“I’ve made passing mention of my mom’s suicide in my writing over the last couple of years, but my first truly raw and open essay about her death came out in the Rumpus last month, and since then, I have felt a new responsibility to be brave. The response to that essay was overwhelming. I was flooded with the most beautiful, wrenching, deeply personal emails. Some readers told me I had given them the courage to tell their own stories. They, in turn, have given me the courage to move forward with my darkest story, to look into the places that scare me and try not to flinch.”

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***

The Rumpus: You’re one of the first women to hold an executive editor position at an online magazine. Is that right? And why is that so unusual in 2012?

Ann Friedman: There are some very notable women who beat me to the punch – Arianna Huffington springs to mind, as do the Mother Jones editors, who (like me) are at the helm of both the print and web publications – but I do think it’s a pretty small group. Too small. Someone said to me recently that we have to encourage more young women to want top-level editing jobs. I think that will happen naturally as we have more role models, more examples of boss ladies who aren’t sad and cruel and overworked and undersexed (*cough* DevilWearsPrada *cough*), but who are straight-up owning it and notable not for their gender but for their editorial savvy. A lot of this is about narrative. Writers and editors, we find ourselves fascinating. We like to write about what’s happening in our industry. And every time there is an article about the blogger generation growing up or about a forward-thinking crop of young editors that features only men, the narrative perpetuates. One way to make more women executive editors is to ensure the ones already doing the hard work are more visible. I suppose this is a very long-winded way of saying thanks for interviewing me!

Rumpus: Yes, this straight-up owning it, tell me about that. What do you love about the work you do at GOOD? What really makes your day?

Friedman: I love working with such talented writers and editors. I love telling stories and finding great ideas and profiling fascinating people. I love playing with words. The best feeling is checking the site first thing in the morning, seeing so much great content, and being unable to decide which of our pieces to tweet about first. That, and the day the new issue of the quarterly magazine arrives from the printer. Pretty fucking satisfying!

Rumpus: My guess is that your enthusiasm also has something to do with GOOD’s dedication—by design—to socially conscious articles and themes. This mission was built in by GOOD’s founder, Ben Goldhirsh, but you’ve taken it a step further, printing some edgier articles and riskier topics. How would you describe your impact on GOOD’s mission? What editorial wishes did you bring to the magazine when you joined in 2011?

Friedman: Absolutely, GOOD’s mission is a big part of what drew me to this job. However, the problem with a lot of journalism oriented around social good is that it’s boring as hell. One of my goals in assuming editorial leadership of GOOD was to build on the brand’s reputation for positive, solutions-oriented journalism while pushing it a bit—making it funnier, edgier. I’ve tried to make GOOD’s core series and products, like our Daily GOOD email, even better, while expanding into new terrain with pieces like Mac McClelland’s essay on PTSD or our Hustlin’ series.

Rumpus: Yeah I get the impression you wouldn’t last with “boring as hell” for very long. Last week our Rumpus Radar (*cough* IsaacFitzgerald *cough*) alerted us that you were the genius behind the Tumblr #realtalk from your editor. I was speechless when I saw it: every GIF is truth! Then I found International Slutty Women’s Day: a Story in GIFs on your blog. It’s like GIF paradise. You’ve raised it to an art form, Ann. How do you do it? Can you answer this with a GIF?

Friedman:

Rumpus: Dammit, that’s what I thought. You’re magic. You also bend time apparently because between being executive editor of GOOD and busting out GIF truths you founded and curate the LadyJournos! site, which is all about shining the spotlight on women writers. What defines great writing for you? What makes you say YES to something either for GOOD or LadyJournos?

Friedman: I know the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but being an editor is different than being a curator. For GOOD, I’m interested in pitches that have compelling people and ideas at the core—and a good news peg certainly doesn’t hurt. We look for stories that are solutions-oriented, but not irrationally upbeat, from writers with a strong voice. For LadyJournos, where I’m curating not editing, I’m looking for a balance of reported and essayistic work by up-and-coming women journalists. Often that means combing online-only sources or alt weeklies. I’ll feature the occasional New Yorker piece, but everyone reads the New Yorker, so that’s not super helpful. (Also, there aren’t a lot of women to be found in those pages. Zing!) The hope is that other assigning editors will use it as a resource, and the women featured on the site will make their way up the journalistic food chain until they’re freelancing for the $2/word outlets and getting the kinds of assignments that lead to National Magazine Award nominations.

I created the site so that lazy assigning editors would know how to put a steady stream of work by women writers into their regular feeds.

Rumpus: You’ve said on your blog that it’s the editors’ responsibility to achieve equity in publishing for women—a sentiment I totally agree with—and you prove this with balance at your own publication. Do you feel like you and your fellow editors have to work harder to get fantastic work from women? What does it take?

Friedman: I don’t have to work extra hard, but that’s because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists. If editors truly want to improve their byline ratio, they need to stop lamenting the fact that few women journalists send them cold pitches and start taking a hard look at their stable of regular contributors. How many women are on the masthead? How many women columnists or bloggers are on the payroll? This is how real change is going to happen.

Rumpus: As someone who spends so much professional time on the Internet, how—and why, and when—do you disconnect? What’s the best thing about the time you spend offline?

Friedman: I have a dream of retreating to a #spinstercabin for a few weeks of respite from the Internet. In the meantime, I make a point of occasionally leaving my house without my phone. Or I drink enough whiskey that I am unable to operate it.

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Lloyd’s mission grew out of her own experience as a child in England. She didn’t just survive abuse and exploitation; she grew up, got herself to America, and took on the system, working to expose the issues that contribute to the crime while empowering girls who got out of “the life.” Her voice and the voices of the girls she works with have helped pushed the United States legal system on the right track toward advocating for minors forced into prostitution instead of criminalizing them. Lloyd talks about how laws are only a small part of the battle, about what pro-sex workers and anti-trafficking advocates both have to learn about the realities of exploitation, and about what we can do for vulnerable kids to make a real difference in their lives.

***

The Rumpus: Your book, Girls Like Us, is memoir—it’s your journey from survival to advocacy—but it’s also a larger look at the crime of commercially sexually exploited children and the psychology of what makes that crime possible. When did you see this as a book? At what point did you say, “I’ve got to put this experience on paper”?

