In the movie Absolute Power, while trying to rob the mansion of billionaire Walter Sullivan, master thief Luther Whitney witnesses the murder of Sullivan's much younger wife Christy. It is a drunken tryst with the president of the United States gone wrong.
When the president turns violent and she defends herself, the secret service shoots her. They then cover up the real truth and pin the murder on Luther.
In some scene, Walter Sullivan tells someone that the reason he married a woman so much younger than him was because, after the death of his previous wife, he never wanted to bury another wife. That was a pain he did not wish to experience again.
So he wanted Christy to outlive him and now she has not only died but died in a gruesome and embittering fashion. She was murdered.
Although most of the world seems to treat this detail of the movie as insignificant, it's actually a central plot point. This detail is part of why Walter is so incensed when he learns the truth about her death that he personally goes and either murders the president or seemingly "helps" him commit suicide. (The movie leaves some room for doubt as to exactly how he died.)
On the one hand, movies, TV, etc. routinely err on the side of casting much younger women in roles with older men. It somewhat reflects the reality that in most romantic heterosexual relationships, the man is a bit older than the woman.
On the other hand, the reasons why this occurs in real life tend to not be addressed in some meaningful manner and there is a lot of negative messaging around age differences in relationships.
Someone once suggested to me that men just let people assume that they dated a particular woman because of her age or looks as deflection from the truth. When you have a serious career, you are a constant target of strangers with an agenda wanting to get something from you and what they don't know won't hurt you.
Having a public life means people you don't really have a personal relationship with will have knowledge of you and opinions about you. Most of those opinions will be uninformed and wrong.
People will leap to a conclusion based on some crumb of information. They will then feel free to spout off about you because you are famous, so not a real person in their eyes. You are more like a character in a storybook as far as they are concerned.
So if you want a serious career of the sort that involves a relationship to the public, you just need to accept that people will have opinions about you and those opinions will often basically be BS. You should not waste time trying to educate each person individually, though there may be cases where someone says a thing that clues you that "This looks bad." and it's useful to then consider some means to educate everyone all at once as the least worst answer.
The essence of fame -- even if small scale locally "famous" -- is this: More people can know a lot about you than you can personally interact with.
Trying to deal with everyone one-on-one can prevent you from ever really getting a public life. It simply doesn't scale.
I suspect women tend to be trained to deal with people individually one-on-one in a way that creates a glass ceiling because it limits how many people she can be known by. This gets reinforced by other people and their demands for answers from her because the world tends to expect this of women as well.
This general assumption that women must address each individual who has an opinion about them is a burden that can derail any effort to get more of a public life. There simply isn't enough time in the day for her to do that for everyone who knows something about her, which helps keep women trapped in a lesser life.
Instead of going "It's not their business and they can think whatever stupid stuff they want." women seem to be prone to over-explaining, which comes across as defensive and as someone in need of a justification for their personal choices. This gets read by other people as them being somehow guilty of something and encourages people to keep demanding yet more details.
This can be a very thorny issue to try to navigate because hell is other people and if the entire world more or less agrees that someone of your demographic is required to do X, it can be tough to find a way to escape that pattern.
When the president turns violent and she defends herself, the secret service shoots her. They then cover up the real truth and pin the murder on Luther.
In some scene, Walter Sullivan tells someone that the reason he married a woman so much younger than him was because, after the death of his previous wife, he never wanted to bury another wife. That was a pain he did not wish to experience again.
So he wanted Christy to outlive him and now she has not only died but died in a gruesome and embittering fashion. She was murdered.
Although most of the world seems to treat this detail of the movie as insignificant, it's actually a central plot point. This detail is part of why Walter is so incensed when he learns the truth about her death that he personally goes and either murders the president or seemingly "helps" him commit suicide. (The movie leaves some room for doubt as to exactly how he died.)
On the one hand, movies, TV, etc. routinely err on the side of casting much younger women in roles with older men. It somewhat reflects the reality that in most romantic heterosexual relationships, the man is a bit older than the woman.
On the other hand, the reasons why this occurs in real life tend to not be addressed in some meaningful manner and there is a lot of negative messaging around age differences in relationships.
Someone once suggested to me that men just let people assume that they dated a particular woman because of her age or looks as deflection from the truth. When you have a serious career, you are a constant target of strangers with an agenda wanting to get something from you and what they don't know won't hurt you.
Having a public life means people you don't really have a personal relationship with will have knowledge of you and opinions about you. Most of those opinions will be uninformed and wrong.
People will leap to a conclusion based on some crumb of information. They will then feel free to spout off about you because you are famous, so not a real person in their eyes. You are more like a character in a storybook as far as they are concerned.
So if you want a serious career of the sort that involves a relationship to the public, you just need to accept that people will have opinions about you and those opinions will often basically be BS. You should not waste time trying to educate each person individually, though there may be cases where someone says a thing that clues you that "This looks bad." and it's useful to then consider some means to educate everyone all at once as the least worst answer.
The essence of fame -- even if small scale locally "famous" -- is this: More people can know a lot about you than you can personally interact with.
Trying to deal with everyone one-on-one can prevent you from ever really getting a public life. It simply doesn't scale.
I suspect women tend to be trained to deal with people individually one-on-one in a way that creates a glass ceiling because it limits how many people she can be known by. This gets reinforced by other people and their demands for answers from her because the world tends to expect this of women as well.
This general assumption that women must address each individual who has an opinion about them is a burden that can derail any effort to get more of a public life. There simply isn't enough time in the day for her to do that for everyone who knows something about her, which helps keep women trapped in a lesser life.
Instead of going "It's not their business and they can think whatever stupid stuff they want." women seem to be prone to over-explaining, which comes across as defensive and as someone in need of a justification for their personal choices. This gets read by other people as them being somehow guilty of something and encourages people to keep demanding yet more details.
This can be a very thorny issue to try to navigate because hell is other people and if the entire world more or less agrees that someone of your demographic is required to do X, it can be tough to find a way to escape that pattern.