Brittney Griner and the Problem With Women’s Basketball
Speaker 1: That said.
Shayna Roth: Welcome to the Waves of Slate’s podcast about gender feminism and nothing but NET and Russian prisons. Every episode you get a new pair of feminists to talk about the thing we can’t get out of our minds. And today you’ve got me, Shayna Roth, senior producer at Slate and producer of The Waves.
Speaker 3: And me, Amir Rose Davis, assistant professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas Austin and one of the co-host of the Brenda All Down Feminist Sports Podcast.
Shayna Roth: Brittney Griner. Probably one of the top players in the WNBA has spent the last five months detained by the Russians. Russian authorities found hashish vape cartridges in her luggage at the airport. Last week, Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges and is expected to still spend the next weeks and months in Russian detention as the court reads the file into the record. And then she faces up to ten years in prison. This is a case that at first got surprisingly little attention, especially outside of the sports world. But that has started to change, particularly as talks of essentially trading Griner and another American for a Russian arms dealer have circulated a mirror. You are our amazing sports expert here on the waves. Why has this case captured your attention?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it’s terrifying. This has been so many ripples and waves to this case, first and foremost. To hear that she had been over there and by the time we really started getting the news stateside, it had already been three weeks. That has been terrifying. And then just seeing it kind of escalate and be this long and still not have Britney home. I think it’s a story that has been hard to wrap our heads around, quite honestly, but that touches on so much of the themes that we already talk about in women’s sports and being a black woman in America and being queer in America. And so I think it’s something that all of us should be having our attention on at this point in time.
Shayna Roth: We’re going to take a break here. But when we come back, we’re going to talk about the reaction to Graner’s detention and what that says about how we value female athletes.
Shayna Roth: Welcome back to the Waves. In May, Brittney Griner wife, Cheryl Griner, sat down with Robin Roberts of Good Morning America about what was at the time Britney’s 100 day stint in Russian detention.
Speaker 4: I know that you want to speak with President Biden. Absolutely. I just keep hearing that he has the power. She’s a political power. So if they’re holding her because they want you to do something, then I want you to do it. And I know that Secretary Blinken has reached out to you and has communicated to you that top priority. Do you feel that’s the case? I don’t know. I was grateful for the call. You say she’s top priority, but I want to see it. And I feel like to see it would be nice to be on US soil at this point. I don’t even know who I’m getting back when she comes back.
Shayna Roth: So that was about a month and a half ago. And since then, Griner has pleaded guilty. Also, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson is reportedly planning a trip to Russia to try and negotiate the release of Griner. But other than that, not a whole lot has happened. And for Griner to be sitting in a Russian prison, I’m sure each day feels like a year. So, Emira, how do you react to to that?
Speaker 3: It just breaks my heart to hear the pain that so many carry around this, especially, of course, Cheryl. I mean, I think that it’s one of these things that when she was first detained over there, a lot around her camp, a lot in her circle, a lot of us who who cover women’s sports were kind of told don’t make a big deal out of it because it will be easier to get her home quickly and safely. If we don’t talk about it, if it’s handled under the radar.
Speaker 3: And I think part of the sting of this is that for the first month, that was what so many of us did like scared to talk out, scared to raise the alarm about this, because suddenly, you know, you have the State Department and promising that, you know, is just like a whisper network almost. And now here we are. It’s been months. It’s very clear that that strategy was not the strategy. Now we’re into the place where we have hope as we have people speaking out. We’ve, you know, these interviews happening and it still doesn’t feel like the needle is really being moved in the way that it needs to be. I think there is a feeling once the State Department classified, I was wrongfully detained, that things were going to move faster. And I feel like this has been month after month of of false hope almost. And so I feel weariness.
Speaker 3: My reaction at this point is very weary. It’s it’s still quite terrifying not to really know what’s going on and to feel like you have to put belief in a system, in an administration who is saying the things. But like, as Cheryl said, how can we measure the actions? There has been none. And and that point, what is the value of words and prayers and thoughts and prayers again and again when we know what that is?
Shayna Roth: I want to go back to that interview with Cheryl Griner. There is a part where Robin and Cheryl talk about Brittney Griner Aboyeji, as Cheryl calls her, and her experience playing overseas.
