell, undeniable and sybaritic, or just "very strong," in the words of a friend who hugged me right after I used it. You need to feel bold when you put it on; otherwise, it's a little ridiculous. There's no hiding behind this scent, just like there's no hiding a horse.
To feel like a horse, you can't just keep things surface-level. Even when you're still, it's very muscular; they are a perma-flexed beast. Moving fast and with power has been a physical priority for me since it felt potentially relevant to my future that I might need to kick some Nazis. I was referred to a dance class close to me called Pony Sweat and texted four suspected former horse girls I knew. "Tell me about your horse-girl past, and I'll show your pony-sweat future," I texted. No one was free, but at least one nicely declined by saying "Stay golden, pony girl." I wondered if it would be the choreography to Ginuwine's "Pony" as executed by Channing Tatum. It was not. The music was New Wave–y and the movements were kicky and slinky. The leader, a dainty punk named Emilia , encouraged us through some energetic wiggles among the spicy smell of body sweat and natural deodorant. After the class, Emilia told me it's named after a band she formed with her friends called Pony Boat that had never actually played but had inspired some tattoos. The dances were clever and quick, if not particularly assertive, and I felt a little distracted. But then, I am not a pony.
There was one song from Pony Sweat that I kept playing, by L7. It has a ground-pounding chorus that goes, "She's fast, she's lean and frightening!" It's about me; it's about a horse. The way I've felt it most recently is going extremely fast on my bike. Extremely fast, by the way, is a feeling, not a speed measurement. It's legs pumping, blurred trees, sweat, traversing power, wind in your shiny mane, and staying very golden.
Maggie Lange just moved to Los Angeles, and is still on East Coast time. | | | | | | | | | | | | "What You Have to Offer to the World Is the Most Beautiful Thing About Yourself" | | | | By Olivia Clement | | |
Jocelyn Bioh and her best friend used to have a joke between themselves: "If we went out with our lighter-skinned girlfriends, we'd say: Well, at least we don't have to worry about being hit on. We can just have fun!" Sitting across from her, it's hard to believe that Jocelyn could go anywhere without being hit on. She has one of the most beautiful smiles I've ever seen. She's warm and incredibly funny. She's smart. And she's written a play that will break your heart, then mend it — on repeat.
School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play takes place at an exclusive boarding school in Ghana in the 1980s. It's the story of five young women trying to make sense of the world as they know it: what it means to be popular, to belong, to be liked, and to be beautiful. In the play, like in much of the world, beauty is defined by a Western, white standard: the lighter the skin, the prettier the woman. It's this falsehood that causes the complete undoing of the school's reigning queen bee, Paulina Sarpong. Things spiral out of control for Paulina when her chances of getting into the Miss Universe pageant are upended by the arrival of a biracial girl named Ericka. "The world has already decided … You are better than me," Paulina tells her rival.
Jocelyn, a successful actress (she was seen on Broadway in the Tony-winning production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and, in 2017, she starred in two hit Off-Broadway shows: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's Everybody and Suzan-Lori Parks's In the Blood), is making her professional playwriting debut with School Girls in New York. The show was named a New York Times Critics' Pick and quickly extended its limited downtown run due to popular demand. Not bad for a first gig.
For the playwright, it's also a play that's close to home. Though Jocelyn has been writing plays for as long as she's been acting, it seems fitting that her first professional production is about a subject that's so personal.
"I always knew I was going to write something about colorism one day. Just because of my own insecurities and how I learned to come into my own self-worth and own my beauty," Jocelyn tells me. The daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, she's experienced firsthand what it means to be treated differently because of her dark complexion. In her early 20s, the actress and playwright often felt overlooked in the company of her lighter-skinned friends. "I did feel very inferior to a lot of my college friends," she says. "We'd go out, and everybody would want to talk to them and not to me."
