Hannibal Lecter and other female allies

Paul Graham figured out how to get Jessica Livingston taken seriously for her work though he was vouching for her in a sense AND sleeping with her.

He designed a company around her strengths and expected her to WORK.

Everyone else, me included, doesn't see how a powerful wealthy man can BOTH vouch for a woman AND sleep with her.

I spent YEARS fascinated with "How in the heck did Jessica Livingston DO that????" and it took me a long time to realize she didn't. She was looking to marry well and inadvertently became a successful female founder because Paul Graham had other plans.

He's pretty tight lipped. He doesn't talk about his private life as far as I can tell.

It is fact that she was job hunting and failing to seal the deal and they were dating and talking regularly over dinner about her job hunt. It is speculation on my part that he saw her as marriageable material and because he has a PhD and she has a Bachelor's degree, he probably decided that he would lose his marbles and not stay if he had to keep listening to her WHINE about the glass ceiling etc.

So he gave her the opportunity other men wouldn't. Because he could.

He had recently sold ViaWeb and was newly rich and successful venture funds are typically run by experienced business people. YC is a marriage of his strengths and hers. He had the business acumen and she was in finance and came up with new financing contracts as her contribution to making YC stand out.

It was sort of a fiction that there were four founders. It wasn't a lie. The other two founders were involved but only part time.

YC was mostly Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston at first. His two partners from ViaWeb helped vet candidates.

Making them founders meant they were working for a future payoff. He didn't have to pay them cash upfront.

Stock in the company that would be worth something someday IF it succeeded was payment he could afford and it was payment that aligned their goals with success of the company.

But they probably mostly showed up to vet candidates in the interview process and never spent time alone with Jessica Livingston.

He said once they tried to "be professional" and said that meant they hid their romantic involvement at first. 

I think his goal was for her to have a serious career so they would have something in common and he wasn't trapped in a relationship with a little wifey with nothing interesting to say to him.

I have this nasty little expression about intelligent, accomplished men probably experience a lot of their relationships as being like "having sex with a talking blow up doll" and some intelligent male said to me once "Every time you say that, I think the fact that it talks makes it worse because it's like one of those dolls where you pull a string in the back and it says one of three phrases until you are like MAKE. IT. STOP."

Paul Graham found a way to make it stop and to hear new words out of its mouth.

And when I realized Jessica Livingston's career was an accidental success from her perspective, I was like "Darn. It's not replicable."

It actually is, just not by the method of being a woman trying to marry well and ending up a company founder. Because Jessica Livingston wasn't trying to get a serious career out of it, so if you want a serious career and hope that hooking up with some rich man gets you that, you aren't doing what she did to begin with.

I imagine most rich men would not be enthused to be blatantly used by a woman hoping that sleeping with him opens doors for him, though it somewhat frequently does. Bruce Willis's current child bride got help from him in promoting vacuous garbage like perfume because that's all she had to offer that his fame and business acumen could leverage.

Actresses in Hollywood somewhat often are married to the director or whatever. So being with a powerful man can open doors.

Linda Hamilton was married to the director of Terminator at the time. She had to deliver or it wouldn't have become a big franchise and it's not characterized as "She got it via the casting couch." but she kind of did, then delivered results enough to establish her own professional reputation.

And her delivery is legendary. She had a baby a few months before getting buff for T2 and her physique was so impressive that Cher said  "I want whomever did that to her." and tracked down her trainer and made exercise videos with him.

So no one ever suggests "She isn't talented and only gets hired via nepotism or the casting couch." They barely talk at all about "She was married to the director." Instead, they talk about what a badass she is in ways she doesn't usually play in other roles while she makes polite noises about "That's not really what I expected to get known for."

That's on par with Johnny Depp taking the secondary role in Pirates of the Caribbean and playing it so brilliantly he became the star of the franchise. It's a thing she accomplished where you can't say something like "Well, yes, you play alongside Arnold and everyone gets more buff and eats better after doing a movie with him."

It was essential to making the character believable and it's a kind of body modification typically associated with male leads. So absolutely no one can say "Linda Hamilton didn't really work at it. She just slept with the director."

Johnny Depp's character wasn't supposed to be a main character. Terminator is a horror movie and horror movies typically have a female lead playing the victim and she doesn't become central to the franchise. The franchise is typically about the bad guy.

The title of The Silence of the Lambs is about the darkest fear of Clarice Starling. It's a movie about a woman and her career ambition played by an extremely talented actress and the franchise is about the bad guy Hannibal Lecter, even though I believe the movie was so compelling because it's about a woman with career ambition being dismissed constantly by everyone around her except Hannibal Lecter.

All other men in that movie are predators of women. Hannibal Lecter is her ally and he's a serial killer who preys upon men, not women.

And I think that hit a nerve with the public for reasons no one could put their finger on and that's why it's a big, big movie. And the following franchise about Hannibal Lecter did relatively poorly because it missed the entire point of what gripped the subconscious fears of the public.

By all rights, Sarah Connor should be that bimbo who gave birth to John Connor and has at best bit parts played by random actresses in future movies. Sarah Connor as played by Linda Hamilton is an important part of the franchise because Linda Hamilton delivered and made it an important character who does more than give birth to the future leader of the resistance.

Big bands sometimes break up and then sometimes all the members go on to big careers afterwards. And sometimes don't.

Sometimes, one guy gets a big solo career and no one hears much about the others ever again. And then the arguments and claims made while they were still together get seen in a different light, that maybe that one guy has valid complaints.

