When we started Pantsuit Politics, we thought of nuance as a noun. Nuance meant finding the subtleties in arguments, being open to shades of gray, and moving past political talking points. As we have grown our community and our understanding of each other, we’ve realized that we need to treat nuance as a verb. It is a lifelong practice. Like exercising or playing the piano, engaging in nuanced discussions requires constant conditioning and attention to the fundamentals.
The principles we’ve set forth in this book provide the foundation for your practice. You’re equipped to examine what informs your political views and to develop those views based on your values, rather than defaulting to a party affiliation. You’re ready to treat yourself and others with grace and to participate meaningfully in political conversation and work while keeping it in perspective. You’re prepared to hear and respectfully consider opinions that challenge you from a variety of sources. You value expertise, and you value your own perspective and experiences.
Now you have to do it. Over and over again, you’ll need to repeat this cycle. Working your way through this process will develop intellectual, emotional, and spiritual muscles. Sometimes you’ll overdo it and need a break. Sometimes your muscles will feel stronger and more flexible than others. We experience these changes and challenges in ourselves. Even on a consistent schedule of talking to each other about difficult subjects, we have off days. We annoy ourselves and each other on certain topics, and pushing back against our instincts to be representatives of our parties is a constant struggle.
We are always pushing ourselves. Our listeners sometimes think we push too far past our party boundaries. When we discussed rape on college campuses and asked whether the emphasis on punitive measures actually helps rape culture, some of our listeners were outraged. We have tried to consider not only the gravity of the threat a nuclear North Korea poses to the United States, but also why North Korea might feel threatened by the United States. We have tried to put ourselves in the shoes of NFL athletes protesting police brutality during the national anthem and in the shoes of families of officers who have been killed while protecting their communities. We have tried to see the world from the perspective of students in Syria and Iran, because the world is not a stage for American drama.
The practice of nuance means asking painful, difficult questions—questions that might reveal something new or bring a position into different relief or otherwise illuminate our perspectives. We don’t always or even often advocate for policies that align with our conclusions, and often we don’t reach conclusions. We ask questions simply because we think too few questions are being asked in America. We don’t want to participate in a race to sell answers. The process of asking these questions will necessarily involve mistakes and discomfort. It is a stripping away of our programming so that we can inhabit our souls while we grapple with the experiment of living together in a democratic society.
Talking about politics is hard because we’re humans talking to other humans. We’re a mess—a glorious mess of emotions and life experiences and family histories and stresses and habits and beliefs. The more we practice nuanced conversation, the more we realize that the whole mess needs to be at and on the table. We are at our worst when we pretend to be neutral or unemotional about a topic. Our discussions are more effective when we are radically transparent about the aspects of our personalities and lives that color our perspectives. Sarah likes to say there is literally nothing she won’t talk about, and she’s brought Beth along with her. Pantsuit Politics listeners know all about the car accident Beth experienced at age seventeen and about the shooting at Sarah’s high school, because these tragedies are integral parts of who we are and how we view the world. They also know about our faith. We return throughout our conversations and in this book to what faith means to us, because it is inextricably linked to our values and policy ideals.
We’ve had a very hard time talking about our faith on the podcast—we never want anyone to feel excluded or put off by those discussions. There is a distinct frustration in America with expressions like “thoughts and prayers.” We understand that frustration. We are also not interested in leaving or able to leave our faith behind. We’ve learned that most people warmly embrace honesty. We share where we are. We share that we don’t expect everyone to agree with us. We try to share as explicitly as possible what faith means to us. During Hurricane Harvey, we saw several people saying versions of, “What does one pray for regarding a hurricane?” Rather than being up in arms about questions like this one, we try to explain how we pray. We explain that we almost never pray “for” anything but we pray because it connects us to a loving presence that is greater than we are. We pray because it is the best way we know to send love into the world. When we drop our defensiveness about prayer, we find that people who vehemently disagree with our beliefs still respect them.
We also try to take care in our language. When president Donald Trump was inaugurated, he spoke about “American carnage,” referring to the economic losses our country experienced as a result of a decline in manufacturing. Months later, bullets rained down from a hotel room in Las Vegas onto a crowd attending a country music concert. The Las Vegas shooter killed 58 people and injured 489 people. This was actual American carnage. It matters when we use words like evil, enemy, and ally. When we talk about terrorism, what do we really mean? Do we mean the involvement of a foreign power, or violence motivated by politics? In an era filled with hyperbole, media noise, and brutal assumptions about the people around us, being precise in our language is a revolutionary act. It is revolutionary to use words calibrated to the circumstances, because doing so keeps us grounded. To put it in language Beth uses with her children, we can be at a two instead of a nine.
