Anastasia Ashman
About My Guest
Bay Area native Anastasia Ashman is a global technology and digital media executive. She is known for bringing provocative, forward-thinking thought leadership and strategic transformation to a variety of top roles, currently as COO of a mobile delivery SaaS in a hot new growth sector, and recently as co-founder of 10 Block, an award-winning mobile streaming startup, and Operating Manager of a Monaco-based family office venture fund.
She was recognized as a top mentor at UC Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, and the European Innovation Academy, the world’s largest extreme accelerator. She’s also a critically acclaimed cross-cultural communicator, global connector, and educator. Her appearance on NBC-TV’s TODAY show as editor of Tales From the Expat Harem, the internationally bestselling travel anthology that spawned hundreds of trailblazing discussions on 21st century resilience, was particularly notable. She will be most proud when she can bring diversity to corporate boards around the world that drives unprecedented innovation and progress to our societies.
Shervin Talieh:
Hi, welcome to conversation number two. We're discussing misogyny, and today, I am joined by-
Anastasia Ashman:
Anastasia Ashman.
Shervin Talieh:
Oh, thank you. Anastasia Ashman, and maybe let's start off where are you taking this call from? Where are you?
Anastasia Ashman:
Yeah, I'm calling from San Francisco, and this is the Bay Area and I'm from the Bay Area. But I spent 30 years outside of the Bay area. So, I'm the prodigal daughter or whatever of the Bay Area. That's my basic arc is that I was raised in Berkeley and went out into the world and saw a lot of things and did a lot of things, and now I'm back here and it's just interesting because the Bay Area is a very future focused place. And so to have that kind of focus and go into the world and then come back 30 years later, having practiced that focus out in the world, it's just interesting to compare with the people who are here or learning at the original, the source of it.
Anastasia Ashman:
So, I will get into that later, but I do think that's part of what's going to be ultimately important about what we talk about today is where I came from, where I went. And the second part of where I went is that I went to college on the East Coast to a women's college called Bryn Mawr. And so I will get into that too, but I was just taking some notes about what you might want to hear about. And I figured it's not about industries or anything like that, what I ever did for a living. It's nothing about that because ... Well, I'll let you ask the next question. Or if you have questions about all of that.
Shervin Talieh:
I have questions, but I want you to continue if it's not about that, what is it about?
Anastasia Ashman:
Well, I mean, one of the questions that you talked about maybe asking today was something like, "Tell me about your first memory of misogyny or sexism." And I had two thoughts almost immediately. And one was, well, it was every day and for as long as I can remember, so I don't really have a first memory. And then the second thought was, "Oh, and I was super lucky." So, I think that's why I'm here able to talk about this today because even though I have memories, and also, I mean, by the way, there were so many that ultimately the only things that you end up remembering are the super low points because the rest of them, they just all melt together.
Shervin Talieh:
Is there one super low point that you can share with us?
Anastasia Ashman:
There are two that I thought I might share today. And the second one answers another question that you wanted to ask, which was what can you tell us that we don't know? What can you tell men about misogyny and sexism that they don't know? That I'll tell you later, but the first one answering what's a memory, a big highlight of misogyny and sexism is there was a time in my 20s. And by the way, the other thing is that, well, this pervades the whole story, all the stories, which is that as this is happening, you know it, and that leads to what I think is a low grade depression that all women have, which is that you know you're being talked down to, or you know you're being denied opportunities, or you know you're being terrorized for the reason that someone else is sexist.
Anastasia Ashman:
So, this one memory that I have is that I was working at a post-production house in New York city after college. So, I'm mid 20s, early mid 20s. And it was a very male dominated space because it was mostly people who worked in these dark TV post-production rooms. And there were mostly guys and mostly technical stuff. And there were only a couple of women there. And I worked for a company that was embedded in this ... It was all subterranean offices in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza. So, over there by the UN and it was like a warren of dark offices and studios.
