Spoil alert! White men are going to take home a lot of Oscars this year. America and the world will once again honor the cult of male genius, and the great men of history.

Steven Hawking, Alan Turing, Martin Luther King Jr. – these are some of the great men of this year’s Oscar line-up. Their accomplishments are significant. And kudos to the filmmakers, who, in a few of these cases, complicated the “lone genius” idea by telling a story that reveals the power of mentors, colleagues, and friends. But the genius or the hero is always male, isn’t he?

I still haven’t seen a movie about a woman genius, and I’m wondering if I will in my lifetime. Afterall, our social construction of “genius” is a math-equation-solving white male nerd who is usually associated with an elite institution. We have SO many movies about that guy. Are women ever part of the equation? Isn’t the equation itself reductionist and unfair? Taking this even further, do all geniuses have to use chalkboards, or can we find great thinkers and problem-solvers outside of classrooms?

The genius stereotype isn’t something we let go of when we leave the theater. Fiction shapes real life. Sarah-Jane Leslie is a philosopher at Princeton University who writes in the journal Science that the male genius stereotype is holding women back.  And therein lies the challenge – the vicious cycle of fiction shaping reality and vice versa. How can women be called to math, physics, and philosophy, for example, when all we hear about are the great men of these fields?

This genius question undergirds Walter Isaacson’s great new book about the forgotten female programmers who created modern technology. Will anyone invest in making this story into a movie, or does it not fit our narrow idea of genius?

It isn’t clear if Oscar-nominated The Theory of Everything pushes the genius trope to the next level. The film doesn’t put a woman in the equation, exactly, but she is nearby. While the film sets us up to follow Steven Hawking’s career and contributions, there next to him in almost every scene is his girlfriend and then wife Jane, who saves him from his depression upon being diagnosed with ALS, and then nurses him and cares for him for not two years (the period of time his doctors give him to live), but decades upon decades, while raising a family and pursuing a PhD. Just as important, she is an educated peer who pushes his thinking. She’s a superwoman! And she speaks to us. What woman doesn’t feel a pang of familiarity watching her balance work and family, thought and emotion? That said, Jane’s load is huge and lonely, especially without her husband’s consent for additional assistance.

In The Theory of Everything, Jane is a type of hero in a film about defying all odds. Still, the film left me feeling like she didn’t get her due. Given her heroism as a caretaker, perhaps Jane should be the one, at the end of the film, who takes the stage and tells us how she did it. Afterall, she appears to be a problem-solving genius. How in the world did she study Spanish literature, raise three kids, care for a severely physically disabled husband, and get food on the table every night?

The Theory of Everything enables us to see the great woman behind the great man. But we still have a ways to go before the great women are the stars of the show, and the Oscar recipients.

For a great infographic, see Women’s Media Center on the gendering of this year’s Oscar nominations.

We need to keep critiquing the genius effect. Just for fun, I’m going to start using the word a whole lot more, to describe the women in my life. There are a lot of amazing problem-solvers out there.

Part 3 in a series

At a recent speak-out, I shared how Rodney King’s treatment by police 20 years ago helped me to find my voice as a social justice activist. And yet, despite our national attempts to stop traffic and speak back to injustice, I am horrified by how little progress we have made since then. Yet another generation is forced to confront these structural problems.

Following on Gayle Sulik’s recent post, Don’t Black Lives Matter?, many of us are involved in protests on our own campuses. This is the letter our feminist faculty at Colgate posted in solidarity with students on our campus. Now I want to share it widely with student activists across the nation. Students, we are here with you. We feel broken too. Let’s move forward together.
-Meika

Dearest Students:

We write this letter in the spirit of solidarity and love. And we begin this letter with one word, one potentially problematic idea: “to be broken.” And then to ask, “what does it mean to break, to be broken?” Certainly, the events of this last week, this last month, this last semester have left many of us with broken hearts and a more general sense of brokenness: a broken justice system that facilitates impunity and the abuse of power, a broken society where the humanity of the racialized and the poor is subject to daily assaults and being disappeared, a broken world all together where the cracks reveal far too many injustices. There is much that is broken. And we recognize that in this vulnerable moment things and persons nearest and dearest to us feel all the more fragile, easily broken, as we pause to also reflect on the histories and structures that render some lives, some bodies, more fragile, more easily broken, than others. It’s possible that many of you, as you read these (broken) words, are likely feeling that brokenness in your hearts. And that some of you are likely feeling that brokenness in your bodies and in your very spirits, the week’s/semester’s/year’s events leaving you feeling weary, broken-down, on the side of a shadowed road with your spirits deflated, while “hope,” that elusive winged-thing, speeds by, sees you for a moment, but can’t be bothered to stop to help with the repairs. Many of you know this brokenness far too well, so well in fact that it’s beginning to feel like a broken-in shoe. And you are tired.

