| | | |  Illustration by Alessandra Genualdo | The boy called. I didn’t know how he’d gotten my number. He asked for me by name, and my mom put her hand over the receiver and mouthed, It’s a boy! A popular boy. The kind who wore slouching khakis and a worn-in white baseball cap, who would grow up to have a line of premium vodka and a featured story in the wedding announcement section of the New York Times. Not really my type, but I didn’t have a type back then. I was more concerned with being a type, the type She had patented. She was my best friend. I was Her second best friend. I could live with that. When she wasn’t looking, I studied Her — the way she held Her pen in class, elbow pointed outward, bracelets chiming. The way she tilted Her head to drag on a Parliament. And once, through a crack in Her bathroom door, I watched her twist around and take a tissue to her backside. So this is how you’re supposed to look when you go to the bathroom, I thought. “How’d you get my number?” I asked the boy on the phone. It was something I’d heard her say to a boy before, though her voice had a lilt that gave it a less accusatory tone. He spoke of the Hebrew-school directory. She had introduced me to him in the elevator at the synagogue after our weekly confirmation class. At 14, She was the access point to boys from other schools, and that was powerful to students at an all-girls school. Boys defined us, despite their absence in our formal education. And they liked Her. I was the friend who flanked Her, waiting outside rooms they pulled Her into and knocking on doors when our curfew was getting close. I was the short one with the big nose, the one who visibly shook around the boys, who didn’t matter but whom She insisted come along and they said fine. *** Once, I thought we were the same. We were neighbors, B-plus students, lefties. Our moms were friends, and we both hated our moms, but not really. We liked chocolate cat tongues and sleepovers, kiwi Body Shop soap and walking to school together, pretending we were famous people engaged in a famous conversation, using words like agent and movie trailer loud enough that strangers might hear. But boys changed things. “You’re funny,” the boy on the phone said. “I want to take you out.” “Where would you take me?” I asked him. The other line beeped. It was Her. *** In Her bedroom, we listed what embarrassed us — beyond farts and period stains — the weird stuff we couldn’t explain. Her dad’s baldness, my father’s predilection for cowboy hats, saying the word Guggenheim. These were the conversations that made me love Her. For a time, we were so similar — same bra size, same skinny legs and arms, same pinkish, freckled skin and green eyes — I imagined we were one person, split in two. But after boys, when we compared our reflections, I noticed Her green eyes were jewel-toned rather than swampy, Her lower lip was fuller than mine, and despite Her protestations, Her nose wasn’t as prominent. Nothing could be done about my hair, a halo of wool that was all I could see of myself in Her bathroom mirror, unless I stood on a stool. “You’re obsessed with Her,” Her first best friend once told me, and I resented her for implying the feeling wasn’t mutual. “Guess who’s on the other line,” I said, pausing between the popular boy’s first and last name for effect. If she was jealous, she kept it to herself. “See?” she might have said encouragingly, but it wasn’t like Her to condescend. More likely, she pretended the boy’s call was as normal an occurrence for me as it was for Her. There were things we didn’t say outright. There were lies. She would say she’d gotten a bad grade when she hadn’t, or that a boy liked me when she knew he liked Her instead. But these were merciful deceptions, simple mistakes. Anyway, I lied too. The boy on the other line referenced something we had in common, a joke we shared, or a time we first met that wasn’t the time I remember. He’d made a mistake, of course. He thought I was Her, and for a moment, so did I. But if he met me, if I opened the door and saw the flash of disappointment on his face, it would confirm what I already knew: I was unlovable. “I think you’re confusing me with someone else,” I had to tell him. “No, you’re Piper,” he insisted. “With the brown hair.” That was true. “And you’re medium-tallish.” “No, I’m the short one.” *** We were sixteen when I decided to end my friendship with Her. Around that time, I was cutting up my arms with a kitchen knife. After my scabs were discovered, my family encouraged me to consider the root of my self-loathing. I thought of Her, and how our discrepancies had become too hard to ignore. As long as she remained my point of comparison, I’d always be the girl who wasn’t Her. So I called to tell Her I needed a break. In the years to come, I would have other close friends. I would learn to replace envy with respect and drive, to confront someone without cutting them off, to diminish the value placed on male approval and better understand the origins of my insecurities. I learned how much you miss someone when they’re gone, and how their absence will haunt you. After graduation, She and I had virtually no direct interaction. However, there were four cryptic messages she sent me through the years, each delivered by a third party. The first two took the form of a question. -
