The Female Lead Page 10
Young women are more exposed to stereotypes of female beauty than I ever was and we’re seeing huge pressure to achieve academically.
One of the themes in my career has been working with and supporting women and girls. I am passionate about equality, fairness and people reaching their potential, about everybody contributing and being able to contribute. Girlguiding didn’t seem like a radical departure. Its image belies the truth. People think I want to change it but, actually, I’m showing what it’s really like. The organisation hasn’t always been bold enough to shout about how fantastic it is – we’ve got more than half a million members, 30,000 groups of girls and young women meeting around the UK every week and a big waiting list.
Girlguiding is a wonderful combination of fun and the opportunity to develop life skills. We have a great badge programme. Our Free Being Me badge is for body confidence and helps girls as young as seven to unpack the images they see in the media. There’s also our Be The Change campaign to promote advocacy and the power of using your voice.
I would never have imagined, when I was 16, that I’d be doing what I am now. If I could advise my younger self, I would tell her not to be so afraid, to believe in herself and her potential. I was very fortunate to have a good family. My mum worried about how shy I was and was constantly trying to reinforce me and build up my confidence. I was also lucky that in my first full-time paid job, I had a chief executive who pushed me to trust my instincts.
I made an active decision to commit to a career in the not-for-profit sector. You spend most of your life at work and you need to know you’re doing something worthwhile. We’re put on the earth for a certain period of time and we have a choice how to use it. I want to make the most positive contribution I can, and I believe that working with young people is a good way of doing that, because they are the future.
Julie’s Object
A card from my mum, which she made for me just after I ran a marathon. I’d done the run for a cancer charity and she had terminal cancer and knew she didn’t have long to live. She drew a star on the front in gold. The writing inside was her authentic voice. She said, ‘Thank you for being such a courageous and generous person.’ That was 13 years ago now and it’s faded and dog-eared, but it’s always on the wall in our kitchen and, if I am ever having a moment of doubt or lack of confidence, if the little Julie Bentley comes back, I look at it and I am reassured and encouraged.
JULIE BENTLEY
Chief executive, Girlguiding UK
LENA DUNHAM
Lena Dunham was born in New York City. Her father and mother are artists. Dunham studied creative writing at Oberlin College in Ohio and made several short films. In 2010, she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture, a semi-autobiographical story, which won the South by Southwest Film Festival’s best narrative feature award and caught the attention of Judd Apatow, the producer of Hollywood hits such as Bridesmaids. In 2012, at the age of 25, Dunham became famous when Girls, her television show about four 20-something women living in New York City, premiered on HBO; it is now in its fifth series. Dunham plays the main character, Hannah Horvath, and she is also the writer, executive producer and director. She has been nominated for eight Emmy awards and won two Golden Globes, including best actress, for her work on the series, and she was the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America award for directorial achievement in comedy. In 2014, Dunham published her essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s Learned, which went on to become a bestseller. The following year she launched, with Jenni Konner, a newsletter and website called Lenny, which focuses on feminism and politics. Dunham and Konner have launched the Lenny imprint with Random House, which will be a home for emerging voices in fiction and non-fiction.
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When I was little, my mother told me that there are followers and there are leaders. That may be true in third grade, but in adulthood I think it is possible (and necessary) to be both at once. I follow and I lead, depending on what the situation requires. Following is relaxing, though.
I think a leader is someone who listens, with compassion, to the needs and desires of people who have never been properly heard. Through this listening a leader gains power and can sensitively and passionately reach for what is right.
When I was young, I wanted to write stories that moved people and made them laugh. They could be poems, plays or articles in the school newspaper – I just wanted to use words to connect, to feel less alone. I also wanted a potbelly pig, which still hasn’t happened, and I’m pissed!
If my teenaged self could see me now, she’d be like, ‘What? You’re dating a rock star! Lena, you DID it!’ (She was mostly worried about boys.) If I could give some advice to my teenaged self, I would say, ‘Sweet Lena, you don’t need to fight so hard to get where you’re going. It’s happening without you. Don’t flail all your limbs, don’t gasp for air. Let the current carry you and just look around.’ I think the expectations placed on young women by both social media and traditional media are painful and impossible to navigate, but I see a new generation fighting back and it gives me a lot of hope.
A leader is someone who listens, with compassion, to the needs and desires of people who have never been properly heard.
I want to use my platform [Lenny] not just to talk about some of the more abstract philosophical issues that women face, but to enact real changes to policy, so that other women in America, with less privilege than I had, have new structures in place to protect them. I want to change the rules. I also want to be a mother and, in whatever form I am blessed to have children, I want to give each of them what they need and to meet them where they are. I want to say, ‘I see you.’