We do the best we can, and we repeat the practices of giving ourselves grace and being comfortable with our discomfort. When we’re wrong, we admit it and move on. When we lose our nuance, we acknowledge it. We keep going, expecting setbacks and using those setbacks to make us better thinkers, speakers, people, and friends.
We’ve realized that embracing the mess and mixing the emotional and spiritual with the political is distinctly feminine. When we tried to introduce male guests on the podcast on a more regular basis, we heard from listeners—particularly from male listeners—that they didn’t enjoy the conversation as much. Male listeners shared with us that they have never had an opportunity to hear two women talk this openly, uninterrupted and uninfluenced by men, and they saw the value in this new approach. An iTunes reviewer once referred to us as “godmothers of a new genre.”1 We hope that review was prescient, because the kind of conversations we’re encouraging you to have in this book will get America’s political car out of the ditch and back on the road. Conflict sells, but conciliation creates progress.
The kind of practice we’re discussing is not a magic potion that will solve every problem in our country. It is a practice that will open up opportunities for problem-solving. We believe that America has all the brain power needed to address environmental changes, harness the power of technology while mitigating its downsides, and adapt to economic evolution. We also know that America has thought leaders, teachers, pastors, ethicists, and artists to help us deal with discrimination and oppression. We need to open the doors for those conversations, and we need you to walk through those doors with all your skills, ideas, and experiences. We have to stop fearing difficult discussions and start seeing them as opportunities for growth.
• • •
Saturday Night Live captured America’s tortured relationship with tough subjects in a sketch about the #MeToo movement.2 In the sketch, three couples were enjoying dinner together until one member of the party brought up an article about Aziz Ansari’s sexual encounter with a young woman referred to as Grace. The encounter was described by babe.net in excruciating detail3 and instantly became a lightning rod. Some individuals viewed Ansari’s conduct as predatory.4 Others saw the babe.net piece as a disappointed lover unfairly slamming Ansari for not being into her.5 In the sketch, the mention of Ansari’s name sent chills through the previously jovial diners. Each person tried to express thoughts, only to be warned, “Careful!” by their companions. SNL perfectly portrayed the awkwardness and fear that accompanies conversations about sex, consent, and power in sexual relationships.
We discussed the Ansari story on the podcast and received record-setting feedback. So many women and men wrote to us, some to litigate the facts of the encounter, some to share their own hurtful and confusing experiences, and many to ask whether and how the disconnect in perspectives between men and women can be bridged. Initially the #MeToo movement had been about holding powerful men accountable who had clearly abused their power through often criminal actions over a number of years and with numerous victims. The standard for accountability shifted with new revelations, and the Ansari story felt to many men and women like the court of public opinion had gone too far.
If America is to genuinely reckon with the imbalance of power between men and women that often leads to sexual abuse, we need to be able to talk about the Ansari story over dinners everywhere. We don’t need to do this in salacious or personal ways. Our interest is not in shaming Ansari or Grace, or even thinking about Ansari and Grace. This story struck so many nerves because it is so relatable, so morally ambiguous, so fraught with questions about the decisions two people made in a private moment. Leave Ansari and Grace out of the story. Leave sex out of the story. An encounter in which a man is pressuring a woman to act in a certain way, and the woman is conflicted about how to respond, and the man doesn’t think he is pressuring the woman, and the woman experiences the pressure as intense and possibly threatening is the story of gender relations. We can all do better in our interactions with one another, and some of us can do better than others.
We don’t need to decide who was right and wrong, or who was more wrong, or whether Ansari’s career should be impacted, or whether Grace should have talked to that reporter. So many journalists and pundits have opined that the babe.net piece hurt the #MeToo movement. We can understand that mind-set: “Win the war, not the battle.” “This one isn’t the hill to die on.” “This fight isn’t worth our capital.” Those phrases all conjure a mentality of violence, fear, and scarcity. They hold us back from better understanding each other.
Whether we are talking about gender, race, sexuality, or other ways in which some of us hold more or less power than others by virtue of identity, defensiveness arises. When we are told that we have power by virtue of our identity, we recoil. It feels accusatory: “You’ve done something wrong just by being you.” We also recoil from hearing that we have less power by virtue of our identity because it feels condescending: “You’re going to have a hard time just because you’re you.” That personal defensiveness is reinforced in cultural commentary. Stories about sexual abuse have borne this out. Reactions include “men can’t even say hello without being labeled predators,” “women are being treated like infants who can’t take care of themselves,” “people are being fired without due process, and now anyone can make an accusation that ruins someone else’s life,” and “who paid her to smear him?”
