LESLEY: That’s good. Let me ask you about a change. I don’t know that you’ve changed on this. I wanted to find out. When you were young, in your 20s, you wrote a book called The Female Woman, and it was seen as an attack on the feminist movement. Do you still feel that you’re not, and never have been, a feminist?

ARIANNA: You know, it was never an attack on the feminist movement. It was really very much what Betty Friedan wrote in The Second Stage. I don’t know if you remember what it was like in the early ’70s, when there was a sort of contempt for the women who chose to be mothers, or the women who did not make their careers the highest priority. And all that I was saying in that book, which I wrote when I was 23, was we need to give equal respect – I mean that’s straight out of the book – to women who chose to pursue … to sort of do their lives, either by focusing on their careers, by focusing on their families or by trying to do both. And society needs to support all these choices. That is really the message of the book. And certainly in my own life I worked all my life. I never, for one moment, imagine my life without a career. So that was just, I think, a misrepresentation of the book based on how heated those times were.

LESLEY: Right. Well I guess the feminist movement kind of caught up with you, in a way.

ARIANNA: Well definitely the feminist movement changed a lot, because —

LESLEY: Yes.

ARIANNA: — all that anger toward men and toward family and children, remember … disappeared. Women discovered that that’s not what they wanted exclusively.

LESLEY: You’ve written another book, On Becoming Fearless, and I love the subject as well. The way I see you, you’re the epitome of fearlessness. You do not seem to be afraid to put yourself out there, take the hits, bounce back. I cannot imagine that you have ever been afraid of anything.

ARIANNA: No, I don’t think that’s the case. And what I’m saying in the book is it’s not that we’re not afraid or that I haven’t been afraid – it’s not letting our fears stop us. I think that’s the difference. I think fear is just another human emotion we all go through. The difference is, do we let our fear stop us, or do we keep going despite our fears? And in a sense, I wrote that book for my teenage daughters. And that is the message I wanted to give them. And in the course of writing it, I reinforced it for myself because, you know, when the Huffington Post was first launched there were a lot of naysayers and other people, including many good friends of mine who said, "Why do you need that? The chance of it succeeding are so few. You have your books. You have your articles. You have your syndicated column. Why bother?" And very often in life we do that, right? We say, "Why rock the boat? Why try something that’s a reach?"

LESLEY: Yes, and that you could fail at.

ARIANNA: Absolutely.

LESLEY: People are afraid of failing, they’re afraid of not having respect, they’re afraid of being rejected, and you’re saying – throw yourself in there. I think that’s —

ARIANNA: I think especially women. I think we women have a much deeper fear of failing than men have.

LESLEY: You know what I think the single bravest thing a woman can do – and tell me what you think – I think the single absolute bravest thing a woman can do is tell a man that she loves him before she knows how he feels.