How Tiffany Shlain Turns Off Tech to Turn On Creativity and Activism

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Tiffany Shlain is the author of "24/6. The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week". She is also the founder of the Webbys, Character Day (where you can find her Tech Shabbat challenges) and the creator a number of films. In today's episode Tiffany brings it all together. You'll hear how taking time off from technology and taking time to reflect helps fuel your creativity and activism.

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TRANSCRIPT. We do our best, please forgive or let us know about any errors.

Tiffany Shlain:                      My name is Tiffany Shlain and I'm a filmmaker. I founded the Webby Awards and I just finished my first book that came out called 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. And it's about my family's decade-long practice of turning off all screens from Friday night to Saturday night for what my family calls our technology Shabbat and how much it's made our life better. And then Saturday is just literally everybody's favorite day of the week. We just, we hang out, we cook, we nap, we read, we journal, we space out. It's literally everybody's favorite day.

Lauren Schiller:                  Today, Tiffany Shlain tells us all how to step away from our screens just one day a week. But why would you do that?

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's good to have a day where you're, I can be reachable to the entire every news headline, every family member, every text alert. It's actually that's what have, I love being available to them the other days, but I need a day to just ground myself.

Lauren Schiller:                  What was the inspiration to take this break from technology?

Tiffany Shlain:                      I had this really intense year where my father was diagnosed with brain cancer and I found out I was pregnant in the same week. And those nine months, I thought a lot about life and death and what are we doing when we're here. And whenever I visit my dad who was quite sick, I would turn off my phone of course. And then he passed away and my husband's, and my daughter was born days later and we just knew we just wanted to change the way we're living.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And then shortly after that, we're part of this group called Reboot, and they had a national day of unplugging, which was one ceremonial day a year of turning off the screens, national day of unplugging. We did it and they asked us to write something for it, and it was this really wonderful night. And the next day, it just felt so good. No screens, it was this cleanest day, it was the longest day. It was the most present and happiest I'd been in a long time and we never stopped doing it.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So now it's been almost 10 years and the benefits just get. I see them more clearly and they just multiply and amplify. Just in terms of my sense of creativity, I feel very creative both on Tech Shabbat because I'm just, my mind is wandering and the next day is probably my most productive day of the week is Sunday and I laugh a lot more. I just feel I'm there for the funny, I'm just present for life more, feel more connected to myself, to my kids, my husband. It's this day every week that is so important to us and grounds us and even my teenage daughter, she is in her junior year of high school, which is super stressful. And in the last month because she knows she just started school.

Tiffany Shlain:                      She has commented I think each Saturday, I'm so glad I have this day. There's no homework, there's no being on, she gets to kind of reset and regroup, which we're not giving ourselves any time for it anymore. And especially with the news and we're waking up to the stressful news. We're going to bed with the stressful or FOMO or this or that or whatever mishmash of things you get on your phone. And so in the book I really talk about how much it's changed us and it has this ripple effect to the other six days because I've incorporated all these kind of smaller things into the week to not have the screen dictate my every move. And I was starting to feel like a marionette also, but the book also talks about kind of the history of time on time off the concept of a day of rest and all different cultures and why we need to bring this ritual back.

Lauren Schiller:                  So when does Saturday night end or are people sitting around waiting for midnight?

Tiffany Shlain:                      No It's funny we... If you are an observant Orthodox Jew, you wait till three stars are in the sky but for us it would be the three closing screens, no it's five o'clock so 5:00 PM Ken and I get ready to go out on a date and the girls get ready for what they call their double date with technology. And this is the great thing is that not only do I run towards Friday night, turning off the screen each week and everyone does, but on Saturday night you reappreciate the marvels of this miraculous tool called the web and technology all over again. So sometimes I extend it, but a lot of times I, there's something I wanted to look up the head to ponder all day. The pondering is actually quite delightful I think we've forgotten how to do that. Not be able to look something up immediately, but so it has this dual effect each week where I both can't wait to get off the screens and then I reappreciate what they can do when I come back on at five.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller this is Inflection Point, I love this idea of taking a day off of screens and I thought you might like it too. So next up Tiffany Shlain tells us how to start our own Tech Shabbat, stick around. I'm back with Tiffany Shlain let's just start with how do you pitch this to your family?

Tiffany Shlain:                      This is the question. Do not say to your kids, we're going to turn off screens one day a week, they might start crying no one's going to want that.

Lauren Schiller:                  No one wants that.

Tiffany Shlain:                      Here's what you say. Tip number one, ask every member of your family, including yourself. What do you wish you had more time to do? Everyone's got a list, I mean everybody has a list. Why do you wish you could do more of, is it skateboarding? Is it painting? Is it reading? Is it napping? Is it hanging out with your friends? What's the list? Everyone write their own list and you fill your day with that. It'll become everyone's favorite day of the week. So it's not what you aren't getting it's what you get back. And that's a whole framing because I think people are so attached to their phones for everything, which I think is problematic and kind of reminds people to even jog their mind of all the pleasures in life that don't require a screen.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So that's exercise number one. What are those things that you love doing? Think back when you were younger, what did you like doing, what do you want more of? And then make the day pretty much all of that and it's just, there's so many things that are pulled away from the screen, you're in a moment, whether it's reading and then you're reading and then it makes you think of something on your phone and then your phone and you're on Instagram and you're off the book. I could say that sentence with everything. So I think it's a framing thing. It's that we need to remind people how incredible it is to be human and to be really present for the people right around you instead of the people in the phone or the things happening in the phone.

Lauren Schiller:                  I feel I do have a bad habit of when my kids come home and I'm on my computer, my kids come home and on my phone and then I get mad at them for being on their phone when I'm trying to have a conversation with them some modeling.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's why this is really good, it's modeling and we made this film called Dear Parent, which I don't know if you saw it, it's a two minute film. It is so much about modeling behavior and a lot of kids do say their parents are the one, just the culprits too. So if you make it like a family experiment and I mean I always wish when my kids see me on the computer and I'm working, you wish there was a light blinking above your head. Actually I'm working right now, I'm helping to pay for the bills I'm not just scrolling away.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But it is about it being an all in family thing. And I think that's a key part of the toolkit is that everyone has to be in and you're going to have your own rules. I think part number two about rules, so for us it is the screens or the conduit to every distraction and work and all the mishmash of things. So, and we really like kicking it off with a dinner and that's also fun. Who do you wish you spend more time with? Who do you wish you saw more? Everyone's got that list oh, I wish I hang out with that person more. What's a neighbor you want to know better? Who do you want to spend time with that you're not distracted by the phones. And it is such a different experience when phones aren't on your lap in your pocket.

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's a whole different dinner, it's people are really there they're not half there. And then we've done it with two kids in soccer, we've done that unfortunately they're not both in soccer right now. But you can do it with making plans you have to do a little prep in the Friday afternoon.

Lauren Schiller:                  So do you put the word out ahead of time, is there an auto reply or something?

Tiffany Shlain:                      I have some haxe on our website for the book and with all these resources is 24sixlife.com and there are some haxe to put auto responses on your text message. You know how when you get the do not disturb I'm driving, you can actually set that to go. I don't have it on my email because people know I usually do a tweet, I'm on Twitter, that's my preferred social media.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I usually will on Friday night say turning off screens for my weekly ritual see you on under the tide just kind of remind people they can do that too. And then we invited everyone to try it on mass and we have so many resources for people now on our site and with all these kind of research and short films and ways to get people on board and tips to prepare for your Tech Shabbat. And it is kind of an amazing thing that we need this much to unplug from the network for one day a week I mean the irony is not lost.

Lauren Schiller:                  It's begging for a camping trip, the inflatable bed.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And I think it's about just remembering our humanity that we're so often. I walked down the street and everyone's looking down and I listen, it's not I have digital perfection down the other six days I actually think it's harder. I do a lot of mini things the other six days I don't look at my phone when I wake up anymore and that's hard. But I'm don't look at that phone and I get my coffee and I journal, I do a five minute journal. We're talking it's a 10 minute experience that I'm not on my phone but it sets my day in such a different way. But I think it's harder during the week to do all those, don't have it at the dining room table at my film studio no phones on the desks anymore. It is too distracting, so it's in your bag until you go to the bathroom and check it on a break.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But on my Tech Shabbat, the phones away because it's the visual, even seeing someone else's phone on a table when you're having lunch, it could be off it's their phone. You're not as present because you're looking at their phone, which could ring and it reminds you of your phone, which maybe is in your bag, whatever.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So we just don't realize how much we are pulling ourselves away from just being where we are. So I think it's actually of course I know people have so much fear around it. I think if people just layered it back and reframed it, as I said from this more positive space, it is literally something I run towards now. I'm I can't wait for it. And I feel I just remember how to live in a different way. They say for creativity, I mean, you do so much creative work and it's good to put your mind in a different mode, even if it's just one day a week and every week it just feels this very deep relaxation and different mood that kind of carries me over to the next week.

Tiffany Shlain:                      And listen, there's a handful of times a year where I'm traveling, I can't do it. And I feel unmoored I just don't feel quite as solid. I feel oh, I didn't get it.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well you talk, there's a chapter in the book that talks about creating rules and breaking them?

Tiffany Shlain:                      You're going to find your own rules, for a while we only listened to Vinyl on a record play, which is really fun, but we really like to cook on our Tech Shabbat. I don't have time to cook during the week as much as I on the weekend. And we started using Alexa as our timer, we have an echo Alexa verbal speaker now, for us that counts.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's okay because it's not a screen, I literally say Alexa set the cooking timer for 10 minutes, but I'm not on a screen. If I did it on my phone then I'd get a text and an Instagram and a notification and I'd be off. So for us, we still listen to Vinyl but we also use that as [inaudible 00:11:29]. So that's our rule, I mean you're all going to come up with your own rules. And I have a friend who has special needs child and she was saying I have to be available and a grown child, and I was, what if you got a flip phone that was like your bat phone for that day to kind of force you to just communicate in a different way. So you were always available even if you're out of your house but you weren't mindlessly scrolling being distracted from everything.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So I think you really need to look at what your family, in the book I have talked about, if you're single, if you're older, I don't know one person in my life or I've talked to so many people about the book that doesn't feel they're on the screens too much. So how do you build this? It's a very old from our people practice. Again I'm not religious but I love going deep on the cons it was such a radical idea. A day of rest it put a period time was ongoing there was no ending and it was a day of rest. It's the fourth commandment above, do not commit murder is after six days you shall rest for a whole day. That', a huge thing to say. So it's such deep wisdom and it's thousands of years old.

Tiffany Shlain:                      It's free, it's available to everyone. And I do meditation and yoga and I don't consider myself Hindu or Buddhist, but these are practices that bring great balance back into my life. And I would love for people to engage with a full day of Shabbat because then again, most Jews I know that did Shabbat, maybe they do a Friday night dinner. That's probably the most, but the only people I knew that did a full day were Orthodox Jews. And I was always marvel, you don't drive, you don't use money, you don't wow. That's, so I was marveled at it, but I think that it's not for me, but I think in this modern era, I don't know anyone that doesn't feel they're on their phones too much. So how do we bring a very old practice into the 21st century and make it work?

Tiffany Shlain:                      So getting back to your rules question, I think if you kind of, and we have a series of exercises in the book to kind of walk you through the questions, how many hours do you think you're on a day? When does it not feel good? When does it feel good? I mean, there's lots of times I love the work I do and these global conversations as the best of you get a text from an old friend or there's so many incredible moments. You look something up and you go down this whole beautiful rabbit hole of ideas. There's so many goods, but it just seems it's infiltrated every part of our lives and it doesn't feel good. And so all day long when you feel a marionette doll, which I feel there are thousands of behavioral scientists and engineers, their job is to keep your eyes glued on the screen.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So when you feel you can't take your eyes away from that screen, it's because that is an intention. So to kind of reclaim yourself one day a week it gives me perspective, every week I really get to detach and think about what's happening and how I can try to help change it. Because there's stuff on a personal level, there's in your family you can model behavior and your kids are living in your house until they're 18 you run the household, you can set some new frameworks and at your company you could say, hey let's put our phones away from our desks let's try this. And then there's some legislation that's coming out we're doing these short films, dear parents, they're all two minutes. To your student, to your CEO, to your legislator and to your fellow human, and they're all approaching this idea from these different perspectives.

Lauren Schiller:                  You got to talk about the things that you need. What are the tools that you need? [crosstalk 00:14:48].

Tiffany Shlain:                      And remember what it was like landline. First of all, landlines are very inexpensive, and how much is your sanity worth? They're good for real emergencies. I mean, we've got earthquakes they're really good if there's a real emergency, they're good if you want to find your lost cell phone and they're really good if somebody really needs to get in touch with you on your Tech Shabbat. So landline I just think is really good to have. If you don't have a printer that might be good but I've also just written things by hand, when we did have two kids in soccer, so Friday afternoon I look at what's happening Saturday, which fields are that? I would remind the team just to reminder, we're not on screens, we'll meet you there.

Tiffany Shlain:                      That's how it used to exist before cell phones, before everyone would be I'm 10 minutes late, I'm around the corner, I'm parking, who cares? We don't need the updates. So especially like the most profound fact I found during researching the book was that it takes 23 minutes to get back into flow after you've been distracted by a notification or a text. So just imagine how much we're taking people out of their moment every single day. So I text a lot less since I've written this book. So Friday afternoon I do a little prep and it's not much just write it and keep it on the counter with a sharpie. I love writing with a sharpie and that is also good for Friday night when there's inevitably things I'm, oh I forgot to do and just all the things that tumbled from your head just to have a place to put them. There'll be there on Sunday for you to deal with, so you just remind people and then you know remind people of your landline and you are liberated and set free. I think people forget how good it feels to not be so reachable.

Lauren Schiller:                  When we come back Tiffany Shlain tells us how to get into the habit of taking 24 hours away from our screens and how it will help us all be better at leading change support inflection point with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org just click the support button. We'll be right back with Tiffany Shlain.

Lauren Schiller:                  Lauren Schiller:                  Am back with Tiffany Shlain. I'm just going to make the leap of faith that most of the people that are listening to this cares deeply about, feels needs to change feels we need to make progress on and that there's not a moment to spare.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But here's the thing, by taking a day for yourself, you're going to be that much more able to do your activism. I remember after the election, I mean you were doing so many women's rights issues and so much stuff and I was exhausted a year in exhausted by Trump, exhausted by it all and I had to re master my strength and on my Tech Shabbats', I feel you have to be able to recharge. This is a long fight, this is a lot of not even, I don't want to use the word fight because issues around the environment that's long term behavioral change, women's rights that is longterm changes.

Tiffany Shlain:                      These are all marathons and if we're running a million miles an hour, 24 seven activism you're never going to recharge and you're not going to be as effective. And I come up with my best ideas, I do a lot of activist films on my Tech Shabbat because I've pulled away from all the noise and I can think we're not giving ourselves space to think. There's a quote it's something about, it was again with the women's movement, you have to find the joy that you can't it's exhausting and it can be, I mean you have to find the joy in life to keep going and I find most of my joy on these Saturdays and then I feel completely recharged to fight for the... I'm not usually out in nature, so I'm appreciating nature. I'm seeing that I get perspective on women's rights, on our government issues.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I just get the perspective, I don't feel I have the other six days. So, and then lastly I'll say that if everyone took a Tech Shabbat day off, from consuming maybe we'd, that would be one great step for the climate change crisis. We're all consuming and doing 24 seven and that's also not that healthy for crop or for ourselves. And I think it'd be better why is 24 seven our goal, why is growth always our goal doing more and more.

Lauren Schiller:                  You are sending out a series of emails leading up to character day many challenges. Could you just review what each of those three or four of them?

Tiffany Shlain:                      They're still available. And this is something that we're, we're having these resources up all year round. So if you wanted to step in and go, okay, I want to try this.

Tiffany Shlain:                      By yourself or with your family, whatever. It's an eight week program in total on the first week was don't look at your phone when you wake up, 15 to 30 minutes, replace it with something else you love and again it's not the year without, it's what you get back. So before you go to bed, before you go to sleep and at meals, put the phone away. So I was challenged number one, and then the second week was go and walk without your phone for 30 minutes. I know that sounds hard, but it's so great once you're ah, I am without my phone, I am no one's tracking me. No one can find me am just with myself. So that was week two, and then the third week was how do you cultivate your character online and off.

Tiffany Shlain:                      So really start to think about where your dad is going, how do you know if something's accurate? What is the effect on you when you're only reading negative news, which is the majority of news activating your amygdala, how can you do other things? So really how do you bring your best self when you are online? And then the fourth week because the Tech Shabbat challenge a whole day with yourself or family. It's good to have a buddy have somebody a squad do it with you for a day, but the key thing is not just about one day is put in your schedule four weekends in a row because building any habit you have to, it's the ritual of it. To me, the power is that we do this every week, go completely off and see how that feels and I promise you it's the best thing I've ever done in my life and I love the web, but we can't lose our humanity when we're using it.

Tiffany Shlain:                      I feel people don't make eye contact anymore. They're just grunting their way and scrolling it, they literally I remember it was gauche when you in pull out your phone, you're talking to someone now everyone does it. It's always at the table. It's what's important to us and let's think 10 years into the future, if we keep going in this direction, it's going to be the movie Wally. And is that what we want? I used to be a smoker, which I'm not proud of, but I came from a doctor's family, so I was rebelling and who would've thought, I mean everyone used to smoke in San Francisco and I would have never thought that no one hardly smokes anymore.

Tiffany Shlain:                      But it was a combination of laws and awareness and not coolness and everything. And then the behavior changed and I'm not completely equating smart funnies because of course smartphones brings so many good things but the habits around them are ridiculous right now. So the pendulum has swung so far, so just try this very simple practice to bring it a little back and I promise you it's going to make you feel better about the way you're living.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Tiffany Shlain, author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week to find films, resources, and research about how technology is rewiring our brains and what it's doing to teens and youth plus to find the rest of the weeks of the Tech Shabbat challenge, we'll put a link to Tiffany's website, characterday.org on our website along with the link to her book. It's all at inflectionpointradio.org I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our inflection point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to let us know@inflectionpointradio.org while you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one-time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org we're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the inflection point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions and follow me on Twitter @laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter you know where to go inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

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Feminist Detective - The Case of The Fleabag Crowdfunder

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Introducing a NEW Inflection Point segment “Feminist Detective” in which journalist and author Ruth Whippman joins me to seek out sexism in all its tiny guises so we can make big changes. This week we dig up the original crowdfunding page of the mega-hit show Fleabag from back in 2013, and discuss how the tone of it shows us the crazy lengths women have had to go to reassure and placate men that equality is not threatening.

This segment premiere is presented ad-free. Support Inflection Point with a tax deductible contribution and help fund production of more of them!