Anastasia Ashman:
And so you'd be walking down the hall, anyway, the company that I was working for, there was a production house. So, we had our own productions and we had the outside world to communicate with. And I remember that I ran into the CEO of the post-production house that was our landlord basically. And he said to me, I didn't say anything to him, I just was walking down the hall with this low grade depression, I just mentioned. And he said, "Oh, what's on your mind other than your hair?" And I thought, "Oh my God, I just got basically slapped across the face by the founder, or CEO, the boss of everybody who works at this dungeon like place."
Anastasia Ashman:
And I was on my way to his mailroom where his employees had been sexually harassing me for months, making basically my job a gauntlet of having to try to avoid having interactions with them, but also needing to use shared resources like the fax machine. In fact, the very specific that day was a day when someone in the mail room said, "Give me a hug before you use the fax machine." And he was actually standing in front of it, so I could not get past him to use the fax machine to do work.
Anastasia Ashman:
That's just one day. That's just one day in one place. And it's like it took me years to figure out that I had a case. It took me years to figure out that this was not okay and that low grade depression was actually about something, and that my life was being sucked dry by these people who did not think that I was worth anything, that they could do these things in a place of business and that the owner could speak that way to someone in the hall who, and by the way, I had no relationship with him.
Anastasia Ashman:
So, I don't think we ever spoke. This was his observation from afar that that is the kind of person that I was, that I only had my hair on my mind. And by the way, yes, my hair always looked great, but I also had a hair styling routine that enabled me to wash my hair once a week, set it at night, the night that I washed it. And then for basically a week, I didn't have to do anything. I just had one clip. I'd put the clip in it and I was done, which means that I probably spent less time on my hair than he spent on his.
Shervin Talieh:
What does low grade depression feel like?
Anastasia Ashman:
It feels just like a sadness, like an energy drain that as I recall in those days, and by the way, the other sort of double edged sword of this was that street harassment was the other thing that came up when I was thinking about this, which was constant. So, it meant that anytime you were out in public or on the street anywhere, or even on the way to your office going through the lobby and getting sexually assaulted or almost, constantly. I mean, it's not just harassment, people were saying things, people were trying to touch me all the time. I mean, some of them were successful. I was touched by people. And I mean, that is just such a disgusting violation to have to, as I say, walk that gauntlet every day, but that low grade depression feels like, say you wake up on a sunny day, and that's not a good thing. It's another sunny day that was stolen from you.
Anastasia Ashman:
Because, by the way, going to sit on a park bench on a sunny day in the big city was completely impossible at that time, because of the very thing that I told you, which is that there was no way that I could have sat on a street bench without being preyed on by so many people. Do you know what I mean? That you're walking down the street, and it's just like there's sirens going off for all of these other people who are making you some kind of a project. I mean, it really got to the point in New York, this is all happening in New York, that I would walk down the street with mirrored sunglasses and headphones on, listening to something so that I did not hear what they were saying to me and that I didn't have to look them in the eye, I didn't have to look at them at all and they wouldn't know that I wasn't paying attention at all and also that they wouldn't be able to look me in the eye, because I needed to have all of that armor just to walk through the streets.
Shervin Talieh:
I actually grew up in New York, and as a child, I had watched that behavior towards my babysitter or maybe a relative who'd visited, someone older than me. And I remember a cab driver doing that once to our babysitter. But no, I do not know what it's like to be targeted on a daily basis and harassed and touched and victimized. I have no idea what that feels like. What else do you want to share about that?
Anastasia Ashman:
I think you just led into it nicely, which was the second story I was thinking of, which was a somewhat more recent experience where actually a friend of my husband’s came to visit us when we were living in Istanbul, before we moved here to San Francisco and we walked through the streets together, it was a hot summer day and he was a 40 something man, who had grown up in Vermont, but then been living in New York for 20 years. So, he could have seen those very things that you just mentioned. He walked through the streets with me and by the end of an hour, he was shell shocked. He was like, "What the hell just happened? What did I just witness? What was that all about? I never thought that it would be like this." And I was just like, "Are you kidding me?
Anastasia Ashman:
You've had girlfriends, you had a mother," he didn't have sisters, but I mean, "You knew women, didn't you? How is it that you're 40 years old and just realizing that a woman walking through the streets," and I mean, you can say a woman of a certain age, or you can say someone noticeably female that's I think it really ultimately noticeably female is the baseline. And so then it doesn't really matter any of the other things like how old you are or what you're doing, or in this case who I was with, just the way that the people in the street were behaving was just so extremely blatant and wolfish. But I mean, I had been living ... and so I was in my 40s.
Anastasia Ashman:
And by the time I was in my 40s, I had beat back this low grade depression and been fighting back for probably about 20 years. So, I knew walking through the streets, I was fine because, one, is that I had learned the cultural cues that would shut these people down if anybody was really bothering me too much, and also knew where I was. But I was with this American person who I guess saw it because it was so extreme and maybe because he had never walked down the street with a woman before, I just don't know. But he could not believe the disrespect and just how creepy it was, and how he felt on edge. He, somehow, in that hour walked in my shoes.
Shervin Talieh:
You said that about 20 years ago, you started fighting back. What was sort of the moment where you started fighting back?
Anastasia Ashman:
I was working at a magazine, an Internet world magazine and they had let go a clutch of reporters, and we were all women, they were four or five of us, and there were no men let go. And one of the other editors at the magazine said, "Hey, this doesn't look right as a firing, you might want to speak to a labor attorney." And I did that, and I actually invited the other women to join me in doing that. And no one took me up on it, but doing that was very empowering to actually go and speak to someone whose job it was to make employers do the right thing. And to find out that, yeah, I possibly did have a case and that there were steps that I could take and that the way that she worked and the way that actually a lot of the world it turns out does work is that she would get them to pay for her services.
Anastasia Ashman:
So, on the merits, I could pursue it, and so I did. And it not only came in handy immediately because they also illegally tried to cut off my health insurance, the next day or something that, or the next week, which they weren't allowed to do. And it was amazing to have someone in my court that I could call. And she would say, "You know what? I'm faxing this over to them right now." And as I'm standing there in front of my dentist, I hear the receptionist say, "Okay, you're good to go." And it's like, "That's right." That you can not do illegal things and get away with it. And that was just a turning point for me.
Shervin Talieh:
So, you brought up doing legal versus illegal things, and one of the areas that I'm trying to explore is how sort of systemic misogyny, systemic disincentives, an imbalanced field, if you will, that sort of thing. I'd love for you to sort of explore that topic a little bit more and share with me what you've seen.
Anastasia Ashman:
I have had quite a sort of individualist portfolio career. So, most of the things that I've done, and as I mentioned, I moved around the world a lot, so I did all kinds of things.
Shervin Talieh:
Can you quickly-
Anastasia Ashman:
Yes.
Shervin Talieh:
See, I'd actually love to learn where have you lived and-
Anastasia Ashman:
Where did I go?
Shervin Talieh:
Yeah. So, you left the Bay. So, you had a 30 year-
Anastasia Ashman:
I went to college on the East Coast at Bryn Mawr, that's a women's college. And then for my junior year abroad, I went to Rome. So, I was in Italy for half a year, actually. And then afterwards I graduated, I went to New York, that's where I had these early 20s experiences. And then I went to LA for three years and then Southeast Asia for five years, and then back to New York and then on to Istanbul. And then I moved to San Francisco. So, I lived in majority Muslim countries. That is in itself ... That's very systemic when you think about where are things buried? What are the expectations?
Anastasia Ashman:
And to be there as a Western woman, I really stood out a sore thumb and then to pursue the things that I pursued, they're very independent. So, I did work there and actually worked for the Ministry of Science and supervised 25 scientists. I do recall that the male scientists were ... they didn't love it. But at the same time, Malaysia had the presence of mind. This is a Muslim nation, has the presence of mind to have an astrophysicist 45 year old, brand new mother, astrophysicist who ran that department who then was poached by the UN to run their office of outer space affairs. So basically, she was a one in a million woman.
