Adopting a russian mentality where it doesnt apply. Russians are conspiracy because they live in a country where there are successful conspiracy is the way in which power changes hands. You have the benefit of living in a country in which that possibility is precluded. I think that is a useful note to end on. If you are so minded buy a copy of davids book and come up and meet the author afterwards. Thank you so much. [applause] you are watching booktv on cspan2. Booktv; television for serious readers. Okay. Good afternoon. Welcome, everyone to the 32nd annual Chicago Tribune printers row lit fest. I would like to give a special thank you to the sponsors. Social media plug, the theme of the festival is what is your story. We encourage everyone to share the stories they hear on twitter, instagram, facebook using the prlf16. You can keep the spirit of lit fest yearround by downloading the printers row app where you will find book contents and discounted ebooks and the lit fest schedule. If you download today you get a free ebook and 5 off merchandise. Todays program is being broadcast live on cspan2s booktv. We will have time at the end for audience questions and when the time comes please come line up at the microphone sthoe home audience can hear the questions you have. And before we start, silence your cellphone and turn off the flashes to any cameras you have. With that, we are pleased to welcome todays moderator, great johnson. Hello. Thank you for coming. I am verging on the like of it is too hot so good for choosing ac. I am the host of a pod cast called nerdet. The idea is you are a nerd about whatever you are excited about and that could be dr. Who or calculus or feminism. The cspan title of this is discussion on women. Which is great because we are all automatically qualified to be on this stage regardless of what else we do in our lives so that is cool. Each of you has a very different approach to feminism in your book. Do you want to go down there line and talk about what you are working on and why. Rebecca . I will start. Because i think my book is the oldest. I released a historical novel in 2016 in hard back and paper back this past year inteatled jam on the vine. It is loosely based or rather it was inspired by the life of b wells barnet who was a suffer age and editor and journalist and most known for being onewoman, antilynching crusader during her lifetime. My novel courses the life of a young black girl who comes of age in the jim crow south, moves to the midwest and starts or hen black newspaper in the vine strict of kansas city, missouri in the 1st quarter of the 20th century. I never used the term feminism however when you read about the actions of my heroism clearly they belong to a tradition of womanism which is an offshoot of femimism that seeks to uplift not only women but black men and children. It business clear in ways in which they use the newspaper for democratic rights that if they were living in todays time they would identify with the term of womanist or black feminism. Wendy . I wrote a memoir called shrill that came out a couple weeks ago. It is a very personal confessional approach to feminism and it is vulnerable and stories of my life about the appearance of growing up in a big world and woman in a world where i felt i was taught and conditioned aggressively to make myself small. Small physically, small in my presence, small in my opinions. So the book is about growing out of that, figuring out how to live in my body and in my personality the way they are now and not try to shape and mold and shrink them to fix these externally applied expectations. And you know for a million reasons. I think a lot of those expectations are based in capitalism. There is a lot of people making money off the idea we teach woman are supposed to be mall and compliant. I discovered i was living my life in the future. I didnt identify as a fat person but a failed thin person who would eventually succeed and then i could have a real life. The book is about coming to that moment and pushing through it and starting to really live and starting to say this is my body. It may never change. I have to be okay with that because that may be the truth. You know, what other choice do i have . And i dont think there is anything objectively wrong with being me. That is the ark of the book. Yeah, right, thanks. That sounded very grim. But it is also funny, and it deals with all of the other stuff i harp on about like abortion, rape jokes, and all of the hits. All of the fun things. [applause] i am rebecca and i wrote a book called all the single ladies. [applause] thank you. It is actually interesting we all do have totally different gen genres and approaches. My book is a nonfiction look at unmarried woman. In my day job i am a journalist and write about culture from feminist perspective. I intended this book to be about the swiftly expanding population of women who are delaying or foregoing traditional hete heteromarriage. There are now more unmarried people in the United States in the United States than married people by a hair which is unprecedented. I started doing the research and looking at the history i realized there was this fast na fascinating story of the history of single women in the United States with all around race, class, social movements, and so the book wound up being a much bigger project than i intended. It is a mix match of contemporary journalism, a way we need to better support the kind of lives women are living