Lauren Schiller and Ruth Whippman

Lauren Schiller and Ruth Whippman

Candace Bushnell–Is There Still Sex in the City? Live On Stage

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Candace Bushnell gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week to soak in the stories of the women--and men--of the 90s television culture-changer "Sex and the City". Candace has written a number of books since then and her newest book is called "Is There Still Sex in the City?" This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have an on-stage conversation with Candace Bushnell, hosted by INFORUM at The Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Bushnell kicked off the evening with an update about what she’s been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk--friendships, love, loss and dating over 50.

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TRANSCRIPT: To err is human. If you find an error, let us know.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode, Candace Bushnell.

C Bushnell:                            Like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City. And there were some surprises. One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive and it does go both ways. Yes it does.

Lauren Schiller:                  Now that's a driveway moment. Stick around.

C Bushnell:                            At one point, I had this idea for a TV series where the women were going to run, it was a brothel, but it was for other women and they were going to employ these younger guys because there were so many young guys who, I don't know. And I thought the idea was really kind of interesting, but everyone's like, "No." But you know, I had a lot of wacky ideas about what I was going to do with all these stories and this material. And I really went back to the structure that I used in Sex and the City which is, it's really fiction written as journalism as opposed to journalism written as fiction.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller with stories of how women rise up and that was Candace Bushnell. Yes, that Candace Bushnell who gave us a reason to sit on our couch every week and soak up the stories of the women and men of Sex and the City. She's written a number of books since then. She's a prolific writer and now she's out with a new book. This October I teamed up with Women Lit of the Bay Area Book Festival to have a conversation with Candace on stage hosted by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Candace kicked off the evening with an update about what she's been up to lately and a reading, and then we got to sit down and talk. Here she is on her new book called Is There Still Sex in the City?

C Bushnell:                            Is there still sex in the city? Yes. Yes, but less. And everybody's having less, including the millennials. They're having the least of all. Well, we'll talk about that later. This is not a sequel to Sex and the City, but it has different characters. But the inspiration for writing it was the same feeling that I had when I started writing Sex and the City. And when I started writing Sex and the City, the feeling was really like, this is uncharted territory. Writing about single women's lives in the city and the mating and dating rituals. And at the time we thought, oh gosh, this only happens in New York city. But it turned out that it actually happened everywhere. Now back in the mid nineties, I was a woman in my mid thirties and I felt like being single was really like a feminist kind of statement and it meant that you were kind of willing to break the rules and pursue your own dreams instead of maybe necessarily pursuing finding a man.

C Bushnell:                            And what's so interesting to me is that 20, 25 years ago, if you were a single woman in your mid thirties, people really felt that there was something wrong with you. Now, and I think partly thanks to Sex and the City, people just think you're normal. And so I think that's a bit of a triumph. But when I was writing Sex and the City, I felt very much like an outsider. And like a lot of my Sex and the City friends, I did end up getting married and I guess I found my Mr bigger and also maybe my mister was a little bit younger. And most of my friends also ended up finding their Mr big, their Aiden, their Harry or maybe even their Steve. Now all you guys, you know Sex and the City, right? Okay. Because I don't want to be like, people are looking at me like who is she talking about?

C Bushnell:                            And then something happened and I personally ended up getting divorced when I was 52. And so that was kind of the end of my, what I thought would be happily ever after because I really didn't think about it that much. And my first instinct was to run away. So I ran away to Connecticut, I started riding horses and then I had two other girlfriends who they didn't have children and I decided to do what women are always saying that they're going to do when you're younger. We're all going to live together and we're all going to live close by and we will be like the golden girls. And honestly, for six months it worked.

C Bushnell:                            We went to the vegetable markets, farm stands, we made dinner, we had one friend of mine Sassy, she came up with any excuse to have a party and wear hats. And I sort of thought, okay, this is going to go on forever. But then a whole bunch of my other friends ended up getting divorced. And what happens when women become single again? You go to where the other single women are. So all of a sudden, all of these newly single women, all in their 50s came to Sag Harbor, which I call the village in this book. Now when I got divorced, I really thought I did not want to date at all. I really felt like I've already done this. I've already done the reproductive cycle where I got married, I was in love, this and that, and then it didn't work. Why am I going to attempt to do it again? Isn't there's something better than we as women can do now that we're in our fifties besides looking for men?

C Bushnell:                            Okay. The answer was pretty much no. Because all of my friends and women who I know wanted to start dating again. And once again, and it's not just dating, but it's also reinventing your lives. And so once again, it felt like this is really uncharted territory because they are women who are dating again, they haven't dated for 20, 25 years. And things have really changed. And the other thing that happens when you get somewhere in your fifties is that there can be a feeling of invisibility and there's a question of are you still relevant? Children leaving the nest, careers may end, all of that kind of stuff. So there's also that struggle. But like Sex and the City, once I started dating again, I discovered that there were certain types of guys out there just like there were in Sex and the City and there were some surprises.

C Bushnell:                            One of the things that seemed immediately clear was guys your age no longer find you attractive. Okay. So 50 something guys, and I know there are men in the audience like, "I'm not like that." We're not really brought up to think of somebody in their 50s or 60s as being attractive and being like a potential sex partner. And it does go both ways. Yes it does. And one of the things that one discovers is there are younger guys who are interested. That's another story. And then one of the things that you do is okay, guys your age aren't interested. They're interested in younger women. So why not try to beat the odds by going for guy who's older? Maybe dating a man who's 15, 20 or even 25 years older? Which is fine except that given the fact that you're now middle-aged yourself, that means that man who could be 70, 75 or even 80.

C Bushnell:                            You wouldn't think that there would be a large contingent of men out there at that age who are dating. But when you think about demographics and how so many of the boomers are now in their later years, it makes sense that there's a crop of 60, 70 and even 80 something men out there acting like they're 35. I personally encountered one of these men at a party given by a married couple in their early sixties, and they decided to just get it over with and invite all the newly 50 something single women. I don't know how many of you guys have been in that situation. And then they would invite a couple of eligible guys who they could dig up.

C Bushnell:                            So there were lots of 50 something single women there and two or three of these senior age players or SAPs. These are older single men of means, meaning they have enough money to add it to their list of attributes and are often still employed in a lesser version of the high powered career they once had. At some point during the evening, I must've talked to one of these men because a few days later, Ron, the host of the party contacted me to let me know that out of all the 50 something women there, and I was in my fifties then, now I'm 60, he wanted to let me know that a fellow named Arnold had picked me out of the bunch to ask me out. Now, Ron was very excited about this and he was suddenly very impressed with me that I could attract a guy like Arnold because Arnold, he said was a big deal and everybody really admired him.

C Bushnell:                            Arnold played Ivy league football and he was once an oil man and a newspaper magnet and all the Park Avenue hostesses were always inviting him to their parties. He was sought after. I thought I remembered the guy. A tall, thick battleax type who was definitely older, too old for me I decided. "How old is he?" I asked. "He's a little bit older than I am," Ron said. So that would make him like 68. The thing is these guys often lie about their ages. They fudge somehow forgetting about that truth revealing device called the internet. Sure enough, when I Googled him, Arnold turned out to be 78 and that made him much closer to my father's age than mine. My father was 83, Arnold was just five years younger, but they couldn't have been more different. My father is very conservative and Arnold apparently is not. According to Ron, Arnold used to be somewhat of a notorious wild man at Studio 54. And even to this day, Arnold still has much younger girlfriends. The last one being 42.

C Bushnell:                            "I don't know how he does it," Ron said. I wanted to tell Ron that I didn't want to be the one to find out. And so I tried to say no to this fix-up. Peer pressure however, is one of the things that I hadn't counted on in middle age, and when it came to dating, it turns out there was a lot of it. My friends kept reminding me that it was good to go out and it was really good that someone had finally asked me out, when was the last time that had happened? Of course I should go. What's the harm in it? And besides, you never know. Of course the problem with you never know is that so often you actually do know. I knew or I was convinced I knew that I was not going to date a 78 year old man, no matter how wonderful he was. What if he fell down? I didn't spend my life working this hard to end up taking care of a strange older person.

C Bushnell:                            But every time I tried to explain this to people, I realized how ageist and judgy and anti-love hopeful I sounded because I didn't know. Did I? I didn't know what was going to happen. What if I fell in love with him, in which case his age wouldn't matter, right? Plus, I didn't want to be that creature. And you know that shallow woman who cares more about practicality than the blind illusions of love. Plus, as Ron reminded me, I must feel so honored than a man as powerful as Arnold wanting to spend time with little old me. In preparation for the date I went to my friend's Sassy's house and we looked at photographs of Arnold on the internet. His photos would have back about 35 years. He'd been a big man and rather handsome. "Oh honey," Sassy said, "he could turn out to be absolutely wonderful. You must keep an open mind."

C Bushnell:                            And so arrangements for a date were negotiated. We could have gone to a restaurant in my town, but Arnold really wanted me to see his house, which was in another town about 30 minutes away. However, he offered to pick me up and take me to his town and then I can always spend the night at his house if I needed to. And he would be really willing to drive me back to my house in the morning. A sleepover with a 78 year old man I didn't know? I don't think so. Thank you.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and that's Candace Bushnell reading from her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City? We'll take a quick break and when we come back, I get to ask her a few questions. Inflection Point is a listener powered independent production. I hope you'll consider supporting us with a tax deductible donation toward our fundraising goal at inflectionpointradio.org and clicking the support button.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm talking with Candace Bushnell, whose new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? We spoke live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Arnold. So-

C Bushnell:                            Yes. You know-

Lauren Schiller:                  You didn't spend the night I take it.

C Bushnell:                            I'm sorry?

Lauren Schiller:                  You didn't spend the night. He showed you his bed. He really tried hard.

C Bushnell:                            I mean, the thing about ... actually, I really made it funny and I worked hard to make it funny. He was really, really sexist, like shockingly so, and really quite oblivious and very entitled. Like one of the first things he showed me was his bed, which was 20 years old or older and he shipped it from California and he said, "I had a lot of really, I've had a really lot of good of sex on that bed and I expect to have a lot more." And I was like, this is just too much. He was, yeah. I mean it's-

Lauren Schiller:                  I want to know why your friends were so invested in you meeting with this guy.

C Bushnell:                            Well, I think it's something that we as women do, we want each other to be taken care of and it's still somewhere in the back of all of our minds, even though it really doesn't happen. That somehow the mail is going to be the protector and you'll be okay if you're partnered up. And I do, I think as human beings, we tend to feel that way. The problem is that they're looking for a relationship that's really just about fulfilling their needs.

Lauren Schiller:                  But it seems like from reading the book, what was so exciting to your friends about this guy is that he had a little bit of money and he had a little bit of power.

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Exactly.

Lauren Schiller:                  And so it seems like at this point in our cultural history in this moment that we're in right now, that maybe that would become less important, but yet it's still lingering on. What do you see happening with all that?

C Bushnell:                            I think it's still lingering on, but what's frustrating of course is that men like Arnold are not ... I don't know. I mean it's not what a lot of women are necessarily looking for and powerful men, they like to enjoy their power. And for powerful men, often part of that is a certain amount of sexual freedom. And that was Arnold.

Lauren Schiller:                  He was raring to go.

C Bushnell:                            He was raring to go. And I think, but that's the other thing that's very shocking, but it won't be shocking to any of the men here.

Lauren Schiller:                  Are there any men here?

C Bushnell:                            But when you start dating again ... there are men here, I saw them already and they're like, ah-

Lauren Schiller:                  Just checking. Okay.

C Bushnell:                            They're like, "We're going to kill her."

Lauren Schiller:                  Is Arnold here?

C Bushnell:                            They want sex immediately. It's like really? But I find though also when I talk to women who work in like old age homes and that kind of thing, they're like, "It's really a problem. These men, they want to kiss you, they want to do all of this and it's just not appropriate."

Lauren Schiller:                  Do you think it's just, you get into your seventies, I mean, neither of us are there yet, but like let's just cut through the crap. Let's just get to the sex. I mean is that maybe part of what's going on? Who knows?

C Bushnell:                            No, no, I don't think so. I think that this is somebody who that's how he operates. He has these certain things that he's going to tempt you with. Like he had this little pool and he was like, "You could come and swim in my pool any time." And I was like, "No." No. On the other hand, the thing that makes these situations so tricky is if the guy had been like incredibly attractive and all of that, that might've been something that I wanted to hear. So that's unfortunately human nature.

Lauren Schiller:                  Right. But what's interesting about, I mean we don't need to totally overanalyze Arnold for a guy but-

C Bushnell:                            No we don't. Because everyone's like, "We want to talk about this today." We don't even know who Arnold is and you probably won't even be in the TV series.

Lauren Schiller:                  But just that he expected that something would happen with sex and you, and like no matter what, like maybe, I mean I know he picked you out of the crowd at the party and everything, but that you maybe were more discerning.

C Bushnell:                            Well, one of the things that he said was that he asked how old I was, when I told him how old I was, and I think at the time I might've been 57 or 58. He was really shocked and he said that he had just upped his age group to maybe include 50, but he wasn't really thinking that that would be somebody who was like 58. And he made it very clear that ... because I think at a certain point I got so pissed off at him and I was like, "Why do you think women have sex with you?" And he said, "Because I buy them handbags."

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh my God.

C Bushnell:                            And this was a real thing. I mean this is another thing that I hear a lot from men is that they are hypersensitive, a lot of them and maybe rightfully so or they're incredibly aware of the power that money can have over women. And I do hear men complaining about things like women just want money from them and women just want them to buy things for them and this and that. And to a certain extent there are women like that. So that was Arnold's set up.

Lauren Schiller:                  Could you imagine a future where the power dynamic is totally reversed?

C Bushnell:                            Yes, I could. Although I don't know what makes me say that.

Lauren Schiller:                  And would that actually be better? I don't know.

C Bushnell:                            But you know power is it's about money really. But I know there's personal power, which is the power to get things done and make things happen on your own. But men, they exercise a lot of it's economic power over women. Economic and educational and access.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, it was really fun reading the book and I mean it just, I want to say it starts with a bang, but it actually it starts with a bang. I'm just going to put it there and I'm ... not like that kind of bang. Okay. It's an action packed to beginning. And anyway, I got about 10 pages in and then I was like, "Wait a second, is this a memoir? Is this fiction?" And then I looked and it says fiction. So, talk about how it's constructed.

C Bushnell:                            We're calling it auto fiction because it's a lot of autobiographical elements of my life in a fictionalized setting with fictional characters. But yes, I mean there are a lot of things that that did happen to me in the book and a lot of very poignant things because the other side of all of this is that your 50s is a very different time than your thirties. In your thirties, you are not generally, I mean you can be hit with all of these life altering events, but it's not the same as being in your 50s or 60s when you're hit with a certain amount of loss.

C Bushnell:                            And that's one of the things that's a big difference. In your thirties, you're looking up, up, up, and you know you're going to move forward. You're going to ... maybe you're already in a relationship and you're raising children and you're doing that into your forties and your career. Everything's going up. And then when you get into your 50s, things can kind of go ... And you know there, a parent will probably pass away. A friend will probably die unfortunately. And so while I was writing the book, my father actually did die while I was writing the book and one of my best friends took her life. So it's an interesting experience. And I talked a lot with my editors. Like originally I had one editor and he was like, "It's just supposed to be funny. We don't want death." But it's like that is such a part of people's lives at this time. And it's one of the things that shapes this period and it changes you psychically and psychologically. And because it does, it can be an opportunity for growth.

Lauren Schiller:                  We had a chance to talk before we sat in this room and one of the things that we were talking about is that, well, just like your editors were saying, "We want it to be funny. We don't want any death in the book." That there's not great role models out there for how to process the death of a parent or a friend or even prepare for it.

C Bushnell:                            That is true. And you know, I mean one of the things that's really different in the last 50 years, maybe the last 30 years, I think it was like in the mid 1960s or maybe even 1970 or 75, 76% of the population over 50 was married. So that was pretty much everybody was married unlike today where it's 50% of people are single, maybe even more people. So when these things happen to you, they happen to you in this in a sense, in the comfort of your own home. And it's happening and you tend to have like relatives and people who have dealt with this, people are there.

C Bushnell:                            You still have a partner, you've got a family, you're probably in the same house that you've lived in for a long time. Today when these things hit you, that is not necessarily true. You may be single again, chances are you may be living on your own, you may have moved, you may be getting divorced. There are a whole bunch of things that happen that don't really insulate you from these situations. And I think that's one of the things that that makes these things a little bit tricky.

Lauren Schiller:                  While you're writing the book, you lose your father, you lose your friend. How did you process those events and then, I mean, was writing the book a way of processing them or did you have to kind of go through it and then figure out how you were going to write about it?

C Bushnell:                            You know, I kind of had to figure out how I was going to write about it kind of while it was happening. Like I went to see my father, I knew he was going to go and I was like, "You know, the reality is if you're a writer, as Nora Ephron said, 'Everything's copy.'" I mean, I hate to say it, but I was just very, tried to be very aware of my feelings, et cetera, and tried to process them in an adult way, which means not having a breakdown and figuring out, I mean that's really what this time is about. You know what? At 50 you're an adult and you have to be. You kind of do.

Lauren Schiller:                  You kind of want to have the breakdown though.

C Bushnell:                            I just do. Being an adult is not necessarily being busy all the time. Being an adult is being able to stand back, assess the situation, take your ego out of it and figure out what is the best thing to do, how to move forward in a way that is the most humane and kind to everybody around. And it's a time when you have to kind of reach down and figure out how to move on. And it's hard. I mean there were a lot of times when I was writing this book when I was like, I was depressed writing the book. But as I was writing the book, I also felt something was lifting. And when I've looked at that U-shaped curve, the realities for most people, the bottom of that U-shaped curve, it is in your fifties and then things kind of start to go up again.

C Bushnell:                            So it was this personal journey for me through my fifties and it wasn't always easy. And I do, you know, I have friends who are ... I've seen people in a lot pain and I've ... this is also a time when you see that some people just, they can't get it together and they just can't make it. Men and women. So for me, this is something to explore and to write about.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, in that, and one of the things that you've written about consistently is friendship and female friendships specifically. What role does friendship or has friendship played for you in coming through those kinds of hard times?

C Bushnell:                            I think it's what it always is. It's like people being there for you. I mean, I had like one friend who she just decided, she's like, "I never turned down a funeral." She's like, "I'm going to them all. I'm going to figure out ... I'm figuring out how to do this." And it's like you got to show up for your friends in a different way. At one time maybe you were showing up with dating advice. Now you're showing up with soup. I don't know. But yes, it's again, another time of finding it's for a lot of people it's like reconnecting with people who you were friends with before you got married and had kids. Because when you have children, your friends tend to be the parents of your children's friends. And if you end up getting divorced, all of these things are changed.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller talking with Candace Bushnell. When we come back, the Mona Lisa treatment. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point with a live on stage recording with Candace Bushnell for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival that we recorded the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Do you want to talk about the Mona Lisa?

