Hasta La Gadget!

There are networking events, and there are fashion events, and rarely the twain shall meet… unless you were meeting at the the first-ever Elle Magazine Women in Tech dinner at Quince Restaurant. Celebrating the X-chromosomes of tech leaders and changemakers profiled in the magazine’s July issue, the evening honored thirteen distinguished women at the top of their game in both function and form. These women were bold, bright, beautiful, and badass in the very best sense, an unstoppable force of femininity and feminism that coalesced the glamorous group of Silicon Valley and San Francisco powerhouse guests into a temporary sorority on steroids.

As host of the evening sponsored by Verizon, Elle Editor-in-Chief Robbie Myers adroitly attended to the thirteen honorees, and ensured that introductions were made all around. If you need to crowdfund your concept, go get Danae Ringelmann, founder of Indiegogo. If you want to grab a byte from an engineer with 1.46 million Twitter followers, find Padmasree Warrior, CTO and Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco Systems. Danika Laszuk of Jawbone can set you up with the latest wearable technology, Sarah Friar of Square can create a whole new credit category, and Caterina Fake can serve up startups like Findery, Flickr, and Hunch. Want to meet the Martians? The perfectly named Gwynne Shotwell, President of Space X, can advise you how to pack for the eight-month voyage. (Her don’t miss tip? BYOA — Bring Your Own Atmosphere.)

Although many of the honorees and guests had only met that evening, it did not deter a rapid-fire download of meta-data about what mattered: how to get more women enrolling in engineering institutions, how to negotiate VC funding, how to get changed for a fancy dinner in an airport bathroom, which Kleiner Perkins’ Juliet de Baubigny had just done just prior. And because these were women at the top of their game, they didn’t shy away from the really big questions: handling difficult shareholders, managing multiple mentorships, and finding drop-dead shoes that don’t make your feet numb.

No topic was off the exquisitely set table, thoughtfully equipped with ipads containing bios of the honorees and detailed descriptions of Chef Michael Tusk’s exquisitely refined dinner, a test for even the most diet-conscious: tomato fantasia with herbs and basil gelee, lobster-corn risotto, a choice of wild seabass or spring lamb, and a Mars-worthy red planet of a dessert that used glassblowing techniques to render a perfect sugar sphere containing rose, lychee and berry cream. Guests lingered over cappuccino to exchange ideas, ID’s and Instagrams, Tweeting and tagging one another like it was schoolyard recess. It was an unusual night in the Valley, and nobody wanted to disband the temporary girl group of stars that Elle Magazine had put at the top of the charts.

Also honored: Jessica Livingston, Cofounder and Partner, Y Combinator, Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America, Alison Pincus and Susan Feldman, Cofounders of One Kings Lane, Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor, Re/code, Genevieve Bell, VP of User Experience for Intel Labs, and Grace Woo, Founder for Pixels.IO. An equally accomplished guest list included actress Rashida Jones, Valley Girl Jesse Draper, plastic surgeon Carolyn Chang, Silicon Valley Bank’s Michelle Draper, PR powerhouse Brandee Barker, travel titan Ruzwana Bashir, venture capitalist Gina Bianchi, photographer and bon vivant Douglas Friedman, Facebook’s Libby Leffler, Elle Publisher Kevin O’Malley, lawyer and lobbyist Heather Podesta, retailer Sissie Twigs, chic Shoptiques Olga Vidisheva, Anne Waterman, Elle’s Fashion Director Samira Nasr, TechCruch’s Sarah Buhr, startup advocate Julie Samuels, and Enscient’s Shelly Kapoor Collins. Space X’s Gwynne Shotwell brought along her Stanford student daughter Anna Gurevich, whose poise and enthusiasm reinforced the evening’s unspoken theme, that these girls are just getting started as stars of the tech universe, breathing the amazing atmosphere of their own creation

Gay adolescents today are faced with a much more welcoming world than when I came out. Legislatively we have never had it so good and are now almost equal with heterosexuals. The big businesses who would once fire us now embrace the “pink pound” with relentless vigour. Even the unthinkable has happened — the Conservative party has endorsed us. Far from being the “pretend families” of Thatcher’s era, we can now marry and adopt children. On paper it really does look like gay people have made it — but what are the hidden costs?

