Because I Was a Girl

by Melissa de la Cruz

  The story was about North Carolina’s dubious new restrictive voting laws. The joke of the piece was to expose these laws not as racist, as most critics were calling them, but rather as “Democratist,” or intended to hurt all Democrats (it was a term we coined). Our comedic solution was to level the playing field (off of a John Lewis sound bite that we conveniently misinterpreted) by making it more difficult for Republicans to vote as well. For one of the jokes to work (in which we call on Democrats to limit Republican votes by moving voting booths to Planned Parenthoods), we needed an establishing shot of a Planned Parenthood, under which the correspondent (let’s call him Aasif) would post a sign that read “Vote Here.” Our schedule was tight—we had been running around all day looking for locations, and we had to get them all before our flight that evening. So we were overjoyed when we learned there was a Planned Parenthood nearby in Asheville.

  As we rolled up to the clinic, I saw a few pairs of eyes poking out of the blinds. I ran inside to assure the staff we weren’t doing anything shady. I walked up to the receptionist and repeated my standard script: “Hi, we’re with The Daily Show. Is it cool if we film an establishing shot—”

  “We know who you are,” she said before I could even finish my sentence. “We’re fans. We just want you to know that someone just threw a bag on our steps, and the bomb squad is on their way to make sure it’s not explosive.”

  My heart stopped. I froze, unsure what to do. Then I remembered my boss’s directive: “be more aggressive.” I raced outside and assessed the situation. It didn’t look like a bomb (I later learned it was actually a bag full of shit, literally), Aasif was already in position, and the shot would take only a second to grab.

  “Roll tape!” I calmly instructed the DP at the top of my lungs. We shot one take, and then I told everyone to quickly run to the van, and we got the heck out of there. As we drove away, the bomb squad rolled up, and the crew suddenly understood why I hadn’t insisted on multiple takes. Thankfully, no one was even remotely upset that I might have put their lives or limbs in danger. (Okay, Aasif was a little annoyed.)

  When I looked over the footage in the van, I saw that we had gotten the shot!

  The piece turned out great. It actually ended up going viral, and my bosses were thrilled. A year later, a judge even cited our segment in a court ruling to overturn the state’s unconstitutional voter ID laws.

  That segment was a turning point for my career at the show. I worked at The Daily Show for two more years and produced a lot of great segments. I learned to be more assertive out of the gate when making first impressions with a new crew. I also discovered that I could use being female to my advantage. A lot of people I encountered in the field (more often than not, men) seemed to find women less threatening than men. As a result, I was able to gain access to people and places my male colleagues might not have been able to. I’m not sure how that makes me feel—I can be all kinds of threatening—but I was sure happy to get the shots and interviews. Never again would I put my crew in danger for the sake of a joke, but the experience did teach me to have confidence in my skills and instincts as a producer … and to always remember to donate to Planned Parenthood.

  TV PERSONALITY AND PRODUCER, SPEAKER, AND STEM ADVOCATE

  EMILY CALANDRELLI

  I was an afterthought.

  When I walked into a room of professional scientists and engineers, they addressed my male field producer first. They introduced themselves to my cameraman first. They showed off their fancy spacecraft to our audio guy before including me in the conversation. I was the host of the show—the girl in four pounds of makeup and three-inch heels. But I was an afterthought, sometimes ignored entirely. They didn’t realize that I was the only one in the group who had spent years learning about ion propulsion, lunar-lander technology, and different ways to design a rover’s wheel to make it survive harsh Martian conditions.

  It wasn’t until I started asking about their technology with questions only a person who had studied nearly a decade in the field would be able to ask that they paid attention to me. Even then, I was once asked if the male engineers in the room fed me my technical questions. I would think, If I were a tall, burly man, would you have made that same assumption?

  I was told that it was my own fault that I was ignored. I wasn’t “assertive enough” when I entered a room; I needed to “be more confident.”

