The Usual is Still Not Natural: Why are we still tolerating bad male behavior?
In 1970, American art historian Linda Nochlin was asked, “why have there been no great women artists?” Her response, printed in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews, was a groundbreaking essay and serves as a masterclass in recognizing and rejecting assumptive precepts innocently posed as questions. While this mere eight-word question-asked by a prominent white, male gallerist of a female art historian-may have been innocent on its face, it packed a punch: it presumed, perpetuated, and provoked. It sought-or rather expected-acquiescence to all that it implied. Like most questions of this nature, it was a lazy, quasi-intellectual attempt to maintain the status quo by reinforcing little-challenged “greatness” narratives that have been controlled for centuries by white males. Nochlin responded by not only dissecting the motives behind the question but by dismantling its main assumption: that the “usual” — what we are used to, what we see, what we are taught, is always natural. She did so by turning a critical eye on institutions that, for centuries, nurtured white male talent and genius mythologies all while excluding anyone born outside of that narrow demographic. Fifty years later many of us remain conditioned by old ideas about gender and race that cause us to yield authority, advantage, and space to white male bodies by rote, almost always at our own expense. We are still accepting things as they are because they seem natural and our institutions are still failing us.
Recently, in the wake of the New York Times Caliphate podcast scandal, many women came forward on Twitter to document how Andy Mills, NYT audio producer and Capliphate’s co-creator, had abused them while working at the public radio station, WNYC a few years earlier. The women felt compelled to publicly divulge their encounters with Mills after it became apparent that he was going to escape any culpability in the Caliphate debacle if they remained silent. They had good reason to feel this way as they watched the scandal unfold. In a problematic podcast where the executive editor of the Times, Dean Baquet, apologized and officially retracted parts of Caliphate, Mills’ female co-host, reporter Rukmini Callimachi’s name was mentioned several times, Mills not at all. Only Callimachi, was “reassigned” even though Mills publicly accepted a Peabody for the podcast on behalf of the team that made it. Callimachi was clearly being positioned as the face of the scandal. Then, only a few days after Baquet’s mea culpa, Mills was guest-hosting The Daily, the Times “tent pole” podcast with an audience of millions. If seeing Mills face in the news wasn’t enough of a trigger for these women, his continued ability to “fail up,” was. On December 23, 2020, they began tweeting about encounters with Mills, from unsolicited backrubs to violent outbursts, that had left them so disillusioned with a system that protected him, they had buried them until that moment. Some, like Kelsey Padget, had left the industry entirely.
“So here’s a bit from me. Andy Mills told coworkers and others in radio/podcasting that I was hired not because I was qualified, but because I was a woman.” — Kelsey Padget , via Twitter
“Andy Mills told me that the reason Radiolab didn’t hire women was because women are bad at Pro Tools. In comparison to him, who could cut “three drafts of a story in one day!” He said this at a party in front of big name producers and one big podcast CEO.” — Stephanie Foo via Twitter
“Once at afterwork drinks with coworkers, we were all going around saying our fav karaoke song. I called Andy Mills’s song “hipster” — he then took his beer and poured it over my head in front of everyone.” -Kelsey Padget via Twitter
“Yrs ago he said I was too pretty for my pitches to be taken seriously. Grateful I didn’t listen. But sad no raging! about all the whispered stories and harm…” Yowei Shaw via Twitter
I had dinner with Andy & Rukmini (& 3 other industry colleagues including another NYT staffer) right after they finished editing Caliphate. The things that Andy said about Rukmini to me alone…and in front of the other non-NYT people when he thought Rukimini and their NYT colleague were out of earshot were the worst things I’ve ever heard anyone say about someone they work with. Andy claimed all credit for the success of both Caliphate and The Daily…” Briana Greenvia Twitter
“Andy Mills was a young producer with variable facial hair and a boat on the Gowanus Canal, always up for after-work drinks. But he had a reputation. During a Q&A at the 2014 Third Coast International Audio Festival, a storytelling conference, he stood up and asked Annie McEwen, winner of the Best New Artist award for a story about a breakup: “Are you single now? Do you want to go out later?” The host interjected: “I’m gonna warn you about Andy.” Mills replied, “I was kidding, sort of.” -At WNYC, an Uncertain Path Out of Scandal, New York Magazine, 2018
We celebrate men like Mills, Matt Lauer, Jeffery Toobin, Charlie Rose, Louis CK, and Les Moonves, describing them as having “big” but “flawed” personalities and refer to their predations as “peccadillos.” We use metaphors like “big appetites” to describe and excuse their excesses. Finally, we wipe the slate clean time and time again due to their “creative genius.” Society has excused numerous crimes and misdemeanors to protect their potential, even as they dismiss the potential of those who are harmed by the excused behavior. We are so accustomed to protecting the status of white men, that I don’t think we realize we are doing it. When we encounter a white man, we often unconsciously benefit them with a narrative with scant evidence to back it up: they are leaders, bosses, fathers, sons, and brothers. We too easily deem them irreplaceable and one-of-a-kind. This is why at the tender age of 22, just as they are starting, they are paid more than other groups: we see their potential and set them on a gilded path. 1 All they have to do is not be a complete disaster. The rest of us are dissected for the various potential problems we present as employees and are either not hired at all or paid less because we are an unproven entity, a risk. All we have to do is not be too much. This may mean too loud, too smart, too ambitious, too masculine, or too feminine. It is our burden to figure out who to be each time we enter a meeting or boardroom before we even start to do the work we were hired to do. These opposing trajectories only snowball over the years, widening the earnings gap, worsening inequality. This ironically makes those of us who least benefit from such a system even more dependent on its existence because those 22-year-old dudes beating us out for jobs and promotions are now our gatekeepers, our bosses, our husbands. By and large, this has been the natural way of things. Business as usual.
