Lady Business: Media men, in fiction and reality, and the stories we tell about who’s interesting
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 121st issue, published February 7, 2021.
Weird Stories
Back in the before times, when we could crowd into overheated indoor spaces alongside dozens of strangers, I attended a talk by a writer I respect and admire—and who irritated me with one of her comments that night. The gist was that, in general, she preferred to write about powerful men rather than powerful women.
Men are more interesting, she argued—not in and of themselves, but because of how they’re socialized, and the far greater opportunities they are given to succeed. As a result, powerful men can still be weird, and thus more interesting for journalists to write about; whereas most successful women have had to sand down their individual quirks, in order to stay within the narrow paths to power available to them.
I understood her argument even as I hated her conclusion. Yes, it is unquestionably harder for women to succeed; and many who do have followed the very-defined, mostly-white, mostly-privileged Lean In/GirlBoss path to power. But I disliked the implicit dismissal of powerful women as interesting subjects, or worthy of equal scrutiny. And increasingly I’m questioning the first part of her premise, too.
After all, one of the side effects of #MeToo has been its demonstration that men can be weird in ways that are both damaging and cumulatively kind of tedious! (If one man abusing his power to coerce sex is a tragedy, how many make a statistic?) In the media business alone, the past weeks have brought us the tiresome sagas of the prominent men who: 1) publicly poured a beer over a female colleague’s head before getting his next big job (where he enabled a massive journalistic failure); 2) reportedly used the n-word and made other racist and sexist comments while teaching teenagers in 2019, and faced few immediate professional consequences; 3) reportedly swung between screaming at his subordinates and icing them out before getting his next big (and doomed) job; and 4) lied so much on-air about the election that he helped get his network sued for at least $2.7 billion.
These stories are weird, I guess, but there are so many of them that they start blurring together into one pretty familiar pattern. While the details and the outcomes might change from crappy man to crappy man, every woman has had to plot her career around these sorts of bulging egos and bad behavior. And it's increasingly evident just how straight the line is between “men can retain weirdness while achieving power” and “men can retain plenty of other toxic habits while failing up."
Which—to bring it into fiction, and one of the few things that has been bringing me joy in the last few weeks—is one of many reasons I was so satisfied by this season of The Expanse. (Spoilers ahead.) My favorite recent space opera just concluded a TV season that mostly shunted its white male heroes to the background and focused on three women of color. It did so while telling a story about terrorism, imperialist occupation, and politics—and what really happens when you leave a spaceship without a space suit.
There’s the engineer trying to thwart her abusive ex, who (like so many abusive partners) has graduated to terrorism. There’s the freedom fighter for her occupied people—a woman played by an Indigenous actor—who opposes that terrorist, but who’s coerced into supporting his violent resistance. And there’s the career politician trying to stop both the terrorist’s attack and her military’s jingoistic response to it. (“We can’t afford an emotional response,” her completely out-of-his-depth superior tells her, as he orders more retaliatory bombings of civilians.)
Gender informs these characters and their stories, even in this speculative and more gender-egalitarian fictional universe (where the last global elections were contested between two women of color). But one of the things I love about this niche, nerdy, scifi TV series is that it’s somehow found a way to tell realistic human stories about successful women, individual weirdness intact—and without any episodes about "What It’s Like to Be a SheEO in Space!"
It's also significant—to bring this back to reality and the post-#MeToo media business—that The Expanse has been willing to face the real-world consequences of its storytelling commitments. Over the summer, after this season had finished filming, one of the lead actors was publicly accused of widespread sexual harassment. The showrunners investigated, eventually got rid of him, and did some editing (and apparent re-shooting) to kill off his character by the end of the season.
As a fan of both the show and the books it’s based upon, I found the character’s death awkward and a little unsatisfying. But it was also relatively easy to overlook—because The Expanse and its writers were already busy telling so many other, more interesting stories around him.
Lady Bits
—Speaking of women who aren’t allowed to succeed while being weird, the Framing Britney Spears documentary is infuriating. (Besides her father, who somehow still has legal control over his 39-year-old daughter’s person and finances, people who come off looking pretty terrible include Justin Timberlake and Ed McMahon, who once asked an 11-year-old Britney if he could be her boyfriend.)
—And speaking of infuriating: “Men say caregiving is valuable, and they think they should do it equally—but they don’t do it.”
—"It’s not fair to reduce Iowa’s very real disasters to symbol, but on Aug. 10, with its flattened fields and exploded barns, Iowa looked like America felt.” A deeply-reported and deeply-personal feature from my colleague (and Iowa native) Erika Fry.
—Happy birthday to my fantastic mother!
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