Anastasia Ashman:
I do see this lucky thread that goes through all of my experiences, which is that I have had female role models. Anyway, that experience was not going to be a highlight for me in terms of sexism and misogyny, but I was going to say that moving on to when I lived in Istanbul, part of what I did there was I published a book about Turks and Turkish culture through the eyes of a foreign women who had lived there and worked there over the course of 40 years. So, there was a lot of sexism and misogyny which was explored through that culture, but also the fact that that culture has a lot of ... I mean, it is very powerful in terms of it's respect for women too.
Anastasia Ashman:
Turkey is a very controversial and complex place, but ultimately that when you find your way in a culture, you can achieve things that are not possible in other cultures. For instance, one of the people in my book was a war correspondent who was out there in the East of Turkey. And she ended up having to spend the night in this Kurdish village. And she spent the night at the head man's house and they gave her an opportunity, they said, "Do you want to sleep with the women?" This was actually not an example of the women having much of a say. I mean, "They all slept in the kitchen and on the floor, or if she wanted to sleep [in the same room with] with the head man and all the other top men of the tribe.
Anastasia Ashman:
And she said, "You know what? I want to sleep [in the same room] with the headman of the tribe." And he lent his pajamas to her as if she wasn't a woman, that he clothed her in this other worldly sort of out of culture sort of designation, which is what I was mentioning before to be foreign in that culture. I had figured it out, how to not be harassed or not be worried by it. And so that's sort of the tightrope that I think women are walking is that when you look around and you see, "Oh, this is how things are run." And that is the systemic part of it, is that everyone there is agreeing to that. That we do have opportunities to sidestep that.
Anastasia Ashman:
And so that's been part of my own solution to it as well. So, going to a women's college was sidestepping what I had already seen in high school and in middle school and in elementary school, that I did not want to be in a classroom of boys who were distracting me from my work, which is another mini story. When I was a 12th grader, I was thrown out of a physics exam because the boy next to me was flirting with me and would not stop talking to me during the exam. And the fact that I was thrown out, well, he was also thrown out, but I shouldn't have been thrown out because I was taking the exam. I was taking the test. I was a serious student. And I remember thinking, "Oh my God, I'm getting penalized because that guy's an idiot."
Shervin Talieh:
How much of your time do you think over the years has been spent with sort of defensive maneuvering this cognitive overhead of trying to keep yourself safe?
Anastasia Ashman:
Many years, and that's also born out by the fact that after I graduated from a women's college, where basically in some of my classes, there were men because they also had graduate schools and there were men that were from a school that was in an Alliance with them. So, Haverford and Swarthmore. And then maybe some students from University of Pennsylvania. So, I did have a few men around, but very few. Right after that, I basically entered or stayed in a completely gay world for at least four more years.
Anastasia Ashman:
I didn't go to school to be in a gay world, but there was a big gay world component to it. And it was not just the company of women, but then also the gay world. When I moved to New York and I ended up having a lot of gay friends and roommates, I found that I just enjoyed the way that I was treated by men and women alike in the gay community. And it was a bubble that I didn't leave until I actually left New York, and I totally missed it because suddenly ... But I did feel that I was old enough to, as I said, take care of myself and to defend myself and to continue cutting people off at the knees when needed.
Shervin Talieh:
Earlier, you touched on Islam, and I'd like to spend a little bit of time sort of exploring the role of religion and large scale institutions in sort of systemic misogyny. And I think given your experience, I'm really interested also to ask you this question, which is, and I think you started to touch on it a little bit, what does the average person not know about Christian based misogyny versus Islamic based misogyny?
Anastasia Ashman:
I don't know. Nothing comes to mind immediately for that question. I was raised in the Catholic Church, and so in my own personal anecdotal experience I never had ... Of course, I don't don't have any kids but I know no imam ever came to my parents and no imam came to me and said this about my daughter, but a Catholic priest, actually our parish pastor said to my mother after my sister went on a youth retreat and in a youth group where it turned out that the guy leading the the choir or whatever had had an affair with one of the high school students...
