Dear Gossips,
Do you subscribe to Lena Dunham’s Lenny? If you do, you would have received the third newsletter today which includes an article written by Jennifer Lawrence about being paid less than her male co-stars. We’ll get to that later.
Maria noted in her last post about Lenny that the newsletter, as opposed to other celebrity lifestyle projects, is, actually, about reading. She’s shared short stories, she’s interviewed Hillary Clinton, there’s the aforementioned Jennifer Lawrence essay, and my favourite from the current issue, a piece called How Sports Gave Me Swagger by Gina Prince-Bythewood. You might know Gina from Love & Basketball or The Secret Life Of Bees, or most recently, Beyond The Lights, starring the extraordinary Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Gina wrote and directed them all. And she posits here, in Lenny, that playing sports contributed to her confidence, supporting a theory that was also put forward in a book I promoted last year called The Confidence Code: The Science and Art of Self-Assurance – What Women Should Know by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman. The authors of The Confidence Code found that girls who stay in sport longer are more resilient and experienced in risk vs reward, an asset that served them well through adulthood. As Gina points out, 90% of female CEOs played sports. 90%!!!
So, yeah, that’s what I learned today at Lenny. I also learned what it’s like to become Grace Jones via Doreen St Felix. One of the criticisms of Lena Dunham’s Girls is that her show and the world it observes is not inclusive and diverse. Has she heard that feedback? Has she evolved from it? Both Gina Prince-Bythewood and Doreen St Felix are featured prominently in Lenny No 3. Lena is trying.
Click here to read the latest Lenny newsletter. And click here to subscribe.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey
PS...we updated the mobile site this weekend to address a few glitches. In doing so we had to do away with the swipe navigation to jump from article to article. More updates are coming but for the time being, if you prefer reading the site "bottom to top", you will need to jump back to the home page. We will be adding a "left arrow" navigation shortly. Thanks for your patience!