It’s this brave new gay world that Julie Bindel deconstructs in her book Straight Expectations: What Does It Mean to Be Gay Today? Bindel’s thesis is controversial: the once flourishing lesbian and gay movement has completely sold out in the face of assimilation. We’ve been “duped” and are now pathetic shadows of our former selves, “a cowardly mass of apologetic sops”, grovelling for crumbs from a largely conservative society, who exploit us for our disposable income. To quote an early, typically caustic jibe:

“the gay rights movement has not just lost its teeth, it is operating like an elderly claret-soaked Tory making his way to the bedpan in the corner of the room: bloated, smug and plodding.”

There’s certainly nothing pedestrian about this book — it’s shamelessly ambitious, tackling all the hard hitting issues related to being gay today, from marriage, kids and bigotry to whether homosexuality is in the genes; Bindel steadfastly contends that sexuality is a choice and even maintains we’re playing into bigots’ hands when we say we were “born that way”.

But it’s over gay marriage that she really takes no prisoners: she sees it as one of the last outposts of patriarchy — an anachronistic institution which precipitates the oppression of women. Bindel is a proud “radical lesbian feminist” and understandably confronts the key debates from this standpoint: it is women who suffer the most from matrimony, she persuasively argues, but — more controversially still — she boldly claims that David Cameron’s support of gay marriage is little more than a ploy to divert attention from the other, more vital issues, such as anti-gay bullying in schools, the organised prejudice of religion and the plight of lesbian and gay people abroad.

Conscious that she seemed like a lone voice in objecting to gay marriage, Bindel polled 5,492 lesbians and gay men and 4,036 heterosexuals to reveal people’s real attitudes to homosexuality; 88% of respondents supported equal marriage. She examines these responses at length, returning to them repeatedly throughout the book, resolutely going against popular opinion as she reasons that lesbians and gay men — by jumping on the marriage bandwagon — have opted for “ordinariness” rather than the more revolutionary concept of “alternative lifestyles.”

Bindel’s rage at the current state of play burns through every page, but is juxtaposed with moments of surprising poignancy as she reflects on her own early days as part of a very different “community” — that of the Gay Liberation Front, which is the point of comparison on which much of her argument rests. The GLF, we are reminded, was an organisation which didn’t advocate for a seat at the table, but wanted to overturn that table — not just for gay people, but for heterosexuals too. Society was intrinsically corrupt — an avaricious, capitalist conspiracy resting on outmoded power dynamics. Nothing less than a complete overhaul was acceptable.

What’s really disappointing for Bindel is the failure of gay people to live up to these early promises and, most importantly, to their potential as gutsy outsiders. She carefully summarises ground-breaking moments in the gay rights movement, signposting where she believes things began to fall apart. Through her own back story we’re shown the moment when gay men and lesbians broke away from one another as they challenged Aids and Clause 28 in the 1980s. Clumping the two groups together is not only foolhardy, Bindel stresses, but more contentiously:

“until gay men recognise that lesbians suffer the double bind of sexism and anti-lesbianism, and that the two operate together like a pernicious form of social control, we cannot effectively work together in a way that will benefit both groups equally.”

The text is peppered with quotes like this — uncompromising and rabble-rousing, but convincingly argued.

But neither do lesbians get off the hook — crucially, it’s the failure of both gay men and gay women, who have either become “too tired to fight any more or too conservative to want to dismantle the remaining oppressive structures”, who really irk Bindel. These individuals are so desperate to be accepted that they’re not just aping straight people, but — worse still — aping the most conservative of straight people – those who have sold out to a Faustian pact where “profit has trumped politics”, in a gay commercial playground which values “equity over equality.”