As faculty, we write this letter to say that we know this brokenness too, and that we are living with that brokenness, albeit in ways both similar and different, alongside you. We write this letter in an effort to recognize and name that brokenness and to note that we are here, standing beside you amidst the fissures and the cracks that have been revealed. Without undermining or glossing over the very real pain that has resulted from so much breakage, we write this letter from a space of hope for what these heart-breaking moments of rupture might reveal and what lessons they might teach us about how we want to be and belong as a community here and beyond. Breaking offers opportunity for building anew. After all, “[a] writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking,” says Alice Walker. “[I]t is through that broken window that we see the world.” As we look, cautiously perhaps, through these broken windows in our midst, what can we now see? What connections and opportunities for new relationships and alliance-building does such breaking reveal?

The events of this last week (and prior) have served to illuminate the inherent brokenness of a system—a broken system that facilitates students feeling uncared for, unseen, unsafe. We write this letter to let you all know that we recognize this brokenness and that we take serious our responsibility to make sure those gaps in the system are addressed so as to trace the threats to their source(s). With all of that said, we thus hope that this letter will signal a different kind of break—the fracturing of a narrative that tells you are in this alone. You are not alone. This letter gestures towards the possibility inherent in what we recognize is a heart-breaking moment, but one that has also broke open the opportunity for us to share our stories of breaking and being-broken—stories that might bring us closer to recognizing the deeper bonds and commitments we need to have to one another during these heart-soul-body breaking times. We are here, with you.

In solidarity,

Your feminist faculty

Read the entire Black Lives Matter Series on Feminist Reflections

• Part 1: Don’t Black Lives Matter? by Gayle Sulik
• Part 2: How Sociologists Can Support Black Lives Matter by Mindy Fried
• Part 3: An Open Letter to Student Activists by Meika Loe
• Part 4: Racism is not Dead: Language And Everyday Interactions by Trina Smith

I’ve been thinking a lot about Anita Hill.

Especially after witnessing this exchange this past weekend:

5 year old boy to a 7 year old girl: “You’re stupid. Suck my cock.”

(He grabs at her vaginal area.)

The girl quietly says “Stop,” but isn’t sure what is going on.

The scene haunts me, and millions of other individuals across the gender spectrum, as it replays over and over in our society. I share this to remind us how much more work needs to be done.

Here’s what gives me hope. My college students, like many, are activated around the larger context of harassment on campus. They are talking, discussing, holding protests, and claiming their rights.

Sadly, by week one in college most of my first-year students can identify a harassment culture. They have examples to share: instances of harassment based on sex, gender identity and expression, looks, racial and ethnic identity, and class identity. This is always terribly discouraging.

For years I have shown my students clips of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearing to help them to understand how far we have come. I talk about being a college student when there was barely any language to describe that hostile climate. And were there school policies addressing stalking, sexual assault, and online bullying? I doubt it. But today, those policies exist. Today, Title IX is helping us to achieve equity in college environments across the board.

My students are always unusually fixated, watching the Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings of 1991, when Anita Hill is disemboweled before the public for her claims of sexual harassment. Fourteen white senators staring her down. Senators like Arlen Specter ask over and over about discussions of penis size, porn, and pubic hairs, in what appears to be an attempt to humiliate and break her down. It is as if she is on trial. And yet, she calmly perseveres. In the process, she teaches senators across the political spectrum and the public at large what constitutes hostile climate in the workplace, and what constitutes sexual harassment in a time of great ignorance and denial.

Even though this all occurred before my students were born, they are always grateful to know, understand, and experience this piece of history. Perhaps they see themselves in Anita Hill. They certainly see a brave woman who catalyzed social awareness about sexual violence and gender inequality. And they are standing on the shoulders of Anita Hill, and other reformers like her, including ), Fanny Lou Hamer (involuntary sterilization), Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin (rape culture), Anne Koedt, Shere Hite, and Barbara Seaman (women’s right to pleasure) and many other brave women who have publicly named sexual violence in their lives and society.

