Gloria Steinem and Ronan Farrow in Conversation

i am so honored to be here thank you gloria for doing this no the thank you was on the other foot it's you know in first of all i'm in the company of so many wonderful people here and i have to thank janna for that introduction and amy richards of course and all the wonderful performers from vibe that was very inspiring uh but i especially i do want to stand to my stick to my guns about thank you for for gloria just having to go back through your incredible career to prepare for this has been inspiring for me and you know i felt as i was doing a lot of the reporting that i wound up doing on sexual violence uh the accumulated weight of women pushing and pushing to be heard more and the ways in which those brave sources speaking stood on a foundation that you would help to build and in reading through just the highlights of this incredible generationally singular career you really get the impression over and over again that you are someone who at every turn was futuristic by dint of not caring what people thought at the time and not being afraid to piss people off so i guess i would start there i mean how do we learn that lesson and impart it to others what was it in the water in ohio that gave you that strength of character so consistently it wasn't in the water in ohio it took me quite a while and i think what gave it to me was other women and men too you know we need each other we discover that we are not alone when we tell our stories about something we think uniquely happened to us and we hear other people saying that and that's what a movement is made of and i have to say i'm so glad that you're all here in person we're not looking at a screen okay we're not divorced from all five senses because uh as gayatri davey the great neurologist are you here shout out it [Laughter] it's explained to me you can't empathize unless you are together with all five senses you don't produce the oxytocin the tendon befriend chemical that allows us to not just learn intellectually but to truly empathize with each other and i say that because i think we are in an age of screens and i worry that we're not spending as much time with each other so this is step one this is how movements happen you know sitting in a circle telling your story and that's how it happened to me and i'm so grateful for all the women along the way for bill abzug for wilma mankiller for flo kennedy for everybody who was there before me the title of the book you write about how it's rooted in the vietnam era how do you think it applies to the present moment well how long do we have we've never had an infantile narcissistic personality disorder in the white house before like i said she's not afraid to piss anyone off no but i mean all those psychiatrists psychiatrist psychologist who told us in the first place that he was a narcissistic personality disorder person and he has remained completely predictable he will follow slavishly any praise even if it comes from saudi arabia russia wherever it comes from and he will react with huge hostility to any criticism and this is the person we have up there in the white house now uh that is pissing us all off and it is also educating us i think don't you i mean i i i really feel like there's more activism in this country as i wander around more people for running people are running for office who didn't vote before right so it's dangerous to have him there i'm not saying it's a good thing but it is an education and one of the threads in donald trump's rhetoric is this kind of authoritarian attack on the free press it's the enemy of the people it's been fascinating reading your quotes about the media i feel like we both have put out books that are sharply critical of the media at times one of the quotes that struck me was the media are not reality reality is reality and yet it seems to me that you you do have a fundamental optimism in or belief in the potential of the free press no i do absolutely and here you are you're the record thank you gonna whoever got that on video just send it straight to my mom but part of the reason here you are is that you were not in a medium totally controlled by advertising and i think we don't count how much advertising subverts our media because it just measures the number of eyeballs who are watching not the accuracy or reliability of the facts that that come with it uh who somebody famously said that donald trump was not good for cbs but he no he was not good for the country but he was yep said that this audience is so smart thank you thank you um and i i say that because i think long term uh i mean you wrote a book without advertising the new yorker is less influenced by advertising than most other publications we need to pay for our media as at least as much as you know for the new york times or books or something if we if we expect to have accurate media and i don't think that the sinister influence of advertising is really talked about enough it's such a typical answer for you you always go to a granular practicable answer it's really and it's it's a testament to sort of call you up when i'm depressed and i can say please please put me on speed dial gloria steinem i you know i need those conversations too so often i think the distinction between effective and ineffective activism is exactly that you know are you making a call to action that actually targets something specific and you've identified i think an important crux of the matter much of the plot that unravels in catch and kill is about an advertisement driven business model and the ways in which that tends to be populated by executives who don't necessarily have an investment in journalism or a background in journalism and there are a lot of scenes that play out in this book of those executives kind of saying well why not kill the story you know and not understanding that journalism is a sort of a specialized case where it's not just about the the usual quid pro quo and what is the most expedient way through so so the call to pay for your journalism is a great one because it is telling the new yorker amongst many other ways in which it is an effective platform uh and it has a lot to do with personalities and brave journalists there but it also is subscription based so that's my stealth advertisement subscribe to the new yorker right now and buy gloria's book and my book no but it's really important i mean somebody at the boston globe asked me to write about censorship