Don't Call Me Princess Read online

  Dedication

  For Steven, a prince of a guy

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction: Two Girls in a Room

  Part 1: Starlets, Scientists, Artists, Activists & Other Noteworthy Women Atsuko Chiba: The Nonconformist

  Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan: Ms. Fights for its Life

  Phoebe Gloeckner: A Graphic Life

  Caitlin Moran: They Don’t Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore

  Elizabeth Blackburn: Why Science Must Adapt to Women

  Miranda Cosgrove: The Good Girl

  Katherine Mary Flannigan: The Story of My Life

  Part 2: Body Language Does Father Know Best?

  Thirty-Five and Mortal: A Breast Cancer Diary

  The Problem with Pink

  Mourning My Miscarriage

  Baby Lust

  Breast Friends

  Put to the Test

  What Makes a Woman a Woman?

  Call of the Wild

  Part 3: Not Your Mama’s Motherhood The Perfect Mother Trap

  Your Gamete, Myself

  Bringing Down Baby

  Where I Got Daisy

  The Femivore’s Dilemma

  Part 4: Girls! Girls! Girls! (and One about Boys) Children Are Alone

  What’s Wrong with Cinderella?

  Playing at Sexy

  The Hillary Lesson

  The Empowerment Mystique

  The Fat Trap

  The Battle over Dress Codes

  Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves

  When Did Porn Become Sex Ed?

  How to Be a Man in the Age of Trump

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Peggy Orenstein

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction: Two Girls in a Room

  When I was seventeen years old, a senior at St. Louis Park High School in Minnesota, I was summoned to the counselor’s office. Ms. Peckham, a middle-aged woman with bronze-tinted hair and thick, plastic-rimmed glasses, was, to me, the essence of clueless adulthood. So I was shocked when she asked me to write a story for the school newspaper on students who were teen mothers. It never occurred to me that one of my peers might have a baby, though given that there were twenty-eight hundred of us, maybe it should have. Truthfully, I didn’t even know kids my age were having sex.

  A couple of days later, I met with another twelfth grader, a girl I’d never seen before, in an empty classroom. She told me about life with her two-year-old daughter, the secrecy, hardship, and shame. Her mom babysat during the day while the girl was at school or working at a minimum wage job. She didn’t go to parties. She didn’t go on dates. She didn’t have many friends. Hardly anyone knew about her double life. It was brave of her to trust me with her story: I promised I wouldn’t use her real name in the article, and, what’s more, I’d never reveal it to anyone, not ever.

  When we were finished, she thanked me for listening. “But if you see me around,” she added, still smiling, “please don’t say hi. There’s no reason that someone like you would know someone like me. And I don’t want anyone to ask questions.” Then she left the room, disappearing into the crowded hallway.

  This wasn’t, I realized, simply a cautionary tale about the perils of teenage sex. It was the story of the two of us, girls who, through choice or chance, were on very different paths. Even more, it was about how class, status, and stigma limited the new opportunities of girlhood, about how far women had come, and how far we still had to go.

  That was, I think, the moment I became a writer: the moment I recognized the power of individuals’ stories to illuminate something universal, something essential about our time. Nearly forty years later, the stories I’m most drawn to telling are still about women. I came of age in the turbulent wake of feminism’s second wave; education, work, relationships, parenting, sexuality—all had been abruptly transformed. What could be more compelling than documenting the impact of that? When I’m honest, though, I have to admit that I was pushed into my subject matter as much as pulled toward it, that constraint played as much a role as interest. I graduated college eight years before Anita Hill would bring sexual harassment out of the shadows—over three decades before allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein would set off a tsunami of #metoo activism. So, when during an interview for my first job, as a typist at Esquire magazine, I was told that one editor had a penchant for rubbing up against young female staffers, and asked could I “handle” that, of course I assured them I could. I kept at least six feet away from the guy for the next three years, but there were also editors there, men as well as women, who championed me, mentored me, and encouraged me to stop typing other writers’ manuscripts and get to work on my own.

  With a few exceptions, female writers at the time (not to mention the entire category of women’s magazines) were tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, considered lesser than the guys—less talented, less prestigious, and, of course, lower paid. Writing about women, particularly for publications that weren’t specifically geared toward them, meant I avoided direct competition with men while creating a distinctive niche, if one that was sometimes seen as token. And it was a pretty sweet beat: after all, women are nearly fifty-one percent of the world’s population. Since we tend to be seen as female first—women directors, women executives, women politicians—I gained entree into worlds I might otherwise never have seen.

  Being a feminist writer, though, does not just involve whom I write about. It’s about how I write: my stance relative to the reader, a skepticism about hierarchy and expertise. I generally reject authority in authorship, positioning myself as the readers’ companion rather than superior: asking questions, expressing doubts, working my ideas out on the page. I want to share the journey, not just present tidy conclusions. Similarly, I decided early on that if I was willing to hold other women’s lives and decisions up to scrutiny I had better be willing to do the same with my own: if every woman’s life tells a story, mine would, too. Reviewers have sometimes referred to my first-person work as “honest,” especially my essays on infertility and cancer. I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be a compliment, but I sometimes suspect it may be code for TMI. The truth is, I don’t know how to write any other way. Observing my own experience, documenting my successes and missteps as a modern mother, wife, woman, worker, human, is how I make meaning for myself and, ideally, for others; it is also how I hope to galvanize change and progress.

