Business Musings

Isabelle Mège has been called The Opposite of a Muse. She's a French woman who worked as a medical secretary in Paris who asked renowned photographers to take her picture. She sent letters telling them "I would like to see how you see me."

Many of them were nudes, so the above article contains nude images. The interviewer says:

Then I asked another question, one that had played in my mind since I first learned about the collection. Did the interest of her photographers in the sensuality of her body ever extend into real life? She counted. There were two artists she had slept with. I silently calculated this number, over the twenty-two years that she worked, to be around one per cent of the artists she had worked with. “In life, this sometimes happens,” she said.

Regardless of the circumstances under which they meet, people sometimes hit it off. She wasn't paid for any of this, yet in some sense you could say it was her profession or at least occupation. It's something she pursued as a serious interest for more than two decades.

Men don't habitually and immediately lose their careers because they had sex with a colleague. Women frequently do, though not always.

Historically, Hollywood movie co stars routinely had affairs while on the set. This was common knowledge and didn't result in female stars becoming the little wifey, merely a bauble on his arm, never to work again. 

As recently as the hubbub about Brangelina, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt met on the set of a movie. She reportedly threw herself at him though he's eleven years older than her and was married at the time. Both of them continued to have big careers.

I would be surprised if Madonna had never slept with any of the powerful people she's worked with, but I don't believe she gets jobs via sexual favors. They hire her on merit. 

I have heard she went to New York at age seventeen, lived in an apartment the size of a closet and worked at "every fast food place" while trying to break into entertainment. She said her father put all the kids in classes for a musical instrument and she briefly took piano before talking him into letting her take dance classes instead. 

In this clip, she talks about realizing being a dancer would never pay her bills and deciding to go into musical theater as a career plan. So she thought strategically about her career and how to actually make adequate money from doing what she loved.

Years ago, I saw her say she carried an audio tape with her everywhere in case she happened to run into someone whom she wanted to promote herself to professionally. She remarked on getting her face in front of people with her photos getting out there as an important step in furthering recognition. 

She participated in some event where old school male singers complained about the rise of music videos ruining everything. They just wanted to sing. She upset the haters by saying something like video was another means to express herself as an artist.

I'm not a singer or dancer or "artist." I'm a writer and blogger and I would like to make clothes, but as a woman who has read books and articles about business since my teens and at one time kept a blank book with notes like "You typically have one hour of unpaid work for every hour of paid work." if you are a freelancer, I was fascinated with little snippets about Madonna's business savvy.

I sometimes hear women entertainers tell stories like "My agent told me memorize a different part and pretend I got the wrong information." but I've never heard as many casually mentioned snippets indicating some woman had ambition, kept her eye on the prize and worked her buttocks off nonstop 24/7 to get it, often in ways you would never notice if she didn't tell you.

It takes significant thought, time, effort, preparation and hassle every single day to put together a demo tape and keep it in your pocket so you can immediately pull it out before the moment passes if the exhausting search for an opening with the right person happens in real time before your very eyes.

Men do that. Men with real careers are always on like that. 

I rarely hear the same from women. And whomever Madonna has or hasn't slept with, you can bet money she never thought "Welp, I can COAST now!"

And that's why she's a star and not someone's secretary or little wifey.