The Woman Card and Work

I've just added a footnote to a piece I wrote yesterday elsewhere called This is a Piece about Consent and Initiating. That piece could have been posted here. I have my reasons why it's there instead of here and why I have too many blogs and that will likely continue to be true.

My understanding of events that happened during World War II well before I was born is that Schindler was kind of a scoundrel and unfaithful to his wife and supplying the Nazis with munitions and these facts facilitated his ability to have a list and get Jews out.

Supposedly, he was bringing food to a young Jewish woman who was about twenty years old and the Nazis let him feed her because they assumed he was having sex with her. I believe she was still alive when the movie came out and she said no, he wasn't having sex with her. But the belief that he was facilitated his ability to feed her.

The 2004 film A Good Woman is based on the 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde. In the film, a young man is paying the bills for an older woman -- who turns out to be his wife's mother -- and everyone thinks they are having an affair and they aren't.

So let me state unequivocally upfront that I do not believe that if two people are alone and have the opportunity to have sex, sex will obviously happen. But I learned early in life that the key to having a secret sexual relationship is establishing the ability to openly meet with the person alone while no one bats an eye at it.

I learned that inadvertently because at age seventeen I began having sex with a longtime friend and this relationship occurred largely because his working single mom didn't trust him and wouldn't allow him to have girls over when he was home alone except for me because she imagined I was some paragon of virtue and she trusted me.

That's all kinds of messed up and could have potentially gotten me sexually assaulted by him if he's really some untrustworthy bad guy. It didn't and I wasn't taking advantage of him. He initiated the relationship and it just kind of happened organically because we had opportunity to spend time together alone regularly the summer we turned seventeen.

It was the first relationship for both of us, so we made polite noises about getting married but he asked someone else to prom and I wasn't offended. So the reality was that neither of us wanted to admit publicly to being involved and the relationship ended in less than a year without real drama or heartbreak. We just saw each other less and less until I guess I officially broke it off one day.

We were young and stupid and didn't know what we were doing. Adults in our lives decided it was fine for me to go to his apartment anytime I wanted and go swimming because his apartment had a pool and that was initially my reason for going over there.

Early on in my marriage, I wasn't faithful to my husband and I was extremely torn up about that fact, so I spent like a decade reading everything I could get my hands on about affairs. 

You read dramatic stories about some guy getting caught having an affair and it frequently involves the wife learning that he dropped out of the weekly card game with the guys months ago or something like that. In other words, he's been lying about where he goes.

Successful affairs frequently involve everyone knowing these two know each other socially. Historically, sleeping with the secretary was a standard meme because there's access and opportunity.

I read one astrology book where the astrologer played counselor to both the wife and girlfriend of a wealthy man who recently died. The wife had stopped having sex with him years earlier but never filed for divorce. So he slept with the secretary and the secretary actively dressed dowdy and did all she could to not look like this was an affair.

I wrote a piece a long time ago called The Gray Zone which is available on this site and on Witness to Destruction but was originally posted on a personal blog and to my SHOCK I recently tripped across the fact that someone posted it to Hacker News who wasn't hitting on me, whom I don't recall ever emailing me. 

So my apologies to him and anyone else I may have inadvertently slandered when blogging about how no one on Hacker News ever posted anything of mine if it wasn't gossip or they weren't hitting on me. I didn't remember that there was ever a time when that wasn't how that went.

The HN discussion has 178 points and 90 comments. I appear to have left just one comment.

Anyway, The Gray Zone posits that it's a veritable minefield for a woman to try to establish trust as a business person because as a woman in a man's world, establishing trust for business purposes often looks to other people exactly like establishing a romantic relationship. It can look like it to the man she is trying to network with. She can feel confused about the situation and end up feeling attracted to someone when her goal was a business connection.

I don't think someone like Cheryl Yeoh accepting the offer to be his "plus one" at a prestigious event and then dragging him publicly for what she describes as sexual assault is helping things.

Her own writing makes it clear she knew she really didn't belong at that event on professional merit.

A friend of hers whose name I don't recall wrote a piece about sleeping with a VC I believe and she talked about how early on, she got attention simply because she was a woman and used that to further her goals and later she got attention because of who she was professionally.

I don't know what the right answer is. Someone on Cyburbia said "Well, you have their attention..." and didn't know how to explain her point. I've talked about that previously.

I was not comfortable with her talking about "playing the woman card" to open doors. And yet Erin Brockovich opened doors by being a little flirty and explains that to her boss by saying "They're called boobs, Ed."

