by Leigh Stein
Until we raised our series B, we had only three months of runway. I could work all day and all night, but what mattered more than my grind was whether or not I could sell a room full of male VCs on me, the genius visionary, lady Zuck. Zuckette.
For centuries, women had been told there was something wrong with their bodies, their hair, their skin, their teeth, their minds. They were sold products to “take care” of themselves. At Richual, we were no different, except—and here’s where my genius vision kicked in—Devin and I were women ourselves. We “got” it. Looking good was an ideal left over from the patriarchy. We were about feeling good, and existing as a conduit between the brands that could deliver that feeling and our user base who craved it.
And so many women today felt so bad—this demonstrated the value our social platform provided. I just had to convince investors that this platform had quintupled in value to $25 million since our last round of funding, or else we’d reach the end of our runway and crash.
My shares in the company would be worth nothing. My mom’s retirement plan, which she called the “M.G. plan” for my initials, would be back at zero.
For the record, I never said I wanted the first daughter to get hurt. I only posted a thread about the multifarious and terrible accidents that have happened at garment factories. A revenge fantasy for the next time she went overseas to perform quality control on a peplum blouse.
* * *
...
On the phone, Harold of Harold’s Wildlife Services had sounded reassuringly older, like a sardonic bachelor uncle who can change the oil in your car, but in person, Harold was my age, possibly younger, which embarrassed me. It used to be that when something went wrong, there was an adult you could call, but now I was that adult. So was Harold. When you needed someone to ethically remove a wild animal from your eighteenth-century manor, Harold was your guy, and when you needed someone to recommend the best happy hour drink specials below Fourteenth Street, I was your guy.
I felt like an idiot. At least I’d thought to put on a bra.
“Thanks for coming so quickly.” I shook his hand, which was soft and warm. He was wearing a dark goatee and a yellow beanie cap over messy hair. Harold first put medical blue booties over his black hi-tops and then followed me to the mechanical closet.
“This is where I first saw the bird. And then it crawled through that hole up there near the pipe and now I don’t know.”
“What makes you think it’s a bird?” he asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“What makes you think it’s a bird and not a bat?”
Replaying the image of the frail spindly talons I had seen gripping the hole into which it disappeared made the hairs on my arm stand at attention. “Because I saw the feet,” I said. Feet? Talons? Feet?
“Not really the season for birds,” he said. “More for bats. People call about birds when really it’s bats.”
Harold tried to open the locked door to the next room.
“Oh, that’s locked,” I said.
“You have the key?”
“It’s not my house.”
“Can you ask whose house it is for the key?”
The thought of having to explain to Evan that there was a bat trapped inside his house and I needed the key to a room that was obviously private for a reason seemed somehow more ridiculous than just trying to problem-solve this myself. You’re in the weeds again, Maren! I justified snooping for the key because if I found it somewhere, then it was meant for guests to find, right?
“I guess I was just thinking that if it could climb through that hole, then it could come back out here, too. Excuse me,” I said, and squeezed past him to once again put my ear to the door. There was only silence. “I swear I heard the wings just before you got here.”
“It’s probably scared now. I can wait,” Harold said, sitting with his back against the wall on the floor of the closet. “But if it is a bat, it’s not going to come out here again in the light. Last week I was at a house until two in the morning, waiting to catch one. I’ve known people, they sell their house because the sound of bats in the attic drives them insane. They can’t sleep.”
“How does one . . . catch a bat?”
“Nets. A bat can fit through an opening the size of a golf ball. If you don’t deal with the problem, or if you block off the exits, then what are the bats going to do? They can’t eat and they die inside your house and then you have a bigger problem.”
Then we both heard it, the fluh-fluh-fluh, fainter now than before, but the sound still made my stomach flip-flop in a mix of empathy and fear. Harold stood up to listen at the door. “Huh,” he said. “Does sound like bird wings.”
This was the most exciting thing that had happened to me away from a screen in as long as I could remember.
Harold set up a dark green trap, a little larger than a game-board box, and showed me how it worked: seed at the bottom would lure the hungry bird and the slightest pressure on the metal basket would trigger a mesh net to cover her. It wouldn’t hurt.
He demonstrated by dropping one of his work gloves on the trap and it immediately sprang closed with a loud snap.
“Call me when you have it,” he said, like we were collaborators.
Harold removed his booties and put them in the pocket of his overalls. I followed him outside so I could get a signal to Venmo him whatever was left in my account. It couldn’t have been later than five o’clock, but already the light in the sky was dimming to indigo.
After I saw his truck pull out of the driveway, I opened my first bottle of wine. After all, I deserved it. Drinking was the ritual that transformed working into something to celebrate and waiting for the bird was tonight’s work.
* * *
...
