GELF “Overlooked Women In Media” Panel, September ’09 (VIDEO)

Audience member: You guys mentioned Julia Allison earlier and about how she sort of cheated because men when you start writing are like “ooh write first-person about sort of nothing at all” and you’re sort of pushed to do it and she’s sort of taken this to a whole new level and she’s become very successful, or very exposed. I feel like she’s resented a lot a lot as a result of that, and is there a second sort of women who are putting their personal lives out there in a successful, sort of unique way?

Rachel: And is that cheating?

Caroline: Well there is certainly a number of women who have made a career out of putting their names out there and putting their lives out there: obviously Julia Allison, Emily Gould…there are a couple of others. I don’t know Emily, I do know Julia and she’s extremely smart, very hardworking and she definitely does many things I wouldn’t do, but I think she is definitely in control of who she is and her image. The thing is, if you are a 27 or 28 year old female writer and you are writing dating columns, and you are writing about your dates with this guy or that guy and that is the basis of what you are writing about, what are you going to write about when you are 40, and you want to be writing about politics or business or something like that? I think you can certainly achieve success from that at a young age but then it’s like, where do you go from there, what are your hopes etc? Are you still going to be writing about relationships, are you still going to be writing about your own life? I’d be interested in seeing what their answers would be because it’s a whole new can of worms with “Is it sexist if they aren’t taken seriously if one of them wanted to go write about the financial crisis?”

Jess: I don’t think that that’s sexist, I think that any man who did the same thing at this point in their young lives (only wrote about themselves) would equally not be taken seriously if they then tried to tackle serious subjects.

Rachel: I’m thinking of Ben Kunkel and Indecision, I remember that being a big…

Jess: That’s a novel.

Rachel: Right and I remember that being a big discussion: about how if that had been written by a woman and her relationships and her struggles with self-identity in her mid-twenties, would that have been covered and packaged differently?

Jess: I don’t think that’s a good example because he did do serious journalism and well lets see if he tries to write a serious book.

Glynnis: My comparison with Julia is that no she didn’t cheat, because she was very clear of what she wanted to accomplish and is very unapologetic abut chasing it. So she is what she is, and its not like she’s trying to be something else. But who would you say is the male comparison to Julia Allison?

Caroline: Like Toby Young?

Jess: Would you take it seriously if Toby Young wrote a book about (unitelligable). Absolutely not. Again that’s a question of branding, and if you get behind one sort of public image really strongly then it is hard to dig out from that no matter what it is.

Glynnis: I’d be surprised if Julia wanted to write about the financial crisis. I could see Julia wanting to write about the hunt for love in 20 years, or her version of it. She’s been very clear.

Caroline: On the other hand I’ve been covering Facebook and Google, if I suddenly wanted to turn around and write a book about dating, people would be like “When was the last date that you’d been on?”

Anna: I don’t think it’s the same thing: you’d be taken seriously because you’ve written about serious stuff and they’d be sure you could tackle something lighter. I think you could write a book about dating if you wanted to. I don’t know what to say about Julia Allison because I don’t know who she wants to be.

Rachel: What about writing about her on Jezebel?

Anna: I don’t.

Rachel: What struck me about the Jezebel comments is that it’s a lot less snarky place than the classic Gawker partaking.

Anna: Really? Well we don’t write about Julia Allison on the site. I just don’t find her that interesting and the times that we have people haven’t liked it. Not like we could only put up posts because people liked it but ultimately I don’t find her that interesting…she’s just this incarnation of something else that’s come before. I’ll put it this way…I won’t run out in the middle of the street in a cheerleading outfit to get attention, I’m not going to expect that someone’s going to take me seriously for something else down down the line: a week later, a month later, a year later. That may be unfair, but that’s the way that it is, and that’s how I kind of think about her. There are certain things that are hard to take seriously with regards to her because of those kinds of stunts.

