So you want your child to strive for the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes? Crack open some feminist books for kids. You can’t be what you can’t see (or read, or discuss, or understand).
Most of the media that kids are exposed to—TV, movies, iPad games—isn’t designed to teach, for example, the importance of consent or enforce the idea that each of us has the right to be just who we are. But into that vacuum steps these age-appropriate, beautifully illustrated feminist books for kids—tracing the history of voting rights, introducing them to indigenous woman war heroes, celebrating black girl magic, and delighting them with stories of girls and boys who are brave, brilliant, and big-hearted.
Past generations had groundbreaking titles like Free To Be You And Me, The Paper Bag Princess, Piggybook, I Love My Hair, and Heather Has Two Mommies. Authors and illustrators have run with the spirit of those breakout works, expanding into a library of feminist texts for every kind of reader. We picked books that represent intersectional feminism—feminism that doesn’t leave out any kind of woman or identity.
No need to wait until the kids in your life are freshmen in college taking an intro gender theory course—picture books about feminist heroes, egalitarian fairytales, and funny, fresh takes on girlhood are available now. There has never been a better time to teach kids—regardless of their gender—how good it feels to be a feminist.
We all dream of our kids growing up to stand for what’s just and right in the world—the best way to get them started is a good book.
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The sixth Democratic debate held in December 2019 wasn’t quite filled with surprises, but it did have a few good zingers—one of which was delivered to us by none other than Andrew Yang, the sole person of color in attendance and perhaps the unlikeliest candidate on stage. (He just missed the cutoff for tonight’s debate in Iowa.)
“If you get too many men alone and leave us alone for a while, we kind of become morons,” Yang said.
For much of the 2020 race, Yang was a virtual unknown in a crowded field; he’s never held an elected position, and the position he talks about with the most passion isn’t health care or student debt, but universal basic income—which, he maintains, could help deal with problems like health care and student debt.
Yang believes that advancements in AI will eliminate entire swaths of the American workforce. To cope with the destabilization, he wants to put a little cash in people’s pockets each month—no strings attached. Yang is an optimist about human nature and a realist about the issues we all face. Hence, the “men can be morons” quip.
Sure, the line shouldn’t be that impressive. But in the context of a presidential debate, the admission that groups of men left alone in rooms can and do wreak havoc on the world (and the women) around them felt momentous.
A few weeks later, I called Yang to talk about it as he was driving around rural South Carolina and I was heading from Palm Springs to Los Angeles. We chatted about feminism, tech, child care, reproductive health care, and, as Yang put it, a lot of “bullshit, frankly.”
Molly Jong-Fast: How did you get here? How did your views on sexism evolve?
Andrew Yang: I’ve been working in the startup world for a number of years. And it doesn’t take anyone that savvy to figure out pretty quickly that the startup world is highly male dominated and chauvinistic. I saw dozens of aspiring female entrepreneurs who would interact with potential advisors or investors who were men, and the men were more interested in hitting on them than helping them.
You see that and you think, Wow. Any thought that the startup ecosystem is somehow a meritocracy of ideas and [the process is fair] is completely farcical.
My husband is a [venture capitalist] so we talk about this a lot—women in tech and how women in tech are treated.
I’m sure he sees a lot of the same. Bullshit, frankly. I mean, just the level of bullshit that women have to put up with is staggering. So that was one input.
Another was seeing so many incredibly talented women that I went to school with end up running into all these headwinds when they were in various corporate environments. The companies seemed to alienate women in ways big and small. I saw so many women friends eventually just say, “Is this worth it? I have to armor myself up when I go into the workplace every day.”
On top of that, many of them also have families and all of their responsibilities were just multiplied 10 times over, 20 times over, a 100 times over. I saw it with my wife’s experience even when she was pregnant and had our boys.
Is that how you realized that paid leave was such a big problem?
You have to ask yourself, “How the heck is the United States nearly alone on a global list of countries that doesn’t recognize something as basic as a need for moms to take time off when they have kids?” It’s because we’re pathologically anti-woman, anti-family, and we treat everyone like their [only value is] their economic output.