Speaker 4: And she had spent quite a bit of time in Russia playing for the team there. What was her experience like prior to this? Honestly, great. You know, you are a goat. If you can actually play in Russia on the team, big plays for they treat them like superstars.
Shayna Roth: There’s been some talk about female players needing to play overseas because it pays a lot better than playing in the U.S. And to put that into perspective, the average annual salary for the 2021, 2022 season in the NBA was 7.34 million, according to Statista. For the WNBA, the women’s league, it was 120,000. The highest earners in the women’s league make less a lot less than the league minimum for WNBA players, which is insane. But what also really struck me here was treating a female basketball player like a superstar. Honestly, I feel like in the U.S., yes, we sometimes get shining female stars that everybody knows and talks about, but it happens so rarely. Griner coach Vanessa Nygaard spoke to this on July 4th during a press conference.
Speaker 5: Do you think there’s enough of an outcry? No, no, no. I just you know, we in women’s sports, we don’t get as much coverage. And so we get 4% of the media. And so because of that, this has gotten 4% of the attention it probably should get. It’s devastating. And we have an Olympian, we have the best the most dominant player in the WNBA is not playing. And it’s just it’s crazy. And there’s been lots of people put attention to it, but there’s more people out there and there’s there’s more that can be done. And we just hopefully, hopefully this message on this important day for us will be one of the five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you can hear right there, you know, so much of the tension, how it throws it into conversations about the infrastructure of women’s sports in general, the fact that you have to go overseas, the disparate treatment that you receive at home versus overseas. I know it’s hard to imagine women athletes being treated like superstars. And I would say one of the big things and big differences is that we in the United States have individual superstars who usually play individual sports, like Serena Williams, like Simone Biles.
Speaker 3: Right. But the team sports, particularly women’s basketball that’s constantly looking for these bread crumbs, looking for like some glimpse of respect and resources. And so it’s far fetched in our head sometimes to think about what it looks like to have women athletes treated like superstars in other spaces. But it’s true. You have these longstanding international labor markets in which there is really a standard of of resources, of pay, certainly of experiences.
Speaker 3: And so while it’s a hard decision for a lot of people to go abroad, they also are, you know, staying in good hotels or on private, you know, plays. And that actually why part of the reason the arrest was so shocking. A lot of times they handle the coming in and coming out of the countries. You have a driver. You’re you’ve done this so many times that there’s a system to it. And part of the agreement is that you’re kind of insulated from some of the other cultural politics that might be happening on the ground where you’re playing.
Speaker 3: Russia has long been a place where women’s basketball players are able to go, many of them queer. And part of that is because they’re in a kind of insulated bubble away from the policies that the Russian government might be implementing against gay people. And so if you think about that and you think about how shocking it is to then suddenly have the machinery that usually protects you and you’re abroad be absent.
Speaker 3: But the other thing that I think Vanessa and I got like touched to in that statement was that absolutely it’s not just the infrastructure of the pay disparity that has them over there in the first place. But because the media coverage is set up in the way that it is for women’s sport, meaning there’s basically none, it’s very hard to get not only traction about these stories, but then to have people who actually know what they’re talking about, being able to get these stories written and heard. And what we’ve seen is a lot of misinformation, a lot of shoddy reporting. And I think a lot of that comes from people who don’t know anything about women’s basketball now trying to report on a developing situation.
Shayna Roth: Yeah, I think for a lot of people, the initial reaction is probably, well, if they’re playing overseas, they’re probably not a good player. You kind of have this assumption that, oh, they’re overseas. That’s for the people who couldn’t make it in the United States. Whereas with female sports, it’s the exact opposite that I don’t think a lot of people realize that.
Speaker 3: Right, for sure. And you are often seeing some of the biggest names go over there because in reality, they’re they’re the ones who can get those lucrative contacts overseas. If you’re a developing player, you can play overseas, but you’re not we’re not talking about the superstar treatment that at that level. And it’s actually why the WNBA has been working in their new collective bargaining agreements to try to keep their superstars like Brittney Griner home so that they can try to build this league up and not have their best players also go be the best players around the world. I mean, you can see why that’s a targeted thing in especially now it throws that right back into the spotlight of isn’t this a searing indictment on how we value women and how we value women’s sports here, that somebody is even in this position in the first place?
