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I’ve had grey hair for at least the past six or seven years now. It shows up in the part on top of my head and in the front, around my temples. I’ve been lucky enough that, up to now, it’s pretty much blended in. My hair is kind of a light brown, but there have always been just enough blond highlights that the grays can kind of hide in there and not be too obvious, for the most part.

It’s not like I grew up with my hair being perfect or anything — Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, no. In fact, I was kind of prescient about how much it (and by extension, femininity as a whole) was going to be a trial for me in that I completely refused to deal with it for the first twelve years of my life, allowing my mother to do what she wanted with it when I was little, and then wearing it in pigtails or a ponytail any time I was in public from pretty much second to sixth grade. Sure enough, once I started to pay attention to my hair, I struggled with it endlessly. Like most women I know, I found it to be yet another aspect of my appearance — along with my weight, my height, my nose, the circles under my eyes, my arms, my butt, my stomach, my front teeth…you get the point — that I forever was trying to wrestle into the perfect cultural norm, no matter how that cultural norm changed or conflicted with what it naturally wanted to be. In high school in the late 80s, hair had to be straight or precisely feathered, so my weapons of choice were a blow dryer and one of those round brushes, and, at one point, a curling iron, though I can’t really remember what I did with that other than burn myself. By sophomore year of college, it was supposed to be curly, so I got a perm that I kept through I think senior year, when I finally, at some point, gave in to the fact that my hair didn’t really get curly, even with a perm, it just got wavier. It was the first time it occurred to me that my life would be easier if I tried to work with it rather than against it, so I got a diffuser and tried to just make the waves do something I liked. This principle of just working with what I had (although not the diffuser, which I ditched soon after) became my MO for most of my 20s and 30s. It justified doing very little when I was going to work on set at 6 am, when I both didn’t want to attract attention to the fact that I was female and didn’t want to get up any earlier, and made it possible to go for a certain kind of wavy bigness when I went out that I deemed its most positive result, by using mousse, gel, spray, scrunching, finger-wrapping, blowdrying upside down, and whatever other techniques I saw or heard about other people using (I didn’t actually spend money on fashion magazines because fuck that scam, but I still queried my friends and hairdressers). At the same time, I was so obsessed with the obsession hair can be for women (and for some men) that I made my first documentary about it, exploring the connection it forms for many of us between appearance and identity.

Which of course led to me to deconstruct how my hair related to my identity even more, and some time in my late 30s, I entered my most recent stage of hair “care”: the stage of not caring. I stopped blowdrying my hair altogether, except in the winter, if I had to prevent it from freezing, then I basically stopped using product when I went traveling for weeks on end in Latin America and having it meant just having one more thing to carry. I did still want to attract people, because I was still single, so I would make an effort to do something with it if I was going out or had a date, but once I met my husband at age 40, that was pretty much the end of even that. In the past year or two, my intricate, personal hair ritual has become washing it every other day (this was a concession to the drying effect of the grays, but it also fit in nicely with my growing feelings of apathy), brushing it upside down (somehow that just stuck, even though I don’t think it does anything if you don’t use product) and then going right-side-up and making sure there’s something of a part. That’s it, and it takes all of maybe eight minutes, including the washing part — without that, it takes two. And that has seemed about right for a while now. On set, my job is really just to blend in, so I basically have to look just well-kept enough that nobody will think there’s something something seriously wrong with me, at least not in any way that would be distracting to the actors. So, yeah, that’s what I ask of my hair: just don’t make me look crazy. I do still have several bottles and tubes of product that I’ve acquired over the years, so when I’ve got to go to a wedding or a bar mitzvah or something, I might roll the dice and use one of those, even if it’s expired. But in general I’ve felt like, given all of the other things going on in my life, this was expending about as much energy toward my hair as it deserved, and so I had to be okay with the results. Even when I saw pictures of myself later on and wasn’t all that thrilled, that’s hardly a new experience for me, considering how, as you might have guessed, I have never developed an attractive look to present in photographs. Want examples? Of course you do. Here, here, here (based on how often I have my eyes closed and my mouth open in photos, I must both blink and talk more than other people), here (granted, it doesn’t help when someone is squishing your face — I doubt a Kardashian would ever allow that), and here (yes, I’ve just reached the top of Machu Picchu, and still I don’t look happy).

A couple of months ago, though, something felt like it changed — or maybe it was a combination of things. For one, I got a less good haircut than usual. Again, I have nobody to blame for this but myself, since I get my $35 haircuts from a local hairdresser that seems to be popular more as a barbershop-like neighborhood hangout than as a consistent, up-to-trend stylist, and I often don’t pay attention to what’s being done. This last time I was exhausted from work and so I was literally asleep at the wheel — I kind of knew she was parting it too close to the middle, but eh. For another, I bought a different shampoo than the one I’ve been using for maybe ten years plus, since they were out of it at the Park Slope Food Coop — again, my fault for relying upon the Park Slope Food Coop to be consistent with their stocking, and for choosing instead to try a “thickening shampoo” even though my hair isn’t thinning, because eh.

But honestly, I think the real culprit is just the gray. It’s reached a critical mass that can’t really be ignored any more — not so much the color, as what it’s doing to the texture. It’s wiry. It doesn’t behave. It looks messy and dirty, and in a way that no hipster could pretend was intentional. It looks bad.

When I realized this, I took an informal poll of my friends about their hair. Which means, I was at a wedding with my high school friends, and then a get-together with my college friends, and then looking at photos sent by my other college friends. And the upshot was, basically, everybody dyes. Out of all of my female friends who are at the age when I know that they must have gray hair by now, I seem to have only two who actually do.

That’s pretty crazy. I guess I was kind of hoping that by the time I got to be this age, we’d have all of this shit worked out already. I just thought we were going to take that final step forward and be the generation of feminists who were allowed to get old, who could truly accept ourselves for who we are rather than how society expects us to be – forever young and thin – and be valued for the wisdom, experience and skill that make us distinguished, the way we think of older men, rather than extinguished. When I looked at my friends on an individual basis and noticed they were dying their hair, I told myself, Well, she’s always been very pretty and it’s hard to let go of that, or, She works in an industry that’s very competitive, or, She’s someone who is very in control and it’s just another a way of expressing that, or, Well, she lives in Texas. But as I started to get more uncomfortable with the changes to my own appearance as I got older, I started to realize, No, this getting old shit is just hard, and it doesn’t really get easier, no matter how enlightened you may tell yourself you are. It’s kind of just one new hurdle after another, as one more aspect of your appearance starts to go. Now that it’s my hair that isn’t looking good to me, the idea of dying doesn’t seem so unthinkable. So maybe it wasn’t ever that I was more feminist, or less vain, or less…Texan than they were. Maybe I was just lucky.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, you’re not supposed to surrender your principles when they become inconvenient for you. In this political moment, that seems more important than ever. On the other hand, couldn’t I just fucking go easy on myself for once? Rather than trying to pretend that I don’t care about getting old, because I don’t want to care, shouldn’t I be entitled to whatever is going to make that process slightly less sucky? It’s hard enough having more people noticeably ignore you, knowing that means not only that the world doesn’t any longer think of you as attractive, but also doesn’t think of you period – meaning you’re far more likely to fail, not just because you’re old and you have less time, but because people will give you far fewer opportunities than you had when you were younger. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to do anything that continues to give me more of a fighting chance? But then my other mind comes back with, But where does that end? Am I going to decide that I next need Botox to make myself happy, or a full-on facelift, if that’s what my friends are doing? I know some people probably don’t see this as a continuum, but I can’t help it. Once you surrender to what society thinks you should be, rather than what you believe about yourself or aspire to be, where does it end? Am I going to be the friend who makes it okay for someone else to get a tummy tuck, because they tell themselves, “Well, Betsy did it, and she’s a feminist, so…”

These are hard questions to answer, and so I’ve chosen…spray-in conditioner. It’s helping to make my hair be less dry and unruly — in other words, it continues to make the gray continue to blend in. Is that on the continuum? I suppose that it is. If I really wanted to make the statement that women should be allowed to go gray, I’d just do nothing and let it be that way in all of its unruly glory. But I guess the personal compromise I’ve learned to make between the social norms of beauty, and feminism, and my identity therein, is to work with what I have — not trying to “fix” myself, but not ignoring wholesale what the world thinks either. Because you can’t. It’s in your head, it just is.

So I’m not here to judge how you do it — every woman has to figure out how to walk that line for herself. But I can also still dream of the day we won’t have to any more, can’t I?

I was on the Q train recently, coming home from Manhattan. It was approaching rush hour, and the train was full, but not as packed as it often gets, when you find yourself sardined against your neighbor’s armpit, using them to hold you up because your hand won’t reach a rail. You know what I’m talking about, straphangers.