I arrive 15 minutes early to the Upper West Side restaurant where I am supposed to meet Susan Isaacs to talk about her new novel, Takes One To Know One. This only because I had spent the previous half hour loitering at a nearby coffee shop, uncharacteristically nervous. Biting my nails nervous. Extra shot of espresso nervous.
Isaacs, a novelist who has published 16 books, isn’t the most famous author I’ve interviewed, but she is the one who provokes the most agita. The morning of our interview, I think about why Isaacs’ work matters so much to me—and how bereft I feel when I would talk to other women, other writers my age or younger, who don’t get it. Reading her felt as if one of my relatives had written novels, the tone so familiar to this suburban Canadian Jewish girl, yet foreign enough with their American (and sometimes, international) settings.
I’ve met and interviewed writing heroes before. Almost all have been gracious and kind. Sue Grafton, author of the Kinsey Millhone private detective series, blurbed both of the crime fiction anthologies I edited at a time when she’d all but stopped endorsing new books. (It was an honor to deliver this tribute at Grafton’s 2018 memorial service, too.) Dorothy Salisbury Davis shared priceless memories of her life and work, and the other crime writers she knew during her mid-century heyday, during an afternoon visit a year before her death in 2014. And the several occasions I’ve met and interviewed Mary Higgins Clark, the “Queen of Suspense,” who at 92 years old still shows younger writers how it’s done.
None of them made me as nervous as Susan Isaacs does.
Isaacs’ debut novel, Compromising Positions, was an instant hit upon publication in 1978 and something of a unicorn in suspense fiction, thanks to the perspective of bored Long Island housewife-turned-amateur sleuth Judith Singer. Her voice rings out in a rich, alto, D-minor key (Relaying a description of the murder victim, a Lothario periodontist with a penchant for illicit photographs of his lovers: “The man had a body that made her want to learn how to carve marble.”)
Even with second-wave feminism in full swing by 1978, the fact that the book’s heroine was 34 is notable. In an era in which 24 was deemed “over the hill,” Singer would have been deep into middle age. Women like her were supposed to be invisible. But here was this dynamic woman casting off the protests of her friends and her condescending, fat-shaming husband to play sleuth.
“Susan knows Long Island like Charles Dickens knew London or like Raymond Chandler knew Los Angeles,” Jennifer Weiner, who has long acknowledged the influence of Isaacs upon her novels—Goodnight Nobody is outright homage to Compromising Positions—told me by email. “Her narrators are unforgettable characters who feel like smarter, wiser, versions of you and your best friends, and she gives them happy endings that don’t feel cloying or unobtainable.”
Novels like Compromising Positions—commercial fiction, made more Jewish—didn’t get published four decades ago. Novels like this paved the way for Isaacs to publish whatever she damn well wanted, whether social comedies mixing marriage and politics (Close Relations), sweeping multigenerational sagas (Almost Paradise) feminist King Lear rewrites (The Goldberg Variations), or Jewish-inflected spy stories (Shining Through, much, much better than the Melanie Griffith movie). Her novels featured women who were funny and flawed, brave in deed if not in thought, without being “feisty” or “spunky.” I wasn’t the only reader who loved Isaacs’ novels. Each of them hit the New York Times bestseller list.
“There used to be this condescension towards domestic fiction,” Meg Wolitzer, author of The Female Persuasion, who has known Isaacs since she was a sophomore in college, tells me. “I’m not sure we’ve fully left that time, depending on who is reading and criticizing. But I believe strongly there is something really worthwhile to say about the lives of characters who might not be empowered. Susan has a way of calling things out without being polemical.”
Wolitzer’s mother, the novelist Hilma Wolitzer, whose four-decade old friendship with Isaacs began when they both joined a fiction workshop for women writers, is equally admiring: “Her books are delicious, but they are not light. They have a lot of texture and layers.”
I’ve always felt feminism to be like a block party: euphoric, emancipating, jubilant, and open to all. I often fear that many women in my generation think about it instead like a speakeasy: closed, password-protected, and open to the already enlightened.