Glynnis: I don’t think if Andrew Ross Sorkin ran out in the middle of the street in a cheerleading outfit…

Caroline: I think that there’s being taken seriously, and there is injecting humor in what you do. If Julia was running out in a Soho street in a cheerleading outfit to expose something (laughter)…I can’t think of the exact angle on that, but I think that silly stunts absolutely have their place in serious journalism.

Rachel: Well A.J. Jacobs book, The Guinea Pig Diaries just came out. He’s made his publishing name as a journalist as such.

Glynnis: So did George Plimpton.

Anna: When you bring sexism into it it changes though.

Rachel: And Julia Allison, on no planet could be perceived as overlooked.

Anna: Well I’d say in New York, she’s definitely New York.

Rachel: There could be a symposium on Julia Allison.

Glynnis: Not just Julia Allison though, but her whole brand of journalism.

Jess: But I still think it has to do with sexism that the way you present yourself. If you present yourself in a totally un-serious way, then to ask people to ignore your previous acts is just not right. People absorb your behavior. So I think that insisting that people forget about something you’ve done and trying to foist upon them – and I’m not talking about Julia Allison I’m talking just generally – your past acts and behavior matter. That’s just life.

Audience member: So you’re saying that the negative feedback that Julia gets – and she’s got some crazy people that really tear her down – that’s more of an extension of her focus on dating as opposed to that she’s just a woman?

Jess: No, look at Neal Pollack who writes about his hits(?), he’s been torn to shreds. I think that’s anyone who writes about their personal life on the Internet is opening a major can of worms.

Caroline: Who is that Times writer who wrote about getting his house foreclosed?

Jess: Oh yeah, he got ripped to shreds. So I think its more if you’re putting yourself out there and exposing your personal life.

Rachel: So on the one hand, exposing yourself and writing from a first-person perspective is attractive, and on the other hand it will be attractive to commenters bashing you. So there is that ying and yang point going on here.

Audience member: So there was a recent review of the Helen Gurley Brown biography and it wasn’t really interested in the book, it was just a pretty severe takedown of Helen Gurley Brown. I wanted to get your thoughts: Do you think she was just misunderstood or maybe there was something redeeming?

Glynnis: When did she start? I wonder if she’s going to start to factor into Mad Men.

Anna: I think it was set in the late 50s. I don’t think she covered Cosmo until the 60s…her book Sex and the Single Girl came out in ’62.

Glynnis: Don’t you think that Peggy is going to have a Helen Gurley Brown thing? I just feel like while Betty is in the suburbs living the Feminist Mystique, Peggy is in in the city about to live the Sex and the Single Girl.

Anna: All Gurley Brown’s get their pulps(?). So on the one hand she’s about having sex for sex’s sake and enjoyment, and on the other hand she’s about sleeping with married men, or having a sugar daddy, and only eating so many calories a day so that you weigh so many pounds.

Glynnis: I don’t read Cosmo, I never did, but by the time I was a teenager Gurley Brown’s moment was 20 years before. So i have no concept of how freeing she might have been to a woman in her 20s in 1965. That’s just so far outside my realm of experience that what she was to me was like this older, skinny woman for a magazine I rarely read.

Jess: I remember the Saturday Night Live skit where Rachel Dratch plays her and its really horrifying.

Glynnis: But I don’t diminish how important she must have been to women in a far more socially restricted world than I personally experience.

Anna: That’s a difficult question, because none of us grew up with a Cosmopolitan ever that she edited. But if you look at the old Cosmos they’re actually quite fascinating, because her editors let her go all over the place. You can see that she was writing and drinking martinis or drunk or something, and is hilarious. Her pieces are really really long, twice the length of an of an op-ed today, they’re text-heavy, and there would be this picture of her in her office and she’s obviously batty or drunk, as I said. She seems now more like a relic in a way, and I don’t mean that as an insult. I think I need to ask my mom about her, is what I realized.

Rachel: I didn’t read the takedown: Cosmo was very informative to me when i was 15, and all in a good way. Probably she didn’t deserve as evil a takedown as it sounds like it was, because it’s hard to be the first anything woman. She probably did the unpopular, and is likely a mix, but on balance her going first made a difference to the people going behind her.