Rachel Lloyd: Honestly, I can remember—there’s a scene in the book where my pimp at the time puts on gloves and dusts the house for prints [and I realize he’s going to kill me]. I remember him smashing my head into the concrete a bunch of times, and thinking, wow, I actually saw stars; that’s like Tom & Jerry. And I remember thinking, weirdly: That’s a good line. If I live through this, I need to write this down. I need to remember this, and I need to write it. I think that was always in my head. And then over the last few years, as I’ve been doing this work and telling my story in a way that is somewhat helpful for other people, I began to think: how can I do this in a way that’s going to reach more people than just the folks who are in the room today?

Rumpus: So your story is powerful in your day-to-day work at GEMS, too. The fact that you’re a survivor is part of what drives your daily work, is that right?

Lloyd: Yeah, I think when I was first talking to a publisher about doing this book, I really did not want to do a memoir. I wanted to do a polemic, actually, because I was really worried about—I feel like I’ve fought very hard to be taken seriously outside of my story, and to be seen as an executive director and an advocate and somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about from a larger systemic perspective and psychological perspectives. It’s very easy as a survivor to get reduced to your story over and over again. So I didn’t want to write about my story; I thought I’ll do that in another book. This book, I really wanted to do a smart book that’s like polemic-y and academic.  And as I sat down to write, I thought: How did I learn about this and what was my journey? And that’s what ended up coming out. I realized I didn’t need to prove that I was smart to people. [laughs] You know what I mean? That was my own shit that I needed to work through. But it was important for me to be able to hold my own, to write the psychological aspects and the historical stuff, and the polemic-y stuff, and the political stuff.

Rumpus: How do you think your relationship to your story helps other girls relate to their own stories?

Lloyd: We work really hard with the girls around this, how to facilitate workshops without ever mentioning your story. We want them to have the skills and not just get pegged into this box of “this is all I’m good at, just reiterating my story over and over again.” With the girls, I run a weekly group. In last night’s group, I said some stuff that was particularly relevant to what a couple of the girls were talking about. But when I’m training law enforcement or when I’m doing advocacy work or whatever, I try not to bring that up all the time, because you want to be seen as a person outside of that, and as a professional. That’s what we teach the girls, that you’re a survivor but you’re more than a survivor. You don’t have to be defined by that.

Rumpus: That’s interesting, because you’ve brought a lot of the girls with you on the legislative journey, too. And that’s a piece that really amazed me reading the book and learning about what you’ve done—that it’s not just about getting out of the life or getting your shit together. That’s great, but you’re empowering these girls beyond where most women are empowered. What’s that like for them? How do the girls feel about stepping out in front of the New York Legislature? What’s that experience like and what does it give to them?

Lloyd: I think on some levels, and particularly in the early years when we were first doing it as a group and trekking up to Albany, I think there were parts that could be really scary. I think, winning Safe Harbor, while it was half the battle—legislation is critical but it’s not the only thing that makes a difference—I think it sent the message to the girls that their voices matter, that they won against a lot of opposition: the D.A.’s office, the criminal justice court and the mayor’s office. It felt at one point like the entire state was against us. Frankly we would go up to Albany and the girls were like, “Oh, it’s all white men in suits.” And I was like, “Yes, let’s talk about that, and why it looks like that, and what power looks like in this country.” It was a civic-participation lesson in action. We had some really, really interesting meetings and conversations. We were in a meeting once with about six people in the room and there was a guy—the only person he would speak to no matter who spoke was the white lawyer in the room. And the other five of us—survivors and women of color—he wouldn’t speak to anyone else in the room. So, as much as the legislative victory was great, in the larger scheme of things having a group of young women—particularly young women of color, particularly low-income young women, who’ve been totally marginalized across the board, not just as girls who’ve been in the life, but just period, right?—having them be the primary advocates on this bill, and then win!? That’s the victory, in and of itself.

Rumpus: That’s amazing, for them to recognize that as their accomplishment.

Lloyd: Last year I went down to DC with one of my young women who was 20, and who’d been part of the Safe Harbor advocacy for years. We were doing a congressional briefing, and, you know, it’s Congress and it’s a big deal and we’re in DC and we’re in the capital. And I’m like, “Are you nervous? We’re a little bit nervous, right?” And she’s like, “No, not really. I’ve been doing this since I was 14.” And I was like, geez! How awesome that it feels normal to her. You know what I mean? There are young people in this country—you know, there are privileged young people, a minority of young people—who feel like, “Oh, I can walk into halls of power and I have the right to say whatever I want.” And here’s this young woman from Brownsville who feels like, “I get to talk to legislators and congress-people!” We ended up going to the White House. We met Biden, and she talked Biden’s ear off. And Obama walked in, and she talked to Obama. She was pretty excited. That experience for her is part of what she’s grown up with now. So I think for a lot of girls—and there’s a group of girls who I think helped blaze the trail—having me along as a survivor and telling my story, and learning what bits to hold back, and how to do this, has been helpful for a lot of the girls. Now I think we’ve got a history and it’s normalized and it’s just kind of what GEMS does.

Rumpus: So you’re a model for them—a survivor who can walk forward into these groups and not have fear, or have fear and do it anyway. There are so many moments in your book that just knocked me out or made me see something through your eyes or through new eyes, or with a better understanding. You wrote about one of the moments when you were in the Oval Office signing ceremonial legislation and a lobbyist insulted you. What was that moment like? What was going on there?

Lloyd: I was so angry and so hurt and taken aback. I mean, it’s the freaking Oval Office! Right? Like, you’ve come a long way, too! We’re all in the Oval Office right now! It’s a big deal for any of us. You know, not every moment in my life am I thinking: Oh, God! Sixteen years ago I was getting smacked in the face by a pimp! I don’t measure my life like that. I enjoy the moments I have. And there has been a fair amount of years. I was just nervous, and there’s Bush, and so you’re thinking, frankly, a bunch of stuff about Bush and the Oval Office, and I’m touching the desk and then I’m like, okay, Obama’s gonna be here! It was 2008 when everyone was very, VERY excited about Obama. So there was just a lot of stuff going through my head, and for him to take it there… We were literally having a very loud whispered argument about seven feet away from the President, and pretty much everyone in the room realized something was going on. I mean, I cried the whole way home.

Rumpus: What was so amazing about it on the other hand was how it showed that you had this new understanding of your boundaries. Whereas sixteen years earlier, you perhaps didn’t know your physical or emotional boundaries, here you are in the most stressful position, and you were like: The hell you will talk to me like that. You know? And that to me was what was really amazing—that you had come that far and nobody was gonna cross that line.