had i ever been censored and i said yes i've been censored by three forces advertising advertising and advertising because think about women's magazines in which you have to write way disproportionately about fashion and food and so which are fine subjects but if you don't write about them and praise them you can't criticize them right then you don't get the ads and there used to be fiction and poetry in women's magazines remember that long ago and that those days are gone so you know it is a uh subliminal influence that we have to keep remembering and you just hit on another important point there so many of the revelations of the last few years have been about uh sexism in the media that the people telling us the stories we hear about ourselves and our culture and our politics also had their own problems in terms of their views of women and how women were treated the reporting about les moonves that i was involved with being a good example some of the reporting about nbc that people are now grappling with uh you have unique insight into this because you navigated that gauntlet of being told to write as a journalist about fashion and you know things that are appropriate for women and you pushed the envelope at every turn when you were a journalist well but there's something very important to say here which is i never had a job okay you were a freelancer i was always a freelancer so nobody could fire me and i could always schlep the article to to you know to someone else so you know it often takes a lot more courage as your book shows for somebody who's in the middle of a kind of hierarchical journalistic television place to actually tell the truth but listen you do something that is so wonderful and is so rare which is you tell about getting the story and you know in in this case it is the story the difficulty of getting the story and that's so great because usually that huge amount of experience and information never gets on the page you know the result gets there but not the process i think your book is going to inspire just thousands and thousands and thousands millions of journalists thank you gloria it means a lot to me i i hope that's true i you know i struggled in earnest to strike the right balance of we were talking about this before you know not just naval gazing not patting myself on the back but telling my story to the extent that it was needed to illustrate these themes of the ways in which vast structures in our media and our politics conspire to oppose the truth and a lot of journalists stories run through catch and kill not just my own and i hope it reads as a tribute to them we need more good journalists banging their heads against the wall doing the right thing and and that that spirit is embedded in your own career i mean i'm struck by how many times yes you were a freelancer but you were dealing with traditional media structures um and there again you weren't afraid to piss people off i the story about you going undercover in the early 60s as a playboy bunny is striking to me right partly because i've done some reporting on playboy and the culture around it and um you know did that story on karen mcdougall the playboy playmate who had a story about trump who was her story was then acquired by the national enquirer this is where the term catch and kill comes from they bought it to bury it not to publish it and i incidentally in the course of that reporting i ended up talking to a lot of playboy centerfolds and bunnies and people around that system and certainly in the modern era were overdue for more expose of that type but you as with so many things in your career you were early to that uh talk about doing that and the reaction to that because you got blowback for it i got sued actually no i uh well you said people people were reluctant to take you seriously after that yeah no that was a different kind of blowback actually but because that came later but i was sitting at an editorial meeting at uh show magazine i don't know if anybody remembers this big beautiful arts magazine a whole tree sacrificed his life for every issue and the playback club was just opening and i said well we should send lillian ross great new yorker writer right to be a bunny i mean obviously that was completely impractical and so suddenly the editors who were all guys of course i was the only woman looked at me and said no you do it i said no are you kidding me i mean they're not going to hire me i don't have id i don't i'm too old actually even then i was too old to be a bunny um they said no no so i needed to pay my rent and so i went and discovered that they were desperate big time desperate for bunnies because it is a lousy job they were advertising that you would earn much more money than you actually earned um so i to my amazement passed right through all the tests and rehearsals and everything and ended up in this costume that was so tight that a man would have a cleavage and you know and and being trained in the bunny dip and so on and so what is the bunny dip the the the bunny dip is basically do i want to know is is basically how to hold a tray and serve your customer without falling out of your costume that's the bunny dip and we had to practice it and so on but i just want to say that another requirement was that you had to have an internal physical exam which they told us was a requirement of the uh i don't know food servers in new york state and which of course was utter and i knew it was utter but i knew i also couldn't do the story but anyway um but at least that and some of the other worst things were done away with because of the expose i did now so i'm not sorry i did it but it is true that as old as i am and i am seriously old when anybody wants to put me down they say well she was once a bunny yeah still you still get that you still remember yes yes i still get that right well those people seem not worth any of our time how much do you think things have changed in terms of misogyny in the media well i i do think they've changed a lot the personnel of the media has has changed there are it looks a wee bit more like the country the people we see in in the media uh there's a lot more sources of information online and you know all kinds of diversification of sources of of information and i think also what's very important is that now the exposure of the bad practices is a majority activity it used to be like 10 or 20 crazy people over there in the corner we were talking about sexual harassment and we