We’re living in a time when although people are unhappy with the status quo they are often afraid to speak out; causing offense is a definite no-no. Given this, it’s refreshing to read a book that not only questions the state of the the gay nation — the “new normal” — but systematically rips into it. Bindel’s irascible, impassioned, but always compelling voice reminds us what activism is about; change can only happen when you nail your colours to the mast. And that, Bindel concludes, is what the next generation of gay men and women must do — will they “fit in or fight?” The future of the gay and lesbian movement now rests with them.

Julie Bindel’s Straight Expectations: What Does It Mean to Be Gay Today? is published by Guardian Books and is available to buy online.

This piece first appeared on DANKE MAG. Visit dankemag.com. Follow Danke Mag on Twitter: @dankemag.

I am (a fake) blonde and have large breasts. I am also a writer, employed and pursuing my Master’s. I’m half Mexican, have two dogs and usually show up to work sweating. I am often convinced I have a mustache. Sometimes I eat entire pizzas by myself. I have a strange and delusional fear of getting dosed with LSD.

These are things that make me “me.” These are all things that have nothing to do with each other. Right? Right.

Since we agree, please do us all a favor and remove the phrase, “You’re smarter than you look” from your vocabulary.

I hear it all the time. “You’re so much smarter than you look.” I have yet to determine whether I look like an imbecile or am actually intelligent; I assume it’s the former.

I never associated appearance with intelligence. After all, I was raised in Los Angeles, and I only knew attractive people. (Just kidding! Sort of.)

I grew up admiring my grandmother — the ultimate manifestation of beauty and brains. My grandmother is a very successful businesswoman as well as proud owner of a shoe collection so impressive it would shame Carrie Bradshaw all the way to Queens. Her constant nagging was a staple of my childhood — I didn’t (and don’t) wear enough “rouge.”

See, feminism! A pretty lady who cares about looks and clothes made it to the big time! What do you mean sexism? What do you mean we don’t take women seriously?

Well, when she was written up in a world-renowned business magazine a few months ago, they breezed over her remarkable contributions to the business and marketing world and diverted the piece to focus on her gracious hosting and flawless mascara application. Mind you, this was in a business magazine. Not Glamour.

This is nothing we’re not used to.

I spent the entirety of my formative years living in constant torment and agony as a result of my appearance.

In middle school, fellow classmates berated and teased me about my bra size. Some girls took photos of me when I wasn’t looking and posted them to their LiveJournals. I was the girl with really big boobs. Boys fondled me, girls tore off my pants in the hallway, boys teamed up to take off my shirt on the bus once on our way back from community service.

The school principal told my mother that the bullying was my fault.

“Maybe she shouldn’t wear so much makeup.”

A few years later I was sexually assaulted. I was also blamed for that. Because I wear makeup, because I’m a girl, because I look the way I do and don’t feel the need to hide it.

I’d like to think that the one thing that can’t be taken from me is my brain.

But I was unpleasantly greeted by a strange form of same-sex sexism when I began my undergraduate career at prestigious, competitive and outright pretentious liberal arts college.

The school was sort of like a nineties high school movie flipped on it’s side in an alternate universe. Everyone dressed the same — think Randall from Clerks. It was like an acid-infused rustic jungle rampant with overmedicated, flaccid lit majors and their miserable, undyed-virgin-hair-having, perfect straight-across-bang-strutting-clog-wearing female counterparts.

(I believe there’s a term for this now. ‘Normcore.’ Buzzfeed told me that.)

There was a group of kids my friends and I called the “Literati.” My off-and on-again hipster douche boyfriend was a member. He is the most infamous “Woah, you’re smarter than you look. I only wanted to hook up with you ’cause I thought you were a dumb slut.” (True story. Romance.)