Lloyd: But it hurt. It really did hurt. I mean, it didn’t hurt for weeks. I was able to talk some trash about him within twenty-four hours, and laugh about it. And it makes for a great story in the book. But with the girls, it’s been really important to be able to say and be honest about what you want. Because our leadership and our empowerment isn’t just about being in this movement. It’s whatever you want to do. If you want to be a manager of Macy’s. It’s whatever that leadership looks like for you. And whatever empowerment and economic empowerment looks like in your life. I want them to be able to succeed in whatever they want to do. And not for everybody will that be this movement or this field. And maybe for some girls it will be a certain time period and they’ll move on and do other stuff. And they’ll be a handful of girls who for them this is really what they want to do.

Rumpus: You talk about how you process the way you look back on all this. What were the most difficult parts when you were writing? Were there places that you said, I’m not even going to go there? Or did you feel like you were able to get it all out, and what was that like? How was the writing process in terms of reliving a lot of that psychologically?

Lloyd: I think the two hardest parts were really my mother, and being very thoughtful about what I wanted to put in there. I have a very good relationship with my mother now, in the last few years. And we have worked really, really hard to find healing and peace and forgiveness. I just spoke to her before I talked to you. We talk every day. That’s been a beautiful thing in my life, to have that finally. I did not want to destroy that again. There was stuff I wrote that didn’t end up going in. And I think I was really conscious about—that was probably the area I held back. Because it’s not just about me at that point. It’s about somebody who is alive, and who cares what is said. I tried to be fair and honest. So there was that part. And then the other piece was the Johns piece. That was definitely the hardest to write and the hardest to leave in. Because it’s one thing to talk about, “Oh, I was in the life. Oh, I was sexually exploited. Oh, I’m a survivor.” But what you’re not saying when you say that is, “I had sex and did sexual things with men for money.” There’s something about talking about that part of it that’s really hard. So the thought about, like, who’s going to read this; this will be out there forever. That part was hard. But to not address the demand side, to not address the buyers, would have done such a disservice to the issue, and to the girls. So that’s where you weigh out the larger responsibility to the field and the work, between what you consciously would want to have out there. It was just one of those things I had to suck up. But it’s really hard. Once you put that stuff out there, it’s out there.

Rumpus: That’s what I was thinking, too. People must think, “Oh, she published a book, she’s fine with it!” But it’s still your experience. You lived all those feelings. That’s something you still own.

Lloyd: But then, not, right? You do, and you don’t. There’s a level that you give up when you put a book, any type of memoir, out there. You’re giving up a lot of that right to say, well, this is my stuff. Now people feel like they own it, people feel like they know you in a way that they absolutely don’t. And there’s some good stuff around that. I’m not knocking that people feel like, Oh I had that experience, or something similar, and I feel connected. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s the gift part of it. But then there’s that not-so-cool, weird part of it, too.

Rumpus: Well, that you’re exposed again. It’s like a double exposure.

Lloyd: Yeah.

Rumpus: I also want to talk about one of the aspects of your book that I really connected to. I haven’t lived experiences like yours, but I feel like I recognized a lot of bad boyfriends in your book. And I also have someone very close to me who was raped as a teenager and ran away from home, and luckily didn’t get victimized further—she made her way home. But what really moved me in your book was the idea that girls who end up on the street, girls who end up victimized by a trafficker, they’re really looking for love. They want to be loved. That part of it—the psychological understanding of it, for me, really shifted. People traditionally think of girls who go through this as girls who make bad choices; they’re not very smart, or they’re getting something out of it; they’re getting money out of it. That they should take responsibility for their behavior and they should be punished. But you really illuminate why punishment is a bad idea. And that there’s something going on here where the girls don’t even know they’re victims. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Lloyd: Yeah, there was a point where I was writing and my editor said, “You have to remember, you’re not writing for your girls [at GEMS]. You’re writing for a general audience.” And I said, “That’s the thing: I’m writing for an audience predominantly of women, one in three of whom will have experienced sexual abuse or domestic violence. And if they haven’t, they know someone who has. So, I actually think this is going to translate in a way that maybe you don’t think it will right now.” And it has been incredibly gratifying to be right about that. We’re all on different places on the continuum. Just because we haven’t been exploited in the commercial sex industry doesn’t mean we haven’t been in a situation where some dude was treating us like shit, and we kept going back, or our girlfriend was going through it. We’ve all had those types of experiences, or watched women that we love, or girls that we love go through those experiences. So what’s been really gratifying is to have a lot of women email and say, I didn’t have this experience, but I could see myself in bits of this, or I could see parts of my experience, or I could see how easily given the right set of circumstances when I was 15, 16, if I had met a pimp at that point, I would have totally been in the life because that’s what I was looking for.

Writing the book, I was very, very conscious about women. Because if it’s just my story—I mean, there are other books about women being in the life or whatever. Other than memoir. There are lots of memoirs, period. Just writing a memoir about my experience frankly isn’t that illuminating to people. But I’m responsible for what I put out there about girls. My whole career has been about getting people to see our young women—who are awesome and precious and wonderful—to see them as real people, people, girls who are looking for love and ultimately how deep their desire for family is.

Rumpus: That seems enormously important: the role and responsibility of family in a child’s life.

Lloyd: We were just in group last night and one of the girls was saying, “…and that’s why I went with him. Because I thought for the first time that I was important to somebody. Somebody actually cared about me.” That’s a story we hear over and over and over again. I think people can relate to that. That need. Particularly when you’re a young person. Particularly when you’re a teenager who hasn’t experienced that from family and a support system. That idea that girls are just lazy or they want designer clothes [laughs]—all these bullshit ideas people have about girls and young women in the life, when it really comes down to some very, very basic, core needs that all of us have. That hopefully are being met in really healthy ways, or even semi-healthy ways—but for the girls we serve are being met in these incredibly distorted, fucked-up, exploitive ways. But they’re being met. That’s the thing. That’s why you stay—because it does feel like an approximation of love. Do you know what I mean? If you don’t know what love looks like, well, this shit is as close as I’ve ever gotten.

Rumpus: Right, and a sense of belonging.

Lloyd: And of being good at something. And being validated for being good at something. And having attention. And freedom, but not really freedom. All these things that are packaged in normal basic human needs, that pimps and exploiters take total advantage of, and twist into something else.

