- The demand society places on women, the choices they make about their lives, their relationships, and their appearance can be overwhelming.

Today's guest exposes those expectations to the bright light of day and forces all of us to consider our own roles in them.

She's Lindsay Crouse, this week on Story in the Public Square.

(upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to the Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with the Providence Journal.

- This week we're joined by Lindsay Crouse, a multi-talented Journalist and Film Producer.

She's currently a Senior Editor for the New York Times.

Lindsay, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thanks for having me.

- You are a native of our home state of Rhode Island, and we're curious a little bit about your journey to the New York Times and what got you where you are today.

So tell us a little bit, I know that you were a very competitive athlete earlier in your life.

What got you into running?

- Well, I played soccer, I'm from South Kingstown Rhode Island and I played soccer growing up.

And at some point I realized I didn't wanna blame a coach for not playing me, like if I scored a goal or something and I realized with running, I could only ever blame myself.

If I didn't kind of succeed the way I wanted to, and I just, after a while I found that addictive, just some sort of this autonomy, this independence, and also this freedom to the sport.

And so I just got really into track and field and then cross country, and finally earned myself a spot at Harvard and competed there and just been really into marathons ever since.

- Well, I know in 2000, and you graduated from Harvard in 2006, but I know that part of your career you spent some time working on documentary film and one that's near and dear to us, 4.1 Miles, Daphne Matziaraki's Oscar nominated documentary.

How did you get into that part of your career?

- Well, I finally earned my way into the Times and I started as an assistant and I got to know the head of this new documentary series called Op-Docs really well.

It was this guy Jason Spingarn-Koff and he was just kind of starting it almost like a startup within the Times, we were experimenting with new mediums and then Kathleen Lingo who became the Executive Producer, I became a producer under her almost her deputy and Daphne's supervisor at her graduate school had sent us a cut of the film that she was making.

She's from Greece and so it was her senior thesis and I saw it and I immediately saw the footage itself and that idea that there was like this hero that every viewer could kind of put themselves in his shoes and wonder if I had the opportunity to save a person.

Obviously we're all watching the refugee crisis at that time enfold our screens and he was actually charged from the choice of if I could save these people drowning right now, what would I do?

And we watched him actually spend day after day into the film was just one day with him, but watched him actually make that choice and just kind of see the emotional toll and also the physical toll that what he was doing was taking.

- So you mentioned Op-Docs and I'm gathering, you were there sort of at the birth of Op-Docs.

Do I have that right, you were there at the start?

- Yup, I was there at the start and we just had our ten-year anniversary this month.

- Yeah, congratulations.

So for people who may not know what New York Times Op-Docs are, and they're great by the way, maybe just give an overview of what they are and how they're a new form of storytelling really and certainly of opinion storytelling.

- Absolutely.

So Op-Docs was started with a mission to expand the text report of New York Times Op-Ed and opinion what are now guests essays.

It was trying to expand to that sort of that point of view, that storytelling opportunity to independent filmmakers and to allow them to tell the most important stories of the day through film.

And so we have an open submission process, so anyone, whether you're a student filmmaker or an Oscar winner can submit a short film to us, and then you get a premiere on the New York Times homepage and we will support you in festivals with awards, et cetera.

And at this point, I think we've published more than 300 short films by almost 300 filmmakers from all over the world and from all different ages and backgrounds.

- Wow, that's quite an accomplishment.

And we're gonna get into a couple more of those later on, but what decided, what really convinced me, I was familiar with your work, but what convinced me that we really had to have you on was a recent piece you did, "For teen girls, Instagram is cesspool," and it really struck a chord with me and it certainly is an issue that is very relevant today.

Talk about that, the issue and the piece itself.

- Sure.

Well, so that story was coming out of when Frances Haugen, the former Product Manager at Facebook, she was a whistleblower at Facebook and she told the Senate that basically that Facebook and Instagram were putting astronomical products before people.

And of course that led to a massive outcry among lawmakers and the general public.

And so the argument that I was making in that piece is that yes, Instagram is a cesspool for teen girls, but really they're just carrying on a longstanding legacy or an American tradition so to speak of basically putting American girls through a ritual of making them learn to hate their bodies.

Because once you do that, once you make girls feel pain, you make them vulnerable and vulnerable people will spend money.

And so there's a tremendous industry here at stake where people are just making a lot of money off of these teen girls and their drive to fix themselves.

- In that column, you reflected on your own sort of adolescents and it wasn't, this was before social media, before Instagram, it was magazines, right?

It was print magazines that you would get and subscribed to that would basically do the same thing that Instagram is doing in terms of the way young women view their own physical appearance, is that accurate?

- Absolutely.

It's really scary how these messages can stick with you.

