Lady Business: Pat Meehan’s mash notes; Olympic-sized blind eyes; Many “manels”

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 fifteenth issue, published January 25, 2018.

Not-So-Brotherly Love

I spent last weekend visiting my parents in Philadelphia, which turned out to be the place to be, news-wise! (Well, aside from the marches of hundreds of thousands of women around the country, protests that were profuse and yet were not mentioned by most of the Sunday news shows.)

First there was emo sketchball and flowery pen-pal Patrick Meehan. The 62-year-old, married U.S. Congressman appears to have a seventh-grade grasp of his emotions to go along with his pre-kindergarten grasp of ethics; he was “really hurt” when his young employee didn’t share his feelings of “complete partnership to me.” (She’s Just Not That Into You, U.S. Congress edition.) Meehan’s tender sentiments were so very bruised that he soothed them with taxpayer money, settling his employee’s sexual harassment complaint with a payment he later characterized as “a way to reward the work she had done for me.”

No, you know what’s a great way to reward a valued employee? Paying the salary you agreed to pay her, promoting her, and, right, not ever hitting on her. That’s the baseline! (Also, even outside of workplace settings, claiming that someone is your “soul mate” when she’s recently started dating someone else seems prettttty delusional. If very Love Actually.)

Olympian Failures

Also this weekend in Philadelphia, the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl. I’ll be cheering for them, though I’d be slightly more enthusiastic had the team actually hired Colin Kaepernick to replace their injured quarterback. Just think of the righteous showdown we could have had with Kaepernick versus Trump-supporting, tomato-fearing Tom Brady and his equally tedious coach, World’s Most Humorless Human Bill Belichick. That would be a Super Bowl that could actually excite non-diehard football fans like me, including the people who are pretty disgusted by the NFL and who are fleeing its broadcasts.

It’s a bit of an existential problem for the NFL because, as the ratings decline shows, football is as much about entertainment as it is about sports. And entertainment of all sorts is having a big old reckoning of late:

At least Hollywood actresses are adults with mature judgment with which to defend themselves. At least they have some small power of self-determination. The girls and young women who were abused by Nassar under the roof of USA Gymnastics and Michigan State had none of those.

…Camps were mandatory. Treatment was mandatory. Physical exams were mandatory. They were required to sign waivers, releases, agreements, indemnifications, a pile of paperwork that ceded their bodies to the control of others. “They always made us feel like if we ever said anything or complained we were being dramatic or high-maintenance or difficult,” [gold medalist Aly] Raisman says. “When you only have five girls who make the Olympic team — we were just conditioned from a young age not to say anything.”

Timing is a funny thing. Larry Nassar abused girls for decades, under the protection of USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic Committee and Bela and Martha Karolyi and Michigan State University. MSU knew about what he was doing for some 20 years, according to some victims, and started investigating it in 2014. The rest of the world has known about it since at least 2016. And yet it wasn’t until the past few days that his sentencing snowballed into a public reckoning, with more than 150 women testifying about Nassar’s crimes and the culpability of the organizations that employed him. It wasn’t until the past few days that the U.S. Olympic Committee made headlines for what happened for decades to some of its most popular athletes, or that university presidents and USA Gymnastics leaders started to resign.

And, as it happens, the past few days are right before the start of the Winter Olympics. 
 
How grateful is the U.S. Olympic Committee, and NBC, that gymnastics are a Summer Olympics sport rather than a Winter one? That Katie Couric and the rest of NBC’s anchors won’t have to spend the next month awkwardly talking around how all of the athletes on your video screen of choice were subjected to USA Gymnastics-enabled sexual assault?
 
I mean, it's going to be awkward enough already with the specter of Matt Lauer. And the Winter Olympics’ blockbuster sport, figure skating, has plenty of commonalities with gymnastics: young girls competing, lots of older men coaching them, intense training sessions with variable external oversight. So I’m kind of waiting for figure skating’s sexual-abuse shoe (skate?) to drop any day now.
 
Oh, wait, it already did. In 2007. And 2000 (same guy). And 1999. And 1993. I’m sure figure skating has totally cleaned itself up since.
 
Though that 1993 article quotes someone pretty familiar with the Larry Nassar case!

Several top-echelon coaches insist that the power of the male coach over a female student can be used constructively. Bela Karolyi, the former United States national gymnastics coach, still coaches 2,500 girls each summer at his ranch north of Houston. He said that he had seen several of his coaches marry their students.

Karolyi, who also coached Nadia Comaneci to Olympic gold medals in gymnastics, said that when he was coaching team handball for women in Romania, he noticed one handsome male coach was able to gain the attention, and the fire, of his students.

"The girls were interested because of his good looks and had a better commitment," he said. "Their goals were remarkable. They wanted to be the favorite."

Yep. That’s about what I’d expect from someone who was a decades-long accessory to institutionalized child molestation.

Lady Bits

--I heard from so many of you last week about being invited to moderate all-male panels, in all sorts of professions. I’m sorry/glad to know it’s not just me! (One friend bravely introduced herself to a room full of dudes as “your token diversity." It did not go over well. Another friend’s husband has started calling these events “manels,” which is a term that I’m totally stealing.)
 
-On vacation in Scandinavia this summer, I discovered a new and wonderful non-dairy milk for my coffee: oat milk. Then I came back to New York and discovered that an oat milk latte here costs $7. This NYT Styles profile explains it all.
 
-The Good Place was particularly good last week.
 

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