  The worst feeling would come on shoots when men would say, “Well, you certainly don’t look like an engineer!” Meant as a compliment, I would instead hear, “You pay attention to hair, makeup, and girly things. You couldn’t possibly have the brain capacity or interest to focus on science, too.”

  I’m not saying these sorts of things were intentional. I believe they are the result of subconscious bias or, hey, maybe even social awkwardness! Perhaps the men were merely intimidated by my fabulous fake eyelashes. Experiences like these didn’t happen on every shoot. In fact, it didn’t happen most of the time. It never happened with my female experts, and I’d met a few male self-proclaimed feminists, who treated me as an equal. But every time one of these things did happen, it was a hurdle to overcome for the day, and something that would stay with me long after the shoot.

  Then something funny happened. These sexist interactions started happening less and less. I suspect it was because the show started to do well. It got picked up season after season, and it won a few national awards for science education along the way. Instead of crafting pitches to persuade companies to film with us, businesses were reaching out to me requesting to be included in the next season. We’d created a science show with a solid reputation, and people were paying attention.

  Our show’s reputation, and my reputation as the host, preceded us. My interview subjects would kindly ask about my time at MIT, my TEDx talk on space exploration, and my thoughts on searching for life beyond Earth. I was no longer an afterthought. I was seen as an individual with a genuine interest and basic understanding of science and space, someone whose voice mattered.

  The experts began to look me in the eyes and include me in the conversation. They described their technology to me and stopped doubting the origin of my questions. All this happened … and I didn’t even have to change the way I entered the room. I walked, talked, and introduced myself just as I had done before.

  * * *

  THEY DIDN'T REALIZE THAT I WAS THE ONLY ONE IN THE GROUP WHO HAD SPENT YEARS LEARNING ABOUT ION PROPULSION, LUNAR-LANDER TECHNOLOGY, AND DIFFERENT WAYS TO DESIGN A ROVER'S WHEEL TO MAKE IT SURVIVE HARSH MARTIAN CONDITIONS.

  PERHAPS THE MEN WERE MERELY INTIMIDATED BY MY FABULOUS FAKE EYELASHES.

  * * *

  Today women often have to work just a little bit harder to get included in the conversation, to sit at the table, or to be afforded the same credibility as their male peers.

  When it comes to STEM, the bias can be even stronger. People seem to believe that women must be one-dimensional in their interests and surprised when girls can love coding and Kylie Jenner’s new lip kit. We can fight cancer in the lab and get our nails done in the salon. And, of course, we can have a deep appreciation for fake lashes while understanding the significance of rocket reusability for the space industry.

  WRITER AND EDUCATOR

  Photo credit: Nicholas Belardes

  JANE HAWLEY

  The sweltering heat of our apartment puts us on edge.

  I’m six years old, sitting at the counter. My mother, wearing a white cotton nightgown, is standing in the kitchen, cracking ice cubes out of a plastic tray.

  I’m looking up at her, trying to tell her something, but she stares at me blankly.

  “Mom,” I say. “Are you listening?”

  Her eyes glaze over. Her center of gravity tips.

  She falls onto the yellow linoleum, dropping the tray and knocking a glass off the counter. The glass shatters. Ice cubes skitter across the floor.

  Her body convulses, shaking, shaking, shaking.

  I call an ambulance
, which transports her to the emergency room, where the doctor reports her epilepsy to the DMV. They immediately revoke her license.

  She never drives a car again.

  My mother would die two years later from complications related to lupus. In the time between her first grand mal seizure and her death, I watched her lose much of her independence. My mother had a big personality—she wore silk blouses and full makeup nearly every day and possessed a fierce sense of justice. Her illness not only prevented her from doing many things she loved—mainly working as a head paralegal at a top law firm—but the epilepsy also prevented her from traveling anywhere not on the city bus route. She had to rely on others to take us to the grocery store, to the doctor’s office, to the movie theater. Though Mom found ways to get around some of the limitations, I watched her struggle with living life on her own terms. Her illness was closing in on her, preventing her from living expansively. Her life, she felt, was shrinking.

