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grrlinthefireplace · 5 years

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Hey so I’ve been seeing you post a lot about La Casa de Papel recently. What exactly is it? It looks kinda interesting.

Thank you so much for asking!

I am delighted beyond reason to have the opportunity to tell you - and by extension the entire world - why this show has cleared my skin, watered my crops, and legitimately healed my soul after this particularly soul-crushing season of Grimdark White Man Television almost broke me as a human being.

I will attempt to keep this as spoiler-free as I possibly can, because this is a show that should be experienced in the moment, but in a nutshell, La Casa de Papel is a heist show set in present-day Madrid which follows both a found family of thieves who rob the Royal Mint of Spain, and the law enforcement officials on the outside who are chasing them.

If that is enough for you, go right to your TV or computer, fire up the ol’ Netflix, and don’t waste any more time.

If, however, you need a little more, here are the top five things I flail about to every single person in my life to convince them they need to start watching this show like immediately and then come back and tell me all about it.

For visual flair, we’ll intersperse them with some gifs of ladies, because I know my audience.

5. character driving plot > plot driving character.

You know that infuriating thing lazy TV writers do where, in order to to hurry up and get to the big explosion or battle scene or dragon attack or whatever, which is the only bit they really care about, they handwave away the whole concept of motivation and make some character do something that any halfway-attentive viewer will immediately clock that they would never actually do?

There is none of that bullshit here.

In its simplest form, the plot of La Casa de Papel is as follows: a brilliant criminal mastermind devises a heist which cannot possibly go wrong, and then we proceed to watch all the ways in which it goes wrong.

This is a fantastic setup for an action story, made even more breathlessly exciting by strategic use of my favorite heist movie plot device (as perfected by Ocean’s Eleven): namely, “scene where it looks like our crime heroes have been outsmarted and are now threatened by a completely unforeseen disaster” immediately followed by “flashback to the team prepping for the heist where we learn that of course they prepared for this exact scenario.”

But from time to time, things do actually go wrong (as they must, or else there would be no story); and, when they do, it is never because you can tell a writer just wanted to write a scene where bullets go flying, and didn’t care how he got there. These characters are so clear, their behavior so consistent, that when gasp-worthy plot twists happen, they happen because of course that character, in this exact scenario, would do that exact thing.

I’m telling you, I came to this show for a ship (more on that in a minute) and I stayed for a swooning, heart-eyes writer crush on the impeccably-designed plot structure and characterization.

4. High stakes, low gore.

Tone-wise, on a sliding scale of Heist Film Intensity where a really fluffy episode of Leverage is a 1, Reservoir Dogs is a 10, and the Ocean’s franchise is somewhere in the 3-4 range, I would place La Casa at a 5 or a 6, which is perfect for me. I love action, suspense, drama and adventure, but I hate gratuitous violence (especially when it’s pointless and masturbatory and doesn’t contribute anything to the plot) and have a very low tolerance for blood and gore. So I kept waiting for the story to eventually take a hard left turn into Tarantino Land, until eventually it was all just one huge pile of dead bodies, and was genuinely surprised when it didn’t.

This is how I learned just how badly my brain has been fucked up by lazy showrunners who think shock deaths are the only way to raise stakes. During the first season of this show, before I had figured out that it was a Flawless Gem of Television Which So Far Has Not Once Disappointed Me, there were probably a dozen moments where I was absolutely convinced that some character was about to be gruesomely killed for shock value … and I was wrong every single time.

Reader, it was fucking wild.

Every single time I was convinced that person A was going to shoot person B in the head because blah blah maximum angst over here in this part of the story and then it will motivate person C to do this other thing, the show did the hard work of finding a smarter, more unexpected direction to take that character’s story. That means that when deaths do come along - and there are a couple - they feel genuinely earned, and they matter deeply to the story and to us.

3. I would die for these women.

This show loves women. Like it truly, authentically, uncompromisingly loves women in all our fucked-up messy glorious complexity. There are no “types” or cliches here; no one is forced to be only one thing. Fuck your one-dimensional Strong Female Characters, lazy writers.

For one thing, on many shows you might be lucky if you get maybe one mom who is given a personality and a story outside of motherhood. Often, on shows written by men, the fact of her motherhood diminishes her strength or her agency. On this show, nearly every one of the central female characters is both a mom and an action hero simultaneously. Seriously. By season 3 there are four different battle moms. They’re all different, they’re not all on the same side, they have different perspectives, and their role as mother impacts the story differently, but that’s the joy of having a whole lot of different kinds of women - no one has to be everything to everyone.

These women are complicated. They laugh, they cry, they crack dirty jokes, they get laid, they have babies, they fight, they make mistakes, they fall in love, they grow. Men pull sexist shit and they shut it the fuck down. Some of them have love stories, some of them don’t, but they are never defined by or triangulated around relationships with men. They get to have relationships with each other. All of them are excellent at their jobs.