now, and a look at the history of women living independently of this institution that has historically confined them in any many ways and what happened in the eras where they did live independently of marriage and there is a thread of my own story in there but it is a minor thread. It is a good thread. [applause] so i have to say i am super excited to talk to you guys about all of the things. I dont even know where to start, man. I definitely want to talk to you about hillary because it was a really big week for hillary and i feel like you will have great insight about that especially rebecca writing big girls dont cry. But i thought i would start with ask you you how your relationships with feminism has changed over your lives . Partly i ask because i i guess i am going to omit this. I would not have called myself a feminist five years ago. Neither would i. That makes me feel better. I thought it meant i was admitting there was an imbalance i refused to acknowledge and i think that comes from a place of privilege in terms of the fact i lived through my mid20s and felt like i had the same opportunities that men did and i was treated fairly so what is the big difference . Here i am, deal with it, i guess. Which i dont know if that is reasonable to call postfeminism. I feel like not really because here we are needing that conversation. But were you raised in feminist households . What was that like for each of you . I want to hear from another red sent feminist. I studies history as an undergrad and graduate student and i would always consider historically what women did during the first waves of feminism or women who didnt identify as feminist but when we look back at the work we would say it is such. I would look for contemporary analogy that would fit them. Even today i struggle when i am on the internet and looking at feminist conferences i have a problem with what i see. I will not put anyone on blast. But i was looking at a conference, one occurring in australia and one in india. The footage i saw of the feminist conference that occurred in australia, for example, did not address the fact there are many white australian men who once they had to too much to drink, think it is fun to jump in their pickup trucks with their rifle and go hunt abers which is short for b abogrinal and they will go find those women and hunt them and attack them. I feel there is room, you can be about yourself and i am certainly not dismissing memoirs, they are powerful and rig writing is a form of act ivism. But we have a right to take on struggles that are happening with women globally. In india there is a big movement for what is called ring a bell. If you hear an indian woman getting beat by her husband the idea you will run over and ring the bell and temporarily stop the beating. Maybe just for the night. But we dont hear american feminist when in india speaking at these conferences addressing the issues of domestic violence. That would be a big problem i am having now. It seems that feminist is a noun and feminism is the verb. The aspect of the Real Movement is largely pissing. I take a shoe of that. I really do. I think you have want to use it as an adjective and noun that is fine. But if you are a woman that loves to trot the term ask yourself what are you doing besides saying i am a feminist and i want what he has. It has to be bigger than that. [applause] a totally agree. I try to think of feminism as something i am not something i do. Like you earn a status and get a bunch of cred. Not that we grant a bunch of cred to feminism. You are still treated horrible in certain circles if you say the word feminist. But i agree there are huge gaps in even just peoples global understanding of what women are facing in other places. It is really easy. I mean of course i just wrote 300 pages about my feelings. So i am very conscious of this and i worry about it a lot. It is a struggle. And i think it is important to i try to not just write about my feelings but to seek out other peoples viewpoints, amplify those viewpoints and make sure i am aware of my place in the world. But at the same time, i think personal narrative is really powerful and, of course, there are i guess i dont want to chose. Not that that is what you are saying we have to do. But i dont want to chose between campus rape and honor killings. I feel like it is important to address all of those things. It is also important for me to stay in my lane, to some extent, and not speak in a condocending way and speak to people in cultures i dont understand. You said it perfectly. It is an action. And yeah but also in terms of my own feminist journey, i was taught my freshman year of college that feminist means that you okay. So my freshman year of college i went into it buying into the stigma it was not cool and boys will not like you if you are a feminist because feminist are annoying, wet blankets who ruin everything. I was like well, i dont want to be that. Even though i group in a super progressive household. I dont know if my mom said the word feminist but she certainly fit the mould. But i went into college like i dont know. And freshman year i had a professor who said raise your hand if you are a feminist. And like one girl who was really cool and had like a nose ring was like yeah, and all of the rest of us were like eh, and he went around shaming each of us individually and saying, you know, oh, so you dont believe you deserve equal rights . And we were like, well, i do but it is just no