Transcriber: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Amanda Chu
Hi, everyone.
So, I was invited here today
to talk about how and why I started a company
called Female Narratives.
But if you told me five years ago
that I was going to start an all-female company,
an all-female anything,
I would have said you were crazy.
Because the thing is, I just never got along with girls.
I went to an all-girls inner-city state school,
and I learnt hard, and I learnt fast
the terrible and catty nature of girls bullying girls.
It wasn't fights; it was worse.
It was girls masterminding ways
to get waves of others girls not to like you.
It was talking about you behind your back in such a way
that you knew about it, but the teacher didn't.
It was a slow process of isolation.
And so, I decided, as soon as I could make the decision,
that I would only be friends with boys,
that I got along with boys better, I understood boys better,
that I was a boys girl.
I would hang our with my older brother and play sport with my father.
I would strive, I would hustle, and I would not be soft.
But I learnt this example from somebody else, also -
from my mother.
My mother is strong, tough, assertive, hard-working.
She taught me through her actions rather than her words
that in order to be successful in this world,
I was going to have to learn to embrace my masculinity.
And my mum is by no means
the first woman in history to have done this.
I could give you hundreds of thousands of examples
of women who've done this.
And I will give one:
Athena.
Athena is the goddess of wisdom and of war,
but in order to be so,
she is perceived in a way that is as masculine as possible.
She is broad-shouldered and wears full armour
at a time when fighting was exclusively male work.
She's a virgin, with no children,
and she has no mother,
instead being born directly from the head of Zeus, her father.
Only under these prerequisites and many more
could she be the goddess of war.
And so, I would be Athena.
I would be my mother.
I deep-dived into my masculine like a defence mechanism.
And I don't really even know when this began.
It could have begun as early as when I looked like this,
and kids in the playground would ask me if I was a boy or a girl
just because I had short hair.
I've often asked my mother why she cut my hair this short,
and she said that it was easier for her to maintain.
But I've often wondered
if she ever thought if it was easier for me to live with,
or perhaps if this was another way,
another one of my mother's subtle teachings
through actions rather than through words,
that this would be the best way for me to make it through in the world.
My mother, since then and to this day, still wears her hair short.
And so I decided very quickly
that my answer to the taunting kids in the playground would be 'Boy.'
When I was 15, I was scouted by an agent,
and I started modelling.
This might come as a surprise, based on this picture.
But as soon as I could decide
whether or not I wanted to go to the hair salon with my mum,
I stopped going altogether,
and my hair grew,
and grew and grew.
And it may seem like modelling was a departure
from my very masculine narrative,
but it wasn't.
You see, modelling was a new space
where girls could see other girls as competition
and what I knew to be true about women could continue,
this time, pitted against each other on even more ludicrous things,
like height, weight,
and the number of inches that created the circumference around our hips,
the preference of now well-known predatory photographers,
the favouritism of agents and designers.
In a world where I was being valued purely on my outward appearance,
it was actually behind my masculine shield that I felt the safest,
letting the slings and arrows of criticism seemingly bounce off me
as I strove to outwork others.
As a side note,
in all of these images I've selected for you,
I'm under the age of 18.
In 2013, I graduated from university,
and I moved to Los Angeles to be with my agency there.
I was really excited;
it was the first time I'd moved away from home.
And when I arrived,
they told me that I needed to make an Instagram account.
So I did.
Two weeks later, I was called in for a meeting.
I showed up to their big glass building in Beverly Hills.
I sat on their long boardroom table with all of my agents sat opposite me.
There was a big screen between us,
and they looked at the screen and looked at me and said,
'What's this?'
I looked at the screen and looked at them and said,
'It's my Instagram account.'
And on the big screen between us,
projected was my live Instagram feed
where for two weeks I had been diligently documenting my friend's cat.
Because, you see,
I didn't understand the premise of what they were telling me to do.
And they said, 'No, it needs to be pictures of you.'
I said, 'But why? That seems so self-indulgent.
I don't just want to post pictures of myself.'
And they said, 'No, you have to do this,
for work.'
I was learning that if modelling was a space of competition
and comparison between women,
Instagram was it on steroids.
I have a friend who is a mum blogger,
and she's told me that of the criticism she receives for being a 'bad mum'
or doing something 'wrong' as a parent,
it has almost exclusively come from other women.