Tokyo is the kind of hot mess antihero protagonist we’ve been watching middle-aged white men play for decades.

Allison is such a realistic teenage girl it’s genuinely painful to watch.

Monica has one of the best arcs I’ve ever seen on television, this is not a drill.

Alicia is terrifying. (A pregnant black ops interrogator! ON WHAT OTHER FUCKING SHOW!?!??)

Nairobi is unlike any other character you’ve seen on TV before; she’s got a little bit of Parker from Leverage, a little bit of Raven Reyes from The 100, but she’s entirely her own creature and you will fall in love with her instantly.

And Raquel. Oh, my love, my angel, my hero, Inspector Raquel Murillo. Love of my goddamn life. A fierce, kickass hostage negotiator swimming upstream against a tide of workplace misogyny who sometimes has to make the frustrating little male-appeasing compromises we all have to make to get through the workday. A beautiful, sexy, powerful heroine over 40 whose femininity isn’t diminished based on some bullshit notion that, for example, pairing your tough-bitch suit and gun holster with red toenails and a lacy blouse detracts from your strength. A loving mom and daughter who has to juggle raising a small child and caring for an aging parent with the stress of, you know, trying to stop the biggest robbery in the history of Spain. A domestic violence survivor (TW for those who need it; nothing is ever shown onscreen, but it’s discussed several times) who is given the space to discuss the things that have happened to her and how she has worked through them with such dignity, accuracy and respect that you can tell the writers did their homework.

This is a show where you can tell there are women in the writers’ room.

2. The Professor and Raquel. I don’t want to spoil a single thing for you here except to say that I myself was lured into this show by the promise of electric sexual chemistry between a criminal mastermind and the police inspector hunting him down, and my God I was not disappointed.

1. Love.

This show came into my life at a period where I was so weary of cynicism on television - so fucking furious at showrunners who dangle hope in front of us and then crush it, who only care about building anything if they can tear it down later, who treat love and fun and joy and hope and family and happiness like they’re intellectually lesser than grimdark nihilism with no soul - that I was honestly kind of broken by it. I was just so. fucking. tired. Tired of “the way we show this heroine is strong is to kill off her love interest.” Tired of “sorry but all this rape and murder is NECESSARY because of REALISM” (particularly rich when coming from shows featuring evil A.I.’s or dragons and ice zombies). Tired of getting invested in relationships - whether ships or friends or found families - only to realize that the show I was watching was always going to sacrifice character to force plot mechanics into place, and those relationships were never going to get the kind of care and focus I wanted them to get.

But that is not this show.

The single most revolutionary thing, to me, about La Casa de Papel - the thing that sets it apart from every other rollercoaster action thrill ride on television - is that every single thread of the plot is tied to love.

Every.

Single.

One.

Love of all different shapes and sizes - parents and children, friendships, doomed crushes (straight and queer), toxic exes, blossoming romances, siblings - and over it all, a deep, deep love for humanity.

The thing I said before, about how when things go wrong they go wrong in character-driven ways? It’s this. Love is why everything on this show happens. Love is what makes children want to live up to their parents and what makes parents fight to leave a better world for their children. Love is why deaths have stakes. Love is why we spend so much screentime lingering on small moments another show might ignore, like all the thieves at heist camp sitting down every night to have dinner together and argue about paella techniques. Love is what causes chaos in the middle of the heist; when there’s one person in the room you care about more than the others, you can get distracted and take your eye off the ball. Love is how your enemies can get to you, by leveraging or blackmailing the people who matter most, knowing that you’ll crack if they’re in danger. Love, gone wrong, causes toxic men to develop possessive and controlling behavior towards women. Love is how the Professor gets the idea for the heist in the first place. The plan is flawless on paper, but it doesn’t account for the human variable, and over and over again we see that relationships and connection and sex and family and love cause people to behave in unpredictable ways and throw the whole plan into chaos, which is what makes for a dynamic and compelling story.

How refreshing to see a show simply refuse to grant the oft-repeated premise that a show cannot have both high-octane thrills, and a big soft squishy heart, at the same time.

