That Time I Ate Salad in Total Silence with Gloria Steinem

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

Meeting your heroes will always be fraught; this is the fact I've resigned myself to as I'm ushered in to interview Gloria Steinem. At first I can't see her but she's there, tucked into an enormous chair overlooking Sydney Harbour.

At 82 years old the equal rights pioneer, feminist organizer, and writer is still slogging through grueling days of back-to-back interviews for her memoir My Life on the Road. Along the way she's also campaigning for Hillary Clinton, and even heading up her own show on VICELAND called WOMAN.

"I'm kind of tired of hearing my own voice," Steinem admits, extending her hand as I take a seat. I try to reach out and shake it but I'm stopped short, my coat caught under the leg of my chair. I strain across the last few centimeters, releasing an audible eeeh.__

From there though things improve, at least momentarily. Steinem launches into the story of of how she came to work her show WOMAN, after meeting VICE's CEO Shane Smith at a conference. She was there talking about a horrifying reality: for the first time, there are less women on the planet than men. "Anyone who believes we're living in a postfeminist age will learn that violence against females—from female infanticide and child marriage to honor killings and sex trafficking—has now produced a world with fewer females than males, a first in recorded history," she explains.

WOMAN digs deep into the causes of this gap—from sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Canada's silent epidemic of missing women—stories presented by an all-female roster of journalists around the world. I tell Steinem this is exactly what her book My Life on the Road made me wish for. That I could trace back through time along the stories of women, knowing what they were doing while men were fighting wars and colonizing countries, or whatever we deem worthy of filling history books with.

Despite being a memoir, Steinem's book is peppered with the quiet revolutions women have staked out forever. "I wish I could imitate the Chinese women letter writers of at least a thousand years ago," she writes. "Because they were forbidden to go to school like their brothers, they invented their own script—called nushu, or 'women's writing'—though the punishment for creating a secret language was death."

I want her to tell me more of these stories, and to shed light on her own—what it was like starting Ms magazine and New York before that; catalyzing a generation of women around reproductive rights; even growing up on a strange perpetual road trip with her eccentric father and depressed mother. But suddenly a woman approaches, telling us we'll need to be quiet because they're using the room to record an interview with another author. It'll just be a moment.

But a moment stretches out into a minute, then five, and suddenly my interview with Gloria Steinem has become a silent lunch. Shushed, we focus all our energies on the "mixed winter leaves" and broccolini a waiter has placed between us—trying to avoid any scrape of knife on plate. I'm struck by that same queasy anxiety of when you realize you've taken someone on a terrible date.

"Hey," whispers Steinem. I look up from my food. "Am I chewing too loudly?" She dissolves into silent laughter. This was the thing that struck me about her during our odd, quiet interview—that after nearly 60 years fighting an uphill battle for women's rights, seeing the horrors women are subjected to first hand, Steinem hasn't hardened, she isn't cynical.

In a whisper, I ask her about pop feminism, how the word has become so enmeshed with the brands of icons like Beyonce and Taylor Swift. It's something that often troubles me, that while both project an image of female empowerment, their music is still largely written and produced by men.

Steinem considers this for a moment. "It depends on the content," she decides. "If the word [feminism] is there with no content, that's not a good thing. But if it retains its content, then that's a good thing.

"If you're thinking, say, of Beyonce when she put "FEMINIST" on the stage, she defined it. Just as the Nigerian novelist she was quoting defined it."

Measured and unflinchingly optimistic, there's only one moment when Steinem flares with anger. It comes when I broach the criticism that's often leveled against her brand of feminism—that it's very much in the vein of Sheryl Sandberg and Taylor Swift, empowerment for the relatively wealthy, white, and privileged.

"In my country, women of color—especially black women—were way ahead of white women in terms of being feminists," she fires back. "So I find it especially frustrating when people call it a 'white middle-class movement'… it wasn't. That renders invisible that black women were always there."

In My Life on the Road Steinem tells the story of walking with an African-American woman named Mrs. Green during the 1963 March on Washington—best known for Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. The older woman complained loudly during the speeches to Steinem, at the time a young reporter for New York, that while history was being made, not a single woman was addressing 250,000-strong crowd.

"She totally enlightened me," Steinem tells me. "I was just accepting who was speaking."

This may well have been the moment of genesis for Steinem's lifelong push to see things as they really are. When she was younger, and constantly on the road campaigning, Steinem tells me that when when she arrived somewhere new, she'd always take a walk to the highest point in town—to get a true perspective of how things unfolded below.

There's also another stubborn habit, perhaps the complement that has made her such an effective campaigner—her desire to tells things as they are, to give voice to realities no matter how uncomfortable. "At Ms we were trying to name things that we knew were going on, and didn't have a name. Like domestic violence, sexual harassment…

"In the case of sexual harassment that had been named by someone at Cornell University—students who'd been working over the summer—and they were trying to think of a name for what happened to them," she explains. "So they called it 'sexual harassment' and we did the first story about it. Then Catharine MacKinnon—a wonderful feminist lawyer—arrived at the legal theory that included it as sex discrimination."

Is there a modern equivalent to these kinds of tectonic shifts: is "mansplaining" really in the same league? "It's great," she assures. "Because you know immediately what it means. It's a great invention.

"To be able to make the invisible visible, give it a name, and then see the response. Obviously it's a very shared experience."

We've hardly touched our meal when Steinem's publicist tells her it's time to wrap things up. As we walk down the corridor towards her next interview, the 82-year-old is still chatting intently, noting the names of young female campaigners that she should know in Australia down on a scrap of paper.

I'm left feeling the philosophy driving her still is quite simple: If we aren't told, we don't know. And if we aren't talking, we can't be told. So Steinem will keep on talking, keep listening, keep giving voice to issues too often ignored. She's trying to help build our own nushu, a language with which we can understand what it means to be a woman.

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