one ever asked me on a date so i am kind of like already got strikes against me. But anyway, so i was taught in that class that feminism means that you believe Women Deserve equal rights and currently the world is not a safe and just place for women. And so i sort of moved forward with those things. Do i believe those things . Yes. And since then my understanding has broaden to understand there are lot of women of color that dont identify as feminism, there are trans people that dont identify as feminism and it is important to understand that as well. Feminist. Can i just ask something . I got rid of my television so i string everything. But because of the Political Climate we are in i had it on. And meredith was on and this past week the sort of lay mans term for feminism was given as a woman who wants to be equal to a man. And you know that gets turned on its head when you are a black woman. What does it mean, and you do if you are in my skin have to add race. There is a different picture you have do that. When i consider conversations i had with black male colleagues in the academy i came in at a higher salary when i considered the degree to which africanamerican men are hunted by the police and massive incarceration epidemic we are in. So i fare better than men in my community so the concept of wanting to be equal in my Community Looks different. So the definition of wanting to be equal to a man needs to be exploded and expanded on. That definition fails us. Do you think like that . I want to be equal to men . I dont think about men at all. No, i think this is about a global takeover. No, i dont thing about it like that. But i think it is a commonly perceived they are different. The definitions that are generate from the academy are far more complex and nuance. I am teaching in the fall at northwestern and was reading joy james fantastic book called shadow boxing and it is an analysis of black feminism and you mentioned capitalism and it has me excited from reading your book. We are all at war with capitalism. Let me tell you. Yes, we are. But, you know, the terms you encounter in the academic approaches to feminism are more nuance and rigorous than what you would hear on a talk show. But the laymans term as far as you guys have said so much i want to engage. Briefly, in terms of my own background in terms of feminism, and i am totally ambivalent on the term. I use it. It is useful. I wrote a piece many years ago about maybe it might be a good idea to abandon it for a lot of reasons because it has come under very valid critiques. Both the term and way we historically cast and portrayed the movement has come under so much attack from the right and from those who are very threatened by gender equality and there is vast periods of our recent history in which it has been used to suggest ugly things about women and perhaps we could, you know, start from scratch. I dont have particular attachment to the term. I use it but not with any relish . Relish is fine. No, i like it. Sort of. I just think it is it is a term that is very contested for all kinds of really good reasons. But that is how i feel about feminism itself. The Womens Movement or a series of movements because there are all kinds of social movements over the course of history that worked from angles toward what i think of as it larger goal which is increasing opportunity for more kinds of people. And addressing injustice and bias based on all kinds of overlapping and intersecting identity. Now we know why we have feminism the word because it is harder to put all of that on a bumper sticker. This is something i feel about feminism, the Womans Movement, is that it has been rights of contradiction. It is antifeminist trope to suggest it has ever been unified in some way. Since women, meaning half the population have urged for increased opportunity and greater rights and justice and because they are half the population and contain multitudes of competing priorities, perspective and experiences, there is never going to be one Umbrella Movement that serves women. So from the beginning of a Womans Movement there have been fights. This is one of the things you see all of the time. We got this with the prime and young women dont like hillary and older women do and feminism is exploding. No, no, no. My positive spin on this is that this is the conflict that tells you that the movement is healthy. That it is continuing to move forward and fight battles; right . A unified Womens Movement wouldnt be doing as much good because there is no unified priority. It would tell us it is kind of dead. So the story that feminism is about to implode on itself because everybody is fighting that is a sign it is healthy as it has been with and it is shifting with time, technology, changing circumstances, changing challenges. And so that is sort of my take on some of the stuff and my own history of it is i was raised in a progressive household. My mother came of age just before the Womans Movement and had been raised conservative on a farm in northern maine. Conservative and religious. And her political awakening came with the Civil Rights Movement and she lived a feminist she got an advanced degree and was the chief earner in our household but she had not been brought to life by feminism in anyway. My father, very progressive also, and he also had sort of been energized by the Civil Rights Movement and he would have said he was a feminist and believed in equal opportunities and married to a woman who