The image of Afghans storming a plane after Kabul fell to the Taliban. And the image of Vietnamese trying to flee Saigon (pictured below)have similarities that are pretty hard to ignore. I was remindedof an expression, most often attributed to then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — who recognized long before 1975, that we could not win the Vietnam war, but hoped to save face by allowing “a decent interval” between when we left the country and when it would return to the North Vietnamese.

That interval didn’t last long in Afghanistan and before we start blaming various administrations for our failure we should look at the hard lessons learned from a man who was considered the chief architect of the Vietnam war, Robert S. McNamara.

Although these wars and the geopolitical landscape of these regions are vastly different, there are a number of lessons that should have been learned from out failure in Vietnam.

McNamara learned from his mistakes and confessed them in his seminal work, The Fog of War. Here are some of the lessons he cites that have become all too familiar themes after the fall of Afghanistan.

1. We failed because we lacked Empathy. McNamara cites this as the fundamental reason we lost Vietnam; The North Vietnamese actually believed the US presence was little more than another attempt at colonialization. This thinking in retrospect was “absurd” to McNamara, because he lacked the empathy to see it through their eyes. Like the French and Chinese before them, the US was just another power attempting to take over. In Afghanistan, we assumed we were doing the right thing by eliminating a band of misogynistic fundamentalists, with the same hubris we had to eliminate the threat of terrorism. But we never understood that civil war was fiercely entangled with tribal allegiance and two-thousand year-old Shia Law. Empathy is a dirty word in the rough and tumble world of Realpolitik, and it’s taken a huge hit with the growing mistrust of our institutions lately. But the main reason we lost Afghanistan to the Taliban was the same reason we lost Vietnam. Afghanistan has been invaded as many times as Vietnam, and no matter how bad the Taliban’s brutal regime, the cultural and tribal politics would never adapt to the kind of democracy we were trying to implement. The writer Anand Gopal, who has reported extensively from Afghanistan, wrote, “The US designed the Afghan state to meet Washington’s counterterrorism interests, not the interests of Afghans, and what we see today is the result. The cultural complexity of the environment is just so huge that it’s hard for us to understand it,” he said. “For Americans, it’s black or white — it’s either good guys or bad guys. For Afghans, it’s not. There are good Taliban and bad Taliban, and some of them are willing to do deals with each other. It’s just beyond us.” The implicit belief in our military might and democratic ideals as being dominant, and immutable are the greatest impediments to empathy in dealing with developing countries with ingrained traditional cultures and tribal alliances, alliances that we greatly overestimated.

2. We lost sight of our original intentions. Why did we invade Vietnam? Our mindset during the cold war was that communism would spread via “the domino effect,” one nation falling after another, and we had to stop it to keep it from reaching America. Why did we invade Afghanistan? President Bush made it clear after the 9–11 attacks that we would fight terror in Afghanistan to keep it from reaching our shores. But over twenty years in both of those wars (although Vietnam was never officially declared “a war” we replaced the French in 1954 and didn’t evacuate until 1975) our intentions changed, or we lost sight of what our original intentions were. Were we trying to rebuild Vietnam?; to project our notion of a democracy which would never be a good fit for a country embroiled in a civil war. Our politicians ignored the obvious fact that South East Asia is the most ethno-centric heterogenous in the world. Vietnamese didn’t just fear and hate the French and Americans, they had been invaded by China, and were in the midst of a civil war when we first entered the conflict.

When did we shift our focus from defending against terrorism to rebuilding Afghanistan into a parliamentarian democracy? We gave them aid. Supplied them with eighty-three billion dollars of military training and equipment and now blame them for not standing up and fighting for democracy. Their leader flees the country and we’re left with this vague notion that they abandoned a goal of freedom we fruitlessly try to impose our culture on a political system that’s historically only governed through tribal alliances.

3. Be Prepared To Reexamine your Reasoning. McNamara makes this point and clarifies it by stating leaders must learn from their mistakes which is especially hard for politicians who are battling an entrenched narrative and sticking to it at all costs. Ask anyone today the reason we got into Afghanistan and you’ll hear anything from rooting out Al Kaeida, to protecting the rights of women. It became clear in both conflicts early on that we’d never succeed in building a model nation-state in either country. And this was never our original intention. George Bush didn’t want to rebuild Afghanistan. He did want to leave it in a better position than he found it, but by then keeping terror from American shores was replaced by trying to remake a foreign culture into our image. This fallacy was as absurd to the North Vietnamese as it was to the Taliban. They both assumed we wanted to occupy their country the same way the communists tried to with the Russian invasion in 1979. And the Chinese and Japanese invasions of Vietnam.