Even when men face a reckoning and are forced to be accountable, we place them in a temporary purgatory before we start to do the work to rehabilitate them. (Please note that the “we” in this instance is other white people, typically white women). That rehabilitation starts by portraying them as victims of “cancel culture,” as if losing a high-paying, high-status job is tantamount to losing one’s inalienable rights. In the wake of all the known and emerging criticism of Mills, the New York Times audio team vouched for him via a statement from Lisa Tobin, his boss: “He described… (his time at WNYC) …as a profound awakening for him, and a source of great shame and remorse (and) has successfully worked with and for women inside an audio department that is predominantly female — a close-knit and deeply collaborative team.” Their accusers are inevitably (and ironically) charged with being part of a frenzied “witch hunt”.
When I was employed in the advertising industry, I worked with countless “flawed” men who wreaked havoc on the workplace. It goes like this: at first their behavior is disturbing or shocking, you wait for someone with authority to do or say something, nothing happens, you adjust yourself in order to get your work done so that you can keep your job. I’ve had bosses that have fallen out of office chairs due to intoxication, had messy affairs with underlings, that I’ve had to chase down in dive bars, midday for deal-closing signatures or event tickets for clients. At my very first job in New York City, I had a co-worker and cubicle mate who spent a good chunk of his day watching porn on his work computer (our cube morphed into a place where a crowd of nice young men could gather to watch porn on his computer. Yes. They saw me sitting there). You adjust yourself by trying to figure out who you need to be to co-exist in an office with them. Sometimes you make yourself smaller, quieter (as it was with porn dude). Sometimes it’s “cool chick” or “caretaker lady” who can handle booze breath and excessive sweat as you share a cab on the way to an important meeting. But no matter what, as you try to run the race carrying their flaws on your back, you always have to be the person who shares successes but not defeats. In my case, all of these men were gently reprimanded, while at the same time propped up as “genius” and therefore indispensable. (The idea that anyone is indispensable in advertising is…humorous). I left that industry, they did not.
“The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education-education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals.” -Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” 1971
All of this is not to ask, “why are there no great women podcasters?” or “…advertising executives?” I suppose it’s more to marvel at the fact there has been a fair amount of women who’ve reached to corner office despite what has to be navigated. Yet…yet…the number of women in either field-any field-that are celebrated for being messy, flawed, and good at their jobs is zilch by my count. We mostly felt sorry for David Letterman in the wake of his office sex scandal, more recently with Ellen DeGeneres, we couldn’t get the pitchforks out fast enough when she was caught being less than nice. The margin of error we afford women at the top of their game could fit on the head of a pin. Most working women who reveal cracks in the facade, so to speak, are viewed as problematic, a burden, a train wreck. They are disappeared, reassigned and Covid has only aggravated this problem. In this era of zoom and the home office, exposing our cracks are unavoidable. While we may share cute videos of toddler-interrupted staff meetings on social media, employment statistics point at something much darker: that women, especially women of color, are being let go in record numbers.
In her 1971 essay, Linda Nochlin wrote that the majority “…of men, despite giving lip-service to equality, are reluctant to give up this “natural” order of things in which their advantages are so great.” After living through the racist and misogynist depths that were the Trump era, we clawed our way back by electing…another 78-year-old white man. I voted for Joe Biden and believe the country is infinitely better off with him at the helm. But like most progressive women, I also wondered if it was possible to hope for systemic change if we keep seeking solutions in the same places and faces? While it’s clear that the best way to evoke real, lasting change for women is to elect more progressive women-especially women of color-to state, local, and federal offices, that process has remained frustratingly difficult and slow. When, as Nochlin says, every “symbol, sign and signal” from birth on tells us to pick the white guy, because he looks like he should be in charge because that what people in charge have looked like for hundreds of years, it’s hard to break through…But we must persist because seeing and hearing women in positions of power is impactful. And it makes a real difference. Just this week, the Prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced that her government is underwriting the cost to supply free sanitary products to girls in high schools across the country to stamp out period poverty. Who has she tapped to oversee this project? Her Minister of Women, Jan Tinetti, naturally.
Originally published at https://www.bethcavanaugh.com on February 18, 2021.
