Lady Business: Aziz Ansari and dating regulations; All-male panels; Grey’s Anatomy endures
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fourteenth issue, published January 18, 2018.
Regulating Modern Romance
There should be a German word for “the utter lack of surprise felt when the Nice Guy who stayed silent about Louis C.K. is alleged to be a pushy bad date.” While the Aziz Ansari thing is a mess, I generally come down on the side of those who think it’s better to expand the conversation about normalized behaviors and consent than to worry about the purity of #MeToo or whatever.
It’s not a new conversation, but as Lindy West points out, men have generally been able to get away with ignoring it:
If you’re fretting about the perceived overreach of #MeToo, maybe start by examining the ways you’ve upheld the stigmatization of feminism. Nuanced conversations about consent and gendered socialization have been happening every single day that Aziz Ansari has spent as a living, sentient human on this earth. The reason they feel foreign to so many men is that so many men never felt like they needed to listen. Rape is a women’s issue, right? Men don’t major in women’s studies.
Or maybe we just need some new government rules! Maybe #MeToo advocates should focus all of their efforts on promoting dating regulations, and encouraging Congress to create a Consumer Romantic Protection Bureau!
No, not really. But bear with me for a minute. I spent a lot of my professional life covering the financial crisis and the ensuing government regulations, so this is a deeply nerdy analogy, but: In self-regulated systems, power usually ends up with the powerful. Without rules imposed by an outside authority, the norms that evolve will always wind up ultimately favoring the people or entities in power. Debt collectors. Kickback-taking financial advisers. Irresponsible mortgage lenders. There might be individual good actors (the truly good, and the wanna-look-good “nice guys”), or the occasional widespread internal push to change what’s seen as approved behavior ... but without outside rules, the powerful just aren’t going to push for standards that tell them “You can’t do this thing you like doing, this thing that’s good for you.” It’s not rational.
So, dating. Gross generalizations here, but most relationships are partially power negotiations—in the bedroom, sure, and in plenty of more mundane ways. Who spends more time with the other’s friends? Who makes sure the house is clean, or stays home with the kids, or moves for the other’s job? Well-meaning, moral people with an interest in each other and in communicating can negotiate each of these questions and all of the others, but there aren’t hard and fast rules. Evolving norms, yes; public conversations about consent, yes; but in the absence of clearly-defined rules, people who tend to have power are generally not going to think about taking the power. I don’t think we have to over-caveat that straight white men are still, in general, the most powerful demographic group in America, whatever challenges they’re currently seeing around the margins, or that straight men in general are still, by tradition and social norms, the default more powerful party in your average hetero relationship.
I keep on thinking about this one, much-quoted line in Moira Donegan’s essay about why she created the Shitty Media Men list: “This is another toll that sexual harassment can take on women: It can make you spend hours dissecting the psychology of the kind of men who do not think about your interiority much at all.”
This lack of thinking about others’ interiority applies to more than sexual harassment, as the Aziz Ansari fallout shows us. Non-listening, in all its forms, creates a spectrum of selfishness in the powerful--and there’s still nothing mandating that they move away from it.
Moderating While Female
There’s a certain … trend I’ve noticed, as a business journalist of the feminine persuasion, in some of the invitations I get to speak at events. Well, more to moderate panels – ie, to do my journalistic thing and ask other people questions. It’s a skill, and something I enjoy doing. But it’s not unusual to show up, or to see the headshots of the people I’m interviewing, and to realize that they’re all as white as I am, and they’re all a bit more male that I am. In other words: “Oh, I’m the diversity.”
Remember a few years ago, when Tumblrs would occasionally make headlines? I’ve been thinking this week about the one called “Congrats! You Have an All-Male Panel!” I looked it up this week--it still exists!--in part because recently I’ve attended several recent qualifying events.
The whole point of panel discussion is to allow several expert viewpoints to interact, and sometimes to clash; panels where everyone looks the same tend to be panels where everyone mostly agrees, and panels where everyone agrees are boring panels. Calling in a woman to moderate (diversity bonus points if she’s a woman of color!) doesn’t really provide more than a fig-leaf of inclusion, since the moderator is generally supposed to ask questions and steer discussions rather than actively engage in debate. It’s fundamentally a support role—one that can be fun to play, but one that’s always better when there are actually divergent viewpoints to corral.
Lady Bits
--The Cranberries were one of my first CDs (remember them?) and my first teenage concert, and “Zombie” might be one of the first songs I remember playing on repeat and feeling consumed by. R.I.P. Dolores O’Riordan.
--The Children, on Broadway, is funny and smart and well-acted, but also the second play I’ve seen in the last few months about life after a nuclear meltdown. So it was maybe not the best thing to see on “Oops, we pushed the wrong button in Hawaii" weekend.
--I feel like I should be embarrassed about continuing to enjoy Grey’s Anatomy, 14 seasons in and well past its time in the TV zeitgeist, but … I’m not. It remains one of the (generally, despite last season) most satisfying melodramas on TV, and unlike on Scandal, the characters are all akin to real human beings. This interview with star Ellen Pompeo is candid and very matter-of-fact about how yes, it’s just a job for her; and yes, Disney has made $3 billion on it and on her; and no, despite her role as the title character, they still wouldn’t pay her more than her male co-star until he left. I also loved her take on the perception versus the reality of success for women in Hollywood:
I'm not necessarily perceived as successful, either, but a 24-year-old actress with a few big movies is, even though she's probably being paid shit — certainly less than her male co-star and probably with no backend. And they're going to pimp her out until she's 33 or 34 and then she's out like yesterday's trash, and then what does she have to take care of herself?
I can’t wait until this season returns and Grey’s pick up the cliffhanger about cyberhacks and bitcoin!
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