4. Never assume, that attacking a foreign country engaged in civil war will automatically win over the hearts and minds of the minority revolutionaries. We learned this lesson the hard way (or should have) with the Bay of Pigs invasion. Our assumption was that once we attacked Cuba our force would somehow reignite a hatred of the communists. In fact, the opposite happened. Citizens even antagonistic to one another automatically reunited against the foreign invaders; the Cuban militia we sent to attack was soundly defeated.

There are good Taliban and there are bad Taliban. But all Afghans share an undeniable heritage that no war will ever erase. Furthermore, our method of engagement in Afghanistan; a well intentioned emphasis on air attacks to protect American lives — was a complete disaster, as the collateral damage to the civilian population would be enough to turn any supporters against us. There’s a saying, Generals fight their last war, and sadly despite the vastly different terrain — from the jungles of south east Asia to the brutal desert of Kandahar, we inflicted a lot of collateral damage on people to do the good we thought we were doing. “How much evil must we do in order to do good?” a question Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most influential American theologians and philosophers asked, and in trying to answer that question, McNamara makes a brutal confession: I failed. How do you think his counterpart, the arrogant hawk, Donald Rumsfeld would have answered that question about his involvement in the middle east?

Last, the true victims of the fall of Afghanistan are the American and coalition forces who died or lost friends in the twenty year quagmire that these wars produced. We must show we’ve at least learned one lesson of the past by NOT discarding our veterans the way we did after Vietnam. How would you feel losing a son, a daughter or a best friend to the enemy, only to watch them retake the land you fought and died for? History will show that our leaders made mistakes and the war was a complete and utter failure, but if we neglect the mental and physical health of our heartbroken veterans then we are all to blame.

I wish there were a cabinet level position devoted to protecting the rights of women, because when it comes to creating laws that promote equality our government is pretty much broken.

I have not given up on our democracy. I teach history and English and my students know I’m a fanatic when it comes to politics, equality and what history can teach us about both. The DNC last week was my Superbowl and as I watched the delegates nominate the next president, I listened to Joe and Kamilla talk a lot about women’s rights. Lots of politicians talk about women’s rights, but many of them just don’t know how hard it is to pass equal rights legislation.

But history is on our side this week. It’s the centennial celebration of the 19th amendment, that gave women the right to vote and no real-life superhero embodied that fight more than Susan B. Anthony.

There is a poster of Susan that hangs on our classroom wall (correction: used to hang on our classroom wall. I don’t have a classroom anymore. I teach now from a “pod.”) But when I had walls there was a portion of our classroom devoted to “Real Life Superheroes.” (A poster of Susan could be found between the pic of Catherine the Great and Joan of Arc.)

The media remembered Susan and her battle for emancipation as if she were born to lead a crusade, preeminently chosen the way we’d like to believe all our heroes are chosen for their larger-than-life roles. Many reported correctly that Susan was arrested for casting a ballot while posed as a man. But they failed to mention that it took forty-two years after her arrest for the 19th amendment to become law.

Forty-two years is a long time, and that’s not unusual when it comes to challenges as big as gender rights. Change does not come easily, especially change that requires the ruling class — not just rich people, not just white people — but all men to give up something they see as a birthright: Power. Domination.

I ask my students to vote on who can lead us on the next great crusade if not for equal rights, at least, the protection of those basic human rights that are blithely violated with rape, and workplace harassment. When you study the all too real people who demanded emancipation you don’t find perfection; that is, you don’t find all the natural gifts of oration and charisma you’d expect from a leader.

A real superhero can’t cast a spiderweb or leap tall buildings in a single bound. Many are not always naturally gifted. Some are deeply flawed. And many of those so-called flaws are what motivate them to take a stand in the first place.

Our current president is the leader of what can only be called a party of White Domination. Nevertheless, he found a clever way to redeem his misogynistic reputation by pardoning Susan for her arrest. (If only Susan were alive to see this spectacle. What do you think the feisty suffragette would have done to a man who is known as the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief?). But the PGIG isnt our only problem. Donald Trump may be evil. Donald Trump may be the anti-Christ. But he didn’t create gender inequality, we all did. And we need to admit that if we want to see lasting change.

