Shrewed

by Elizabeth Renzetti

  After we returned from Los Angeles, I was hired as a section editor in my old newsroom, a management posi­tion. I had a tiny, windowless office and twenty-eight people reporting to me, which is about twenty-four more than you’re supposed to have, according to the best practices of middle management. Not that I knew anything about middle management; the entire culture of the newspaper, at least then, was: learn on the job, sink or swim, and other fairly useless mottos that could be embroidered on a pillow.

  I was not a very good manager. I absorbed people’s pain like a sponge, and there was, for whatever reason, a great deal of pain to be absorbed. “Your department’s a fucking casualty ward,” one of the other managers said, with what seemed suspiciously like glee. One day, after a particularly harrowing week in which several people cried in my office, a journalist sat down across from me and burst into tears. I rummaged around in my desk for Kleenex but found they’d all been used to mop up other tears. All I had left were black cocktail napkins. I handed him one and watched, horrified, as it collapsed under the weight of his tears and left tiny black streaks on his cheeks. As I say: inexperienced manager. With better training — with any training — I might have learned to deflect the collective pain of my department and channelled it toward something more useful.

  But I did not have more experience, and there was no one to train me, except my beloved mentor, who sat in the office next to mine and kept me sane. Once, and only once, we were sent on a day-long management training seminar. There was nothing she could do about the culture of bias inherent in the newsroom, though. Newsrooms are notoriously conservative places: We are very good at writing about change and very bad at implementing it. There was an atmosphere of sexism baked into the place, which we collectively agreed to ignore, much as we ignored the dirt embedded in the decades-old carpets.

  There was an older guy I had worked with when I first came to the newspaper who resented having me as a boss. Our struggles came to a head and resulted in a meeting where both the union and Human Resources were present. This man had been waiting for his moment to dig the knife in: “I know you’re young and in over your head,” he said, with mock sympathy. “I’m sure you’re doing your best.”

  He was an anomaly. The majority of people in the department were smart, resourceful, hard-working, and kind enough to keep any resentment they felt under wraps. It wasn’t the people below me in the management structure who were the problem.

  One day, at the morning news meeting where the next day’s paper is mapped, a senior editor — who outranked me in the power structure — noticed the red boots I was wearing.

  “Cool boots,” he said.

  “Thanks. They’re new.”

  “You should show everyone.”

  I sat up and stared at him. “What?”

  “Put them on the table,” he said. “Show everyone your boots.”

  The rest of the managers looked at us blankly, eager to get back to their coffee and cigarettes and deadlines.

  I shook my head, no. I couldn’t believe this was happening.

  “C’mon,” the senior editor said, in a tone that implied I’m just joking, can’t you take a joke? “Show everyone your boots.”

  He was not about to let it go. Slowly I put one boot on the table, feeling enraged and humiliated. There were only a couple of other women managers in the room, but they looked away, mortified. The men shuffled their schedules. I put my foot away, boiling with rage, unable to say anything. I should have said something. It was my Norma Rae moment. I could have scrawled “sexism” on a piece of paper and held it up; I could have taken him aside after. I didn’t.

  There were few women in upper management at my newspaper. There has never, for example, been a female editor-in-chief or publisher. My former colleague Vivian Smith has written an entire book about the way that my beloved profession is hostile to the ambitions of half its workforce. Her research is collected in her 2015 book called Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love and Leave Their Newspaper Careers. The journalists she interviewed experienced much the same thing I had — casual sexism, ingrained networks that enforced existing power structures, a macho adherence to punishing hours and schedules. It is a workplace, Smith writes, “that has been hostile to women for 150 years.”

  Newspapers are not alone in failing to nourish women’s ambitions or to provide a pathway to upward mobility. A fascinating report from Boston Consulting in 2017 offered a glimpse into why and how women advance in workplaces. It revealed that personal ambition does not die with age or when a woman chooses to have children, but is smothered by workplaces that do not actively promote gender equity. In other words, it’s not us, it’s them.

  Boston Consulting surveyed 200,000 women, and the results showed that “women start their careers with just as much ambition as men. Women’s ambitions do vary, but they vary by company, not by family status. When companies create a positive culture and attitude regarding gender diversity, all women — mothers included — are eager to advance.”

  This conundrum — female ambition ground down in the jaws of an unforgiving workplace culture — was brought into the spotlight a few years ago when one very high-profile woman decided to write about it. In July 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece for The Atlantic about her struggles to balance her career as first female policy director for the U.S. State Department with her guilt over being absent in the lives of her sons, one of whom was struggling in the mire of adolescence. It was titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and it set off an explosion in the fireworks factory of our worldly ambitions.

  Slaughter’s arguments, later expanded into the book Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, were nuanced and complex: She acknowledged that she was writing from a position of material privilege, which many women didn’t share, and that the real problems with women gaining traction in the world were systemic, and not individual. It was the office that was fucked, and not the drones who toiled in it. As she wrote: “The culture of ‘time macho’ — a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you — remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.”