ANYWAY, I’VE TAKEN UP ENOUGH OF YOUR VALUABLE TV-WATCHING TIME, GO JUMP ON BOARD THIS TRAIN AND COME SCREAM ABOUT IDEALISTIC SPANISH ROBIN HOODS WITH ME, AND LET THE GOOD SHIP SERQUEL INTO YOUR LIFE, YOU WON’T BE SORRY

THANKS FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK

#lannister-slings-and-arrows #la casa de papel #money heist #from the inbox #i have a lot of feelings about this show #is this entire post just one long subtweet of 'the 100'#listen #maybe #i'm still pissed about kabby and will be for awhile #but legit this show was HEALING and CATHARTIC in some unexpected ways #yes virginia you CAN have functional loving stable relationships and high-stakes drama at the same time

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alwaysalreadyangry · 6 years

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due south: the ladies man (redux)

In the fall of 1998, I was a student of Derrida’s in his seminar at The New School for Social Research, “Justice, Perjury, and Forgiveness.” Despite the ambitious title, Derrida’s singular focus that semester was forgiveness. He was particularly interested in the notion that to be pardoned or forgiven is only actually meaningful in the face of the unpardonable, the unforgivable. To forgive someone for a minor mistake, or to say “pardon me” when accidentally bumping into a stranger on the street, is perhaps a nicety, a well-meaning mannerism or gesture, but where forgiveness is really needed — where it actually changes human relations — is where (and when) it is given to the unforgivable. In this way, the power of forgiveness depends upon the unforgivable.

Since then, I have maintained a correlated interest in the acceptance of the unacceptable, in the toleration of the intolerable, pairings that indicate a deeper problem; deeper in the sense that humans regularly accept the unacceptable (unlike forgiving the unforgivable). People regularly accept theoretically changeable facts of the world that are, even by their own accounts, totally unacceptable. Adjustments and acquiescence to unhappiness and dissatisfaction are common expectations of a practical life of “doing what one has to do,” and yet, it remains a basic ethical instinct to say that we should not accept a life that does us and others real measurable harm — at home, at work, in school, in society. And yet we regularly do. We do, that is, until there is a revolt against the unacceptable, against the intolerable.

richard gilman-opalsky, specters of revolt

this is an interesting section in the introduction to the book i’m reading. the book is mostly about revolt and its possiblities -- both the possibility of revolt haunting the capitalist world, but also the possibilities of what revolt can do.

but i think there’s something interesting in this passage -- and as someone who really struggles with derrida that’s not something i expected to find myself saying. after these two paragraphs, gilman-opalsky starts talking about revolt. which i am also interested in. but i do find myself thinking about the moments before. all the unforgivable moments before. before revolt; when revolt is a ghost, a potential body rather than a real physical force. and then i also think a lot about the idea that forgiveness given to the unforgivable has the power to change human relations.

which all relates back to my meta on what the ladies’ man in due south says about law enforcement and the US “justice system”.

because the bit i was struggling with the reading of the most was: the scene between beth botrelle and ray kowalski at the end of the episode. it’s not that i found it hard to reconcile it with the rest of the episode; on an emotional sense i understand why that scene is there. it’s about the system, not him. she understands... and also, it’s him facing a final, impossibly hard emotional truth. and... it’s ray giving the crime scene back to her, and making it back into a personal tragedy. or the scene of the crime done to her.

but on a craft sense; or on an ideological sense, i wondered exactly what the final embrace between them was saying. ray apologising multiple times; beth botrelle hugging him, and kissing him on the cheek. it’s a brutal, beautiful moment; why?

so i’ve been talking with @zielenna about this episode, and one of the other things that came up was the way in which it talks about masculinity, but especially through this very male police hierarchy. all of the cops around and especially above ray are men. the woman he has to fight to exonerate and her lawyer are both women -- and this is not a coincidence. no, it’s very much about patriarchal systems... the patriarchal arm of the state and the ways in which masculinity & homosocial relations are used to keep men in line, to keep them as enforcers of it.

there’s something also interesting that the dead guy is a male cop -- and a male cop who is named, in the episode’s title, as a “ladies’ man”. no, not a ladies’ man. he was “the ladies’ man”. there’s something there about virile masculinity, about how men admire other men who treat women badly.

and so when ray dissents from the ways in which the basic instinct of the police force is to cheer the woman’s execution, to bray for her blood (dewey operates here as a stand-in for the force at large) -- there is a sense in which that can be seen as a rejection of these structures of male power. by which i don’t mean that i’m reading ray as a radical feminist. but if we’re thinking about human relations, and the act of changing them at a time of emergency (and this episode is absolutely about a state of emergency), then it bears teasing out. he is absolutely rejecting a system of male power and personal relationships that intersect with and help strengthen this power.

this episode gives us a male mentor for ray kowalski, who up until now has had very little past beyond his family and ex-wife. a workplace mentor; a mentor who pretends to be supporting ray as a friend, but is actually out to save his own skin and consolidate his own power, his own power-network.

this is important; it shows us the figure of ray in a long line, in a huge interconnected network of men who will let this sort of thing happen. and it also shows the ways in which personal relationships between men will be used to strengthen this network; and the ways in which women and those who are outside and marginalised by the network... can and will be crushed by it.

ray’s only one link; when he consciously shatters that link, the network doesn’t fail. but he is able to save one person, in the face of this huge monolith.

so, let’s look at beth botrelle. in the first scene we see her in, her lawyer reinds her that she does not have to see ray. she can turn him away. not only does she choose to see him -- she insists that it’s alone, one-on-one. no lawyer, no fraser. it’s a personal connection. two people who can’t forget each other; and two individuals in a system that’s out to crush one using the other.