“Did you ever threaten Her with a knife when you were a teenager?” my mother asked me. She’d heard, through a chain of mothers, that this was the reason for our friendship’s ending. -
“Why did you pass Her on the street and pretend you didn’t see Her?” Her first best friend, who remained as such, asked when we met up post-college. But I hadn’t done these things. At least, I have no memory of either incident, and yet both seem like impulses I might have had, troubled as I was as a teenager and ashamed as I was about it years later. It was as if She had witnessed the dreams I’d had of Her — dreams I still have, even now in my late 30s. In a recent one, She was looking at me as she whispered in someone else’s ear. The third message She sent came amid a bad breakup. She tagged an old photo of us on Facebook. I was at work when I saw the picture and instinctively slid off the chair to hide under my desk. Then I deleted my Facebook account. She reached out to my sister to see if I was OK. “What should I write back?” my sister asked. “Don’t,” I told Her. *** “He thinks I’m you,” I said. I’d put the boy on hold, so I could tell Her and get the humiliation over with. I pretended this was actually what I’d wanted all along. “Really?” she said, quietly enough for me recognize that this was more embarrassing than a bald dad. “I can give him your number if you want,” I think I said, but she didn’t seem to care. For a moment, we were the same person, but now we were not. Maybe some part of Her was disappointed, too. Either way, he’d already hung up. *** The fourth message She sent was delivered by a best friend I made as an adult. By fate, my newer friend was Her neighbor, and they soon became close. I anguished over what She might say about me. Irrational as it was, I believed she knew the dark truth about me, whatever that was, and Her role on this planet was to warn others about it. In fact, the message she sent was “Tell Piper I’m sorry.” “For what?” I asked my friend. “I don’t know, that’s all she said.” Recently, I thought to respond. “I miss you,” I could write, but enough time has passed that the sentiment isn’t accurate. “I missed the opportunity to know you better,” I might write in the future. Or “How are you?” Or “What were you sorry about?” Or “I’m sorry, too.” Piper Weiss is the author of You All Grow Up and Leave Me: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession, published by William Morrow. She lives in Brooklyn. | | | | |  Illustration by Chiara Lanzieri | All home cooks tend to have one major flaw. We don’t say “I’m a home cook.” We say “Oh, I’m just a home cook.” I spend my time on the road urging people to lose that “just,” to stop apologizing, desist from outlining the ways in which our talents, abilities, and output fall short. What we are doing is comparing ourselves to chefs and feeling ourselves the lesser for it. We are not chefs; we can’t do things that chefs can do — we don’t have the time, energy, or training — but to deduce that we are inadequate at the task of creatively feeding ourselves and others is madness. I am routinely called a chef. I point out, politely, that I am not a chef, but a home cook who writes about food (I have no training and have never cooked professionally), and I am always charmingly chided for being modest. But I am not being modest in the slightest: I don’t regard being called a chef as an accolade; I regard it as a case of false attribution. I can see it confuses people: If someone writes books and cooks, albeit clumsily, on TV, then it is fair to presume that person is a professional. So I will own up gladly to being a professional food writer. But I started my food-writing career (relatively late in life — my first book, How to Eat, came out when I was 38) precisely because I felt that the domination of chef-food in publishing and television was damaging and wrong. Real cooking is what happens in the home. Restaurant cooking can be fabulous, inspiring, transcendent, and oh-so-marvelous in many ways, but for me it will always partly belong to the realm of theater. Furthermore, the restaurant kitchen insists and relies on conformity; the spontaneity of the home cook is by contrast gloriously anarchic. Don’t apologize for that: revel in it. Of course, there’s a reason why the home cook has always been seen as a lesser creature: traditionally, chefs had been male and paid; home cooking was “women’s work,” unwaged and taken for granted, sentimentally prized but not essentially valued or respected. There was a time when denigrating cooking and insisting on how hopeless you were at