The idea for School Girls was sparked by a controversy at the 2011 Miss Ghana pageant. The winner, Yayra Erica Nego, was an American-born and Minnesota-raised biracial woman. Officials claimed that her father was from the obscure Volta region of Ghana but never confirmed his name or whereabouts. In a world where white is beautiful, was it an attempt by the Miss Ghana Pageant officials to have a more viable and perhaps winning contestant in the Miss Universe pageant? When Jocelyn heard the story, she knew she had her next play. It was the perfect setting to explore how Western ideas of colorism had infiltrated West Africa.
The details of her research were sad and shocking. Jocelyn learned about the multibillion-dollar skin-whitening industry, which is still burgeoning today despite a ban on many of the products. In an attempt to measure up to white, empirical standards of beauty, a large number of Africans bleach their skin with harmful creams that cause severe irritation and blistering. In School Girls, Paulina uses lightening products to the point of hospitalization.
"Colonialism completely devastated and ravaged so many African nations, and it's really sad how much of that influence has continued to infiltrate African society," says Jocelyn. "The fact that so many women are made to feel that they need to look other than what they look like biologically in order to feel beautiful is a very sad state."
"The judges are looking for a more universal and commercial look," the pageant recruiter, herself a darker-skinned woman, explains in School Girls. "We are looking for girls that fall on the other end of the African skin spectrum." When you hear the words, it's almost absurd, yet it's impossible to ignore the fact that a similar standard of beauty has also been imposed here in the United States.
Though the play takes place in Ghana, the story feels all too familiar. So many of us will recognize the kind of self-loathing these young women endure. Yet that's not to say it isn't a fun time at the theater; School Girls has the audience in hysterics within the first five minutes. And that's on purpose. For Jocelyn, comedy is a way of inviting people in to relate to foreign characters and situations. Laughter lends any story universality, says the playwright. "When people feel like they're having a good time, it releases them to connect and open their ears and hearts."
Finding the comedy in dramatic situations has always come naturally to Jocelyn, but there are some jokes — like saying in jest that a lighter-skinned friend is more likely to get hit on — that she's learned to stop making. "I had to start really letting go of those jokes. They were residual feelings of insecurity that I was hanging on to," she says, "and I had to let them go."
Unlike the young women in her play, Jocelyn has done a lot of work to embrace her own self-worth. "It's more important to be a good person than a pretty person," she says. "Beauty is subjective, but there's nothing subjective about being kind and warm and funny and loving and intelligent."
In the character of Paulina, we see how society's idea of what she should be has changed her for the worse — it has made her ugly. Jocelyn hopes it's a message that will reach audiences of all ages and races.
"I understood what I offered as a person, and I realized that what I offered was a lot more than whether some guy thought I was cute or not," she says. "I knew that I was smart and funny. I knew I had a lot to offer as a human being — to art and to culture."
"What you have to offer to the world is the most beautiful thing about yourself," she continues. "Owning that and accepting that and loving that about yourself is going to make all the difference in how you move through the world."
Olivia Clement is a playwright and writer living in New York. | | | | | | | | | | | | Abigail Adams Persisted | | | | By Alexis Coe | | |
In this new column, Alexis Coe, Lenny's historian at large, conducts Q&As with specialists across the country, focusing on one primary source. For this edition, Alexis spoke with Sara Georgini, series editor for the Papers of John Adams at the Massachusetts Historical Society, about a letter Abigail Adams sent to John on February 13, 1797, about James, a black servant she'd educated at home and eventually sent to school — despite the objections of her white neighbors.
Alexis Coe: Fortunately for our collective memory, Abigail and John Adams were apart a good deal and had an awful lot to say to each other — and to us, as they clearly wrote for the archive. Today, we are discussing one of thousands of letters we have from them, but this particular one was written at a significant moment: John was a month away from becoming the second president of the United States. Abigail was preparing to meet him in Philadelphia (then the site of the President's House). She wrote to him about taking care of loose ends in Quincy, Massachusetts, but the main focus of the letter is James, a black servant she'd been educating in their home. Who was James, and how long had he worked for them?