made more money than he did and he believed in intellectual equality of women but he never washed a dish and they had a relationship that was domestically and still is very traditional. But i was raised with quite less politics. My mom grew up conservative on a form and my dad grew up communist in the bronx. I was interested when i was in high school, i went to the march for womens lives in 1992. I am 41. In the period where i was coming in age was like a deep freeze on feminism. I went to school at northwestern which wasnt a hot bed of feminism in the 90s. You could basically go the vegan pot luck and be like who is a feminist and it would be like no one we know. And where was very interested in these things. When i was taking english classes i was interested in gender and power. But i never thought growing up, i didnt know i wanted to be a journalist, but the idea i would find a professional outlet for my interest in questions of Power Dynamics and identity like i never imagined a world in which there would be a professional outlet for that. So i was very surprised and became a journalist and wrote about the movie business in my early 20s and then i went and took a job where i was given the freedom to write about things that interested me in 20032004 which was the time the feminist blog sphere was sprouting i began to write journalism from a feminist perspective and that is mostly it has been about learning. So much about the history. As a student, i was looking at literature from that perspective but i didnt take womens studies or history class. It has been a process of teaching myself about the history of all of this stuff. So that is how my perspective has changed. I have been wrong so many times about it that which is great because i have had to learn more about it. I wanted to add because you jogged this for me when you said you would like to put a positive spin on it. I would like to see more action in the feminist movement but i was thinking when i was watching the news and saw the back page of the stanford daily and the massive protests, the amazing amount of signatures that they were able to galvanize. I think 800,000. , a tremendous number. It occurred to me this probably would not have happened without feminism. So the positive spin is that women, we are seen in a different light. So i dont want to come down antifeminism and it hasnt been any good. It has certainly done a lot of good. I just want more. I mean, the judge [laughter] i just want to say, like, you know, the sentence that the judge handed down is absolutely ludicrous. And the fact [applause] the fact that, you know, biden and all of these people are very, very vocal about it, this is a wonderful thing. And i think feminism has played a part, and its the same way feminism plays a part in the fact that when female teachers sexually abuse their young male students, thats also wrong. And those women get really, really much longer sentences, ill just, you know, ill point that out. Sean da rhymes tweets this past week, you know, lets stop calling it teachers having sex with their students and start calling it molestation and calling it rape, you know, what it is. So the culture is moving forward, and feminism has played a major role in it. I just wanted to say that. I think thats what makes me, w even when im critical of some aspects of contemporary feminism. At this point i set up and said i couldnt imagine having a career in feminism. Now there is reasonable critique of the culture and its totallym valid, however, im agreeing, compared to the deepfreeze that i grew up in, i will take that feminism if it also produces a population of young women and men, one of the things that i have been thinking about is that his short sentence is too short. One thing i wish there was a lot more of his the other senses are too long. We also need to look because part of the comparison here are the excessive sentences that we are handing down to africanamerican men in particular and as long as we have this instance that has rightfully garnered our attention and it is very spare to say that yes the sentence is too short, it might also be an opportunity to look at the excessive lengths of sentences that we hand down to other people. That is part of feminism to. Is [applause]de a mis and really, who we label a rapist and who we label a guy who made a mistake. Pl its very easy to call a black man a rapist. While he said kid whos a good swimmer who got drunk. To us who are to work the bootha communicating on the internet about these issues, i dont think its totally without value for example, in my my community this week, in seattle, we discovered that a person who wa a fixture in the community, a person ive known for nearly a decade allegedly was exploiting and, its a legal gray area whether or not it counts as rape or not but was preying on young women. People had known about this for a long time, but it was individual voices. No one believed one woman. It took until right now when these women and finally found each other because you have things like finally bill cosbyg is going to trial. Cultural finally we have just a little more Cultural Dialogue about what rape means and how it affects people and how we talk about it. Ive watched this in real time. Ive watched these women who we had all been whispering about and trying to figure out what to do. I watch these women find each other and i watched other women circle around them and demandi that they be heard. Thats a product of the