This year, a long-anticipated documentary about Anita Hill, Speaking Truth to Power, is available. It details the period before the trial, the trial itself, and the aftermath, including the approximately 25,000 letters received by Hill, a mix of death threats and loving support. We learn about her family (she is the youngest of 13 siblings), and her mother’s influence in her life. We also meet many of the people who have supported Hill over the years, including a group of women politicians, former colleagues, and family.  At the end of the film Hill is featured working with the younger generation, inspired by their energy and activism related to harassment culture. Most importantly, Anita helps us to reflect on how those hearings changed her life, and specifically how the combination of race and gender shaped her life, and changed the dynamics in DC and beyond.

Yesterday I screened this film for my class, and once again the students were transfixed. Afterwards, they talked about interviewing their moms, and their surprise in learning that many of their moms have experienced harassment in the workplace. In more than a few cases, these mothers experienced heightened misogyny at work, during and after the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas trial, a wrinkle that the film does not address.

Throughout the trial, Anita Hill is asked why didn’t she report these incidents. Today, students are also asked the same thing. Reporting is not an easy thing to do, and while reporting rates have gone up in recent years, the numbers as a whole are way too low to reflect the troubling reality on our campuses. It doesn’t seem fair to put full responsibility on the survivors, rather than the perpetrators. But how else do we hold people accountable for their actions? Anita Hill felt she had a responsibility to speak the truth.

Clearly, we still have a long way to go with this harassment culture, especially when it starts at age 5. But thank you Anita Hill, for telling the truth, and for paving the way. Thank you, Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University, who asks us all to “carry the weight” on October 29th.

Thank you to everyone who continues to be activated around sexual harassment. Let’s continue to break through these  silences and push towards equality.

Related articles

• Sexual Harassment: The Continuing Need to Speak Truth to Power

When we had a baby girl, her super hip grandmother asked “Is there an Internet site where we can buy books that feature strong girls?”

At the time there wasn’t. But lo and behold, it has arrived. And it is a sensation. We have to thank the feminist blogosphere for helping us to get here.

One of our favorite bloggers told us about A Mighty Girl – a site that features 1500 girl-empowerment books. What a relief to not have to ask every bookstore owner and librarian to find these books for us! Here they are all here organized by age, awards, etc. And maybe now future daughters of feminists will not have to receive 5 copies of Paper Bag Princess!

Today, girl power = mighty and pink. Girls have to prove they are just as good as boys, and also girly girls. As the founders of A Mighty Girl say, “Girls do not have to be relegated to the role of sidekick or damsel in distress; they can be the leaders, the heroes, the champions that save the day, find the cure, and go on the adventure.”

This is true liberation, but it also means the bar has been raised, and expectations for girls can be contradictory, wide-ranging, and just plain overwhelming.

Educator and life coach Ana Homayoun, author of Myth of the Perfect Girl, meets these high-achieving girls in high school, as they are preparing to apply to college. On the surface they appear to be doing well, excelling across the board. But beneath the surface, she says, girls are stressed out and stretched too thin as they strive to be perfect. “Somewhere along the way… they lose sight of who they are, and instead work overtime to please their friends, parents, teachers, and others.”

This is what I was thinking about when I watched the super short docu-movie Gnarly in Pink featuring the “Pink Helmet Posse,” three 6-year-old girls who share an unusual passion: skateboarding. They cry, they beat up pink ponies, and skateboard like champs while wearing tutus. Multi-dimensional girls in a violent culture. It feels/looks like a much more complicated world than generations before, but then again, it is familiar. Tomboys have always experienced serious peer pressure to fit in with the girls (to be accepted). You just hope that in the process of meeting everyone elses’ expectations, that they are also living for themselves.

Homayoun says we can help our kids “forge an anchor that can hold them in place when everyone else is calling for them to conform.” And books can help us with this project. Thank you, A Mighty Girl, and feminist parents far and wide, for your efforts in helping our kids come to self-acceptance and develop their own sense of purpose.

How do you help the girls in your life navigate endless social expectations and pressures?

This blog post was originally published at Unconventional Kids!