then there’s this:

Beth: So, you're looking for forgiveness? [Ray still does not meet her eyes.] Ray: Is that what you think?

ray does not ask for forgiveness. she doesn’t give it. what she does do is try to give him some kind of easy absolution, or a way to clear his conscience. “any cop could have taken that call,” she says. but ray knows that. and then she tells him that she killed her husband; and as soon as she says it, ray is certain that it’s not true. so she hasn’t given him absolution, or forgiveness. in lying, she has given him the truth -- or some portion of it.

let’s contrast this with the end of their final scene:

Ray (softly): I'm sorry. Beth: No. Ray: I am. I'm so sorry. Beth (tearfully): No. [She cups his face with one hand, then kisses his cheek.] Beth: Thank you, Officer Kowalski. [They embrace.]

there is one constant; beth botrelle is saying “no” when ray apologises, taking the responsibility upon himself. this isn’t so different to the way she tries to absolve him earlier. only, in the earlier scene she gives him all the cop platitudes she knows from her husband -- anybody could have taken that call, don’t let it wear on you. she lies. she is all give, willing him to take what she’s offering.

but it’s false; ray hasn’t done anything to earn it. he doesn’t take it; he can’t take it. she is the prisoner, and he is the cop. she’s an incarcerated woman, he’s the man whose role as a cop put her there. and not only is she incarcerated, she’s being touted everywhere as a “cop-killer” -- the people the system hates the most, because they have targeted the officers of that very system. even if, as beth botrelle didn’t, they did no such thing. despite beth asking that they be alone together, they can’t change the nature of their relations to each other.

in the final scene, everything has changed; except nothing that happened to beth has been taken away or removed. she still lived through an atrocity; she still had eight years of her life stolen from her. and that is -- unforgivable. both in the basic sense that it’s an awful, unimaginable thing that has happened to her. that has been done to her. but it is also unforgivable in the sense that she can’t forgive it; it’s impossible to grasp the totality of it, and all of the different people and systems and -- nodes in the network of power that created her fate. she can’t forgive it because they are not all there, it’s impossible to face them all. and it’s also unforgivable, specifically with ray kowalski, because he was one part of the larger system which failed her -- and not all of it. he is complicit, but he is not the root of the corruption.

does this make sense? i find myself doing that old essay trick of looking up the different, interconnected meanings of the word “forgive”. forgiving debt, giving up resentment towards -- and then. to pardon an offender.

because beth was thought to be an offender; she wasn’t one. because it’s the system and the state that can forgive offenders, and beth is a victim (a survivor) of the state’s violence. because ray did not commit an official offence against her; because those that did (the higher-up law enforcement officials) are not there. for all of these reasons, too, she is not able to forgive ray. because of the systems they exist within; because of the systems that shape their lives, and how they relate to each other.

and also just because of the unimaginable, horrifying scope of what was done to her, the way in which her life was destroyed.

so what does she do? she thanks ray. she kisses his cheek. she embraces him. this is not the words “i forgive you” -- and in fact, in the use of the repeated “no” we see her trying to absolve, rather than forgive. the idea that you have nothing to be sorry for equals i don’t need to forgive you.

but the first thing she thought ray was there for was forgiveness. and the last thing she does is she thanks him, and embraces him. a gesture of love; a gesture that nobody could have expected, a gesture that nobody outside the situation could perhaps easily understand.

so, i’m not a derridean, and if you’ve made it this far then you’ve probably guessed that? i’m not good with theory and i’m sure the phrase “human relations” has had a lot written about it (without even getting into the idea of forgiveness). but i’m not backing out from this now. in this passage, we see derrida’s ideas that forgiveness matters most in the face of the unforgivable; that this is when it is a radical act that can change human relations, which i read as relations between humans.

is her thank you and embrace -- forgiveness? is it absolution? does one have radical power that the other does not? or do both have a radical power in the face of all that has come before this moment? we have seen ray splintering the network that he was part of, that other male cops were trying to coerce him to remain committed to. and here he is, to a certain extent, cut loose from that. he is a person, again. alone with another person.

knowledge of the past power relations haunt this scene -- and of course there is still a power imbalance between them, even now. things have changed, but they have not changed enough. ray did all that he could; he is no longer slumped over in a chair in a prison. he has done something. he has changed something.