C Bushnell:                            Oh gosh, yes. Well, first of all, it's a laser that ... and I know some of you have heard of this and they use it to restore elasticity and et cetera into your vagina. So it's a laser, but it's for inside and it's ... yes, they put it in your vagina and it works like lasers work. I mean it's just, it's skin. Okay. So it makes sense that it might work, but I want to preface it by saying that it's something that it's so easy for us to make fun of. The idea of women pursuing something, I don't even think it's sexual dysfunction, but something to enhance their sexuality or whatever. And there are basically three things for women and there are 77 products for men. So let's start with that.

C Bushnell:                            So it's actually could be a good thing. But what happens was I was thinking about doing it and it costs $3,000, but I thought if I'm going to do it, I only can do a before and after. So I have to find someone to have sex with before, and get the treatment done, because how am I going to know? I don't know.

Lauren Schiller:                  You don't think you'd be able to tell?

C Bushnell:                            I don't know. I'm making that up, but I don't know. Probably yes, because-

Lauren Schiller:                  I would hope for a $3,000-

C Bushnell:                            Well, I first heard about it, I heard about it from my gynecologist and then I brought it up at lunch with this guy, like have you ever heard of this? And he literally went pale, but he said, "My wife got it." And he said, "She's divorcing me and she's gone off with a younger guy." And this, I was like, "Wow." I heard the story about 20 times from other people of the same thing. So I thought that was very interesting of women actually leaving their husbands when, and really just being rejuvenated or whatever and saying, "Hey, I'm going to go out there and I don't feel like giving this up." So-

Lauren Schiller:                  Well let's, while we're on the topic, let's talk Tinder because you did a whole event experiment with [crosstalk 00:38:29].

C Bushnell:                            I did a Tinder experiment and-

Lauren Schiller:                  Everyone know what Tinder is?

C Bushnell:                            Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just making sure.

C Bushnell:                            How many of you have gone on Tinder?

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh, show of hands.

C Bushnell:                            It's all the young women and it's a guy.

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh, you met on Tinder? No. Okay.

C Bushnell:                            You could meet on Tinder. I mean Tinder there are no filters or anything like that and people make their own choices. So, but I discovered an app like Tinder, it really is a game. It's designed like a card game and you know the app doesn't care if you meet somebody or not. It just wants you to be on it and stay on it. But what I found interestingly with Tinder, and this is something that I feel like I'm hearing it more and more out there from guys, and I think the thing that was most interesting about Tinder was how many men, first of all thought that the other men on it were absolutely horrible. And when men think like other men are bad, you really should pay attention because normally they cover up each other's bad behavior.

C Bushnell:                            And the other thing was how quite a few guys said how much they hated themselves when they were on Tinder and how it brought out like the worst sexist sides of their personality where they really just felt women were objects. And it was really interesting to talk to these guys and get their take on it and it's not heartening. And I ended up also talking to a lot of 25 year old women in their twenties who are on Tinder and they talked a lot about their frustrations and their biggest frustration seem to be with the quality of the men that they were meeting. So hello, maybe you shouldn't go on Tinder. And I thought, I mean I'd heard women complaining about dating before. Dating's never been easy, but it was really like the first piece I did for this book. And it was very eyeopening how much more negative women had become about dating and men.

C Bushnell:                            And I just heard like a lot more anger. I mean look, there are always women out there who are they're having a great time. It's all working out for them and they have it all together. But you know, a lot of women didn't and they insisted that the guys that I was going to meet on Tinder were going to be maybe not what they said, that they would have undiagnosed mental illnesses, and that a lot of them would use drugs, and that they were really unreliable and that this sort of thing. So I went on Tinder. The first thing that happened was Tinder set my age range for who I would be attracted to based on my age. I couldn't lie about my age because I didn't know I wasn't skilled enough on Tinder. And so it matched me up with, there were like two guys over the age of 58 and they were both like smokers.

C Bushnell:                            So I set the age, I was like, "What's going on?" I set the age range. I was like, "Okay, I will say 22 to 32 and see what happens." I got tons and tons of hits, so many hits and I really was like, "Wow." And people were writing really nice things. And I was like, "Those girls are so wrong." And then I matched with this guy who, he was 33 I think, and everyone kept saying, "Oh, he's a real man man." He had a beard and a lot of hair.

Lauren Schiller:                  Sure sign.

C Bushnell:                            And so we agreed to meet up, we met up and he told me a lot about like Tinder and how all the horrible guys were on it and this and that. And he was a vegetarian and the only place we could go, I could find to go was like a hamburger place. But he was like, "Don't worry, I'll deal. I'll just eat French fries." So I was like, "Okay." But it was interesting. It was fun. We kind of ... it was friendly and he seemed like a really nice guy. So then he asked me out again and we went to see this really cool downtown play and I was like, "Hey, this is like groovy. It's great. This guy's really cool." And then he asked me out again and I was like, "I really shouldn't do this, because I'm not going to date anybody for a story."

C Bushnell:                            And I wasn't really interested, but he asked me to go to this Shakespeare play in Brooklyn. So I thought, Well, why not? Am I doing anything else? I should go. So I was crossing the Brooklyn bridge and of course I couldn't help but think about that scene in Sex and the City when it's Miranda and Steve, they're going to meet on the bridge. And I was like, I'm crossing the bridge, maybe something's going to happen. Isn't this nice? Like I'm going to prove to everybody that you could meet a great guy on Tinder.

C Bushnell:                            And so I get there and everybody's pairing up and going into the theater, and then they're ringing the bell. And I didn't have the tickets, supposedly this guy had the tickets and he didn't show up. So it was an expensive taxi ride there and back. It was like $40 each way. And I was like, what's, you know. And so I texted him and I said, maybe we got the date wrong or something like that. And I didn't hear from him for two days. And then I got a really, really long text that said I am so, so sorry. I lost track of time. I took MDM PD do, some kind of new designer drug and I don't know what happened, but I tried to drive my car, I was arrested and then I was put in a 48 hour hold and it went on. And I was just like, he turned out to be exactly what the Tinderellas had said I would find. And I really thought Tinder, it's like Vegas, it's the house. It always wins.

C Bushnell:                            And then I was going to this black tie event and I saw this woman outside and she was really beautiful and she was smoking a cigarette. And I was like, "Wow, someone's still smoking a cigarette." I used to smoke. So I was like, I'm just going to go near the cigarette smell. And I just started talking to her and she was incredibly attractive. She was tall, blonde, she was maybe 32. She seemed like she had it all together. And so I decided to ask her about do you go on Tinder? Now I forgot to mention she was Russian.

C Bushnell:                            And she was like, "Yes, of course I go on Tinder." And I was like, "But why? You're so beautiful, you certainly don't need to be on Tinder." And she was like, "It's when you go on Tinder, you get more Instagram followers. It's all about Instagram." And I was like, "That's it." So there you go.

Lauren Schiller:                  And this is why millennials are not having as much sex obviously.

C Bushnell:                            Well, I don't know if anybody watched this. You know, there was that Lisa Ling thing about pornography and its effect on young men. And again, there were a lot of young men on there who were really very distressed about this constant use of porn and how they become addicted and how it affected them psychologically and how difficult it made them to find real women attractive and how it wasn't ... and how being around real women made them very nervous, very uncomfortable. They didn't know what to do. And again, like how they really, really did not like themselves.

C Bushnell:                            And I mean, I think that, and that's something that I hear. And I heard this when I was writing this Tinder pieces well from guys about how it's impossible for them to avoid pornography and how they get so much pornography, whether they want it or not, and how it's affects them in a negative way. And that's definitely, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, porn is such a big money making industry that we are never going to get a straight answer on it. I promise you. I'm not a fan of porn. I think I know too much about it.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just thinking about how women in their fifties and up are depicted in the media and in movies and in our culture in general. And how we can start to see a shift toward that being, we're not just irrelevant. It's-

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Well I think that is-

Lauren Schiller:                  New world.

C Bushnell:                            It's really, I mean, it's changing so much because I feel like the Sex and the City woman who to me, I mean, to me the Sex and the City woman is a woman who's my age. I'm 60, but it's about really it was a change that happened in the late seventies and the early eighties. And it really happened because of feminism, the pill. Also women's magazines at that time were really very important and they were just seminating information to regular women out there about things that you could have that you could never have before. And one of them was an orgasm and the other was a career. And-

Lauren Schiller:                  And that ladies and gentlemen is having it all.

C Bushnell:                            Exactly.

Lauren Schiller:                  Forget everything else.

C Bushnell:                            And in the late seventies and eighties, there was a huge influx of women into the workforce. This has happened a couple of times in the 1920s, for instance, but then it always, women end up going back to the home. And it happened at that time. And that really made for a lot of changes and it was a group of women who they were going to go out there and do something that their mothers hadn't done. They were going to try to have it all. It was really like the first generation of women that were encouraged, told that you could have it all, that you could have a family, you could have a career.

C Bushnell:                            So this is not a group of women who are shy violence. This tends to be a group of women who they're used to challenging the status quo and they're used to going out there and changing things and changing perspectives. And this is really the same group of women, but they're older. And they're not going to go away. So I do think-

Lauren Schiller:                  So now's the time to show up. They're showing up.

C Bushnell:                            Yes. Yeah. I mean I do think it's a different time.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Candace Bushnell speaking with me live on stage at the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco for Women Lit, a program of the Bay Area Book Festival. Candace's new book is called, Is There Still Sex in the City? I'll put a link to it on my website influctionpointradio.org, where by the way, you can find future events by clicking on the events tab there. I'd love to see you. I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know a woman leading change we should talk to? Let us know at inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at inflectionpointradio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on Twitter at laschiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go. inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host. Lauren Schiller.

 

Jessica Reaves is Calling Misogyny What It Is–Another Form of Extremism (Interview + Toolkit)

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We're hearing more from and about American extremist groups lately, like white supremacists and Incels. One thing their members have in common is misogyny. Today's guest is Jessica Reaves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League. She and her team monitor extremists across the ideological spectrum. In today's episode you'll hear what she's learned about these groups, why she thinks misogyny should be treated as another form of extremism, and how we can put a stop to it.

Jessica Reaves headshot.jpg

RESOURCES:

ADL Resource Library

Report: When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy

TRANSCRIPT: We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know!

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. On today's episode...

Jessica Reeves:                  It's a terrible moment and yet I'm hoping that when we look back on it, future generations look back on it, we recognize the extent to which this has been a moment maybe that led us to a place of honesty on these issues that we've never had before.

Lauren Schiller:                  You can only hear that conversation on Inflection Point coming up.

Jessica Reeves:                  My name is Jessica Reeves and I'm the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism at ADL or the Anti-Defamation League. My job mostly consists of, well, it entirely consists of overseeing the entire body of work produced by Center on Extremism staffers. We're a staff of about 12 around the country, and we monitor extremists across the ideological spectrum and produce reports and work with law enforcement and the community to educate them on extremism and the risks that various movements pose.

Lauren Schiller:                  Does that mean that you and your staff are looking at these movements and events as they unfold from the outside in or are you deeper inside what's going on? Do you or any of your staff actually have relationships with people inside these movements?

Jessica Reeves:                  Our research is outside in, we tend not to participate in any of the activities even as sort of observers. We just look at it from a journalistic perspective. We do have ways, which I will not get into here, but we do have ways of keeping track of what's going on inside of these movements, and some of that is based in technology, some of it's based in experience, some of it's based in past relationships. So we have a fairly broad toolbox to work with when it comes to understanding what these groups are doing, what their activity looks like on a day-to-day basis. It helps us stay abreast of the very quickly changing landscape these days.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. In today's episode, I'm talking with Jessica Reeves of the Anti-Defamation League or ADL, and she, as you just heard, studies extremist groups. Many of these groups that she studies including white supremacists and incels, so-called involuntary celibates, have one thing in common, they would like to keep women down.

Jessica Reeves:                  This has always existed. This has always been there. We are a country founded on white supremacy. We are a country founded on misogyny. There are so many things that formed the backbone of this country in our society that we have to deal with, and we have never dealt with any of these things. And I just think it's such a... it's a terrible moment, and yet I'm hoping that when we look back on it, future generations look back on it, we recognize the extent to which this has been a moment maybe that led us to a place of honesty on these issues that we've never had before.

Lauren Schiller:                  We hear about white supremacists, we hear about white nationalists. Let's just start there. Is there a difference?

Jessica Reeves:                  There is no difference, no. White nationalism is just a sort of prettified version of white supremacy. If somebody says there are white nationalists, there are white supremacist. They may try to differentiate themselves by saying, "Oh well, as a white nationalist, I believe that white people should have their own space. We should have our own territory within the United States and non-whites can have their own territories. So I'm not advocating for the injury of anyone else or for the expulsion of anyone else per se, I just want my own space. But in fact, it all just comes back to I believe that white people need to be separate because I believe they are superior and different and better in all of these different ways, and I want my own country based on race."

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's talk about misogyny. Define misogyny.

Jessica Reeves:                  Misogyny is just a step up from everyday sexism. Misogyny is taking action that will injure women. That doesn't mean physically, it could mean emotionally, it could mean in terms of jobs, it could mean professionally or educationally or any of those things, but you're doing something to injure women, you're doing something against women, and it doesn't even have to be knowingly, there's a lot of internalized misogyny as we know, as we saw in the last election, there's... All of these things can play out in a non-extremist looking way and I think that's what's so interesting and challenging about studying misogyny is that we all have experienced sexism.

                                                      Most of us have probably experienced misogyny, it's just harder to put our finger on what made it different. And I'm still grappling with how to explain the nuance there because sexism is treating women differently, misogyny is treating women differently in an overtly or explicitly harmful way. Misogyny is rooted in a hatred of women and often a fear of women.

Lauren Schiller:                  You've recently released a report on the connection between white supremacy and misogyny. And it's very obvious just in the first few minutes that we've been talking, that those two things are connected by hate of an other, but there's so much more to it. There was something that you wrote in that report that was, they want femininity over feminism. And so now the next question is really, what are their views on feminists that make us so vile?

Jessica Reeves:                  Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  I laugh wickedly, [crosstalk 00:06:53] -

Jessica Reeves:                  Feminism and feminist more generally are the enemy of white supremacists as well as misogynists, and I can talk more about the various strains of misogyny that we're following and that have come to the fore, especially in recent years, but the beef with feminism and feminist is that women are attempting to take stature away from white men, and this victimhood narrative is just pervasive throughout white supremacists ideology and misogynists landscapes. So this is one of the things that connects them, is this sense that, okay, all of these opportunities, all of these things that I've theoretically worked for, and I'm using air quotes, which is not helpful on an audio recording, but these things that are supposed to be mine, and this is the white man talking, are being threatened by advances by women and advances by people of color, and God help them if they get close to a woman of color, then that's a whole other... All of their fears wrapped up in one.

                                                      It's just a victimhood narrative, it's a sense of being cheated out of something, it's a sense of being denied their birthright, and they see this as an encroaching issue. They also, white supremacists also are very clear in that they link feminism back to the Jews because everything always comes back to the Jews, and this is part of a larger white supremacists conspiracy theory about Jews controlling things including immigration, which is a plot to replace white people with non-white people.

                                                      Anyway, there's a whole underbelly of horribleness that we could get into there, but just to keep the focus on feminism, again, we're back to that grievance. There's just a constant state of grievance among misogynists and among white supremacists. And when I started working on this report that you mentioned, it was spurred on by the Alek Minassian van attack in Toronto, which happened in 2018, and that was definitely not the first time that we'd seen someone who identifies as an incel, which is involuntary celibate, act out against women violently, strike out against them, murder them, but it was a sort of turning point in the sense that people were starting to really pay attention to this issue in some cases for the first time, or they were starting to take a broader look at this issue for the first time.

                                                      The Alek Minassian attack led me to start looking at some of these message boards where incels spend a lot of time and I noticed how frequently their language mirrored the language that I saw on white supremacists message boards, their language about women. White supremacists have a very specific view of how women should behave, how women should be... Of their role in the household, of their role in society. White men in the white supremacist movement want women who are fertile, a, that's their most important function. They are breeders who can create the next generation of white warrior babies. And then after that they're supposed to be supporting their husbands, they're supposed to be building and keeping a beautiful home. And then of course raising all these many white children.

                                                      That's the very specific set of demands that are placed on women in the white supremacist movement, and there's a lot of overlap in terms of what the misogynist sector of the internet, which is broadly referred to as the manosphere, they have their own views of how women should behave, but it's all very retrograde, like it's 1950 all over again. They're, women need to know their place. Women need to understand that men are in charge. Women are taking too many liberties with the way they dress, the way they speak, the way they run for public office. So there's very much a need to contain women, and that's true across the board, there's just different ways of expressing it in the white supremacist community versus the misogynist online sphere.

Lauren Schiller:                  The first question I have is, why would a woman go for that? I imagine that half of the population is women just like the rest of us and that many of them are bought in full force. What are some insights around why that would be?

Jessica Reeves:                  There actually aren't... There aren't a huge number of women who are active in the white supremacist movement. There are [crosstalk 00:12:14] -

Lauren Schiller:                  They're not all married? They're not all married to women who are buying into this idea of the breeder?

Jessica Reeves:                  A lot of them seem to be single based on what I've seen, and or suffer from tremendous marital problems, which is in some ways not all that surprising, but certainly there are women who provide support to these men, who make sandwiches for them or whatever when they're going out to protest against a synagogue or a gay rights rally or whatever they are doing that Saturday. But there are just not that many sort of visible members who are women. So it's been hard to understand them, that population, because they just don't speak publicly.

                                                      There are a couple of women who do and who will coach other white women on how to behave, and that's where the 1950s housewife ideal comes into play. That's how we know what's expected of white women in the white supremacist movement. But again, we come back to the good old internalized misogyny. If you are brought up in a situation where you're led to believe that you are less than, that you're not a full person, that your worth is dependent on the acceptance and love of a man, and that a man is supposed to control everything in your life, you're going to seek that out obviously in your own relationships. Or if you just have really low self-esteem, that's a running issue throughout extremism.

                                                      A lot of these people who are most susceptible to being recruited into extremist movements, they're looking for a place to belong, they're looking for a purpose in life, they're looking for a group that will accept them. Many of them struggle with social anxiety or social alienation growing up, and we see recruiters from the white supremacist movement capitalizing on that. We see exactly the same thing happening when let's say ISIS wants to recruit people. You seek out the people who do not have a sense of who they are yet, what they believe, where they stand on issues, and you mold them. So that recruitment process is very similar across extremist movements.

                                                      And it's true for the women as well. We know that a lot of these women do not have strong senses of self. There's not a huge amount of self-esteem going on. Sometimes we have to take on the role of armchair psychologist, but sort of a fascinating subcommunity and I think we're just starting to learn more about these women. We're seeing some women leaving the movement and they will of course be the best sources for inside information. You know, what goes on, what kind of recruitment happens for women.