Devin and I were a team. She scouted the influencers and courted them, at expensive lunches with the tiniest portions, over cocktails at Le Bain, at female entrepreneur mixers. To become a Richual influencer, they had to commit to leave their other social platforms behind and encourage their followers to join ours. It was like moving your whole family to a foreign country, but once they built their following back up, we would act like an agency, connecting them with major brands on campaigns that would earn them $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 a post. No one was spending their marketing budget in traditional channels anymore. It all had to funnel through real people—successful, hot, popular, inspiring real people.
After they signed their contracts, Devin turned them over to me. I worked on the “real” part. Our average Jane user had to buy the sponsored content—the protein shakes and the wearable posture trainer and the three-step cleansing routine to stabilize the skin microbiome—without realizing she was being sold anything. She had to trust that these influencers were human, as messy on the inside as their followers, only with a more polished veneer.
In my email to new influencers, I wrote:
Our users join our community in order to learn the sacred practice of self-care. Many of them are here because they have struggled with depression or an eating disorder or experienced a trauma, etc. Beyond offering holistic solutions and wellness products, we also pride ourselves on the high caliber of influencers we recruit, to model resilience at the highest strata of the Richual family. You ARE what has happened to you and we want you to feel comfortable opening up to your new family about that. Please know that your answers to the attached questionnaire will remain confidential and will only be used with your permission to develop the most engaging content for your new Richual profile.
I developed the questionnaire after months of lurking and listening to what our users were already talking about. Have you ever: lost a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a husband, a boyfriend, a friend, other (please describe); known someone who overdosed; experienced sexual harassment in the workplace; been adopted; been biracial; been molested; been a cutter; been in an abusive relation
ship (check as many as apply: emotionally, physically, verbally, sexually); been raped; had a chronic illness; been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, other (please describe); struggled with addiction to alcohol, pain meds, heroin, meth, cocaine, marijuana, food, shopping, sex; had anorexia, bulimia, or an eating disorder not otherwise specified; had an abortion; had cancer; been bullied; been accused of narcissism; felt like someone was underestimating you; thought about taking your own life?
Incest was out. No one wanted to hear about incest. “Molest” sounded dated—I encouraged them to use “sexual abuse” instead because it was more inclusive. Bipolar disorder was tricky because there was so much stigma around it, so I preferred to let the women who looked the least bloated from lithium post about how we need to break the silence around the stigma. Likewise, it was most impactful to have someone who was a size 2 talk about how she had recovered from her eating disorder and even better if that eating disorder was anorexia because no one wanted to read posts about vomiting or laxatives (perfectionism was more compelling). We had to be careful that ED posts didn’t come across like how-tos.
Posting about abuse and assault was encouraged, but influencers were not allowed to name their abuser, not even a first name, not even a pseudonym. We didn’t have the infrastructure to handle a defamation lawsuit.
Dead grandparents were boring, but I allowed one post a year, especially if the user had a glamour shot of granny in her twenties she could post in remembrance. It was awesome if one of your parents died after you became a Richual member, because the first post announcing the death always got the most hearts. But for everything else, it was better to look back on something that had happened in the past, a crucible you’d emerged from stronger than ever.
Bonus points if you could reveal something from your past and at the same time raise awareness about trans issues or police brutality against POC or the anniversary of 9/11.
“I want to try!” Devin said. Once I developed the methodology, she contacted @GypseaLee, whose following had plateaued at thirty-six thousand. Her butt looked great in exercise tights, but so what? The videos of deadlifts and donkey kicks had grown stale. Unless users knew the woman behind the butt, they weren’t going to believe her when she claimed the weekly delivery service of frozen organic smoothie ingredients fundamentally changed the relationship she had with her body.
I showed Devin her questionnaire and sat in the papasan chair in her office while they Skyped. “If you would feel comfortable sharing that,” Devin said. “I know, but . . . that fear you’re experiencing right now is exactly the vulnerability people want. We want to know we’re not alone . . . You should totally post that with one of the pics you took in the Bahamas . . . I don’t think you even need to use the word rape . . . ‘Assault’? We are pushing back against the assumption that if someone’s life looks perfect on the internet, then it is perfect, right? Say ‘I’ve never told anyone this before.’ That’s actually true, right?”
Afterward, Devin gave me a high five. “And I have a surprise for you,” she said.
She rummaged through a big cardboard box and pulled out a sample of one of the beach towels we were going to add to our merch shop. In mint green against white, it said, “Every Body Is a Beach Body.”
“So 2016, right?” She wrinkled her nose and threw it on the floor. The next towel she pulled out was bubble gum pink with a green fern leaf pattern, soft and thick and silky to touch. It took me a minute to see that the leaves spelled “Believe Victims.”
“I thought you would love it,” Devin said. “Don’t you love it? It’s empowering, right?”
“We’re going to sell this?”
“We can sell it, but we can also send the towels to new influencers after they complete their questionnaires, as, like, a thank-you.”
“But is it something you’d want to relax on? By the pool?”