How hard is it to make a lasting change when it comes to equal rights? Imagine you are the sole crusader for a cause in your favorite video game. When the game begins all the other players are against you. And they have all the weapons. And I don’t mean flashy lasers and stun bombs but real, primitive weapons like the rocks and gas-filled bottles that are being thrown around the county now.

I doubt there will ever be a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women’s rights alongside their right to vote. But why not a cabinet level position? We have secretaries devoted to our Health, Education and Welfare. Isn’t the mental and physical health of young women dependent on her safety? What kind of education system ignores teaching that promotes the rights of women?

My students and I couldn’t agree on a title of the cabinet position. Secretary of #Metoo? Department of Gender Equality? So, I ask you to help us with a title and tell us who would be the person you think would be best to fill the role.

She probably has to be a lot younger than I am because it will take another forty years for real change to take place. And I doubt she’ll be perfect. In fact, knowing history, I think the best choice would be a young person who knows that humility and vulnerability just might be the new superpowers we’ve all ignored.

Times Up, Donald. But we’ve still got a long way to go. Who would you nominate to promote gender equality in the next administration? I really want to hear from you.

Of all the new words that entered the lexicon last year, “whitelash” was the hardest one for me to share with my students. I felt relief when a local media source in San Francisco chose “Xenophobia” as the word of the year, because that word’s easy to accept. Phobia is a powerful suffix we review in my class because it gives us a lot of leverage to help decipher hundreds of words — it stands for fear, and hatred.

It’s opposite is philia.

“Xeno” stands for foreigners, and it’s easy to admit that many people have a fear of foreigners. We’ve been this way for a long time. (Did you know “Xeno” actually comes from the name of a Greek general. A guy who lived a long time ago, and you guessed it, didn’t like foreigners.)

Whitelash, however is much worse. According to one news source it means, “backlash by white racists against black civil rights advances.” It doesn’t hide from it’s racist intent the way a word like “xenophobia” and “superpredator” does. We blame the politics of Donald Trump for this word, but anyone who studies fiction and language can tell you that the fear and resentment of black civil rights advances has been hardwired into our language; into the stories we write, the words we create.

The secret life of racism can be found in words.Words are created to help explain, but the truth is they’re just empty boxcars used to hide our darkest fears. As Toni Morrison eloquently elaborates in her Nobel Prize speech. “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence…it must be rejected, altered and exposed.”

If you’ve been following this blog you know that I think young people have it a lot tougher than most people think. They’re confused; no — they’re downright stupefied — because we give them dangerously conflicting messages on what it takes to be a man or a woman in our world. They come to teachers and need help. We show them facts, have them recite history, and then with all those stupefying words explain the past cannot repeat itself, because we know who all the bad people are.

Instead, we should quote Toni who gave this dire prediction ten years ago:

“There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.”

Pretty heady stuff, but let me boil it down for my students and their parents: Donald Trump may be a racist. Donald Trump may be the antichrist. But Donald Trump isn’t responsible for whitelash. We are. And if you really want to find a way out of the hell we may have to endure; only fiction can save us. because fiction sees all the fears that we’re too ashamed to admit, and Toni Morrison, is a much better prognosticator than those clueless Washington pundits, because only Toni can see that language is little more than a racist straightjacket we hide a lot of our fear in.

Today as we celebrate the life of a great man, some of us will point fingers and wring hands at who is responsible for all these new words that just stand for a timeless hate we should’ve seen coming. Evil politicians didn’t create whitelash. We did. And maybe the only way to see the real truth is to read the fiction of a great writer like Ms. Morrison.

I teach middle school and have posted a sign on my classroom wall that reads: Real Life Wonder Women. Beneath it I have posters of female role models, some you probably would recognize, others maybe not. For those of you who know my work, this probably isn’t much of a surprise; I believe our duty to empower women doesn’t start in college, or even high school, but from the time a girl can read and comprehend social media.

I have a poster of Shalane Flannagan, Des Linden and Kara Goucher (OK, I’m a running enthusiast and coach). And also pics of the faces you’d probably recognize: Joan of Arc, Emelia Earhart, and Rosa Parks.