                                                      I gather there are matchmaking efforts made to sort of pair up the men in the movement with eligible women. And by eligible, generally speaking, we're talking about quite a bit younger, I would imagine mostly legal age, but still quite a bit younger than the men or at least a bit younger, and the key thing is, for the white supremacists, is that the women cannot have ever had a relationship with a non-white man. Because if that happens then they're ruined and they are off the table altogether. They are no longer even considered human in the eyes of the white supremacists.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point, with stories of how women rise up. I'm speaking with Jessica Reeves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. You can reveal your true power with a contribution to our production at inflectionpointradio.org, and by subscribing to our podcast on your favorite podcast app. When we come back, we'll talk about why extremism seems to be on the rise and what we can do about it.

                                                      I'm Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point. My guest is Jessica Reeves, the Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. What is happening in our country right now that it feels like we're seeing a rise in this movement? And subquestion, are we seeing a rise in this movement or is it just sort of the same percentage of our population but they have risen more to the surface or somehow seem to gain more attention or possibly even power? I don't know.

Jessica Reeves:                  Yeah, it's all tied up. Certainly in the last presidential election in 2016, we heard language used that we have never heard in mainstream politics before. Language about immigrants, language about women, language about non-white people, and that changed the game. This was a signal to a lot of these extremists, a lot of these white supremacists, a lot of these misogynists, that it was, "Hey, come on out. Everything's safe here. You're allowed to say these things." You can express your views freely because this guy is out here talking about these issues and using these words and nothing's happening to him.

                                                      So we can't discount how powerful it is for these people to hear someone at the upper reaches of power in this country talking about women and non-white people in a way that we literally have never heard before from a public official.

                                                      To your question about whether there's more of these people or if they're just more visible, I would say there are more of them in the sense that if we define them as [inaudible 00:19:46] people who can engage with other racists and white supremacists in chat rooms or online otherwise. That doesn't necessarily mean they're out in the streets, that they're going to Charlottesville, that they're taking part in these white supremacists rallies, but it does mean that they are spending time in these forums, on these message boards, where these views are shared and celebrated and elevated and where they're egging each other on too often to commit horrific crimes, obviously not anywhere near all of them commit crimes, but we do see this echo chamber effect which is just creating a really very like sort of a cacophonous space where these guys are all yelling and screaming at the top of their lungs and they're finally finding people who will listen to them.

                                                      These people have always existed, but they just have a much broader reach now because of the internet, and they've also been to a certain extent, given a microphone, because of some of the discourse we see from public officials.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. Well, that's another thing I've been thinking about is what this rise in their vocality... Is that even a noun? Means for who runs our country, and which one led to the other? Did Trump get elected because these guys felt emboldened and ran to the polls to vote for him? Or are there sort of like less vocal people who hold these views that felt emboldened and they felt like they found their guy without necessarily describing themselves as white supremacists? Somehow normalizing that behavior.

Jessica Reeves:                  A lot of white supremacists, I will say, do not like Trump. They think he's a sellout. They don't like that he's friendly with Israel. This goes against a lot of their fundamental core beliefs. But they love it when he says things, and we've charted this on our blog posts, at Center on Extremism, they love it when he comes out and says overtly racist things about immigrants or non-white people. When he made that comment about, why aren't we seeing more immigration from Norway? They loved that. That was right up their alley.

Lauren Schiller:                  Is that a classic dog whistle?

Jessica Reeves:                  That's another term, the dog whistle. Yeah, sort of having... White supremacists have long been enamored of all things Nordic, all things Scandinavian. So whether he was using it as a dog whistle, I don't know, but it certainly resonated within the white supremacist movement as, "Hey, this guy knows the lingo. He's speaking our language."

Lauren Schiller:                  Does that mean I need to get rid of the hygge book in my bathroom?

Jessica Reeves:                  No. We've all been feeling very, very, sad for all the very nice Norwegian and Swedish and Finnish people that we know and work with because their culture has been co-opted to a certain extent by white supremacists. That's been the case for quite some time. The Odinists are a group of white supremacists who have essentially co-opted a lot of these symbols, but anyway, no, you don't have to. We want to defend our Scandinavian friends as best we can. So, no.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. I guess one of the bigger questions I'm asking is, because we are hearing more about white supremacists, their views on misogyny, misogyny being normalized by our president, but at the same time we're in the wake of this Me Too movement and Time's Up, and sexual harassment being something that's on the front page as often as an extremist act is in some ways, is that a coincidence that those two things are happening together? Or have you thought about what the connection is just in terms of the pendulum swinging back and forth like this?

Jessica Reeves:                  Right. Well, two things. One, I think Hillary Clinton was robbed of this election victory because of misogyny, I will say that, and sexism. I think we all just have to accept that and recognize it for what it is. The white supremacists, even the full-on racists in the United States, do not make up a large enough voting block to have changed the outcome of the election. I think there's certainly evidence that there were people who just were uncomfortable, and I'm using air quotes again, with the idea of a woman being in charge and specifically with Hillary Clinton.

                                                      And obviously we can get into... There's so much political background there, but fundamentally, this is a country that did elect twice a black man to be president and we could not get it together to elect a woman, a white woman, but a woman, and it's like that means something. That means something about where we are as a country. I think a lot of us after 2016, I felt... I really internalized a lot of that.

                                                      It was sort of like, "Geez, this country hates women." And... I don't know, there was so much that came out of that that I think emboldened men who had a baseline of feeling that women were not on par with men, but it also fueled so much anger and so much frustration and so much righteous rage from women that, I have to believe that that was tied into women saying in workplaces, in Hollywood, around the world saying, "Enough. Enough. I'm not dealing with this. We just listened to this guy talking about assaulting women with impunity and he just got elected to be president of the United States. I personally am not going to put up with this anymore."

                                                      I think there are historians and social scientists who know this, what this pendulum looks like and how the... Could probably graph all of this out, but that's my lay person's opinion of why we saw what we saw.

Lauren Schiller:                  You study extremism, but then there's all these other tentacles that leak into the mainstream points of view, even as those same people might say they abhor the views of a white supremacist or a misogynist.

Jessica Reeves:                  Yeah. There are a lot of people who are perfectly comfortable and perfectly willing to live with what we consider sort of low grade misogyny or sexism, who wouldn't consider themselves to be sexist or misogynist. Which is exactly the same thing we see with racism. It's what you're conditioned to be okay with, again, with the air quotes. But it's all about what we are willing to put up with in our daily lives. What people of color are willing to put up with to keep their jobs, what women are willing to put up with to keep their jobs. That's sort of what defines what's acceptable and that's putting all of the onus on the people who are experiencing the discrimination. That's not cool. To put it scientifically.

Lauren Schiller:                  One of the things you say in your report on the connection between white supremacy and misogyny is that misogyny is dangerous and under-reported. How do we make it more reported and less dangerous?

Jessica Reeves:                  When I wrote the report, I was trying to really drive home the fact that we talk about prejudice in a certain way when it affects certain populations. So we talk about antisemitism, we talk about racism, we talk about xenophobia, we talk about homophobia, and all of those things are tied into extremist movements in different ways. But we rarely discuss misogyny, which is a, as we discovered through doing this research, is a cornerstone of white supremacy, but also of this specifically misogynistic group of men who exist primarily online and occasionally lash out in murderous rages as we've seen over the last couple of years. But how often do we call out misogyny as part of these extremist movements or as its own form of extremism?

                                                      I just wanted people to see them on the same level and to talk about them with the same frequency and to be willing to call people out on it. I just think that we let a lot of misogyny go, we let it fly, we let it sit, and that's really dangerous for women and for the young boys who are hearing it and who are hearing it be okay over and over and over again. And in terms of reporting, I think we just need to elevate misogyny into this space where people are taking it seriously, where people are calling it out for what it is, and where people are recognizing that it has real life impact, it has impact on women's bodily autonomy in terms of domestic violence, it has effect on women's ability to go to a hot yoga class or to walk down the street in Toronto or to belong to a sorority in Southern California.

                                                      These are all places where men have attacked women because they have felt that women were not treating them the way they deserve to be treated, specifically, that they were not having sex to the extent that they felt they deserved. And those are incel attacks, those are involuntary celibate attacks, all of which I chart out in the report.

Lauren Schiller:                  Incels and white supremacist, they share this misogynistic view, but if you're one, you're not necessarily the other?

Jessica Reeves:                  Right. Incels view women specifically through a sexual lens, whereas white supremacists tend to view women more through this traditionalist retrograde lens of being a housewife, being a mother. They do have very different views on women, but both of them denigrate women. It's part of their ideology.

Lauren Schiller:                  Going back to identifying violence against women as a demonstration of misogyny, but then also the connection between domestic violence and mass violence, it seems like in many of the attacks that we've seen in mass shootings, specifically, that these guys had already been in trouble for hurting their wives or girlfriends, would bringing misogyny more into the limelight so to speak and institutionalizing that as a problem that could lead to bigger problems be helpful?

Jessica Reeves:                  Yeah, absolutely. The New York Times did a really... Several reporters in New York Times did a really great piece in August, and the headline is A Common Trait Among Mass Killers: Hatred Toward Women, and they tracked a bunch of these mass murderers and looked at the relationships they'd had with women. I think we're getting to the point where we are starting to understand that there is a connection between violence that happens in private and violence that happens in public. And I think that there... Yes, absolutely. One of the things we can do is to talk to law enforcement and make sure that they understand, "Hey, this is not something that you dismiss. This is not something that you just write-off as boys being boys. This is a serious issue that can lead to violence against one woman, violence against many women." And I think the more law enforcement is talking about this, frankly, the better.

                                                      Scott Beierle, who's the guy who shot up the Hot Yoga studio in Tallahassee last year, he had been called in a couple of times to the police station because he had been groping women. He had been groping them, he had been following them, he had been stalking. I think one... There were all kinds of red flags going on, but in a couple of cases women didn't press charges. I think that speaks more to what's going on with our policing system and how women are treated when they do bring charges, and I can't speak to their specific cases obviously, but we know that women who bring charges of assault or violence or harassment against men are not often treated as well as they should be.

                                                      But if these things had been taken more seriously and if Beierle had not been able to get a gun, which he should not have been able to, then we might not have had that mass murderer in Tallahassee. It's all tied up in law enforcement response, in gun laws, and closing loopholes, and just legislation generally, both on a state and national level, taking violence against women more seriously and pursuing charges in a more vigorous way.

Lauren Schiller:                  What about these websites like 4chan and 8chan? 8chan, the founder even said there's too much violent rhetoric happening on this website. It should go away. Does that actually make an impact?

Jessica Reeves:                  Honestly, what we've found is that when one site shuts down another one springs up. For the tech companies at this point where it's sort of a whack-a-mole situation, they're trying to, to some extent and with varying degrees of success, monitor the conversations that are going on on their websites, on their forums. But when they shut one thing down, very quickly these guys find another place to be, another more forgiving or "Open" place to be.

                                                      There are a couple of tech companies that seem to take a very antagonistic view towards anybody trying to encourage responsible monitoring or enforcement of terms of service. That should be commonplace, but we just don't see that happening in a lot of these sites.

Lauren Schiller:                  How does that make you feel after you've spent an hour crawling through some of these websites?

Jessica Reeves:                  It's a challenge. I was a reporter for many years before I joined ADL and I think that really helped me set up a compartmentalization in my brain. I covered some rough stuff as a reporter and I got good at, reasonably good at coming home, turning that part off and focusing on the rest of my life. That's not to say everyone on the team doesn't have recurring nightmares. The people that you come to rely on in this work, are the people who really understand what you're going through on a psychological and emotional level on a day-to-day basis. So I rely on my co-workers and colleagues too. If I need a sounding board, if I'm just feeling run-down or just under too much pressure or if I just can't take it anymore, I know how to take a break, but I also know that I can call people that I work with and just vent.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. So when you go on vacation, is it just like a no technology zone? Like are you able to insulate yourself for a minute?

Jessica Reeves:                  Yeah, I try really hard to just leave everything at home. The problem is that, and this is something that affects our work in a global way, but I mean extremism is part of our everyday news cycle these days. So it's not as if I can just say, "Okay, I'm not going to look at extremist news." It means I can't look at the news generally because extremism has infiltrated so much of our day-to-day lives and it's in our political landscape, and the news cycle is just all about these stories. And so, yeah, I just have to say, "Okay, I'm not even going to look," and that's really hard for me to do as a former reporter and just as a sort of interested human. But it's so important to do it and I know I need to do it more often.

Lauren Schiller:                  All right. Jessica, what's the best advice that anyone's ever given you about how to stand up to someone who is spouting a worldview that is totally an opposition to what you believe to be right and true?

Jessica Reeves:                  Honestly, I think if you can stomach it, you just need to talk to people. It's very hard to hate someone when you know them. And I think the more people reach out to each other and spend more time around people who are not like themselves, the less likely we are to see racism or sexism or misogyny or white supremacy. We need to surround ourselves with people who think differently than we do, and that doesn't mean accepting terrible worldviews and dangerous worldviews, it just means talking to people and trying to get people to understand a more compassionate and empathetic worldview, and I know that's easier said than done.

                                                      My first reaction is always to write people off when they express views that I think are horrible, and certainly if they're dangerous views, you want to get away from them as quickly as possible. But I'm talking more about the, again, the garden variety racism or the sexism. You want to talk to people and you want to find out what's going on and you want to figure out if you can present yourself or someone in your circle or family, and this is only if you can do it safely obviously, but if you can present yourself as an opportunity for them to learn more about why diversity or being kind to each other or not embracing racist ideology is a good thing, then I think that's a moment of opportunity. And I don't think we can pretend that they come along all the time, but I think it's something that we need to be on the lookout for.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and you're listening to Inflection Point. Coming up, Jessica Reeves will tell us how to respond to misogyny when we encounter it online, at school, and at work.

                                                      I'm Lauren Schiller and you're listening to Inflection Point. And here's Jessica's toolkit.

Jessica Reeves:                  I tell parents, pay attention to what your kids are doing online. Everybody knows this. It's parenting one-on-one, but there's just so much out there that's so incredibly dangerous, and I will often refer them to a really amazing piece in the Washingtonian from May of this year that was written by a parent of a 13 or 12 year old, I think 13 year old boy, who had an incident at school where he was chastised for treating a girl badly, came home and started to look for support online because he was feeling wronged by whatever disciplinary action had been taken. And he went online and found all of these sites where he could talk about girls and how they were bad and they were taking things away from boys, and that escalated into full-on misogynistic commentary and forums and participation in that. And then he got sucked in to full-on alt-right websites.

                                                      Literally there's just this like algorithm to disaster that YouTube has perfected and it's just, it's incredibly unnerving to see how quickly all of this can happen and snowball online. So pay attention to what's happening online. We need to raise kids who are good at asking questions. We need to raise girls who aren't going to take guff. We're going to raise boys who respect women in a meaningful way. And we're going to make sure that we're calling out misogyny when we see it or hear it, and it doesn't matter where it's coming from. Whether it's coming from the president of the United States or whether it's coming from the leader of your cub scout group.

Lauren Schiller:                  Can you talk for a minute about the world of gaming, which everyone's got a different point of view on the world of gaming and its influence on our children? But you happen to have some data around what happens inside these online video games and what it means for recruitment of mostly young guys, I'm imagining?

Jessica Reeves:                  We are increasingly seeing these games that you can play on an open network used by extremists to recruit, especially young boys. So these games that you can play with people around the world where you're chatting with them, where you're having interactions with them. These are becoming recruitment opportunities for white supremacists, just as they've long been recruitment opportunities for people who are pedophiles and other horribleness.

                                                      The extremists are looking into these open network games because they know that they're finding boys especially who'll be susceptible to their teachings, to their way of thinking. They want to find new recruits, that's something that white supremacists are constantly doing. They're keeping an eye on college campuses. We've seen a huge rise in propaganda efforts on campuses, because again, you're targeting people who are at the right age, who haven't quite figured out who they are yet. So the idea of targeting these gaming platforms, these gaming systems, falls into the same line of thinking. If you can grab these kids before they have themselves sorted out altogether, you're finding a really... It's a very vulnerable population.

Lauren Schiller:                  So now that we've scared the crap out of some parents who are listening, who have kids who play on these open network games, what do you suggest to parents?

Jessica Reeves:                  If it were me, I would be closing those networks down. Just play with people you know. Just play it close. Play with the people in your family, play just with your friends who you can identify specifically online. I don't know that there's any reason for kids to be so exposed for hours at a time to a world that we know is not particularly safe at the moment.

                                                      It's really important not to dismiss sexist or misogynist comments just by laughing them off or saying, "Boys will be boys," and I will advise people, think about whether these comments were targeting a person of another race or ethnicity and does that change your perception of how serious the slur is? And it can be a really powerful teaching tool because we are reasonably good at detecting... Of responding to racism. What if we were that good at recognizing when sexism and misogyny were happening?

Lauren Schiller:                  What happens when you're in a moment as an adult where you are spotting sexism or misogyny in your professional or private life?

Jessica Reeves:                  Yeah, I think as with other prejudices and expressions of hatred, we need to be more comfortable with being uncomfortable. We need to call these things out when we see them. If you see something happening in your workplace that you know is wrong because a woman is being treated differently or talked about differently, or her femaleness is the butt of a joke, or anybody who's identifying as a woman is being treated poorly based on her gender or gender identity, that is a moment to speak up. That's a moment to say, "Hey, I don't appreciate hearing this. I don't think it's right. I want you to stop." And if you need to elevate it to an HR situation or if that's available to you, that's really important because I think systemically we are not set up to take these things seriously.

                                                      The more that the change agents, and I do think of HR department sometimes they can be change agents in their best iterations, the more that change agents hear about these things happening and these misogynist or sexist expressions, the more likely they are to start incorporating that into their teaching or into their training, and that's how change happens. It just has to happen on a personal level, at the same time that it's happening on a societal level. Because one really can't happen without the other.

                                                      I think we need to really demand that our law enforcement officials and agencies generally take violence against women seriously. We need to make sure that they are responding to calls in a meaningful way, meaning that they're not just brushing things off. We need to train law enforcement to understand what domestic violence can look like. We need them to understand when they're called into a situation that they need to look for specifically misogynistic red flags. And I think that's just part of a broader societal sort of teaching moment where we can all figure out, "Okay, we're going to start taking this seriously, misogyny as a social problem, as a social ill, as a form of prejudice, as an extremist mentality. We're going to start taking it seriously." Law enforcement is often the first line of defense and I think that we just have to make sure that they're well trained.