The narrowing of feminism has presented itself in subtle and not so subtle ways. A few years ago, when I was on a panel and suggested that making the world better for women involved a plan for generating better men, the rhetoric I received was shocking, but familiar. “I don’t care about men,” one of the panelists said. I heard the retort and a round of applause from the audience and sat there dumbfounded. A few months ago, when I suggested that an abortion rights movement that is in peril should remind people that men who get women pregnant also benefit from a women’s right to choose, I was told that “there’s something slightly demeaning about framing women’s fundamental human rights as worthwhile because men have ‘personally benefited’ from them.” When I advised a Western government on a gender equality ministry program and suggested moving a sliver of the resources currently budgeted for girls over to boys to reach them how to be feminists, I was told none of the existing gender equality budget could go to them. For the last five years, when I’ve told people I am working on a book about how we need to develop a new kind of man in order to secure our freedom as women, I was routinely ridiculed. “Yes, because we don’t hear enough about men,” came the sarcastic sneer.
I am all for a feminism that decenters men. I am all for a feminism that puts women’s voices front and center. I am all for a feminism that seeks structural change and expects men to surrender power, but more and more I’m alarmed at a feminism that has no plan for men at all.
It wasn’t always like this for me. I too used to dismiss men’s role in the feminist movement. Men betrayed, harassed, assaulted, and traumatized me before I was even old enough to kiss one. I had to change schools due to violent bullying from the boys in my class. My experience with the opposite sex is far from unique. In fact, it’s shockingly normal and far worse for girls who aren’t white, middle-class, and able-bodied. In the United States, more than one in three women report domestic abuse from a partner in their lifetime. And in an average month, at least 52 women are shot and killed at the hands of an intimate partner. These are men women know. Never mind the men we don’t know.
To put it simply, women have been hurt and harmed by men for centuries, so as they’re enjoying increasing liberation, worrying about their oppressors isn’t on the agenda. It’s not like we don’t still have work to do on our own behalf. Despite major wins, poverty is still so feminized that the gender wealth gap is expected to take more than two centuries to close. Programs that benefit women have had to endure the steepest cuts under the Trump administration. Even in the make-believe world Hollywood creates to distract us from the grim world we live in, women are less likely to be protagonists and speak half as much as men do. Given that women already get a smaller slice of the pie, there is a legitimate concern that dedicating resources to men is shortchanging women.
My Outlander habit started because it looked like something my husband and I would be able to watch together. I like historical fiction, he’s got a thing for kilts and bagpipes (and can trace his own ancestry to the Cameron clan); so when a coworker described it to me about three episodes after the premiere, I paid little attention to her telling me how “hot” it was and more to the 18th-century Scotland bit.
Then, of course, 11 minutes in, Claire was initiating sex with Frank in Mrs. Baird’s creaky bed and breakfast. Later on a countryside tour, she enticed Frank to get down on his knees and please her as she sat on the table in a room we would later learn would be Claire’s surgery as a healer.
At the time I hadn’t read any of the books—I’ve since listened only to audio books one and two; Davina Porter is a fantastic narrator—so I had no idea what steaminess was coming next. And I don’t mean the full-on naked sexiness that has become synonymous with the show, I mean the wonderful, obvious, repeated references to consensual sex and female pleasure.
PHOTO: Neil Davidson
First there was Claire and Frank, where she felt free to kick things off whenever and wherever in prudish post-war 1945. The examples continued to pile up in season one: Before the wedding, Jamie doesn’t slut-shame Claire for being more experienced in bed; he seems happy about it. “You don’t mind that I’m not a virgin?” she says, after MacDougal has arranged the marriage. “Not so long as you don’t mind that I am,” he replies. “I reckon one of us should know what we’re doing.” It’s like sexting in 1743.
Soon after, in the biggest fight of their young union, Jamie follows Scottish tradition and punishes Claire for not obeying him. Claire stands up to the domestic violence, and when they get around to the make-up sex Jamie won’t proceed until he gets Claire’s go ahead. “I want you Claire. I want you so much I can scarcely breathe. Will you have me?” he asks. She doesn’t just grab him or pull him to her, she gasps, “Yes.” Clear, audible sexy-as-hell consent.