  People’s well-being will improve and become more humane, she argued, only when the leadership gap closes, which would require her country “to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.”

  As for me, I was exhausted and dispirited after two years in management. When my husband was offered the job of European bureau chief for our newspaper, based in London, I jumped at the chance to accompany him. There, I would go back to being a regular old reporter, no longer burdened with having to worry about anyone’s neuroses or career path but my own.

  YOU JUST MIGHT FIND YOU’LL GET WHAT YOU NEED

  Here is something that took me years to learn, and I share it now in the hopes that it may stick a few pins in your own voodoo doll of anxiety: Ambition, in our late-capitalist world, is almost entirely expressed in terms of work. That is, in terms of the labour you sell to your employer, or which you sell on the open marketplace. This is a monstrously constricted view of human potential. For too long, when we talk about women’s dreams made manifest, we talk about jobs versus our families. The “all” in “having it all” is an office and a house filled with children. It does not consider the totality of women’s lives, the huge space of creativity and fulfillment to be found outside those fenced areas.

  What if your ambition instead is to be an extraordinary volunteer at the local old-age home, and that’s where you find your deepest satisfaction? What if you dream of making the world’s best paella? What if you want to be a foster mom to
possums? What if you come most alive when you’re neither a worker nor a mother, but a chorister, a woodworker, a surfer? What if the greatest satisfaction you ever feel comes in looking after an elderly parent? Why are these things not considered important peaks in the mountain range of our ambition?

  For some women, ambition will rest primarily in the realm of career, whatever that career may be. Everything possible must be done to support that choice. I have certainly found an extraordinary home for my energies in daily journalism, and was lucky enough to be among the last dinosaurs walking Planet Newspaper. But we now place a debilitating burden on the workplace (and its attendant status and monetary rewards) as the entire repository of our dreams.

  It’s scary to step off the professional carousel, however briefly, and to know that it will not slow down for your return. If you’re lucky, when you decide to return you’ll leap back on, catching the tail of a pink unicorn while your briefcase bursts open and spews diapers and Advil and spreadsheets to the wind.

  I stepped off the carousel. My daughter, our second child, was a year old, and I’d had my allotted year of maternity leave. I asked my newspaper if I could work three days a week. My editors agreed. It was a sacrifice for our finances, but it made sense, as it does in any household where two large careers collide with two small children.

  My husband was away reporting half the time, and I told myself that I was doing what was right for the children — and, crucially, for me. I could not slice the pie of myself any more thinly and still feed everyone. I wanted my life to be different, and wider, and more creative. I wanted to write that book.

  I still felt a pang of guilt every time I turned down a magazine assignment or opened a chiding email from an editor. I was envious when I saw colleagues take on glamorous assignments. But I placed the envy and the guilt in the same mental Tupperware where I stored my inner asshole voice, the one that told me my work was fruitless, and I sat down to write.

  I worked on my novel while my kids were at school during those two days a week. Three years later, I had a book. Many drafts later, I had a finished book. Many rejection slips later, I had a publisher. I became Sybylla Melvyn on the day I found out I would be a published author. All my prickly bits were still in place, all my rough parts unsanded. And it was fine that way.

  For years before and after I wrote my first novel, I interviewed other women about their ambitions, and I realized that each story was different and too oddly shaped to fit into a convenient narrative. Each path was different — not better, or happier, or more frustrating, just different. There was no point in looking at anyone else’s map and wishing I were there. I was where I was, and I could be somewhere else tomorrow.

  YOU’LL PAY FOR THOSE BREASTS, OR THE COST OF BEING A LADY

  I WAS THIRTEEN and in grade 8 when my classmate Oliver slipped his hand up my back, under my grey velour cowl-neck, and flicked my bra strap. He did it with the facility of one of Henry V’s archers, tugging adroitly and releasing, as if our middle school were Agincourt and the French were in his sights.

  “I like you, Renzetti,” he said. “You’re smart, and you’ve got big tits.”

  Both of these things were true, and would continue to be true, and would hang in the balance — if you’ll pardon the pun — for the rest of my life. It was a combination that confused people. It confused me. Having big tits, for no reason that I could discern at that point in my youth, meant that you were somehow mentally deficient, as if brain matter had been redistributed south to build a bigger pair. Barbie had huge breasts and thought math was hard; Jayne Mansfield was seldom called upon to do quadratic equations. All the little-tittied girls were clever, sleek, unburdened by expectation. Another reason to be jealous of them: Over the course of a lifetime, they would not have to spend the equivalent of a luxury vacation corralling their breasts.

  The bra that Oliver snapped that day, and for many days after, was a Dici. In the 1970s, all teenagers wore Dici, lured no doubt by the siren song of its famous television commercial: “Pretty as a bird up high, let me be free or let me fly, Dici — Dici! — or nothing . . .” In the commercial, an animated bra transforms mirac­ulously into a seagull, and I could not have been the only thirteen-year-old disappointed when this never occurred in real life.