I still remember the dieting advice around how, what is it, celery or iceberg lettuce has negative calories.

I can still look at a plate and just kind of know how many calories are on there.

I think especially as a distance runner, there's always been that pressure to look and to perform a certain way and your body is a part of that and you just don't know how much of this is messaging and how much of this is real.

And I think the other challenge is when you're a teen girl, you soon learn that this is not just in your mind, it's real, people will treat you differently based on how you look and your body is a massive part of that.

Part of how you're awarded is whether people like to look at you.

And I think for me that's what distance running in particular in sports has ironically also been a wonderful solution to that because it teaches you that your body is more than something for other people just to look at.

But at the same time, all of these things are constantly intentioned with each other and I haven't been a teen girl for probably two decades now, but you still remember or I still remember just how real these pressures are and they won't go away.

- Lindsay, there seemed to me too to be a through line through some of your work, which is about society's expectations of how women present themselves, how they look, whether you're a mother or an athlete.

You earlier in your career took on some of the big sports apparel companies, and in particular the expectations that they were placing on their elite athletes.

Can you tell us a little bit about that work?

- Sure.

Well, in 2019, I guess this project started in 2018.

I started to move into another role at the Times where I was producing videos in our opinion video section, which is different from Op-Docs and that we report and produce the videos ourself.

And through my decade at the Times I'd built up a bit of a body of work around women in sports, particularly through the lens of distance running where women really are ascendant and in many ways kind of a Petri dish for a lot of the challenges that are unfolding with gender in America.

And of course as we know, especially during the Trump administration and in to this day there were massive questions and discussions around maternity leave and maternity benefits and the extent to which America applauds mothers and almost fetishizes motherhood versus the extent to which we're willing to actually support that.

And I'd done a bit of reporting a few years ago, I think it was in 2014 where I myself as a distance runner and watching the people that I knew around me, including my friends have babies and then come back stronger as athletes.

I saw that this was also happening at the pro level, for example, with Kara Goucher, the Olympian who ran for Nike.

And so I did a lot of reporting then where I just kind of said like, look, this is possible, like motherhood does not need to be an impediment to your athletic success, in some ways it can be an accessory, women can do it all.

And of course that was a very kind of starry-eyed and almost Pollyanna-ish vision and it was the narrative that I wanted to believe.

And at that time, some of the athletes that I interviewed had told me, "Yes, physically, we can do this.

Like, yes, we can be these incredible athletes, but what's not being reported is that we actually get financially penalized in our contracts when we do have babies, because we're not competing, we're physically not able to and of course we need to recover."

They didn't want me to report that at the time, I actually did put a line in there but it was without attribution and it really went without notice.

But then when I had this new colleague and opinion and he was like, "Why don't you pursue that a little bit longer or a little bit more in depth, it's a new era."

And so I reached out to Alysia Montano who had been talking about this issue on Instagram, I reached out to Kara Goucher completely off on background, and finally reached out to Allyson Felix, who happened to be navigating that issue right when I reached out to her I originally reached out because she had just had a baby, and I thought if Allyson Felix can't get what she wants from a maternity leave perspective, who can?

I thought that she was gonna kill my story, in fact, she was also dealing with the same issue.

And so altogether using Alysia Montano as sort of the voice of the project, we made a video that really called Nike out nuts, I mean, of course, yes, for publicly applauding these athletes and penalizing them privately, but also really taking them to task for the advertising rhetoric that they were using around this.

When I saw the ad that came out around the Oscars about "Dream Crazier" narrated by Serena Williams, I was like, "Oh, they must have certainly included some sort of maternity protection in their contracts at this point."

Of course there was no way to actually know because all these contracts are protected by really powerful NDAs and there's a lot of fear surrounding Nike's sports marketing department, particularly on the part of athletes.

And at the end of the day, through Allyson, we were able to confirm that yes there was a massive gap between the advertising and the truth.

And when we released that in May, there was a massive outcry among both the public and even a congressional inquiry, and finally, by August, Nike did announce a new maternity policy for all sponsored athletes, which guaranteed pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy.

And then as we did that reporting, every athlete said, if Nike makes a change, other companies will make this change too and so many other companies did that as well.

- So that's another great example of how great journalism can actually produce results and bring change, which I think is at the heart of what a lot of journalists are about in terms of their writing.

I want it to go to an opinion piece that you had published earlier in 2021, "So You Want to Save Women's Sports," it begins with a subhead, "More than 20 states are considering bills to ban transgender kids from girls sports.

If only people really care about female athletes."

And let me just read a passage and I want you to elaborate on this as you did in the piece.

"All this new passion has made me wonder, what if all these people claiming to be fighting for the future of women's sports would really fight for the future of women's sports?