put it on the cover no first in the early 70s there were women at cornell university who were trying to describe what happened to them on their summer job they invented the term sexual harassment we did a cover story about it uh and we tried to be you know not too controversial we had this is a miz cover story a miss magazine yeah ms magazine did a cover story about it using puppets so we wouldn't be too controversial still we were put off the newsstands in in uh supermarkets and so on right um then uh kitty mc catherine mckinnon our great legal theorist feminist legal theorist wrote sexual harassment into sex discrimination law so it became a form for men and women a form of sex discrimination then three women all black women brought cases two against the government i think and one against a bank and won their cases so you know this is a process so this is what movements do uh you know it it that's where we started but the metoo movement and and i have to say that you as a male human being writing about you know i mean it just makes a huge it is now a majority consciousness now where do we need to go i think we definitely need to go to the place where our bodies are our own male or female it's it's the basis of democracy if we can't control our own physical selves it's not democracy but the counterweight to that is patriarchy which means controlled by definition controlling reproduction and if there's racism or caste as in india or any you know other hierarchy it gets even worse because in order to perpetuate race or caste or class you have to control women's bodies even more it doesn't mean that women are all treated the same i mean historically white women were sexually isolated and black women were sexually exploited in this country but it does mean that you have to control women's bodies in order to perpetuate race class caste whatever which is why sexism and racism and all these are intertwined there's no such thing as as being a feminist without being anti-racist and there's no such thing as being successfully anti-racist those are also i mean you know these things there's no such thing as being a feminist without being anti-racist anti-cast anti-you know hierarchical anything by birth and vice versa right it just doesn't work you snuck in another really important point there several but one that that struck me was about the democratization of media platforms and it has been striking to me how the narrative has been changed by the fact that if you are a powerful wealthy person you can no longer maintain a vice grip on the narrative just by having the right publicist who can get you on you know time and newsweek in 60 minutes and for so many years that some version of that was true in the various iterations of american media you could just buy out a few platforms and either literally buy or metaphorically buy with your influence and that that is slipping and i think when i when i'm asked the question of sort of why now is a framing that i get a lot which is a little bit of uh a reflection of some misapprehensions i think about everything that came before the two things i talk about are that systemic change in terms of who controls the media and how many platforms there are and more platforms as you say encourages more voices and then also the fact that there was this history and it's the recent history of terrana burke for years and years with the term me too and the cosby accusers coming back and back and back into the four even after years of opposition um you know we have seen how what you're talking about has built and built and built and i i assume you think we'll continue to build yes absolutely i mean it is now it goes global much faster now uh you know it was always growing and in a movement sense but now it is a majority consciousness and we are beginning to get to the place where we are saying to ourselves no body invasion is you know a more serious but it isn't still legally i mean it is still probably uh more punished to invade your living room than to invade somebody's body you know we still have a long way to go and it's certainly more difficult to prove right one of the things that i talk about a lot is the distinction between activism and journalism and for me as an investigative reporter it's very important to stress that i am not acting as an activist i am interrogating the facts and am willing in each story i do to go wherever they might lead me and of course i have views about issues i care about issues but in a specific story i'm not advocating for any side and i am inspired by activism that follows on that and takes the facts that i hopefully do a good job of fairly exposing and and then runs with it and makes it into a movement but i view the roles as separate you have occupied both of those roles tell me about that transition well i i i kind of didn't have a choice if you know what i mean but i i'm with you in the sense that i think as journalists we are utterly responsible for making facts as accurate as we possibly can and explaining who they came from and what the experience was and why we're writing this and what you know full disclosure that's absolutely but if we separate fact and opinion i think it's possible i mean in in in my case the movement was beginning uh and burgeoning and so on you know so i was it wasn't possible to separate them except in that way which has to do with accuracy here's what i know this is a fact here's what i think we are record we are entitled to our own opinion not to our own facts bravo that i mean that is the antidote to the enemy of the people line right we keep ourselves accountable and we stick to the truth now what happened to me was that i just i i reached the end of i mean i couldn't get published that much and people were asking me to speak on campuses because the women's movement was burgeoning and so on in no way could i even imagine speaking in public you know it was people become writers because they we don't want to speak in public and i went to a speech teacher and she said well of course you've been at two things a dancer and a writer no wonder you know you don't want to talk you know no wonder you're having such a hard time but i couldn't get things published and so in order to get the word out i ended up inviting a friend of mine dorothy pittman-hughes who was like fearless wonderful human being to speak with me and it turned out that that was a great accident because having a black woman and a white woman together meant we got