women – Page 2 – Don't Gel Too Soon

Big Change for BlogHer: A NABLOPOMO Recollection

SheKnows_team — R- L from top R: BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone, SheKnows’ Philippe Guelton and Samantha Skey, and BlogHer co-founders Jory Des Jardins and Elisa Camahort Page

BlogHer has merged with SheKnows, as Lisa Stone and and AdAge announced this morning. Since 2006 the wonder that is BlogHer has been a central part of my life. On this NABLOPOMO day 3, here’s why*:

In 2006, I was working with David Aylward and the National Strategies firm. He doesn’t know this but there’s a story (If you know me you know there’s almost always a story.) We had a client who wanted to reach parents. David hired me to help and I had this big idea about making a parent website to promote them. Well. David sort of said “What about these blogs I keep hearing about? Would that be better?” I knew so little about blogging that I had to go look it up online. I found a story about this little conference in San Jose called BlogHer, meeting for only its second year. David and I convinced our client that I should attend this mysterious event and off I went along with fliers for our product and real curiosity about who these women were and what they were up to.

Here is what I received – from BlogHer 2006 and every one since:

1. Access to an entirely new world of remarkable women (and men too.) Including ( a little bit of a yearbook list) Elisa Camahort Page and Lisa Stone and Jory Des Jardins and Morra Aarons-Mele and Cooper Munroe and Emily McKhann and Liz Gumbinner and Kristen Chase and Asha Dornfest and Jennifer Burdette Satterwhite and Mary Spivey Tsao and Danielle Wiley and people I haven’t mentioned here (Sorry – some I’m not completely sure who I met in 2006 and who later.) Feels like I’ve known you all forever as well as Sarah Granger and Kelly Wickham and Jill Miller Zimon and Joanne Bamberger and Stacey Ferguson and Cynthia Liu and Anita Sarah Jackson and Jenn Pozner and Cheryl Contee (and and and) And that doesn’t count the new (to me) folks like Sharon Hodor Greenthal!.

2. An entirely new way to communicate and create.

3. More fun than a barrel of groovy blogger women knew they could deliver. And – here’s the reason I’m writing this post at all:

4. Another decade at least of being part of and participating in the new parts of the world – online and on screens, instead of watching from the bleachers.

Lots of boomer women have joined me and the other early birds each year and I am certain they feel the same way (I’ve asked several and besides they’ve written about it.) At a time when many of our friends are settling into a more and more peer-centered life, we have the gift of having broadened, rather than narrowed, our world and hearing the voices of women we never would have known about, much less known for real. So David, thank you for the gift of my entry into this universe and for the imagination and vision that opened your mind to its possibilities. It’s a beautiful place to hang out and I’ll always remember who sent me through the door.

*This post first appeared on August 2, 2014.

Do We Americans Still Have It? Do We Care? #MicroblogMonday

I’ve spent most of my life thinking about disasters and potential apocalypses and injustice and misery: I’m a journalist, or at least I was, so I don’t get discouraged easily. So far the world, or at least our country, has always seemed to right itself in the nick of time. I seriously wonder if we can still do it though. We all know why:

A bitterly divided country

Racism

Institutional injustice

The terrifying assault on women’s rights and well-being, here and elsewhere

The decline of our public schools

Climate change

The rise of fundamentalism

The coarsening of our culture

The cost of a college education

Ebola

ISIS

Hunger

Anti-Vaxx-ers (seriously)

Add your own here____________________

Beneath those individual issues lies the biggest threat: what appears to be the larger change in our values. As I watched The Roosevelts and, strangely enough, re-watched The King’s Speech, I wondered (not for the first time) where those sorts of world leaders (FDR, a president with political skills, toughness, vision and an understanding both of where the country was and where he needed to take it, Teddy Roosevelt who took on income inequality through trust busting and began what became the environmental movement (and yes he also started a couple of wars… or a reluctant King George IV, who not only held Britain together and committed under horrible circumstances but also led by example) are today, whether they could be elected or heeded — whether they would even be willing to try. Even more, I wondered if our country would accept them; whether we are still capable of selflessness or a sense of duty or a thoughtful response to a call to sacrifice. I hope so.