Hollywood is a weird business environment where it seems to somehow be okay for costars to marry and both continue acting. In a lot of other work environments, if you learn he's sleeping with the secretary, she marries him, goes home and has babies and someone else gets paid to be the secretary. 

In urban planning, I knew one couple who made it work because she was a planner and he was like in IT in the planning department and there was no conflict of interest.

Another couple, she moved to where he lived and he was the senior planner in the county and she took a job she described as being the only planning job in the county that didn't report to him.

Madeleine Albright did an interview once and said she got a degree in journalism and married a man with a degree in journalism and couldn't get a job as a reporter because his employer wouldn't hire her and neither would his competitors. Wikipedia makes no mention of that issue and just says:

The couple moved to Joseph's hometown of Chicago, Illinois, in January 1960. Joseph worked at the Chicago Sun-Times as a journalist, and Albright worked as a picture editor for Encyclopædia Britannica.

This is an issue I've observed in life over and over and heard mention of in interviews. Singers, actresses and similar sometimes can sleep with band mates or their agent or whatever and no one cares. For most other kinds of work, sleeping with your boss or a coworker is a problem and any conflict of interest is typically resolved by making her the little wifey AKA destroying her career so he can keep his.

Presumably, singing is a talent where either you have it or you don't and there's not much room for faking it. No one cares about the fact that Celine Dion married her agent, even though he was her agent starting when she was just twelve and that detail should concern everyone.

Celine Dion can sing and there's no Milli Vanilli lip sync scandal. In the seemingly largely overlooked movie Connie and Carla, two women become successful drag queens because they do their own singing. Most are lip syncing.

I personally don't think Jennifer Aniston is all that talented. She's the girlfriend in Bruce Almighty and that should be a major character in the film and I kind of wonder if she wasn't delivering and they edited down her role.

She seems to get hired for looks and "because she's been in a lot of successful stuff" though Friends had an ensemble cast. She didn't carry the show as its star.

It's probably harder to say unequivocally "She can deliver" as an actress in a movie when script, editing, other actors etc. are a big part of it. But if you stand on stage and you are the only voice anyone hears, either you deliver or you don't.

Yes, I know acoustics and the band etc are not irrelevant. Here's a clip of a bad backing track followed by the singer doing it acapella for the audition.

So singers seem to be practically immune to people caring about the details of exactly whom they are sleeping with or what social machinations got their toe in the door. But most other jobs are much tougher to assess what value you are really bringing and large parts of society operate on a basis of "When in doubt, kick her out."

And this has widespread suppressive impact on female careers and I don't really see other people talking about it, though it's something I think about a LOT.

Workplace romance statistics show that over 60% of adults have had a workplace romance. .. our survey found that 43% led to marriage...

47% have changed jobs to date a colleague

Nearly half of all people who have had a workplace romance have gone as far as leaving their job to pursue their colleague of interest.

And it doesn't say anything about who is changing jobs in terms of gender and what impact that has on female careers.

Melinda Gates met Bill Gates at work and basically became the little wifey. No one calls her that because he's a billionaire and she gets spiffy labels like philanthropist, but dating the boss effectively ended her career at Microsoft.

Mackenzie Scott was Jeff Bezos' secretary. They left the company and founded Amazon and she effectively became the little wifey.

People talk about the fact that she helped create the company and worked there in the early days, but I've never heard that she was listed as a founder with stock in her own name and when she got billions of dollars worth of stock in the divorce, Jeff Bezos retained the voting rights.

So in the divorce settlement, she got money stripped of power intentionally.

And this same story repeats endlessly across countless heteronormative marriages more quietly without anyone doing interviews of the couple because he's just a manager and she had some entry level job or whatever before becoming the little wifey.

I gave up a National Merit Scholarship and quit college to be with my husband. I was one of the top three students of our graduating class and my own husband acted like I didn't really give up a career to support his. 

If I had quit an established job making $50,000 annually, he would have conceded the point. But since I never established a career, in his mind I was a loser with no life and no accomplishments and no potential, not someone who made a great sacrifice for his benefit and then got pissed all over, disrespected and imprisoned by him while he took all the credit.

What I might have done had I not married him counted for nothing in his mind and he spoke to me when we argued like he was some hero who rescued a damsel in distress and I was some loser who would CLEARLY be on welfare or maybe flipping burgers if I wasn't cooking for him and cleaning up after him.

A woman gets pregnant or gets married and hopes to have children and she starts erring on the side of making sure his career succeeds in case she wants or needs to take time off for the baby. And planet Earth looks at that and decides "Lazy bitch with no ambition." rather than admitting that pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing are a significant burden on women with practical, logistical issues that must be accounted for if she is to have a real career and have children.

This doesn't impact men in the same way or to the same degree.

Anyway, I don't know what goes on in the mind of Paul Graham that he has this seemingly unique accomplishment to his name and I don't know what men can do to figure out some variation on what he figured out for how to get a woman's work taken seriously and "who cares whom she is sleeping with?"

I've spent a lot of years feeling like if a guy takes romantic interest in me, he's now useless to my career ambitions whether I sleep with him or not. And I don't think that's just me, being neurotic.

I think most people treat it that way and most gatekeepers of career anything are male. I treat it that way because that's my firsthand experience: Men who take a romantic interest in me typically are promptly useless to me as career contacts.

How we fix this, I don't know. But it surely won't change if we aren't even talking about it or recognizing it as a pattern.