For the record: I hate the term “straphangers.” There haven’t been actual straps in the subway since I moved to New York in 1990 (and according to this Quora answer, which I consider accurate since it was written by a fellow with a masters in urban and regional planning from Columbia, they were replaced in the the mid-70s). Plus, it just sounds kind of nasty, like something you’d never want to be because eew, straphangers…which I have to say feels true a lot of the time. New Yorkers all have this feeling that the subways have been getting worse in recent years — slower, less reliable — and the evidence of how often trains break down or have delays backs that up, apparently. As the system deteriorates, the city just doesn’t have enough money to maintain it. But all in all, it’s our sometimes crappy system, and it’s still mostly functional 24 hours a day seven days a week, and I’m happy that I live in a city where public transportation is a major part of our lifestyle – even if it (the subway system – but okay, also the lifestyle) is far from perfect.

Anyway, on this particular day, I’d just gotten on the train, I was tired and looking for a seat, when a woman standing near me said, “Did you see what happened with that bag?”

I looked at where she was pointing, toward a paper Trader Joe’s bag that was sitting on the floor a few feet away.

“No,” I replied.

“Some guy just left it there and ran off the train.”

“It’s just garbage,” offered a man standing next to the bag.

I walked over to look in the bag. Indeed, there just appeared to be an open box of crackers and some other half-used food product and its accompanying trash. But it was enough stuff that I couldn’t see all the way to the bottom of the bag. There could have been something hidden underneath all that.

“He kind of looked around and then ran off the train,” said the woman. “It was weird.”

“Well, we should tell someone,” I said.

You get that refrain drummed into you here, and maybe these days in any big city: see something, say something. Over the loudspeaker in every subway station and train car, you’ll be told, “If you see a suspicious package on the platform or train…” and then the rest is usually so garbled as to be unhear-able, or I’ve already tuned it out. But the gist is, you report it, and this was clearly one of those situations.

I realized we were in the front car of the train, so I said to the woman, “I think the conductor is right here,” and started walking it that direction. The woman started walking with me, and as we pushed our way through people, she was walking pretty fast, and ended up in front of me. I wondered, Is she just trying to get as far away from the bag as possible? I suppose the fact that that thought had occurred to me might’ve made it seem like maybe I was doing the same. But I’d announced my intention was to go tell someone, and it wasn’t like we would be able to escape whatever was going to happen as long as we were on the same train car — I’d already thought that one through too. It seemed far more likely that some mildly disturbed or forgetful or inconsiderate person had left a paper Trader Joe’s bag of junk on the train than that they’d put a bomb in one, but the headlines and action movie explosions flashed through my head nonetheless, as these things do. We see the world in narrative, and that’s certainly the narrative that the person writing this script would have written, at least if they wanted it to have any hope of getting made.

We got to the front of the train around when it arrived at the next stop. I could kind of see the conductor through the window in his little capsule, but it looked like that little window didn’t open. The easiest way to talk to the him seemed to be to just get off the train. So I got off. The woman followed.

“Somebody left a paper Trader Joe’s bag on that car,” I said, pointing. “It just looked like there was food and junk in it, but she thought he was acting weird when he got off…” I indicated the woman who’d accompanied me. She nodded.

“Uh huh, okay,” said the conductor. He said something to a guy who was with him, and that guy headed back toward the train car. “I’ll have him go check it out. He’s a trainee, so I can’t leave him alone in here. But thank you, thank you for letting me know.”

And then he closed the window, and the doors, and pulled the train out of the station, leaving us behind. Which wasn’t what I’d expected him to do. I’d expected him to wait, have the other guy check it out, and then, once he’d made sure everything was okay, then go to the next station. That seemed like the protocol to me, if you really thought there might be something in that bag. But on the other hand, the conductor had probably seen this a million times: a couple of paranoid New Yorkers who freaked out over something entirely inconsequential – and then he got flack for holding up train service. And I’d been that other passenger way more often, the incredibly annoyed one having to wait while my train sat on the tracks, due to “an investigation.” Still, again, my brain went to the visual image of the train blowing up in the tunnel — both from inside and outside the train, since my imagination is comprehensive like that, and which angle you pick depends on whose story you’re telling at that point. And I also pictured everything being fine…with me now having to wait for another train.

“Thanks for reporting it,” said the other woman, who seemed pleased with how everything had gone down. “It really did seem weird.”

“Sure,” I said, “I’m glad we did.”

Only I wasn’t entirely glad, because I suddenly felt bad that I hadn’t gotten back on the train. I could have. There was a moment there before the doors closed when I had been able to make that choice, but I didn’t. And while I hadn’t gotten off because I was trying to save my own skin, once I was off, and had a split second to decide whether or not to get back on, the thought did pass through my mind that it was better not to be on that train. It’s not like there was anything else I could have done at that point to help if there was a bomb in that bag. The conductor made a choice, and I made a choice. And maybe his choice could have turned out to be stupid if things had gone differently, and my choice would have turned out to be smart. But instead, it just felt small and cowardly. It kind of still does.

As I’ve written about before, sometimes it’s hard to know the right thing to do in this city. After 9-11, in particular, a lot of us had hard time trying to figure out how we were supposed to go on with our daily lives. Many people I knew talked seriously about moving. In some ways, at the time, it seemed like a sensible thing to do. I just decided that I wasn’t going to live like that: in fear. And while that day in some ways seems like it’s in the distant past, now, more than ever, I think we’re living in an era where way too many people are choosing to make their day-to-day decisions out of fear — of terrorism and violence, of losing what little they have, or just of a changing world that they don’t completely understand and in which they don’t know where exactly they belong.

I don’t ever want to be one of them. I hope I’m not. Because as stupid as it is to obsess about whether you did the right thing when you found an abandoned bag on the Q train…it kind of matters. Now more than ever, it’s important to be brave. We might not all be Emma Gonzales, or Danica Roem (although I hope more and more of us continue to stand up and do what they’re doing), but we all have to decide the type of world we want to live in every day. 

I don’t get to the movies as often as I’d like these days, but I do watch a lot of TV. There’s a lot of good TV and a lot of great TV, and even in front of the mediocre stuff, I tend to be either working out or eating or just slumped in a puddle after a long day on set. So I spend a lot of time thinking about it, and its images and storylines often dominate my thoughts way more than they probably should.

Maybe that’s why, a couple of weeks ago, when I was watching The Crown, at the height of a lot of #metoo, somehow the two got stuck together in my mind. It was in a scene when Queen Elizabeth is getting ready for a royal event and her husband, Prince Philip, comes over and kisses her on the back of the neck, and she bats him away. I was struck by this: how this very powerful woman had to act like she didn’t want her husband to touch her, how he’s acting (knowingly) as a bad boy, doing something “naughty,” and it’s her job to stop him. And I thought, Man, we are so fucked.

Now, you can certainly point out that English royalty have a much more convoluted sense of propriety and duty than anyone else, and indeed, The Crown is all about that — but you could find a scene like this in virtually any show on TV. The idea that women don’t want sex or at least have to pretend like it in public while men can behave any way they want has dominated Western culture, if not all culture, for so long that it’s baked into everything. The whole concept of flirting as this dance where it’s the woman’s job to let the man know she likes/wants them, but in an indirect way in which she needs to do it with glances and gestures, because she can’t just come out and be up front about it, comes from decades upon centuries of that way of thinking. Men as the bad boys and women as the good girls is a social order that still — still — basically underpins societies around the globe. The wonderful “tradition” of French seduction that Catherine Deneuve and her ilk so feel they must protect: why does this exist? Why does the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” seem rapey but in fact probably isn’t? Why do we still have the fucking “third date rule”? Why are men still expected to initiate the first date/first kiss/first sex? Why does anyone still have the conversation, when talking about rape, about what the victim was wearing? Because we all are told on some deep and fundamental level that women aren’t supposed to want sex, and when they do, they’re sluts/whores/unnatural/wrong. Still.

And then, of course, with playing hard-to-get-good-girl the norm, everyone had to take advantage of the power of the slut, and sex became the greatest selling tool of all. From every 80s movie to nearly every beer and GoDaddy commercial you’re going to see tonight when you watch the Super Bowl to Entourage and its successor Ballers, women as sex objects have also been the flip side social norm forever. And even though none of it’s made for us as women, we’ve completely internalized it too. If we’re not the target audience for the product (and if it’s being showcased during the Super Bowl, chances are we are not), we are being sold the concept of sexy women who “own it” to sell other products, from fashion to lingerie to makeup to Lemonade and M.I.L.F.$, and women and girls are buying. And the complicated part is that of course we should own our sexuality. The problem is that we let everyone else tell us how.

As women, we are groomed to be great listeners, great followers of rules, great adaptors. The self-help books used to be all about getting a man, from Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus to The Rules (both, in typical fashion, written by men). Now, they’re telling us how to improve our lives by tidying up better (since the home and cleaning it are a woman’s domain, still), or how to Lean In to succeed in the business world. But they’re still all about reaction — about making the best of our lot, coping with men, or being more like them, about adapting better to the system that they built and run. Everyone else but especially men tell us how to be, and we be. Beyoncé may be saying that girls run the world, but if every woman in the halftime show is gyrating in a skimpy outfit while she’s saying it, is that empowerment? I love the words of the message, but when you look at how it’s delivered, it looks to me like it’s still kind of all about men – because all that cleavage certainly isn’t for my benefit. We are still letting them tell us how to be what they desire as if that were the most important thing in our lives, and we are still — still — fucking listening.

