Vol 013 | May 20 2021

Hey! Good to see you. This is the thirteenth volume of The Persistence, which rounds up female-focused reads to help you feel seen, save time and make sense of the world. Please share with a friend!

HOPE

ARE WE HALF WAY UP OR HALF WAY DOWN?

Last weekend I went to a shop. No, not a supermarket. An actual shop, one that sells pretty trinket-y things that I don’t need but used to enjoy looking at in the before-times. And while it sounds far too Sex And The City circa ‘99 to say I had a spiritual experience amongst the scented candles, after five months of this latest lockdown something definitely happened in there. Emerging from the shop - hell, let’s be frivolous and call it a boutique! - something clicked back into place that I hadn’t even realised was out of alignment. Not ‘excitement’ exactly (I had to queue in the rain. For candles), but an emerging sense of ‘possibility’ at least. It had been so long since I’d mindlessly whiled away half an hour alone looking at beautiful things that, I realised, I’d gone beyond missing the pleasure of shops / galleries / people watching, and simply forgotten about it all entirely. 

It’s crept up on me, this lockdown malaise, or languishing as we now call it. When I first read Vogue’s thoughtful How do we come to terms with the indelible loss of the last year a few months ago, I imagined I’d greet any lift in lockdown like an excitable Labrador, not waste time on a post-mortem. Re-reading it again this week was a valuable reminder that even those of us who have been fortunate during the pandemic still have a lot to unpack. As some things open up but so much remains uncertain, it’s no surprise that we’re not sure if we’re half way up, half way down, or somewhere stuck in the middle.

Likewise, this nugget of optimism from the gloomily titled (but actually hopeful) Is Pandemic Purgatory worse than a lockdown jumped out at me, and made eulogising about a shopping trip seem less silly. "Emotions don't just 'happen' to you, they are made by you. Or more specifically, they're made by your brain while it's in constant conversation with your body and the world around you… You are an architect of your experience. Once you realize this, you have more opportunity to control what you do and how you feel."
If like me you’re not quite wearing rose tinted glasses, more simply cleaning the grubby lenses of a regular pair, I hope it helps you too as new opportunities hover in to view.

FIRE

HOLD THE FRONT PAGE FOR FEMALE JOURNALISTS

A few weeks ago, Filipino-American investigative journalist Maria Ressa was awarded the UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize. If you don’t know Ressa, she’s a powerhouse. In a thirty year career she’s been CNN’s lead investigative reporter for Asia, a tireless campaigner for press freedom, and co-founder of news site Rappler, one of the few media outlets in the Philippines to criticise the government, for which she faced multiple threats of jail. Yet her award was a rare moment of good news for female journalists, who are increasingly being subjected to online violence, gendered abuse and harassment. 

Just last week, British broadsheet journalist Rosamund Urwin shared a Twitter thread of her experiences which included being stalked, sent death threats and ‘bombarded with abuse when 8 months pregnant.’ 73% of female journalists (based on a survey of 901 by UNESCO from 125 countries) have been abused online, with 20% seeing that spill over in to real life. Death and rape threats are common. At one point Ressa was receiving over 90 abusive messages on Facebook every hour. 

Journalists of course, have always had their haters. And we all know the online world can be mercilessly vicious. But add a slosh of good old misogyny and the fact many women write about gender issues, and you can instantly feel the flames being fanned. Recently it’s become more sinister, with targeted campaigns against female reporters by powerful, populist leaders and deep fake technology being used to try and intimidate women out of the business. “The internet has now become the most dangerous place to be a woman journalist”, comments Sian Norris, who has written extensively on the subject. And of course there have been high profile IRL fatalities, like Daphne Caruana Galizia of Malta, and Gauri Lankesh of India, both subjected to long term hate campaigns before being murdered.

So I share the varied articles below both in solidarity and celebration, with Ressa and all the other female journalists putting themselves at risk day in, day out. They persist so we can know the truth, and so they can simply do their jobs. It’s time we heard their own stories too.

Women behind the headlines:
The good: Something about this moving collection of tributes to Indian journalist Kakoli Bhattacharya, from her colleagues at The Guardian after she died from Covid-19, really got under my skin. Partly perhaps because it went some small way to humanising the horrific statistics that have come out of India recently - so many nameless, faceless casualties who have been little more than a point on a graph. And also because it lifts the curtain on a rarely talked about role in foreign reporting, that of a local correspondent who never gets a byline or on-screen fame, but is utterly critical to the operation. Here, Bhattacharya gets the glory she deserves.

The bad: There’s been a lot of attention on media oppression during the conflict in Myanmar, but this piece from Vice takes a rare angle, spotlighting the huge amount of sexism female journalists face there, but exploring how they’re trying to turn it to their advantage to get the story out. Inspiring.

The ugly:  “I was vomiting, my blood pressure shot up, my body had reacted so violently to the stress...The entire country was watching a porn video that claimed to be me.” Rana Ayyub is an Indian investigative journalist who has revealed human rights abuses and government corruption. Not coincidentally, she was an early victim of a devastating deep fake smear campaign that only ended when the UN stepped in. I Was The Victim Of A Deepfake Porn Plot Intended To Silence Me is an unforgettable account. And it will spoil nothing to tell you Ayyub, now a Washington Post columnist, has been anything but silenced.

EQUALITY

THE MOTHER OF ALL TALKING POINTS

Motherhood has rarely been out of the headlines for the last year, and if you’re not one, I thank you for your patience as I share another piece exploring it. Why the Cult of the Perfect Mother Has to End, feels kind of different though. And while because of my own perspective I can’t know for sure, I think there’s value in it whether you have children or not.

Ultimately, is an excoriating takedown of the myths we’ve allowed society - and ourselves - to tell women about motherhood, and a bucket of icy water in the face of feminism for not fighting harder on this front. It’s confronting, exceptionally honest and full of rage and reassurance, not least when comparing parenting standards of the past with today’s drive for perfection. I personally will meditate on this ‘advice’ from 1928 on most days from now: ‘“If you haven’t a nurse and can’t leave the child, put it out in the backyard a large part of the day. Build a fence around the yard so that you are sure no harm can come to it.” If you must watch the child, “make yourself a peephole so that you can see it without being seen, or use a periscope”’.

But it’s the damning contradictions that the writer Eliane Glaser highlights - between our tech-obsessed, scientific, equality-espousing world and the rise of natural motherhood - that I hope can unify us all. Because at its core, this cult of perfection is holding women to a different standard than we expect from men; supposedly deifying them on one hand while holding them back with the other. And you don’t need firsthand experience of ‘shitting a pumpkin’ (as one commentator puts it) to see the sexist double standards in that.

PS for the mums: Glaser’s remark that “I’m for the child but also the mother” instantly made me think of @amotherplace on Instagram. If you’re in need of solidarity today, check out her video “I don’t love being a mum” which has had over a million views

SHORTCUTS

1. This is a piece about abortion. No one will read it. As abortion laws come under ever more pressure in America this week, this tackles the thorny issue of why so many say they care but so few actually engage

2. Nora Ephron would have been 80 yesterday. Was it sex, equality or women’s appetites that were at the heart of her films?

3. Help! I’m a geriatric millenial! (I wish).

Got two minutes to tell me your thoughts on the newsletter, the state of the world or just what the hell’s for dinner tonight? I reply to all messages (and steal most recipes). TIA!

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