Anastasia Ashman:
That's the church...he said to my mother, he called her into the rectory office to say that he had a problem with her daughter because she thought she was ‘God's gift to men’. And I was like, "Excuse me, where the heck do you get off with language like that? And you're supposed to be a man of God. And you're saying that about a teenage kid," about whatever. People get up to trouble, there was a car accident. I'm sure some people were drinking. He showed himself not to be a good guide for the youth of, I mean, the youth of today. I was like, "I don't even know why you would entrust your kids to a person like this or a place like this." That's the one thing I do feel that there's, and other experiences that I know of people who had, I would say that I know a lot more child sexual abuse stories in the Christian world. And I have more exposure to that world, but in the time that I spent in these Muslim countries, it really was nothing in comparison.
Shervin Talieh:
Does misogyny impact your faith?
Anastasia Ashman:
My faith?
Shervin Talieh:
Yes.
Anastasia Ashman:
Does misogyny impact ... Well, I guess that would be an example of my faith impacted by misogyny that I was like, "As soon as I am old enough to be out of this house, I would never return to a church and I certainly wouldn't return to this church." So yeah, that misogyny in particular impacted my faith and I realized that that is of no interest to me.
Shervin Talieh:
So, you find yourself back in the Bay Area, this place that I think you were characterizing it as sort of always looking into the future.
Anastasia Ashman:
Yes.
Shervin Talieh:
And I'm really interested to learn from you, because having lived there myself, I think there's this perception of the Bay Area of being this progressive bastion, but it feels like there's, specifically in tech, there's a really specific form of misogyny that has been around for a long time. I'm curious if you can share your thoughts on that.
Anastasia Ashman:
I did allude to that when I first introduced myself, because I do feel that I got a really strong foundation in feminism, from an early age, whether it was from my own family or not. And in many ways, it wasn't from my own family, because I think Berkeley as a community had a lot more people sort of contributing to feminist thought than my family. But one of the first memories I have about what feminism was, was that my family got the San Francisco Chronicle and there was this Doonesbury cartoon comic strip. And there was a family, it was a man and a woman, and they had a little kid who was a toddler and her mother was pregnant.
Anastasia Ashman:
And so when the baby was born, the little girl said because the little girl had been, like I as a little girl in Berkeley had been steeped in this progressive mindset, when the baby was born she said something like, "That's not a baby girl. It's a baby woman." And I was like, "Oh, I see." I remember I asked my mother, "What is the difference?" Like, "What is she saying?" And my mother was saying at the time calling women girls was starting to become unacceptable. And so she was being politically correct and saying that this was a baby woman. And so I realized, when you call a woman a girl, that there's nothing wrong with being a girl, but you do become a woman at some point...
Anastasia Ashman:
...and the person does deserve credit for becoming an adult. And calling her a girl is infantilizing her. So, I really got that and I was just, I don't know, probably, in fifth grade or something. I was also at the same time being sent to a special camp in the summertime because I wasn't doing well in math. When you asked these questions originally, I remember this thing popped up that I had to go to this thing called ‘math for girls’ and that was an example of the sexism and misogyny that I've experienced. But actually now in context, I can totally see, no, of course, that's how I was lucky. I was lucky that I got to go to something called ‘math for girls’, because they had realized [a need for] that, and this could have been part of having to be in class with boys and the effect of boys on girls in classes...
Anastasia Ashman:
...that girls had at some point started to, around puberty, had -- this is also my dad's theory and I hope he got it from somewhere -- but that girls would start drifting away from their studies and then become interested in boys, boy-crazy girls would suddenly lose their ability to be good students. And of course, that's actually not the case. As I say, I hope that that theory was actually from somewhere, but I do know what he was thinking about because, as I say, I was in classes where boys stopped me from working.