All of this was already brewing in my mind when the Aziz Ansari incident came along. You can see how caught up in all of these cultural messages the poor millennial is who wrote about her terrible night with him. The girl doesn’t want sex, that seems pretty clear, but she is also giving him mixed signals — because that’s just how women are supposed to act. This woman is supposed to attract the guy by being sexy, forward and friendly (like she was when she met Ansari and gave him her number), then find a way to let him know what she actually wants, or doesn’t, in a way that won’t hurt his ego or his feelings. And I have to also pity Ansari, who seems just as caught up in these same mixed messages. It certainly sounds like he thinks his job, as the guy, is to coax and seduce her — because that’s what he’s been told, by film, TV, and clearly, porn. If he sees her being reluctant, playing hard to get, he’s supposed to bring the sexy to help her get past it, not considering that maybe she really doesn’t want it — because she’s supposed to want what she’s told to want…which is what he wants. Still don’t get his point of view? Just watch the last season of Master of None. The first ¾ of Season 2 are fantastic and creative and full of original ideas and execution. The last two episodes, however, devolve into a traditional romcom written by a dude. They focus on how Dev, Ansari’s character, is infatuated with, pursues, and eventual attains a Hollywood-conventionally perfect woman — beautiful (in a Hollywood conventional way, even though Ansari is not), sexily foreign, cute/fun-loving and new to New York (meaning he gets to show her everything in his world and she loves it), who has the obstacle of being engaged to someone else. And she’s absolutely, maddeningly a mixed message machine who doesn’t know what she wants. It’s his job to both figure that out and coax her into it. Watching these episodes drove me nuts even when they first came out, which was way before #metoo. The woman so clearly came out of the conventional romantic comedy playbook, a perfect object of desire because she fits right into the guy’s fantasy, with no real personality of her own to get in the way. The list of what Dev likes about her sums it up completely: the things that are actually about her are her beauty, her “magical”ness, and that she makes pasta. The rest are about him.

And it seems like so many of us are like this: we can be brilliant, unconventional thinkers, coming up with the most creative and unusual ideas, but when it comes to intimate relationships, particularly (but not always) with the opposite sex, we somehow fall back to our basest tropes and assumptions and stereotypes, our most superficial and stupid and unoriginal lowest-common-denominator ideas – and that’s what we go with. 

It’s going to be a long time until we all sort this one out. But one of the main subjects we’re going to have to talk about to do that are the messages that the media tells women and men about what they are each supposed to want, or not want. You can say that a lot has changed in this country in the past 50-60 years, but it’s surprising how much the underlying things the culture teaches us about how to be male and female haven’t. When you watch the Super Bowl tonight, in between watching the game (if you even are), pay attention to the parade of commercials directed at male sportsfan America, the performances of the cheerleaders, Justin Timberlake’s halftime show, and take some time to reflect upon what the media tells us about men and women every day. Until we give the conventions we live by a long hard look, and until more women get to positions where we can break them — and we’re willing to take the creative chances necessary to do so — we’re all just going to keep repeating our same bad choices out of the same stupid cultural playbook. 

Now that the season of giving and receiving is upon us, I’m betting that a lot of us are going to be doing one or the other with electronics, and that a lot of those electronics are going to be “smart.” I’m not sure how many of us have thought about how bizarre it is to use that word in reference to a phone, much less a fridge, or considered these devices at all beyond the joy of owning them or fear of having them hacked (and probably not doing as much to prevent that as we should, because who has time to worry about someone hacking your fridge?).

Living with a few new smart devices that Damon and I acquired in the past year, however, has brought up some interesting questions for me. The main one was the Amazon Echo Dot we got in the fall of 2016. In case you don’t know, the Echo, or this version of it, is a little round disc, about an inch high and three in diameter, that is constantly listening to you in order to do your bidding and provide Amazon with endless future blackmail material (hahahahahaha but that’s actually a genuine possibility because who reads the entire user agreement?). The Echo is like Siri, except that it’s meant specifically to be a tool for the home. Not only can it go order kitchen utensils or pillow covers for you at Amazon with a simple command (which I think is something Amazon wants way more than we do), but you can hook it up to various home appliances that it can operate for you as well. We have two smart lightbulbs in the kitchen and one smart plug in the living room that is also connected to a lamp, and the Echo can turn them on and off for us if we ask. But when we ask, we call it “Alexa,” which is its other name. We had to choose one of those names when we set it up, and I guess we thought that it would make us feel more stupid to hear ourselves talking to an entity with a name out of a dystopian YA novel. So now, when we want the lights in the kitchen turned on, we say, “Alexa, kitchen on,” and when we want the living room light on, the one that we use primarily for eating dinner, we say, “Alexa, dinner light on.” When Damon wants to play music, he’ll sometimes have her play directly from Pandora, which she can do because Pandora and Amazon don’t hate each other, by saying something like, “Alexa, play my lounge channel” (perfect for Sunday afternoons), but if he wants something from Apple Music, he has to play it off of his iPhone, and he’ll instead say, “Alexa, connect to my phone” (just to make it clear that we don’t need to call our devices human names. My iDevices have successively been named “Betsy’s [ordinal number] iPhone” or “Betsy’s [ordinal number] iPad,” the uncreative default names that Apple gives them).

Alexa makes a lot of mistakes, as one might expect with a piece of new technology. She often doesn’t understand what you’re saying correctly, because speech recognition just isn’t that good yet with any of our smart devices, as I’m sure you’re aware if you have an iPhone and have tried using it to speech-to-text messages to your friends like “See you leper!” Considering that understanding human speech is probably 75% of their jobs, you’d think at this point Siri and Alexa would be better at it than they are. It’s not as bad as when my dad first tried to show me how great it was on his first phone fifteen years ago, when a typical interaction I’d witness might be,

“Call Betsy.”

“Calling Henry…”

“No! Call Betsy.”

“Calling Dentist…”

(My father has always been an early adopter, it’s just that sometimes he adopts the wrong things too early, like he did with the Betamax.) But still, today, it’s surprisingly not good. For a while, when we said, “Alexa, dinner light on,” more than half the time she would say, “I don’t know that device,” or, “I can’t find the device ‘din light,’” or, “I’m not sure what device you are referring to,” despite that she was only hooked up to three lights, and the other two are called “sink” and “entry,” or, jointly, “kitchen.” We found that, “Alexa, dinner on,” seemed to work better for a while, until it didn’t, probably due to a software update, at which point “dinner light” seemed to become more understandable to her. Luckily we, as humans, can adjust to her learning curve. Another funny thing that Alexa does is respond unexpectedly when you haven’t been talking to her. This can happen when you’re talking about her with someone else, as you might expect, which is why we’ve taken to calling her “Dingus” when we want to say something about her and we actually remember that she’s listening (an idea for which Damon gives credit John Gruber, and which I know you might think sounds kind of mean, but for the record, we aren’t using it in the Urban Dictionary sense, we are using it more in the Dictionary.com sense, or the Hudsucker Proxy sense — and if you haven’t seen that film, you MUST now watch this 8 min clip to understand why the Coen Brothers are geniuses. You’re welcome). Sometimes, though, she’ll also just start talking when we’re watching TV, because she’s heard something on the TV that sounds like “Alexa,” although we never seem to be able to figure out what that thing was, because inevitably it didn’t sound like “Alexa” to us. The times we’ve tried to go back and play the piece of offending TV again, she doesn’t react the second time, which makes it all the more baffling.

Now, you’ll notice that I have lapsed into calling Alexa “she” rather than “it.” This feels only natural, since she responds to “Alexa” and has a female voice. When you ask her to turn something on or off, after she does it, she responds, cheerfully — even more cheerfully since that system update — “Okay.” Or when she can’t do what you’re asking, she’ll reply with one of the many responses above, or “The device is not responding,” which could indicate an internet problem, or a software problem, or, well, who knows what. So you kind of get used to thinking of “her” as “she.” You talk to “her,” “she” answers.

