Lady Business: Supreme Court calendars, Barstool safe spaces, and who gets to curse

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 forty-fourth issue, published September 27, 2018. 

Vocal Minorities

I received two notable bits of reader fan mail this week. Well, “fan mail.” The first was an outraged email from a man who disliked that one of my stories mentioned Black Lives Matter. (Not that the story was about Black Lives Matter, or even explicitly endorsed it -- just that it was mentioned. Just that his delicate conservative eyes had to read the words “Black Lives Matter.”)
 
The other one was a Twitter message from a dude who wanted me to write about his product. I get hundreds of emails like that a week. What made this man slightly unusual: When I didn’t respond, gratefully eager to help him spread the word of his work? He cursed me out.
 
Neither of these messages was particularly unusual, or the first time I’ve received profane hate mail in my career. But they were extremely well-timed for this week in the news, which is really highlighting the double standard that still exists between what some men in power do or say--and how they squawk when called on it.
 
There’s the Supreme Court nominee whose high school yearbook includes gross notes about his female classmates, his drinking and his alleged habit of sexual assault. That’s not relevant, though. That’s just a few “things that make (him) cringe,” not any sort of insight into his character, or his habit of lying about his behavior. He’s even got tear sheets from 1982 Northwestern Mutual swag (possibly the preppiest non-evidence ever?) to back him up!
 
There’s the comedian finally, finally sentenced for his decades-long well-known rape habit. I can’t put it better than New York stand-up comic Ted Alexandro:
 

“Look, there are mechanisms in place for justice. Eventually justice is served. Women complain that they’re second-class citizens. But look, Bill Cosby raped dozens of women, decades went by, the allegations were widely known and reported, comedian Hannibal Buress told some jokes about it, it went viral, and eventually justice was served. The system works!”

 
Or there’s Barstool Sports, subject of an extensive gross-out feature this week in The Daily Beast. Robert Silverman’s piece lays out how much Barstool and its founder Dave Portnoy revel in attacking and cyberbullying their critics -- especially journalists, and especially women. This was the most interesting point:
 

Some percentage of Stoolies and Barstool bloggers really do see their way of life as somehow being under assault, and that they are the real victims here. The siege mentality and dedicated trolling both dovetail to the same result, though: never, ever having to consider that there are real human beings on the other side of the screen, ones who never asked to play Judy in this grim Punch and Judy show. And yes, Barstool is but one vector of white male grievance culture that has been monetized.
 
… For a certain brand of bro, Barstool functions as a “safe space,” one that’s free of politics, or at least free to constantly complain about the politics of others while never reckoning with their own. But make no mistake, a political ethos definitely exists.

By accident, [Barstool Editor in Chief Keith “Kmarko”] Markovich may have done the best, most succinct job of summing it up. In a recent blog post—naturally, one complaining about a woman, who then spent days fending off Stoolies online—he said the internet used to be a fun place.

Not so much in 2018, because “there are so many vocal minorities stomping their feet and yelling about shit,” he wrote.

Which brings me back to my fan mail. Black Lives Matter: Bad. Women ignoring men’s desires: Bad. Man cursing and yelling about shit, when he just wants things to go back to the “fun” way they used to be: Totally acceptable, why would you even ask?
 

Lady Bits:

--This terrific Kathryn Schultz New Yorker feature about two hippie, locavore chefs who moved to remote Utah manages to be simultaneously about entrepreneurs, the food industry, life in a Mormon small town, federal environmental conservation policy, and white women’s increasing political activism in the age of Trump.
 
--Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a very enjoyable half of a novel, though it turned out to be a whole lot of setup without much payoff. It also made me feel hilariously old; never before have I realized that an author, who seems to have been in her late 20s when writing this book, apparently believes that life ends at 30. “She lived a quiet life, a typical life, of minor disappointments and ordinary loneliness," Fu writes of one character … who is 33. (It's all downhill from there, girls!)
 
--PSA: New Good Place tonight!
 
 

 
 
 
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