and it’s not enough -- because nothing could be enough. forgiveness is impossible. but in the face of the power relations that both hold them still, and haunt them, we see a radical act; an embrace. tenderness. halting, emotional honesty -- contrasting with the comforting lies she tells in the earlier scene. in the face of this system, which can perhaps only be saved by its total destruction, by revolt, by a radical, collective act -- this is what can be done to change power relations. an embrace. a few words. it’s not quite forgiveness; he still does not ask for forgiveness. he does not ask; she bridges the gap. personal tenderness; two people, who are trying to live as best as the world will let them. who are trying not to be defined by the roles in which their relative positions of power would have them. embracing in a way that is not about desire, or about one person’s power over another; embrace as transmission of emotion, empathy, understanding. when i started writing this, i thought it was forgiveness. i don’t think it is forgiveness; i don’t think it’s less of a gesture on beth’s part for that. because --

it’s not enough, and it’s not enough. of course it’s not enough; between two people in this situation, enough is not possible. between any amount of people in this situation, enough is not possible, because the atrocity was already committed. what is so upsetting, the reason why ray cries, is because her tenderness with him is not justified, is not reasonable. the maybe-forgiveness, the attempted-absolution. she can’t give it; and yet she gives it, or something like it. ray has done all that he can, and he does not deserve what she is giving him in return. what she is giving -- an act of love -- is radical in a way that he can’t answer in kind. which is why it’s so beautiful, which is why it’s so sad.

ray can’t be forgiven because he’s not responsible; and he can’t be forgiven because he was complicit. it’s a double-bind. and in the face of that knowledge; love. understanding. thank you. gratitude.

at the end, it’s gratitude. what is gratitude? kind words said, in earnest, in response to an imbalance -- in response to kindness, specifically an act of kindness which creates an imbalance between two parties. but here, the imbalance is insurmountable. the gap is so wide. it can’t be breached

the words fly tenderly across that gap anyway. thank you.

and so we have ray crying in his car -- we return to that image again. and of course there is so much more to be said about masculinity; about the ways in which it has been shed, and changed by ray’s relationship with beth. this is what a change in human relations means, this is what it can look like. so i have to end on it. ray, sobbing, unconsoled.

what is unforgivable cannot be forgiven; but that doesn’t mean it’s not a radical act to try.

#it's romance son #due south #look this is unforgivable sub-derridean nonsense from someone who does not know derrida #but i was having a terrible anxiety attack and writing this calmed me down #i am not clever enough!#you read this at your own risk!#overlong meta #my writing #unfortunately

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lodelss · 5 years

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The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women

Ann Foster | Longreads | July 2019 | 14 minutes (3,613 words)

On March 5th, 2004, Martha Stewart was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators. At the time, she was one of comparatively few female CEOs, and she was irrevocably tied to her company’s success: her smiling, serene, WASPy perfection thoroughly entwined with her company’s numerous ventures. When she first faced charges of insider trading, news media and the general population reacted with schadenfreude, or as one New York Times article coined it, blondenfreude: “the glee felt when a rich, powerful, and fair-haired business woman stumbles.” And stumble she did: In the wake of the scandal, Stewart voluntarily removed herself from most of her roles at the company, and as part of her sentencing she was barred from involvement with the empire for five years. Stewart re-joined the Board of Directors in 2011, but the company never truly bounced back from effects of the scandal.

The Times named Stewart’s conviction among the 20 most notable cases of insider trading, and she is both the only woman charged on the list, as well as the person whose alleged financial gains amounted to the least ($51,000), drastically less than the millions — and cumulative billions — of dollars taken by the men on the list, including Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron. Samuel D. Waksal, founder of ImClone, the stock Stewart was alleged to have illegally sold shares from, pled guilty to orchestrating stock trades and was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison. Yet, it’s Stewart who would become the lead character in two made-for-TV movies — Waksal’s role in each is found much further down the call sheet.

There are countless other instances of men investigated for stock fraud at a similar level to Stewart’s alleged actions, and most of these men were not charged. Stewart was both investigated more ruthlessly than many of her male counterparts and she was also publicly shamed in a way men were never subjected to. In the end, the Department of Justice charges against Stewart for criminal securities fraud were thrown out, and a civil insider trading case the Securities Exchange Commission brought against her was settled. Crucially, neither of these alleged misdeeds were what ultimately landed her in prison. She was charged and found guilty of lying to investigators in an attempt to cover up her lack of insider trading: Yes, guilty for trying to cover up a crime she hadn’t committed in the first place.

When news broke that she would face five months of jail time, it was greeted with delight by late-night TV show hosts, the news media, and seemingly most of the nation. Her case was covered more in the media than the concurrent investigation and trial of Lay by a vast margin, as coverage of Stewart dominated business, entertainment, home, lifestyle, and even some sports sections of newspapers. Between November 2003 and May 2004, the time period of Stewart’s trial and the Lay investigation, New York–based magazines featured Stewart in 1,507 articles; Lay, in just 12. Though Stewart was more of a celebrity than Lay, he had clear ties to then-President Bush and Vice President Cheney, as well as other high-ranking political officials. A scandal could have been made of his connections, but clearly that wasn’t as appealing to readers as minute-by-minute reporting on Stewart’s downfall.

