EXCLUSIVE: Gloria Steinem on boys and men

Bringing joy and laughter back into the gender equality movement

At the end of last year, I sat down for a long conversation with Gloria Steinem in her gorgeous Manhattan home. The video is out now. Please do take a look, and share with your networks. (Also support her Foundation’s goal to maintain the home as a center for women’s activism and networking).

One of my goals right now is to truly appreciate these kinds of opportunities. And I do. It was a real honor to spend more time with Gloria, who has been such an inspiring figure to so many, and a hero to me. When I mentioned to a neighbor I was going to meet Gloria, she said: “Tell her she is the reason I mustered the courage to move to New York and pursue my dream to become an opera singer.” Others have recounted similar stories. As the face of the women’s movement for decades, Steinem’s influence is hard to overstate.

I wanted to talk to her now, specifically, because I believe we are at a pivotal moment for gender equality. The danger of backlash against women’s progress is often overstated in my view; but that does not mean it isn’t real. I believe that the way forward is to expand the gender equality movement to include boys and men, not just as allies but as beneficiaries. But would the founder of modern feminism agree?

Representation matters

I asked Gloria explicitly about the need to break down gender stereotypes about roles and jobs in both directions. I reminded her of her statement that “Women are always saying, ‘We can do anything that men can do.’ But Men should be saying,’We can do anything that women can do.’”

Me: It sounds like you would agree then, that it is just as important to have men in education roles in caring roles, as it is to have women in, say, engineering.

Gloria: Yes…We need to be doing both, and we need to be doing it multi racially at the same time.

She went a step further and argued for a world where we don’t even have to worry about gender representation anymore, where enough progress has been made that we can focus instead on humanity rather than gender. As she put it:

Maybe we are in a place now where we can more often ignore gender. And go for interests and occupation and talent and who knows what, you know. So if you’re going to direct a movie it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman.

If you’re going to lead a fifth grade class, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman or who is in the class. I mean, humanity, I hope, is our goal.

This humanist strand ran through much of the conversation, in fact. Here for example was her answer to my question of how she defines patriarchy:

I’m not sure how much it encompasses, but it is father superiority or male superiority. Women who are married take their husbands name, not the other way around or not using both hyphenated, which we also do. So, I think what we want is egalitarian, is human, is compassionate, is empathetic, and the more we can downplay when it’s not relevant, gender, class, race, probably the better off we are.

Joy and laughter

Maybe the biggest takeaway for me wasn’t intellectual but emotional. Gloria is a joyful, funny, open-minded person and thinks that the gender equality movement should be fueled by these positive emotions and affect. I strongly agree, and in fact it’s infectious. Gloria talked about the famous “pee-in” at Harvard to protest the lack of female restrooms, for example. We had quite the laugh about that.

She lamented the move away from “liberation” as a goal, because that had more of a feeling of uplift and joy in it. She responded to my question about her popularizing of the famous motto “A woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle” as being an example of “purposeful humor”.

I really think this is an important message right now. There is so much negativity, lack of goodwill and humorlessness in our public debates. Tone matters. Emotion matters. Being for good things is at least as important as being against bad things, especially in the long run.

Gloria Steinem’s influence has been so great, I think, not just because of what she has said and done, but in the way she has done so. She said:

Laughter is the only emotion you can’t compel. You can make somebody afraid. You can even make them think they’re in love if they’re dependent for long enough. But you can’t compel somebody to laugh. And as a result, in some Native American cultures there is a God of Laughter.

I’m labeling it “infectious inclusivity”.

The best of both worlds

Gloria’s humanism seems to be to be based on an appreciation of the ways in which men and women bring something different to the world, on average of course and especially, as she said, in the reproductive years.

We talked for example about styles of communication that skew male or female. In the end it’s not that one is better than the other; it’s that each has their place and their due. I found this exchange fascinating:

Gloria: There’s a kind of boardroom way of speaking, which is not necessarily democratic and doesn’t invite people to make suggestions necessarily. So, why not adopt what is often culturally a female way of group, you know, everybody speaks in turn and you sit in a circle instead of in a hierarchy. I mean, you know, we can all take the good parts of gender and universalize them.

Me: Yes. And perhaps there will be some occasions when the more male way of communicating might be more effective.

Gloria: Right. Yes.. . If you’re in the fire department.

One point she reiterated was that until and unless we can see ourselves in the various roles in society, it’s hard to argue that we are fully free. Take the U.S. Presidency for example, a subject on which Gloria had forceful views:

I mean, here we are in a democracy. We’ve never had a female president. How crazy is that? I mean, we’ve, we’ve had, very qualified women who ran for president.

Hope springs

At the end of our time together I asked Gloria what what made her hopeful. She said:

Well, first of all, I’m a hope-aholic. You should know that. . . Hope is a form of planning. You know, if you, if you if you don’t hope for it, it means you don’t envision it. And if you don’t envision it, it becomes way less possible.

As you can imagine, there’s much more in the conversation, including discussions of single-sex schools, same-sex parents, crying, cruelty, zero-sum thinking, men with babies, why she likes the “HEAL” acronym, fatherhood, defining feminism, Cherokee matriarchs, and much more.

For me, as well as the need for a more joyful approach to this work, I took away a strong future vision of a more humanist approach. Of a world where gender really does matter less, but only because we have taken gender equality seriously enough to get us to that point.

Again, do watch the conversation on YouTube and as always, let me know what you think!