                                                      We also need to train our educators better to understand the language that can happen in classrooms, the language that will often happen between kids, and I believe firmly in the right to free expression. I think that the way to counter bad speech is with good speech. I don't believe that we should be censoring people for normal exchanges, and people should be able to ask questions. But I do think once you get into inciting violence, once you get into specific threats against specific people, that's when people have to act, whether that's law enforcement acting, whether it's tech companies acting, whether it's individuals reporting things to tech companies, I just think we all have to be much more vigilant about the language that's being used.

                                                      And we also need to ask that our public officials call out misogyny. We need to also ask that they not actively participate in or contribute to misogyny, which unfortunately seems to be beyond the scope of what's possible at the moment. But hopefully down the line we will get to a place where we are able to expect a degree of civility from our elected officials at large.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Jessica Reeves, Editorial Director at the Center on Extremism, at the Anti-Defamation League. I've got a link to her paper on white supremacy and misogyny on my website at InflectionPointRadio.org. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is how women rise up.

                                                      That's our Inflection Point for today. Today's program was produced in part by the generous donation of [Paul John Turco 00:51:13]. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcast, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. Follow me on Twitter @LASchiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go: InflectionPointRadio.org.

                                                      Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco NPRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller.

 

How Stephanie Lepp Makes Room for a Reckoning (+TOOLKIT)

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Stephanie Lepp is the creator and host of a podcast about how people change their hearts and minds-- it’s about people who decided on their own to completely change their world views. It’s about people who took a look in the mirror, and realized they did not like what they saw. How do you do that? Her show is called Reckonings...and it sure feels like our society could use a reckoning right about now. But do things need to change on an individual level first? I invited Stephanie to share what she’s learned about how personal change can lead to positive societal change.

RESOURCES:

https://www.sandiego.edu/soles/restorative-justice/campus-prism.php

http://www.againstviolentextremism.org/

TRANSCRIPT. We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know!

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller. And today on Inflection Point we want a lot of people to change their ways right now. How far are you willing to go to let them?

Stephanie Lepp:                It's amazing what a gesture can do and are we willing to let alone give the person a job, just let the bad guy change?

Lauren Schiller:                  Join me and Stephanie Lepp of Reckonings. Stay tuned.

Stephanie Lepp:                I am Stephanie Lepp. When I feel comfortable with people I would say that I'm a tuning fork. I would say that I am a gentle mirror.

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell me more about the tuning fork.

Stephanie Lepp:                The tuning fork.

Lauren Schiller:                  I love that.

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, I just came out right now. I guess I am seeing the gravity of the situation or sensing the gravity of the situation but also responding to it in a way that is hopeful and creative and maintains imagination and maintains humor.

Lauren Schiller:                  But it seems like both of your metaphors are about being in touch with the world and wanting to kind of play back what you're seeing.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes, because I think that's part of the idea of in order to get to anywhere we have to start from where we are. Part of it is yes, must see the nature of the situation clearly in order to go anywhere, but cannot stop only at seeing the nature of the situation clearly. That can also just lead us to stagnation and depression. So there is both a seeing clearly and a dose of creativity and imagination and hope to move us forward.

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller. And that's Stephanie Lepp, the creator, and host of a podcast about how people change their hearts and minds. And this isn't about changing your mind on the small stuff like, "Oh, I wanted to cook dinner in but instead let's eat out." It's about people who decided on their own to completely change their world views. This is not an easy thing. I mean, when's the last time you did that, or I did that or made room for someone else to? Her show is about people who took a look in the mirror and realized they didn't like what they saw. As someone said to me, it's like they took their own hearts out of their bodies, took a good look at them, moved things around a little and put them back inside. How do you do that?

                                                      The show is called fittingly Reckonings. And it sure feels like our society could use a reckoning right about now. But do things need to change on an individual level first? I invited Stephanie to share what she's learned about how personal change can lead to positive societal change. So where did you grow up?

Stephanie Lepp:                I grew up in the North Bay [crosstalk 00:03:41].

Lauren Schiller:                  Of California.

Stephanie Lepp:                Of California. Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Did that influence the way you think about the world do you think?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, my mom is a yoga instructor. My dad is in technology. I'm a Mexican Jew. I was raised very much... Spanish was my first language and my mom is an artist who would always kind of take us to every single museum within a 25 mile radius of wherever we were traveling I feel like, grew up in an area and in a family that was definitely very much about being open and available and thinking freely and asking questions. And Judaism also has kind of a practice of asking questions, right? There's kind of like the reinterpretation and re-reinterpretation of every single thing in Jewish history. It's kind of like we continue to ask questions about the same old things forever and ever and ever.

                                                      I think I've just been aware of my evolving consciousness from a young age. I mean, I remember in second grade waiting for the school bus for second grade. And I remember thinking, "Last year I didn't know anything. Last year was first grade. I didn't know anything. Now I really know what's up. I'm going into second grade." And then having that same experience going into third grade, and having that experience enough times that I was like, "Wait a second. I'm noticing a pattern here. Maybe I don't actually know everything there is to know now that I'm going into fifth grade. Maybe my mind is actually just in a process of changing and growing and evolving." And that stuck with me.

Lauren Schiller:                  So this concept of how people change their hearts and minds, I mean, why is that something you decided you really wanted to explore?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So that was through my earliest experiences with activism and social change in college and early into my professional life the question would always come up am I changing anyone's mind? Am I actually moving anyone on climate change or mandatory minimums or whatever issue I happen to be focused on at the time, which then of course, begs the question, how do people actually change their hearts and minds? And that question just kind of became a little bit of a fascination of mine. But I almost didn't even know what am I even researching here. What's the search term in my googling worldview transformation? Is that even a thing? I know behavioral economics is a thing, but I'm not looking to find out what makes people floss their teeth more often. I'm looking to find out what moves people in fundamental ways.

                                                      And it finally just kind of occurred to me that that question might be really powerful to manifest in the form of stories of people who have made these kinds of transformative change as a podcast. And so that's where Reckonings comes from. It is an exploration of the question how do people change, and really kind of more specifically, how do people change in ways that connect to or scale into broader social and political change.

Lauren Schiller:                  And so when you think about your role in bringing this understanding to light, I mean, how do you think of yourself?

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, a mirror actually is very apt. That's really what I'm doing for the person I'm interviewing. I'm just being a gentle... I deliberately don't do interviews in person. Because a lot of what I'm asking people I'm asking people to talk about some really sensitive stuff sometimes. Sometimes it's the thing that they are the least proud of, the thing that they are really reckoning with. And I find it more helpful if I can just kind of be a little voice in their head that holds up a mirror to them such that they can just see clearly what they have done, the impact that they may have had on other people, and then how they have learned from that and grown from that. I want to make an uncomfortable experience like a tiny bit more comfortable, just a tiny bit, so you can just hang out in it longer and speak from that place.

Lauren Schiller:                  From the standpoint of the listener or the person who you are talking to?

Stephanie Lepp:                The person telling the story. Are we just going to keep taking the mirror metaphor everywhere? We might. I mean, yeah, the listener, there is kind of maybe a collective mirror of us beholding our own capacity to change. That's certainly part of what I'm doing, because I believe that we can at least even just for me personally in producing the show it's like what does it do to us to wander through the world with the belief that the people around us can change? It just creates more room for new things to happen that haven't happened before.

Lauren Schiller:                  Have you ever wanted to turn the mic on yourself? I mean, is there a reckoning of your own that you've been wanting to explore?

Stephanie Lepp:                I find that so intimidating. It's amazing that no one... I've been interviewed a little bit, a couple times. And it's amazing to me that no one has asked me the question of what I'm reckoning with, which I dread, which is so amazing to me or just hysterical to me because yeah, I mean, obviously, that's what I'm asking my guests to do. But I'm kind of just in total awe of all of my guests. I think what they do is so hard. It's like basically asking you in some ways to have a public therapy session. I mean, you're just letting out the hardest things. Have I wanted to turn the mic on myself? No. That sounds really scary. Which is part of why I'm so in awe of my guests.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, what are you reckoning?

Stephanie Lepp:                So therefore, you're going to ask me the question.

Lauren Schiller:                  What are you reckoning with?

Stephanie Lepp:                What I am reckoning with is put really simply my relationship with productivity. It took me a long time to understand what I want to do. And so I feel like I've wasted all this time. And I have all this kind of old regret, and so therefore I must use all of my time super productively. And so I'm in this tug of war with time and I just hold my time accountable to... I mean, even just my understanding of what productive even means it prevents me from really just kind of being inside of and experiencing my life, is what it's preventing. And it became much more apparent to me once my daughter was born.

                                                      I thought she was going to start challenging me when she turned 13. It started immediately. It's like the second she came out of the womb, she was like, "Let me hold up a mirror to you mom and show you how addicted you are to crossing things off your list of things to do, because the second I need something from you have a really hard time diverting from whatever your plan was for what you were going to do in the next 10 minutes or the entire day." So it's just become that much more apparent to me as a mom, and I feel I am reckoning with... I mean, I guess it's also just the way I relate to and then have in my life and I am wanting to feel less like I'm struggling against my life or struggling against time and more in a experience of gratitude and awe for my life.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller being fully present with Stephanie Lepp, host of the podcast Reckonings, a show about how people change their hearts and minds. You can cross one thing off your list when you subscribe to the podcast and make a contribution toward our production at Inflectionpointradio.org. Coming up, Stephanie will share clips from her show, including the reckoning of a former neo-nazi. And she'll share what she learned from a sexual abuse survivor and her perpetrator, both of whom managed to work through it using restorative justice.

                                                      I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point. I'm here with Stephanie Lepp, host of the podcast Reckonings, and we're talking about how personal change can lead to positive societal change. Well, let's talk about some of the people that you talked to on Reckoning. I would like to start with your episode 19, which is about violent white extremists, because that... well, I mean, we can't walk away from it. So in this episode you talk with two different men-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... Jesse and Frank.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Why don't you tell us a little bit about each of those guys and then we'll play the clip.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So Frank is a former white supremacist. Jesse is a former jihadi extremist. And I weave their stories together. And part of the reason I do that is because I guess on the one hand we kind of think of those ideologies as somehow kind of like opposite or something. But you get to see how when you need something, when you are just feeling broken, and don't have many options and it's like you're going to reach for heroin, or alcohol, or white supremacy or jihadi extreme, whatever it is that helps you cope. And either one of them could have gone in the other direction. And there are times in the episode where you may not even be able to distinguish between their voices, but that's kind of part of the point.

                                                      So this is when Frank, he just got out of jail. He's looking for a job. He can't find a job. He has swastika tattoos all over him. And through a friend he manages to get a gig at a trade show with a Jewish antique dealer. And the Jewish antique dealer knows that Frank is a neo-nazi, but he says he doesn't care what Frank believes as long as he doesn't break the furniture. And so this clip picks up right after Frank has worked to this gig at the trade show with this Jewish antique dealer.

Lauren Schiller:                  And this guy Frank is the basis for the-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... character that Ed Norton plays in American-

Stephanie Lepp:                American History X, yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  1998 for those of who are wondering when did that movie come out. Yeah. So if you've seen that movie or if you go see that movie that gives a instantaneous visual-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... from what we're talking about here.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Frank:                                        He gave me a ride home that night. And when he gave me the ride home and then as he's dropping me off he just goes, "Hey, what do you do for a living?" I said, "I don't do anything." He goes, "Why don't you come work for me?" And I'm looking down at my Dr Martens on my red laces, which meant I'm a neo-nazi. And I keep looking down at the boots as he's talking to me, this Jewish man, and I'm trying to hide the boots underneath the other part of the seat. I'm just looking at him like, "Thank god this human being is in my life."

                                                      It's fear. I was full of fear. I was full of absolute fear for everything. And so I got with a group of people who also were fearful people, their fear for losing their homeland are going to lose their women to the black man. You name it. And my fear I felt made me weak. And so what they did is they turned my fear into an anger. And they made it to where it was my strong point. I was embarrassed. I was completely embarrassed of my beliefs. I was wrong, and I'd been wrong for the last seven years of my life. I'd been completely wrong. This is all [inaudible 00:16:42]. I believed in something that I was willing to die and kill for, something that is [inaudible 00:16:48].

                                                      I had so much seniority in this group. Seniority was important to me because I had nothing in this world. I cut everything and everybody that was not part of the movement out of my life. So that's all I have. So the car ride is coming to an end and he drops me off. And he goes, "I'll see you Monday, right?" And I took my pay and I went home and I could not wait to get home and get them boots off my feet. My whole image of me is gone. And I got to build something new.

Lauren Schiller:                  So for this episode the overarching question that you ask is what happens when we look past ideology.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  And, I mean, this guy that gave him a job, this Jewish guy that gave this neo-nazi with swastikas all over himself a job. I mean, it's kind of incredible.

Stephanie Lepp:                It's completely incredible. It's completely incredible. I mean, it's both incredible that he was willing to do that, and it's also incredible how much that does, how much a gesture like that can do. And yeah, it poses the question back to us if we were that Jewish man would we have given Frank a job? I mean, even less than that, like giving someone a job, even talk to people being willing to talk to people. So yeah, it's amazing what a gesture can do, and yeah, I take that back to are we willing to let alone give the person a job just let the bad guy change?

Lauren Schiller:                  I mean, one of the things that this episode made me think about and even just that clip is the responsibility of the person who is going to change or wants to change or maybe doesn't even know yet that they want to change and that it has to be a two way street. So there's the input from someone showing compassion. But then there's how is that received? How was he in that place at that time to be able to accept the work, even if he had reservations about whether or not he would get paid, which is part of what we didn't hear.

Stephanie Lepp:                Well, and it's a gradual... so Frank's transformation process actually started in jail when he started playing sports with black people and started getting to know black people really for the first time in his life. And it was coming from that experience and the confusion that that brought up of like, "Wait, actually black people are fine." Then he had this experience, so generosity from a Jewish person, and that just kind of sealed the deal in terms of revealing to him the absolute bankruptcy of his ideology.

                                                      And so it was a gradual thing. But yes, that is kind of what put him in the position and say, "Well, wait a second." Because you go through this process of like, "Okay. Fine, black people are fine, but Jewish people?" And it's like me with the school bus. After having enough experiences of seeing yourself repeat the same pattern you start to wonder is there a pattern here? Am I going to just say, "Okay. Fine Jewish people, but then the next person." Or am I finally going to say, "Actually, maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that I have been seeing the world"?

Lauren Schiller:                  So on this topic of domestic terrorism and white supremacism and the attacks in El Paso and Dayton and Gilroy, and you reference in this episode the Oklahoma City bombing. One of your characters, I wouldn't know if it was Frank or Jesse.

Stephanie Lepp:                It was Frank. It was Frank, yeah.

Lauren Schiller:                  So Frank, the same fellow has insight into the bomber.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  Timothy McVeigh. And so he wants to go and talk to the FBI-

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... about that. So can you just share a little bit about what happens as a result?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, he watched the bombing or he watched kind of footage from the bombing on TV. And it was one scene in particular of a firefighter carrying I think a very young girl who looked like she might have been killed. And he just realized like, "I actually understand where this bomber was coming from, and I need to help. I need to use that understanding I have to help us prevent this from happening." So that's when he showed up at the FBI and he kind of... I think they first kind of were a little disarmed, but he showed up, he was like, "I need to talk to you about the bombing." Like, "No, I don't know information about the person but I understand where that person was coming from. And I need to help you understand where that person was coming from."

                                                      First I think he worked with the FBI and then even started working with the Anti-Defamation League and talking to Jewish audiences about what gives rise to these kinds of ideologies. And I guess this is kind of the concrete thing if you want to share with this episode. Actually both he and Jesse are part of this... It's called the Against Violent Extremism Network. This is unbelievable too me. It's a searchable database of former violent extremists. You can literally search for the kind of violent extremism you're looking for, so that you can find someone, a former extremists, who can then talk to current extremists or their families and basically help people exit lives of extremist violence, because they can speak to, they were there, they can speak to who they are coming from and kind of make the bridge to where they have come to.

                                                      And yeah, it's unbelievable to me that something like that even exists. But that's basically what they have made themselves, both Frank and Jesse and the others who are a part of it, made themselves available for is available for people who are still in those ideologies to even just kind of explore, experiment, or conceive of the possibility of moving in a new direction.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. Which gets back to this question of when is someone ready? How can their path change sooner before the violent act?

Stephanie Lepp:                I don't know if I have a specific answer to that question. But certainly making it possible, making it available for them. I don't know if the Against Violent Extremism Network has an anonymous hotline or something where you don't have to... yeah, I don't know. But at least having that be... and I don't know how it's promoted. And actually, here's a kind of a similar example. Are you familiar with Footsteps?

Lauren Schiller:                  No.

Stephanie Lepp:                And I do not want to equate these things at all but just kind of an analogy in the sense that... now I'm almost hesitating. But it's an organization that helps Orthodox Jews explore the possibility of leaving the orthodoxy. That's really all it is. And I don't know how they promote themselves, but even just knowing that there's somewhere you can go, maybe it's anonymous or the person doesn't have to know you where you can even just dip your toe in the water of change, just see how it feels, try it on, don't have to commit to anything, don't have to change your public identity about it yet. But yeah, I mean, it's like if we're going to ask people to jump ship we need to give them a ship to jump to. So to the extent that there can be ships out there, that is helpful.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's play a clip from another episode. This is episode 21, a survivor and her perpetrator find justice. For this one, you pose the question what does it sound like for a survivor to get her needs met? And what does it sound like for a perpetrator to take responsibility for his sexual abuse of power? Before we even play the clip I'm curious. How did you get answers to these questions? How did you find these people who are willing to talk to you?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah. So I was looking for them for a long time. I knew I wanted to find a perpetrator and survivor of sexual assault who managed to work through it using restorative justice. Because I just felt like that's what we weren't hearing and would be really helpful to hear the voice of a survivor who got her needs met and the voice of a perpetrator who actually graciously skillfully takes responsibility for his sexual abuse. And so I just reached out to and bugged all the practitioners of restorative justice for sexual assault violence that I could find, which, by the way, the fact that that's even a job that people have is amazing to me that that's some people's job, what they do for a living. So I reached out to as many of these practitioners as I could find. And someone named David Karp kept my name and got back to me a year later, and said, "I think I found your guests."

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, let's see hear this clip. So you've given names to these people. These are not their real name.

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes. These are pseudonyms. They gave themselves their pseudonyms.

Lauren Schiller:                  Okay. Great. So just introduce us to who these people are.

Stephanie Lepp:                Unwin and Sameer. Yes. So Unwin and Sameer met freshman year. Sameer was into Unwin, and they started kind of seeing each other a little bit, but then Unwin kind of blew him off and one night they ended up at the same fraternity party, which is when Sameer convinced Unwin to come home with him and then coerced her into sexual activity. So that was freshman year. And then their senior year, and you're going to have to listen to the episode to find out what happened between freshman year and senior year, but their senior year Unwin invited Sameer into a process of restorative justice.

