Lady Business: Girl-boss movies, caretakers, and self-weaponizing women

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 124th issue, published March 14, 2021.
 

(Cover-line kudos.) 

Promising Young Women

The girl-boss discourse has seeped its way into the fiction of men. Well, kind of.
 
I Care a Lot, the latest movie letting Rosamund Pike act ruthless but charismatic, is bookended by scenes that made me wish the whole film had been slightly recalibrated. Pike plays the founder of a thriving startup, complete with sleek, minimalist offices (the better to offset her pop-colored power shifts) and a staff of stylish, racially-diverse young women. By the end of the movie (partial spoiler alert), Pike’s Girl Boss has graduated to investing-TV appearances for “Women in Business Week” (lol) and, of course, business magazine covers.
 
The horrific punch line is that Pike’s startup makes money by legally scamming, stealing from, and involuntarily institutionalizing vulnerable elderly people. My professional biases are showing, but I wish that writer/director J Blakeson had done a bit more with this setup! Think about all he could have said about startup culture, the female-founder double standard, and a white woman gaming the male-dominated system by creating the most toxic possible version of “caretaking.”
 
Maybe Blakeson started out making a version of that movie. I Care a Lot doesn’t really explain its antiheroine’s motivations, other than that she likes not being poor, dislikes men telling her what to do, and would rather be “a lioness” than its prey. But Pike told the LA Times that earlier drafts did more to spell out why her despicable grifter turned to crime, after her small business was edged out by bigger competition:
 

“It was that point that she thought, I’ve tried to live the American dream fair and square, tried to be the small business owner. I got screwed, fine. I’m now going to play dirty. Like everyone else, I’m going to screw people too,” Pike said.

 
That tension—the little guy who can’t win by playing fair, the woman who can’t compete against sexist double standards, and the individuals who use those truths to permit themselves bad behavior—is at the heart of so much entrepreneurial shadiness and self-justification, including for women.

But instead of exploring any sort of Elizabeth Holmes/Adam Neumann territory, I Care a Lot takes a weird turn into some sort of Coen Brothers gangster warfare thing. I found that part pretty boring, though the art direction and set design helped distract me! (I still don’t understand why Peter Dinklage’s crime boss was so incompetent, but I really covet his wallpaper.)
 

 
The film’s candy-bright colors also reminded me of Promising Young Woman, another recent movie about a young white woman who weaponizes her femininity and fragility to prey on others. (Again, spoilers.) Her motivations are both obvious and righteous, and her victims—rapists, and those who enable them—are much more deserving than the innocent elderly of I Care a Lot. She seeks revenge for a loved one, not personal wealth or glory. She’s also furiously fighting a rigged system—and she accepts that she can’t win without destroying everything, herself included, in the process.
 

 
So behind the blonde wigs and pink accents, her girl-boss story is just as grim as the one told in I Care a Lot. But Promising Young Woman writer-director Emerald Fennell stays much more focused on the bleak damage done to, and done by, her main character. Weeks after I watched it, I’m still not sure if I liked Promising Young Woman. But I really understood what it had to say.

 

Lady Bits

—One Year (or More) Later: For more than 530,000 Americans. For Breonna Taylor. For 2.3 million working women. For Asians and Asian Americans facing increased racism and violence. For Broadway. For restaurant workers.
 
—"Whenever the royals come up in conversation, there’s always that one guy — technically not always a guy, but, you know, usually — who asks why anyone cares about them since they’re all a bunch of privileged richie-riches whose activities have no bearing on American life. My snarky response to this sort of thing is usually something along the lines of this: ‘I don’t know, why do you still care about the New York Jets since what they do has no effect on society at large, and also, they’re consistently terrible?’” Why Oprah’s (master-class) interview of Meghan and Harry is so important.
 
—I wanted a little more from the ending, but I really enjoyed the alternate-Elizabethan world-building of Megan Campisi’s Sin Eater.
 
—"Beth Moore has more influence and more cachet with Southern Baptists, especially white Southern Baptist women, than the vast majority of Southern Baptist pastors or other leaders.” Maybe, someday, more organized religions will realize how self-defeating it is to deny women equal status and official power? Since women are, you know, more likely to be religious? And the ones doing the bulk of the outreach and cheerleading and all of that community-building work that actually gives a religion power?
 
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