Shayna Roth: Later in the discussion I mentioned earlier, Nygaard had this exchange with a reporter.
Speaker 5: Yeah. If it was LeBron, he’d be home, right? Yeah. Really sucks. And does is a is a statement about the value of women. It’s a statement about the value of a black person is a statement about the value of a gay person, all of those things. And we we know it. And so that’s what hurts a little more.
Shayna Roth: So, yes, in this whole case, there are a ton of political. Implications here, but I don’t necessarily think she’s wrong and minimum is LeBron James was not heard of for two weeks. Everybody would notice. And when we get back to the idea of the value of a woman, of a gay person, of a black person, I mean, it’s hard to not feel that when we’re talking about actually trading people, about trading Griner for a a Russian prisoner in America. Is BG worth one arms dealer? Do we have to throw in another American to make it worth it? And I’m being glib on purpose. Obviously, we want all of these people that are wrongfully detained to come home, but it’s hard to not question how we’re valuing these lives.
Speaker 3: LeBron, would it be there in the first place? Wouldn’t it be in that situation in the first place? But absolutely. I think there’s a lot that this moment in this case says about how we value people. And I think ironically, you know, Russia saying reportedly brokering this deal for arms dealer known as the merchant of Death is because they see ironically and have ascribed much more value to BG than the United States has, both in how they support athletes like BG when they’re over there playing.
Speaker 3: But I think that it’s interesting because now the United States is in a place to say is one or two American lives worth this, this merchant of death? It’s absolutely uncomfortable, especially when you have a great portion of the country who would already dispose of black people and queer people and women. And so it’s hard to take the country at face value when when you see a lackluster response to try to bring Baiji home, where you hear only certain voices calling for her to be home, it feels like that disposability that so many people know and live in are well aware of. It feels like it’s on full display at this moment, quite literally.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Shayna Roth: We’re going to take a break here. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about the dominant player BG is and what her being gone means for the league.
Shayna Roth: And if you want to hear more from Amira and myself on another topic, check out our Slate Plus segment where Ameera is taking us to cheerleading school.
Speaker 3: And please consider supporting the show by joining Slate. Plus, members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcasts, no paywall and the Slate site and bonus content of shows like Amicus, Slate, Money and of course, this one. To learn more, go to Slate.com, slash the waves, plus the.
Shayna Roth: Welcome back to the Waves. Let’s talk about what it means for Boogie to not be playing right now. Boogie is maybe not even arguably one of the best female basketball players out there. Last year in the WNBA playing for the Phoenix Mercury, she was second in scoring first in blocks and is the best offensive player in the league. She’s won an NCAA national championship for Baylor in 2012. She won Player of the Year that same year, and in 2021, she was named one of the 25 best players in WNBA history. Oh, and she’s also got two Olympic gold medals. I mean, we’re not just being polite when we say that boogie is a goat. And she hasn’t played since February a mirror. Walk us through what it means to not have boogie playing. And let’s start with her team.
Speaker 3: The Phoenix Mercury last year, where in the WNBA finals, which they did not win, they lost to the Chicago side. But still, you have a championship caliber team here who is really struggling. And I think it’s so hard to talk basketball, but the fact that every time we see them, we don’t say they’re struggling because they’re missing one of their most dominant players.
Speaker 3: A lot of the team has also been staunchly advocating for her. They met with the State Department as a team over her detention. I know people joke a lot of times about like what off the court distraction looks like, but I can’t literally think of something that would be more distracting. It’s distracting to the entire league in that it’s hard to play when your sister, when your teammate, when your friend is in a prison across the world under these circumstances.
Speaker 3: But for this team, especially, that are quite literally going through practices in which she should be they’re rewriting plays right. That she would anger are missing her leadership missing you know not just her production on the court, but what she means to that locker room. And I think that that is a gaping hole, a gaping loss in their chemistry and in their ability to be that championship caliber team. And so from a basketball standpoint, yeah, I mean, they have flashes of it, but you can tell the team is not the team they were last year and they’re not the team that they are with.