The NFL, Women and Spartacus

Nobody can stop talking about the NFL. Me neither. Yesterday I wrote about the complicity of broadcast networks and sponsors (who by the way paid my salary for more than 25 years) in this issue of women’s and children’s safety. I’ve never seen so many tone-deaf people in my life. Even CoverGirl can’t seem to get it right.

But today, on Microblog Monday, I have another question. What do we do about this world of modern gladiators in a game that damages their brains until many of them are never able to think clearly again? How do we protect them from the impact of the conditioning and brutality that is part of their work? And what is the difference between NFL owners and those who sent Rome’s ancient, doomed fighters into the Coliseum?

The Statue and the Synagogue

This is what the women saw. There are few sanctuaries more beautiful and moving than this 1675 Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, and here the women, while separated, were still able to share its beauty. In fact, in many ways, they saw more.

The service, certainly, but also the outside world for which they prayed. It was a hike to get there, of course, but the dignity and faith that infuses the place was more available to them than in many other observant synagogues. It’s difficult to describe the peace and beauty of this place, even with a photo. Or two. The black and white one is a wedding photo taken in the synagogue.

So where you ask is the statue? Well, he’s right here. Baruch Spinoza, whose ideas wreaked havoc in religious communities of Europe. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”^[8]

Spinoza’s given name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה‎ Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means “the Blessed”. Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books.

A powerful figure in Jewish history and history in general, he stands just steps from the Synagogue, there – and not there; a compelling figure of faith — and doubt.

We are currently sailing through the Kiel Canal, an engineering feat that cut northern Europe in half and created a pathway that reduced isolation for many. Tonight we stop in Helsingborg, Sweden and Friday night, in Copenhagen.

Farewell to Friends

This is me with my new sister Ramona. We met when we were looking to share a car to Mont-Saint-Michele and she and her amazing husband decided to join us. We have had the best week. Remarkable how quickly relationships form in a travel environment.

Now she is returning to her home in Beirut with her husband to await a new grandchild due within days of ours. We had a wonderful time with them. Thanks my friend! And send pictures.

“There’s not a word yet, for old friends who’ve just met.”
― Jim Henson,

The Heathers Would Love American Blogger (at least the trailer)

First, watch this and see if you notice anything odd (other than the SNL-ish narrator)

When Sheryl Sandberg launched her Lean In Foundation, I noted the homogeneity in looks, age and (not literally but almost) hair on their Who We Are page. It’s gotten a little better over there, but the coming documentary American Blogger (or at least its trailer) … hasn’t.

I wish I were as temperate as Be Blogalicious co-founder Stacy Ferguson , as thoughtful as Katherine Stone and others on the #americanblogger Facebook thread or as enthusiastic as some of the film’s participants and their friends, but I felt like I was watching Charlie’s Angels Build a Blog..

The rest of us seemed somehow excluded — unworthy, almost. Because life online, and blogging especially, can be such a naked experience with such power to build deep relationships and tribes, the unfortunate, beauty queen/Martha Stewart Home nature of the two minutes we saw seemed a personal assault, suggesting that the women in this film are the women we need to know to understand and appreciate the online world the rest of us have come to rely upon and love.

For me, this world is better represented by the tribe that surrounded the last journey of Susan Niebur, the infertility quest of Melissa Ford, Laurie White’s transformation, Kelly Wickham’s tales about life, The Cuban and the kids in her school, Erin Kotcecki Vest’s fight against lupus, Morra Aarons-Mele on business and on politics, Joanne Bamberger on women and politics, Jill Miller Zimon on politics and running for office (right now!) or Liz Gumbinner about almost anything.

I know the women chosen here also have deep feelings about blogging and they are in no way responsible for the choices made by the film’s creator. The film is the sum of its parts and it seems that each individual participant joined in good faith because of their love of what they do.