it were ways of establishing distance from the role of domestic drudge. And yet I have always felt that to disparage an activity because it has been traditionally female is itself anti-feminist. Moreover, cooking seems to me to be one of the basic prerequisites for sustaining the self: it is an act of primary independence. I love feeding other people — I can’t even let a person who’s come in to mend my boiler leave without something wrapped in aluminum foil — but I derive no less deep satisfaction from feeding myself. Cooking is also, supremely, a creative act. By that I mean not an art but a craft. I leave the Art with a capital A to chefs. For the home cook, or for this home cook in particular, there is something less lofty and more physical: the feel of the dough in my fingers, the scent of a lemon as I zest the skin and the aromatic oils spritz in the air, the sizzle of onions in a pan, the darkly gleaming beauty of an eggplant. Cooking provides deep aesthetic pleasure though it is manual work. But it doesn’t have to be labor. It doesn’t have to be difficult. It certainly can be difficult: I read any recipe written by an award-winning chef, and I know I will be daunted. Getting dinner on the table doesn’t require any abstruse skills, arcane knowledge, or even dexterity. I haven’t got a knife skill to my name, but I cook often and gladly. For home cooking is not technique-driven but taste-led. The very simplest processes can lead to great complexity of flavor. The chicken-and-pea recipe below is a testament to that. And, of course, all too often there is a great misunderstanding about what home cooking is, as if authentic home cooking can exist only if we use ingredients that were available before the industrial revolution and make dishes that were a feature of our grandparents’ kitchens. I was always mystified by this until I realized that this nostalgic reading — the familiar fallback of those for whom home cooking means an unchanging repertoire from a glorified past — comes from those who don’t cook. If you don’t cook, of course the term has a museum-piece feel about it. Those of us who do cook are greedy for the ingredients that may be new to us; dishes from other cultures’ cuisines breathe new life into our kitchens. So much of cooking is more jumbled than that: we are not creating a cuisine, we are making something to eat. Sometimes, this means we go to the store for far-flung ingredients; at other times, we simply choose the ease of the familiar. Neither is better than the other, and sometimes the two are fused: ultimately all home cooking provides comfort. This Chicken-and-Pea Traybake is a favorite of mine. (Food snobs may be dismayed by a recipe that leads with a packet of frozen peas, but I don’t see why that should worry us.) It is the simplest sort of cooking: the frozen peas are clattered into an oven tin, mixed with dry white vermouth, leeks, garlic, dill, salt, and olive oil, topped with chicken thighs, and cooked in the oven. Use white wine in place of the vermouth if you want (I am not enough of a drinker to keep an open bottle of wine about) or replace with chicken broth (and I don’t mean you have to make your own), and if you prefer thyme to dill, then fine by me. Cooking is by its very nature improvisational: a recipe must be utterly reliable, but it is always an invitation, not a command. .jpg) Courtesy Nigella Lawson |
Chicken-and-Pea Traybake Serves 4 7 cups frozen petits pois (approximately 2 pounds)
4–5 medium-large leeks, trimmed and cut into approximately 1-inch slices
2 fat cloves garlic, peeled and minced
¼ cup dry white vermouth
2 tablespoons regular olive oil, plus more for drizzling
2 teaspoons sea-salt flakes or kosher salt, plus more for sprinkling
1 small bunch dill, torn into pieces
8 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs I thought I had exhausted the culinary possibilities of a package of frozen peas, but my friend Alex Andreou, an excellent cook, led me by the hand — it does take a leap of faith — to his method of using them, still frozen, as the first layer of a traybake. It’s a life-changer. The peas become soft and sweet in the heat — duller in color, but so much more vibrant in flavor — and the steam they produce as they bake makes the chicken beautifully tender, its skin crackly and crisp on top. What’s key here is the size of the roasting pan. I wouldn’t go any smaller — measuring from inside rim to inside rim — than about 15 by 11 inches (a little larger is fine), as there needs to be space around the chicken thighs for the magic to happen. -
Preheat the oven to 400°F and clatter the frozen peas into a large roasting pan, followed by the leeks, garlic, vermouth, 2 tablespoons of oil, 2 teaspoons of salt, and most of the dill. Turn everything together in the pan — breaking up any large clumps of the frozen peas — until well mixed. I advise you to wear CSI gloves for this, just to stop you getting frostbite, though you still will feel the cold. -