Shayna Roth: Big on top of her impressive resume as a player. BG was also a major advocate for the game for Black Lives Matter, for gay rights. In July 2020, she protested the national anthem. Given that Boogie has such a high profile both in the game and outside of the game. What is this going to do to the league itself? As we heard before, women’s sports get 4% of the attention. So when your biggest player isn’t on the court. I mean, what does that mean for not even just women’s basketball but like women’s sports in general?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, I mean, I think it’s another opportunity for a lot of voices to step up. I saw LeBron that we were talking about earlier, used his platform on the shop to talk about Boogie. I think that the more people who get involved help not only Britney, but help the to help raise the profile of women’s sports for for all conversations, not just the really urgent press and political ones.
Speaker 3: I think that is also really hard because you have a great portion of this country who think Britney deserve it, who are using Britney’s protests for black lives in recent years to take a kind of cruel irony in this, especially on the 4th of July. There were a lot of comments around, oh, now you want the country’s help, etc., etc.. And it’s really a shame because you can see the people who are kind of salivating at not only her potential downfall, but at the W itself. And I think that that can’t be understated, that that’s constantly what women’s sports are up against and what this league is up against. And so this is an opportunity for people to fill in that space that big takes up and to step up.
Speaker 3: There’s a number of vocal marketable leaders in the W who have been screaming from the top of their lungs about this and supporting those voices and continuing to work on the infrastructure, continuing to ensure in this moment, if this is not a call to action, to invest properly in women’s sports, to create opportunities for people to play sports and earn professional salaries and not have to go overseas.
Speaker 3: This is this is a resounding call for that moment, not just in basketball, but across across the field. And I think that that this moment compels us to say, all right, all everybody who’s sharing this now, everybody has concern now because it’s gotten to the extreme. You can step up. You can step up and demand that it’s on TV. You can step up and demand investment. You can demand the game. Be accessible that the jerseys be available to buy everybody at all.
Speaker 3: Star War Brittney Griner Jersey. And I find a great irony in that that it’s very hard to find WNBA jerseys. If we wanted to go into a store to wear Brittney Griner jersey to support her, it would be very hard, if not impossible, to do without making a custom jersey. And I think those are the kind of things that this moment can help shine a light on, that we can say, hey, we might not be able to go to that Russian prison and actually open the bars and let Britney out. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t things that we can’t do in this moment to aid towards both getting Britney home and making sure this never happens again.
Shayna Roth: And I think in order to further that, I would love to ask you, who are some other players that we should be watching and giving our love to and giving our attention to and sort of stars that we should be trying to raise up?
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I have to start with Giancarlo Jones, reigning MVP. Katie Barnes wrote a wonderful cover story over on ESPN about Jonquil Jones. And John Clark has been very vocal about speaking out about the fraction of attention that she gets as a black woman, as a queer woman. And but as clearly one of the best players in the league, John Paul Jones, is definitely worth watching. Kelsey Plum just won the MVP at the WNBA All-Star Game. She had a remarkable journey and come back through injury to be where she is.
Speaker 3: And the ACES as an organization are just a lot of fun to watch. And legends like Sylvia Fowles, who are openly playing their last season, who has been a dominant presence in this league, who is part of that? Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, you know, legendary vanguards who are about to make their exits from the game. Watching their kind of last go round is nothing short of miraculous. And we should all be really grateful that we have the opportunity to watch them continue to play at a high level, even as their seasons in the W are coming to a close. I would say there’s a lot of stars in the WNBA. Leigh Pass is super affordable and you can find it and you can watch it and get to know. Players fall in love with the team and that’s where I would start my journey.
Speaker 1: I.
Shayna Roth: Before we head out, we want to give some recommendations. A mirror. What are you loving right now?
Speaker 3: Okay, so I’m really obsessed with Formula One. Netflix Drive to Survive captured the attention of me and my co-host, Jessica Luther. So much so now we’re very big Formula One fans. So if you haven’t checked out the show, I recommend it. But I also recommend doing that in conjunction with our podcast on it because we asked the burning question for new F1 fans Where are all the women? Is a sport that is dripping in oozing and masculinity and sometimes that works for it and sometimes it doesn’t. But there are women in and around the sport.
Speaker 3: We burn down, have a number of interviews with women in motorsport and actually watching the show about F1 on Netflix, which is, by the way, just a great show. It’s the drama. One of my grad students described it as a Real Housewives at 240 miles per hour. And I can care because it’s so dramatic. But but I also think that you see women in all these spaces working as physios, our former drivers on the, you know, W series who just have high profiles and they don’t get as much space. So we try to carve out the space and run all down to continue those conversations.