Sara Georgini: This 13 Feb. 1797 letter is good evidence of the pastiche of information and opinion that Abigail regularly sent to her often-distant husband. She ran the farm back in New England with the rigor and innovation of a modern-day CEO.
James, a paid African-American servant of the family, picked apples, mowed and harvested crops, tended oxen, prepped the cider mill, trimmed trees, built the stone walls bordering the property, and tended to general agricultural duties. James also learned how to read and write from Abigail. When lessons in the front parlor with the First Lady waned, sending him to Samuel Heath's school must have seemed like a natural next step. Abigail's plan for James's higher education, however, meets with serious pushback. So with her husband away and enmeshed in political troubles, Abigail steps in and resolves the issue. It's signature Abigail: She's candid and feisty, fiercely set on broadening others' rights to keep her community intact and improving. She protests, she persists, she perseveres.
AC: At the time, slavery was legal, and most of the Founding Fathers — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe — owned at least 75 men, women, and children, but not the Adams family. Why?
SG: "I wish most sincerely there was not a Slave in the province," Abigail wrote in 1774, as demands for American liberty grew. A lifelong anti-slavery advocate, Abigail was irate when she learned that the Declaration of Independence's "most Manly Sentiments," denouncing the slave trade, were, after great debate, heavily struck out of the final draft. The Adams family's New England roots may have placed them far from the realities of Southern plantation slavery, but they were conscious of its cruelty. In towns like Braintree and Quincy, clergymen owned slaves well into the 1780s, when the practice was legally abolished by the Massachusetts constitution (largely drafted by John Adams). John and Abigail found slavery abhorrent and taught their children so. Eldest son John Quincy Adams, well-known for his anti-slavery crusade, lived up to their lessons.
AC: Abigail wanted to send James to school. Was that because she was leaving Philadelphia, or was he a particularly promising student? What sort of future did she envision for him?
SG: Whether in London, Paris, or Quincy, Abigail Adams kept a sharp eye on her staff's progress and behavior. She celebrated their weddings and new children, regularly reevaluated their pay, and swiftly dismissed more than one coachman for insobriety. We do not know what she had in mind for James, but Abigail championed literacy and the pursuit of knowledge for family and servants alike. After all, she had borrowed her brother's books during his Harvard years, learned theology from her father's lending library, and even read plays in Auteuil in order to teach herself French. Like many eighteenth-century elite women on both sides of the Atlantic, Abigail indulged in education as both intellectual entertainment and as moral improvement. I think that she'd want anyone to have the same experience, including James, and therefore loathed any attempt to bar it.
AC: James goes off to school, and all seems well until "Neighbour Faxon" stops by and tells Abigail that her servant is ruining everything. At first, she's confused. Had James misbehaved? "O no, there was no complaint of that kind," he replied, "but [the other boys] did not chuse to go to School with a Black Boy." Abigail, true to form, grills Neighbour Faxon.
SG: Since she tells the story best, putting her argument in perfect pitch with a "ladylike" appeal to religious sentimentality, I'll hand over the tale to Abigail here. In her words:
"is this the Christian Principle of doing to others, as we would have others do to us? O Mam, You are quite right. I hope You wont take any offence. none at all mr Faxon, only be so good as to send the Young Men to me. I think I can convince them that they are wrong."
AC: Classic Abigail. I distinctly recall Abigail's "Remember the Ladies" letter, in which she stresses that women's contributions to the American Revolution should not be forgotten in the formation of the country (which they basically were), as my introduction to women's history. I think that's true for a lot of times; it seems like she was always sticking up for some disenfranchised group.
