WAITING
IN THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE TO COME
Dulles Airport. Waiting. For once I’m early for
my flight. I am not good with waiting. Or being told to wait. I came to D.C. to
attend the first ever State of Women Summit, and had
to wait about an hour and a half to register, because there were so many women,
from all over the country who showed up for this. Standing in that endless
line, and later for the “gender-neutral” bathrooms, I was strangely patient. I
felt as if something was shifting inside me. Maybe it was for many of us, as we
came together to listen to powerful speeches from the President, First Lady,
V.P Biden and a parade of amazing women leaders, inventors, educators, entrepreneurs,
all ages, races, religions, regions. Maybe I was O.K with waiting because for
the first time, I was feeling like, well: WE HAD ARRIVED!
At the State of Women's Summit, all the female U.S. Congress and Senate members |
See, for a long while I have resisted the story
of women being told from a place of lack. We’re not this, we’re not that, we're
just not enough. Even Oprah, as she was
interviewing Michelle Obama during the closing session (and my table-mates were
having mild seizures of ecstasy), brought this up… how every woman she has ever
interviewed spoke of suffering at some time from
debilitating low self-esteem. As a young feminist, I countered this with outer
defiance, recalcitrance, rage. Over the years, I strengthened my armor with
stories of pioneering women, explorers, artists, first-timers, and would devour
their biographies. Amelia Earhardt was a childhood heroine, then Beryl Markham, Isabelle Eberhardt, Alice Guy Blaché, Rosa Luxemborg, Margaret Bourke-White, Martha Gellhorn. Receptivity, passivity, nurturing, these
so-called Jungian feminine traits were to be avoided at all costs.
I wanted nothing to do with feminine weakness.
My best friend even nicknamed me “bobcat” for the little bulldozer you see on
construction sites. My favorite Sylvia Plath line, from the poem “Lady Lazarus,” was
always, “I
rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air.” But in
the last few years, building GlobalGirl Media around
the world with so many different young women, from such a wide array of family,
cultural and personal backgrounds, watching them navigate their teens and
twenties, I started to notice something. Unlike me, many of these younger women
were not afraid of revealing their vulnerability. Schooled in posting sexy
selfies and snapchat, maybe it was part of their overall subtext. Much more nimble with the “emoji” than me, could
they also be embracing a femininity I was afraid of? Without being reductionist
here, and I know I am venturing into thorny territory even just broaching the
subject, but I really am talking about a new prism for feminism. The one that
allows for fluidity, for contradictions, for fierceness and grace.
Or as Moxie filmmaker Tiffany Schlain once
said in an interview: “ Feminism is the thing that
declares without apology and with absolute logic that the things I know to be
true in my heart are true indeed.” That is a beautiful way of saying, what you
are feeling inside, is just as important as what you present on the outside.
Contrast this with Luis Vuitton appropriating
“Lightning” the heroine from the hugely popular video game Final Fantasy. For
their latest ad campaigns, they proclaimed her the perfect avatar for the “globalized, modern woman.” In a world where social
media and all its endless iterations are so integral to our lives, this digitized fembot doesn’t
necessarily spell strength. You could also see Lightning as The metallic tin-woman (man)
without a heart.
Lightning, from FINAL FANTASY |
I recently attended the Geena Davis Institute’s
See Jane Salon, “Keeping Up With Generation Z,” where I learned from Annie
Leal, the vibrant, young Social Media Manager of We are Mitu. She spoke of
how youth are actually becoming less public on social media, more discerning of
what they post than my generation, shunning facebook and even instagram for
platforms like snapchat, where their presences instantly become absences. Like
self-curators in a sense, they are O.K. with both objectifying and then
silencing themselves.
As the media world shifts from consumption to
creation, and as more and more women challenge the barriers to their entry into
this world, so long dominated by the male narrative, is it enough to encourage
young women to merely tell or even yell her own story? Or do we need to make space to really
consciously listen, and wait?
A quick
google search of the word “quiet,” brings up a reference to one of my
favorite books of late, Susan Cain’s “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World
That Can’t Stop Talking.” Cain reminds
us that it was introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve
Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society. But
right beneath this is an Op-Ed in the Washigton
Post on the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen: Troubled. Quiet.
Not being heard can be tragic, deadly. And it’s
exactly the media’s dominant drilling of Mateen’s outer-allegiance to extremism
that misses the inner, awful truth: since a child, he was bullied. He was brutalized
by a society that demonized his difference: chubby, of Afghan descent. We may
never really know what would drive this very troubled young man to such
savagery, but that’s just it: we shouldn’t pretend we do. If the stories we
tell around such tragedies beget more hatred, othering and intolerance, then
how are we ever to stop the insanity?
In wandering around the photography exhibit at
the Women in Arts Museum in D.C., called “She Who Tells A Story,” I
was struck by the series, “Girl In Her Room,” by Lebanese photographer Rania Matar. By photographing young
women in Beirut and Palestine in their bedrooms, she was able to capture a
remarkable vulnerability, an interiority that is rarely showcased in teen-age girl’s
lives. Roland Barthes said about privacy:
“the absolutely precious, inalienable place where my image is
free…” These photos were both intimate
and liberating. As viewers, we are asked to see these young women as
individual, authentic, complex, real.
From "She Who Tells A Story" Exhibit, Photo credit: Rania Matar |
Photo credit: Rania Matar |
Yet, as
I wait for my plane back to California, I’m thinking more about how to live
from our insides, how to speak from the silences, the softness, how to be
better protagonists of our own stories. And if that means getting better at
waiting, for the bathroom, the bus, the answer, well, what’s the rush?