Speaker 3: And also, if you’re like me and you’re like Jessica and you love romance novels, I will have, you know, there are not one but two F1 romance novel series. The first is a set of four books by author Kat Ransom called Fast and Hard Series. I really recommend those. She’s a local author, formerly based out of Austin, and last two books of the series are actually about Austin racers in this fictional world. Really fun. And I just finished the Dirty Air series, which is four books about F1 romances, which are just how I’ve been spending my time.
Shayna Roth: Gosh, this may be like the best recommendation package I’ve ever heard. We’ve got fast cars, we’ve got romance novels. I love it.
Speaker 3: Listen, range, range. That’s what we have.
Shayna Roth: So I would like to recommend an actress who is also a staff writer, Jana Schmieding, which is my way of also recommending reservation dogs. And Rutherford Falls Reservation Dogs is on Hulu and season two starts August 3rd. It’s about four friends going up on a reservation in Oklahoma and all the hijinx that ensue as they try to get off the reservation and head to California. It’s created by Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. So, you know, it’s heartfelt, hilarious, thoughtful and all around brilliant. And Jana has this scene stealing role in one episode in season one as a receptionist, and it looks like she’ll be in it more in season two.
Shayna Roth: Judging by the trailer, Rutherford Falls, though, is where Jana really shines. The show itself is initially about how Ed Helms’s character, Nathan Rutherford, doesn’t want a family historical statue removed, but it quickly becomes about so much more than that. And especially in season two, is where Jana is really the star. As Helms’s best friend, she’s trying to create a cultural center for the initial incarnation, which is a fictional tribe that she and a lot of the other characters in the show are a part of. So both the shows are fantastic, and Jana is an amazing talent to watch. She’s also a staff writer on Rutherford Falls, so I recommend everybody check out Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs and really everything else that she has done.
Speaker 1: Fact that.
Shayna Roth: That’s our show this week, The Waves produced by myself, Shayna Roth, Shannon policies.
Speaker 3: Our editorial director Alicia montgomery is the vice president of Audio.
Shayna Roth: We would absolutely love to hear from you. Please email us at the waves at slate.com.
Speaker 3: The waves will be back next week. Different hosts, different topic, same time and place.
Shayna Roth: Thank you so much for being a Slate Plus member. And since you’re a member, you get this weekly segment. And this week, we’re going a little bit different. A mirror knows a lot about cheerleaders, and I am dying to learn more about cheerleaders because obviously I has a bias. I was for like a hot second, a cheerleader in high school. I was not what they were looking for in a cheerleader other than the fact that I’m a very loud person. That was kind of the extent of how well I did. I mean, my idea of cheerleaders has very much been shaped, admittedly from, you know, high school movies and the cheerleader being the snotty, bitchy one, the mean girl. But that is not the whole story. So a mirror. Tell us about cheerleaders.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think cheerleaders are such a fascinating topic because it’s really easy to dismiss them as saying absolutely not. Feminists are saying absolutely they are. And I think like many things, they have a very complicated, overlapping history. So obviously, when cheerleading starts off in the United States at the turn of the 20th century, it’s still really dominated by men. It’s largely acrobatic based, see some cheering, you know, organized chants around like football games to get the crowd into it. But it’s not really until the 1920s when you start seeing women really get involved in shooting in mass. And that coincides, of course, with suffrage. It coincides with a massive push of modern girls around the world getting education, moving into educational spaces.
Speaker 3: And it’s not a coincidence that that’s one of the times that they’re also pushing into cheerleading, because as they’re going into these educational spaces, there’s not intercollegiate opportunities really offered for them except for these cheer squads that they get into. They change the look, right? They include gymnastics more, they include pom poms. And you start seeing it really evolve into the kind of origins of the sport we know today.
Speaker 3: If you move through the course of the 20th century, you can follow those kind of ebbs and flows of social movements along the lines of when you have big moments for cheerleading as well. And so, you know, once you get into the fifties and sixties, you have a widespread use of cheerleaders at both the high school and the collegiate level. And then as the National Football League is forming at the end of the sixties, you have professional cheerleaders, of course, being debuted by the Dallas Cowboys.