Rumpus: I was amazed, a few weeks ago, there was a profile of a woman in the New York Times, who is a 52-year-old prostitute.

Lloyd: Oh yeah, I saw that.

Rumpus: Which was a beautiful character profile. It was so respectful. I loved that. But there was a quote where she said, “I never worked for a pimp for protection.” And that really struck a strange chord with me—the idea that she would describe a pimp as someone who protects you. Because my first immersion into the trafficker mind was your book. So there is a sense that pimps are perceived as protectors, and maybe in that world they protect you to some extent, but it’s not for your own protection. What was your reaction?

Lloyd: There were a lot of people who were like, You’ve got to respond to this article! It was an individual character profile. Can I come back at her and say, “Sweetheart, honestly, I know that this is not the way that you are portraying it”? Can I, in fairness, put that out there? Absolutely not. That’s disempowering. That’s one of the challenges in the anti-trafficking movement; I see us more as a girls’ empowerment organization than an anti-trafficking organization. I think that’s one of the challenges between the pro-sex-work community and the anti-trafficking abolitionist folks, not always being able to respect people’s individual experiences.

Rumpus: We have a lot of people who are sex workers who read and contribute to our site. We have a columnist, Antonia Crane, who’s amazing, and she’s been an adult sex worker, and our editor-in-chief Stephen Elliott is a former sex worker. So I’m curious if you could talk about the difference between the idea of sex work as empowerment and ownership of your body and choice, versus trafficking, which is obviously not choice. I wonder how one thing influences the other, or if you feel like they’re more disconnected.

Lloyd: Yeah, I’m happy to talk about that, and I talked about it a little bit in the book. I think there are some real challenges in finding common ground around this. And I am very careful. Are there women for whom the experience looks empowering? Yes. Can I argue with that? No. I think that’s where we as—I’ll put myself in the abolitionist, prostitution-is-violence crowd, movement—I think that’s where we can end up doing ourselves a disservice, and shutting people down. Because if somebody gets up and says, “I’m a sex worker and this is empowering for me.” And we’re like, “NO IT’S NOT!” You can’t argue with somebody’s individual experience, can you? You can say, “Maybe that’s true for you. Here’s the vast majority of women for whom this is not true.” And I think that’s the challenge. And on the flip side, I’ve seen sex work advocates absolutely dismiss the idea that there are underage girls involved. The amount of pimps that might be involved. The amount of violence that might be involved. That’s not helping the issue either, being so intent that everybody’s empowered—hell no they’re not. The vast majority of women who talk about sex work in an empowering way are generally not low-income, women of color, women for whom this was the only option. And that’s the thing: if you’ve got other options when you get in, then you’ve got other options to leave. It doesn’t look like that. We don’t quantify this just as: it’s bad if a pimp is involved and if it’s trafficking. If I’ve got a 19-year-old girl or a 23-year-old young woman who is working in a club and she grew up in foster care, and she was abused by her family, and maybe she had a pimp for a couple of years, and now she doesn’t, and she’s been homeless, and she’s got a kid, and she can’t afford child care, and there’s no affordable housing in New York, and then—this is not empowerment. Even though she’s not being trafficked, the industry is still exploiting her. To me, that’s the reality of who ends up in the industry. The numbers. Sex work advocates can argue about numbers and we can all go back and forth on that. And I don’t think the anti-trafficking movement has always helped itself in terms of some of the numbers we’ve put out there, or the way the issue gets presented. There’s been enough studies that talk about the links between prior sexual abuse and entry into the sex industry. The amount of women who end up in the sex industry who were sexually abused prior to entry. Who grew up in domestic violence households or substance abuse households. Trauma in childhood, and then you end up in the sex industry. I mean, if 80 percent of writers were sexually abused as children, we’d be like, “Whoa! That’s a high correlation! There’s something about the writing field that is really damaging!” But we can’t say that about the sex industry? That’s problematic. The sex industry does not make its money and do well, and stay a billion dollar industry off of a bunch of adult, college-educated, empowered white middle-class women. It doesn’t. That’s not how it’s able to sustain its billion-dollar industry worldwide. It’s making its money off the backs of girls from Brownsville who were in the foster care system. And women who live in Hunt’s Point who are drug-addicted. And women in Calcutta who were sold when they were twelve. And women in the Ukraine who have absolutely no other options. That’s who’s being impacted globally. Are there a handful of women for whom this looks different? Cool, great. Let’s not argue with you. Let’s talk about the systemic issues of poverty and racism and classism and sexual abuse and family abuse and all the things that make young people and adult women—unaffordable housing and childcare and lack of education and inequity—all the shit that makes people vulnerable.

Rumpus: It can feel overwhelming to people, and it’s true. I feel like you’re hitting right at the center of it: it’s the choices you have that can protect you from exploitation. One of the things I felt right when I closed your book was: I want to do something. But I didn’t know what to do. I can give a donation. I can interview you—and I feel lucky that I have a platform where I can do that. What do you recommend when the average person says to you, “How can I even touch this? How can I even do something small to make a difference, or what if I wanted to do something big?” What do you tell people?

Lloyd: I think there are a million ways that people can get involved. People can feel very overwhelmed by the scope of the issue, and then feel like there definitely isn’t a way that they can do anything. What we’ve seen over the years, especially if you’ve seen our documentary Very Young Girls—about 4 million people have seen it, which is unbelievable—is that people just begin to have a different perspective, and share that perspective.

Whether it’s encouraging people to read the book, watch the film, talk about it, change their language about it. We have seen in the last few years—and I’m not saying that GEMS has been solely responsible for this, but I know that we’ve played a big part in watching people begin to change their language, change their perceptions. People read an article in the news now that’s like Teen Hookers! and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to write a letter to the editor because that’s not really a helpful way of talking about girls in life and that’s not accurate.” Seeing examples of the glorification of pimp culture and people actually standing up to that. People downplay how important just awareness and conversation and dialogue and changing perception is. Any social justice movement in this country or globally—we can do legislation and we can do programs—but the big piece is really about social change. If you think about, like, drunk driving and just how different our perspective was 30, 40 years ago. And now, on New Year’s Eve, on Facebook all these people are like, don’t drink and drive! Don’t drink and drive!

Rumpus: Right, that they even care to say something.

