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In Defense of Girliness
July/August 2005
by Alejandra O’Leary ’04

Debbie Stoller ’89PhD was a psychobiologist doing research on leeches when she began her graduate study at Yale, but she soon found herself drawn back to women’s studies. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in social psychology, with an emphasis on the psychology of women. She has since become the co-founder, editor-in-chief, and co-publisher of Bust magazine (“For Women With Something to Get Off Their Chests”) and the author of Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook and Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, which have helped start an international network of women’s knitting groups.

Y: Why did you start Bust?

S: It was 1993. I would see women like Kim Gordon [of the band Sonic Youth] giving interviews to Sassy and saying, “I wish there was a magazine like this for me when I was a teenager!” And I thought to myself, “I wish there was a magazine like this for me now!" And then I thought, “That’s it. We need to do a magazine like Sassy for us now, a magazine that’s just as honest, just as funny, just as full of pleasure.” Ms. magazine, purported to be the main feminist magazine, wasn’t even writing about Riot Grrl [a feminist punk-rock trend] and they were not writing about pleasure. There was no equivalent to the queer rights movement: just having a celebration of what we were, outside of all the negative crap.

Y: How successful has the magazine been in conveying its message, nearly 15 years later?

S: People say it’s not a feminist magazine—“You show women as sex objects, and that can’t be feminist, and how can talking about a recipe be feminist?” I really never expected that the complaints would come from feminists. I thought that they would see right away what this project was supposed to be about. And some of them do, but others don’t. But I should have known, because not everyone understood my perspective at Yale, even. Or anywhere else.

Y: What is your perspective?

S: I believe that feminism isn’t necessarily a political thing. It’s a cultural puzzle. The feminists coming up in the nineties didn’t necessarily have defined political goals; their ideas about feminism were very influenced by the Riot Grrl movement and the girl bands of the early nineties. These were feminist young women who were wearing baby doll dresses and barrettes in their hair. They were also jumping around in mosh pits and celebrating this fact of girliness, reclaiming the word “girl,” and they spelled it with a whole bunch of rrrs, like a nice little growl right in the middle.

Y: Let’s talk about this idea of girliness.

S: This is also such an early-nineties thing. In the seventies, people really looked down on the word “girl.” This is one of the things that women’s libbers fought for—“Don’t call us ‘girl.’” Even when I was ten I would say “Mom, can I invite some women from school to come over and play?” But a side effect of that was almost thinking that girls themselves were bad. Boys will be boys, but “girl”? Ewww. Pink? Ewww. And, of course, hidden in that is a misogynist idea.

Y: So how is girliness liberating?

S: In the seventies, feminists said that liberation would be freedom from having to wear feminine wear. We should be wearing pants and no makeup and not having to spend all this time on our looks. I can understand how they thought that at that particular moment. But look at what has happened in the last 30 years. Look at the Taliban, where women are not allowed to dress like sexual beings. Nobody would say that that is liberation either. And there, as they get more freedom, women say they feel liberated by being allowed to wear makeup. Maybe any time you restrict a group of people to presenting themselves only one way—maybe that’s the problem.

Y: What do you think of magazines like Cosmopolitan? Do you read them? Do you think they’re fun?

S: No, I don’t read them, and I don’t think they’re fun. They talk about a lifestyle and a life that are completely foreign to me. Every week they come up with a new anxiety: “Could it be your scratched heels that are keeping you from the man of your dreams?”

Y: How is Stitch 'n Bitch related to Bust?

S: Stitch 'n Bitch is totally related to and all part of the same mission as Bust. I was on tour promoting The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order when I became obsessed with knitting. But when I would tell people, sometimes I’d get a weird reaction—they didn’t understand how a feminist could be into knitting. And I thought, “You don’t think that knitting is something I should be doing as a feminist because knitting is something women have always done and anything that women have always done is bad. If I were playing soccer, you'd think that was great.”

Y: There are now thousands of Stitch 'n Bitch groups all over the country. Do you feel like a trendsetter?

S: Well, I didn’t have to do very much except remind people of this idea. And I think that this new generation of young crafty people is just so great. Crafting is the new rock and roll. There’s this energy behind it, this way of being rebellious and breaking free of the mainstream. It’s also very girly, and I like that. And I like it that finally American women are doing something that’s not about losing weight, it’s not about toning your body, it’s not about self-improvement, it’s just about pleasure.

Looking Up
July/August 2005
by David McKay Wilson

Dr. Geoffrey Tabin ’78, one of the world’s top mountaineers in the 1980s, was the fourth person to climb the Seven Summits—the highest peak on each continent. Tabin, director of international ophthalmology at the University of Utah Medical School, now travels three times a year to mountainous Asia to teach and occasionally perform eye surgery with the Himalayan Cataract Project, which he co-founded with Dr. Sanduk Ruit of Nepal in 1994. For his most recent trip, which took place in May, he trekked to a remote village in Nepal to carry out 350 cataract surgeries in ten days and to climb Mount Cholatse.

Y: Why found a nonprofit for cataract surgery?

T: In Nepal in the 1980s, doctors would slice the eye in half, take out the whole cloudy lens, sew up the eye, and give people Coke bottle-like glasses to allow them to focus. The problem was, people would often lose their glasses. Also, sewing up the eye without a microscope would cause distortions. With modern cateract surgery, you take the cloudy lens out and put in an artificial one. We can do it in a way that doesn’t require stitches, it doesn’t distort the shape of the eye, and gives a clear focus.

Y: Have you been able to make a difference?

T: When we started in 1994, there were 15,000 cataract surgeries done that year, and only 1,000 that were done with microscope and interocular lens implants. In 2004, there were 122,000 cataract surgeries done, and 99 percent were performed with modern techniques. Nepal is the only country in that part of the world where they are doing more cataract surgeries than there are new cases of cataract blindness in a year.

Y: And there are personal rewards.

T: There is no more satisfying surgery. There’s no pain. People are blind, and the next day they can see. And we’re not just restoring their sight: when people go blind in places like Nepal, life expectancy goes down to one-third of their peers'.

Y: How did you get started in mountain climbing?

T: I grew up in Chicago and hiked with my dad in the West. In my second semester at Yale, I discovered the collection of mountaineering books at Cross Campus Library. It got so I couldn’t start my studies until I’d read one of those books for an hour. By the end of my freshman year, I’d become a fanatical armchair mountaineer. In my sophomore year, I met Henry Lester ['80], who had been a climber in high school. We started climbing together at the Shawangunks in New York and Ragged Mountain in Southington.

Y: What about the dangers? Seven climbers died on Everest last year.

T: You try to minimize it. And there’s an element of denial. When I look back, I realize I’m very lucky to have survived my teenage years, and even luckier to have survived my 20s and 30s. You like to think you are in control, with a margin of safety, but I have many friends who were better climbers than I, and they have died. There’s an adage—the more you are in the mountains, the better judgment you have. But that judgment comes from experience, and that experience comes from having very bad judgment.

Y: Were you ready for the climb this spring in Nepal?

T: I am now married with kids and a full-time job, so it was hard to train sufficiently for a climb of this level. I was the slowest member of the team. But it was a privilege at age 48 to join some of the best young climbers in the world on a beautiful mountain. After completing all the technical difficulties, I was not quite strong enough to summit, but five of my partners reached the top.  

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