Media coverage during Stewart’s investigation and trial was derisive, mocking the traditional feminine aspects of her empire as well as deriding her alleged “diva” behavior. This misogynistic treatment — both of her facing charges for lesser actions than men who never went to trial, and for the delight and nonstop news coverage of her trial and sentencing — would become the standard for treatment of formerly powerful women in the midst of a downfall. Let’s call it the Martha Stewarting of powerful women: a single-minded focus on their misdeeds, while countless men doing the same thing avoid the spotlight.

Martha Stewarting is hardly a new phenomenon, but the retrospective understanding of her treatment sets it in a new focus. Women as leaders have been rare throughout Western history, and those who strived to attain positions of power usually did so under designated survivor circumstances: There weren’t any male relatives left to take over the family property, the family land, or the kingdom. Nearly 1,000 years before Stewart’s sentencing, the heir to the throne of England was a 33-year-old woman named Matilda. The nascent country hadn’t encountered this particular designated survivor scenario before. In fact, the concept of a female monarch was so unknown that the word “queen” at that point meant only “the king’s wife.”

Let’s call it the Martha Stewarting of powerful women: a single-minded focus on their misdeeds, while countless men doing the same thing avoid the spotlight.

The rhetoric recorded as she attempted to rally support to take the throne is eerily prescient to the press around today’s female business and political leaders. Matilda battled for the throne against her male cousin for 18 years in a period then known as “the Anarchy.” Chroniclers of the time reported the 12th-century misogyny that prevented her from being able to rule: Matilda’s ambition, and the very concept of a female leader, was seen as unnatural. Her cunning, intelligence, and craftiness was interpreted as shrewishness. She was seen as unsympathetic for not displaying the charm or warmth of her male rival; a woman could never be a ruler, but also, couldn’t she smile more? It was Matilda who settled the Anarchy when she suggested her son take the throne as the new king; the nation, crippled from nearly two decades of war, relented. It would take more than 300 years after her death for Lady Jane Grey to become the next woman to — albeit briefly — sit on the English throne.

Hundreds of years later, our modern society is not too different. Our current equivalent of reigning monarchies, corporations, are overseen by men just as their predecessors held roles as dynastic kings and elected rulers. Most women who ascend to these ranks do so by virtue of family connections, inheriting companies or empires from male relatives or spouses. For a man to fail as a king, president, or CEO through wrongdoings is so commonplace as to be insignificant; in fact, the patriarchal system supports these men as they fall, leaving doors open for them to regain their former level of power. For a woman to ascend to these roles is novel enough, rare enough, that when they display the same fallibility or criminal activity, they dominate the news cycle for months. This when we reach peak Martha Stewarting: the particular schadenfreude expressed at the public shaming of powerful women behaving badly; the way that women who misbehave are treated as representatives for the entire gender and shamed far more than men would be for the same actions.

This double standard is similar to treatment of the mostly female victims of European witch hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries. During this time, approximately 50,000 people were put to death for alleged witchcraft. These were most often women who wielded some level of power and autonomy that caused discomfort to local magistrates. Women in many European countries at this time were not permitted to own property or control their own finances. But women with no male relatives — widows, women without children, spinsters — found ways to make ends meet on their own terms. These women ran their own businesses in fields like midwifery, herbalism, and the sorts of alternative healing popular today among female CEO Gwyneth Paltrow’s fans. The accusations made against these women were often that they had been consorting with the Devil and providing dark magic to their clients. In the Salem witch trials of 1691 and 1692, these women’s property was seized and turned over to the same men who accused and sat in judgment of them. In both the European and American instances, it wasn’t just the alleged witchcraft that led to these women being executed; it was the threat they posed to the patriarchal culture. If women were able to create their own livelihoods, to live outside of a patriarchal society, it threatened the higher status of all men — the notion of a “natural order” with men always in a superior position. Today, powerful women are still eyed suspiciously, though their trial is through the court of public opinion rather than through a Puritan tribunal.

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As rare as it is for an upper-class white woman to reach the level of success to warrant so substantive a fall from grace, it is even rarer for people of color and working-class people to attain. As such, Martha Stewarting happens primarily to wealthy white women, those whose privilege can fool them into believing their gender is a nonissue or even an advantage. That is, until they dare to make a mistake, in which case they become defined entirely by their gender — the invisible misogyny suddenly apparent. There are other double standards affecting people of all marginalized identities’ opportunities for success, in the amount or lack of support they are able to obtain for their careers, and how the media portrays them both when providing exemplary models of humanity and when breaking the law. With very few exceptions, it is wealthy white women who are able to get close enough to white male power to threaten it. And, if they threaten to make white men look foolish for following them, the Martha Stewarting comes on even more strongly as a defense mechanism to protect the woman’s former supporters.