Arrange the chicken thighs, skin-side up, on top, then drizzle them with a little olive oil and give them a good sprinkling of salt, before roasting in the oven for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven and give the peas a small stir or tamp down, so that the few that are sitting on the surface and drying out a little are submerged in the liquid. Don’t do the same to the leeks, however, as the bits that are peeking out will become desirably caramelized in the heat. Put back in the oven for a further 30 minutes, by which time the peas and leeks will be soft and the chicken tender and cooked through, its skin golden and crisp. -
Tear off the remaining dill fronds, and scatter over the top before serving, perhaps with some simple steamed baby potatoes to soak up the pea and chicken juices. Recipe from At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking, by Nigella Lawson (Flatiron Books, 2018). Nigella Lawson has written ten best-selling cookbooks, including the classics How to Eat and How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Her eleventh, At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking, is available now. | | | | |  Illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban | Don't miss all of Daughter, First: In part 1, we meet the Governor's daughter, Katie Mahoney Brown; in part 2, the attorney who's going to take down the administration digs into the family secrets; in part 3, the matriarch, Rosemary Mahoney, uncovers her husband's dirty business deals; and in part 4, Katie's marriage begins to unravel. Dia wasn’t surprised when her phone buzzed with a text from her best friend, Njeri: I saw the news … By then, everyone in Boston had seen the news. Fourteen members of MS-13 had been arrested in Chelsea, and there was her colleague Whittier on every channel. We seized 30 pounds of heroin, over $300,000 in cash, and we have sixteen assault rifles now in our possession. Though I can’t say any more at this juncture, we expect to add first-degree-murder charges. This is a win for our city, our future. Whittier craved the flashbulbs. How many times had he forwarded Dia that Seth Meyers Boston-crime-movie parody? You gotta see this, D. Wife says he and I could be twins. And, of course, MS-13 was an ideal opponent. Whittier’s white teeth sparkled. “Our goal is to stop that cancer that is MS-13 before it metastasizes.” It seemed like the man’s stockpile of metaphors was akin to his budget for dental veneers — infinite. Dia leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. It was nearly 6 p.m., and she’d been in here for close to twelve hours, bouncing between her own investigation into the Mahoney administration and the news about Whittier. She closed the window on her browser. Enough. Her office phone rang. “This is Dia,” she said, longing for the modern wonders of technology, caller ID. It was her boss, Henry. “Don’t worry,” he said. “In a couple of days, this little shit’ll be yesterday’s news. That’ll be you up there.” She sighed. “Great. Can I send a proxy?” Henry chuckled. “’Fraid not, kiddo. What I can tell you is that our circus will definitely be a helluva a lot more exciting than this one.” *** After the call, Dia leaned back in her chair and felt queasy. Even if he wouldn’t admit it, Henry knew as well as she did: Big Jim wasn’t MS-13. What would happen next wouldn’t be a circus; it would be more like a funeral. She thought of those T-shirts they started making when the Red Sox became the Yankees, when Tom Brady became our Lord, Jesus Christ: “Boston vs. Everybody.” Not everyone likes change, but people in Boston share a particular loathing for anything different, any shift in what they perceive as the natural order of things. Even the locals whose parents had been victimized by decades of Big Jim’s slumlord shenanigans would lament his demise. Whether you loved Big Jim or hated him, there would be townie pride in knowing the man, having watched his rise and fall and followed his family in the gossip columns. Slideshows of the Mahoneys in different stages of growth would crop up all over the place. You’d see Katie escorting Orla from school — That poor, beautiful woman, imagine them coming for your daughter like that. Big Jim would be referred to as a “complicated figure … a family man.” After all, he wasn’t Whitey Bulger. He wasn’t the Boston Strangler or — God forbid — Bill Buckner. There was power in being a part of a family unit. Dia remembered being a kid, watching Family Feud, counting the players on each team, realizing that hers would be so small: just Dia and her parents. They were only three. Maybe she was so hell-bent on taking down the Mahoneys because they were such a unit, so fortified by their own numbers. Also, if she was being honest, because it still hurt to think about freshman year, running into Katie before Thanksgiving break, both handing in papers before the deadline. “Where do you guys go?” Katie had