“It’s a conversation starter! ‘What does your towel say?’ ‘Oh, my towel says “Believe Victims.” What does yours say?’”
The “Every Body Is a Beach Body” towels were my idea, but Devin was right—that message was stale. As a millennial feminist, I was supposed to be liberated already, fine to frolic the beach in my bikini, no problemo, the cellulite on my ass cheeks a proud mark of my body acceptance and rejection of society’s punishing patriarchal beauty standards.
“Victimhood is heavy,” Devin said, throwing the towel over her shoulders like a chic cape, “but this keeps it fresh.”
When we launched Richual, I truly believed we were creating something valuable to help women care for themselves.
Here, we said, buy this beach towel, try this ten-step beauty routine, rub this on your chakras, brush your skin, tone your vagina, lubricate your third eye, pumice your spiritual calluses, alchemize your intuition, spend all your time and money taking care of yourself because there’s no one else you can trust who will.
* * *
...
Two drinks were never enough. Two was only the beginning. Sometimes two meant happy hour at the corner bar with a woman who wanted to pick my brain about how to leverage her viral tweets about gender neutral bathrooms into a personal brand as a thought leader on the paid speaking circuit and I had to find a tactful way to tell her that as a cisgender woman she should really be quiet.
Or a contact from my nonprofit days wanted to partner on a fundraising campaign where we’d give them free sponsored posts to raise money for girls’ soccer academies in Central America and they’d give us the social proof that Richual was Making a Difference.
Sometimes the women who asked me to drinks didn’t even have their own Richual accounts and I spent happy hour intoxicated on my own smug counterintelligence, knowing I wouldn’t help them with whatever they were asking for if they hadn’t even put in the effort to join the community.
I knew there were people out there saying, Talk to Maren. Talk to Maren. Part of me wished they would stop. And another part of me worried about what I would become if they did—someone with nothing of value to offer.
After a couple of glasses of watery pinot grigio, I had the clarity and focus to head back to the office and start on whatever byzantine email I had been procrastinating on all day. The alcohol erased any doubts I’d had on how to begin and I breezed through my novel-length directives, with the perfect blend of bolded action items and animated gifs to motivate the team. I never spelled anybody’s name wrong. I never replied all by accident. I always CC’d Devin so when she got out of her class, she’d see how I kept the torch burning.
Cheers,
Maren
On my commute home, I moderated little flares of outrage from the social justice warriors who couldn’t pass up an opportunity to let us know a photo collage of vegan lunches called “Nine Crazy Ways to Convert a Carnivore” used ableist language (crazy), or to report a white influencer for racism because despite repeated warnings from them, she continued to use AAVE in her posts from the gym (she thicc, that’s ratchet, SLAY). I waded into a comment thread about white feminism in which a Greek woman was refusing to identify herself as white and a Jewish woman was joining her, while a mob of others (mostly white) were insisting, “You two are the problem.”
When one of our influencers messaged me because she was at the bottom of one of these pile-ons, I told her she had two choices: She could capitulate, admit she was wrong, apologize, promise to never again post selfies she took with the orphans she cared for in Mombasa because now she understood the meaning of white saviorism. Or she and I could go back to her questionnaire, find something from her past that showed that she, too, had suffered, and with a single post we could turn the tides of sympathy in her direction.
I couldn’t avoid responsibility when shit went down in the community I created, and drinking was the indulgence I permitted myself. While John narrated, in a voice of numb disbelief, stories of Russian in
fluence and collusion and diplomatic faux pas and decimation of environmental protections, I cocooned myself in my own drama—the Richual arena where self-awareness and a scorekeeping of identities took precedence over engaging with any other world.
I never ate when I was drinking. That would be self-sabotage because food created a roadblock between where I started and where I intended to go.
Drink three was when I really started to enjoy myself. The window between drinks three and four was like a Magritte painting—pale blue sky, a beautiful piece of fruit, the touch of a soft piece of fabric.
After four, I started dropping things. I told anyone who would listen what I really thought about the poor choices other women had made with their careers, their romantic relationships, their gauche social media posts of bleeding wounds that no one, I mean no one, wanted to see. At any moment, I might start crying. One night, working late, trying to undo a paper jam, I broke the plastic tray off the office printer, so the pages flew everywhere, uncollated and uncontained.
“Planned obsolescence piece of shit!” I yelled, even though there was no one there to hear me. I thought that was pretty clever, so I got a Post-it note and wrote:
This is a planned obsolescence piece of shit.
Khadijah, please order new one from Staples!
I double-checked the spelling of obsolescence on my iPhone so I wouldn’t embarrass myself.
I wasn’t an alcoholic. Alcoholics fucked up their lives, their jobs, their relationships. I performed drinking like any other activity I was a professional at. Sometimes you needed to know when to walk away, but most times you needed to know when to push through to get to the other side.