Lloyd: And people will take people’s keys, and encourage people to get in cabs. I mean, have we ended it? No. But people see it very differently socially now. So I think we’re beginning to get there with this issue. I mean we’ve got a long way to go. I think figuring out what’s happening in your local community around women and girls is important. A lot of people come to us, like, “I want to work with a trafficked child!” Okay, well, not everybody’s going to get to do that. But it would be awesome, too, if you were figuring out where in your community there might be girls—like, prior to [harm] happening to them—that you could have an impact on them so maybe that doesn’t happen to them. Mentoring. Big Brother, Big Sister. Thinking about ways that you can be a supportive, healthy, consistent adult in the life of a young person. If we’re saying that that’s what the vast majority of what young people are looking for—which is true—then how do we offset that by providing options for consistency and love and support for young people in our communities? How do you help people begin to make connections between this and other social justice issues? If you are an anti-poverty activist or if you are involved in education reform or child welfare reform or community revitalization or whatever that looks like—how do you begin to tie this issue back in, and help people see all of this as being interconnected? This isn’t what has happened in the anti-trafficking movement in the last couple years—it’s quite frankly a sensationalized perspective of this, that it’s very much, “Bad man! Poor little girls!”

Rumpus: Right, that’s so true.

Lloyd: And that’s helpful for getting people’s attention, but not much more than that. So being able to help people see this as the heart of much larger systemic issues, and then working on those things. If you’re working on anti-poverty efforts, you’re working against the commercial sexual exploitation of children. Do you know what I mean? You don’t have to go out and rescue a trafficking victim to have an impact on young people and young women and the lives of folks who are exploited and marginalized.

Rumpus: Absolutely. It’s very encouraging.

Lloyd: Talking to men about this issue, and sharing the book with men in your life. Having conversations with men about “Have you ever bought sex?” “What are your reflections on that experience?” “What do you think that experience was like for the other person?” These are hard conversations to have, but critical. Talking to your boys and sons and young men in your life about what they’re seeing in the media in terms of women’s bodies and intimacy and masculinity and gender equity and all those things. That’s how we raise healthy young men to see women as equals and not see them as dogs to be purchased.

Rumpus: I have two sons, and my big thing was talking to my teenage son about what consent means. Just consent. And this started with another New York Times story about a really young girl in Texas who was raped. And it blew my mind that lot of young guys don’t know what it means for a girl to say yes or no. And why that’s so incredibly important. I treasure your perspective—it helps me as a parent. And your book made me feel like raising a stable family is an act of advocacy.

Lloyd: It is, right? It is, if we were all doing that, or even if you’re not a parent. If you’re finding young people who you can support and love and pour into and tell them how awesome they are every day. And for somebody who isn’t going to be as vulnerable, to just keep on showing up and doing the same thing. Healthy young people come from healthy families and healthy communities. I think if we just focus on legislation and “Let’s arrest the pimps!” it just becomes, “Oh my God! Slavery!” We lose the common sense stuff around this issue.

Rumpus: Rachel, I can’t thank you enough. You’re my superhero. I just want you to know that.

Lloyd: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Rachel Lloyd’s book, Girls Like Us, is available in hardcover and paperback.

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The media provided rationale for the latter point of view. In the New York Times, David Brooks chided those who would dare claim that they might have acted more conscionably than Paterno did. In his article, “Let’s All Feel Superior,” he cited history—“the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods”—and psychology—“Normalcy Bias” and “Motivated Bias”—to underscore the idea that there is a “pattern” to our “natural tendency to evade and self-deceive.”

And in Men’s Health magazine, Bill Phillips surveyed a forensic psychiatrist and psychiatry scholar to make his gender-biased argument that men are doomed to fail when it’s time to face and take responsibility for facts as glaring as a child rape happening under their watch. Like Brooks, he called up the “Motivated Bias,” added “cognitive dissonance” and the whopping generality that “humans are programmed to not question authority”—especially men, he added, when they are in hierarchical positions. He quotes an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, William Pollack, PhD, who explains, “Men are still socialized to not show vulnerability,” which should explain why McQueary and Paterno might not have wanted to appear to be “overreacting” by reporting the rape.

Phillips asks the inevitable question set up by his column: “Since men seem more predisposed to protect each other and their organizations (see ‘Church, Roman Catholic’), I wondered if a powerful woman might have reacted differently.”

I’d rather not think of moral decision-making as a gender issue, even if it gives me a (false) advantage. And I would need the heft of many more psychiatrists to weigh in before I’d ever agree to the idea that all men are categorically prone to bad judgment in positions of authority. If this were true, no law could even hope to hold them responsible for their actions. And I know too many men whose judgment I admire, even in the worst situations. Paterno and McQueary are two men for whom the lowest psychological explanations happen to fit. There are men in similar positions who have done better (see below).

When we run the hypotheticals, it’s not gender that we test; it’s empathy. When people say, “What if it had been your child?” or “What if you had been in charge?” the question is straightforward: Can you imagine yourself in this situation? How much can you empathize? And if you can empathize at all, what action would you take? Of the apologists’ analyses—Brooks’ and Phillips’—of Paterno’s non-action, this was the one word missing from their arguments: empathy.

Whether or not we can empathize, there is the sense within the debate that the moment of opportunity—in Sandusky’s case at least—has come and gone. The crime is over; we speak in hypotheticals because we were not there. We were not, are not, Paterno. We have no proximity to the crime; it is past.

But is it? Sandusky’s crime is but a sliver of what continues to happen to children and women around the world, and in our own cities, every day. And how important is proximity? We know that even when the crime happened in Paterno’s local locker room it wasn’t enough to motivate him to intervene. So, whether the crime is in front of us or thousands of miles away, the same hypothetical questions apply: what should we do if we hear that someone has been raped? A boy or a girl? A man or a woman? How far does our empathy or responsibility or potential effectiveness extend? Would we do the right thing?