Why do we feel this need as women to criticise one another?
Why did I feel like my biggest barrier to entry on so many things
was in fact other women,
that when I hung out with other women, my insecurities got activated,
and that Instagram was a catalyst fueling this fire
of open comparison and self-hatred?
Like I said at the beginning, I never got along with girls.
And then, in the summer of 2016,
I boarded a plane and I sat next to a girl who was the complete opposite of me.
She was outwardly feminine.
She was kind and she was nurturing,
and against all of my expectations,
I liked her.
I thought she was really cool,
and I found myself almost saying the words:
'Will you be my friend?'
A month later, I went to Burning Man,
and I went with all the preconceived notions
of it being a drug-fueled, techno rave in the desert.
But I drove there and back in a U-Haul van,
and I spent 12 days in Black Rock City, building and talking to strangers,
and the experience pushed me way out of my comfort zone.
Because I wasn't just battling with the elements.
I was battling with myself.
I was meeting people in my camp
who weren't interested in the superficial me.
They wanted to know about what values lay on the inside,
and they had the patience
to slowly chip away at my masculine exterior.
And for really the first time, I allowed myself to be vulnerable.
When I came back from Burning Man, I sent my parents an email,
a long essay of an email telling them
about the transformational experience I had had,
the things I had learnt, the people I had met
and how much I wanted them to join me next year
on this journey of transformation and humanity and community.
This was me opening up to my parents
in a way that was very out of character for me.
And my mum replied,
short and curt,
her work signature embedded in the bottom of the email,
to say, 'Thanks.
But no, thanks.'
She spoke on behalf of her husband, my dad,
to let me know that Burning Man should not expect them next year,
or indeed, any other year,
and that at the age of 60,
she would have to make a hard pass on the offer of transformation.
'OK, Athena.'
I was frustrated.
Of course I wanted my mum to join me,
but I was also learning
that her total disinterest in transformation
did not have to stop me on the journey to my own.
Over the course of the following year, I met many more incredible people,
many of them women,
and towards the end of the year, in a forest somewhere in Denmark,
I met a mother,
a mother whose name I can't remember,
but whose story of loss I will never forget.
And she looked me somewhere deep in my soul
and started talking to me about divine femininity.
Now, it case it isn't obvious,
I wasn't raised in a family with any kind of religion,
let alone spirituality.
My parents were born and raised socialists.
They were working scientists.
We never went to church, unless it was as tourists.
So, often when I'm confronted with ideas about spirituality,
I don't know what to say.
I shut down and I stop listening.
But I'd been doing a lot of listening that year,
perhaps more listening than I'd ever done in my life.
and what that woman told me was this.
She said that if on the coin which I had these beliefs about women
and the war between us
there was another side which I hadn't been turning to look at,
if on the one side was the notion
that women had the power to make me feel unwanted in a space -
I knew this to be true,
school and modelling and Instagram had proven this to be true to me -
she said that on the other side of the coin was the notion
that there was no one
that could make me feel as welcome in a space
as women could.
And when I really thought about this,
when I thought about the way women hold space,
the way we allow friends and family and strangers into our homes,
the way grandmothers give hospitality,
I knew this to be true.
She described to me that divine femininity
are the aspects of the self associated with creation and sensuality,
compassion and empathy,
collaboration and intuition.
She said to me that as opposed to masculinity,
which is a very tangible energy,
a 'I will pick you up and put you down somewhere safe' kind of energy,
the sort of energy that you can't help but turn around and say thank you for,
femininity is much more ephemeral.
It will pick you up and carry you just as far,
it will be the wind beneath your wings,
but you won't really know what's doing the carrying.
You'll think you're the one doing the carrying.
Because it's altruistic, it's selfless, it's maternal,
and because of this, it often goes unseen, unheard and unappreciated.
How often do we turn around and say thank you for femininity?
Now, this was a lot for someone like me to take in, right?
My masculinity and I, we've wrestled with this concept for a long time.
And then I found myself in Israel,
in Jerusalem, at the Western Wall,
and at the Western Wall, you're given the option
to take a slip of paper, write something on it
and slot it into a crack in the wall.
And like I said, I'm not very spiritual,
so in these moments, I don't really know what to do,
but instinctively, I found myself thinking of that mother, and writing this.