all kinds of so when she had to stay home with her baby then uh or wanted to stay home with her baby then florence kennedy took her place and that you know does anybody here remember florence kennedy the great okay there's there's a play about her that is i mean she you know she was fan tastic in every puzzle [Laughter] uh so so it it just grew out of journalism for me so the book shows this incredible swath of quotes from different eras and shifting views over time too on your part uh one quote not in the book this is not an ambush i said that i was gonna ask about this is from a 1998 essay you wrote about bill clinton called feminists and the clinton question and you wrote if all the sexual allegations now swirling around the white house turn out to be true president clinton may be a candidate for sex addiction therapy but even if the allegations are true the president is not guilty of sexual harassment he's accused of having made a gross dumb and reckless pass president clinton took no for an answer how have your views on that changed well i wrote that at a certain point of knowing so the facts that i knew were that monica lewinsky was bravely incredibly bravely while locked up in a hotel suite with fbi agents and you know everybody trying to get her to say that this relationship was against her will she refused to say it was against her will and the other case that was known at that point was i forgotten her name but a woman in arkansas paula jones paula jones right uh who actually under huge pressure from the right-wing groups that were putting her forward said he said to me i wouldn't want you to do anything you don't want to do. all right so we're not anti-sex here we're just talking about consent now as you point out there's another case that came forward uh about clinton but that the juanita broaddrick allegation and she claims that many years ago he raped her and has maintained that story consistently told a lot of people at the time there i have not investigated that case but certainly it has all the trappings of a credible claim that you know merits closer looks yeah no we were talking about this before if i had known that at the time i wouldn't have written the op-ed page piece but as it was it was so clear that the right wing was using free will sex you know which i mean there's no president we've ever had that couldn't even eisenhower well maybe nixon okay but anyway [Laughter] um you know that that's not the point we we're not we're not against sex hello we're just in favor of of welcome sex not just consent welcome right so i wouldn't be able to write it now because more facts are known but at the time it was important to write and i guess there's there's two layers to that and i have to say i've always admired how you are extraordinarily forthright about talking about when you have changed your mind or evolved on something or were wrong about something um which is like a lesson we all have to teach ourselves over and over and over again to just say oh i have changed my mind on that uh there there is the more serious set of allegations against bill clinton that are facts that were somewhat buried at the time and this goes back to the themes of media complicity juanita broderick gave interviews at the time and in the years after and claims that those were suppressed or downplayed in various ways and then there's the additional layer of sincere change happening in how we view a case like monica lewinsky's including on lewinsky's part you know i've had conversations with her where she's you know appeared to process in real time okay was this actually the love affair that i thought it was given the power imbalance and the circumstances of you know not just the most powerful person at your workplace but the most powerful person in the country and an intern so do do you feel like on that count too your views have shifted i think i would take monica's word you know i know her she is incredibly smart and courageous and i feel terrible about the way she's been treated over time and she was so brave so brave against i mean she was you know locked up with all these fbi agents and so on trying to make her say that it was against her will and she was saying no i came there i was attracted to him i came there with the intention and hope of having an affair that's why i worked as a new so i you know i i respect that and she had the support of a lot of young women in the opposition of a lot of mothers because young women viewed her as you know somebody who was saying yes we have a sexual will of our own and mothers were saying no but the age difference makes it different so you know i i think that who we should listen to is monica lewinsky it's it's worth going back and watching she i think to pay her legal bills sort of broke a long period of silence maybe in the early 2000s uh and did a documentary called monica in black and white do you remember that no i didn't see that it's extremely compelling because it is a town hall with monica lewinsky shot in black and white it's very stylish uh but more significantly it is her kind of talking about this stuff and processing it for the first time in a long time and it's an interesting snapshot of that moment and it also very succinctly lays out the facts and i think you've hit on the crux of it we haven't talked enough as a culture about the ways in which monica lewinsky was terribly mistreated by the media by the clintons and people around them by the authorities by you know everyone involved in the star report and on and on and on everyone on both sides of the aisle treated monica lewinsky in such a terrible demeaning way no i agree and i think that was true of the women in the clinton family too i mean you know they could have they didn't have to i don't know the if they publicly said bad things but i don't remember but you know we as women have to bond with other women who were having a hard time regardless you know and not be totally loyal to the guy who was the bad guy hello it it it was a way more um mysterious and subtle situation at then and it is somewhat still more mysterious and subtle although as you point out there is this other case in my reporting i've found mostly the people who encourage sources i'm working with to shut up are men in their lives it's brothers it's fathers it's husbands but also in some cases there are women who are a big part of the machinery that shuts people down and you know a major character in the book is lisa bloom who was a