  I also felt confined. Because I couldn’t go anywhere myself, I used books to push against the limits of my life—and I found myself leaning on them even more after my mother’s death to navigate my grief. Yet something was missing in the books that were either assigned at school or recommended to me. Adventure seemed only to belong to men. Sal Paradise. Huck Finn. Raoul Duke. Men were having adventures, leading messy lives, getting into trouble, and finding themselves on the open road. Not girls.

  I hungered for a road narrative that was representative of me, for a book that might lay out a map for my own life. When I was sixteen, a girlfriend from my high school creative-writing class recommended Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays. I read the novel in one sitting, exhilarated by the passages of Maria Wyeth, the novel’s heroine, driving alone, endlessly circling through the infinite circuits of Los Angeles highways: the 405, the 101, I-5. She uses the time both to process her life and to get her mind off her ghosts. It’s not what I would call an uplifting novel. Maria isn’t a particularly good person. The ending isn’t redemptive.

  That’s not Didion’s point. Not even close.

  It’s that you have to live life on your own terms. You have to be in control of the cards. No one else can play your hand. You have to play the game for yourself.

  Once I got my own driver’s license and the keys to a used Volkswagen, I was almost never home. Dad trusted me not to get into too much trouble. I pushed the limits of where I could drive and back in one day, with only a few maps crumpled under the passenger seat to use for navigation, sometimes going as far as my home in Bakersfield to Los Angeles and back before curfew.

  It only made sense to go away for college when I graduated high school. Dad wanted me to enroll at the local community college, to stay at home. I wanted to skip town. I wanted to get away from anything that was familiar, anything that was safe.

  When I was seventeen, I moved to Wyoming for college. After graduation, I returned to California for a few years, then packed up my car and drove myself to Texas for graduate school. My family and friends expressed their concerns. Was I aware of what could happen to me? There were so many things to fear on the open road: breaking down, blowing out a tire, losing or crashing the car, getting lost, getting assaulted. Since childhood, I had been conditioned to feel that going out by myself for any extended period of time was a threat simply due to my gender.

  So I stopped asking for permission or approval. I just drove.

  In my twenty-eight years, I’ve moved across the country four times and have taken countless road trips on my own. I’ve driven alone across the Mojave Desert at sunrise and seen the technicolor lights of Las Vegas at night, curving around Utah’s red rock hoodoos, speeding through the High Plains at eighty miles an hour, watching thunderheads race across the big blue sky. I’ve driven across West Texas at night, cutting across vast landscapes of nothing and everything, a blanket of stars twinkling overhead. I’ve struggled through Reno during a snowstorm and stopped in Marana, Arizona, where the asphalt melted the bottom of my shoes.

  I’ve baptized myself with the great holy dirt of America.

  My family’s fears? Most of them happened at one time or another. I’ve broken down, run out of money, run out of gas, been stopped at the border, gotten speeding tickets, and gotten lost. But I also found my way and found myself. I’ve had to face myself, listen to my thoughts, and figure out what I’m driving away from and what I’m driving toward. I stopped looking at these obstacles as something to fear. Instead, I simply began to see the fear as a challenge to overcome, as an essential part of not only my life on the road but also my life’s journey.

  * * *

  MEN WERE HAVING ADVENTURES, LEADING MESSY LIVES, GETTING INTO TROUBLE, AND FINDING THEMSELVES ON THE OPEN ROAD. NOT GIRLS.

  * * *

  As a young woman, I was taught to fear the world around me. We teach our girls not to take risks to keep them safe. Traveling alone as a woman is dangerous. It’s also radical.

