Being a Boss with a Compulsion to Apologize

I'm not a huge Lena Dunham fan.  She's an outspoken champion for women, so I feel obligated to pay attention to her.  But her show hasn't enticed me; I read Not That Kind of Girl and personally found much of it unsympathetic and unrelatable.  I've subscribed to her newsletter, Lenny, but more often than not I just roll my eyes at the titles and delete them.  For the most part, her work is just not my style . . . and because of that I often don't give her a break.

For some reason I read her recent post for LinkedIn:  Sorry, Not Sorry: My Apology Addiction.  (Maybe it had something to do with her fantastic headshot at the top of the article.)  Once I got past the trendy title, and the Beyonce-referencing first paragraph, I was ready to dismiss the article as yet another redundant---however earnest and frankly accurate--- piece about how women apologize too much and need to learn to have more confidence.  But then I got to this paragraph:

"I say sorry all day . . . I am a woman who is sometimes right, sometimes wrong but somehow always sorry. And this has never been more clear to me than in the six years since I became a boss." (emphasis mine)

I realized that Dunham was talking about my experiences.  As someone who runs a team and has direct reports, I have to make decisions and tell people what to do.  Most of the time the team works in harmony.  But as with anything, screw ups and disagreements happen.  Sometimes decisions have to be made that can't please everyone.  This falls to me, and I'm ok with that.

Female Artists Are Not Their Characters (More Women Owing Their Artistry)

Many moons ago, I wrote a post about Women Artists Owning Their Artistry.  That post focused on journalism and the media's insistence on talking to women artists about the lucky nature of their success and talent, rather than engaging with the artist's work seriously as they usually do with male artists.

This week I came across another aspect of women artists, and their work still receiving less respect than the work of men.  Lena Dunham has been making headlines for throwing shade at Woody Allen during a panel at the Sundance film festival this week.  However, if you listen to the actual discussion, Dunham (along with Mindy Kaling, Kristen Wiig and Jenji Kohan) is talking about how the world generally equates female artists and writers with their characters--- assuming that the artist/author shares the foibles, issues, aspirations etc. of their characters--- whereas this happens much less with male artists.  Here is the excerpted segment:


Again, rather than engaging with a story or a character as a serious piece of art and creativity in and of itself, people prefer to spend time puzzling out how the character is a window into the neuroticism or hubris of the female author/artist.

This is problematic and sexist because:

1. It again refuses to take the art seriously, simply because it was created by a female.  The same respect, intelligence, experimentalism, and benefit of the doubt afforded to male artists are not extended to the women.
2. It is a sort of dominance display, attempting to ferret out the vulnerabilities of a woman against her will, and prove that the investigator knows the woman's mind and self better than she.
3. It is based on the assumption that women are fundamentally crazy (hysterical) or flawed, and a morbid desire to expose this.