But that brings up all sorts of weird shit. For one thing, we are just basically giving Alexa orders all the time. It’s always, “Alexa, do this,” “Alexa, do that.” You aren’t even expected to use the niceties that you would use with a person, like “Alexa, would you mind,” or “Excuse me, Alexa,” or “Sorry to bother you, Alexa, but could you…” In fact, you can’t use them, because it’ll make it that much harder for her to understand, and as I’ve described, it’s already hard. She’s been programmed to respond to commands, so that’s what we give her. It’s not even like what you’d say to Siri, who likes to be hailed with “Hey, Siri,” or the Google Assistant Who Has No Name, whose attention you get with, “Okay Google.” I mean, neither one of those is particularly polite, and “Okay Google” doesn’t really even make much sense as a way to begin a conversation, but neither one sounds as much like you’re Darth Vader talking to a subordinate who you might execute at some point in the not-so-distant future. I sometimes wonder what my neighbors think of me if they hear me hollering “Alexa, kitchen off!” for the second time, louder and more fully enunciated than the first time, because she didn’t get it right the first time and turned both of the kitchen lights on instead of turning off the one I was using. It must sound like I’m yelling at some personal assistant or maid who I treat like they’re both stupid and hard of hearing, or, worse, that I’m one of those English speakers who are unused to dealing with non-English speakers, and thinks speaking louder and more slowly is somehow going to magically translate the words into the their language. Plus, as several others have written about, it’s bad enough with adults, but what about kids to whom we’re still trying to teach the importance of speaking to others in a polite and respectful way? Then there’s when Damon gets frustrated with Alexa getting something wrong repeatedly and says “Alexa, stop!”, or, “Alexa, shut the fuck up.” It’s not that I don’t regularly growl, “Fuck you!” or “Stop it!” or “No no no no!” to my computer or other inanimate objects when something goes wrong with them (often something which is at root my fault for how I miscommunicated with the computer, not the computer’s fault for making a mistake), and we both know that Alexa is a computer, an object, not a person. She’s not sentient, she can’t feel bad in any way when she’s derided. But there’s something about an epithet being directed at a computer with a female name and a female voice that makes me uncomfortable. It reminds me of when I worked for a day on a documentary about women’s boxing, where we filmed the first professional women’s bout. As much as I wanted the equality the moment represented, I had a hard time watching women get hit — because I associate it with domestic violence and other sorts of violence against women, rather than sport. In the same way, while I don’t see anything wrong with getting pointlessly angry at our technology as long as it has no feelings, there is such a terrible history of men (and to some extent women, although that largely has negative connotations for different reasons — catfights, backbiting, competitiveness, self-hatred) taking out their anger verbally on women that makes it feel justifiably cringe-worthy. (Why these devices come with a female-voiced default is a whole other topic for discussion. And while I’ve turned my Siri into an Australian man, Alexa’s voice is not alterable).

To compound all of this, we recently acquired Deebot. Deebot is a robot vacuum cleaner — essentially a cheap Roomba (and if you’ve never heard of a Roomba, you must now watch this). The idea is that Deebot can do your vacuuming for you, or at least keep your house cleaner between vacuums. Deebot is much less smart than Alexa. It does have a memory that you can program to vacuum at different times automatically, and it does have sensors that tell it when it needs to change direction, which are sometimes only activated when it runs into stuff (so not so smart sensors). It will even communicate with you, deploying a beeping sound when it gets stuck and needs your help. But that’s it, it’s intended to be a simple device with just one purpose: vacuuming. And yet, it’s hard not to anthropomorphize even this most basic technology. Watching it make its way around your apartment, with its little wing-like brushes, pulling out cables from underneath pieces of furniture and leaving them strewn about the floor, it really seems like a critter. Plus, our Deebot came somehow pre-programmed to vacuum in the middle of the night, leading to a couple of surprise, wee-hour encounters — in the first week, I once found it sitting outside the bathroom when I got up to pee, and then several other nights, it’s woken us up with its plaintive beeping (apparently, we are also not so smart, since we still can’t seem to figure out how to get it to stop doing that). It makes you feel like you’re dealing with a bad kitty or some other troublesome pet with a mind that you can’t quite fathom and its own objectives, which may lie counter to your own (such as sleep, or not killing yourself on the way to the bathroom), despite that you know, logically, that it can’t possibly have either. And it doesn’t hurt that seeing a worn out Deebot whose battery has died sitting on the carpet with its little brushes splayed out reminds me of Lil Bub.

I know this all seems relatively small potatoes given what’s going on in the world right now, and it is. But now, while the potatoes are still small, is the time to start thinking about this stuff and figuring out how we deal with the human-seeming inhuman and the animate inanimate, because we all know that this is the way things are going. The other day I was reading a book, an actual book, and I caught myself trying to pinch to zoom on the photo on the page (yes, electronic devices allow you to remain in denial about the fact that you need reading glasses in a way that paper books don’t). The fact that I made that gesture on a piece of paper tells you what my norm now is, and I’m 48. Older generations may not be able to wrap their heads around the increasingly rapid pace of innovation that we are witnessing, and Generation Y and beyond tend to just absorb it. It may be up to us middle-aged types to think deeply about its potential ramifications for who we are as a species. We’re not at Westworld yet, but one day in the not too distant future, we will be using voice commands for all sorts of things, and bots will be taking over many more of our menial tasks — such as driving — and even the non-menial ones. Damon and I, at this point, have created a whole bunch of bots, at first just on Twitter but soon to have their own Facebook and webpages where the non-Twitterized can see and, in some cases, interact with them as well, that do a bunch of things on their own, ranging from inserting Kiddie Rides into historical photos to creating unusual new mnemonics for learning to play musical instruments to, most recently, writing poetry. All of them work within very simple parameters and none of them have what you’d truly call AI, but they all can, at times, simulate it, by making decisions and taking actions within those parameters on their own. And there are a lot of people out there doing similar things, not just for art or entertainment, but for providing affirmation, or political activism, or, of course, profit. As we get better at AI, it’s not just expensive or top secret proprietary technology that’s going to get better at passing the Turing test, it’s stuff made by and for people like you and me. And I’m starting to think that the most important questions might be around not what will those bots do to us or for us, but how will we treat them, and use them to treat each other, when we think nobody is watching? It’s not just about etiquette. Human beings will do bad things if we don’t put boundaries, rules and laws in place that keep us in check. That’s just a fact. It’s how we allowed the mistreatment of women to become the way our culture operates, because they had no power and the incentives to look the other way were huge. So what do we need to fix now, before using our bots badly becomes the next new norm?

Something there’s been a lot of talk about lately, since so many sexual harassment and assault scandals have broken, is how hard it is to have to confront the fact that people who have done terrible things have also created wonderful works of art. One article I read recently talked about this with regard to watching the work of Woody Allen, going into detail about how hard it is to now watch Manhattan in the post-Soon-Yi era (not to mention the post-Dylan-sexual-assault era, which is something the author spends less time on, perhaps because the parallels are not so direct).

But this makes me wonder not so much How do we watch it now? but, Why did we watch it then and not feel disturbed? Why did we not talk about how problematic it was that the film’s main character, the 40-something Isaac played by Woody Allen, was dating Mariel Hemingway’s 17-year-old high school student? Why did everyone in the film and by and large the audience just accept that without feeling icky? Sure, the film is partly about how the relationship between Isaac and Tracy makes Isaac uncomfortable because he knows she’s too young for him and their feelings aren’t mutual, but it’s not about the fact that that’s true because he’s an experienced adult having sex with an vulnerable teenager. On one level, you can look at this as just being part of Allen’s problematic oeuvre: he’s pretty consistently terrible at stepping outside of himself, which is why there’s almost always a character with Woody Allen’s mannerisms and preoccupations in the film, and why too many of his films become a quite obvious repetition of those same preoccupations over and over again. He may be our most self-conscious and least self-aware celebrated filmmaker, which is one reason why his films are so drastically uneven, and also probably why he can’t face up to the fact that there were some fucked-up choices in his personal life. I know many cinephiles want to think of the man as a genius, but why can’t we, instead, think of him as a guy who has made some films with wonderful aesthetics, some with ingenious storylines, some with insightful/hilarious dialogue, and some with all three, who is still just a guy with a lot of problems (which show up in his films) who, consequently, has done bad things — partly because our elevation of him to this pedestal is what allowed him, if not inspired him, to do them, and get away with it.

This is one good thing about working in the business: you learn very early on that very few people, if any, are worthy of being worshipped. At best, these celebrated artists — male and female — whose work you admire are very talented human beings who have all of the failings that go along with the human being part, in addition to whatever additional moodiness, egotism, and poor judgment may come with the talent. At worst, they’re total assholes, thanks in large part to the distortion of reality around them that fame creates. Most of them are somewhere in between, and the idea we have that they must be wonderful because they’ve created art that affected us strongly, often on an emotional level that we have trouble critically analyzing, is a terrible mistake to make. The fact that we want this to be true is understandable. If you can say people are good or bad in the same way that movies are good or bad in the same way that ideas are good or bad, it’s all much easier for our little brains and large emotions. But that’s not how it usually is, and our desire, against all logic, to see things in black and white — even if it’s gorgeous, wide-screen, high contrast, and shot by Gordon Willis —  is what needs to be dissected and challenged, because we should never have looked at them that way in the first place.

This is just one of many things we need to get past as a culture in order to make sense of things post-Woody, post-Cosby, post-Spacey, and post-whoever-is-next (I’d say Matt Lauer, but really, no great loss there). We need to start thinking more discerningly about the people we entrust with our admiration, be they actors, or directors, or public office-holders. We’d like to say that anyone who sexually harasses, assaults or abuses other people in any way should be erased from public life, which is what the entertainment industry is trying to do right now with Kevin Spacey and Louis CK (who I have worked with and am not a fan of, see here, in spite of never having been forced to look at his penis). But making them just go away without talking about what they did, the damage it inflicted, and what should happen next is going to make it impossible for our culture to take stock of where we’ve been that allowed these things to happen, and where we go from here. We need to think and talk about these men as human beings who did things we, justifiably, love, and also did things we, justifiably, condemn. Because loads of good things to do and bad things to do exist in every situation, and it’s going to be hard to teach anyone to choose one over the other if we don’t admit that each of us, no matter how brilliant or boring, is capable of doing both.