But this trailer, as it introduces us to the project, is so exclusive and exclusionary that it’s hard to remember that if you know it and hard to discover if you don’t.

Take a look at this perfect response: The Real American Blogger, where bloggers across the web post less airbrushed versions of the women who write here, who are of course as diverse and generous and cranky and skinny and large and messy and neat and coifed and barely head-covered and patient and pissed and happy and sad and lonely and not as the rest of us – except, apparently, the women chosen to promote this film as it moves toward release.

From Bunny to Brave Leader of Us All. Happy Birthday Gloria!

Gloria in her "underground" Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine. — Gloria in her “underground” Playboy Bunny garb for her 1963 expose in SHOW Magazine.

I was 17 the first time I saw this, a Pittsburgh kid with grand ambitions for worldliness and intellectual heft and the ability to do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink; so many that I actually subscribed to magazines like The Saturday Review, The New Yorker and SHOW: the Magazine of the Arts, where Gloria’s famous Playboy Club expose first appeared.

My reaction: “What a showboat, dumb thing to do!” My (never-less-than-honest) mother responded “You’re just jealous!” And she was right. Gloria had done something I so wanted to do – and so early in her career! How could I ever get from a Monongahela River mill town to that?

I never dreamed that Gloria, too, came from an industrial town – Toledo – much less that we would both have attended the same college, that I would hear her speak at my sister’s Smith graduation, and that, amazingly, I would actually come to know this remarkable woman. And here, on her 80th birthday, is what I learned:

In 1974, I told one of Ms’ spectacular co-founders how much I admired her. She replied “That’s how I feel about Gloria.” Heroes have heroes too, and hers was Gloria.

In 1982, for Ms. Magazine‘s 10th birthday, I produced an anniversary story called “A Day in the Life of Gloria Steinem” for the Today Show. The camera crew and I took a train from Penn Station to Philadelphia with her and followed her from event to event, including a couple of large public appearances. At least once every couple of minutes, a woman would walk up to her to thank her for something: courage, perspective, “you changed my life.”

Every time, every interruption, every stop on the street or in the hotel lobby or the ball room or the train, she treated each woman as if she were the first one she’d ever met. She listened intently. She responded in a very personal way. Every time.

To Gloria, every woman: each of us, all of us, has mattered to her. We are not just a formidable, critical cause, we are women who one by one by one have been living the lives women live, unequal, unheralded, amazing lives.

It is this that has made her the most remarkable of leaders, of change agents and of women. Never, in all the marches and speeches and honors and sadnesses has she forgotten that each one of us is all of us. She is not just a leader, she is a shining example. And inside each of us, we know it.

Happy Birthday Gloria – and thanks, from all of us here now and the girls and women yet to come.

Take a look at this MAKERS profile, too.

To Letty and Marlo with Thanks: My Free to Be Grandson

My grandson Nate turned two yesterday. He loves music. And, a child of his era, music video. We are avid watchers of Free to Be…You and Me clips.

This morning, this song, and the others, ran on a loop in my mind as I walked passed strollers and playgrounds in the park. Not for the first time, I was overcome with gratitude to the two of you and the others who brought these songs to what is literally now generations of children. It was a major factor in our home when our boys were little; it was even the school play at their elementary school. Now it belongs to their children. And, I suspect, those who follow.

It's become my go-to baby present to young families who don't already know it – and sometimes to those who do. And, within a few bars Glad to Have a Friend Like You or When We Grow Up, can bring me to tears.

It's everything we wished for our kids when they were little – all of us; it's a myriad of memories of all the hours we spent loving, dancing to and singing these wonderful songs as they became part of us.

And so I presume, for all the moms and dads, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and teachers and friends — to thank you one more time, as I enter the third year of the second generation in our family to be "free to be."

Glad to have a friend like you!

Do We Love this or What?

This Is Up on Lisa Ling’s Facebook Page: Save Women, Save the World

She calls it a "potential game changer" in Afghanistan. Over and over we've learned that when women are empowered educationally, economically or politically the standard of living rises. This is a great example.