The Literati was cool. They liked poetry. They discussed philosophy. They were angry and brooding and took Ancient Greek. My friends and I, however, were sort of a mismatched group of girly girls who found each other in the hall of our party dorm — we really liked boys, we really liked drinking and we really loved blasting Miley Cyrus (Yes, pre #BANGERZ) in our dorms and jumping on our beds.

What people thought of this behavior became very apparent when I began dating my Literati boyfriend. People couldn’t believe “he was dating someone like me.” We “didn’t make any sense together.” People asked what we talked about. What did we have in common? Did I even read books?

I was seriously asked if I read books. No, I’m a Literature major. I do not read books. I am writing my thesis on Listicle Theory.

My Literati boyfriend begged me to wear less makeup, more sweaters and dye my hair back to brown. (Yeah, he hated my blonde.) I started to listen. I also developed a very intense addiction to benzodiazepines around this time. Clearly, I was not doing well.

My Literati boyfriend trained me to “look smarter.” Contrary to popular belief, my hair color did not affect my intelligence. It did affect my happiness, though, and I am very gratefully back to blonde.

People still tell me that “I’m smarter than I look.” They are usually impressed that I have read one book. And they are genuinely surprised when my Tumblr (lots of sparkles and Britney Spears) is mine while DANKE MAG is as well.

I subconsciously recite my resumé and accomplishments to everyone I meet. I cling to my qualifications and GPA, for they are the only thing that will separate me from being “just a girl.” My LinkedIn profile is plastered with glimmers of hope — one girl’s impressive resumé is one man’s clean slate, and mine is the key to traversing the line into “equal to.”

It’s 2014. A man walks in and greatness is expected. A woman walks in and greatness is a huge surprise.

We aren’t smarter than we look. We’re just very smart.

And you look very dumb for thinking like that.

This week I was on my way home from work and was stopped at a red light. The car at the light in front of me was also stopped and blocking much of the entrance to a business I was trying to enter. I was trying to figure out if there was enough room between my car and the one in front of me so that I could squeeze into the parking lot.

As I was making those mental measurements, I was suddenly thrown forward and caught by my seatbelt. A quick glance in my mirror and I realized a truck had just smashed into the back of my car and was pushing me into the car in front of me. I heard metal bending, saw steam start to come from under my hood and felt the pain from being thrown forward at a high velocity.

The end of the story is that a driver coming up behind me hadn’t realized that everyone was stopped at a red light and had just slammed into my car pushing me into the car in front of me. In short order the police, fire, and ambulance were on the scene and the little area of the street was a flurry of activity. It was a hot day and I was standing on the sidewalk watching all the activity. A woman from one of the shops along the street came up to me and asked if she could get me a glass of cold water. All of a sudden my mind left the accident and focused on the kindness of this woman. She didn’t have to leave what she was doing and come check on me. She made the offer out of kindness.

Remember the verse in Matthew 10 that says this: And if you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers, you will surely be rewarded.

You see, I’m certain Christ really knew the impact of giving to someone else… the power of simply kindness. When the woman at the accident asked me if I wanted some cold water, it really wasn’t about the water. It was about a woman showing an act of kindness to someone she didn’t even know. At that moment there were no racial differences, social status concerns, or philosophical differences. There was simply a woman who wanted to show she cared about me and extended an offer to help.

I’ll never know this woman’s name but she has made me look at Matthew Chapter 10 through totally different eyes. I hope that as you have opportunities, you, too, will offer a cup of water whenever you can.

You may view more writing from Dr. Myers here. Videos may be viewed here.

With Roger Moran in the Tea Room aboard the Royal Britannia Yacht

What American could resist a bird’s eye view into the private enclaves of British royalty? Not this one. Epecially when it provides some unexpected insights.

It was my last day in Scotland, my final morning in Edinburgh. Checking out of my hotel, I debated whether to head to the train station or find one more point of interest before returning to London.