asked, that irritating innocence in her voice. Dia was blunt. “Home.” “So it’s just the three of you?” What was the point of replying? Katie Mahoney would never understand a family like hers. Instead, as Katie hoisted her Dooney & Bourke duffel over her shoulder, Dia asked, “Where do you go?” but she already knew. She’d seen the pictures in some magazine. “Oh, God,” Katie said, always maintaining a low buzz of friendliness, even when it would have been more natural for them to coexist in silence. “We’ll be on the Cape. It’s a total madhouse.” Dia pictured an asylum with padded walls, even though she knew the house was more likely to have tasteful wallpaper and an entire wall dedicated to framed family pictures. “Wow, how many people will be there?” “This year, I think there are 26 of us,” Katie said. “You don’t want to know how many turkeys we have to make.” Later that week, Dia was home. It was Thanksgiving, just she and her parents gathered around the kitchen table. She pushed her mashed potatoes around her plate, and her father eyed her. “Whatsa matter? We’re not good enough for you anymore?” It was an impossible question to answer. No, their three-person family wasn’t good enough, wasn’t big enough, wasn’t white enough, wasn’t black enough. Then she took one look at her mother’s face and did a 180. “It’s just … at school, everyone has so much, you know? Cars and endless cash and fancy vacations full of family time and —” Her father sighed. “That’s the road to hell, Dia. Comparing yourself to other people.” “That’s not what I mean.” Dia’s mother knew how to calm a storm. “That Katie comes from a different world,” she said. “Nobody says you have to be best friends.” *** It would be wrong to discount Whittier’s success, so when she got the invitation to pour one out for the local hero, Dia headed down the hall. She obligingly lifted her glass along with everyone else. Dia wondered what she would say when it was her turn to stand at the front of the room with the whole office, clasping paper cups of cheap champagne. But wait. There wouldn’t be a pour for her. Instead, Whittier’s many admirers would be sequestered at their desks, whispering among themselves about her “witch hunt,” emailing editorials laden with phrases like “the complex nature of men in power.” Even the pictures of Big Jim with his lady friends would conjure sympathy. They’d blame the hidden first wife: I bet she told him she was on the pill … I bet she tried to take him for millions … How do they even know Stephanie is really his daughter anyway? Dia saw Whittier making his way across the room. She nodded to Henry for the OK, and she emptied her glass before that plaid cad could get to her. As soon as she stepped out of the room, she texted Njeri at lightning speed: I’m free. And buzzed. Be at Harvard Gardens in twenty? The response came quickly: Done. *** Now that Dia’s parents were gone, Njeri was the closest thing Dia had to family. She was sensitive to Dia’s aloneness in the world — no surprise, since she was a clinical psychologist. “So I saw that guy on TV,” Njeri said, as soon as they settled in at the bar in the glow of the Patriots game. “What a day, right?” “You know his name is Whittier.” Njeri shrugged. “All I know is, he was in full Affleck mode.” Dia was already more relaxed. “I’d say he’s more Wahlberg than Affleck. He wouldn’t even have a glass of champagne to celebrate. Said he wanted to be able to play with his kids when he got home. Please.” Njeri grew serious. It was a stark reminder of their differences. Njeri was married, with two kids. Her husband was a pillar of the business community. If she were putting Big Jim behind bars, she’d be able to say she was doing it for her family. “Dia, is everything OK?” Dia hadn’t divulged any of the details of her case. Emotions, however, were another story. But Dia held her ground. “I’m fine,” she said. “What about you? How’s that new nanny working out?” Njeri wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Dia,” she said. “I see what’s happening here. You work with Whittier; you see him up there preaching about good and evil, like that’s how it’s done. But that’s not you. Don’t let him get to you.” Dia nodded. “And if your parents were here —” “Which they’re not,” Dia said, signaling to the waiter for a second drink. “If they were …” Njeri said. “They would tell you what I’m gonna tell you. They would say you were happier six months ago when you weren’t in that office day and night. You did right by them. It’s over. Take a break.” The waiter arrived with Dia’s drink. Nothing for Njeri, who must have waved him off. “You ever notice how some people in this world don’t get caught even when they do get caught?” Dia said. She rubbed her forehead. “I think I’m just tired.” Njeri’s shoulders dropped a little. “No,” Njeri said. “You’re sad. Grief isn’t all at once. There are waves. All you can do is ride the waves.” She leaned closer. “But Whittier’s big win doesn’t mean that