                                                      Restorative justice basically is a response to crime that engages offenders and victims in repairing the harm that was caused. So Unwin invites Sameer into this process, and I also want to be really clear that in this episode we hear from both Unwin and Sameer, although in this clip we're only going to hear from Sameer. So this is kind of in the middle of the restorative justice process. This is right after Sameer reads Unwin's written testimony of what happened that night.

Sameer:                                   I thought in my brain I had asked her to take her shirt off. I didn't. I told her. I did not remember emotionally manipulating her to coming back to staying with me. I thought from my perspective I was being a potential teacher when it came to oral sex. Turns out, I was basically coercing her into doing this even though she wasn't comfortable. For my end I was like, "Oh, this was just a fun hookup." But then from her end it's like, "This guy is like pushing himself on me," and it didn't sound like me. It sounded like a monster. But that was the hardest part was that this guy who forced himself onto this girl is me.

                                                      I think it was combination of desperation, validation, wanting to finally get the girl that I've been after forever. I wanted to have fun and run around and just have a bunch of sex because that's what I thought college was. But now I wish I could just go back and talk to the kid and just be like, "Hey, dude, your heart is may be in a good place right now. But here's some things you need to know before you start engaging in sexual activities with other people that will prevent a lot of pain. You're a larger guy. You can't just go ahead and ask things and then expect people not to be intimidated by it. If it's not an enthusiastic yes don't do it."

                                                      I've made it very difficult for her to enjoy many parts of intimacy. I absolutely terrified her for years just being around. She would spend every day or at least once at some point almost every day trapped in that night and basically reliving it and she's had to think about it every single day. And I'm not sure if the wounds are all the way healed. I doubt they are but it's a pain that I can't take away no matter what I do. I can't take that away, and I know I've said it 1000 times but I am sorry.

Lauren Schiller:                  I've listened to that so many times and every time-

Stephanie Lepp:                Me too.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... it just gets me the same.

Stephanie Lepp:                Me too. Me too. Yeah. Me too. Me too [inaudible 00:32:00].

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. I mean, what was your takeaway from what they went through and what people who are listening to this could take away too?

Stephanie Lepp:                Well, first of all it's just so refreshing to finally hear a man take responsibility and do it in a... he did kind of at first get a little stuck in this whoa it was me thing, which is not... this isn't about you. You can't get too stuck in self pity because then you're not actually helping the other person. So it's not just about hearing someone kind of like grovel. It's see clearly what they did and then be inspired by it, take that as, I don't know if inspiration, but yeah, it's motivation to help and to heal and for Sameer to work on this issue in particular. And so it's really refreshing to hear a man do that gracefully.

                                                      And it actually sounds... I mean, that's part of what I feel like my job here is, is to make it sound more stunning, more powerful, more manly I could say, to take responsibility, and to, let's say even be also just communicate around sexual intimacy in an open and mature way than to do the other thing where we're just kind of aloof and don't know how we affect other people or maybe don't care about that. Part of my goal here is to make it sound more beautiful and powerful and sure, manly to do what he did. And it does actually sound beautiful and powerful to take a look in the mirror and grow from what we see.

Lauren Schiller:                  In kind of the bigger picture of social change and being convinced that there's a better way forward if we think things are going arise, say, I don't know, with our society [inaudible 00:34:07] people who we might not agree with on a whole host of issues from the political on down to the biological let's say. They think they're right and they don't need to change, and we think we're right and we don't need to change, and finding a way to open the conversation and communication feels like the hardest task of all. So in terms of the kinds of things that you've learned from hearing these stories, these stories of change, I mean, is there kind of an anatomy of change or a way to take this personal change and think about it in terms of how does that scale-

Stephanie Lepp:                How does that scale.

Lauren Schiller:                  ... to social change?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yeah, and that's kind of precisely what I'm playing with here, is the relationship between personal and social change, this idea that big change out there in the world can start in here, inside of us, and that therefore we can be the change. But how does that actually happen? What does that actually mean? Well, we can look at these episodes as example. How does Sameer's personal change translate into social change. It's one less dude who's just kind of going around engaging in sexual activity in kind of a mindless way and one more mindful dude who has done this thing and has really learned from it and grown from it and can talk to other men about it.

                                                      Frank. It's one less white supremacist and one more advocate who can talk to people who still live lives of violence and can also kind of help us understand where he was coming from and where people are coming from and what would speak to them. So part of it is, let's say, growing the cadre of advocates or allies, and these people are kind of like uniquely effective advocates because they are kind of these bridge people. Sameer can speak to guys. He's a young guy. Frank was a leader in the movement.

                                                      So part of it is growing the team. And I tend to think about things in terms of power. And we all have the power to change ourselves, but some of us have more power in this world than others. And put crudely, their personal change would therefore translate into even broader social change. There have been guests of mine, for example, who have a lot of influence. So let's say for former congressman Bob Inglis made a really dramatic shift on climate change. He has a lot of power, and so his personal reckoning had that much more kind of social impact.

                                                      Jerry Taylor was a prominent... he was kind of like the spokesperson for climate skepticism. And his transformation also can lead to... So when I think about my wish list of guests I kind of think about who are the fewest number of people that if they had a personal reckoning that would lead to the biggest social change? What if Charles Koch had a reckoning? But that's still kind of coming from how does personal change lead to social change. We can also kind of think in the other direction, how does social change translate into personal change? How does or should the experience of participating in social change kind of change us as individuals when we have participated or when I have participated in activism and social change? Has it made me more angry? Has it made me more compassionate? Has it made me more hopeful? How does even engaging in social change or how do we want it to kind of change us personally?

Lauren Schiller:                  Have you heard from any of the people that you've spoken with... Well, you know you can kind of like feel a cold coming on? You get a little tickle in the throat or whatever, have they ever talked about feeling a change coming on whether it's a mental or physical sign that I am about to think about something differently? And how do you recognize that?

Stephanie Lepp:                I love that question. I've never heard a guest say that. And also for some people, they hit a rock bottom and clearly something needs to change. A white supremacist I interviewed a while ago, he hit a point where he said he was sitting over a bridge with a gun in his hand, and he said, "Wither I'm going to kill myself now or I'm going to change." For other people there's also kind of a house of cards thing that happens where... because a lot of our ideas are kind of like interconnected or held up by each other.

                                                      And so once you start dismantling one thing the entire house of cards just comes crashing down. So there was a young man I interviewed who he was in the military. He fought in Afghanistan and he became a conscientious objector. And once he started dismantling his ideas about the military and war all of a sudden his ideas about religion, politics, everything came crashing down. So sometimes there's also just an initial change that is kind of like, I don't know, canary in the coal mine or the kind of like a sign that more change is coming.

                                                      A third thing I'll say is we kind of create opportunities for ourselves or at least we can for I'm thinking specifically of Yom Kippur in particular. Is my favorite Jewish holiday. It's a holiday where you basically take a day too fast and reflect on how you affect other people and how you want to affect other people. And thank God I could definitely use that once a year. It's really helpful. Thank you God.

                                                      I mean, that's kind of like planting opportunities for change in your life. So maybe it's not like I can feel it coming on like a cold, but I at least want to make a little space in my life for it to happen if it needs to happen, and it probably does need to happen on a somewhat regular basis throughout my life with intention.

Lauren Schiller:                  What are the lessons that you have learned from all of these stories that you're gathering?

Stephanie Lepp:                Yes. So I used to have this extremely unscientific list of things that I thought radically transformed people. So falling in love, near death experiences, psychedelics, sometimes very rarely information because we usually just trust information that confirms what we already believe. And from what I have seen from the hours and hours of talking to people who have made transformative change, it's not that those things make us change. What those things have in common, or what they do, is that they reveal to us the difference between who we think we are and who we actually are, or the difference between the impact we think we're having on the world and the impact we are actually having on the world. And it's seeing that difference. It's seeing that gap. That is what initiates the process of transformation.

Lauren Schiller:                  Well, what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to change?

Stephanie Lepp:                How to change myself?

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Stephanie Lepp:                What's coming up for me is a quote by a philosopher named Ken Wilber, which is, "Any good theory helps you get to a better one." So to kind of just treat where I am, what I believe as kind of the provisional on my way to where... it's not the end all be all. I haven't figured it out. It's just the next step. It's what's going to help me keep moving forward in my pursuit of unimaginable happiness, joy, understanding, peace, love, all of it. So yeah, to just treat what I believe now or where I'm at now as the provisional and part of the movement forward.

                                                      I'm not all for like peace, love compassion, always. I'm a mischievous, pragmatic pluralist. Within the context of restorative justice, restorative justice and traditional criminal justice are not mutually exclusive. Just because someone is sitting in jail doesn't mean they can't work to repair the harm that they caused somebody else. So people should enjoy the consequences that are appropriate to whatever they did. And if we're also interested in having people also learn from and grow beyond what they did well, then, restorative justice is really helpful. It's not compassion or consequences. It's all of the above, under the right circumstances, in pursuit of our collective liberation. We have the punishment thing down. We know how to do that in this country. Actually then learning from the thing we did, that's the thing that we like, have it totally engaged.

TOOLKIT

Lauren Schiller:                  If you're considering a change stick around and hear Stephanie Lepp's toolkit for how your small personal change can lead to greater societal change. I'm Lauren Schiller. And if you're wondering what personal change you can make that can lead to positive societal change here's your toolkit with Stephanie Lepp. First things first, Stephanie says we need to make room for change.

Stephanie Lepp:                Over the years of producing Reckonings I have been able to witness our human capacity to change. We are capable of all kinds of extraordinary change, and we need room. We need room to change. And we are such a punitive culture. It's like even after perpetrators have taken responsibility or let's say kind of healed things up with their survivor or their victim, which in my humble opinion that's the most important stakeholder here, we often are still not even willing to see them kind of beyond the worst thing they ever did, or let them help. I mean, Sameer is a perfect example. He tried. He reached out to local public high schools and tried to kind of tell his story as part of their sex ed program. And they didn't know how to let an ex offender help.

                                                      And so the personal change, I think we can make, that could translate into broader social change is yes, to make more room for each other to change and grow, to make room under the right circumstances for perpetrators to become allies, which might sound like a blasphemous thing, but then when you hear it within the context of Sameer that can make sense.

Lauren Schiller:                  Stephanie says to keep a conversation open try not to respond with judgment or shame when you hear ideas you disagree with.

Stephanie Lepp:                I mean, if you think about Me Too as an example let's think about how have we each kind of participated in the Me Too conversation, how have we talked to the older men in our lives or even the younger men in our lives, or what have we liked online, or shared online, or commented or tweeted? Have we kind of adapted our ideas about someone to the way they actually behave to whether or not they have actually taken responsibility? I mean, I can give a personal example. I had a really long conversation with my father-in-law recently. We ended up in a car together for a long drive. And he heard Unwin and Sameer's episode and he responded in, I hate to say it, but it's kind of like the typical way that men his age kind of respond which is like, "In my day that wouldn't have been sexual assault. And so is that really sexual assault?"

                                                      And my response to him is like, "Just because there wasn't sexual assault in your day doesn't mean it's right. It doesn't mean like someone wasn't hurt." And so I think in our conversation I guess I didn't respond to him with judgment or shame. I made enough room, I think, in our conversation for him to kind of expand his mind on this and in a way that actually made me want to talk to his siblings, like my aunt and uncles in law. They kind of came into the conversation at a certain point, and I decided I'm going to talk to them over Thanksgiving, which is the whole trope of not talking about politics at the Thanksgiving table. But yeah, I guess the question to ask ourselves is am I engaging in the issues I care about in a way that makes enough room for my adversaries To change.

Lauren Schiller:                  And number three, the easiest way to remove barriers is to make connections. Ask questions and understand where someone is coming from.

Stephanie Lepp:                What I have found is that you may actually have similar values or similar intentions or similar... My father-in-law is and example. It's like he would not want anyone to be hurt either. And so if we can agree from that then we can kind of reverse engineer how do we get there. The LGBT Center in LA, this is a story, but I think it'll help answer the question, the LGBT Center in LA so after Prop 8 passed in California, which anti gay marriage, there was this whole reckoning really like how did that happen in California, in a state like California.

                                                      And so they did this thing, which apparently is really rare and political polling, where they decided to talk to people who voted against them, who voted against gay marriage, to understand where they were coming from and kind of with this idea of like, "Maybe we're going to change their minds." And so firstly knocking on doors and talking to people and kind of like shaming them a little bit. And of course, that didn't work. And what they learned, what they realized was that all they have to do is ask people open ended questions. And you can actually watch these conversations. They have videos.

                                                      So you watch this person knock on someone's door. It's like, "Oh, how did you vote on Prop 8?" It's like, "Okay, do you know anyone who's gay?" And the person's like, ""Oh, yeah. My cousin is gay." It's like, "Oh, tell me about your cousin. It's like, "I love my cousin. We have Thanksgiving at their house every year. And he's amazing with my kids. And I love him," whatever. "Okay, great. Are you married?" Like, "Yeah, I'm married." Like, "Well, tell me about your marriage." It's like, "I have the best relationship. I'm in love with her. We've been married for 50 years," whatever. And it's like, "Does your cousin know how you voted on Prop 8?" It's like, "Well, no. I haven't really talked to them about it." "And so how do you think they would feel about how you voted?"

                                                      You watch this person in real time, a stranger just asking them open ended questions about their life. And what I've learned about what moves people to change it's really just about seeing the difference between who you think you are and who you actually are. And it's seeing that difference, seeing that gap, that is what initiates. So all these people are doing is just holding up a mirror. You think you are, whatever you think you are. Frank thought he was this defender of the white race, but here is what you actually are, Frank, You were just an angry and violent and bigoted individual. And that person can make their own determination based on that. And so yeah, I mean, this isn't like a short tip or trick but hold holding up a mirror showing people themselves asking them open ended questions about themselves. People can come to it.

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Stephanie Lepp, mirror, tuning fork, and the host of the Reckonings podcast. I've got a link to her show on my website at Inflectionpointradio.org. You'll find this episode in the Inflection Point podcast feed in two segments. One is the full interview, and the other is the toolkit you just heard. With three ways your personal change can lead to positive societal change. Find Inflection Point episodes in any podcast app, or go to Inflectionpointradio.org. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller, and this is how women rise up.

                                                      That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple podcasts, RadioPublic Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at Inflectionpointradio.org. While you're there support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to Inflectionpointradio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. And follow me on twitter @Laschiller.

                                                      To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go, Inflectionpointradio.org. Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco, and PRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver. Our engineer and producer is Eric Lane. I'm your host Lauren Schiller.

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How Kate Black is Getting More Women in Office–and how you can too (Interview+Toolkit)

 

LISTEN ON: APPLE PODCASTS | STITCHER | PANDORA | SPOTIFY | NPR ONE | MORE

Former Chief of Staff for EMILY's List, Kate Black, just published her first book, written with the actress June Diane Raphael. It’s called “Represent The Woman's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World.” She shares the attributes of successful candidates, the stories of women who rose to office against all odds, and how to respond when you hear someone say this country isn’t ready for a woman president. Plus, how to determine if you have the time to get out there and run.

Be sure to check out Kate’s TOOLKIT FOR ACTION.


TRANSCRIPT: We do our best on these, if you see an error, let us know.

Kate Black:                            My name is Kate Black. I'm a policy advisor in the federal government and the former chief of staff and vice president of research at Emily's List.

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm just thinking about what position does a woman need to be in in her life to either afford to run or have the time to run? I'm thinking about all the things that are stacked against us. We're the primary caregivers, all the things that we're up against in terms of attaining leadership positions, you know, in a corporate setting let alone in a public setting. Is there kind of an ideal situation that you're in that says, "I'm equipped, I'm prepared, I have what I need to make it happen."

Kate Black:                            Well I think first and foremost it's really important to think about a couple of words that we say over and over in the book, which is that men are not waiting.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah.

Kate Black:                            Men are not waiting for that next, you know, promotion or for their children to grow up and move out of the house. They're not waiting for maybe an aging parent to finally get well. They're not waiting for that next training or webinar. Men are not waiting. I think to your point, is there a perfect time? I say no. I think you have to kind of understand where you're at currently and evaluate that. You're absolutely right, women are doing the majority of caregiving in this country whether it's paid or unpaid and we wanted to be really thoughtful about how we were addressing them but we also wanted to address self care and I think that self care gets a little bit of a buzzword these days but you have to really think about what you need to be successful and to bring your whole self, your whole, healthy self to a campaign.

Kate Black:                            If that looks like going to therapy, if it looks like taking a bath in some really nice lotion, if it means going to church, if it means going for a long walk with a friend or reading a book or doing some art. Whatever it looks like you need to make sure that you're making space for that in your campaign.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to imagine. I'm trying to imagine Elizabeth Warren out there taking a long bath. I feel like-

Kate Black:                            I bet she does something. She has a dog, you don't think that dog goes for walks?

Lauren Schiller:                  I don't mean to create the imagine of now like, you know, potentially our future president in the bathtub. That wasn't my intention.

Kate Black:                            Right, Elizabeth Warren walking her dog. That I can see. I can see it.

Kate Black:                            [00:03:14]

Lauren Schiller:                  This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller and that's Kate Black. And while of course we're guessing on Elizabeth Warren's self care ritual, when it comes to getting pro-choice Democratic women in office, suffice to say Kate knows of what she speaks. Kate Black has been on Inflection Point before and returns to us because she just published her first book written with the actress June Diane Raphael. It's called "Represent - The Women's Guide for Running for Office and Changing the World."

Lauren Schiller:                  Tell me a little bit about how you and June got together to write this book in the first place.

Kate Black:                            Sure, so after 2016 June lives in California, I live in Washington DC, but like so many, in fact, millions of people after the 2016 elections were kind of called to do something more. A lot of us marched, a lot of us went to the streets and took up in the Women's Marches. A lot of us ran for Congress and for State House and got involved in politics and June and I specifically came together to write this book. She woke up after the elections and kind of I think like a lot of people kind of asked herself, you know, "If that guy could do it maybe I should." Looked around and there wasn't really a roadmap for her, you know? There wasn't a book that she could buy online or at her local bookstore that she could find. So she kind of made her way to me and we wrote this how-to guide, basically.

Kate Black:                            We wrote the story that we thought was missing. It provides that roadmap that I think June was looking for. It covers so many of the elements of running for office that uniquely impact women, you know? Where do you run? When do you run? Do you start talking about it? Clothing? Yes, we address clothing, and we address a subject that we hear a lot which is, "How do I help other women?" Through almost about three years from an initial phone call that lasted well over an hour to me going to LA, her coming to DC multiple times, writing a proposal, then writing the book itself and editing it and designing it.

Lauren Schiller:                  Is she planning to run or something?