SG: We're fortunate to hold Abigail's "Remember the Ladies" letter here at the Historical Society, and it's one of my favorite manuscripts to show. She wields a powerful pen. Skim the content, and you'll see how she builds the letter with feeling and detail. She opens with a salvo against the Virginia militia, demonstrating how much sensitive intelligence she knows, and voicing concern about whether Southern slaveholders will bolster New England's cause. She describes how British soldiers have trashed their Boston property during the recent evacuation and outlines plans for spring planting on the farm. Then, near the bottom of the second page, Abigail pivots to her main argument to "Remember the Ladies" in the new government's code of laws. Now, as a seasoned letter-writer, Abigail is a drafter. Often she writes a few words, cancels them in a heavy line, and starts again. But here, in one of her most famous pieces of writing, take a closer look: Her pen never slips. Not only is she sure-footed on the page — it's likely because she and John and her sisters and her neighbors have had this conversation before. It's evident in John's teasing reply and worth thinking about more.
AC: How did Abigail come to be this way? Did her parents encourage her and her sisters to be outspoken when women were expected to be silent?
SG: As a young woman, Abigail helped run her father's bustling parish and farm. She grew up at the community's center. She watched her father (and grandfather) settle religious disagreements. She helped fellow parishioners rebuild after a catastrophic fire. And Abigail had her father's library, filled with radical English dissenters' works, to enjoy. To understand Abigail, stroll through her correspondence with her sisters, Mary Smith Cranch and Elizabeth Smith Shaw Peabody. Their letters brim with literary insights, spiritual views, dating rituals, political chats, and much more. We cannot know for sure, but based on that correspondence, I've always thought Abigail grew up in a household where good manners and informed opinions all measured a woman's worth.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Alexis Coe is a historian and the author of Alice+Freda Forever. Follow her on Twitter @AlexisCoe. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Lesbian Cattle Dogs Howl at the Moon | | | | By Lydia Conklin | | | |
Lydia Conklin is the 2015–2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, and her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. | | | | | | | | | | | | Ellen Ullman's Life in Code | | | | By Casey Johnston | | |
Ellen Ullman's latest book, A Life in Code, relays her experience through many of our major cultural tech moments: Y2K, the rise (and fall, and rise, and fall) of artificial intelligence, the emergence of the Internet, and the runaway growth of Silicon Valley over the past two decades. Ullman insists she is only a programmer, but she is also a sharp observer of Silicon Valley culture. Ullman's view as a woman on the inside of tech is incredibly rare, but her ability to remain within the system for decades without letting it consume her is still rarer.
While Silicon Valley abhors pessimism, Ullman reminds us that sometimes positivity about new possibilities is the result of an incredibly narrow view. It takes an expansive imagination or even just a willingness to explore different perspectives and walks of life, to see how good intentions can actually hurt without consideration for people who may lead different lives than the standard white, male tech-company founder. Ullman possesses both the imagination and willingness, and as events in our lives like the 2016 election and the carriage of justice and racial violence become inextricable from the bleeding technological edges, her perspective will only become more crucial.
Casey Johnston: You talk a lot about disintermediation, or the notion that people come to distrust "middlemen" in all kinds of transactions, including informational middlemen like journalists. The greatest example of someone who discredits middlemen, including the media, is our current president. The Internet provides a lot of access to information, but it doesn't tell you who is right or who is worth listening to. How do you think this phase ends? Do you think society has to collapse first?
Ellen Ullman: I saw this happening as early as 1998. So it's not like this is brand new. Once the web came on, it's like, Well, you don't need any intermediary. It's like this arrow that got shot in the air, and rose very high, and fell right at the feet of Donald Trump. Whatever you think about Donald Trump, one must look at the fact that one of the most powerful people on earth has a tool that he uses to go over the head of everybody: his assistants, his aides, the entire structure of the government. He mistrusts all of the security administrations: the NSA, the FBI, never mind the news. So it is a scary tool in this instance.