you lost. Why don’t you come over this weekend? I have a birthday party where I’ll probably see Katie, ugh, but you know after that I’ll need a drink.” Dia realized she was getting what she wanted after all: her shot at Family Feud. As much as she loved Dia, Njeri wasn’t going to be there when she realized that Dia was on a mission to put Katie’s husband behind bars. Njeri ran in the same circles as Katie. Njeri had children to consider. If Dia stayed on the case, it would be Boston vs. Everybody. She would be Everybody. She would also be alone. *** The next morning, Dia’s head was clear. She’d always been this way, more focused with a slight hangover. Her foolproof hangover cure had helped, too: she took vitamin B and plunged her feet in ice-cold water right after she woke up. Sitting across from Tom in the interrogation room, Dia already had enough to convict him. He thought he was being tricky, moving money into a dummy corp, an LLC called Wychmere Selections. His lawyer dragged him in here first thing, and he was humbled, but there were still flashes of pride. “You know, I got the idea from my wife,” he said. “Wychmere, the scarves and the key chains, the jewelry. Truth be told, most businesses fail. Fashion and restaurants, especially.” “But the start-up money,” he continued, sensing Dia’s impatience. “That was all Jim.” “But it’s your signature on the forms,” Dia countered. “Yes, it is,” he said. “But only on the forms you’ve seen. I forgot the others.” Ah, so it was like that. “And you’re here to turn yourself in, then?” she asked. He pulled at the tip of his aquiline nose. “That’s a gross oversimplification of facts.” Tom’s lawyer kept trying to shush his client, but Tom kept going, getting angrier as he went on. “This was the Jim show. See, he laughed at Katie’s ‘little business’ — as if she could just wake up one day and become Lilly Pulitzer. Do you know the story behind Lilly? Do you know she was friends with Jacqueline Bouvier? Down in Palm Beach, she started a juice stand for kicks. A rich woman with nothing to do but squeeze a few oranges and call it a lifestyle. Obviously, it exploded. But that’s the exception. Jim was shocked when Katie actually made money, for a little while.” Dia pointed to the Wychmere file. “Ellen Palmer is listed as the president of Wychmere Selections.” His cheeks flushed. “Ellen doesn’t know a thing,” he said. “She’s someone we just know.” “Through Katie?” Dia asked, knowing what that meant: someone we just know. He twiddled his thumbs like a child. “No,” he said. “Katie doesn’t know Ellen.” “My client is here to cooperate,” Tom’s lawyer said. “We know that you have bigger fish to fry, and we’d like to help you out with that.” Dia wasn’t making any promises. Still, Tom outlined their “magic” tricks, using Wychmere Selections as a sieve for hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing consultants, shop-rental deposits, prototypes that never materialized. That’s the thing about privileged people. There’s delusion that comes with money. They mistakenly equate wealth with intelligence. Deep down, Tom never thought he’d be caught. But then, Tom wasn’t a very good magician. “We’ll resume shortly,” Dia said. And it was a rush, closing the door on him, locking it. Tom’s lawyer wanted immunity for his client — what else is new? — in exchange for his testimony about Jim. In her office, Dia thought back to that Thanksgiving in college, her inability to process her emotions about big families, big money. Even then, she’d sensed that a blanket of money and trust could only hold so many. You couldn’t love 26 people equally. Marriage is a squeeze. Would Katie blame her husband or her father? She watched Tom on the security feed. He paced in the interrogation room, running his hands through his hair, pulling at his pink button-down, no doubt selected for him by Katie. Katie, so often lauded for her impeccable taste in fashion, had terrible taste in men. Caroline Kepnes’s third novel, Providence, will be published by Lenny Books in June. Her first novel, You, has been adapted for a Lifetime series that premieres in September. Special thanks to Instagram user @angelabewicknutrition for the hangover-cure detail. | | | | |  Illustration by Katty Huertas | Women have gotten more vocal about their sexuality, their experiences of sexual harassment, their feelings about their bodies — but the horror of routine pelvic exams remains seriously under-discussed. On a website called For Women’s Eyes Only, someone describes finding pelvic exams so “humiliating, degrading, and painful” that she has to prime herself with a Xanax to get through one without a panic attack. Some women simply refuse to submit to these exams — especially if they lack the means to search out a doctor with whom they feel even marginally comfortable. Most of us just tell ourselves that our fears are childish remnants of an archaic modesty. We suck it up, spread our legs, and attempt to achieve an