Lady Business: Eric Schneiderman, Junot Díaz, and men protesting too much; Yellow Fever semantics

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-seventh issue, published May 10, 2018.
 

This is How You Gaslight Her

Welcome back, friends, from a busy week off for Lady Business! I just spent a few days in Toronto, having some very interesting conversations at the Globe and Mail’s small-business conference, and staying in a hotel that was clearly designed by Ted Danson’s character on The Good Place.
 
(“The glowing clock-radio -- which you can’t turn off -- only plays jazz. The room’s only natural light comes from a large balcony … entirely made of high brick walls. The fancy coffeemaker will explode every time you try to make coffee.” All I needed was a clown nook!)

 
Speaking of hell, part of my time in Toronto involved a dinner conversation about #MeToo that was punctuated by my phone’s news alert about, hahaha, the attorney general of New York and his long history of reportedly abusing women. It turns out that Eric Schneiderman -- a man who’s loudly championed women’s rights, who’s publicly praised reporting on #MeToo, and who’s threatened to bring charges against Harvey Weinstein -- allegedly also hits, strangles, and emotionally abuses the women he dates.
 
Which is, sadly, not shocking at all! I want so badly not to be cynical about powerful, progressive men who loudly proclaim their feminist bona fides. But thanks to Al Franken, Louis CK, Don Hazen, et al, that sort of performative male feminism is becoming as much of a red flag as wearing a MAGA hat. As Jill Filipovic wrote this week in a New York Times op-ed:

With right-wing men who oppose women’s rights, what you see is what you get. With these bogus male feminists, it can be crazy-making — especially since women are so often taught to subsume our own doubts and even our own experiences if men tell us we’re interpreting things incorrectly. Of course we want men to champion women’s rights, and we shouldn’t look skeptically on the men who stand up for all of us.

But we should pause when we sense that men are performing feminism for kudos or influence rather than simply doing the right thing. 

Which brings me to another New Yorker story, one that served as a rare “Before” entry in the magazine’s Pulitzer-winning efforts to turn #MeToo abusers into their “After” selves: Junot Díaz’s long, confessional essay last month about his childhood rape, and the person it turned him into.

The essay at the time was widely lauded for its “bravery.” A few weeks later, of course, the shoe dropped: several women have accused Díaz of harassment and abuse (not to mention awful dinner-party behavior).

And I felt suddenly vindicated in my initial reactions to that essay. When I read it last month, I didn’t immediately think Díaz was a #MeToo predator, exactly. (I guess I’m still not that cynical!) But it did make me think he was a pretty terrible human, a crappy boyfriend who used the New Yorker to revel in the self-indulgent details of the awful things he did in his relationships with women. By writing about all of it in the context of his rape, Díaz repeatedly made the case for why none of his behavior is ever his fault. Eg:

I “loved” her more than I had ever loved anyone. I even told her, in an unguarded moment, that something had happened in my past.

Something bad.

And because I “loved” her more than I had ever loved anyone, and because I had revealed to her what I revealed about my past, I cheated on her more than I had ever cheated on anyone.

Doesn’t this read a little bit like trying to Win the Breakup? Like it was written for their once-mutual friends: “Yeah, I know you’ve heard from my ex-fiancée how much I cheated on her, but it was all because of my rape. Which I am now writing about, in an essay that also describes the implosion of my relationship. In a New Yorker piece that will be lauded for being brave and moving. Criticize me now, suckers!”

It’s just so nice when these performative public apologies wind up backfiring. Or to use my second riff today on the same Díaz title, This Is How You Lose the Breakup.
 

Entrepreneurialism Run Amok

I enjoyed this Taste essay about Yellow Fever, a restaurant chain started by a Korean-American woman named Kelly Kim and vaulted into internet outrage after she opened up a branch in a California Whole Foods:
 

The term “yellow fever” is rooted in racism, but that’s not the question. It is, rather, what happens when Kim sets out to reclaim that term in, as she says in an interview on the website Nextshark, a “kind of shocking” manner? ... Just as Chinese friends might make “Oriental” jokes amongst themselves, or a Filipino drag queen named Yellow Fever would certainly garner my adulation, Kim could (and indeed has, for several years) make a plausible claim on the term.

But Whole Foods cannot. Whole Foods, owned by the largest Internet retailer on earth and with nearly 500 locations and 100,000 employees, has no right to the language that Asians, who are frequently left out of the racial discourse in America, have permission to use within their own community. Whole Foods, with a long history as a harbinger of gentrification in major American cities, has not come close to earning that privilege. And by partnering with Kim’s restaurant, they’re simply sneaking in through the back door.

The whole essay is worth a read for its nuanced analysis of how much blame belongs to which parties. I remain flummoxed that no one in the Whole Foods branding/partnerships/marketing/social-media honeycombs sent the “Um, hey guys, this name seems maybe a little problematic?” email. Or if she did, it was clearly ignored or overruled, which is worse.
 
Or if it was ignored, perhaps that was deliberate! The one point that the essay doesn’t get much into, and probably couldn’t without Kim’s co-operation, is how much she – or Whole Foods – actively courted the controversy. Most press is still good press, after all, despite the top section of today's newsletter. Now I, a New Yorker who writes about women in business, know that there’s a woman-owned Asian-fusion bowl restaurant in a Long Beach Whole Foods.
 
Next time I’m in Long Beach, I won’t go eat there. But I bet some people will.
 

Lady Bits

 
--Remember that Michelle Wolf joke at the White House Correspondents Dinner about how Morning Joe’s Mika and Joe getting married is what happens “when a #MeToo works out”? It also applies to this (fascinating!) article about “A Very German Love Story,” which began when a 59-year-old liberal professor started sleeping with his 22-year-old conservative student.
 
--I have no idea who Taylor Hill is, but I laughed out loud when I saw her … dress … at the Very Special Catholic-themed Met Gala this week. I really hope this will make “Sexy College of Cardinals” this year’s hot Halloween costume.

 
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