While it’s fun to watch, portraying sex this way matters. “It’s incredibly important to show sexy, consensual sex on mainstream and popular shows,” says Jean Kilbourne, creator of the Killing Us Softly film series, media critic, and feminist activist who has studied how women are portrayed in advertising and media. “In this #MeToo era, it seems that some men are confused about what consensual sex is. Really guys?” It’s also important to show female pleasure and desire. Seen together it’s a magic cocktail, she says, “it helps people understand that consent can be sexy, and can be part of the whole experience—rather than an interruption of it. Consent can and should be enthusiastic!”
Rewatch the sex highlights (admit it, you’ve done it) and there are plenty of reminders. In episode 110, Jamie may have a chance to clear his name. He’s waited years for this information, and his very life may depend on it. But when Murtagh is banging on the door to tell him all the details, Jamie will not give up going down on Claire. He ignores the thundering racket until she climaxes. Oral and an orgasm? When was the last time you saw that, even on cable?
That wasn’t a one-off. The night before Claire returns to her time through the stones, Jamie pleasures her so he can watch; her pleasure is more satisfying and important than his own. “They are two equals. Neither is on a pedestal,” Sam Heughan told Glamour about the consensual sex. “He always puts her first, but he listens to what she has to say. … he’s always seen her as his equal. I think that is probably what makes their relationship work.”
Season two—as everyone bemoaned—was largely a dry spell, even as Jamie frequented a brothel with the bonnie prince. (Though Jamie’s initial reaction to the Parisian approach to grooming is worth noting: “Claire, what have you done to yourself? Your honey pot is bare,” he says. As Claire points out she waxed her legs too, he continues: “That’s bad enough, but to rid yourself of such a lovely forest!”)
Season three followed largely the same sexless trajectory with the two cross-century love birds trying to find their way back to each other.
But with season four, the Easter eggs are back. (Spoilers ahead if you aren’t up to date.) In 1970, when Brianna rebuffs Roger’s proposal, she points out his hypocrisy that he’s slept with other women without marrying them, but she can’t do the same. In the New World, as Mr. Myers explains the ways of the Cherokee as he guides Jamie, Claire, and Ian to their plot of land, he says “Cherokee women choose who they marry. And before that who they bed with,” as if consent were an act of honor as old as time. (Ian’s treacly, “I love this land!” almost kills the moment, but wouldn’t we all love to live in a world where consent is a given?)
And then, when a bear-like creature haunts both the Frasers and the Cherokee, we learn that it’s actually a former member of the tribe. “One year ago, he lay with [his woman] against her wishes, and that is not our way. So he was banished to live alone in the woods,” a Cherokee explains. “He did not accept this. He returned to us again and again. But we would not see him.” The man was once a great warrior and leader in the tribe, but there was no “hey Louis C.K., you’re welcome back any time” here. (It’s worth noting that this is different than in the book, where Jamie defeats a real bear; hat tip to the writers and producers for making this bit a little more relevant to modern day.)
The series is best when Jamie and Claire are in Scotland, but season four may bring back some of that ruggedness in a new world on the cusp of revolution. (There are signs of strain, though, particularly over major issues like slavery and the theft of Native American lands. Claire and Jamie were willing to try to rewrite history—to murder Dougal even—to save the Highlanders. But they aren’t willing to do anything to try to save the lives of millions slaves or Native Americans?)
But as all good streaming relationships go, my husband and I are now watching episodes at our own pace. He petered out before Jamie and Claire even set sail to the west. But for now, I’m sticking with this season for the sex—the consensual, feminist sex. How revolutionary.
On the surface, HBO’s new limited series Sharp Objects has all of the trappings of last summer’s massive hit Big Little Lies. Like BLL, Sharp Objects is an adaptation of a blockbuster novel (this time by Gone Girl‘s Gillian Flynn). It also brings a buzzy A-list actress, Amy Adams, to television after a string of Oscar-nominated film performances. To top it off, the two shows even share the same director: the famed Jean-Marc Vallée. Naturally, the Internet is here for this comparison.