out-of-body experience. But our dread is not entirely irrational. Statistics on sexual abuse by doctors are inherently sketchy, if only because most victims are too shocked or traumatized to say anything about what went on the examination room. But a 2016 study by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that 2,400 American doctors have been publicly sanctioned for abuse. I, for one, have endured at least three medical assaults — including one by a gynecologist who saw fit to manipulate my clitoris (a distinctly unpleasurable experience) and, bizarrely, one by a woman doctor (in apparent retaliation for all the questions I was asking her). But I have never spoken of these incidents and would find it painful, years later, to describe them more fully. Clearly, the medical profession has a reckoning coming. What makes medical, and especially gynecological, procedures susceptible to misuse by predators is that they often so closely resemble real sexual interactions. Consider the standard gynecological exam, which women are expected to undergo annually: It consists of breast palpation, vaginal penetration, and often a rectal examination. These are shockingly intimate procedures. If a person were to come up to you on the street and offer to perform them, you would scream for help. But if that person represents himself as a licensed physician, backed up by years of scientifically based training, and you encounter him in a sterile-looking professional office, you would assume that whatever he does, however unpleasant, is done entirely for your own good. This is why Larry Nassar, the longtime USA Gymnastics national-team doctor, was able to get away for so long with the sexual abuse of the young female gymnasts entrusted to his care. As one of his more than 135 victims stated: “I just told myself it was normal, that he knows what he’s doing and don’t be a baby.” Another serial molester of girls, Donn Ketcham, was a doctor working at an American evangelical mission in Bangladesh in the 1980s. He told the young daughters of missionaries that his “exams” were necessary for their health. If a twelve-year-old questioned him about what he was “feeling for,” he would reply, “Just checking.” Although the exams were medically unnecessary, since breast and cervical cancers rarely occur in children, he performed them on one girl almost daily. Obviously, fiends like Nassar and Ketcham need to be apprehended and punished. But what about the ordinary noncriminal doctor going about his or her business? American women are usually expected to undergo annual pelvic exams twice as often as women in other advanced countries. In addition, a woman may have to put her feet up in the stirrups because she needs a prescription for birth-control pills, or because she fears STDs, or simply because she is there. One evening, when I had been briefly hospitalized for some cardiac symptoms and was comfortably reading in the hospital bed, a young male identifying himself as a resident showed up and announced he had to do a breast and pelvic exam. For cardiac symptoms? Certainly there are times when a pelvic exam may be useful or necessary — if, for example, you are experiencing pelvic pain or unusual discharges or bleeding. But routine exams, performed yearly on asymptomatic women, are an entirely different matter. The first indication that they are being performed far too often came from studies done in 2011 by Dr. Carolyn Westhoff at the Columbia University School of Medicine, who told an interviewer that some of her colleagues asked, “Carolyn, are you trying to put us all out of business?” Three years later, the American College of Physicians, which represents internists, strongly urged that doctors stop performing routine gynecological exams on symptom-free patients. Most recently, the prestigious United States Preventive Services Task Force declared that there is not enough evidence to either justify or discourage routine pelvic exams. Even the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has the most to lose in this debate, has begun to waver. There is a word for a medical procedure that is performed repeatedly but with no verifiable beneficial effect on the patient — ritual. This is the word that nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists applied to the healing practices of indigenous peoples, which often involved drumming, dancing, chanting, and the manipulation of sacred objects such as animal teeth and feathers. To distinguish these activities from the medical procedures of “real” — meaning Western — doctors, anthropologists called the indigenous healing practices “rituals,” meaning that they were more of a performance than anything a “civilized” person would recognize as medical care. Today, we have to acknowledge that the routine pelvic exam is not a serious, evidence-based medical intervention; it is, in the full pejorative sense, a ritual. Some influential doctors have taken to defending ritual for