I also had a poster of Sheryl Sandberg, which isn’t hard to find on the walls of many middle schools. Let’s face it, she wrote the book on female empowerment. Sandberg’s book, Lean In, is considered to be a feminist manifesto and makes her the most important spokesperson in the fight for equality in the workplace. As the COO of Facebook, Sheryl is one of the most powerful women in the business of social networking,

But, I have to admit, it’s getting hard to keep her poster on my wall.

Sheryl is undeniably a powerful force in the business of social networking, and therein lies the problem; many young people (and adults, too) don’t understand that social networking isn’t just a platform of free ideas. It’s a business, a business that harnesses more influence than our government. Sheryl can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, or spin a spiders web, but as we have painfully witnessed the last two years, her actions influenced a presidential election. She also helped spread disinformation about institutions and people who don’t see Facebook as all that good for young people. She’s acknowledged some of these transgressions, but like many ambitious people, she’s refused to take any responsibility for them.

There’s a lesson I need to teach my students: Whether you’re a man or a woman, you’ll never achieve equality without being ambitious, but ambition can lead you to do some pretty bad things. I have to teach my students that to Sheryl we aren’t customers. We are products; that is, every aspect of our documented lives; from birthday parties to sleepovers; from pics of our first bestie to our favorite pizza — are commodities, mere data-sets that Facebook sells to the highest bidder.

Does that make Sheryl Sandberg a bad person? Not really. I doubt given the bias against ambitious women in the workplace she would’ve gotten anywhere without taking great risks, but it’s tough to read a book about women, work and the will to lead without acknowledging that lying is a genderless topic that shouldn’t be rewarded.

I hope in this new year, Sheryl can explain to us how important privacy is to young people. But most of all, I hope she can tell my students this simple lesson: with absolute power comes greed and corruption — whether you’re a man or a woman.

Sheryl Sandberg’s not your Friend: How Facebook is hurting young people. was originally published in Athena Talks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of all the new words that entered the lexicon last year, “whitelash” was the hardest one for me to share with my students. I felt relief when a local media source in San Francisco chose “Xenophobia” as the word of the year, because that word’s easy to accept. Phobia is a powerful suffix we review in my class because it gives us a lot of leverage to help decipher hundreds of words — it stands for fear, and hatred.

It’s opposite is philia.

“Xeno” stands for foreigners, and it’s easy to admit that many people have a fear of foreigners. We’ve been this way for a long time. (Did you know “Xeno” actually comes from the name of a Greek general. A guy who lived a long time ago, and you guessed it, didn’t like foreigners.)

Whitelash, however is much worse. According to one news source it means, “backlash by white racists against black civil rights advances.” It doesn’t hide from it’s racist intent the way a word like “xenophobia” and “superpredator” does. We blame the politics of Donald Trump for this word, but anyone who studies fiction and language can tell you that the fear and resentment of black civil rights advances has been hardwired into our language; into the stories we write, the words we create.

The secret life of racism can be found in words.Words are created to help explain, but the truth is they’re just empty boxcars used to hide our darkest fears. As Toni Morrison eloquently elaborates in her Nobel Prize speech. “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence…it must be rejected, altered and exposed.”

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If you’ve been following this blog you know that I think young people have it a lot tougher than most people think. They’re confused; no — they’re downright stupefied — because we give them dangerously conflicting messages on what it takes to be a man or a woman in our world. They come to teachers and need help. We show them facts, have them recite history, and then with all those stupefying words explain the past cannot repeat itself, because we know who all the bad people are.

Instead, we should quote Toni who gave this dire prediction ten years ago:

“There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination. There is and will be more seductive, mutant language designed to throttle women, to pack their throats like paté-producing geese with their own unsayable, transgressive words; there will be more of the language of surveillance disguised as research; of politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute; language glamorized to thrill the dissatisfied and bereft into assaulting their neighbors; arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.”

Pretty heady stuff, but let me boil it down for my students and their parents: Donald Trump may be a racist. Donald Trump may be the antichrist. But Donald Trump isn’t responsible for whitelash. We are. And if you really want to find a way out of the hell we may have to endure; only fiction can save us. because fiction sees all the fears that we’re too ashamed to admit, and Toni Morrison, is a much better prognosticator than those clueless Washington pundits, because only Toni can see that language is little more than a racist straightjacket we hide a lot of our fear in.

Today as we celebrate the life of a great man, some of us will point fingers and wring hands at who is responsible for all these new words that just stand for a timeless hate we should’ve seen coming. Evil politicians didn’t create whitelash. We did. And maybe the only way to see the real truth is to read the fiction of a great writer like Ms. Morrison.