What am I passionate about? I am passionate about women’s rights, rescue dogs, wallpaper, cashmere, a good book of essays, New York real estate, rice pudding and genealogy. And what gives me confidence in myself? Eyebrow pencil. It really is that simple.
The expectations placed on young women by both social media and traditional media are painful and impossible to navigate, but I see a new generation fighting back and it gives me a lot of hope.
Who is the most important person in my life? It’s a tie between my mother, Laurie Simmons, and my creative partner, Jenni Konner. They are my muses and my co-conspirators and my loves. I’m also lucky enough to have an adorable and brilliant sister, a feminist father with a wicked sense of humour, and a boyfriend [American musician Jack Antonoff] whose support is almost dizzying. I must have done good in another life.
In addition to the women named above, I’d have to say Nora Ephron is the woman who has had the greatest influence on my life. She welcomed me into her heart in the last years of her life and showed me that I didn’t have to be afraid of this industry or the men who populate it. She handed me my power on a delicate china plate. I miss her every day.
I also consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them.
I have been envious of male characteristics, if not the men themselves. I’m jealous of the ease with which they seem to inhabit their professional pursuits: the lack of apologising, of bending over backward to make sure the people around them are comfortable with what they’re trying to do. The fact that they are so often free of the people-pleasing instincts I have considered to be a curse of my female existence. I have watched men order at dinner, ask for shitty wine and extra bread with confidence I could never muster, and thought, What a treat that must be. But I also consider being female such a unique gift, such a sacred joy, in ways that run so deep I can’t articulate them. It’s a special kind of privilege to be born into the body you wanted, to embrace the essence of your gender even as you recognise what you are up against. Even as you seek to redefine it.
When I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I regret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by.
I know that when I am dying, looking back, it will be women that I re
gret having argued with, women I sought to impress, to understand, was tortured by. Women I wish to see again, to see them smile and laugh and say, It was all as it should have been.
Lena’s Object
A drawing that my mother made when she was a small child. It’s a group of women, dressed in their Sunday best, hanging out in a large empty room. The perspective is odd and childlike but the story it tells – that women are stronger in numbers, best in packs – is wise and eternal. Also I’m pretty impressed by my mother’s kindergarten pencil skills. It was a big deal when my mother finally let me take the drawing to my house. She trusted me to protect something, not destroy it.
LENA DUNHAM
Actor, writer, director and producer
MICKALENE THOMAS
Mickalene Thomas is an artist, best known for her paintings made of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. She also works in photography, collage, printmaking, sculpture and installation art. Born in Camden, New Jersey, she was raised by her mother, Sandra Bush, whose addiction to drugs when Mickalene was a teenager was one factor in the growing difficulties in their relationship. Another was Mickalene’s sexuality. After high school, she moved to Portland, Oregon, to be close to a woman with whom she had fallen in love. She considered becoming a lawyer before switching to fine art, studying first at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, then taking her master’s in fine art at Yale. Her work explores her own identity, sexuality and the relationship of women of colour to the world around them. It draws on art history and classical genres to question why women, especially black women, have been excluded or marginalised. Her work radiates sexuality, black femininity and power.
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I had aspirations to be a lawyer, but while working as a legal-document clerk in a law firm, I had a growing awareness that it wasn’t going to be right for me – and then I was invited by a friend to go on an art-therapy retreat. The plan was to support my friend rather than do something for myself, but it was a very important moment, almost like a calling. Everything fell into place. I couldn’t have imagined becoming an artist but I made a lot of work – it just came out of me – and the response to that work was very positive. It made me consider going to art school.
My mother was an important figure in my art from the beginning. She was a very beautiful and sophisticated woman, whereas I was boyish and rough. I think I was not the daughter she wanted or had imagined. Naturally, as a parent, you have an idea for your kid, and, if you have an aversion to what they do, that’s difficult. I was a woman-loving woman; I wasn’t girly. I was all of these things that she didn’t hope for. I didn’t meet her aspirations for a daughter and, as a result, she felt diminished, because she thought I would be like her and I wasn’t. It was not something she said, but something I felt.
I have a brother who is two years older than I am, and he and my mother were very close. I always felt like the outsider. It was difficult growing up and I think that made me more combative. My mother had drug problems from the period when I was in junior high school. She met a guy who was a drug dealer and she fell in love with him and that just shifted my life.
Art has been a way for me to accept who my mother is and to see myself in her. It was also, later on, a way for us to communicate. Working together allowed us to get closer after we had been estranged. When she featured in my work and we made art together, we didn’t have to sit down and talk, yet we could communicate how we felt for one another. Working with my mother was a way to reconcile a lot of issues we had without dredging them up and blaming each other. It was very emotionally powerful. The question we were addressing, perhaps, is how do you embrace the differences in an individual of whom you are a part, when that person is not necessarily the person you want her to be? Art enabled us to see ourselves and each other.