its own sake, as an essential part of the doctor-patient relationship, and especially when that ritual includes intimate touching. Stanford’s Dr. Abraham Verghese has said: … I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly, on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch — I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. His repetition of the word submit is telling — because what does the ritual of the gynecological exam convey to the patient? When the doctor is male, the ritual exam reenacts male domination and female submission. When the doctor is white or — as is usually the case — of a more privileged class than the patient, the ritual reinforces his or her social superiority. These, I would submit to you, are messages we do not need to hear. Yes, we have to continue to fight for greater access to health care, especially for the underpaid and underserved parts of the population that often have to go without prenatal care, dental care, and medical support for chronic conditions. What no one needs, though, are procedures that exist only to flatter the egos or excite the libidos of the practitioners. The time has come to get up out of the stirrups and say no. Barbara Ehrenreich is the founder of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and her latest book is Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer. | | | | |  Orkideh Torabi, I'll catch you!, 2017. 43 x 37 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. | Iranian artist Orkideh Torabi grew up with art all around her. “Culturally, art has always been a part of Iranian daily life,” she says, her voice cultivated and composed over the phone. And within her family, education and creativity were always celebrated: Her father studied to be a naval officer in the United States, and on her mother’s side, she comes from a long line of artists (she’s particularly inspired by her uncle, the director Bahram Beyzai, who is now a professor at Stanford University). But it wasn’t until she moved to Chicago from Tehran about five years ago that she felt she could fully be herself. “The view of women [in Iran] is so heavily conservative; they don’t have a voice,” she tells me. “I struggled when I stepped outside the confines of my house.” After studying graphic design and illustration in Tehran and a stint teaching studio art at a university (even her male students had trouble finding their voice, she says), her father encouraged her to come to the United States. Torabi studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago and finally found her stride in subjects she had always explored: women’s rights and gender power structures. “I have more freedom here,” she says. “I was able to analyze and observe everything from the outside.” She began evolving a style she had started as an undergraduate in Iran, which took influence from the shapes and lines of Persian miniatures — paintings that appeared in illustrated manuscripts beginning in the thirteenth century. “Some of these manuscripts are full of weird creatures and human beings ripping each other to pieces,” Torabi explains of the influences she gravitated toward in her earlier paintings of women. But she began to feel that her focus was being misinterpreted, that it was too straightforward. So she shifted her eye toward male images. Using the aesthetic and storytelling style of Persian miniatures, Torabi has spent the past few years creating paintings that depict modern Iranian men from a flat, cartoonish perspective. These subjects — tattooed, mouths agape, baby-wielding — are portrayed in paintings with titles like I’ll catch you!, Daddy’s cotton candy (part of a series called “Madonna”) and King of the heaven. They’re funny enough to make you smile (or maybe even laugh out loud), but you can also feel the grime of male entitlement that’s been festering for centuries in Iran and beyond. “I added humor to my work because it becomes more universal, more accessible to different ranges of people,” she explains. “The evolution that occurred naturally here [in the United States] has helped me to understand the world on a larger scale.” Now, here’s a selection of paintings from Torabi’s series:  Orkideh Torabi, Daddy's cotton candy, 2018. 43 x 37 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
 Orkideh Torabi, We can do it, 2018. 48 x 60 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
 Orkideh Torabi, Killing some time, 2017. 43 x 37 inches. |
 Orkideh Torabi, King of the heaven, 2018. 43 x 37 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
 Orkideh Torabi, The greater wall, 2017. 48 x 60 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
 Orkideh Torabi, Chubby Mubby, 2018. 43 x 37 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
 Orkideh Torabi, There you go!, 2017. 43 x 37 inches, fabric dye on stretched cotton. |
Molly Elizalde is an associate editor at Lenny. | | | | | |
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