Speaker 3: There’s a wonderful chapter in my friend Frank Grady’s book about how Texas revolutionized the sporting world. There’s a wonderful chapter about masculinity and femininity in the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders in those early seventies moments. And that’s really where you start getting widespread visibility of like, what a cheerleader look might be. And this is, of course, going to go right into these very objectifying ideas about how short your skirt should be or what body types are valued, what skin tones or what racial kind of identity practices happen on the sidelines.
Speaker 3: But for me, this is a moment that I study in in my own work, because black women who are cheerleaders were also really vocal around the same time in the sixties and seventies about what they what cheering meant to them and how understanding their plight as cheerleaders really disrupted our ideas about integration. So we were noticing, for instance, that a lot of black men were being recruited to play football, to play basketball at schools. These were the kind of first waves of integration, and that was it. And what a lot of cheerleaders said is, hey, one cheerleader I have quoted said, Will you want our boys to play for you, but you don’t want anything else? And so part of what they were saying was you just want the athletic labor, you don’t want the spectacle, you don’t want the actual integration.
Speaker 3: And this became a really galvanizing point. It started many walkouts at the high school and collegiate level. It balloon into other protests in which they would storm the court at places like Memphis, at Providence College in Rhode Island. Really across the country, we see evidence of people disrupting halftime at games, walking to the football field, using their position out on the sidelines to be able to disrupt things as usual, to say, hey, we’re here and black students here need to be treated better. We need to talk about how you treat black women here. We’re not going to wave the stars and bars.
Speaker 3: The University of Mississippi cheerleaders did, for instance, we’re not going to wave the Confederate flag. And you also have people like see Vivian Stringer, legendary Rutgers coach who had to sue her high school to integrate her cheerleading squad, but will say, I only did it because it put me closer to the sidelines and I could really yell at the boys from where the cheerleaders sat. And that was her entryway into coaching basketball.
Speaker 3: And so I think that right around that time, you also see people. Who are cheerleaders, using it to create a new world for themselves and to push the boundaries of what people are telling them they should be. And I think this continues to kind of be interwoven in their tangled, especially after Title nine, where cheerleading is also impacted by the number of sporting opportunities they’re opening up.
Speaker 3: And you really get the development of competitive cheer, which really becomes very tumbling based. It is hugely competitive. You get, of course, shows like Cheer that show us that culture up close and personally and I think you continue to get obviously these tensions we can look at a number of lawsuits against obviously the Washington football team, but also it’s been against the Saints as well. The Bills where cheerleaders have talked about the ridiculous rules they are under, the disparity there, the sexism there, the assault and abuse there. Those are ongoing conversations.
Speaker 3: So to continue to be racial conversations about cheerleading, about the sidelines, where we see cheerleading squads continuing to be really white, and when there are women of color included, they have to straighten their hair, manipulate their look to have the look, quote unquote, which is another point that black cheerleaders made where they said, you know, you don’t want to actually have integration. We have a stomp and shake style, but you want us to leave that at the door and just cheer how you look and how you want to cheer. And I think you can see the legacy of that currently now.
Speaker 3: So it’s a it’s a fascinating discussion. I think it has a lot of kind of hidden history to it. My grad student, Paulina Rodriguez, is working on a history of Mexican women athletes and has an entire chapter over the fight for Mexican cheerleaders in Texas that inspired the entire youth movement in the sixties. So oftentimes dismissed as this kind of like benign thing, Oh, cheerleaders are always there. But actually that sideline has a lot to offer us by way of understanding both women’s history, sports history and feminist scholarship.
Shayna Roth: I feel like it’s just a perfect example of the overlooked having such a huge impact. You know, a lot of people see they think cheerleader. They’re like, oh, it’s the the tight shirt and the Laker girls and the short skirts. But really, it’s a great example of women wanting to get in somewhere and wanting to be athletic and wanting to find a place and then being given essentially a scrap, like, okay, fine. You can you, you can cheer for the boys and.
Speaker 3: Making something out of it. Absolutely.
Shayna Roth: Just totally running with it and just totally making it theirs and making it into something so valuable that has so many echoes and ripple effects. It’s it’s a it’s amazing that history there.
Speaker 3: Is there something you’re dying to know if it’s feminist or not? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at the waves at Slate.com.