It’s awards season in Hollywood, and who doesn’t like watching their favorite star preen and gush over a golden trophy. But there’s someone missing from the lovefests at the Golden Globes and the Grammys. A forgotten woman. She didn’t get nominated for anything, but men and women are paying a lot of lip service to her in their acceptance speeches.

She’s the woman who couldn’t make the party because she was blacklisted by a movie mogul who wanted sex. Mira Sorvino was one of these victims. Her nemesis: Harvey Weinstein. Mira’s a brilliant actress whose career was nearly ruined because she refused to get on the casting couch with that ruthless Neanderthal. Mira’s mad as hell and has proclaimed it’s #times up for her abuser.

She won’t be working with Woody Allen again, either. Mira will survive, but what about the less fortunate victims who aren’t strong enough to fight back. There are plenty of them. Truth is, when it comes to sexual harassment, Hollywood’s no different from the rest of America and the irony of watching liberal, progressive movies cast and filmed by sexist pigs is hard to overlook.

We’re imprisoned by a culture that applauds women who make impassioned acceptance speeches about sexual harassment while wearing see-through gowns. I love seeing my favorite stars in see-through gowns. I also love hearing them stand up to a male-dominated town that allows harassment. And like most people, I try to dismiss this hypocrisy as “just the way things are.” But the time has come to admit who we really are. I felt a weird, cognitive dissonance as I watched the scantily-clad dancers at the Grammys. I felt the same way as I watched Hillary Clinton take a stab at our sexist President, (but all the while, I couldn’t dismiss the fact that she herself had shielded at least one sexual predator.)

Who’s to blame for this? We point fingers at the accusers. We wring our hands and create new hashtags, but truth is we’re all to blame. Our Hollywood stars represent talent, beauty and all the grit it takes to make it to the top, right?

No, not really. Our Hollywood stars are sometimes the darkest projection of our sick selves. We rubberneck their plight the same way we can’t take our eyes off a train wreck–we need Hollywood for reasons we can’t admit; in our hearts it’s that depraved place that could never be like were we live. Truth is Tinseltown’s a real place with real people who do the same things we do. Sexual depravity and equality may never be reconciled but we can start by admitting this hypocrisy is hardwired into all of us. Actors are beautiful, talented people who give great speeches, but this year, as they hold up those golden trophies, I think it’s time for us all to admit that the winner is our own sick selves.

Last week after President Trump called the media “the enemy of the people” he was compared to Joseph Stalin, who first used that term. That’s a horrific comparison that’s thankfully never been leveled at a commander-in-chief, as historians tell us Stalin killed more innocent people than Adolph Hitler. But pundits are making another comparison that really deserves our attention; comparing POTUS with Richard M. Nixon, the 37th President. Most claim that Trump has the same acerbic relationship with the press as Nixon did.

This is true, but there are some important differences that can help us understand why we love to hate this president.

Nixon hated the media, but he needed it desperately the way most men who have a victim-mentality need an opponent. We all need someone to blame for our mistakes some of the time. Unfortunately for Nixon, TV came of age during his career, and the press morphed into the an undeniable powerhouse called “the media.”

Nixon made hating the new behemoth a full-time job. You can still watch the first televised Presidential debates, where Nixon looks lost and haggard alongside the young, handsome JFK. You can still watch the televised new conference where Nixon stated, “I don’t hate the press, because you can only hate what you have respect for and I have no respect for you….”

Nixon became the president everyone loved to hate. Cold, untrustworthy, was how the media dubbed “Tricky Dicky.” President Washington couldn’t tell a lie. President Nixon couldn’t’ tell the truth. And the media hated him the same way it hates the Donald. Right?

No. not really.

There are some important differences between these deeply conflicted men. Nixon was a total disaster as a TV personality. He blamed the media for his inability to come across as trustworthy. Trump’s a genius at manipulating the electorate through social media. He doesn’t see himself as a whipping boy, but as a savior who bans all negative reportage about his administration as “fake news.”

And that’s our problem. The media is biased. And Trump’s genius is at exploiting that bias to his advantage. His supporters credit him with pulling back the veil on a once sacrosanct establishment and showing us the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Let’s face it. Fake news has been around for a lot longer than most people want to believe. It existed back in the early sixties when TV came of age,–and over the years we’ve witnessed the news change from a dedication to the facts, to a dumbed-down hybrid of what many are calling “factual entertainment.”