supposed women's rights activist lawyer and went on my show many times talking about the importance of standing up to powerful men in hollywood who abused women and uh then was you know a co-signee on all the legal threat letters trying to shut down my reporting and uh was engaged in a campaign of smearing all of these women who spoke out against harvey weinstein we're responsible for that i mean you know there's it's perfectly clear right yeah you write uh in the book secrets have power as long as they are secret do you think that we are coming to a place of having less secrets in terms of the terrible behavior of powerful people in this culture i do think so yeah i i really do because uh the less powerful people to whom the bad things were being done whether they had less power because of race or because of class or because of gender and so are are now enough part of a movement so that they are surrounded by people who believe them and they are finally able to speak out and that makes all the difference it i i you know not to be believed about the the worst of it i have to say is child sexual abuse because that is so um i mean it's one thing to be abused by somebody you're trying to work for or somebody who's um you know a stranger or you know what whatever it is but somebody who's supposed to love and protect you i mean that is the most difficult situation and there's a wonderful book called trauma and recovery which maybe you know do you know this book i don't yeah it's it because it takes all the forms of trauma from child sexual abuse to prison camps to sex trafficking to just everything and torture in all of it and shows that trauma is trauma is trauma but actually it's most deep and difficult when it happens not from enemies or from employers or whatever but from people you trust so that's one powerful recommendation any other single piece of writing that we should all be reading oh gosh but you know i'll send you a list with i want that glorious dynam reading list okay don't you guys okay well there's a wonderful book by dorothy dinnerstein now if you get me off on books which at least in the first third or so describes the uh migratory bands which were our original human form of organization and the fact that in those bands both men and women raised children and there were no gender roles we made up gender the the the language the native american you know whoever here we are on matahata island that the the language didn't have he and she you know it it it shows you that it's so wrong the way we learn history it's bonkers the way we learn history we learn with when you know columbus started and when patriarchy started and or is it but most of human history was not this way it was organized as a circle not a pyramid and people women controlled their own fertility and decided when and whether to have children and how come they don't start our history courses when human beings started i mean there are two things history in the past and they are not the same okay so we have to look at the politics of history too you talked about gender just now and in some ways we're in this moment where we're talking more about gender than ever and there's this wonderful move towards inclusivity and gender-neutral bathrooms and wonderful legislative and cultural reforms happening do you see us continuing to focus on gender more or do you think as you seem to be alluding to uh that we may sort of get over gender in some sense that it might become less we get over gender because i mean the world is divided into two kinds of people those who divide everything into two and those who don't okay so i mean we have to get over gender and race without for a moment denying their force i'm not you know in their cruelty in their divisiveness i'm not i'm not trying to be unrealistic but we have to see beyond them they were made up right and if most of human history didn't have words for he and she and didn't have words for race and the quai and the sun in africa where we all came from every single one of us all human beings right and you know i have visited them and the women took me out in the bush and showed me the herb they used for headaches for migraine headaches for abortifacients but i mean there were incredibly sophisticated wise cultures and all my friend and friends in indian country women friends make jokes about what did columbus called primitive equal women but why don't we study what was here before europeans showed up why it just drives me right up the wall so to close things out because i have uh kept you here twice as long as we were supposed to be here uh because i find it fascinating and could go on and on uh when you look at all of this change that we've talked about are you fundamentally optimistic about the free press about feminism about all the kinds of social change we've talked about look i am no way going to let the whoever the adversary is i mean am i going to look let trump take my hope away are you kidding me no as it says in the book i think hope is a form of planning if our hopes weren't already real inside us we couldn't even help them to if you are feeling hopeless uh talk to each other you know because it probably means you've been isolated you you haven't had companionship incidentally there's such great people here tonight i hope you know each other you have to promise me maybe maybe you could just look around when the lights go up and meet you know introduce yourselves to two or three people who don't know say what you care about what you're doing you could leave here with a new job a new idea a new love affair i don't know because the knight is we should be in a circle you know where and i just want us to be more circular so right hope is a form of planning thank you gloria for keeping hope alive in all of us thank you thank you all for coming

Channel: Pioneer Works

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Keywords: ronan farrow, gloria steinem, harvey weinstein, bill clinton, monica lewinsky, miss magazine, matt lauer, catch and kill, catch and kill ronan farrow, catch and kill podcast, metoo movement, mrs america, gloria steinem mrs america, who is gloria steinem, gloria steinem feminism, gloria steinem talk, ronan farrow talk, ronan farrow metoo, ronan farrow harvey weinstein, harvey weinstein trial, gloria steinem bill clinton, gloria steinem blm, gloria steinem icon, metoo 2020

Id: 0wZ4yDnzAtE

Length: 39min 26sec (2366 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020