Working with my mother was a way to reconcile a lot of issues we had without dredging them up and blaming each other. It was very emotionally powerful.
Your duty as an artist is to be something like a scientist, to find new formulas – to look at what came before in order to communicate a new way of seeing the world. You have to insert yourself into the ideologies of other times and other people. I am interested in claiming spaces that particular bodies – women’s bodies, and especially black women’s bodies, the bodies of women who love women – have no right to inhabit, spaces where we are supposed to stay on the periphery.
My art is an extension of who I am. It is trying to make sense of who I am and where I fit in, or don’t – and if not, why not? I am working in film and photography a lot at the moment, exploring love between two black women – which, although it’s part of my life, is something I hadn’t put into my work up to this point.
My art is an extension of who I am. It is trying to make sense of who I am and where I fit in, or don’t – and if not, why not?
As a Buddhist, my mother was open to the world. She brought different types of people into our lives. She encouraged us to broaden our outlook, think about people of other ethnicities, consider different types of careers. I always had a desire to succeed and to see a wider world, and to question. I felt I had opportunity, a sense that there was more that I could learn, discover, experience.
My big ambition now is to have a building where you could have artists’ residencies and where young people could go, especially young girls. I think it’s amazing to be a young woman now. There are all kinds of role models and girls can think about becoming CEOs. It is wonderful to be able to imagine yourself in all these different positions in the world. In a sense, it is what I am trying to do in my art, to reimagine women in different spaces, through different eyes.
Even so, we are not investing enough in art and that has a constricting effect on people’s opportunities – it narrows outlooks instead of widening them. Art is the first thing to be removed from poor communities when cuts have to be made, and yet it makes a huge difference to kids when they are able to be creative. It opens their minds and their imagination. A sense that the arts really matter is much less prominent in education than it should be. Now that I have a daughter I think a lot about that. There are special programmes after school to explore the arts and creativity if you can afford them – but many of those who would benefit most can’t. Then we wonder why young people become destructive and self-destructive. I believe that art saves lives. Period.
Mickalene’s Object
The Buddhist altar that I have at home. I was raised as a Buddhist and although I wouldn’t really consider myself a practitioner, it’s the one belief I have veered towards throughout my life. I feel very strongly about incorporating meditation into my life because it helps to shift my focus back to my priorities, the things that are really important to me. The prayer altar is there to guide me in my daily practice. When things get too hectic and I feel distracted, it is a focal point of strength and comfort. I think of it almost as a ‘refresh’ button.
My mother introduced me to Buddhism when I was three years old. She was a devout Buddhist for 38 years until she died in 2012. We held an amazing Buddhist memorial for her, celebrating her life. I experienced first-hand how much she benefited from her beliefs. I see my practice as an extension of her within myself, and the altar serves as a reminder of the impact that she had on my life.
MICKALENE THOMAS
Artist
MHAIRI BLACK
Mhairi Black is a Scottish National Party politician and MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Born in Paisley, she studied politics and public policy at the University of Glasgow, gaining a first-class honours degree in 2015. She joined the SNP and campaigned for Scottish independence in the run-up to the 2014 referendum and then stood for parliament in the 2015 general election at the age of 20. She ousted the shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander from his previously safe Labour seat, becoming one of Britain’s youngest MPs in history. On 14 July 2015, she made her maiden speech in the House of Commons. By the end of the day, the speech had won her 11 million online views and was trending in
Nigeria. Her last job, before becoming a politician, was in a fish and chip shop. Black counts her passions as politics, music and Partick Thistle football club.
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I was brought up in Paisley. It was Mum, Dad, my older brother and me. We used to go on caravan holidays up to the north of Scotland. My mum’s mum had 13 children, so I had lots of cousins to play with. It was a good childhood.
Our family has always been politically aware. My grandparents were involved in trade unions and Mum and Dad were teachers. They exposed us to politics. My parents were not knocking on doors during elections, but we went on CND marches. When I was eight, my parents, aunties, brother and I marched against the Iraq war in Glasgow. I remember my mum explaining that we were doing this because the prime minister was trying to take us to war, and we shouldn’t be going to war. Tony Blair was in Glasgow for the Labour Party conference, but apparently he got word of the march so, by the time we were marching past the building, he’d already disappeared in a helicopter. I remember finding that really unfair, even at eight.
Inequality of any kind is the thing that really drives me. I always look at who’s losing out and why.
Inequality of any kind is the thing that really drives me. I always look at who’s losing out and why. Everything that I am interested in, be it foreign affairs or welfare reform or LGBT issues, boils down to the fact that there’s an injustice happening somewhere.
When I went to university, my course was music and public policy. I did music for my first year but I hated it – I love music but wasn’t interested in the technical aspects. So I thought, ‘Right, what other courses go with public policy?’ I gave politics a bash and found that I loved it.