So, was Nixon right? No. After all, didn’t his downfall came with the daring and honest reportage of two journalists named Woodward and Bernstein. But the truth is all reporters are human, and therefore flawed. Times have changed. Do you really want to compare Matt Lauer with Walter Cronkite? Or Brian Williams with Edward R. Murrow? Do you remember Jason Blair? He cut a few corners when it came to reporting the truth. How about that reporter for the Washington Post who made up an entire story and won a Pulitzer prize? Her name was Janet Cooke.

Times have changed…teenage YouTube stars have more followers than U.S. Senators. Young people have difficulty telling the difference between reality and reality TV; the check-and-balance system that protects our democracy works because we can just vote people off the reality show this administration has become. Right? The system works. But few understand how before the internet “facts” had to be checked; sources confirmed.

We’re all afraid of the truth, sometimes. And we can’t look away from the train-wreck this administration has become (Is it possible, that some of us are thinking those vile things the President is saying?) We need to step back and see what we’re dealing with isn’t a madman in the oval office, but a brilliant tyrant who, like Nixon, will make anyone who disagrees with him an enemy of the people.

Well, it’s official — The “Casting Couch” is on fire and Hollywood’s in an unprecedented meltdown over sexual assaults by movie moguls, actors, writers, and directors. Why now? is the question most astute observers are asking; Babylon has been Babylon from the beginning — the alluring lights of Tinseltown have attracted starry-eyed wannabes before actors could speak on camera much less complain about being sexually abused by those in power.

While there have always been a few strong enough to complain, never have some many come forward and said ENOUGH. What caused the dam to break? Historians often point to a few seminal events that trigger a catastrophe — World War I was triggered by the assassination of archduke Ferdinand; The riots in Los Angles in 1992, were triggered with the vicious beating of Rodney King. But, while pivotal movements are often attributed to a single catalyst, it’s rarely that easy to explain. And make no mistake, throughout Hollywood’s long list of excess and indiscretion there is only one event that comes close to the destruction we are now witnessing; that is, the blacklisting of actors, writers, and producers that happened during the search for members of the Communist Party in the 1950's.

Joe McCarthy, a Senator from Wisconsin was the catalyst to those events we refer to as a Witch Hunt. He was a demagogue; a liar who fanned the flames of foreign aggression with such recklessness that all the historians agreed we’d never see the likes of him again.

That was until Donald Trump. Like it or not we don’t just look to a President for sound economic polices and assurance that we will be protected from threats foreign and domestic. The President casts a long, moral shadow over what we truly believe this country stands for. And like it or not, the POTUS is now being referred to as the PGIC (Pussy-grabber-in-chief). His degrading comments about women are the final straw in a long history of sexual dominance most men struggle with. But please remind yourself as we navigate through the most troubling times since ordinary people turned on each other and were forced to name friends and co-workers as members of the Communist party — Joe McCarthy didn’t create the “Red Scare” that allowed us to blacklist honest citizens. We did.

Donald Trump didn’t create the culture of misogyny and abuse that has been rampant at production studios for years. We did. The only way we can survive the aftermath of sexual abuse against women isn’t just stopping the Donald. The only way we will be free of sexual oppression is by taking a good, hard look in the mirror and facing our own depravity.

Understanding the Hollywood Sexual Assault Meltdown was originally published in Athena Talks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For those of you who read my blog and books, you know I teach and try to find role models for my young students. Some of the ones I select lived hundreds of years ago. Some are alive, and giving parents, teachers, and young people better choices than the dismal pantheon of famous teenagers in Hollywood who rely on sex tapes and high speed chases to gain notoriety.

Classes started this week, so I have a lot to hear from my students about who they admire and why. I write the words that are traditionally associated with leaders and role models on the board. “Integrity” “Vision” “Kindness”…but there are other more subtle attributes that we miss, and I think they can be found by looking at two actresses who are making some breakout choices with the roles they take, and some of the off-screen decisions they make about what’s really important in life.

Great leaders and role models share one trait that most of us miss when looking for the next person to follow: Vulnerability. This is an unlikely superpower to most larger than life characters. To make yourself vulnerable is put yourself in a place of risk, to appear weak, to make a choice that tells the world you know the difference between fame and personal achievement, between adulation and respect.

