Lady Business: Nashville Women and the “Bach” Industrial Complex

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 seventy-ninth issue, published September 5, 2019. 
 

Party Down

 
Welcome back from the blur that was the end of this summer! I spent the last of it in Nashville, which I knew mostly from some very early childhood memories; the TV series about Connie Britton’s ever-terrific hair and questionable taste in scruffy men; and my first big Inc. story, five years ago.
 
This time I was there for the 3686 Entrepreneurship Festival, at which I got to interview and meet some very accomplished women, including:
 
--Computer programmer, Silicon Valley technical consultant, and extremely successful serial founder Jessica McKellar, who’s proven that it is in fact possible for a tech startup to hire an engineering team that’s 50% female. (Even though women are only 20%, or less, of the engineers at Facebook, Google, et al.) McKellar is also an advocate and force for hiring people who were formerly incarcerated.
 
--Nashville-based lawyer Yanika Smith-Bartley, now a vice president and special counsel at tech firm Asurion, who’s been crucial in creating diversity-and-inclusion programs at two big employers. I especially liked how she shut down an audience question about allowing “diversity of thought,” which is usually code for James Damore-esque misogyny or racism: “Visible diversity is the best way to ensure real diversity of viewpoints,” Smith-Bartley replied.
 
--Venture capitalist Jessica Peltz-Zatulove, a partner at early-stage investor MDC Ventures, and the co-creator of the Global Women in VC directory.
 
--Community builder Alex West Steinman, co-founder and CEO of Minneapolis networking/membership organization The Coven (and hands-down winner of the best company name and best earrings game at the conference).
 
I had a wonderful time at the conference, ate some great food, and met up with some old and new friends. Less fun was the Downtown Nashville Scene, especially on Broadway and the other main drags where most of the events took place. The general sound-and-design aesthetic seemed to be, “What if we recreate Times Square, but louder, with more drunk people?”
 
The last bit, especially, is courtesy of the voracious wedding-industrial complex, especially the bachelor and bachelorette parties that have made Nashville one of their favorite destinations. As Anne Helen Petersen wrote in Buzzfeed last year:
 

Depending on whom you ask, these groups are either a symbol of all that’s wrong with Nashville’s recent, astronomical growth, or exactly the sort of people necessary to sustain it: young, armed with disposable income, en route to the upper-middle class. They are not the Nashville tourists of our parents’ generation. Most have little interest in visiting the Grand Ole Opry; if they listen to country music at all, it’s a mix of what’s become known as “classic” (read: ’90s) country and contemporary pop/hip-hop hybrids.

…“Weekend visits are key to the growth of the city,” Steven Hale, who wrote a locally beloved piece about the bachelorettes for the Nashville Scene, told me. “If you come here at 22, 24, 26, and you fall in love with the city, then you can move here and put down roots.” That’s why the economic development groups in Nashville adore “bach parties,” as bachelor and bachelorette parties have become collectively known: These women are at precisely the point in their lives when a move to Nashville is possible.

 
Petersen’s whole piece is worth a re-read; there are canny entrepreneurs, Instagram-culture critiques, and some damning photos of oblivious white ladies posing next to local panhandlers. And it addresses some of this next question, but not all of it: Why is so much of Nashville’s “bach” reputation specifically focused on the women? On the bachelorettes, rather than the bachelors?
 
Perhaps it’s because women get fewer opportunities to be excused for public rowdiness, or perhaps because there’s so often a level of performative fun for bachelorettes (Sashes! Matching t-shirts! Matching fanny packs! Matching penis necklaces!) that the bachelors get to escape. And perhaps it’s because parts of the Bach Party Industrial Complex in Nashville are so specifically geared towards women, including the pole-dancing classes, Draper James outings, and Instagram-influencer photo ops that Petersen chronicles.
 
But it also allows the men -- who have plenty of reddit threads and online guides for planning the perfect Nashville bachelor party itinerary -- to escape the scrutiny, and the scorn. The mocking headlines about the NFL draft ruining oblivious ladies’ plans. The blame for gentrifying, and for turning downtown Nashville into some unholy combo of Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Country-Music Epcot.
 
While I passed several groups of women in matching t-shirts last week, I was only inconvenienced -- or worse -- once. Coming back from lunch in the early afternoon, I was crossing Broadway when a “pedal tavern” of tank-top-clad, muscle-bound white guys pulled up to the light. They were singing, loudly -- until they started shouting at the nearest pedestrians. They pointed at me, and other single women walking past, and started cat-calling. They seemed entirely drunk at 1 pm on a weekday, and more than a little potentially dangerous.
 
It was the only truly uncomfortable moment I had all week in Nashville, and I don’t even know if the bach business can be blamed. The guys weren’t wearing matching t-shirts, or sashes, or fanny packs. They could have been bachelor party members, or frat brothers, or any other group of young men allowed to be publicly drunk and aggressive. They didn't need any one-time dispensation for their behavior -- and they weren't going to attract any particular scorn.
 

Lady Bits:

--If you’re a woman running a startup and you want to find some heavy-hitting advisors for your board, check out The Point 25 Initiative, a series of application-based networking/matchmaking events this fall. (I’m moderating the Nov. 12 evening, with advisors from Cynthia Rowley, Arlan Hamilton’s Backstage Capital, WPP, and fintech-focused PE firm Centana Growth Partners; the other three evenings have similarly impressive backgrounds!)
 
--Lots of, um, willful corporate ignorance in this story about how Red Lobster is overlooking massive protests and huge tariffs on its titular crustaceans to open in Hong Kong. And this might be my favorite line: “While Red Lobster is a casual dining restaurant in the U.S., it is marketing itself as a premium offering in mainland China.”
 
--Where’d You Go Bernadette was kind of a weird movie. I really loved Maria Semple’s novel, in part for its wry satire of the Seattle tech scene, and I didn’t dislike the movie -- Cate Blanchett would be compelling reading the phone book in a severe bob (and essentially did, through many monologues to her iPhone-based virtual assistant). But the movie version’s tonal shift from sharp comedy to sincere, heartfelt family drama was … an interesting choice that did not work for me. I’m a big fan of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise movies, but I also wondered: Was he (or any dude) really the best director for an adaptation of a woman-written novel about an ambitious female artist in professional crisis, and her relationship with her beloved, precocious teenage daughter?
 
--“It’s an impeccable blowout on top of a technical cut. You can imagine her having someone come to her apartment to do it for her every morning.” I haven’t gotten aboard the Succession train yet, but I will always read smart analyses about TV hair-and-wardrobe choices for power women; see also The Good Wife, Julianna Margulies’ wigs; and Christine Baranski’s statement bling.
 
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