And most importantly, we need to talk about why women have been treated this way by so many men – and that means thinking critically about the art and entertainment they create, and how it often reflects and reinforces a culture that’s just plain bad for women and girls. Visual media are incredibly powerful. They build our sense of what is normal and not normal. By just devouring the images they constantly feed us without questioning them, we’re ingesting them into our worldview. The only way we change that view is to talk about it, how powerful men control it, and how it portrays and validates them at the expense of the rest of us, particularly if we’re female.

Maybe if we hadn’t been so focused on Woody being a genius, we would have seen sooner that his flawed work reflects a culture that views teenaged girls as sex objects. Maybe Alabama would have paid attention sooner to the fact that Roy Moore was acting out those cultural fantasies. But before more women get hurt, it’s time to talk about the important differences between men like him, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Al Franken, but how they all reflect a culture that encourages men to perceive sex as a trophy to which they are entitled. We need to look more closely at how these fucked-up human beings reflect us, instead of choosing to look away.

 

 

When I heard the “news” about Harvey Weinstein, I wasn’t surprised. I already knew. The rumors had been around for years. As many other women have talked about, there were “whispers” among us, telling fellow women to beware. But even if I hadn’t heard some of the actual stories about Harvey — including that he’d raped women, because someone had told me that too — my reaction would probably have been the same. I was appalled, of course, and I’d surely have been more appalled if I’d known the extent of it, how many women had been subjected to this harassment or assault or rape, how regular it was for him. But at the same time, these types of stories about men in power in the business, this system — because it is a system — was to a certain degree something I realized I’d accepted for a long time. It was part of my experience, it was part of the experience of people I knew personally, and it was par for the course. That’s the one thing Harvey said that was true: he was “used to this,” because “this” was considered how the business works. That’s why those are the words used not just by him but women trying to explain why they couldn’t say anything, or who decided they’d rather not be in the business at all than have to deal with this type of treatment. That was the choice, for many: accept and deal, or decide that a career in film is not for you. Period.

How did it get to be this way, that we just accepted this situation as the norm? I think for all of us in the industry, and particularly women, it’s a long story. It’s about how you take up visual storytelling because you love it and because you think you’re good at it. How, at that stage, when you’re first drawn to it, you’re idealistic enough to think that art is really what it’s about, and then the more you become immersed in it, and trying to succeed in it, adjusting to what it takes to succeed in it, the more you slowly come to realize that it’s about a few things that are entirely different. One of them, as I’ve written about before, is money. But another is the fucked up relationship between sex and power in the entertainment industry. But at the point at which you understand, for better or worse, you’re already a part it, maybe hoping to change it to the degree that you can from the inside, but also accepting what exists as reality, because of everything that you’ve had drummed into you along the way.

For me, that story begins in film school. When I started grad school at NYU, I was 21, and really naive about everything. In my group of college friends at Stanford, most of us knew how to either be in relationships or be single, with very little in between. At film school, full of 20-somethings released into the wild of New York City, there were not only constantly hookups and shifting short- and long-term affairs among the students, but also power dynamics that were playing out in uncomfortable ways. There was one woman I knew who always seemed to be in relationships with men who could do something for her, like provide her with a place to live or help on a project. There was another who was rumored to sleep around, not just with fellow students and TAs, but with professors who were not young or attractive (mind you we also had slutty male classmates but we didn’t talk about them in quite the same way). And then there was the fact that, while everyone in first year shot three films for their fellow students, because rotating roles was the structure of the curriculum, by the time we got to third year, the only women who were shooting were shooting for their boyfriends.

Now, you could look at these facts and make no assumptions, or you could look at them and just think they justified some truly negative stereotypes about women: that they use sex and intimacy to get somewhere, and that they wouldn’t succeed if they didn’t use those things to get ahead — and indeed, that was how a lot of people looked at the first two women I mentioned. But I looked at what was going on and saw,

1) That the people who had the power in the business were generally men. In the entire grad program, I worked with only two female professors. 75% of the TAs were men, and the students and former students who staffed the equipment room were exclusively men. 

2) Everyone needed the help of these men in power, because what enabled you to move up in the business was almost purely subjective. In my undergraduate years, the grades you received, even when they involved writing or something else seemingly creative, had generally reflected how hard you’d worked. In film school, you could still get decent grades by working hard, but people only really cared about how “talented” you were. Their judgment of that was partly based on cinematic convention — at the time and in that place, we were watching and talking about Spike Lee, Nick Gomez, and Martin Scorsese (and a small number of us were talking about Jane Campion) —  and partly on things like personal taste, how much they liked you, and how much they felt they’d influenced your work. This was why professors promoted their favorites, and that was now considered okay. It was why the chair of the department in my first year (who was let go at the end of that year, probably more because he was an alcoholic) was able to call in a handful of students out of 50 in the first week of school and tell them, “You are the ones I chose to succeed.” In other words, success was just about convincing other people, particularly those in power, that you had something special. 

How did you do that? Well, that was the question. If you were a man, you often did it with boldness, confidence and swagger, but by and large, those things didn’t benefit you if you were a woman. Ergo, 

3) If you were a woman, a large part of how you gained recognition was through the relationships you created with men. Sexual or intimate relationships certainly were not the only kind that worked. Throughout my first three years of film school, I had a boyfriend, so I generally built friendships with my male classmates by crewing with them on other people’s films. Nothing helps you get to know someone like long days sweating in a swamp in Jersey or long nights freezing on a rat-infested trash pile in the East Village on a disorganized student film, and doing those things with Jim, who ran the equipment room mafia, is how I ended up getting HMIs and the good tripod for my thesis. But I could only get two fellow classmates to let me be their DP after first year — both women — despite that the two guys I’d shot for in first year, who were friends of mine, had been really happy with my work. Basically, I found out that I could become friends with men, but that they generally developed stronger bonds, the kind that made them trust them trust each other with what was important (like the look of their film), with other men. Men generally just did not form those types of relationships with women unless they were intimate with them.  

The next couple of lessons I learned in my first years out of film school, when I started working in production while trying to write feature scripts that, I hoped, would help me break into the business as a writer/director. One day, I was at a local cafe and I ended up sitting next to an older man with whom I struck up a conversation. That wasn’t something I normally did, but I was trying to be better about learning how to network, since I knew that this was necessary, and he’d noticed the screenplay on which I was working. This man said that he was a professor and a successful screenwriter, and he gave me his card. I sent him a copy of my script and called him soon after (email wasn’t yet a thing) to see if we could meet up for him to read and talk about my script. When he wrote back, he invited me to go over my script at his apartment. I declined. He didn’t call back. Huh, I thought, this shit really does happen. I was lucky, I guess, in that I really had no incentive to get into an ambiguous situation with a man I didn’t know but who was clearly not earning his living as a screenwriter if he was also a professor. As I started to work in independent film, I learned the second half of this equation: that men will finance any piece of crap another man wants to make if it enables them to live out their sexual fantasies. I saw this over and over and over again in the 90s — I mean, it was embarrassing. The film about the cab driver who gets the supermodel to fall in love with him and leave her boyfriend because of sexual prowess so amazing that he gives her an orgasm the first time they meet without touching her (and without her touching herself either, which to me really only makes her amazing. But anyway, the dirty talk that makes her orgasm is in the script in graphic detail); the one about the man who can have all sorts of wild sex with any woman he wants (again, in the script in graphic detail) but yet gives all that up when he falls in love with the right one, only to be confronted with (surprise!) a supermodel who he must resist at all cost (fun fact: James Toback had a part in that one, and I was treated to listening to him talk to the director about the women on set were while he leered at me, like I was a piece of furniture with breasts. Scumbag). I’d go on, but that’s the point when they were basically all the same? What these things add up to is  

4) Sex in the entertainment industry is a commodity, plain and simple. You may have gotten that just from watching movies, television and commercials, but seeing it play out within the business while you’re working in it? That really drives it home. 

Especially when you’re trying to navigate dating and relationships. If you were one of the few women on a film set in the 90s, you got a lot of attention, and it was often difficult to figure out what that meant. Spending those intense hours together day in and day out but now for weeks or months, people developed intense feelings about each other that didn’t necessarily have to do with anything real. I often had flirtations or crushes, which I thought meant something, that just ended suddenly ended when you each moved on to other projects. At wrap parties, I’d be the recipient of sloppy drunk kisses, or solicitations for my phone number, from multiple guys with whom I didn’t think I’d had any real connection other than a fine working relationship, but in which there probably had been some flirtatious content, because, well, when you were the only woman on set, that was how everyone interacted with you. And that content often included those things said to you, or to a group of people of which you were a part, that were not appropriate for the workplace — sexual jokes, innuendoes, etc. — but that you had to ignore if you were going to keep working with these people. So, I figured out 

5) The rules of behavior for women in the film business often require a certain degree of “friendliness”  and tolerance that isn’t required from men. You need to be smiling and nice even when you’re not feeling it, or ignore what makes you uncomfortable, because that’s how you survive and stay employed. There were times when I responded that I considered successful, because only one guy felt uncomfortable around me afterward despite my efforts to explain my feelings to him – and that person didn’t have any control over my job. More often than not, though, like when a sound mixer I was booming for made sexual jokes to me on the private line that only he and I could hear, or when another chose to kiss me on the lips every time we said goodbye at the end of the day, I felt like I couldn’t say anything and still have them hire me, and so I didn’t.