Kate Black:                            You know, I think if you were to ask her that question, I don't want to speak for her but I thin if you were to ask her that question she would encourage all women to consider it and I think she's a woman that's considering it.

Lauren Schiller:                  What is the state of women in office right now? I mean, we were so excited at the last election when we elected all these congresswomen, you know? It seems like the momentum is really good but like what's the reality of where we are and where do you think we actually need to get to?

Kate Black:                            You know, the reality is that the work is not done. You're exactly right that after 2018 there was a wave of new women coming into all levels of offices and that was so exciting to see and I think what's been so great about that wave of, that newness, is that it's really invigorated our politics. You're seeing, I think, especially women coming into office with young children. They're having a voice in policy where they were absent before and I think that's super exciting. When you look at just the raw numbers it still isn't where it needs to be and that's precisely why we wanted to write this book. Women are over half of the population in this country but just barely a quarter of the seats in Congress.

Kate Black:                            There are almost half of the states across the country have never had a female governor. You know, and when you look at the mayors and the state legislatures we're making improvements there but we could certainly do more and we need to keep encouraging women to step up and lead. The same barriers that exist to women running for office remain. We know for a fact that it's harder for women to fundraise, especially women of color and our campaign finance system is just as it was. That barrier hasn't necessarily gone away but what we do in the book is provide some guidance and some advice for women who see that barrier in front of them and are just wondering like, "How am I going to raise this money? I have to raise probably thousands of dollars. I don't have that. How am I going to do it?"

Kate Black:                            What we do in the book is really try to rethink what fundraise can look like in your own campaign and instead of just seeing this huge number and budget in front of you and thinking, "I can't do it" instead we say, "Here's a way to jump over that barrier rethinking what you have in front of you."

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and I want to get into some of the nitty gritty of that, too, because that is clearly like, how you actually go and get it done is so important. Imagining it and envisioning it is one thing but then actually getting on the ground and doing it is-

Kate Black:                            Yeah it's [crosstalk 00:08:11] one thing to write the book but it's still really hard and that was one thing that June and I felt so strongly about is when you're writing a book like this you want to make it for any woman who wants to run for office and there's an inherent kind of struggle in making sure that all levels of offices are kind of represented and running for city counsel in a small town is very different than running for governor of a large state. We wanted to speak to both so I think throughout the book you see this kind of pivot back and forth from federal races and big gubernatorial races to the very local races.

Kate Black:                            Trying to understand and unpack how much money it does cost to run for governor of Texas, for example, versus maybe school board in Virginia Beach. You know, those are two different races but similarly a woman could be easily qualified and feel up for the task for both. We want to make sure that both of those women have the tools that they need to be successful.

Lauren Schiller:                  That's actually something I've been wondering about and first of all, it was a great reminder that there are all these levels of positions that are available to run for. It's not just about, you know, we're more so focused on the presidency right now, for example, but it's not just about that level.

Kate Black:                            Absolutely.

Lauren Schiller:                  It can be effecting your community. The 25% that you cited, is that pretty much even across the board across all of these positions or are there positions where we're seeing more woman in-

Kate Black:                            Well let me take a step back. I mean, you brought up a great point that so often I think when we think about campaigning or running for office we think about Washington DC. That's kind of where our mind goes but the book really represents the full depth and breadth of elected offices that you can seek out. There are over 500,000 offices that you can run for in this country. It's not just the 435 in the US House of Representatives or the 100 in the Senate or even that Oval Office on Pennsylvania Avenue. It's this whole landscape that's available to women and so we really wanted to speak to that.

Kate Black:                            To your question, though, about the 25%. We kind of hover around that number whether you're talking about the federal level or state legislatures. There are some super bright spots, though. Like for instance we know that women tend to make up a larger swath of school board seats. We also know that there are some state legislatures that are majority women. I think Nevada is one of those. There definitely are some bright spots, like I mentioned, but I think across the board we need to do more so that there are not just women in some of these specific sectors but rather when you look across the kind of political landscape it's filled with women.

Kate Black:                            I want to see women everywhere. Especially if we're ever going to think about parity, you know, we really have to have a long way to go there.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and keeping the momentum going and you know, I was thinking back to like, in the 90s it was the year of the woman, right? When Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein and three or four other women were elected to the Senate in a single year. That was like, a really big deal, but that was over 20 years ago. How do we make this not just surge and retreat, surge and retreat, but keep the momentum going? What's your vision for how that might come to be?

Kate Black:                            Well I think Barbara Mikulski actually has a fantastic quote about the year of the woman because she would get asked about it all the time, you know? "Is this the new year of the woman?" I feel like that narrative comes up almost every election cycle, you know? "Is this the new year?" To be honest, there has been almost a steady growth. Now, that growth isn't huge, but a steady growth of women in elected office over time. What happens, though, is that as women step up to run women who are currently serving are either leaving their seats to run for higher office, which we're seeing right now with the presidential. All of the women except for Marianne Williamson currently hold elected office. If they're successful, that means that there's no longer a woman in their current seat.

Kate Black:                            Sometimes that happens where a woman is in elected office but chooses to run for something else. That creates a vacancy and it's not always filled by another woman. Or what we have been seeing a lot, actually, on the Republican side is Republican women choosing not to run for reelection. It certainly happens on both sides where we have some growth but for different political or outstanding reasons a woman will choose not to go forward. But you know, I think going back to Barbara Mikulski, I think she would say that, "Every year is the year of the woman," right? That year was special but we should keep this momentum and this narrative alive.

Kate Black:                            It's not that it's this year, it's every year. I think that's helpful just as a reminder. It's not just about women on the ballot, it's about women voters, it's about the issues that matter to women. You know, I think too often we get so focused on a number and I think outside of all that, we strip all that away, you're actually talking about some really fantastic women who have stepped up to lead their communities. Whether it's running for city council, running for Congress or the Senate or even presidency. I mean, that is just in itself, should be celebrated.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, agreed 100%. I mean, and actually to the larger point, why is it important that we have more women in office? I mean, there's the sort of obvious like, well you know we are more than 50% of the population so we should have equal representation but beyond the numbers what are some of the advantages to our whole society for having more women in office?

Kate Black:                            Well first and foremost, you know, I think June and I fundamentally agreed from the jump when we started this book is that having a more representative government, a government that looks like the people it serves I think is a better government. Especially when we see photo after photo of rooms of men deciding things without women present that directly affect the lives of women and our children and our planet. So I think, you know, having us be at the decision making table or wherever decisions are happening about society at large, I think, brings more voices and more opinions and I think ultimately hopefully better outcomes to that decision making process.

Kate Black:                            If you look at the data, which I love, if you look at the data the data does show that when women are in office we get things done. That means we sponsor more legislation, we're more likely to work across the aisle, we're more likely to focus on issues that relate to women and families. That could look like education and health care, it could look like reproductive choice. There are so many things, I think, that women choose to focus on as priorities that make our society better. When someone asks me, "Why should I care if a woman is on the ballot or not?" Or, "Why should I vote for her?" It's like, well two things, number one, if you're tired of Washington not getting things done vote for a woman. The data shows that they just get the stuff done but also if you care about some of these bigger progressive issues we find that women when they're in office do vote and do support some of these really important issues like healthcare and like education, like I mentioned, that do impact families at large.

Lauren Schiller:                  Sometimes you hear about the talk about in terms of like, feminine values versus masculine values and that these areas of education and healthcare and social programs and reproductive choice and justice are more feminine attributes or more feminine values, you know? That's great because we can draw a line between women and those things happening. What I'm also learning and a study actually just came out today I just read the headlines of is that those things benefit men, too. I want to make sure that the outcomes feel like they are not just, "Okay we're going to get more women in office so women as a whole are going to do better" but that men are also going to do better as a result of these policies.

Kate Black:                            Absolutely. You know, I think about it all the time, even just the language that we use about issues. For example when you hear it tossed around especially in election season, "Women's issues," right? A whole bucket of things could be women's issues but that in itself kind of puts it into a segment and allows, I think, anybody, the media, candidates, pundits, whoever, to kind of segment it and park it over in a different spot where it's not part of the national dialogue. Instead of categorizing it just as "Women's issues," I like to think about it just as issues that are important to women. That is a whole host of things. It could be foreign policy, it could be domestic policy, whatever it is, those issues are central to the lives of women in this country and we should be putting them front and center.

Kate Black:                            Too, and anecdote that I would share with you to kind of color the point that you just made, I remember I was in a focus group, this was probably three or four years ago. It was a focus group in Pennsylvania about equal pay. We did a group of millennial men and I remember watching the focus group and the moderator asked a question, "Do you think the wage gap is real?" Half the room said, "No." Then she asked, she kind of explained it a little bit and by the end of the focus group I distinctly remember this one young man's opinion because he was kind of an older millennial and he was one of the few married men in the room. I distinctly remember by the end of the session he said, "So wait, let me get this, if my wife is making an equal wage as she should be, that actually helps me, right?"

Kate Black:                            I wish he could see my face behind the glass. I was like, "Yes 100% it helps you so like, get on board." I just, I will never forget him kind of having that light bulb moment of like, "Oh my gosh, this issue directly impacts me. My wife's financial security impacts me. I need to be for this." It's like, "Absolutely bro. Come to the party. I don't care that you're late but I'm glad that you're here."

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and I'm so glad you're here to listen to my conversation with Kate Black, coauthor of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World." You can change the world right now by subscribing to the podcast and making a contribution toward our production at InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Stay tuned because coming up we'll talk about running for the highest office in the land.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:19:16]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point and I'm here with Kate Black, coauthor of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World." So you brought up the progressive issues. Are you saying this book is for any political affiliation or do you have a bias towards one political affiliation?

Kate Black:                            This book is for, I think, any woman from any party. We acknowledge, you know, I think on page two that June and I both come from progressive backgrounds, that we have both worked to elect Democrats. That's no secret in the book. We also say on that same page I think on the next sentence is that we hope that a Republican woman picks up this book, too, and is inspired and motivated and encouraged to run. I made the point earlier about parity but if we ever want to get to 50% of Congress, let's say, the Democrats can't do it alone. We need Republicans to do their part, too. That, I think, goes across partisan divides. I think if you're a Democrat or a Republican or an independent or a member of the Green party or just out there by yourself. I would say you can pick up this book and see not only the advice that we give, which crosses parties, or the issues that we talk about which also cross party lines, I think you can also see yourself in some of the women that we profile and that we talk to and whose advice is kind of scattered throughout.

Kate Black:                            We talked to Democrats, we talked to Republicans, we highlight Republicans and we highlight Democrats. So I think our intention with this book was to make it non-partisan, both in the look and the feel.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, well right now we're in the midst of the Democratic primaries for the presidential race in 2020. What do you say to people who say, "Well, they're really smart and everything but this country's just not ready for a woman president."

Kate Black:                            Oh man, I would say look at the data. The data disproves that. I think there was a poll that just came out this afternoon that said that 56% of Americans said that the country was ready for a woman president. I think I would also go back to 2016 and for the record, a woman won three million more votes than the other guy. I think there's a lot of data points that we could show that shows that not only is the country ready but voters have spoken about this issue. Also, for the record, I think the women who are currently running for president, they've all won elections before in their districts or their states and so I think there's certainly an electability argument there that is percolating but I feel very strongly that both the country is ready, because they've shown it before, but also that these women are women who have won elections and can hold their own.

Kate Black:                            I'm excited to kind of see where it all goes but I'm just as excited to see these women who have proven records, proven track records of getting voter support.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's kind of, sort of like a psychological game in a way to ask yourself the question, "Am I," especially in a position where I am hosting this feminist show, "Would I vote for them just because they're a woman or would I vote for the most qualified candidate who happens to be a woman or is the magic sauce that it's both?"

Kate Black:                            It could be the magic sauce. I mean, everyone has to answer that question for themselves but in that question I think I would challenge people to think about if you do value gender, if gender is for you, an unapologetic qualification, I think then the choice is obvious. I also don't think you have to be afraid of making gender a must have or value that you're looking for in candidates because this comes up a lot. This dialogue comes up or certainly the question, you know, we hear a lot like, "Yeah, are we ready for a woman president?" Or, "I just want to vote for the person who could win" or, "Her voice, just ugh, I can't." Or, "It's not her turn," or, "It's really time for him."

Kate Black:                            You do hear, or, "Why is she always playing X card," or, "She just doesn't represent me." All of those things we've heard before and what we wanted to do in the book was arm our readers with some kind of go to lines where they could interrupt some of that language. What we do in the book is provide a cheat sheet to interrupt sexist and racist, we say another word, comments about women candidates. It's meant almost to be cut out of the book and taken with you in your book bag, diaper bag, tote bag, whatever so that when it comes up you're kind of armed with something. It could be something as innocuous as, "Well tell me more about that. Why do you feel like you wouldn't vote for a woman just because she's a woman?" Or, "You say you just don't like her. Tell me more."

Kate Black:                            Sometimes I think people say these things because they've heard them before or they're kind of just memes out in the world and they're just repeating them but also I think sometimes there are real sentiments behind some of these comments and I think it's a dialogue that can happen from that interruption could be very valuable and could open up some thinking that might not have ever been kind of questioned before. We wanted to give the reader that part of the book. It was really, I think, a special piece that June and I wanted to include for sure.

Lauren Schiller:                  Actually that section is really helpful I think even as a woman reading the book. To interrupt some of the internalized sexism that we each hold within us because it's just like, baked in since day one of our birth, right, by living in this society.

Kate Black:                            Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know, I think part of writing this book for me personally was understanding my own kind of voice and value and that I am enough to write this book and you know, you kind of have to get over a whole host of your own stuff to be able to do this. This was not an easy process for me and I think I can only imagine what it's like for someone running. The levels of kind of scrutiny and socialization and bias and all of these things that are kind of taught to women and put on women from day one. You know, it's a lot to get over and I think it's a lot to get over and when I think about women running for office I just applaud them from the jump because it's such an undertaking to kind of disrobe yourself from all of that baggage sometimes.

Lauren Schiller:                  You're obviously very qualified to write this book with the multitude of experience that you've had and your role at Emily's List. What were some of the attributes that successful candidates have had that you've observed and that you could call out?

Kate Black:                            Sure. Well I think when you look at successful candidates, and especially I think one of the great things about women candidates specifically is that a successful candidate listens. They understand that to hear from voters and to hear stories and to internalize those narratives and then communicate effectively outward so that they reach people where they are but also share a story that's powerful. That intake and output is not an easy thing and it's certainly not an easy thing to sit quietly sometimes, especially if you're running for office and everyone's kind of waiting for you to speak. It's not an easy thing to sit quietly and hear, and really listen to a constituent share a problem or share something that they're passionate about. Even more so I think we can get kind of bogged down in some [wonkyness 00:28:04] and some policy and that sometimes feels good because that's our home base. Especially if you're running for office you're probably been thinking about all of these issues really seriously.

Kate Black:                            Sometimes I think the most effective candidates are the ones that can talk to you like a regular person and really break down some of these hard to understand issues in a way that I think meets them where they are but also doesn't patronize or talk down to anybody. You know, in fact, I think, Stacey Abrams is a fantastic example of this. But she's also, I think, a self described introvert. I think for any woman maybe listening to this who is thinking, "Oh, Kate's just talking about someone who's outgoing" or "I need to be really gregarious or be able to talk to anybody. That's just not me." I would tell you some of the best candidates, I think, are actually introverts. Where they are able to kind of absorb from other people, kind of sit with their own selves but also then communicate so well and emote and connect with people in such a way that when you're campaigning is such a powerful force to watch and to see.

Kate Black:                            Ultimately I think that's how we win elections is when our own stories kind of fill in the gaps between where voters see us and where they want to be ultimately. I think when you think about that quality, I think women candidates have that so innately because we have so many stories and we have so many narratives. It's so easy for us to connect. This was such an important piece of the book for June and I that we broke it into two chapters. It's called, "How Does This Work in my Real Life Part 1 and Part Deux." Part One really focuses on your professional career and it focuses on money and time. There's a question in there about thinking about what office you want to run for, do you have to quit your job and what are the implications of that? What is the implications on your financial security? What does it look like for your long term career plan? Are you able to take a leave of absence? Have you talked to your boss about this?

Kate Black:                            All of these questions are valuable questions that we kind of lead the reader through so that she's doing this exercise. The next thing that we think about is our time and so to that end, June and I both do a time log. For two weeks we map out every hour and you see it in the book. You see June's and you see mine. We're very different people. She wrote hers out in a narrative, mine's in an Excel spreadsheet. It's fine. Turns out though once you do that exercise you see kind of where your time is going and you're able to assess. "Is there time I can give away maybe for a campaign? And is there time that I need to keep sacred?"

Lauren Schiller:                  One of the many things that I love about "Represent" is that you share the stories of a number of women who ran for office and won and one of the ones that really stood out to me, which I was hoping you would tell the story of Stephanie Murphy, the congresswoman from Florida and how she came to the country, how she attained the position. Could you share that? I just think it's so poignant at this particular moment.

Kate Black:                            Sure, so Congresswoman Murphy was elected in 2016 and her story is so powerful. She was born in Vietnam and her family fled when she was just a baby. They were in a dingy of sorts, they were in a boat and the boat was going to capsize and she was rescued by the Coast Guard. She came to the United States and she worked in the Defense Department, she worked in government, she worked in private practice. She and her family eventually moved to Florida and she was a small businesswoman with two children. She decided to run for office, I would say, five or six months before the general election and she decided to take on a man who had been in office for decades at that point. She was late getting into the race and everyone was like, "Who's this person?" And "Can she raise the money?" And "He's been in for office for so long" and "It's Florida. That's tough. Is she going to be able to flip the seat?" She won.

Kate Black:                            She won with such, I would say, great support from a whole host of different sectors of the voting populace. Her story is one that I think when she goes to Congress, she tells it so well because it connects with both our, kind of, patriotism that we all feel for this country but she was literally saved by people serving in the military. So her connection to not only public service is so real you can kind of, it's almost palatable when she talks. To be able to take on an incumbent who had been in office for so long and to bring in someone so new and so fresh to the public life is really, really exciting.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and just, I mean, just her story of coming over. Fleeing a country that was under duress. Her family was under duress and being rescued and then making her way into some of the highest ranks of the US government to do more good for more people. I mean, just the full circle of it is just incredible.

Kate Black:                            It really is and I think it's a great example of one that, you know, we highlight so many different women in the book and one other I'll just share, too, is Lisa Murkowski, the Republican Senator from Alaska. Lisa Murkowski is a woman whose been in office for some time but she actually lost a Republican primary for reelection when the Tea Party was kind of hitting its stride. Instead of being like, "All right I lost that primary" she said, "I'm going to run as an independent and I'm going to do a write in campaign." Now imagine having to not only run on a different party line but also you now have to tell people, and teach people, how to spell your name correctly so that you get enough votes that count that are legitimate to win a general election. That's exactly what she did.