Which brings us to former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes. In March 2004, the same month that Stewart was sentenced to prison time, then 19-year-old Holmes dropped out of Stanford to focus entirely on her healthcare startup. As CEO, Holmes stood out not just for her youth and gender but also for her conventional white beauty. Like Stewart, her fresh-faced idealism and awkward persona were enmeshed with the company itself, powering media coverage for her youth and ingenuity as well as for the healthcare disruption she promised. Fifteen years later, she — like Stewart — fell entirely from grace. Holmes’s company went bankrupt and folded, and she is still facing criminal charges.

Her case has not yet been decided, but she has been vilified and pilloried by the media in a similar manner to Stewart: her downfall representing not just her personal failure, but interrogated for what it might mean for any woman who dares to take on a leadership role. Holmes’s passionate speaking style, her widely reported tendency to promise more than she was able to do, and her ability to finesse away detailed questions with braggadocio are textbook behavior for Silicon Valley start-up culture. More start-ups fail than succeed — they have about a 40% success rate. Combined with the small percentage of female-fronted Silicon Valley start-ups (26 percent of the most notable start-ups of 2018 included even one female founder), this means that male-fronted start-ups fail more than those fronted by women. Holmes’s actions, like Stewart’s — and Matilda’s — reignited debate over whether their behavior proved women were inherently unsuited for positions of leadership and power.

Holmes herself has yet to admit culpability to any of the charges she’s faced. As reporter John Carreyrou recounts, Holmes “sees herself as a sort of Joan of Arc who is being persecuted.” The parallels between accused fraudster Holmes and literal Saint Joan of Arc may not be immediately obvious. When Holmes was 19, she left Stanford and began her company. At the same age, 15th-century French peasant Joan was executed for heresy and treason following three years of leading French armies against the English. Yet they may share a similar overall trajectory: Both possessed preternatural levels of personal charisma and a single-minded determination and passion to change the world. And both went from being lauded and adored to becoming pariahs.

Had she failed in her military campaigns, Joan’s story may have been a footnote. But she led the French in a number of campaigns that directly resulted in the coronation of King Charles VII. Under normal circumstances in Joan’s time and place, women were never entrusted with positions of power, let alone consulted on military concerns. A lower-class girl like her should have held even less sway. But Joan claimed to be in direct communication with God, her military ideas and dedication proof positive that he wanted the French dauphin to succeed in battle against the English. The people of France adored her as a heroine, but the defeated English and Burgundian troops refused to accept that they could have been bested by a young woman. They also knew that casting her as a witch and a servant of the Devil would taint King Charles’s validity. Like Martha Stewart, her prosecutors were determined to charge her with something. And so, Joan was arrested and tried for her habit of wearing men’s clothing.

She had worn men’s clothing on the battlefield, and, upon her initial imprisonment in England, continued to dress in this manner in an attempt to prevent sexual assault. While in prison, she was successfully pressured to sign a legal document disavowing her claims to have been acting on God’s orders and included a promise never to wear men’s clothing again. The circumstances upon which she was then found to have worn men’s clothing are unclear — had her captors intentionally removed her women’s clothing in order to force her to break her word and don trousers? Had Joan been forced to choose these clothes due to the ongoing threat of prison rape? Regardless of the reason, Joan is recorded as once again donning men’s clothing, and as such was found guilty of breaking her own promise. Her punishment was to burn at the stake.

By contrast, Elizabeth Holmes has settled fraud charges from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and has been indicted on nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The public’s perception of her remains critical — casting her as either a devious con artist or a wide-eyed naif in over her head. Her alleged choice to intentionally lower her voice has also distracted from her legal battles to make her into a source of pop culture mockery. This vocal styling, like her androgynous presentation, seem — not unlike Joan — to be at least partly deployed in order to obscure her femininity in a male-dominated arena. Holmes is a tall, slender, conventionally attractive young white woman — as rare a Silicon Valley CEO as Joan of Arc was as a 15th-century military leader. Holmes’s affect helped her gain the trust of the male investors she needed to succeed. She was able to attract incredibly powerful male allies and supporters, many of whom continued defending her even as Theranos became exposed as a house of cards.

It is here that, outside of Holmes’s self-identification with Joan, more similarities emerge in the stories of these two women. Both have been vilified by some for their actions to an extent unlikely to befall a man who had performed the same actions; their gender has made them more hated by their accusers and critics. Holmes’s acolytes, like the defeated English nobles facing Joan, refused to accept that they had been bested by a young woman. Ultimately, the men in both instances seem to have determined that the only way this could be true is if the women in question was somehow unnatural. Joan was, therefore, a witch and a heretic. Holmes, a sociopath and a master con artist. These men may have been, in very different ways, defeated by these women, but in retroactively recasting the women as manipulative, the men were allowed to emerge as innocent. The women were both temptress and villain, the men twisting reality to retain their own sense of importance. Twenty-five years after Joan’s execution, Pope Callixtus III declared the charges against her unsubstantiated, naming Joan a martyr. In 1920, Joan was canonized as a Catholic saint, and she is now remembered for her bravery, passion, and commitment to her cause. Perhaps Holmes, whose early success predicated on her passionate declarations of wanting to save lives and improve the world, is hoping to be reconsidered similarly.