Anastasia Ashman:
So, I would say coming back here so many years later, it has been disappointing to see, especially since I was an early proponent of social networking and social media and all of these different platforms and social products in general to watch women, sort of the first people who could tell you that something's wrong --or something has the potential for abuse -- be ignored on all of those platforms, and have their requests ignored and/or to be shouted down about how they were being harassed or, in other way silenced on these social platforms.
Anastasia Ashman:
One thing I had done in the past was work on basically teaching women to use the internet for their own purposes, whether it was a self actualization or their career. And so teaching them, giving them the tools and a big component of that was teaching them how not to feel vulnerable about being exposed or seen, or online. And then seeing how all of these techno utopians who built these platforms sold us out. That was very disappointing. I came here and I did a roundtable sort of coaching session one night with some women in Silicon Valley from some of these big Silicon Valley firms. And it was about your personal brand and how you could use it in your career.
Anastasia Ashman:
The people I spoke to were so afraid to be seen by the people that they worked with, that they said that they wouldn't even comment on the ... What was it? Was it called [Yammer]? One of those internal community discussion boards. And this would be a place where they could on a daily basis be showing their expertise and making a name for themselves in the corporation. And they all were terrified to put anything there that could be tied back to them. So, they were silenced whether it was already because something bad had happened or whether it was because as women, as I mentioned, that we have to be as guarded as possible to be safe, that they didn't think that they could be safe in their career by sharing their expertise with their work community. And those are women who work in Silicon Valley at some of these big tech companies.
Shervin Talieh:
So, what can I do? What is my role in helping bring about the change that you would want to see?
Anastasia Ashman:
Well, definitely anytime you see anyone making points like this to back them up, to get involved, but also to on your own advocate for these things, whether it's listen to women or to raise the voice of a woman, amplify women. I think it was Anil Dash spent a year and maybe even longer, only following women, only amplifying women on Twitter. And he challenged his peers to do such a thing. And I think there were very few that did, but that sort of thing. It's actually changing ... And what you're doing right now by having this podcast series that you've committed to producing this and to asking these questions and finding out what people might tell you. This is a huge contribution because, I mean, as you're talking to people, I bet if you added a question like, when's the last time you said all of this? The answer would be never, because we all have so many different stories and so many experiences, and the people who get to hear it most, I think, are the other women where we're talking to them and commiserating.
Shervin Talieh:
When you talk to other women it feels that, or I've just recently learned through a conversation with someone else that there's almost this both explicit and implicitly communicated other network amongst women. And it feels very old as all this time itself because misogyny says all this time, it seems cryptic to an outsider, which I am, and I'd like to understand what do you seek in that network? Is it solutions? Is it empathy? What are you looking for?
Anastasia Ashman:
I hear it mentioned as a whisper network or something like that, but it's definitely communities of women that have been talking from the very beginning and also they are talking to each other in this very multifaceted way that comes from them being women. So, the kinds of conversations that women have with each other are really impossible to have with men, I would think for the most part, because men have a very sort of binary approach to things. And I think that's, what is it? Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychotherapist, called it ‘the animus’ and ‘the anima’. The animus is very focused and the anima is this very diffused energy. And those are the two different energies that men and women have.
Anastasia Ashman:
And I think that what women get out of women networks is all of their surfaces get touched than when they're with men, and also that they're being allowed to be diffuse thinkers or to have a million things going on at the same time, or all of the things that women are juggling at all times. Well, also, I would say with the connective tissue between some of that stuff being ‘how do you survive in this world of men?’ So, I mean, these are our sisters, these are fellow warriors, these are people who are patient listeners. These are people who don't say, "That sounds crazy," or, "I don't understand you." So, what do we get? I mean, we get actually almost everything we need. It's just too bad, I mean, that there's a whole group of people out there who can't join us.
Shervin Talieh:
Actually let's dig into that because on this very topic, I had asked a question of another guest, which was, at our company, there's a Slack channel called Women Empowered and it was an open channel and for a while some men had joined. But recently, I saw a message posted there asking the men to sort of leave the channel so that women could feel more comfortable and open communicating amongst themselves. And I'd like to get your perspective, is there a right way to approach this or a wrong way to view this?