This heightened defensive mode produces the kind of awkwardness mirrored in the SNL sketch. We all have stories where we said or did the wrong thing and someone got hurt. When the headlines remind us of our “complicity,” we struggle and often shut down. We both try to drop the impulse to either shut down or overly shame ourselves. It helps us to remember we are all doing the best we can, and every situation is a complex mix of individual choices and societal influences.
We want to teach our children to handle adversity and their own mistakes with a combination of responsibility, grace, and resolve. If you read the Aziz Ansari story and see yourself in the Ansari role, it’s okay to say (as Ansari essentially has), “I did not understand that I was hurting another person at the time. I see now that I did. I will learn from this so that I don’t hurt someone else again.”6 You are not a bad person because you made a mistake. You are a growing, evolving, loving person when you’re able to fully accept mistakes and learn from them.
Just as growing from our mistakes requires acknowledgement of those mistakes, learning how our behaviors impact other people so that we don’t repeat mistakes requires listening. We don’t lose anything when we listen. If you are a man, acknowledging that women have perspectives based on experiences they’ve had and you haven’t does not in any way diminish you. Hearing that you have unconsciously or unintentionally said things that made women uncomfortable does not condemn you. If we can all come to the table understanding that we do not and are not expected to know everything, we can learn from one another. The two of us can each acknowledge that we are white women from middle-class backgrounds living in Kentucky, worshipping in Christian churches with our children and our husbands, and that those factors both inform and limit our perspectives. We don’t have to apologize for any of those limitations to be aware of them and to be interested in expanding our understandings of people with different perspectives.
Practicing nuance to have transformative conversations about sex requires us to work with every principle we’ve described. First, we have to be willing to have the conversations. It has been shocking and sad to learn that many victims of predatory sexual behavior have spent decades dealing with their abuse alone. It also perpetuates the problem. How many rapes, assaults, and abuses could have been stopped if we encouraged and supported people who share what happened to them?
We have to take our jerseys off. We can’t possibly think that abuse is a partisan issue; it is a human issue. We also need to let go of the idea that #MeToo is only a women’s issue or conversation. Taking off our traditionally gendered jerseys is important. When we put on our jerseys about #MeToo conversations, we’re choosing to disconnect from our own experiences and the experiences of the people around us in favor of mimicking media personalities. We need to show up in these discussions as ourselves.
We must fully flesh out our values to understand why we are discussing these issues. Why does encouraging people who have been abused by others to talk about that abuse matter? Don’t we all share a desire for all people to be treated with dignity, to have others respect their bodies and spirits? You might share those values and feel that the Ansari story was too much—that’s okay. Finding your why isn’t dictating an outcome; it’s establishing a foundation for a shared connection in processing information and working toward solutions.
Keeping politics in its place is a key to grappling with sexual power and abuse. That looks different for each of us. During the height of the #MeToo conversation, Sarah felt emotional catharsis in seeing individual perpetrators held accountable. Beth was reluctant to dive into the details of any given situation, feeling a sense of sadness and empathy for the individuals involved (as both victims and perpetrators) and their families. We both had to take breaks from the coverage and surround ourselves with other activities and interests to avoid being overly immersed in it in ways that were not healthy.
Grace helps us hold the tension in conversations about sex. We can prioritize healing and forgiveness while demanding accountability and acceptance of responsibility. When punishment is called for (as it sometimes is), we can impose that punishment justly, and we can acknowledge that people should not be solely defined by their worst instincts and actions. We can look at our own behaviors, question ourselves, and still love ourselves. For people of faith, we can remember that this is how God sees us—flawed, sometimes reckless, always beloved.
We’ve also developed some specific ideas about curiosity in connection with #MeToo conversations. We think that it is important and frustratingly difficult to hear each other out because sex is so personal. The following five commitments can open and enhance discussions:
1. Commit to recognizing and putting down your defensiveness.
2. Commit to learning something in the discussion.
3. Commit to having a dialogue instead of giving alternate speeches.
4. Commit to assessing whether you’re the right person to say what is on your mind. (Sometimes the answer is no.)
5. Commit to ending the discussion knowing that you have strengthened the relationship.
We think these commitments can foster meaningful dialogue in the context of any relationship if participants in the discussion genuinely embrace them.