To Bill Phillips’ credit, when I finally came across a story about someone doing the right thing, it was about not one but six women, and two men. “The Long Night” is Paul Hond’s cover article in this month’s Columbia Magazine, which begins with a woman who—like McQueary—found herself in an awful place at the right time. Katherine Bolkovac was a United Nations Peacekeeper in Bosnia—a former police officer and mother from Nebraska—who uncovered a sex trafficking scandal within the ranks of the UN. Hond writes:

UN monitors, including some DynCorp employees, were not only patronizing the hundreds of brothels that had sprung up around the peacekeeping presence in Bosnia, but were buying, selling, and transporting women and girls, most of whom came from the former Soviet Union. When Bolkovac reported the problem to her superiors in the UN International Police Task Force (IPTF), she was told to back off — no joke in a part of the world where accidents could happen. Military commanders removed her case files. But Bolkovac kept pressing. In 2000, the UN relieved Bolkovac of her duties, after which DynCorp fired her for allegedly falsifying her time sheets.

Madeleine Rees, head of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bosnia, learned of Bolkovac’s story and in 2001 told Tanya Domi, a former employee of the State Department there. That June, writes Hond, Domi published an article exposing the scandal in the Bosnian paper Oslobodjenje (reprinted in English here).

Bolkovac went on to write a book about her experience, The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman’s Fight for Justice, which was made into a movie by Larysa Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan, released this past August. To avoid a “sensationalized account,” the movie played down the violence committed against the girls and raised their ages; in reality the girls were as young as 11 or 12 years old. Still, writes Hond, Stephen Holden called the movie “a story so repellent that it is almost beyond belief.”

Upon learning about the film, the United Nations, like Paterno, considered turning a blind eye. Hond quotes an extraordinary correspondence between Kondracki and the Secretary-General of the UN, in which she insists that they screen the film and take transparent and corrective action. Like Sandusky’s alleged rapes, the UN peacekeepers’ crimes were “committed by the very people who were meant to protect the innocent,” wrote Kondracki. Ultimately, under pressure, the UN’s response was to screen the film for staff as well as member states, and “embrace the challenge that [Kondracki’s] film places before the United Nations.”

For most of us, it may be easy to think that these foreign victims were unfortunate strangers in a faraway land during a violent war—people about whom we could speak hypothetically. But Hond’s article looks close up at the sex trafficking industry in New York City itself, and the social worker, Faith Huckel, who began an nonprofit in 2008 to support foreign-born victims of sex trafficking in New York called Restore NYC, and in 2010 opened a shelter where they could recover. Huckel described to Hond the women who came to her shelter:

These are cases where girls were trafficked at 16, worked six years in New York in a room, were raped 20 or 30 times a day, were forced to have multiple abortions, had sexually transmitted diseases and complications, had probably attempted suicide. The list goes on.

With new estimates of human trafficking reaching upwards of ten thousand in New York State alone, Huckel’s advocacy is just one model for what the rest of the world—with sex trafficking estimates in the millions—would do well to adopt. But to most people, the problem seems too big to tackle, or too risky to confront (as it was for Bolcovak, who risked her life). Or we have lost faith in leaders we would depend on to take decisive action. Or the victims are so far away; they are not our children; we didn’t do it; it’s not our fault. We suffer cognitive dissonance about our leaders. We have “Motivated Bias” or “Normalcy Bias” or we just want to get on with our regular lives. Or we just don’t know what to do.

Hond’s article is not just about women who do the right thing. One of them is a man, Siddharth Kara, who spent two months volunteering in a Slovenian refugee camp in the mid 90s. Over and over he heard stories of Bosnian soldiers systematically raping women and girls and trafficking them across Europe. Back in the states, Hond writes, “Kara decided that his own advantages and abilities required him to dig deeper.” He spent the next several years researching and writing his book, Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.

The other man is Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations, who has taken the right first step by screening the film, but who still has an enormous amount of work to do to make his organization not only accountable but effective against international sex trafficking.

I was so inspired by Hond’s article about these people—Bolcovak, Domi, Rees, Kondracki, Kirwan, Huckel and Kara. What moved me the most was that, of the seven of them, only Bolcovak was motivated to act because of being a direct eyewitness to crime. The rest were more like Paterno—individuals who were told of wrongdoing and placed in the position to decide whether or not to do something about it. But, unlike Paterno, they were not all in positions of relative authority—they had far less authority than him, if they had any at all, and yet did far more. Nor did they all have proximity to the crime—some were halfway around the world. Yet, they applied their passion, or their disgust, or both. They did what people often do when told of atrocity: They empathized. They acted. They exerted whatever talents they had to expose or improve the situation.

Their stories made me think about all the hypotheticals in the arguments that have gone down all over the Internet and at bars and across dining tables in the past few weeks: What would you do? Only the question changes slightly, when we consider that thousands of children around the world are still being kidnapped, sold and raped every day—not just in foreign countries, but here in America. So the question is not what would we do, but what will we do? When you and I hear that people just like Sandusky regularly exploiting and victimizing the most vulnerable children, what is the imperative? And by all of this I mean that the moral imperative is not on Paterno any more than it is on each one of us: Now that we know, what will we do? It is difficult; it is burdensome; it’s none of our business. Perhaps we think and speak in hypotheticals not so much to enlighten us about our highest potential, but to shield ourselves from it.

Like Sandusky’s alleged victims, the victims of sex trafficking are poor, vulnerable and sometimes tricked into situations from which they cannot escape. In dramatically increasing numbers, they are also American. In Oakland, California, where one in four children lives in poverty, youth sex trafficking has taken hold.  An eight-part series in Oakland Local takes a close look at how kids end up being sold, abused and exploited by sex traffickers, and how the system has so far failed them.

Beside the straightforward gesture of reporting known crime to the police, it may be hard to know what to do, where to go, or whether we have the right training or expertise to help. I asked Mary Lynn Fitton, founder of The Art of Yoga Project—a nonprofit that provides yoga along with therapeutic creative and character development to young girls who are incarcerated or recovering from sex trafficking—what she would recommend for people who want to help but may not know how, or may not feel they are qualified. Fitton says:

“It’s true that special training is required to work directly with these children. But so much is needed to support that work. Anyone with any level or even no level of expertise can be an advocate for children who are sexually exploited. And the truth is, everyone needs to be. That may begin with reading and educating yourself, and talking to people you know. You can give money, even a small amount, because all these advocacy organizations need money to do what they do. Or you can volunteer any talents you may have to support fundraising activities—or host your own fundraiser. You can write letters to your local representatives, and you can vote. Every single action makes a difference.”

The Sandusky case pulls back the curtain on all kids who, like his alleged victims, become sexually victimized and exploited because of their poverty. It exposes how easily such crimes are committed, and how poorly they are prevented and punished. And it exposes how all of us, even as we may side against Paterno’s horrendous irresponsibility as a man who could have made a difference but didn’t, share a similar responsibility. What will you do? Anything, even a single step to better understand the nature of the crime, the statistics, what to look for, and what can be done. It’s not hypothetical.