Stepping outside, I inquired with two local women enjoying a stroll. Would they recommend a visit to Edinburgh’s local docks?

They exchanged doubtful looks while assessing the city’s waterfront merits. Then, as if arriving upon a shared moment of illumination, the two announced in stereo, “the Britannia!”

“What’s the Britannia?” I asked.

“It’s the royal family’s private yacht. Consider it the equivalent to your American White House on the water.”

I was intrigued. But my ignorance was revealed again when I learned this famed yacht was decommissioned back in the ’90s. The Scottish ladies didn’t seem to mind. “You’ll love it,” they promised.

With little time to spare, I returned my bags to the hotel and jumped on the first bus to my newly inspired destination.

Britannia was worth the trip. Last in a long line of vessels commissioned by Britain’s royal family, the ship is a quiet and understated gem. With period details intact and plenty of floors to explore, it’s ideal for experiencing intimate history aboard the House of Windsor’s most modern — if not final — buoyant home.

I loved my visit.

The ship informed me about British protocols, challenged some of my mindsets and humanized public figures.

For example, despite employing a large onboard staff (waiters carefully measured length and distance between plates, glasses and silverware before meals) and paying homage to traditional British pomp (a royal marching band accompanied Her Majesty on all official visits), the vessel is of simple and almost spartan design.

True, Britannia does house Queen Elizabeth’s custom Rolls Royce for official transportation while at port. However, this royal yacht is devoid of the fine fabrics, fussy accoutrements and gilded fixtures I anticipated on a floating palace.

Instead, Britannia’s 1953 commissioning was carefully designed in low profile fashion. Its modest design acknowledges Britain’s lean, post WWII years and reflects its owners’ desire for a relaxed, “country home” environment.

I’d heard of her frugality, but it turns out Queen Elizabeth is unapologetically thrifty. A recovered, century-old sofa in the Admiral’s quarters caused me to ponder the monarch’s extreme sense of economy. Apparently, Her Majesty recycles sheets and furniture for as long as they remain functional — if not threadbare.

A final note could hardly go without mentioning: The honeymoon suite of Charles and Diana.

The suite features the ship’s only double bed (every other bed on board is a twin) which Charles bought in anticipation of his honeymoon with the young princess. Nearly colorless, its presence appears more obligatory than desired. A lone photo of the new couple still sits atop their nightstand, a reminder of a cold and loveless marriage.

I never got to watch Charles and Diana’s 1981 wedding. My husband and I married a few days earlier and were away on our own honeymoon at the time.

Yet as I took in the royal couple’s sanitized surroundings, I compared them with our own honeymoon in Acapulco. Our welcome accommodations were enhanced by tropical pools, acres of lush landscape and strolling guitarists who serenaded us over intimate dinners. Beauty was everywhere, but our greatest joy was in celebrating the start of our new life together.

So as if suspended in time and space, I exchanged thoughts of my happy honeymoon with what I imagined to be Princess Di’s experience. My heart sank for the young bride’s private disappointment. Was this budding princess hiding private tears while the world marveled at a veneer?

The encounter brought an unexpected — if not surreal — element to my visit aboard the Britannia. It was a tangible reminder of how money, titles and privilege cannot guarantee peace, happiness or love.

Children’s fairy tales often conclude with the words, “. . . . and the Prince and Princess lived happily ever after,” but such was not the case with Charles and Diana. Princess Di’s fairytale marriage turned tragic and today she is formally replaced by Camilla.

I left the ship with a universal reminder.

Few of us possess blue-blooded titles or claim vacations aboard private yachts, but we can all seek a love that money just can buy.

So whether you’re living in a lavish castle or just a small studio apartment, here’s wishing you plenty of happiness, joy and love in life!

But don’t go just yet. Join me aboard the Britannia with Roger Moran, an engaging Irishman who serves as the perfect “host” for visiting guests.

Welcome aboard and hope you enjoy your visit, too!