I also ended up erring on the side of not having sex with people I worked with when things were complicated, which largely meant (although not always) my not having sex with anyone, because I was always at work. The actor I was flirting with on the first professional film I ever mixed, but was nervous about getting involved with because it was my first professional film, and because I thought maybe he was only interested in me because he was the one non-gay actor on the film and wanted to prove he wasn’t gay? While I was trying to figure that one out, he slept with my boom operator. The AD I was into who seemed into me but who had a girlfriend? I waffled, he slept with the makeup artist, and I hooked up with someone else – after the film was over, because even when I was desperate to get laid, I was absurdly cautious about getting into awkward situations in the workplace and how other people there might perceive me. I found, however, that there seem to be no rules for most people, because 

6) It’s easy to get involved in inappropriate and often fucked up relationships on film sets. This is probably true of many work environments, because workplace sex is fraught (and if HR is ineffective now, in the 90s it basically didn’t exist), but it’s even more true, I think, when you have short-term jobs with an ever-changing cast of potential partners, which creates an even greater incentive to think only about yourself and fuck all else, sometimes literally. A lot of people have an affair or two on every job, which is just complicated in the normal ways (especially when it’s two). But then there’s the key PA who always seems to hook up with the hottest guy on the set she’s on, who is usually the main actor (once it was a good-looking AC, but that was the exception), or the European DP who assumes his AC will be his mistress for the duration of the shoot (on the job where I met him, the first AC told me she had turned him down, so he was sleeping with the second). This is where it gets particularly murky: when it’s a seemingly consensual relationship between a man in power and a woman who’s not, whose career he can directly affect. Where do you draw the line on who’s doing something wrong? I bet many of you would draw it between those two women: the key PA, like the European DP, did this serially, so she was clearly “no innocent,” whereas the AC was in a position where she may have felt pressured. I bet some of you would just say that they were both adults, making their own choices. Some might even say that both women used sex for personal gain, and using that calculus, you might look down on the AC more, since she’s now a successful camera operator. But to me, both situations are indications of something just plain rotten in the industry. We don’t know what really went down between these men and these women, except that the men had power and the women didn’t, and sex was involved.

Maybe all of this still doesn’t make sense to you, how so many of us could know that this is how things work in this business and still work in this business. But let me point out one more thing in case it’s not clear: 

7) What’s at stake is huge. It’s the fulfillment of your creative aspirations, plus fame that opens doors to everything, and financial reward beyond what any human being really needs. This is what the film industry promises to all of us, and even once you realize you’re probably not going to get those things because hardly anyone does, and that the people who have them aren’t necessarily happy because they’ve made loads of compromises to get there, once you’re a part of the system, once you think you understand it, even once you know how rigged and wrong it is in every way, it’s really hard to let go of the dream. Especially when you’ve been through or put up with or done so much that you never thought you would.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re in this industry, you knew because you know. You know that this is what it’s like, and that makes you culpable, because you’ve compromised, just like we all have. A business where men have all the power and relationships with them are everything, where sex is a commodity, where women are constantly placed in inappropriate situations and forced to choose between poor options, and where the stakes are incredibly high, is just going to be a bad business for women. So if you’re a part of the business, you’re also a part of the bad. Yes, I’ve been a victim, but I’m also part of the system, I’m one of those cogs that keeps it chugging along. I’m taking responsibility for that, as hard as it may sometimes be, rather than just shrugging and saying, as I have so many times, That’s just how it is. That means speaking up not just occasionally but whenever I see something that shouldn’t happen happen. It means creating work with complex female lead characters instead of just Madonnas and supermodels. It means supporting women and helping them move up whenever possible, to change the power imbalance. And even if I’ve failed at changing much because I’m nobody, I need to keep trying, or I need to get the fuck out.

What about you?

 

 

At this point, I’m guessing that all of you have heard of the hullabaloo surrounding the women-only screening of Wonder Woman at the Alamo Drafthouse. This isn’t the first time there’s been a backlash like this, nor are we likely to stop seeing such responses any time soon. Something happens or is done specifically for women — you know, a screening, feminism, making it so birth control is actually covered by health insurance — and all of a sudden its, “Why are they getting special treatment? If we did something like this for men only, you’d have a hissy fit!”

So I thought today, I’d take a moment and try to explain, for those who don’t get it, why groups and events created specifically for people who identify as female, and perhaps feminism in general (for the truly clueless or perhaps just young and stupid), are necessary. And I’d like to use as my primary example a phenomenon that uniquely affects us: girl pockets.

I was at work the other day wearing a pair of pants that I typically wear to work. I like them because they fit well, plus they’re twill and not jeans but not shorts. Thus I know that if I end up on a set that’s been overheated by lights, I won’t get too hot, but if the air-conditioning on a stage is pumping, I also won’t freeze to death if I accompany it with sweatshirt, which I always do. Basically, I need to show up for work prepared for a variety of situations, and this is also reflected in the fact that my work clothes require pockets, in order that I can keep my phone (I get all of my jobs via text these days), my sides (these are the miniaturized versions of the script pages that we’ll be shooting for the day that production hands out), and my gloves (for booming, carrying heavy cases and coiling cable) on me at all times, and also be able to shove in them things like lavaliere microphones, scissors, tape, foot foam, and other items which might be necessary for one of the many tasks that my work on set entails. Well, this pair of pants has four pockets, two front and two back, so you’d think, “perfect.” In reality, though, I was dropping stuff everywhere I went all day long. The problem? They’re girl pockets, meaning that they are small and shallow and completely impractical for keeping in anything you might need to keep on your person. I used to be able to fit a phone into a front pocket, but while phones have grown, girl pockets haven’t, so a large corner to a whole half the thing inevitably sticks out. Trying to get a wallet into one of these — yeah, I occasionally do that, even though I’m a woman. Crazy! — is just a joke, or an invitation for it to drop out or get grabbed by someone. I know from experience that even a small pair of thin gloves falls out of both the front pockets and the equally-if-not-more lame back pockets, unless you really ball them up and shove them down there. So why don’t I wear a different pair of pants to work, you’re asking? Well, because it’s not just these pants that have these stupid pockets, it’s just about everything I own.

Exhibit A: jeans: 

See what I mean?

Exhibit B: shorts. 

To add insult to injury, these shorts add on to these useless regular pockets a bizarre tiny pocket that is good for absolutely nothing, but I guess is supposed to look…cute? Why would anyone want a pocket to be cute?

Yeah, clearly this is just a design element, not an actual pocket.

What’s the big deal, you might say? Don’t women just carry purses everywhere anyway? Well, yes, but for a lot of us, that’s only because we don’t have decent pockets. I’m obviously not going to carry a purse around with me at work on set because it would get in the way of basically everything I have to do – and to be honest, that’s also how I feel about them in general every day life. This is why I pretty much spent the first 25 years of mine trying to avoid carrying one: because having to hang this stupid bag on your person at all times in an absurd pain in the ass and also makes you more of an easy target for theft. One of the few reasons I like winter is that I can wear jackets with pockets and therefore don’t have to carry a purse (women’s jacket pockets are still lame compared to men’s jacket pockets – for example, there are almost never inside pockets in women’s coats or jackets, unless they’re performance outerwear, and even then they’re fewer and smaller – but they are still bigger than normal girl pockets). I know many women consider purses a “fashion accessory,” but that’s only because once we were forced to have them, the fashion industry (created and mostly run by men) decided to capitalize on it. And I know, there’s this whole image of women needing to carry so much shit around that they have to have a bag with them at all times, but let’s break that down. What supposedly goes into a purse? In my case, Tylenol, antacid, tissues, pens, hand-sanitizer, sunglasses, and a sweater? We could fit some of those in our pockets if we had decent ones, some we could wear around waists or necks, and the rest, we could borrow — like guys do. Binkies, snacks, water, and other things we think we “need” to carry for other people, such as our kids? Well, why are we expected to be the ones who have to carry those things? That’s what diaper bags and backpacks are for, and dads can carry those too. Make-up, or a hairbrush? If the world didn’t think we needed to touch up our appearances every hour, we wouldn’t need those things  — and I, in fact, don’t need and don’t carry them, because I don’t care if my one coat of mascara and whatever’s going on with my hair when I leave the house doesn’t last through the day, and neither does my husband, or anyone who’s ever been my friend.

Which brings me to why pockets on women’s clothing are so incredibly lame as a rule: because for us, in a nutshell, it’s considered more important that we look good than that we can function. No, really. You see it reflected literally everywhere, from the fact that the media thinks it’s more important to talk about our clothes or our hair or our make-up than about our ideas — and the way we are said to be bitchy or shrill or talk too much when we try to make those ideas heard — to that we are often only mentioned as the wife of so-and-so, like we exist solely to be decoration or enhancement of their personhood, rather than people ourselves. I’ve dealt with this so much at work I can’t even tell you (although I actually have told you), and I’ve also, like most women, completely internalized it too (see here, here, and here), so that my appearance matters to me way more than it would ever matter to a man of my similar age and occupation/education, even though I grew up a feminist, with a feminist mother, and am pretty freaking self-aware. No, despite our best intentions, the prioritization of our having to look good, often at the expense of anything and everything else, is a consistent state of being for women. And I haven’t even gotten into how complicated the concept of “looking good” is for us — because you also have to look good in just the appropriate way, too, and you’re expected to know what that is at all times. You can’t look too businessy or too casual or too dressed up; too slutty or too buttoned up or too dowdy or too cheap; too young or too old, too hip or too retro. Sure, guys can make these mistakes too, but the consequences of them for women tend to be much, much greater; everything from being denied a tip or a job to public vilification to deserving to get raped is routinely blamed on how women dress. And just like those girl pockets, or purses, that’s a perpetual disadvantage that we are so accustomed to wearing around every day that we just come to accept it, and are expected, even — or perhaps most of all — by other women, to work around.

Realistically, I know there’s no easy solution to the problem of girl pockets. We can’t just wear men’s clothes, because they’re not made for most of us and won’t fit our bodies, making them both non-functional and unattractive. We can’t change the way all women’s clothes are made, because the fashion industry, as well as most men and women — who, again, have 100% internalized that they’d rather look good than have convenience, in the same way that they’d rather wear undergarments that hurt and shoes that destroy their knees, back and ankles, not to mention inject toxins into or chop up and insert toxic foreign objects into their faces and bodies, than not conform to the current standard of “looking their best” — have decided that truly functional pockets would alter the shape of women’s clothes, and would therefore freak the fuck out and basically bring our entire culture to its knees if we tried. Again: no, really. I am not exaggerating about this. The fact is, women looking a certain way is so deeply important to nearly all of us, on some level, that making the kind of changes that would make women’s clothing as practical and useful to women as men’s clothing is to men could never ever happen.

So what’s my point? Well guys (and especially white, straight, non-disabled, and of course cis-gender guys), if you want to understand how important it is to have something that’s actually made for you in a society in which basically everything is built to satisfy the needs, desires and convenience of someone who is not you; in a culture where many of those someones say it’s fine for you to have your comfort only as long as it doesn’t threaten theirs in any way – comfort about which they are so sensitive that even something so small as a woman talking about gender in video games makes them angry enough to send death threats; then try not walking a mile in my shoes (because I can choose not to wear heels, and so my shoes are comfortable), but wearing my pants for a week. Maybe the day you get girl pockets is the day you at least maybe kinda sorta begin to understand what it’s like to be a woman in our culture. Until then, you and your real-pocket pants can  just go sit somewhere else.

As many of you who come here even occasionally know by now, part of what’s going on in my ongoing midlife crisis is that I’ve been trying to make some sort of transition career wise. Just to recap the long story for those of you who need it: went to grad school in film to become a writer/director, started doing sound to pay the bills, been doing it for going on 25 years now while continuing to try and write stuff and make films and…er, that’s it, not such a long story after all I guess. Since the actual filmmaking and writing isn’t paying my bills, I’ve been trying to figure out what else I can do other than sound to earn a living.

Now, before those of you with whom I work stop calling me, IT’S NOT HAPPENING YET, I AM NOT OUT OF THE BUSINESS. Because there’s this thing that happens in production when you even dip your toe into something other than your regular production day job. One person hears that you’re teaching a class, or that you’re making a documentary, and all of a sudden everybody’s saying, “I hear she’s out of the business.” It isn’t necessarily done out of malice, although there are always people who are super competitive and will take any available opportunity to find a way to knock you out of contention for whatever jobs they might also want, especially if you work in commercials like I do, which is a pretty small pool. That type of sniping happens a lot more among sound mixers, who spread rumors like a bunch of nearly-all-male fishwives when they think it’s to their advantage. I think the fast pace of rumor-spreading among people who work in production really has more to do with the fact that we have so much downtime on every job, and not always that much to talk about other than work, especially when you’re literally at work all the time and therefore have no outside life to speak of. You’ve gotta talk about something sometimes and the latest scuttlebutt that you’ve heard but not necessarily verified about your co-workers is going to be the best something to keep your colleagues interested — and everyone wants to feel interesting.

Now that I’ve gotten the “I’M NOT OUT OF THE BUSINESS” disclaimer out of the way, what I will say is that, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a couple of jobs as a video editor. They’re not my first, but I wasn’t really making an effort before to try that out as a possible new day job, for a few reasons which now seem to be diminishing in importance. One, I also like teaching, so I’ve been pursuing that. Getting a full-time faculty job, however, at a time when most colleges just want to chew up adjuncts and and spit them out with no health insurance is getting really frustrating (for public schools that are being starved by their states who are in turn being starved by the federal government, it’s economic necessity, but for many other universities it’s really not, it’s just greed, and part of the whole growing trend in this country toward two completely divided Americas, rich and poor…but whatevs). Two, I was worried for some time that the bulk of the editing work out there was reality TV, and you all know how I feel about that. It does seem now, though, that with so many entities getting some sort of presence on the web and wanting video for their sites, there’s a lot more content being created out there that doesn’t make me want to vomit, so hooray for that. Three, I’ve always had reservations about spending all my time alone in a little room with a computer. And yet I’m finding that that prospect has actually gotten more appealing to me as I’ve aged into introversion and discovered how pleasant the company of machines who don’t expect you to make conversation can be. Not to mention that I just can’t spend all day on my feet any more, holding a pole with a mic on it over my head for long periods of time or working knees/back to move heavy cases and plug and unplug cables the way I have to when I work on set. Every year, a new part of my body cries out in pain and says “Are we really still doing this?” Plus, for me, editing is more intellectually stimulating than location sound. I enjoy the problem-solving and trouble-shooting of location work, particularly when I can anticipate and shoot the problems before they really become trouble, which is generally how you have to do it in our department, and which naturally implies that the problems aren’t intractable, like certain DPs’ lighting, or the now-nearly-ubiquitous wide and tight framing when you have 2+ cameras. Problem-solving with a problem that can’t be solved is just probleming, which is basically gnashing your teeth and muttering to yourself that everyone on set can just go fuck themselves. You can’t possibly overestimate how much time as a location sound person is spent doing exactly that. I also still find it interesting to read the script pages when I arrive on set and picture how they’ll translate, as well as watching actors and directors work — and not just the good ones, because it’s always interesting to see someone make the wrong choice and consider what a better one might have been. I still do learn new things that way, but after so many years, there’s not that much I haven’t seen in terms of technique, and I’ve probably stored about as much as I can for future use considering that many of the futures in which I’d use such knowledge may well never happen.

The thing that’s tough about taking on editing as a new occupation, however, is that, while I’ve edited a number of projects, I certainly haven’t done it in the mass quantities in which I’ve done sound work. As an editor, there’s quite a bit I still haven’t seen — in terms of technique, individual work styles, and what directors want and expect. One way to learn that would be to apprentice in a lower-level position. Coming up in a two- or three-person sound department, I got to see a lot of other people mix and boom, which was incredibly helpful. I never would have started wearing gloves to get more reach and range if I hadn’t worked with a couple of boom ops who I watched do that and discussed with them why they did. I couldn’t have acquired the plethora of wiring techniques that I now know if I hadn’t been able to watch so many mixers try so many combinations of moleskin and snot tape and Topstick and Transpore and HushLavs and all of the other bizarre shit people have developed over the years to make lavs sound good on other people. In the same way, there are tips and tricks that experienced editors have that I’ve only heard about or caught glimpses of, or tried to understand in online tutorials, which may be the godsend of modern life, but can’t reveal everything. Working as an assistant editor used to be the traditional point of entry to the editing ladder, but now that digital editing makes it so easy and fast to organize a project (no more searching for teeny tiny bits of celluloid that fell under your Steenbeck), and editing programs are pretty cheap, most anyone can teach themselves to edit and jump right into being the sole editor on their first or second bupkis-paying project. The fleet of lowly assistant editors who work the overnight shift digitizing, importing, synching and conforming just to catch glimpses of the master in action now mainly survives in L.A., where the bulk of narrative studio work, including most TV and film editing, is done. And that’s a terrible job, even when you’re 25.

One key thing I realized immediately that I didn’t know how to do was judge how long an edit is going to take. Most of my cutting hasn’t been on a deadline, or it’s been on a deadline which was given to me and I simply had to make, so I never needed to answer the question, “How long do you think you’ll need to complete this?” As a result, when I was asked that on my first editing job of the past few weeks, then had to decide if I could do it in 2/3 that time since that was all they had budgeted for, I said, “Suurremmmaybe?” And when I realized that even my first estimate was optimistic, I had to suck it up and eat those extra days on the budget I’d agreed to — which was at a low rate in addition to having too few hours, because that’s what you have to do when you’re starting out. The last job I had to work for the hourly rate I ended up with was probably one of those independent films that male directors somehow got funded in the 90s to play out all of their fantasy sexual conquests (I’m looking at you, Eric Schaeffer, but not just you, unfortunately). Something I also didn’t really know how to do before? Edit while someone else is watching. Pretty much all of the editing work I’ve done has entailed having a discussion with the director/producer, then going home and creating cuts on my own, getting feedback on those cuts from the powers that be, and then going back and making changes based on that, also on my own. On my second editing job these past couple of weeks, I had to sit with the director and work together nearly every day, which meant she was kind of just watching the gears in my head turn — a process that nobody should have to witness, ever. And it was bad enough having to try and come up with clever ideas about how to move the story along or improve the flow while she waited, since there’s nothing that makes you feel more stupid than having to be smart under duress. It was also trying to remember “Oh fuck, now how do I do that again?” fairly often, because all the nitpicky mechanical shit of how to do things quickly in an editing program is not yet ingrained, along with the occasional, “Oh fuck, what did I do that caused that to happen?” that comes from hitting a button by mistake when I don’t know Premiere well enough (”Command-Z” is also in competition for the godsend of modern life). This situation of not knowing what I was doing all the time in front of someone else was made doubly hard by knowing I shouldn’t be making it totally obvious just how much I didn’t know. Everyone who’s had a job probably went through the process of working their way up by taking on new challenges — aka stuff they have to learn how to do as they go — and any employer who hires below the going rate should be aware that the person they’re hiring is probably doing that and that’s why they’re willing to work for less. Nevertheless, there’s always this charade where the employee pretends that they’re just giving the employer an awesome deal because they really like the project, and the employer pretends that the person they’ve hired is the super-experienced professional they couldn’t afford to hire who knows everything. And all of that stupid and pointless pretending? I’m not very good at that either – like most women, who tend to be more comfortable learning by asking questions about what we don’t know than faking our way through it, which sure seems more logical if you ask me, but whatevs. Anyway, thank goodness it didn’t really matter on this job, as the director I was working with was female, nice, and knows less about technology than I do, and so is just as big a fan of the “Should we Google how we do that?” technique as I am.

Basically, the hardest thing for me as an editor is that I’m kind of a newbie again, and that’s rough when you’re nearly 50 (okay I’m 48, but I have so many friends turning 49 or 50 this year that I figure I should just go ahead and try to get into the headspace now to try to diminish the trauma later on). Whereas I’m at the point with booming that I can often do it in my sleep — and sometimes I do — as an editor, I need to be not just awake but fully on. This is, like I said, partly why I wanted to switch careers: editing uses so much more of my brain, in addition to a whole lot less of my body. But these past couple of weeks have made me wonder once or twice, “Huh, do I really want to have a job that forces me to think that hard all day long?” I’ve tried to find some way that I can creatively employ myself in my downtime on set — like by tweeting, which I need to do more of and get better at (being pithy? Also hard), or other little tasks like creating new material for our bots — but it’s hard to focus in the short bursts of downtime that I tend to have on TV, and on commercials I have to work less but appear like I’m working more, to make sure people know I’m working, which is also work. Plus, I find that most of my potential for focused, productive thought is ruined by having to get up at five. But then again, if I can’t use my creative energy at my job, then I don’t use all of it up there either — and I think this has always been the conundrum. We want to be fulfilled by what we do for money, but if that side job becomes too engaging, will we lose our drive to do and be something more? And on the flip side, how do you hold on to that drive for 2.5 decades and still feel like the goal is worth it when your everyday is unsatisfying?

I know the particulars will get easier if editing becomes my full-time job. I just didn’t ever think I’d be starting again, even partly, at this age, and having to face these types of questions. That might be the biggest reason why I put off trying out editing as a job for so long, and of course now that I have waited this long, it’s harder. You know how science has shown how our brain activity wears in neural pathways that make habits normal and easy for us? These days, when I try to do something new, it’s like I can feel those pathways being scraped in with that tool my dental hygienist uses. And yet, smushing together those tiny pieces of what were once celluloid and are now zeros and ones that somehow appear as little purple rectangles to powerfully tell a story or convey a point is fulfilling for me in a way that hitting all my cues during a dialogue scene will never be. In one way they’re quite similar: a feat of strength and dexterity that only a handful of people will ever witness and probably never remember, because the point of doing sound right is that nobody notices, vs. making it possible for someone else to tell their story seamlessly in a style that will most likely only be attributed to them. They’re both ultimately just tiny names somewhere in the credits that you have to search for, and accepting that as my future might be the real growing up I have to do.

A while ago, I worked on promos at Fox News. This was back when we all knew Fox was awful, but didn’t yet know how awful it would become, as its power grew to effectively eat the presidency. Anyway, I remember filming Geraldo Rivera pretending to load fake aid supplies on to a truck as if it were in a war zone, doing it multiple times until we got the right take. I remember filming with a correspondent (whose name I don’t recall but who’s most certainly gone now since that was at least ten years ago and she was a woman) who had a flag with a picture of Lenin on it on her wall, but who kept calling him Marx — as in, “Do you think it would be bad to have Marx in the frame behind my head?” I remember filming with Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes, then of the show Hannity and Colmes, before Fox stopped pretending that they were being “fair and balanced” by putting up this messy, unattractive, poorly-spoken liberal opposite a slick conservative with all the answers, and just made it Hannity.

But what I remember most was filming with Bill O’Reilly. Along with his plug to camera at his desk, which was basically the same as everyone else’s, we filmed a scene of him with his “team,” discussing pitches of the stories they would do that night. He was ruthless, cutting those people off and knocking down all of their ideas when he deemed them not fit, but the most impressive thing was how they clearly all worshipped him because of it. He had a power over them, a combination of the fact that he was their boss, and a star, and tall (never underestimate the power of physical stature) and that he was confident, unyielding, and unflinching in what he thought and what he wanted. He knew how to dole out cutting remarks, praise and abuse in the right amounts to keep those below him hanging on his every word.

I’m remembering that experience now that he’s been fired from Fox News, not actually for sexually harassing multiple women but for losing advertisers after the extent of the harassment claims against him finally came to light. Money talks, and this time, I guess, it said the right thing. But what struck me when I read about the scandal and the stories of what he did to these women who came forward was the idea of how many more there probably were out there who didn’t speak up. This was a guy who knew how to use his power over people, and did it for sexual gain. These women we’ve all heard about said “no,” they all felt that they had the wherewithal to do so. But how many were there who didn’t? How many underlings were overawed by his strong personality? How many women didn’t know what would happen if they spurned their powerful boss, were afraid of getting fired, or not getting asked back, worrying that it might be the end of a promising career, or a serious setback? How many felt belittled enough by him — because that’s how he treated people — and low enough in value as a result that when he picked them to be the object of his sexual advances, they felt somehow chosen, and gave in?

I get sexual harassment – I mean, I’m female. I’ve written before about how, like most women, I’ve experienced it many times but never reported it. It was simply easier not to, to avoid not getting rehired as a freelancer, or the discomfort that would be created in my work environment, which has always been majority male and used to be nearly all male except for me, or because I brushed it off as being nonthreatening, something I could handle. But it clicked for me this time in a new way, knowing that the perpetrator was someone who I’d seen exerting that kind of manipulative power over a room full of people. Just because nobody has come forward who actually was coerced into sex with him, or Roger Ailes, doesn’t mean that that didn’t happen. In fact, it most certainly did. We now know that he, and Ailes, did this again and again, with multiple women who reported it or sued Fox over it. People don’t repeat things that often when they fail, they repeat them because they work.

So let’s just remember that for every woman who has spoken up, there could easily be three who didn’t, and out of those three, or six or nine, there’s a good chance one felt like she had no choice but to acquiesce. She’s living with a memory much worse than being groped or verbally abused or flashed, or of even having to listen to him masturbate on the phone (although even hearing John Oliver try to describe what it might sound like is a pretty terrible experience). And how many of those cases must have happened, aside from the ones we’ve heard of (the most recent allegations reported in the press are from 2016), after O’Reilly’s serial harassment came to light with the first suit 2004, when Fox could and should have put a stop to it? And then think about all of the cases of sexual harassment with male bosses preying on women that you don’t hear about, and how often those guys — the non-famous ones who don’t make the news — have likely succeeded, and how they are probably continuing to succeed because, just like at Uber, someone calculated that those guys are worth more than the women they harm…until they aren’t.

That’s what we’re really talking about here, in terms of numbers, in terms of physical and mental and emotional pain suffered, in terms of the type of self-blame and self-disgust and self-hatred that inevitably result, in terms of slut-shaming and reputations created and destroyed, and how, overall, we are failing women in the workplace when we talk about Bill O’Reilly and sexual harassment.