Here’s a list of resources. If you know of others, please add them in the comments section below.

Take action to fight youth sex trafficking in Oakland and across the U.S.

California Against Slavery (important 2012 ballot initiative)

Polaris Project (sex trafficking tip hotline: 1-888-3737-888)

MISSEY: Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth

The Art of Yoga Project

SAGE SF: Standing Against Global Exploitation

Restore NYC

GEMS: Girls Educational and Mentoring Services

Safe Horizon

The Protection Project

Amnesty International U.S.A: Stop Violence Against Women

Coalition Against Trafficking in Women

Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking

Human Rights Watch Campaign Against the Trafficking of Women and Girls

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Lewis’s new bride was killed instantly, and he lost one-third of the right side of his brain, some of his vision, his ability to organize his memories chronologically, and his Hollywood career just when it had skyrocketed. Sixteen years later, to listen to Lewis’s clear British accent and see his blue-eyed, beatific expression—which you can do thanks to the Atavist.net’s multimedia platform—you’d never know what the man had been through. So, he’s finally ready to pick up where he left off in Hollywood. Colin holds Lewis’s ambition up against his trauma, and makes us wonder where the scale tips between the creative limitations he has acquired, and the ones he has shed.

Blindsight marks a foray into new media, even for an author like Colin who has reported on everything from George Bush’s pool boy, Slovenian ethnic cleansing and chimpanzee filmmakers, to solitary confinement, the Yelpification of the universe and mysterious scraps of paper, in publications like the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, McSweeney’s Quarterly and several anthologies. An early writer and editor for Salon.com, Colin also penned the long-running “On the Job” column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s the award-winning author of What Really Happened to the Class of ‘93.

***

The Rumpus: Neurologically speaking, Lewis is something of a wunderkind. What is this condition called “blindsight”? It doesn’t sound like something a visual artist would want to be afflicted with.

Chris Colin: One day during Simon Lewis’s recovery he walked into a tree. His mother took him to a developmental optometrist, who observed something extremely rare and, to my mind, ridiculously otherworldly: Lewis is indeed partly blind, and if you hold up a piece of paper in his blind area, he won’t see it. But if you later ask him what color the paper is, he’ll get it right. To Lewis it would feel like he’s guessing. In fact that visual information has bypassed his conscious mind and taken an obscure alternate route to his subconscious.

Rumpus: That’s just freaky. I mean, what do optometrists really know about the subconscious? What do any of us really know about it?

Colin: I spent a lot of time thinking about what the subconscious is—it’s relatively new terrain, medically speaking. One way to conceptualize it is to think about those times when you’re driving, and you realize you haven’t consciously noticed the road for the last ten minutes. Your subconscious was at the wheel while your conscious mind was thinking about the dumb joke you made at dinner. It’s an occasional and glancing state for us. Ask Lewis and he’ll say his subconscious never leaves the driver’s seat.

Rumpus: Which is terrifying, if we apply that state of mind to the driver who hit him (and ran). How did Lewis come back from that, psychologically? What motivated him?

Colin: I sometimes wonder if the question of what Simon Lewis wants lost all meaning the moment a ’78 Chevy ripped across Beverly Boulevard at 75 miles per hour and made him a widower—one with a pulverized body and a hefty chunk of brain destroyed. You and I tend to relate to the world in terms of what we want and don’t want. Lewis got bumped to a different plane entirely that night, I came to see, where he’s motivated by other forces entirely.

Rumpus: But those forces were probably at work long before his accident, right? In Blindsight you write that he did his own film adaptation of Macbeth when he was 12, later produced the movie C.H.U.D. 2: Bud the CHUD, and then went on to help make Look Who’s Talking, the 1989 blockbuster that buried all the other films that came out that year and broke box office records. His past would seem to promise that he could overcome anything. Do you think he sees it that way?

Colin: He’s a ridiculously competent and intelligent guy. But of course back then he was working within the system. He’s now an outsider on a dozen levels. But not once have I ever seen him hesitate. I never heard him grumble about having to be driven across town by his mother, or having to work ten times as hard to find the right word or memory in his new mind. I think he believes all things are possible, almost on a molecular level. Like, when you’re a kid and you learn that everything is just atoms, and theoretically you could walk through a wall if they’d just spread out a bit.

Rumpus: At what point in his recovery did he decide to return to filmmaking?

Colin: In those sixteen years, Lewis went from not remembering his own name to reading quantum physics for kicks. I got to know him in 2010, and that’s when he told me he wanted to get back into making movies. He wanted to make substantive ones—but not because he had a new sense of mortality or anything obvious like that. It’s because a chunk of his brain became putty, and brain putty has ideas all its own. He no longer possessed the operating system that helped make C.H.U.D. 2: Bud the C.H.U.D.

The touching thing, to me, was that he had dual reasons for wanting to get back into filmmaking. Partly he has this wild new sensibility that wants expression. But on another level he just wants to work. I found that weirdly poignant. You go through this profound transformation, get rebuilt down to the studs, come to occupy this extraordinary new perch in the universe—and part of you still just wants to clock in somewhere each morning. It’s very human, I think.

Rumpus: I had this feeling while reading that I didn’t want to see that new part of him corrupted by what he would have to become to renew his Hollywood success. And right at that moment, in your story, you reveal that Lewis has a doppelganger of sorts. This blew my mind. What was it like for you as a writer, when you first discovered this double?

Colin: Well into my reporting for this piece it just got full-on bizarre when I stumbled upon something of a parallel universe. I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll just say, imagine you’re writing a book about, say, Gary Coleman, and one day you open the paper to find that some other Gary Coleman exists, but sort of a superior one. He’s even shorter, and he says “What’choo talkin’ ’bout?” even more often, and when he pouts it’s even cuter. What does that mean for your book, and what does that mean for Gary Coleman no. 1? Anyway that’s sort of what happened three-quarters into my thing, metaphorically speaking. The ol’ Gary Colemans problem.

Rumpus: That would have been a very special episode. You open Blindsight saying, “This is a Hollywood story…”  Yet, your telling of it dismantles the Hollywood formula so well. Does Lewis still think in those terms? He’s obviously accomplished and survived more than many people ever will, but is he still waiting for his own act three?