Brockovich was acting a bit like a spy under circumstances where that shouldn't have been necessary but was necessary because of a corrupt system. She wasn't using boobs to get Ed to hire her.

She wasn't trying to establish professional trust with a the guy gatekeeping access to public records she had a legal RIGHT to see. She was metaphorically at war with these people.

I have talked about the fact that I have so little traffic for my blogs in part because I actively looked to ditch attention I felt was problematic. Women get a lot of ugly attention online and I attract a lot of attention from accomplished men who see me as wife material and it's actively problematic for pursuing my own goals.

Ms. Wu is younger than me, she has a different skill set from me (etc), and she's chosen to take the bull by the horns and confront shitty sexist garbage head on. Given that she gets more attention than I do and makes more money, arguably she's "smarter" than me about this.

But I don't want money at that price. I'm content with the choices I've made in a world that affords women no good choices.

Men also get plenty of ugly attention. Johnny Carson got death threats for hosting a fairly lighthearted TV talk show.

But men get more upside than women from putting up with the crap. The second link in the blockquote above is to a comment by me in a discussion about a woman who had commercial success online and then committed suicide.

I'm medically handicapped. I need to figure out how to earn a living on my own merits in a manner that works for me.

I'm celibate for medical reasons and have been for almost twenty-one years. Otherwise I might have dated and married some guy at some point who was attracted to me and not opening doors for me career wise.

I feel like I am probably not adequately explaining that. Tom Fejeran had been an urban planner prior to meeting me. I asked him to read my Solano Rail plan and give me feedback and I never got that feedback.

I don't know why and I wasn't trying to network. I had a personal relationship to him and it was wild coincidence that he had recently left planning prior to meeting me through a mutual acquaintance.

But being handicapped has put me in a position where two things are true:

1. Any failure on my part to adequately open doors and establish a serious career with adequate income can be chalked up to my medical situation.

2. I don't have the option to take the easy way out, stop beating my head pointlessly against this wall and just marry one of the wealthy, powerful men who don't WANT to open doors for me career wise but find me attractive.

It's also not an option for me to open doors via the so-called casting couch. My medical condition can cost a quarter of a million annually to treat. My son has the same thing. That's a half million a year I don't need by prioritizing our health over earned income.

If you are not literally offering me MILLIONS to sleep with you, it's not worth it to me at all. So it's not worth it to me to, say, sleep with a guy for a role in a movie HOPING it will be a big hit and make millions. I need guarantees that it will outweigh the cost to me.

Since the potential financial part alone is not going to be covered by any job offer I'm likely to reasonably qualify for, my eye is on physical pain and suffering and likely loss of functionality as a consequence of sleeping with someone. And that's a NO from me.

Odds are high I will remain CELIBATE for life.

So this puts me in the unique position to observe the world that I am failing to meaningfully participate in and I believe that the casting couch is alive and well and what that means in practice is that a lot of women aren't hired on merit and this harms the furtherance of women's rights insidiously.

The current US President has hired a number of women who are CLEARLY not really qualified for the job but look like HOs. The way to bet is they got that job via sex.

If I'm correct, that has myriad consequences, such as:

1. It muddies the water for casual onlookers trying to figure out how to succeed as a woman and choosing to not assume the worst. If you are a woman wanting a serious career and you think dressing like women hired by the president is how to further your career, odds are high that only furthers your career if you also put out to get that job like the outfit suggests you will.

That's a big problem.

2. It means men who actually want competent employees will be skeptical of hiring women at all in part because women hired as a consequence of sexual favors will not have the skills they are looking for and will have bizarre ideas about what they really need to do for that job, much less for any hope of promotion.

I don't know how we sort this out and establish protocols for establishing trust in the workplace between men and women while guaranteeing people are safe from sexual assault and also making sure women are not opening doors via sex and then not really delivering results work wise and not really understanding what NEEDS to happen.

Because odds are very high women "playing the woman card" to become someone's plus one at some prestigious event they don't qualify for professionally have no understanding of what it takes to get that invitation on professional merit.

Sex sometimes happens between people who spend a lot of time together in professional settings and it's not always viewed as a problem. Band mates on tour sometimes have affairs and those affairs are sometimes with same sex partners and that doesn't automatically guarantee the band will fail.

But something needs to be sorted out about how to have those initial interactions professionally and make a clear distinction. I don't think what we are doing now is really working.