The conversations will be filled with paradox. It can be true that a person in a sexual encounter both likes and, on some level, fears their potential partner. It is true that sexual relationships in the workplace are generally a bad idea, and it’s also true that many people fall in love with coworkers and develop long-lasting, mutually rewarding, loving relationships. It can be true that two people had consensual sex, and that one person abused their power in participating in that sex. It is true that some behavior is not criminal but still violative. It is true that sex can lead to countless problems in our lives and that it is one of the most beautiful things two people can share. The pool of discussing sex has a huge deep end, and we have to be willing to swim in it.
One reason we have so many problems with and because of sex is that we avoid discussing it. Talking about sex is inherently uncomfortable. We receive messages that sex is dirty, taboo. We also receive messages that keeping sex “a little bit bad” is critical to it being pleasurable. We learn that men take sex and women give it, and that men taking is natural while women giving is shameful. It is a significant stretch for all of us to have healthy conversations about sex, especially since many of us can’t fully articulate our own feelings about it. We can be honest about that and do the best we can, knowing that over time these discussions will become more precise and productive.
When we do talk about sex, we’re almost always doing it in echo chambers. Those echo chambers—the community of a few close friends or the clichéd locker room—become even more closed and unhealthy because the topic is so personal and uncomfortable. So the conversations that we do have about sex tend to reinforce the way that sex is portrayed in media. We become more entrenched in existing ideas and drift further from our actual experiences. Leaving these echo chambers is essential to moving the conversation forward. That might mean talking to your mom, your pastor, your therapist. It means that men and women have to communicate with each other in platonic relationships about good sex and bad sex, consent, and desire. It means that workplaces have to do more than compliance training on sexual harassment. They have to set and enforce standards of conduct that create a culture in which people know their boundaries and feel supported and welcomed to call out people crossing those boundaries.
Working our way through this process, we can handle discussing different kinds of conduct without needing to litigate and sanction all of that conduct. We’re able to separate out the process that would apply in a civil or criminal proceeding from the standards that we want to uphold in our businesses, organizations, and governments. It leads to us being able to understand how all our interactions with one another influence respect, power, and agency. When we get to that level of conversation, we can consciously create and model partnerships that are filled with integrity and equality.
• • •
We have the power to transform how men and women relate to each other in order to dramatically reduce gender-based violence. And the lesson for us is that we have the power to transform almost every aspect of our culture that doesn’t work today. School shootings are not inevitable. Partisan gridlock is not predestined. Mistrust in our government and other institutions is not part of the natural law. We can fix these things. Working together, we can build a future that makes us proud and establishes a solid foundation for future generations.
We’ve decided to stop calling America “divided.” Buying into this conflict-driven narrative is a choice, and it’s a choice we’re not going to make. We don’t feel divided from each other or the people in our lives in any way. There are no perfect relationships, ideas, people, or organizations in our lives. They’re all flawed, just as we are flawed. But we see past those flaws—because we are first looking for the good. We don’t size up our husbands, friends, family members, or neighbors based on their stances on nuclear proliferation.
Yes, there are differences in America—even in our values. We are better for those differences. Our system needs a party that embraces federal policy to solve problems and a party that works to restrain federal power. We need people who champion the private sector and people who advocate for more public works. The US Constitution is premised on balance. We need everyone.
There are some deal-breakers and bright lines. As we discussed in chapter 8, no one’s inherent dignity should be threatened or violated. In the landscape of policy issues, these are exceptions rather than the rule. When we pretend otherwise, we acquiesce to a house divided against itself. We need a radical embrace of our shared humanity to move us out of the battle and into community.
We hope that you’ll take up this call to action earnestly. Together, we can invigorate our interests in virtue and spread grace-filled conversation throughout our city halls, the halls of Congress, and even those Thanksgiving dinners. In the process, we will find each other and ourselves. It will not be easy, and it will require growth. We will evolve individually and collectively, and we’ll get closer to that more perfect union our founding fathers and mothers envisioned—one that is united without being unanimous. That is the promise of nuance. That is the power of saying, “I think you’re wrong, but I’m listening.”
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
We hope that you feel ready to use the tools in this book to develop nuanced conversations about politics in your lives. We hope you feel inspired. We need you to bring all your thoughts and energy to developing a greater sense of community in our country.
Review the rules outlined in this book, and think of them as a process on repeat:
• We Should Talk About Politics
• Take Off Your Jersey
• Find Your Why
• Put Politics in Its Place
• Give Grace
• Get Curious
• Embrace the Paradox
• Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
• Exit the Echo Chamber
• Keep It Nuanced
Identify three action steps you plan to take to incorporate these rules into your political engagement.
Thank you again for trusting us to discuss politics with you. We hope you’ll stay at our virtual kitchen table with us. Until we talk with you again, keep it nuanced, y’all.