Colin: The whole Hollywood aspect of this story was very hall-of-mirrors-y. Here was a Hollywood producer who wanted to get away from Hollywood movies—but in a way his story was very Hollywood. Tragedy. Coma. The unlikely comeback. And then, just when I would’ve appreciated a handy and tidy ending, things just got terrifically ambivalent. If this story ever gets made into a movie (Harvey: CALL ME), at least forty snakes will instantly start eating their own tails.

Rumpus: I was fascinated by the photograph of Lewis’s scar: the three-sided rectangle on the side of his head that looks an awful lot like a drawbridge that opens into a castle. Do you think Lewis treasures, in any way, the mind he has now?

Colin: Yes, but with an asterisk. The asterisk is that he treasures everything now. During our time together he often told me he was the happiest person in the world. It was strange for me, because I always had this theory that, in real life, people don’t actually achieve lasting perspective through big life changes. We’ll undergo our traumas or miracles and pledge never to lose sight again of what really matters. But then we’re the same old dope, getting annoyed about a traffic jam. But in Lewis’s case, the perspective stuck. He told me he doesn’t think he’s been mad in 17 years. And I don’t know many people who have more right to anger than him.

Rumpus: Thinking of non-formulaic movies that really intrigued, or perhaps just stumped, audiences–like Terrance Malick’s Tree of Life, or, say, the last 40 minutes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey–it seems like there’s at least some precedent for outwitting the Hollywood formula. What films does Lewis watch? What inspires him?

Simon Lewis

Colin: He does love 2001. But he can also find levels of meaning in schlock, even if he doesn’t want to make it himself. He’s utterly without pretension in this sense. But what inspires him these days is just as often watching the trees behind his parents’ house grow. I love that—though I’d be lying if I said I wanted to see Pine Tree: The Movie. Luckily Hollywood seems to have drilled into him the requirement for drama, action, characterization, all that. Abstract as he can get, I don’t think he’d be happy making Warhol-type films any more than C.H.U.D. III.

Rumpus: The multimedia aspect of this Atavist piece is pretty remarkable. All the film clips, the images of Lewis, of his late wife, etc, so enrich this piece that I couldn’t help but wonder how, as a writer, you might change what you’re setting out to do from the outset. There would be details that you wouldn’t have to bring to life strictly with your words, yet the piece works seamlessly because it brings us so much detail. How was it different to work on a piece like this?

Colin: The multimedia stuff is great. I don’t really see the point of being a text-only purist—I’d also have to be a vinyl purist, and a film camera purist, and a pre- ’65 Dylan purist, and I’d have to jump off the purest bridge from the sheer tediousness of it all. So yeah, multimedia.

But from a writing perspective, one of the funnest parts about working with the Atavist is this new length they’ve staked out: longer than a magazine article, shorter than a book. It sounds like a finicky little distinction but in practice it allows for a certain kind of story to be told that otherwise would get squished into something more formulaic, or bloated out to a length it can’t support. The twists and turns and weirdness of this tale were Atavist-dependent.

Rumpus: You wrote this piece over a period of about a year, after you first discovered Lewis through a feature you wrote for the New York Times about legally blind artists. How many visits did you make with him? And how were your interviews impacted by his neurological conditions?

Colin: Lewis lives in Los Angeles, and I went down there for two extended periods over that year, and basically became a fulltime fly on his wall, as well as a fly that drove us all over Sherman Oaks, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. And of course we also talked on the phone for, I don’t know, a hundred hours when I was elsewhere. The first thing you notice about Lewis is how astoundingly unaffected he appears, physically, by all he went through. (Also, I’m convinced that a certain species of British accent can make a category-5 hurricane seem okay.)

But it wasn’t long before I started to notice the effects of those conditions. His ideas sprawl: A question about where he was born could lead directly to a very lovely soliloquy on the nature of consciousness or the flow of time and soon it’s been twenty minutes and I’m enthralled—but don’t know where he was born. As a reporter I was half the time scribbling pages of notes, half the time sheep-dogging him toward more traditional answers.

Rumpus: What do you think will happen to Simon Lewis?

Colin: I really, really don’t know. I find solace in the joy he brings wherever he goes. But at the heart of this story is a deep ambiguity. In a way I came to see it dovetailing with the ambiguity inherent to traumatic brain injury. Listen to an astrophysicist talk. Then listen to someone missing a big chunk of his or her brain. The similarities can be striking. Genius and eccentricity and fantasy and madness have a distinct and uncomfortable overlap, and which one you see in a given situation—and how the world responds to that thing—probably determines what you predict for Simon Lewis’s future.

***

You can read an excerpt of Blindsight at TheAtlantic.com.

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In a fantastic article over at io9.com, librarian, pulp fiction historian and comic book annotator Jess Nevins notes that this shortage is surprising, because “the first significant fictional mad scientist was a woman.” Nevins surveys the history of female mad scientists in literature, theater, comic books and reality, makes some fascinating discoveries and considers how these diabolical women stack up to their male counterparts.

From Nevins’ “incomplete” (but seemingly exhaustive) list, it’s hard to choose a favorite. There’s George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff (1893-1894), who, in her attempt to overthrow a world-ruling master race of Aerians, “builds a supersubmarine and a fleet of airships, drugs two high-ranking Aerians and Khalid (a powerful Muslim ruler) and makes all of them her mind-controlled lovers, and fights a number of bloody, losing battles against the Aerians.” Awesome. But she’s rivaled by the real-life exploits of Dr. Louise G. Robinovitch, who was known, according to a 1908 article in the New York Times, to “Use Electricity to Reinstill Life.” Robinovitch might have brought a dead rabbit back to life, and maybe a dead woman, too. The evidence was a little sketchy.

Nevins portrays the inequities between male and female mad scientists in fiction, then concludes that, since Whitley Streiber’s novel The Hunger was released in 1981, “the female mad scientist was used in a serious manner, and since then the female mad scientist has been allowed the variation in character and seriousness that the male mad scientists have always had.” Hopefully the realm of sane science is not so far behind.

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Though the installation closed on May 8, it’s set to return soon. Keep an eye on the Bay Citizen blog for info on dates and times.

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Forget social networking and privacy fines. Sean Patrick Cooper breaks the real news over at Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Will you be invited?

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The judges are keeping his name on the list anyway.

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