What if they suddenly said, quote, "We demand women's sports get equal resources, equal media coverage, and equal pay?"

What if these new activists embrace women's sports and invested in female athletes instead of using us as their excuse for transphobia?"

A lot to unpack there, maybe you can unpack some of it for us.

- Yeah, sure.

It's been tremendously frustrating as someone who has at this point spent close to a decade covering women's sports.

And of course, all the excellent things that these female athletes do and are able to achieve with their bodies.

I mean, sports at its core for women and for men is a tremendously empowering pursuit to engage in.

But at the same time, sometimes I worry that women's sports actually conserve as an opportunity for our culture to reinforce some of the more negative ways that we view women and girls.

Our culture loves girls, it loves to empower girls, but as soon as they grow up and money is involved, in particular money and resources, they find that just as in the workplace a lot of the power and in particular resources and opportunities go to men.

And that's what's not being talked about in this debate around women and girls sports, it's all about cheering and empowerment but to me that really rings hollow.

- What about the inequity in pay?

I mean, if you look at professional male basketball players, I don't know off the top of my head, but they get millions and millions of dollars a year, at least the top stars.

And if you look at women playing professional basketball, it's nowhere near, I mean, it's not even close.

What is behind that?

- That's exactly right and I think it is so easy or in fact complicated to parse why all these inequalities exist.

Broadcast rights, audience, all of, just so many reasons why men sports do have a bigger audience and do enjoy better broadcast opportunities, et cetera and that's where a lot of the money is, the Olympics obviously being an exception, but that's where athletes are not paid their amateurs.

When the professional arena is involved, that's when women start to get short changed in so many ways.

And I think that's what really bothers me is that whenever sort of gender differences, particularly in sports do get kind of dissected, there's always a reason why women are paid less.

And I think we need to start saying no, how do we start by creating equality and then work backwards from there as opposed to saying, well, this is why, and this is why, and this is why, because that's what always winds up happening.

If you look at the women's world cup, sorry, if you look at the U.S. Women's National Team, they're the obvious exception where women's soccer is just so much more popular in America than men's and yet the pay gap still exists.

And I think if we could start with them and figure out why is this problem persisting for them, or even with female track and field and distance runners, they do receive parody in some ways, but in many ways they should be making more, they're more popular, they have bigger audiences on social media, et cetera, and that's still not happening and that's what we should be asking about.

- Yeah.

Lindsay, you wrote a very powerful column earlier this fall, "Cancel Culture Isn't the Problem.

Okay Culture is," and it was a response to the scandal involving Jon Gruden, the former head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.

What is Okay Culture?

- Yeah.

It's the kind of culture that exists everywhere, where if you have something negative that you wanna say, something deeply disparaging, I'm not talking about cancel culture where certain views are considered out of bounds.

This is when you wanna use a slur or say something racist or something xenophobic or homophobic or even fat shaming where you know that something is deeply inappropriate and basically mean, basically something that makes you look like a jerk and you say it anyway, because you know that you're a powerful, a successful person and you just feel like it.

And in that case, you're right, you can do that, it's okay.

And that's what I'm talking about here.

In this case, he was using massive wildly inappropriate language to describe people that he'd worked with.

He knew it was wrong and he just did it because he could.

And I think that's something that our culture really needs to change, particularly in the workplace.

- So you had an opinion videos where we're really switching gears here a little bit, It's Quitting Season, which I found fascinating.

First of all, what prompted you to write that and then get into Quitting Season, please?

- Sure, absolutely.

And this is a area that I'm really interested in pursuing much more.

There's been a lot of coverage right now about the great resignation, of course, in the pandemic we know this was a change accelerator.

Our lives have evolved seismically in the past two years in a way that ideally they wouldn't have in another two year period.

And with that as a lot of people doing complete overhauls of their life, reassessments and just deciding that they don't wanna stand for things that, or they don't wanna tolerate environments that aren't really working for them.

And so what I was trying to do with that conversation is both expand the conversation outside of quitting your job, which is one thing to do and certainly a way that many Americans define themselves.

But to expand it beyond just one's job to quitting a relationship that's no longer working for you, quitting a city that you're tired of living in and really helping people to understand that just sticking with something, even though Americans are really taught to never give up, the idea that quitting can actually be an act of courage, an act of self reclamation and that our embrace of grit, so to speak can actually be bad for us just staying the course for the sake of it.

And I ended that with sort of admonishment to readers to not be a murder to grit.

And that really seemed to resonate with people, I mean, particularly through the pandemic we've put up with so much that we'd really rather not deal with and this was an opportunity to invite people to reassess the things in their life that they might wanna trim, especially right now, because we're never gonna have a better opportunity, and when we do that, we have an opportunity to start something new.