Kate Black:                            You know, one of her first campaign ads was literally showing people how to spell "Murkowski" and sure enough, she won that election and she's still serving in the Senate today and doing some tremendous things. Some tremendous bipartisan things, in fact. I love that we share so many different kind of origin stories of women in the book. Hopefully that shows women who pick it up and are inspired to maybe read it, run themselves or give it to someone else that they can see a little bit of something that sparks their interest and sparks maybe their own identity so they can take this on for themselves.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah and I mean, throughout the book you've got this running checklist and these are the 21 things that you need to check off in order to know that, I mean, literally to check the boxes. Make sure that you've got everything from your vision, you know, down to how you're going to get support, down to meeting the requirements for entering the race, you know? Everything is on this list but there's only 21 of them so that feels actually manageable and of course, some of them are going to take more time than others, right?

Kate Black:                            Of course.

Lauren Schiller:                  What was the thinking about structuring this, you know, the book around a checklist?

Kate Black:                            Well we wanted women to feel ... first of all, we love checklists. I mean, who doesn't?

Lauren Schiller:                  Me too.

Kate Black:                            I write things on my to do list just so I can cross them off.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yes, thank you. You're my people.

Kate Black:                            Yes, yes. I also know, you know, sometimes I think we need the details and with running for office there are many steps and there's, you know, to your point some things take longer than others but to make it feel as accessible as possible, why not make it a checklist, you know? As we started kind of building out our chapters we realized like, we're asking them to do things. We're asking them to kind of check things off of a list. Why not have that list build as the book goes through so that the final chapter you're able to really cross off that final thing on your list and looking back over it you'll see how many things you've accomplished. You know, you've written your pitch, you've figured out how much money you need to raise, you've identified where you're going to run.

Kate Black:                            You've also, what I love too about the final thing is you've named at least five other women who you're going to ask to run and give this book to. That's such a powerful closer to the list and I hope that there's women out there who are writing in additional lines because, you know, surely we can all name more than five women we should ask to run but hopefully you can add names as you go because I think that's incredibly powerful to have that kind of checklist in hand. Also know that it's never done because there's always women to ask to run.

Lauren Schiller:                  Yeah. I have to ask you a question that is sort of like a personal question because a few years ago I was asked to run for City Council in my town and I was super busy at the time. It didn't seem like the right time, I was very intrigued by the idea. I was completely overwhelmed by the idea and ultimately I decided not to do it but one of the things that was in my way is that I was imagining myself sitting in these highly bureaucratic meetings where everything moves super slow and as a person who likes to get things done, as you said, "Women get things done when they get into office." That for me was actually a barrier, thinking about the slow moving bureaucracy and procedural rules and things like that that happen in meetings where decisions do get made. Can you say anything to assuage my concerns on that front?

Kate Black:                            Well I don't think it's unreasonable. I don't think it's unreasonable, especially when you have people coming from all different types of backgrounds where they are getting things done or they're seeing change happen around them. Going into government can sometimes seem like, "Hmm, is this really the answer?" So what we do in the book is actually encourage women to think about what is the thing that fires them up? What is the passion that they're being moved by? What are they Tweeting about a lot? What is always coming up at Thanksgiving dinner? Use that as fuel to drive your campaign forward because that ultimately could be your platform. That could be small things. It could be getting a stop sign put at the end of the block so your streets are safer. It could be big things like healthcare or social security or taxes.

Kate Black:                            Reminding yourself about what you're passionate about, number one it's going to help you get through some of those meetings and some of the bureaucracy but two, you know, surely in government things take some time because you're trying to serve a whole host of the public with some of these big decisions. The beauty of being in elected office, too, is that you have a microphone. I would say to you, "You're going to be in meetings and you're going to be fighting for change and some of that change is going to feel bureaucratic and slow and granular and maybe not as exciting but the best thing is you get to leave that meeting and you have an audience and a microphone and a platform from which to speak about the things that you care about. It can be what happened in that meeting but it could also be what that meeting represents to your constituents and I would just carry that with you because there's going to be days when it's hard and there's going to be days when it's not fun but reminding yourself about why you're doing it and about the community that you're serving and about the issues that motivate you, that's what's going to propel you forward and keep you in the game."

Lauren Schiller:                  I will take that to heart, thank you.

Kate Black:                            Well hopefully you do run. I mean, you've got to do it.

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll see. I've got a different platform, right? We're talking on it right now, right?

Kate Black:                            Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lauren Schiller:                  We'll let's- [crosstalk 00:39:29]

Kate Black:                            I will say though-

Lauren Schiller:                  Oh yes?

Kate Black:                            I will say, one of the big things that we did in one of the chapters which is about qualifications and feeling qualified, we did look at all of the professions of the 115th Congress, so what they did before they were elected and radio host is on there. There are radio hosts in Congress. You, too, could do it.

Lauren Schiller:                  All right. More checkpoints, more data points. The last question I have for you, I hope this makes you chuckle a little bit, is what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to self promote?

Kate Black:                            Oh my gosh, so in the book, this will make me laugh. In the book we have a whole thing about self promotion and I was in LA at the time, June and I, we would get together for these multi day kind of writing sessions. They were all day sessions and I knew we were coming in to do kind of a self promotion kind of conversation and chapter and I had just gotten off of doing an interview with a friend who hosts a radio show and I said to June very proudly, "I know how to self promote. Here it is" and I showed her a Facebook post that I had done. It was, June's reaction was literal laughter. I think a belly laugh might even be more descriptive. She was just like, "Kate, this is not self promotion" and she's right because the post that I had done was not about me at all. In fact, it was about the subject matter and was about my friend's show and it was not about me as being an expert at all but really just about the fact that I was on a thing and June ...

Kate Black:                            We included this story in the book number one because it, I think, shows that we all get it wrong sometimes but two, how hard it is to self promote. June gave me some excellent advice and we reworked it and I ended up deleting the post and re-posting a new post which put myself front and center and my achievement front and center, which is not easy to do. In terms of the best advice that I've ever gotten around self promotion certainly boasting about it and then being proven wrong is not a great feeling and you definitely learn from that. But you know, I think for women self promotion is just such a hard thing sometimes because not only are we sometimes taught to be uncomfortable with boasting or bragging and feeling a little squishy about that and feeling, "Are we imposters? Are people going to judge us differently?"

Kate Black:                            You know, I think about when I see men talking about their achievements and I've certainly been in enough rooms where I've heard men talking about something that they've done and I've thought to myself, "Well if he can do it why don't I do it more?" I think it takes a mentality and just a moment of pause to think, "Why am I not sharing this awesome thing that I've just done? Is it about me? Is it about other people? Is it a combination of both?" Sometimes you just got to swallow it and just do it and the more that you do it the better it will feel and also the more that you'll get such great responses from people when they hear about the cool [00:42:51] that you're doing. I mean, that's so special and so [00:42:53].

Kate Black:                            I don't know if I have a great piece of advice but I would tell you definitely sharing what you think is self promotion with your coauthor is a great way to learn what is not self promotion but also trying to do it as much as you can, as frequently as you can is a great way to just kind of get comfortable with trying that on and eventually it won't feel like you're trying it on but rather it's a part of your [everydayness 00:43:18]

Kate Black:                            [00:43:22]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and this is Inflection Point and while we're talking self promotion, I'm excited to tell you we're trying something new on the program and that is to provide a toolkit of concrete actions you can take on the issues that matter to you. Stay with us.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:43:43]

Lauren Schiller:                  I'm Lauren Schiller and we're trying something new on Inflection Point, which I'm very excited about and that is to provide an ongoing series of toolkits in our show, from our guests, with concrete actions you can take on the issues that matter to you. We created these toolkits so that when you only have a few minutes or so you can get the inspiration and information you need to do something. Today's Inflection Point toolkit, my guest Kate Black, the author of "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World" tells us how we can get more women in office. Whether you're deciding to run or supporting someone who is.

Lauren Schiller:                  When it comes to getting more women in office what are three things you need to know before you decide to run?

Kate Black:                            A couple things that I would say to anybody who's listening who's thinking about running, first things to do. Number one is to figure out what issue fires you up the most. You probably have been posting about this on social media, you might be talking about it all the time with your friends, it might come up a lot at Thanksgiving. Understanding and identifying that issue is the first thing to do because it's eventually going to be your platform.

Kate Black:                            The second thing I would say is start showing up. You know, identify how you're representing your community now. It could be looking at are you attending city council meetings? Have you asked for your local leaders to have one on one meetings with you? Are you going to protests? Are you going to community events? There's so many different ways that you can show up for your community. It's important that you start kind of being present because eventually if you run for office you're going to ask your community to show up for you and so it's important to be there for them from the start.

Kate Black:                            The third thing I would say is start talking to people. You don't need to know when you're running or what you're running for but running for office is not a solo activity. It is a team sport and it takes a village. Start telling people you want to run. This could be a small group at first, it could be your partner, your family, maybe your close friends. Our words have powerful, make powerful promises to ourselves when we say them aloud. When you say, "I think I'm going to run for office one day" that not only makes a promise for yourself but it also brings in a whole collection of folks into your journey along with you.

Kate Black:                            those are the first three things I would tell anyone who's thinking about running for office. Those are the first three things I would say to start doing today.

Lauren Schiller:                  So say someone has made the decision to run. What do they need to know?

Kate Black:                            For someone running for office the things that I would tell you to do first are identify the requirements that it takes to run for the specific seat you're looking at. You know, for Congress that means you have to have been a resident and a certain age to run. For local and state offices there might be different requirements around residency or how old you need to be to run for that specific seat. Don't confuse qualifications and requirements. You are qualified today. Your experience is your expertise. Remember that you are enough and that men are not waiting so it's time for you to step up. The other thing I would tell you to do is really think about your social media presence. Do an inventory, go through every Tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram video. Take time, be one with your computer because you need to go through everything. Once you've done that it's time to identify, do you need to have a campaign page and a private page?

Kate Black:                            Eventually I think the answer is probably "yes" because the folks that you first talked to when you set up your Facebook account in college, are they the same people you need to communicate your policy platform with and about events and fundraisers for your campaign? Maybe, but maybe not, so think about having a separate profile and public persona for your campaign that's different from your private pages.

Kate Black:                            The last thing I would say is think about the community of people around you and how you can involve them in this new journey. That could look like your sorority, your alumni association, a professional network, your daycare pickup circle. It could look like the softball league down the street that you show up for on every other Saturday but invite those people into your journey. They can be volunteers, they can maybe host fundraisers for you, they could give you money. They also might be some of your staff. Do you know someone who's really great at organizing events? They can maybe be a finance director. Do you know the person down the street who knows everybody's business and where everyone lives? That person might be a field director. They might be there with you knocking on doors because they know who's home when and where.

Kate Black:                            These are a few first steps I would take to running but you've already done the most important thing, which is deciding to put your name on the ballot in the first place.

Lauren Schiller:                  What could we all do to support other women who are running if we ourselves are not?

Kate Black:                            This is a great question. It's one that we get a lot. The final chapter of the book is actually titled, "How Do I Support Other Women?" Voting for them is a great, cost free way to support other women running for office. You can donate your time, your money, your expertise to their campaigns. You can also help her in other ways. June and I like to say that behind every woman candidate is really another woman trying to help her get it all together. If you have a friend or you know a woman who's running, don't wait to be invited to offer help. Just step in. That could look like making sure that there's Diet Coke's in the fridge and coffee in the morning. It could look like picking up the dry cleaning or walking the dog or taking her to get her hair done or you know, inviting her to go out for a walk just to blow off some steam. Whatever it is, don't wait to be invited, just start showing up for her.

Kate Black:                            The last thing is asking her to run. We know it takes women multiple times to ask them to run for them to step up. We need to be recruited intentionally and thoughtfully and so if you know a woman in your life, and I invite you to think really about all the women in your life and consider them. Whether they're domestic worker, sex workers, teachers, bus drivers, cashiers, bank tellers because we still have those, maybe radio hosts. All of the women in your life can run for office and I ask you to consider them and share with them this book.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:51:02]

Lauren Schiller:                  That was Kate Black, who just published the book, "Represent - The Women's Guide to Running for Office and Changing the World" that she wrote with June Diane Raphael. I've got a link to it on my website at InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Now for some news. When you go into the podcast feed you'll see our episodes broken up into two segments: one for when you have a little more time and one for when you're, well, on the run. Whether it's running for office or running an errand. That way if you want to hear again what Kate Black says are the most important things you can do when running for office or supporting someone who is, it's all right there in a tiny little package. Find Inflection Point episodes in any podcast app or go to InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  This episode is dedicated to my friend Stephanie Walton, who stepped up to run for office in Oakland, California and to all the other women who are raising their hands. You can do it and we support you. This is Inflection Point. I'm Lauren Schiller and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:52:21]

Lauren Schiller:                  That's our Inflection Point for today. All of our episodes are on Apple Podcast, RadioPublic, Stitcher, Pandora, NPR One, all the places. Give us a five star review and subscribe to the podcast. Know women leading change we should talk to? Let us know at InflectionPointRadio.org. While you're there, support our production with a tax deductible monthly or one time contribution. When women rise up, we all rise up. Just go to InflectionPointRadio.org. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Inflection Point Radio. Follow us and join the Inflection Point Society, our Facebook group of everyday activists who seek to make extraordinary change through small daily actions. Follow me on Twitter @LASchiller. To find out more about today's guest and to be in the loop with our email newsletter, you know where to go: InflectionPointRadio.org.

Lauren Schiller:                  Inflection Point is produced in partnership with KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco NPRX. Our community manager is Alaura Weaver, our engineer and producer is Eric Wayne. I'm your host, Lauren Schiller. This is Inflection Point and this is how women rise up.

Lauren Schiller:                  [00:53:44]

 



Kate Black

Kate Black

The F*ck Mom Guilt World Tour LIVE! With Katherine Goldstein and Hana Baba

The next generation of working mothers is not going to accept the status quo. Unpaid labor, the mental load, and harsh self-judgment could be a thing of the past. But only if we stop feeling guilty and start getting angry, says Katherine Goldstein, creator and host of The Double Shift podcast. We debated these issues and more with Hana Baba, of The Stoop podcast and KALW in this live audience taping from the Betabrand Podcast Theatre on the Bay Area Stop of the Fuck Mom Guilt World Tour.

Support our production with a tax deductible donation and we’ll keep bringing you the stories of how women rise up!

Hana Baba, Lauren Schiller and Katherine Goldstein

Hana Baba, Lauren Schiller and Katherine Goldstein

The Reality of a World Post Roe v Wade-A Panel from The Bixby Center for Reproductive Health

In the first half of 2019, the Guttmacher Institute reported that state legislatures across the South, Midwest and the Plains enacted 58 abortion restrictions, 26 of which would ban some, most or all abortions--even before most people know they’re pregnant.

On the brighter side, 93 new laws that expand reproductive healthcare were enacted, including 29 that expanded access to abortion, including NY, Vermont, Maine and Nevada.

In the midst of this maelstrom, in June, 2019 I attended a panel put on The Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health--about the threats against Roe v. Wade and what it means for patients.

I found the speakers and the content really helpful in wrapping my arms around the state of affairs and wanted to share it with you---so the Bixby Center gave me permission to do just that.

The speakers you will hear include Stephanie Toti (who successfully argued Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt in front of the Supreme Court) and now runs the Lawyering Project whose mission is to strengthen protections for reproductive rights under U.S. law and promote reproductive justice), Erin Grant (of the Abortion Care Network, an organization that supports independent abortion providers) and Renee Bracey Sherman (of the National Network of Abortion Funds which works to remove financial and logistical barriers to abortion access).

This panel discussion, “meeting the needs of patients post-Roe v. Wade”  was moderated by Dan Grossman a professor at UC San Francisco and the director of their research program Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, which you will hear referred to as ANSIRH.


The Bixby Center is part of University of California San Francisco, and they research, train and advocate to advance reproductive health policy and practice worldwide through an evidence-based approach. For those of us who use birth control, let’s give them a shout out. Their researchers have played a part in testing every contraceptive method currently approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Meeting the Needs of Patients Post-Roe v. Wade was produced and sponsored by Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, Center of Excellence in Women's Health and Institute for Health Policy Studies. 

Here are some resources to help you stay engaged: 

Organizational websites:

o   Abortion Care Network

o   ACCESS Women’s Health Justice

o   Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health

o   All Options

o   Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health

o   Innovating Education in Reproductive Health

o   Institute for Health Policy Studies

o   The Lawyering Project

o   National Network of Abortion Funds

o   UCSF Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences

o   UCSF National Center of Excellence in Women’s Health 

Support Inflection Point production with a tax deductible donation at https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/inflection-point.

Universal Basic Income is a radical idea. In Stockton, CA they've started to experiment.

This week, we hear about a radical plan to end poverty: Universal Basic Income. Lauren talks to the team behind an experiment with Guaranteed Income taking place in Stockton, CA the one-time foreclosure capital of America where 1 in 4 people live below the poverty line. Featuring conversations with Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, Natalie Foster of the Economic Security Project, and the co-principal investigators on this experiment: Dr. Amy Castro Baker of the University of Pennsylvania, and Dr. Stacia Martin West of the University of Tennessee.

Guaranteed Income and Universal Basic Income—where money is given with no strings attached represents a radical shift in the way we think about the social contract. Could this be what a Feminist Economy looks like?

Special thanks to Mia Birdsong for providing voices of Stockton residents, from her “More Than Enough” Podcast.

Additional thanks to First Lady of Stockton, Anna Tubbs and Sukhi Samra, Executive Director of SEED.

Learn more about the Stockton Demonstration.

Learn more about the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, another project of the Economic Security Project.



Stockton Mayor Michael TubbsPhoto courtesy of Cassius M. Kim

Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs

Photo courtesy of Cassius M. Kim

Can Virtual Reality End Real-World Sexual Harassment? - Morgan Mercer

In the post-MeToo era, men who would never consider saying a harassing word or venture a grope are now asking themselves “can I hug a co-worker anymore?”

“Can I put my arm around someone in a photo?”

“Can I have dinner with a female co-worker...alone?”
For the most part, workplace sexual harassment training includes the same rote video, awkward role-playing scenarios or yawn-inducing speaker, and is not remotely equipped to end a culture of enabling harassers or dismissing claims.

What kinds of training tools will create a true change in workplace culture? The kind that helps workers and supervisors comprehend the nuances of what sexual harassment looks like and how the power dynamics of workplace sexual harassment can damage the careers and well beings of those harassed?

Morgan Mercer, CEO of enterprise training platform Vantage Point, believes the answers to these questions, as well as more nuanced insights about the nature of workplace sexual harassment, lies in virtual reality.   

Listen to my convo with Mercer as we discuss why corporate sexual harassment training has for the most part failed women, and how immersive experiences like virtual reality may be the key to unlocking empathy, action and change.

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