One Vanity Fair headline wrote, “Sharp Objects Teaser: Meet Your Next Big Little Lies–Esque Obsession.” Sydney Sweeney, who plays a young, troubled girl from Preaker’s past, told Harper’s Bazaar, “Sharp Objects has that Big Little Lies feeling.” Comedy writer Brian Stack also joked about the similarities between the two shows on Twitter, writing, “After an HBO promo we just watched, my wife accidentally blended Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects into “Sharp Little Objects.” And I think it sounds like a damn good show.” Here at Glamour, we made a similar assertion.
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But after watching the premiere I don’t see any trace of Big Little Lies. It actually reminded me of an older prestige HBO show that once had similar buzz: True Detective.
PHOTO: HBO
While BLL focuses on the pain women face at the hands of men, in Sharp Objects and True Detective, darkness and evil lingers everywhere. And for the show’s two main characters—Amy Adams’ Camille Preaker and Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, respectively—their darkness defines them.
Preaker is a motel bathtub-dwelling, vodka-swigging cutter. She’s a third-rate reporter for a Chicago newspaper so haunted by the death of her sister—which comes back to her in fast and overpowering flashes—that she’s only one foot in the present, the other in the past. McConaughey’s Cohle is similarly troubled. A down-and-out cop whose daughter died young in a car accident, he drinks to numb the memory—blocking off full days on his schedule to lock himself in his apartment and nurse a bottle of booze. He’s also a recovering drug addict prone to hallucinations.
And both find themselves at the center of murder cases: Sharp Objects traces Preaker’s return home to the tiny town of Wind Gap, Missouri to report on the death of two young girls, while the first season of True Detective follows the years Cohle spends trying to solve a serial murder case of women in New Orleans. Preaker and Cohle are loaners who pour their lives into these cases. They’ve never moved on from their past trauma, so they look to solve these cases as a form of absolution.
Much like how McConaughey was an unexpected choice for such a serious role (remember how it spurred the McConaissance?!), at first, Sharp Objects executive producer and writer Marti Noxon wasn’t sure Adams had what it’d take to play Preaker. “When I talked to her about her interest I was like, ‘Camille isn’t sunny,’” she says. “Amy is just so sunny and has such sparkle. But then I was like, ‘Wait, that is Camille. That’s all of us who just hide it, who have these great coping mechanisms.”
Anne Marie Fox/HBO
Noxon, who’s known for depicting thorny, complicated women on her shows Dietland, UnREAL, and Girlfriends Guide to Divorce, set to work in the writer’s room alongside the novel’s author, Flynn, to perfect the on-screen version of Preaker. “Gillian’s one of the darkest, funniest, people I know. We met each other and were like, oh, we’re sisters from another mother, for sure,” Noxon explains. “We both deal with our demons in the same way, which is like you throw some humor in front of that. You deflect, you deflect, you deflect.”
This deflection came to inform Preaker’s character, who uses a lethal combination of flirtation and sarcasm—and long sleeve clothing—to hide her pain. “I’ve had to cope with mental health issues and addiction issues my whole life, and I just so related to this woman who was functional, yet hides all this hurt literally under her skin. The writing just came out like butter,” Noxon says.
PHOTO: HBO
Throughout the series Preaker uses all of her charms—and then some—to hide from her pain—but once she’s back in Wind Gap, and faced with the murder of two girls around the same age as her deceased sister, her tricks start to evade her. Without offering any spoilers, it doesn’t take long for people to catch on to her struggles, or for Preaker to succumb to her demons. Much like Cohle, the further she gets into the case, the harder it is to pull out of it.
This all isn’t to say that the women of Big Little Lies don’t have as much trauma as Preaker or Cohle—they certainly do. The show’s women have dealt with abuse, disappointments, assault. But they’re able to employ different coping mechanisms, like red wine, running, or throwing themselves into projects and more to deal with their pain, because they’re also mothers, wives, and functioning members of society. Their hurt is just as real, but their lives are much richer than that of Preaker or Cohle, who only have their past and the pursuit of justice.
That’s why this series is less a holdover until Big Little Lies comes back later this year—and much more the True Detective season two we were promised with Rachel McAdams, but the show failed to deliver. With Sharp Objects, finally, we have a truly feminist take on True Detective.
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