Selena Gomez decided to take three months off to assess her mental health and her career. It was a shocking move to the Hollywood establishment and her fans. Why didn’t she just check into rehab after a wildly publicized and largely manufactured “breakdown.” Instead, she sat down with strangers in therapy and made choices most adults couldn’t fathom. She came back a new different person. What we saw once as a squeaky clean girl with talent and mouse ears has blossomed into a young woman who is ready for a new role. In short, Selena became a real life wonder woman. She made risky choices the way Gal Gadot did in her breakout performance of Wonder Woman. By showing us her weaker side, she gave us a glimpse into a real superpower we all have the power to possess.

So, Selena is up on my board in the classroom as this month’s young woman to watch. One parent of course took issue with my choice and asked how I could be so admiring of a girl who sings the ultra sultry songs “Fetish”, and “Bad Liar”. How could I endorse an actress who wears a string bikini and sucks off a gun barrel in Spring Breakers. And my answer was because Selena, like any girl who needs to find womanhood on her own terms, is growing and exploring the complex difference between passion and true love in ways that give us the kind of conflicted character who is tired of playing a little girl. The world doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to shoving teenage sex in our faces, why should Selena? Can’t you hear her pain between the lines of those so-called “inappropriate” songs? Can’t you see why she’s supporting 13 Reasons Why as a way to stare down teen suicide? We parents and teachers still have a lot to learn on what it takes to survive as a young person today.

Thank God, Selena is showing the way.

Originally published at stephendavidhurley.com on August 23, 2017.

Selena Gomez: A Hollywood Role Model. was originally published in Athena Talks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last weekend, Warner’s Wonder Woman broke a box office record. It’s the first film directed by a woman to crack $100 million at the box office. It also revealed a long suppressed, dirty secret of Hollywood; the celluloid boardroom is just as sexist a the rest of corporate America. And it took a film about a strong woman directed by a strong woman to show us that.

Last year, only 7% of the 250 highest-grossing films were directed by women, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. That number has fallen 2% over the past two decades. Even though women consistently take home directing prizes in prestigious festivals like Sundance for art-house films, they’re largely boxed out of the most lucrative genres.

I don’t think Patty was raised by Amazons or wears body armor (except maybe in the boardroom) but she had to overcome a lot of obstacles to make this film happen, including replacing another director (Michelle Maclaren) to make the first major superheroine movie in over a decade. The last attempts were Catwoman and Elektra: both films were directed by men, got poor reviews, flopped at the box office and convinced studios for several years that female superhero movies just “don’t work.”

Ironically, Patty nailed it by not shying away from Wonder Woman’s (played by Gal Gadot) fragile, “more feminine” side. The film opens with our young heroine, Diana, true to the legend as a girl being raised by women on a remote Greek island. The notion of a young, fearless girl being trained by strong-willed mother figures is a powerful, irresistible trope that has long languished in Hollywood’s overtly sexist “princess mentality.”

The notion that a superhero can only recognize her superpower from a male dominated myth, is refreshingly obliterated by the first ten minutes of the film.

When the young Diana finds herself in the middle of World War I, confused and fragile, I marveled at how far we’ve come from the TV cartoon icon of the 1970’s. Diana doesn’t look tough and voluptuous the way Lynda Carter did; she looks tough, and lost. By avoiding all the distracting modern gadgets that fuel modern superhero movies, and placing it in a backdrop of history’s most bloody and pointless war, we see a real woman, who must use more wits than magic to overcome a fear many women have: that their power and drive will undermine a real, romantic relationship.

The casting of Godot was brilliant and is true to form for Jenkins as she’s adept at turning incredibly beautiful women into real human beings (She directed Monster, starring Charlize Theron). Godot isn’t really beautiful until she gets knocked down and punched in the face. Then she becomes the kind of woman who baffles and enthralls her love interest.

For her achievement, Sally Jenkins stands alone, but I don’t think this film could’ve gotten a green light were it not for our begrudging acceptance that gender roles are complex, too complex for your typical “Blockbuster.”

Hollywood, despite all it’s liberal progress needs to realize that sex and gender are still worlds apart and exploring this divide will make future “superhero movies” into films about real women who realize their extraordinary power comes from within.

Originally published at stephendavidhurley.com on June 7, 2017.

The Celluloid Glass Ceiling: How Patty Jenkins Became Our New Super Heroine was originally published in Indivisible Movement on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.