- And what I drew from that, in addition to what you just said was also sort of on a personal and a daily or even hour by hour level, almost a meditative element live in the moment, which is of course one of the great themes of meditation.

Was that in your mind?

Is that also a message that whether or not it was in that piece that you would give to people or have people embrace or want them to embrace?

- Yeah, absolutely.

And also just to think about how your past doesn't have to dictate your present.

For me this is something that I thought about a lot in my life.

I think women in particular were taught that hard work can fix almost anything and I think we can actually kind of turn ourselves inside out with that hard work trying to fix something where we actually might just be smarter to let it go and start something new where we don't have to work as hard and we might actually be happier if we're doing something that we wanna do right now, as opposed to something that we started when maybe we were a different person.

And I think, especially with the pandemic, in some ways probably changing who we are, whether we wanted that or not, but in many ways quitting something and starting something new is a great way to grow.

- Lindsay, how do you find the stories that you work on?

- That's a good question.

I think I've really been benefited in my work in sports by being one of the few, especially when I started one of the few women kind of covering however you would want to define what I'm covering, which I think in some ways as almost growing up in a way where I really believed certain things, like everything that I thought about my body, everything that I thought about work, everything that I thought about ambition, I really believed that these things were true and I worked so hard at checking all those boxes that were laid out for me.

And then as I got older, especially as I started to follow the headlines but especially as I started to follow my friends, I started to realize that some of those things that I was taught about ambition, bodies, work, they're not true.

And I think sports is a great kind of playground or sandbox to look at these untruths in because it's actually one of the only arenas where it's still gender segregated by design, boys and girls are separated and then men and women are separated.

And by watching all of these experiences, by watching my friend's experiences, and by watching my own experiences, I try to think about what's not being covered out there.

And to just say that whether it's the kind of thing that might make people ashamed to think about or uncomfortable to think about, like that's kind of where I wanna go.

And so it's all an experiment, but I've realized as I've gotten older that my perspective is more unusual than I thought it was to begin with.

- I have two daughters, they're grown now and obviously they were teenage girls at one point and much of what you're saying in this conversation resonates with me and thinking back on them, they now have daughters, three daughters.

What advice would you give to young girls today?

- That's a really good question.

I think what I've sort of learned in my career is A, follow your instincts because there were so many times when I was doing something where I was a little embarrassed about it.

I was like, what I'm doing doesn't seem like the path to success, it doesn't seem like the right thing to do, but it was something that I was interested in.

And it kind of goes back to what I was just saying about how I think the rules sometimes are written for someone else and girls don't necessarily know that.

So kind of following your own interests.

And then also just always making sure that what you're doing is for your own satisfaction.

Take opportunities and to work hard but only when you want to, don't trust what you're doing is gonna be rewarded, it may not be.

Make sure that you're your own boss and that everything that you're doing ultimately is what you would wanna put on your bio or even like an open, like this is what she did and that no one told her to do it, that she wanted to and then she went and did it, but certainly don't wait for an invitation because that's never going to come.

You often have to go out and just do it yourself.

- You could probably summarize that by saying, follow your heart.

- Absolutely.

- Lindsay, we've got just a couple of minutes left here.

I'm curious, what did you learn as an athlete yourself that you now take into this work, the work that you're doing?

- Well, as I've gotten older, when I was younger I never won anything.

I think there maybe one race ever and it wasn't really, really obscure one and I hated that, I hated losing.

Like I really hated it.

(all laughs) - [Jim] We all did (laughs) - Yeah, I said three times to make sure you really know.

But I think the benefit there was that it actually made me keep showing up just for myself and it made me do it for the right reasons, which is that I wanted to be there, no one cared if I was there or not.

And finding something that's just your own and where there's no kind of expectations on you because no one can control you.

In some ways I'm very grateful that I was never good enough to be a professional athlete, because then your sponsor becomes your boss.

And for me I'm just doing it for myself, and it's one of the few things in my life where I can say that about.

Like I don't get paid, I am completely in control of how I run.

And there's something so beautiful about that because, and when I do have success in it, it's my own.

And I think there are a few opportunities to have that in life, particularly as you get older and the idea that this will always be with me no matter how good or how bad I am about it is something very special.

- 15 Seconds, what are you working on now?

- That's a great question.

I'm working on right now something about grief and closing out the end of this year by kind of mourning the losses that we've suffered, not just the very real losses, but almost the ambiguous losses that we've suffered, whether it's the jobs we didn't get, the relationships we didn't start, the children we didn't have and thinking about that.

- It sounds powerful, we'll look forward to it.

She's Lindsay Crouse, thank you so much for being with us today.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more Story in the Public Square.

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