internet. Thats a product of our current moment. Its just one time tiny case in one small city but its real. Ekh something similar to this week in chicago. The chicago reader had a piece about a wellknown member of the theater that has been engaging in super manipulative, sketchy sketchy behavior. I think even in the stanfordht case, to your point, that wouldnt have happened without feminism, i dont know also ifan it wouldve happened without the internet. The letter that the victim wrote, that blew up. Fa that was like the most shared thing on my Facebook Page for t days. Thats also about the expansion of feminism as a profession. That letter, it is the internet and it is also a reporter at buzzfeed name katie baker who has done amazing things. Now because of technology and the internet, its a big profession, the feminist journalism profession. You now have places that employ reporters like this and you have a reporter like katie baker at buzzfeed who has reported incredible pieces about Sexual Assault and has earned the trust of people like the woman who published the letter. Read the images and disadvantages of having expanded, of the current status and popularity. I think the efficacy of the internet cant be denied. Im not a person who have interest with trolls but miss wes can certainly talk about that. S every time i think about the women who have to contend with these, i think may be more power to you meeting the woman. That means your voices being heard and you are deemed powerful. Theyre trying to shut you down because you do have a voice. So you should be celebrating your trolls. Thats true. Nobody bothers to try to silence you unless you are being heard. Yeah, thats great, but i do wish okay, dont get mad. What if just one day a week nola men were allowed to use the internet. Which day would it be there . I dont know what they do they want out . They could go outside and play soccer. You start telling trolls to go aside. I do sometimes. I cant even imagine what that would look like. It would be so peaceful, although going back to what feminism means to us, there are women who call themselves feminists who i find repulsive and say the most horrible things to me and who spend their time harassing me and other female riders as much as men do. So yes it is kind of, as a term, when you said that you areyo thinking we should abolish it or retire it, i know you didnt fall for that aggressively. I had a little epiphany when you said that. It doesnt inherently meanan something to me, especially to the degree that its used against me, to lump lump me in with women ally find really whose ideas i do not agree with. Y dissatisfaction with the way that its used before, so thank you. I think that theres a lot of power in the fact that there isnt a monolithic definition, that we have feminism, that we have black feminisms, chicana feminisms, woman i think we have woman as him and that gives a lot of thought for building a bigger conversation. Like you said rebecca, its been contentious from day one. Theres a great book i was thinking about. This is book tv so i feel feel like i can name drop. Years ago they published a book called the grounding of modern feminism. Its really a wonderful look at the beginnings of what we call feminism, dealing with womens suffrage they were these nancy kok who had done a research andd was the author of the book, they were at each others throat. When we think about the fights for womens vote, we seem to romanticize it and that it was the monolithic movement. Never. All you want to do is make babies. E she had five or six children. People were saying you cant be the face of the movement because youre getting pregnant every year. It was really off the chain as we would say today. Im so glad you pointed that out rebecca because its always beet that way. United when i was doing my research on the history of unmarried i women in the United States, its incredible how many, you read now about people and the single women rhetoric and all they want is the government to pay forearl Birth Control and that all comes from the right. You see all these arguments played out in the press of the benefits of early marriage versus late marriage and you would think these are contemporary phenomenon but in fact you could have the exact same arguments played out just as crudely in the end of the 19th century. She got married later and sheen had been in activists working closely with Susan B Anthony and Susan B Anthony was aggressively antimarriage. In fact at one point she hadnt heard from her for a while and she wrote her an out note saying where are you, dead or married . So Susan B Anthony worked closely with ida b wells and she gets married slightly later. She writes about how when she returned to activism Susan B Anthony was so passed off that she had gotten married that she would only refer to her as mrs. Barnett. All this stuff plus the argument about race, class, inclusion socialism and the role of pacifism. You saw some of the feminist support Woodrow Wilson into the war to get the 19th amendmentttu passed which created a rift between former allies who thought those women were becoming warmongers. You can find direct echoes in a number of errors. That was great lindsay, did you have something you wanted to add . Ote just im so out of my depth with people who know things. [laughter] i wrote this little throwaway essay about, when you are a daily blogger, what you what you have to do is skim studies and then regurgitate them