  I’m a little stunned to find I have a body of work to look back on: time seems to have skittered by while I focused on the day-to-day stuff of working; falling in love; building a marriage; struggling to have a child and then raising her. Yet, I don’t feel ever so far from the girl reporter at the high school newspaper.

  I’m not sure how far the world has come, either. Progress seems more a spiral than a straight line, though I have faith that it moves mainly, if not consistently, in a positive direction. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t bother writing. Nonetheless, I’m struck by how many stories from years ago resonate now, at this moment when women’s political, social, economic, and reproductive rights are newly under threat.

  I don’t know how these latest battles will resolve, but I do know this: telling our stories is more important than ever. Not the endless churn of “content” featuring trumped-up princesses and pop stars and famous-for-being-famous social media creations, but real stories about real women, including women of color, queer women, immigrants, the poor, the very old, and the very young. There can never be enough stories.

  As for the teen mother I wrote about so long ago: I don’t know what happened to her
. I no longer remember her name. I’ve even lost the article I wrote, left it behind in some old apartment in some other city. But I still think of her courage regularly, with gratitude; and I have never forgotten what she taught me.

  —Peggy Orenstein, August 2017

  Part 1

  Starlets, Scientists, Artists, Activists & Other Noteworthy Women

  Atsuko Chiba: The Nonconformist

  I was twenty-six years old, living in New York City mostly writing pithy pieces on shopping or Hollywood gossip when Betsy Carter, the editor of New York Woman magazine, called me into her office. She handed me Atsuko Chiba’s New York Times obituary and said, “I want you to write a posthumous profile of this woman.” I knew nothing about Chiba, nothing about her illness, nothing about Japan. I had never even written a magazine feature: I have no idea why Carter thought I should write this one.

  And yet, I’m amazed (and a little freaked out) by the way this piece, which came out in March 1989, predicts the themes of my own life: I had moved to California by the time it was published, where I would soon meet and marry my husband, who is Japanese American; I would end up spending extensive time in Japan, and eventually, inspired by my own medical crisis there, write a taboo-breaking piece about women’s health—in my case, on miscarriage; like Chiba, I, too, would develop breast cancer at an unusually young age, turning to my work, much as she did, as a source of solace, understanding, and activism.

  Atsuko Chiba came to New York to die. It was 1983, and the cancer that had taken her left breast two years earlier—the cancer that had made her notorious as the first Japanese journalist to write candidly about the disease—had settled in a lymph node at the base of her neck. Ever since her stint as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1968, Chiba had dreamed of returning to the States to try her hand as a freelancer. But more to the point was this: “No matter what happens,” she said to her friends, “I don’t want to die in Japan.”

  Death in Japan is no more ignominious than in other countries, but dying of cancer is. Cancer has long been a taboo topic in Japan; patients are rarely given details about their treatment, and doctors often avoid the terminally ill. So Chiba sold her furniture, donated her books to a library, packed up a favorite silk dress from childhood and the one being she was dependent upon—a Siamese cat named Be-be—and headed for a new life at One Astor Place.

  From the moment her plane landed at JFK until July 1987, when she died at the age of forty-six, Chiba devoted herself to encouraging change in her native country. In two weekly columns, “Preparing for Death” and “Living with Cancer,” and in thirteen books written over the course of three years, she offered a running commentary on the American and Japanese medical establishments. She wrote every day, even when her life was reduced to a three-week cycle of chemotherapy. Some days she wrote while vomiting continually into a paper bag. She wrote of life in New York, of the theater, of politics and soirees. Mostly she wrote of herself: “Not once have I shed tears in connection with my sickness,” she wrote. “I have no time to be immersed in sentiments; I am only thinking about how to use the time left meaningfully. . . . I don’t see my cancer as a particularly tragic event. My life up to now, although there have been tough times too, is filled with wonderful memories.”

  There is an aphorism in Japan: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Atsuko Chiba stuck out. She stuck way out and waved her arms. In a society where individuality—especially in women—is squelched early on, Chiba flaunted her mind, her body, and her spirit. She challenged the relegation of female journalists to newspapers’ society pages and became the first female economics reporter for a major Japanese newspaper. She took the victory with grace and irony: sure, she would cover the stock market as well as anyone, but she’d do it in a short, tight dress.