  The soft-cup bras, introduced by Wonderbra in 1974 as an alternative to the conical breast jails of earlier decades, were meant to invoke the freedom of women’s liberation. My mother brought them home from Eaton’s in shades of sort-of white and dirty putty, and I wore them until they were sheer and sagged with use. At a certain point I escaped the nest, and soaring into adulthood like the Dici seagull-bra, became responsible for my own expenses. Because I was a woman, these would be great indeed.

  How does every woman not become a Marxist revolutionary when she realizes the ridiculous price attached to her gender? Earlier this year I spent $500 on six bras, and not one of them is made from unicorn foreskin. Between them, they contain about as much material as a hand towel. Not one of them is the kind of majestic bra you’d find at Rigby and Peller, the London boutique that supplies underpinnings to the Queen, which I entered once and left almost immediately, so intimidated was I by the hushed and reverent atmo­sphere. I was an apostate in the temple of lingerie.

  Women’s intimate apparel is a $32-billion global industry, according to The Lingerie Journal (“Lingerie News from Top to Bottom!”). There is no equivalent outlay for men’s underpants, which, as we know, are bought in bulk by wives and mothers on their lunch breaks. There is no Victoria’s Secret television special in which men parade down a runway in their dingy Y-fronts.

  In the thirty-five years I’ve been my buying my own bras, I estimate that I’ve spent about $12,000, and that includes the purchase of one particularly ill-advised demi-balconette printed with the Rolling Stones’ lips logo (although it could be argued that having Mick Jagger’s tongue on your boobs = priceless). That amount does not include “shapewear,” camisoles, tights, slips, or any other garment aimed at keeping maverick female flesh under tight control (another $2,000). A single gut-shrinking panty girdle can run $100, a figure that would surely shock men — not that you would ever tell your man you’d bought one. That money could have instead purchased a trip to Greece, where I would have had an affair with a hot ferry captain, my breasts swinging gently in the Aegean breeze.

  In the bottom of my purse are eight lipsticks: Stila, MAC, Revlon, Christian Dior. They have names like Vivienne and Runway and Rendez-Vous. Eight lipsticks when I have, at best, two lips. Together, they probably cost about $200. Some of them are rendered inutile because they’ve lost their lids and become tainted with shreds of tobacco, the tiny brown tentacles pressed into soft pink tips, like nerve cells seen under a microscope. The bottom of my purse is where my worst sins reside: vanity and sloth. I can no more resist a new lipstick than I can a social cigarette.

  To be a human being is to be full of contradictions. To be a feminist woman is to walk around, daily, confronted with your empowerment and your diminishment at the hands of others: The soap that tells you to live your best authentic self; the $200 vial of bee venom serum that tells you your authentic self is a wrinkly affront to the world at large. How often do we think about the astonishing amount of money we waste, as women, constructing a pleasing facade?

  In 1990, Naomi Wolf coined the term “PBQ” — the Professional Beauty Qualification — to describe the punitive effects of accepted beauty standards on women. One of those effects was economic: We were selling ourselves short by buying into a crippling aesthetic model. As she writes in The Beauty Myth:

  The PBQ keeps women materially and psychologically poor. It drains money from the very women who would pose the greatest threat were they to learn the sense of entitlement bestowed by economic security: Through the PBQ, even richer women are kept away from the masculine experience of wealth. Its double standard actually makes such women poorer than their male
peers, by cutting a greater swathe in the income of a female executive than that of a male, and that is part of its purpose . . . The few women who are earning as much as men are forced, through the PBQ, to pay themselves significantly less than their males peers take home.

  I was twenty-five when I read The Beauty Myth, and it pierced my brain like a rocket. Empowerment feminism was at its height, and I justified the hundreds of dollars I spent on shoes as a professional expense necessary for climbing. If I were a mountaineer I’d buy crampons, wouldn’t I? My feminism was rooted in the power of the ambitious self, but Wolf’s doctoral thesis illuminated the oppression of the system, the structural traps that economics and history had laid for women. I wanted to give up the shoes and the lipstick and the expensive bras. I did not. What I could not yet comprehend was how much more I would spend as I grew older on the maintenance of my infrastructure. That I would become, in effect, the custodian of a picturesque but sagging bridge.

  Twenty-seven years ago, Wolf pegged the cosmetics industry’s value at US$20 billion (it is now US$460 billion, though this may not be a direct comparison) and the cosmetic surgery industry at US$330 million (it is now closer to US$20 billion globally, with nearly $14 billion spent in the U.S. alone). As the population ages, those figures will increase. You can have surgery to beautify your toes and your vulva, in order to compete with the foot models and porn stars out there. There is no need to visit Transylvania to obtain a vampire facial, a procedure that uses fresh blood cells to make you look less like a corpse.

  Who am I to talk? My wallet lightens in proportion to vanity’s rise. One week I decide to keep a record of this discretionary spending: I keep a separate pot of money for this, away from the family kitty. This seems retrograde and shameful, as if I am comic-strip Blondie hiding new hatboxes from Dagwood’s judgmental raisin eyes. This is not even a particularly expensive week: