I’ve been sick this week. I spent yesterday convalescing with some of my favorite movies. One of my all-time favorite films is Contact, starring Jodie Foster (my all-time fave actress) and Matthew McConaughey.
Contact is a movie about people who believe things deeply, even when they can’t prove or explain them. I don’t know if Carl Sagan’s novel carried the same themes (the novel was first an unsuccessful screenplay), but it contrasts science with religion and reason with faith while it explores the havoc unfounded certainty can create in these spheres.
Yesterday, I watched how the film treats its female lead. Foster’s scientist is intelligent, pedigreed, and passionate about finding extraterrestrial life. Against the advice of her (white, male) mentor, she joins the SETI program. He spends the rest of his time in the film either trying to punish her into following the path he believes to be better or stealing her work.
Almost everyone in the film interrupts her, talks over her, and/or treats her like a child to be managed. Every out-of-this-world discovery leads to more mocking, more questions, more you don’t have what it takes to be here, especially when there’s glory to be claimed by men.
The film is set during the Clinton Administration. His fictional team excludes her from core decisions, makes her continuation on the program conditional on her “good” behavior, and passes her over to speak for her own discoveries. Nobody questions it. Nobody.
It’s a film about how much the United States of America hates women, largely portrayed without comment.
A number of years ago, a female relative asked me a tax question. I hadn’t done taxes professionally in over a decade, but I answered her basic questions and told her to run it by her tax preparer.
That night at dinner, she asked my husband the same question I already answered. He kept looking at me to jump in, but she needed to hear the same words from a man to believe it. Later, I told him the next time she asked me a question, I’d tell her to ask him and I’d give him the answer in advance.
I was in charge of another female relative’s care. She refused to follow anything I said until my husband repeated it.
I was talking to a friend during the 2020 Presidential primaries. He went to a debate and almost stabbed his knife into the table describing how much he hated Elizabeth Warren. I was aghast at how a smart, accomplished woman with a plan reduced someone I previously respected to a ranting boor who voted for the “old guy” and couldn’t articulate why.
I do not have book deals.
I will not be invited to any panel, news outlet, or speaking opportunity where I might expand the reach of this work.
I do not accept outside sponsorships, because sponsors will demand that I cover certain topics the way they want, and I refuse to be beholden to those rules if it dilutes or changes the message I believe Americans need to hear.
I do not sell my newsletter list for extra money.
I do not allow paid advertisements on my Substack. If I endorse something, I believe in it; I do not take money to say so.
This has been a hard week to write, because it’s never fun to confront just how much one’s own country hates her and women like her. We can call it misogyny, but that word implies how MEN hate WOMEN. It misses how many WOMEN hate WOMEN, how enthusiastically women participate in the flaying subjugation humiliation oppression of other women.
I look at all the women who have tried to warn Americans. How many times we were ignored, belittled, mocked. The number of instances where I’ve seen the words crazy and hysterical next to my name and the gaggle of women who sided with men to pile on. The dogged, determined women who still try, even though we all feel like we’re shrieking into a black hole.
The United States of America was never truly free, but it has fallen off a cliff because it hates women. It will never reach its potential until its inhabitants - male, female, non-binary - stop hating women.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but in our daily conversations, let’s push back on these reactions.
When someone interrupts a woman, stop them and say, “Let her finish.” Every time someone in your company laughs at a woman or rolls their eyes, ask them why. If a person says a woman is crazy, hysterical, or overreacting, make them explain how. Whenever you’re asked to repeat something a woman already explained, smile and say, “I agree with everything she said, and so should you.”
Thank you for being here. I appreciate your solidarity, support, and belief. Have a lovely weekend, everyone.