and Say Something funny at the end. So i was doing one of thoset reb where was something about women who take their husbands last name versus women who dont. I dont remember what the conclusion was. I wrote something just about my own experience where i didnt take my husbands name but i have some visceral attraction to the idea. Theres something about it that it appeals to me and i dont w know why. I was like oh no, i broke feminism. I wrote that my husband would never allow it. My husband would absolutely not let me take his name and then, because he, out of, hes black and has a lot of feelings about ownership and ownership of people and the implications of that and he doesnt want to send a message to people that he pressured me to be his possession. He has really intense. Highminded ideas about this. Of course i would never be like now anyway. So i wrote this little thing and in the comments people are like it thats not very feminist of your husband wont let you do something. Then it was this endlesse argument about how it was not feminist for me to want to and it was not feminist for him to not want me to. It just went on and on and then it gets picked up by antifeminist blogs where there saying this disproves feminism and i just remember thinking that me having that little conflict and having this urge, i love that about feminism and the contradictions and trying to figure them out. Theres this endless spectrum of nuance within these ideologyto y that we are smart enough and engaged enough to take on and try to figure out and talk to each other and look inside ofus ourselves. I dont know. It just never, the the idea that were not a model list as my other two panelists have said, is a strength also and also very appealing. Ho i dont know, ive also been thinking about this lately i would say one of the biggest issues in feminist infighting is the inclusion of trans women and i dont understand why. I see a lot of feminists say no, we cannot allow trans women to be women because womanhood isin the static sacred thing and et cetera etc. Ive been on this book tour and i was just just at the glasgow womans library and i was looking around at the entirecenr library of women in the history of womens lives in the minutia of womens lives in all of the things weve thought about for a century at least. I was like really, this is where we cant grapple with this . You just decided this is in surmountable and you cant getet your head around this thing . That feels wrong to me. Dont you think they are grappling with it. I dont feel like there is an engagement on the exclusionary side. I feel like there have been other iterations of that. L i feel like Elizabeth Cady stanton around race and the vote, there were a lot of iterations of that. Im not disagreeing with you but i do feel like even some of the, this is the line but that has also been a part of the grappling. I think what im saying is how can you look at all this and not clearly see that you are choosing the wrong side of history. On to truth. We just have a couple more minutes before questions. I will pose one last question to rl you. Wendy i talked to earlier ou. Today about a podcast. Check it out. One thing you said that i felt was really fun was that if you could rip van winkle yourself to january and skip this entire election process, you absolutely would. Im curious rebecca m lashanda if you also would skip ahead to january 2017 if you had the magical powers to do so. I think i would. Absolutely. Even with the Dirty Martini in hand. St not i think we will be privy to a lot of space back and forth and its not good for the younger generation, its not good for us. There will be namecalling andms waging a linguistic war on my television for the next several months. Who needs this. If there were real discussions about real issues i would be ale the but you know, i adore Elizabeth Warren and so may people were on twitter and facebook and they were so happy that she got donald trump trolled and a part of me was so happy that that genius, brilliant woman, i would much rather her use her voice in other ways. I think there is going to be so much more of that. Thats why i want to be withnu lindsay next january. Okay, rebecca . So in p in practical terms, my own sanity and fear and fear about what we are going to hear and how bad so much of its going to feel and how terrifying its going to be, of course i would go to january, but i also think its horrible and its beenhoug horrible expressed but we are living in an important moment. Its certainly not just about Hillary Clinton. We are living in a time, and i have a particular passion for this kind of stuff even though i know how limited it is as far as that symbolic value. The Democratic Party nominated last time the firstid africanamerican man for president and now the first woman for president. There are going to be a lot of people behaving cheaply, but its also, i feel like there is kind of a rhetorical electoral battle for what direction this country is going in. I feel like its one of those times where these individuals symbolic figures are in for much bigger National Battles that we are having about whether or not were going to be one country moving toward inclusion as we always have or do we actually not want to move forward. Do we want to move back. It is starkly obvious and im shocked at house darkly obvious it was. Im shocked by what i saw this week in a good way. I in a Say Something positive about this election. I wrote my first