Lady Business: Due process and the Princess Bride; Free speech and ICOs; Getting out of movie jail

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 twenty-second issue, published March 29, 2018.
 

Inconceivable!

 
Let's talk about a couple of legal terms that have gotten thrown around, a lot, in recent months. "Due process," for example. As in: No person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." As in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. 

Life, liberty or property: Those are important things! One might call them fundamental rights. You know what they don’t include? High-profile jobs, or professional respect. Those aren't rights, they’re privileges--things you have to earn, and work to keep, however much concern-trolling over "due process" we might currently see, from the president and Sharon Stone and other critics of the #MeToo movement. 

Or there's the concept of "free speech." Another constitutional right! First Amendment stuff, and rather important to a professional writer: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble." 

So, like due process, free speech is a constitutional, legal right. You can say whatever you want, short of the proverbial false fire warning in a crowded theater, and you won't be jailed for it. Which is not the same as being heard. Or respected. Or paid.
 
You have a constitutional right to express your opinions; you don't have a constitutional right to have them taken seriously, or to have them amplified by any of institution that could. “Free speech” doesn’t require universities to pay alt-right trolls to visit their campuses, or for Walmart to sell Cosmo magazines near the cash register. It doesn’t require The New York Times and The Atlantic to hire writers who’ve made racist comments, or denied climate change, or argued that all women who have abortions should be hanged. 

Those are all business decisions, made by institutions betting they will gain more than they will lose by doing something that a core group of their customers will hate. I might disagree with the wisdom of any one of those particular decisions, but I can’t call any of them a violation of my constitutional rights.

Which brings us to the curious case of social media, and the private tech businesses that decide what speech they will profit off of. Facebook and Twitter and Reddit have historically invoked “free speech” a lot … even though they’re in the business of making decisions about which speech they will allow, and which of their customers those decisions will anger.

Take the current cryptocurrency craze. Twitter this week followed Facebook and Google in banning ads for cryptocurrency and “initial coin offerings,” a fairly shady financial scheme that’s like the perfect storm between GoFundMe and gold-plated tulip-hawking. This ban will likely anger a group of Twitter’s customers:

Twitter’s new policies are designed to discourage opportunities for fraud and deception, as users navigate “Crypto Twitter.” Among the cryptocurrency community, Crypto Twitter is infamous as a shady part of Twitter that can sometimes be an echo chamber for bitcoin evangelists to hype up the currency or for others to lure people into their freshly launched ICOs. It’s also an important source of news and whisperings.

So Twitter, like Facebook and Google before it, is worried about fraud. It's worried about financial harm to the uneducated potential buyers of cryptocurrencies and tokens. And it’s made a business decision not to amplify or accept money for speech about these potential frauds. 

If only it took the same care with hatred and harassment! Or even, yaknow, truth. You can't promote an ICO on Twitter--but you can pass around a fake photo of Emma Gonzalez ripping up the Constitution, or you can threaten the vast numbers of women who report being harassed for expressing an opinion. I couldn’t buy an ad for my theoretical LadyCoin offering on Facebook, but I could help contribute to a Myanmar genocide, or influence the U.S. elections.

Those are fundamentally business decisions. (As Facebook and its share price finally seem to be realizing.) Even if Twitter has long acknowledged the hate speech and abuse rampant on its platform, it’s put off doing anything meaningful about it.

Perhaps cleaning up the abuse wouldn’t be worth it, from a business standpoint; maybe Twitter executives have run the calculations and decided they would lose more customers, and money, than they would gain by angering the trolls and the bots and the Russians.

Or perhaps it’s simpler than that; perhaps it’s just laziness. As Reddit discovered, according to this recent New Yorker profile, cleaning up hate speech is hard, and complicated, and unglamorous. And it requires thinking deeply about “free speech,” and what it does and doesn’t mean -- rather than just invoking it as your knee-jerk, pseudo-intellectual mantra:

“Does free speech mean literally anyone can say anything at any time?” [Melissa Tidwell, Reddit’s general counsel] continued. “Or is it actually more conducive to the free exchange of ideas if we create a platform where women and people of color can say what they want without thousands of people screaming, ‘Fuck you, light yourself on fire, I know where you live’? If your entire answer to that very difficult question is ‘Free speech,’ then, I’m sorry, that tells me that you’re not really paying attention.”

Movie Jail

I recently mentioned that Atomic Blonde (Charlize Theron’s dramatic haircut beats up bad guys in 1989 Berlin) made me want to go rewatch Aeon Flux (Charlize Theron’s dramatic haircut beats up bad guys in 2415 Berlin). Last weekend, I did—and found that it remains one of my favorite and most intriguing bad movies, one that I would pay good money to see director Karyn Kusama’s original cut of. She originally pitched it as something akin to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – and then her studio head left:

 
Regime change at a studio is always an enormous red flag for any in-progress production…. By the time Brad Grey and former Fox TV executive Gail Berman had taken the reins at the studio, Kusama had delivered a movie that fulfilled her original vision: a challenging sci-fi romantic thriller with the thoughtful pacing of a highbrow Asian martial arts film. It was just that the studio didn’t want that movie anymore.

Almost overnight, all encouragement and support was replaced with open hostility. Kusama was removed from the movie, and the studio brought in new editors to change it into something else entirely.

…Having lost control over her film, all Kusama could do was watch helplessly as the studio dismantled every choice she, Hay, and Manfredi had made. "The emotional core of things was always being questioned as sentimental, over-romantic, short of literally saying the words 'female' or 'feminine,'" said Kusama. "Huge swatches of storyline, which gave the movie a kind of emotional weight, were completely removed." The action sequences, so carefully choreographed and shot with long, deliberate takes, were chopped up into a jumbled mess. Even the sexuality of a gay supporting character was cut out of the film.

That’s from an intriguing and infuriating 2016 Buzzfeed profile of Kusama, whose debut feature was the critically acclaimed Girlfight. After the studio cut Aeon Flux to 71 minutes (!),“Kusama was asked back into the editing room to cobble together a version that was at least marginally comprehensible,” though “she wasn't ever allowed to be alone with the editor.” Then she barely worked for a decade.
 
The Buzzfeed piece, like a 2015 New York Times Magazine feature about women directors in Hollywood, discusses the concept of “movie jail” and the wildly disparate sentences that men and women get there. It’ll be interesting to see if Hollywood’s post-Weinstein woke!era changes anything there; I’m generally inclined to be cynical, but there are reasons to hope! At the very least, the disappointing results for A Wrinkle in Time didn’t prevent Ava DuVernay from swiftly lining up her next project. And there’s also good news for Kusama, who finally started getting more directing gigs in the last few years: Her next movie is a crime thriller starring Nicole Kidman. 
 

Lady Bits

--I quite enjoyed Collateral, the BBC-turned-Netflix crime miniseries about Carey Mulligan intently listening while pregnant. I of course appreciated that women ran each storyline (though I did wish that the main women weren’t all white, and that the women of color weren’t all refugees or assistants). The John Simm character also felt very Aaron Sorkin, in a good way--which is hard to pull off these days!
 
--"I'm 100 percent sure that if the picture showed a gnarly dude hand with hairy knuckles, the same people treating me like a ditzy idiot would be losing their goddamn minds over this epic kitchen hack, or whatever. Like, 'Finally, my bro, your wife's hair-dryer is good for something!' –Helen Rosner, New Yorker food writer and genius hair-dryer-roaster of chicken, to Allure.
 
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