  The ability to travel and to idle, to wonder and to wander, is necessary to lead an independent life. In A Room of Her Own, Virginia Woolf famously argues that every woman should have a little money and space for herself: “I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

  I say every woman should have a car (or bike or bus pass or MetroCard) of her own.

  COMIC BOOK WRITER

  Photo credit: Lucas VanDyke

  JODY HOUSER

  I’m one of the lucky ones. The first time someone said to me “I didn’t know girls liked comics,” I was well into adulthood and could laugh off his comment as incredibly naive. At that point, I’d been reading comics for over a decade, had spent the past three years running a comic shop’s online store, and had recently completed my thesis for my MFA, an original superhero screenplay. So to me, this comment was an outlier, a joke to toss out in conversation later on.

  Other women I know weren’t quite as lucky. Their first experience in a comic shop was with a retailer who wanted to exclude new fans rather than embrace new readers. Or choosing to express their opinions about comics or other areas of pop culture made them a target for harassment. Or someone thought their cosplay at a convention was an invitation to be touched or mocked or tested to see if they actually knew the character. There are far too many stories like this. Stories that show me just how lucky I’ve been to feel consistently welcomed both as a professional and as a fan.

  It was women fighting for their place in the comics industry that gave me my first big break. I’d been dabbling in comics for a while, creating webcomics and pitching my first anthology. A friend shared a tweet by a female comic artist who was looking to put together an anthology for charity with other female comic creators. Though I didn’t have a lot of experience yet, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring. I sent the artist, Renae De Liz, an e-mail saying I’d love to participate. I was one of over a hundred women who did so that first day.

  That anthology became known as Womanthology, which in 2011 set the record for funding of a comic-book project on Kickstarter. The campaign hit its funding goal in nineteen hours and ended up receiving over $100,000 in pledges, more than four times the initial goal. Big comic and pop-culture names, such as Jim Lee and Kevin Smith, contributed pledge incentives and promoted the Kickstarter. What was initially going to be a small press collection became a massive, 400-page hardcover put out by mainstream publisher IDW.

  Again, I was lucky. I tried my hand at comics right as people were asking where the industry’s female writers and artists were. I signed on to a project that hit the zeitgeist in just the right way, attracting press and readers that no one expected. One of the artists I worked with on the book, Fiona Staples, blew up right after we collaborated thanks to her work on Image Comics’s Saga, the first issue of which came out the same day as Womanthology.

  But the thing about luck is that
so much of it can reach us because of the women who worked hard to pave the way before us. We’re lucky to have people like Trina Robbins, who worked to preserve the history of women in comics. Women have been a part of the industry since the Golden Age of comics, which saw the birth of the superheroes that today grace our movie screens. Girls have been reading comics since the beginning. (Of course, everyone read comics back in the day.) If the road seems smooth, it’s because of the work put in by those who came before us. And because we’re lucky enough to avoid the potholes that are still scattered about.

  There’s still a lot of work to do. Comics is a niche industry these days, and new, diverse voices are the only way to ensure it stays relevant. Much as we see in other areas of media, books written by and/or catered toward women are still seen as “other” or “lesser.” Or that dreaded word pandering.

  But women are louder and more visible in comics than they’ve ever been. A female retailer group, the Valkyries, is influencing what stores carry and thus what readers purchase. A female creator group, Comic Book Women, allows women to network with others in the industry and helps conventions find guests and panelists. Where once a small handful of female creators were familiar names, I’m now part of a crowd.

  I’m lucky to be here, forging a career in an industry where the occasional person may not think I belong. Girls really like comics, both consuming and creating them. And I hope to make the path even smoother for the next girls who come along to tell their stories.

  LAWYER

  LORETTA MIRANDA

  When the economy of the Morongo Indian Reservation in California grew large enough to provide full-tuition college scholarships for descendants, I did what any reservation kid who is told she is “gifted” does: I went to college for the sole purpose of moving to a more exciting area. College was my chance to get out, to escape, to finally make it on my own. I wasn’t going to squander it.