But in general, that's what it can be used for. It's not evil. People start these conversations, and that's fine, they're good, they're fun. I mean, technology can give you a lot of fun; programming is an art, and I'm still excited about it. But I try to have a balanced view. This love should be complicated. After the election of Trump, subscriptions to the New York Times digital edition went way up, so it shows you that there exists a great number of people who are hungry for the truth. The Washington Post has now on its masthead: "Democracy dies in darkness." The New York Times just had "Trump's Lies". His supporters believe him. They believe that mainstream media is fake news. Now you just get on the web and anything you want to believe, you can find support for. It breaks down the notion of culture.
Are we going to go back to something else? I can't tell you that. The Internet is a tool, and it has great power at this point. It has an existence of its own that human beings have adopted in certain ways, but millions of users on the Internet, billions, change the situation.
In terms of the Internet being able to get truth into societies where things are blocked like China, and Russia, and Turkey, and you can go on with this, that indicates the problem of the Internet. It's a choke point. So we'd like to think of it as this truth giver, and in some ways it is. But on the other hand, it makes it easy for tyrants to shut down certain portions of the Internet.
CJ: What is it about tech that preserves the sort of narrow enthusiasm in people, that they tend to be very focused on what it can do and not the downsides of it?
EU: You have to get money from investors and venture capitalists, and the pitch has to be, "This will make a lot of money, and it will change the world." Oh my God, if I ever hear that again: "change the world." Never specify if for better or for worse. I see disruption as a large increase of inequality. In the middle are, let's say, taxi drivers, in particular. There's this whole level of smaller capitalists who were usually at the path for immigrants to come in: the first generation drive cabs, make money for the kids to go to school. The stories I hear about their desperation at losing their livelihood, it's affecting.
Disruption takes this whole middle of commerce and removes it and pushes all the winnings to the very top: people in the start-up, their investors, and so forth. So if you look at it that way, disruption is a way to throw the little guy out of business and make some very small group of people very wealthy. The jobs that are created, those people are being taken advantage of. They are stand-ins for Uber to replace them with self-driving cars. They're experiments actually working themselves into unemployment. These are the things to notice.
CJ: You spend a little time in the book looking at what tools are available to somebody who wants to learn programming and their various biases.
EU: I think everybody, to some degree, should be exposed to programming. Everyone. If only to demystify code and algorithms. They surround us, so it gives the sense that we are imprisoned. You can't get out of it if you live in the developed world. So, given that: One, everyone must have the sense that this is not mystical. This is not inevitable. This was written by people. And people can change it.
CJ: One of the things I really liked about this book was that you offer perspective on what work is like as a programmer. I love the passage when you're talking about the course videos; you advise, "Get what you need from this man. Just get it. All prejudice is meant to slap you back and put you in your place. Use your anger to fuel your determination. It is very hard to face such prejudice." You talk about men rubbing your back and complimenting your hair, all of this stuff that's horrible but also, I hate to say, extremely normal in this sort of environment. Do you see this as the only way into the field of tech?
EU: Everybody has difficulties. Being a woman is an added difficulty. It is a white and Asian world of men. I am not the first to say this, but working and trying, it's just not … the only thing. Get angry, but to just flash out in anger will certainly get you down the rung or fired. So I think that's true of anyone who works in a company, by the way. There's a way. Use that anger, somehow.
Look, this is terrible, because it sounds like, "Oh, you should just put up with it." I don't mean put up with it. I mean use it. I mean see it and say, "This will not get me that."
I leaned into it. By lean into it, I mean, "Do all of the work." That's the thing to concentrate on. I love this work. I'm good at it. It allows you to withstand what's happening, because it's not going to change. You can write blogs, I can write it in my book, but it's not going to change unless women are just inside it. If you go inside it and just say, "Oh, this is sexist, and I'm leaving," then women will never get inside it.
Anyone who breaks barriers will have to endure something. That's the way politics is. When there is a segregated society, going into it will cause pain. Find a way to just say, "That doesn't kill me," and go through it.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Casey Johnston is a senior editor at the New York Times' Wirecutter and a Swole Woman at the Hairpin. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | |
No comments:
Post a Comment