It says, 'To the divine feminine.
To the unseen, unheard, unappreciated wonder of womankind.
To the beautiful women of the world.'
But who is this?
And what have you done with Tijana?
I was a boys girl, remember?
And suddenly, I was finding myself connecting to the women I was meeting,
to women in general.
This was crazy.
But I came back to London with this thought on my mind,
and I called the girl I had met on the plane,
my new feminine female friend.
I asked her what she was up to,
if she wanted to get a coffee and start a company,
because I wanted girls, women, people
to hear these stories about women and femininity
that I didn't feel were being told loud enough,
stories I wish I had heard when I was younger,
about support, not cattiness;
about collaboration, not competition;
about the power of femininity, not the weakness of womanhood.
Because yes, we should live in a world
where masculinity and femininity hold equal value -
but they do not.
So we would start a company called Female Narratives,
and we would tell these stories
of women supporting each other and collaborating with one another,
and being successful by doing so.
For me personally,
it was an interesting shift from the ego of modelling,
from me feeling like I had to be in constant competition with other women
to being able to facilitate space
for teams of women to co-create and hold equally as important roles.
Our company is now three years old,
and we tell stories for brands using real women.
Not long ago, we hosted an event on International Day of the Girl
to a room full of mothers.
The theme was space
and getting girls interested in STEM subjects.
We had four incredible speakers,
from astrophysicists to senior investment bankers,
and they surprised me by talking less about science
and more about their journeys as women.
It was moving, and it was powerful.
I received the microphone back to conclude the evening,
but I didn't feel like we were done.
I asked the audience if they'd be OK to hear just one more talk,
and they nodded.
I said, 'I don't know if this woman will come up here today,
because I honestly haven't asked her to.
But she's my biggest inspiration
for the way that she raised a family
whilst pursuing a career in science as a foreign woman in the UK,
and is now a professor;
a woman who handed in her PhD nine months pregnant with her daughter,
who used that PhD to leave her war-torn country
and start from scratch in a new one;
a woman who, for so many years,
when her young family had gone to bed,
would go back to work, marking papers and writing lectures,
who cut her daughter's hair short
because yes, it was easier for her to maintain -
my mother.'
My mother was stood in the back of the room,
and she had no idea that this was going to happen.
But decades of teaching meant that she was ready.
She came on stage and delivered a heartfelt speech,
and received a standing ovation from the room.
On my journey, I was able to find myself in a position
where I could hold space for my mother,
showing her that her work had not gone unseen, unheard and unappreciated,
to say thank you for her femininity -
which I know is in there;
it had just never really been allowed space.
Because, you see, her and her whole generation of women had to be masculine
in order to take and hold positions of power.
But I worry that our world is becoming too masculine,
and that it's having a detrimental effect on our relationships with ourselves,
with each other and with the environment.
There's a great quote by the classical historian Mary Beard,
who taught me that stuff I know about Athena,
that says, 'If women are not perceived
to be fully within the structures of power,
surely it is power we need to redefine
rather than women.'
If we can redefine power to include more femininity,
I believe this will have a knock-on effect on both women and men.
It will show men
that they don't have to fit these narrow confines of masculinity
in order to be powerful.
It will show women that they do not have to act like masculine men
in order to be powerful.
And I believe that this redefinition is slowly happening.
Surveys are showing that what we want from our CEOs,
now more than ever,
is humility, compassion and empathy.
But this is not a war between masculinity and femininity.
This is not the binary choice of my childhood
between boy and girl in the playground.
This is an integration
because these character traits of assertiveness and courage,
of empathy and nurturing,
are not dictated by our gender.
I believe that we get taught them,
and I am case in point of a woman who was raised masculine,
and stepping into my femininity is hard.
I'm not saying that any of this will be easy,
but in order for us to evolve and reach our full potential,
men and women have to be encouraged to express and explore
both their femininity and their masculinity,
to see what magic can unfold
when we allow all that we are to shine through.
The yin and the yang, both sides of the coin,
are two equal superpowers.
I believe that a good place to start is by telling more authentic stories
and shifting the narratives that we are told
about how men and women should be.
It starts with me telling you this story,
and you telling yours.
Thank you.
(Applause)