book, it was about Hillary Clinton, michelle. Obama. I am an ambivalent hillary person. I just wrote a long profile of her for new york magazine. I have a lot of positive feelings about hillary. One of them was my relative assuredness that when it came time to pivot this primary and toward the general, hillaryy clinton would be one of the things that i would be positive which is moved to the center. Its not to be pretty and i was not looking forward to up at the first beach that she gave was one that she gave yesterday. Her first speech as a general election candidate, unofficial,i sorry. She gave it to planned parenthood which, in itself is tremendous because i have been a member of the Democratic Partyty for as long as i can rememberr and ive heard many of them not say the word abortion in many contexts. Including Hillary Clinton herself, they have run away from abortion and ive seen that parties strategize around reproductive rights. Ive this happen. The idea that moving into her general election speech was gonna be with planned parenthood, i was was startled. Everyone should watch that speech. Not only is it a speech that she uses the word abortion many times, she talks about the connection between womens ability to control their reproduction and how reproduction rights and access are connected to minimum wage, paid leave, childcare, gun culture, systemic racism, and then, so she is laying out what is essentially a reproductivest justice platform and then she thinks reproductive justice advocates and recognizes she isc not the person who came up with this idea. Activis that speech was the best speech by a mainstream politician and not an activist. This is one of the finest w beaches by a mainstream democratic politician and letod alone one who is running for the presidency, that i have ever seen making clear that womens ability on how to take care of their body is key to economic, professional, and other freedom and opportunity. It cheered me up. I thought whoa, what if this wont look the way i always thought it would look. I guess i want to stay awake. Thats a nice optimistic note [applause]rs ago i some years ago, i said i liked. [inaudible] there is a thing of beauty that is in portland. I thought it would be 50 shades of gray was very important and meaningful. I didnt know what it meant when i was growing up. Someday i might explain it but why is it that i can fear ao dominatrix if i want to in almost any major city but not sexual surrogates who can help me not die a virgin. Rush limbaugh would make fun of that. H my question is how do you feel about my sincere statements . Othr i think will take another question. Yes. [applause] good afternoon panelist. I have a question thats not about me or my personal drama. My name is Jennifer Cross from the lead Organization Organizer for chicago. My question is directed to lashanda. I was raised with the pentecostal background. I have a lot of internalized conflicts that i am fighting. How do you promote the obvious elevation of black men and latino men who are suffering at the hands of our Prison Industrial Complex and capitalism but at the same time make sure the voices of women of color, lgbt q members, members with disability who are women or female, how do you balance that out . Thats a beautiful, deep question. I teach womens history. When i teach womens history, i tried to teach from all angles. T its a balancing act as you were demonstrating. When Civil Rights Movement and black Power Movement is taught, they are almost always taught with men as the heroes and it doesnt even have to be something sociopolitical. Backse we can look at something as wonderfully entertaining as jazz. When people talk about jazz theyre talking about the male masters of the instrument. Women are always back seated it in any conversation dealing with reproductive labor. Women it means keeping the household going, domestic labor. Womens work has historically and traditionally always been diminished. Its always been minimized. Ways with the conversation i foam ar so when im on the side. I feel like im not allowed to talk about the deprivations thah women are experiencing. We need to make sure we can express the needs of women and children. It has to be a holistic conversation. Re third world feminists have some really wonderful insights and had to spam the conversation. Okay, i was wondering if the other panelist could chime in, if thats possible where should i repeat my question . I got so caught up. I was wondering how do we do that balancing act . How do we make sure our voices are not silent but also make sure that the needs of real representation also get heard and get what they need . I mean, i dont know, what you think . I do do have a concrete response to that. Im in conversation with the leader and the founder of the wonderful organization thats looking at lesbian, gay, africanamerican, and working with the black lives matter movement. The giving a voice to heterosexual black men, its a wonderful model for how all groups can come together and inspire each other and work toward some of the same and. Certainly by getting together talking to each other and recognizing each other, visibility matters. G i also dont think you need to feel like if you spend time on yourselves and advocating for yourselves and working toward issues that affect you specifically that you are abandoning anyone or doing a disservice to any group. You can do both. Its important to focus on yourself sometime. Im not sure that t i