  Chiba was, in a way, the epitome of an American career woman carried to the extreme. Her work was her compulsion: two days before she died, while passing out from pain, she was cabling the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, assuring her editors she’d meet her deadline. Yet there were those see-through blouses she wore to press conferences at the Ministry of Finance. Provocative clothes on the job aren’t exactly commonplace in Japanese society. Neither is sexual freedom. Mutsuko Murakami, Atsuko’s closest Japanese friend, says she was shocked when, during the two journalists’ first evening together, Chiba pulled out a magazine clip that quoted her as saying, “I believe in freedom in sexual relations and am carrying out my beliefs.” Murakami remembers that Chiba thought, “one boyfriend should not last more than three months.”

  Chiba’s reaction, on Christmas Eve 1980, when she found a lump in her left breast that she correctly sensed was malignant, was, as her friends say, “typically Atsuko-like.” That very evening she began jotting down ideas for a book. “I thought of this as an assignment,” she said. “To lose a part of my body and to write about it as objectively as possible.”

  In late January, a day or two before she entered the hospital for a mastectomy, Chiba had snapshots taken of her nude from the waist up. The pictures show a beautifully formed woman with sharp, unflinching eyes, pointing to a barely visible malignancy. In those eyes you can read the phrase that became the title of her book: Breast Cancer Can’t Defeat Me. Seventeen days later, when she left the hospital, the book was nearly completed. Chiba discovered that she was the only woman on her ward who had even been told that she had cancer, and only then because she forced the issue. Doctors hid the truth, concerned that if a patient knew she had cancer she’d stop fighting or, worse yet, use it as an excuse to commit unethical acts.

  Breast Cancer Can’t Defeat Me eventually included controversial chapters on how Chiba’s lovers dealt with her mastectomy. Even more scandalous was her choice for the cover: one of her topless snapshots. To advertise the book her publisher blew the cover up to poster size and plastered it all over the Tokyo subways. An American colleague, then Wall Street Journal Tokyo bureau chief Mike Tharp, saw one of the posters on his way to meet Chiba and ripped it down. When he asked her for an autograph, she smiled and signed proudly. “It was pretty dramatic, that cover, but that was just the way Atsuko was,” Tharp remembers. “She believed in it, and she knew she had to take the heat as well as any of the glamour.”

  Her ability to suffer for the strength of her convictions may well have been a legacy from her parents. Chiba was born in Shanghai in 1941, the eldest of four sisters. Her father was a Communist activist jailed in his youth up to eight years at a time, but Chiba had little knowledge of his past until her junior year at college, when she learned about it in his eulogy. Her mother was also an activist, whom Atsuko would invoke during her own ordeal: “In 1932, at the age of seventeen, my mother was tortured by two police officers . . .” Chiba wrote. “She was stripped naked and hung upside down while the police pulled her legs. Just by imagining the scene, I realize that my present suffering is nothing compared with what my mother went through.”

  Chiba seems never to have questioned why her parents hid their activism from her or why they neither encouraged their daughters to lead a traditional life nor discouraged them from becoming enchanted with Western ways. After her father’s death, as she became increasingly worldly and independent, Chiba distanced herself from her more traditional mother and sisters. She hated falling prey to anyone’s expectations. She chose an unlikely major—economics—at Gakushuin University, one of Japan’s top schools.

  Although Chiba knew she was just as capable as the men in her classes, when it came time to parade her credentials before prospective employers, she was bitterly disappointed. No one in Tokyo would hire her. Eventually she landed a job as a society reporter for Tokyo Shimbun. She soon muscled her way onto the economics beat, where she was given the toughest assignments—like covering the rice market—in the hope that she would become discouraged and quit. In the end she did quit, but not for the reasons her bosses had hoped: she left to take the prestigious Nieman Fellowship.

  By the mid-seventies, Chiba was fi
rmly entrenched as a freelancer, snagging stories for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Institutional Investor. Even so, being taken seriously on a turf so heavily dominated by men was a constant struggle. In a piece eulogizing her, Gilbert E. Kaplan, editor in chief of Institutional Investor, remembers Chiba’s first encounter with a particular source. “She joined me for a breakfast with the head of a major corporation,” Kaplan wrote. “He spoke only to me, bragging about his firm, and never once included her in the conversation. Finally Chiba chimed in with a technical question about why one of his financial ratios had been down three years in a row. From that point on, she was an integral part of the discussion, and the executive also became one of her best sources.”

  In Tokyo, Chiba became famous during her off-hours for her weekly parties: she hosted a revolving salon of novelists, artists, bankers, bureaucrats, and radical feminists. “She would throw us together in this small physical situation and let us mix and mingle,” Tharp recalls. “One of the neatest things was the way the Japanese men dealt with her. It was not unusual, for example, to see the director of the Economic Planning Agency get all the plates when people were finished eating and do the dishes.”

  When dawn broke and the inevitable Scrabble game ended, Chiba preferred to spend time alone. The three-month rule, the freelance lifestyle, the increasing distance from her family—these were marks of a person whose greatest luxury was solitude. “Because I have been living on my own,” she explained, “I . . . would work and play at my own pace and have the kind of relationships with men best suited to me.” The esteem in which she held independence allowed her to leave her home, her friends, and her family to take a chance on moving 14,500 miles to an uncertain future in New York.