Lady Business: Back-to-business, with worried darlings and gender ambassadors
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a 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 142nd issue, published September 11, 2022.
All My Worried Darlings
When I lived in France many years ago, I loved that September was officially known as “La Rentrée”, or "The Return," from vacation and all those other civilized pastimes. My summer, when I initially promised this newsletter would be “sporadic,” involved rather less vacation time than the French get–and also several weddings and wedding-adjacent events, plus an apparently-inevitable bout of post-wedding-guest Covid–but I appreciate your patience with the longer-than-anticipated break.
So! Not much happened on the gender-in-business beat while Lady Business was dormant, right? (Sigh.) But let’s focus on lighter things for this return-to-business newsletter. Like the trainwreck that is the press tour of the movie Don’t Worry Darling, which might be impossible to explain if you haven’t been following the full, bonkers, “did the One Direction guy really spit on Captain Kirk?” news cycle.
Here are a couple of explainers, but suffice it to say that nobody comes off looking great, including: Director Olivia Wilde, who left her fiancé and started sleeping with her male lead, possibly not in that order; her former male lead (and accused serial abuser) Shia LaBeouf; musican-turned-replacement-lead-turned-Wilde’s-boyfriend Harry Styles, the aforementioned (alleged) spitter; the extremely passionate, extremely online fans of Styles, who haaaaaate Wilde for irrational reasons; Wilde’s ex, Jason Sudeikis, whose ugly handling of their custody battle risks tarnishing his “real Ted Lasso” public persona; and even, I’ll dare to add, Don’t Worry Darling star Florence Pugh, who Wilde dissed in a leaked private video while endlessly praising her publicly. Pugh, whose acting excellence seems to be the one thing everyone likes about Don’t Worry Darling, is basically refusing to promote the movie or acknowledge Wilde’s existence, and her Bartleby-the-Scrivener-style “I would prefer not to” approach to her PR responsibilities comes off as both hilarious and extremely petty.
Stars! They’re just like us! (It didn’t take long for Pugh to be hailed for her “quiet quitting,” a term that Herman Melville wishes he’d coined.) But, of course, the biggest scorn seems reserved for Wilde, who committed the cardinal girlboss sin of promoting her movie (and herself) as super-feminist–only to be caught in hypocrisy. The backlash feels excessive, especially without holding every other director to similar standards, and I found myself nodding a lot at this newsletter from the former editor-in-chief of the British film magazine Empire (including her preface that she’s “a major killjoy and I make zero apologies.” Ha! Same, dear readers.)
I struggle to recall a male director and cast and crew so swamped in such silly conjecture before anyone had even seen their film; where it was so painfully clear that the work was the last thing some people cared about. Let me say that while not everything is gendered: this is. There are often rumours and open secrets in Hollywood; you hear about arguments and relationships gone wrong. It’s rare that it’s officially reported on, even rarer that private correspondence is leaked.
… This is Wilde’s second film. Every female filmmaker I’ve spoken with has emphasised the struggle in getting their second feature greenlit, no matter how successful their first. It’s simply much easier for men – and untested men, or even men with a flop behind them – to get a second film financed and greenlit. They’re innately seen as a safer bet. Women are still considered less bankable and only able to make films for other women (because the female experience is singular and the male universal, right?). Why does this matter? Because reducing women and their films to gossip fodder - especially women who are still building their filmmaking careers - only perpetuates the sense that they’re a risk. That they can’t be taken seriously. It adds more question marks to the ones that already exists. Would you sink seven-figures in a woman who can’t keep her stars in check? Who is known for ‘falling out’ or dating their talent first and foremost?
It’s a familiar story outside Hollywood, too, and one that ultimately has little to do with the actual substance of whatever happened on the set of Don’t Worry Darling. “This thing happens for women, where they become ‘gender ambassadors,’” Francesca Manzi, an assistant professor of management at the London School of Economics, told me earlier this summer. “What they do, how they perform, or what they say all seems indicative of what other women are like—and that in and of itself is just a symptom of gender bias.”
I spoke to Manzi for a Fortune article I was asked to write about Sheryl Sandberg departing Facebook, and what it means for women leaders. I didn’t immediately agree with the assignment, but that became the point: The fact that Sandberg’s departure–or Wilde’s messy production–is supposed to mean something for all women is a problem, and it’s not one of their making.
“We need to go beyond the tokens, and the one to three executives that we can name,” Manzi says. “When we have a group of women, you can have the great ones and the bad ones, but everyone is going to be treated the same way—the way that we now treat men.”
Lady Bits
–If you are interested in reading the above (paywalled) article about Sandberg or more of my work at Fortune, you can get 50% off a subscription there with the code ASPAN22.
–Speaking of sexist double standards for Directors Behaving Badly, I knew about James Cameron’s serial adultery … but not about the time everyone on the Titanic set got dosed with PCP at lunch!
–We’re all for one, we’re one for all: I enjoyed the new League of Their Own series, though I wish it had taken less than five or six episodes to dispense with the setup. (And while I realize that Abbi Jacobson is the show’s co-creator, and that her Carson Shaw was a direct homage to Geena Davis in the movie, Carson was a little boring compared to the other characters, and I wish she hadn’t been a protagonist.) But at its best, particularly in the last few episodes, I admired how the show used a familiar-seeming frame to tell a fresh set of stories about life in the 1940s for women playing baseball, especially Black and queer women (and Black queer women).
–Most laugh-out-loud corporate disaster of the week: The social-media accounts of Les Miserables and Hamilton, kind of forgetting about the actual plots of Les Miserables and Hamilton, rush to join the Brands Expressing Condolences about Queen Elizabeth.
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com