Anastasia Ashman:
Well, I don't know exactly what led them to decide to invite men, but it's possible that in that case, that was an instance where they probably should have created another gathering place and made it voluntary for people to be there or not. And the thing is it would ultimately devolve down into the place where the public sphere would be the place with the men in it and then the private sphere is the place with the women. So, sort of what we experience already today, but at least the men would be trying to talk to women and maybe listening to them if they could manage it. And I mean, that's the real problem, men can't listen to women, men can't hear women, men try to tell women things that women already know [and just said].
Anastasia Ashman:
And maybe they try to ... They actually repeat. Well, that's not even maybe. They repeat back to women what women have just said. Can you imagine how annoying that is? And that happens to us all the freaking time. Actually my husband points this out a lot that women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y, and all of the genetic material that is missing on that missing leg, on the Y that would've made an X, women have and women are doing stuff with that. Men don't have it, men don't miss it. But when men are confronted with women, they can't keep up.
Shervin Talieh:
I know exactly what you mean, just in terms of not being able to keep up. You talked about being better listeners. Men are ... Well, I'll speak for myself, I can't speak for anyone else. So, my inability historically to listen has been born out of insecurity and fear and defensiveness. Because sort of a lot of what I have experienced in my life as a 52 year old Iranian man who's lived in the United States for most of his life, it's based on what I know and how I grew up. So for me, this idea of examining my past and just seeing how wrong my axioms were, just the foundation was not correct in many ways. It's a hard and scary thing to witness. And so how do we make it ... This shouldn't be your problem to solve by the way, but I'm just curious what can I do? What can we do to be better listeners?
Anastasia Ashman:
Yeah. Well, for me, I feel like it aligns with what are the recommendations for being white allies to people of color? That, one, it's the intention to be an ally and then two it's all the work. It's work. How can you be a better listener? Well, I guess you're going to have to work at it because listening is a skill and it's something that somehow men have gotten pretty far in life without having, but it's killing your relationship with women and our relationship with the planet. So, it is still up to men to do the work, but if men are interested in doing the work, well, I mean, how to be a better listener is to actually find out what listening means, and then try to do it.
Anastasia Ashman:
It's just a new skill like riding a bike, you try and find out if you can do it. And maybe it means repeating back at every sentence what a woman just said to you. I heard you say, and then you say it back to her, and don't try to mansplain it and ‘what you mean by that is’, or ‘a better way of saying it is’, just repeating back what she just said. I think that that would actually go quite a long way to having women be receptive to having you hear what they say, that they're actually maybe going to drop something on you at that point.
Shervin Talieh:
That's great advice. And it's something that it feels like the benefits would accrue to men and women, it's certainly just wouldn't be to address misogyny. A final topic with that theme that I'd love to explore with you. You worked in and around production and media and entertainment. Am I introducing that correctly?
Anastasia Ashman:
Yeah. And most recently been the co-founder of a mobile streaming platform, so an entertainment technology startup.
Shervin Talieh:
Perfect. What role does media have in either perpetuating and, or helping us maybe finally confronting and starting to address misogyny?
Anastasia Ashman:
Well, of course it has a huge role in supporting existing misogyny and maybe even spreading newly created misogynies, or just getting it to sustain itself. But in terms of how it can be used to dismantle misogyny, well, one is of course giving women the microphone, giving women the cover of the magazine, giving women the stage, all of the things ... and giving women the opportunity to run the show as men have been doing for so very long. So, it's as easy as handing over the reins to the kingdom of media, but also how media can be used to highlight misogynies of the past and, or current ones. I mean, there's so much good stuff being done out there by people who are sort of social commentators, that sort of thing.
Shervin Talieh:
I appreciate that. I want to thank you for sharing your story and your perspective with me and for the time that we spent, and I'm grateful for you. Thank you so much.
Anastasia Ashman:
Thank you, Shervin. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to all of the interviews you do.
Shervin Talieh:
Absolutely. Thank you so much.
Anastasia Ashman:
Thank you.