Despite strides in American feminism, women are still socialized and groomed to be complacent — we are peacekeepers, subordinate to men’s desires, not raising our voices except to back up what a man has already decided. For a woman to reach a position of power in a patriarchal structure, however, requires her to lean into the game. Traditionally feminine traits like passivity, gentleness, and nurturing will not allow a woman to take a power position. Stewart, always seen as canny and bright, was thought to have betrayed her fanbase when her calculating behind-the-scenes scheming came to light. The sweet-faced Holmes’s leadership style has, post-downfall, been consistently described as bullying. To reach the levels of power of each of these women was to act like a man; facing consequences, they are vilified in a particularly misogynistic manner.

Case in point: Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. The actors were the most famous of the fifty people charged in the college admissions scam dubbed Operation Varsity Blues. Huffman’s lesser charges — and less tabloid-ready family — have allowed her to recede as Loughlin has become the face of privileged overreach. Loughlin and her husband have both pled not guilty, with rumors holding out that their defense will be that this practice is so commonplace neither realized they were breaking the law. Both Huffman and Loughlin have been shown to have made secret payments to admissions consultant Rick Singer; emails have been made publicly available in which both women specifically discuss their actions. Huffman pled guilty, expressing remorse for her actions. It remains to be seen if this will be her defense strategy, and if that will succeed, yet there is truth to the notion that Huffman and Loughlin’s actions are not all that different from those taken by countless wealthy parents. But it’s Loughlin’s face that was featured on tabloid covers and gossip websites. As with Stewart, the dissonance between saintly persona and criminal prosecution was too salacious to resist. When Martha Stewart was released from prison, she expressed her belief that she had been charged and jailed as “an example … that’s it.” Martha Stewarting is not just a woman facing scorn for doing something countless men get away with every day; it’s being charged with these crimes at all.

While Loughlin is best known for her acting roles, she has also been working as a producer on most of her recent TV projects. After cocreating and producing the short-lived primetime soap Summerland, Loughlin took on the role of executive producer on all of her projects for the Hallmark network beginning in 2014. Now part of the 26 percent of female executive producers on television, Loughlin focused on projects that capitalized on her mom-next-door, wholesome vibe. Unlike the more elusive Huffman, who had rarely used her persona to sell her film projects, Loughlin had married her persona to her on-screen presence, as closely as Holmes had married herself to Theranos or Stewart to her eponymous media company. So when Loughlin was charged in Operation Varsity Blues, it affected both her ability to take on acting roles (she was fired from all upcoming Hallmark projects and the final season of Fuller House), as well as her brand as a TV producer. Above all else, the contrast between her persona and her actions led to her own Martha Stewarting: public shaming that focused more on her actions than on those of her 49 co-accused parents, including her husband.

Whatever their culpability, the charges faced by Loughlin, Huffman, Holmes, and Stewart are all backed up by evidence of their actions. Where the double standard comes in is the extent to which they have been publicly shamed for wrongdoing even as countless men have done and will continue to commit similar acts without facing the same consequences. All four women are white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and wealthy, allowing them to thrive in their lanes. However, even these privileges are not enough to protect them from our culture’s glee in watching a powerful woman fall.

The situations faced by these four women represent just one of countless no-win situations for women in our culture. Women are reprimanded for being too fat and too skinny, for being too meek and for being too confident, for failing to report a sexual assault or for bringing attention to one. When money and power enter into the equation, women are chastised for being too dependent on men or for being too much like businessmen. In all scenarios, failure becomes inevitable. The patriarchal system incentivizes greed and allows wealthy people to get away with as much as they do. In order for women to attain power, it must be within this same system, making women as fallible and corruptible as men. Yet the barometer is different for women: “Boys will be boys,” but a woman who is seen to misbehave is immediately condemned by the exact same system she’s leaned into. And it’s the culturally groomed sense of discomfort with women being in power, that it is “unnatural,” that leads to this demonization. We have been living in a false equivalency, pretending as if women can succeed in a man’s world. You can attempt to set aside your gender, like Joan of Arc and Elizabeth Holmes; you can present a sweet face to the public while working ruthlessly behind the scenes, like Martha Stewart and Lori Loughlin; but when you fail, you are nothing more than just a woman.

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Ann Foster is a writer and historian living in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her research interest is in the intersection of women, history, and pop culture, especially the lives and stories of figures both well-known and half-forgotten.

Editor: Katie Kosma Factchecker: Ethan Chiel Copyeditor: Jacob Z. Gross

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