What ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ Taught Us About Ambition

What did a generation of strivers learn about what it means to get ahead from “The Devil Wears Prada”? Was Miranda Priestly, the famed and famously demanding fashion editor at the center of the movie – in many ways the original “girlboss” – an aspirational or cautionary figure? In this episode, Susie and Jess revisit the blockbuster 2006 film and talk about their own careers and changing relationships to ambition.

GUEST:

• Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former executive editor at Teen Vogue and author of the upcoming book, The Myth of Making It

FOR MORE: 

• The Devil Wears Prada Oral History (Entertainment Weekly)
• The Demise of the Girlboss (New York Magazine)
• The Girlboss Has Left the Building (The Atlantic)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
There's a scene at the end of The Devilware's Prada
where the character Miranda Priestley, a famed and famously demanding
fashion editor, gives her young assistant Andy a rare compliment.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
I see a great deal of myself and you.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
This comment comes after a turning point in the movie
where Miranda has just saved her own career by brutally
betraying someone who has been enormously loyal to her. So
Andy is horrified by this comparison, and she rejects it.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
She says she's not sure that she wants to be
like Miranda.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
I mean, what if I don't want to live the
way you live?

Speaker 4 (00:36):
And it'll be ridiculous, Andrea, everybody wants this, Everybody wants
to be us.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
But does everybody want the glamorous, punishing life at the
center of this story. That's the central question of the
movie and this episode. I'm Susie Banacarum and I'm Jessica Bennett,
and this is in retrospect, where each week we revisit
a cultural moment from the past that shaped.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Us and that we just can't stop thinking about.

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Today, we're talking about the Doublewaar's product and the way
it depicts women's ambition. But we're also talking about how
a cautionary tale about sacrificing everything for your job ended
up glamorizing.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Exactly that dress.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
As we've said, we're talking about the Doublewars product today,
a movie starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway and this
fraught relationship they have. Anne Hathaway is a recent college grad,
it's her first job, and Meryl Streep plays her famous
and powerful boss. And this is a circumstance you and
I are somewhat familiar with in lots of different variations.

Speaker 3 (01:46):
No comment, no comments, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Yeah, We've both worked for some famous and powerful women,
some not so famous, but certainly complicated women.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
Is how I would describe a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
I think that's partially why I feel so connected to
the movie. And it is a movie I have seen
countless times. It came out in two thousand and six,
and I honestly can't tell you when I first saw it.
I don't remember if I saw it in the theater.
But have you seen the movie? Do you remember kind
of what you thought about it or what you've thought
about it over the years.

Speaker 5 (02:19):
I mean, I, of course saw it, and I think
it came out at a time when I had just
moved to New York and had dreams of becoming a journalist,
so I was very interested from that perspective.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
Obviously, it's like not that true to life, but it's.

Speaker 5 (02:32):
Really fun, though I forget a lot of the details.

Speaker 3 (02:36):
So can you give me the cliff Notes version?

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, I think the more recent version is spark Notes,
but same thing. I will give you a little summary
of the movie. So Andy, who I've said is played
by Anne Hathaway, has moved to New York right after
college to pursue a career in journalism.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
She was the editor in chief of her college paper.

Speaker 1 (02:56):
She has this dream of working at the New Yorker
or someplace serious like that.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Of course, this is what all my students want to
do also.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
So Andy goes to interview at a big publishing company,
thinking she's going to get a job at some serious place,
but randomly the hr person tells her there's availability to
be the second assistant to Miranda Priestley, who is the
editor in chief of Runway Magazine, which is a fashion magazine.
That character is played by Meryl Streep and is widely

(03:27):
understood to be a very thinly veiled depiction of Anna Wintour,
who is the famed longtime editor of Vogue magazine. Okay,
so despite this amazing opportunity, Andy knows nothing about.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Fashion or fashion magazines.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
She gets the job because she sort of has this
moment while she's standing in Miranda Priestley's office where she
pitches herself as hardworking and smart and Miranda decides to
give her the job.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Okay, so we all know Miranda's just brutal as a boss,
but paint us a little bit of a picture. She's
pretty terrible.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
She's cold and demanding, and she makes really unreasonable requests
that are essentially impossible, Like at one point, she demands
that Andy find a flight for her during a literal hurricane,
and it's like, why can't you get me out of here?
And then there's another example where she demands that Andy
get her the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter

(04:24):
book for her daughters, and Andy actually achieves that one.
But Andy is determined to survive this job for at
least a year because everyone keeps telling her that a
million girls would kill for this job and that if
she can just stick it out and succeed that Miranda
will be able to help her get those serious jobs
she really.

Speaker 5 (04:42):
Wants, which is not dissimilar from what these types of
bosses actually do promise in real life.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
No, I mean, it's exactly what these bosses do promise.
So initially she fumbles, and she doesn't really hide her
disdain for fashion, Like there's all these moments where they're
doing fittings and she's kind of like making a face
or snickering, and that is very much noted by Miranda,
who finds it super annoying. And then there's this first

(05:09):
assistant played by Emily Blunt. So Andy is the second assistant.
Miranda has two assistants, and that's a seniority thing. The
first assistant is more senior than the second assistant. And
Emily Blunt is just hilarious in this. She steals a
lot of the scenes, and she just cannot understand Andy,
like she doesn't think she's deserving of the job, she
doesn't understand her fashion. She's just kind of like, Miranda's

(05:31):
decided to hire you, but I'm just putting up with
you essentially.

Speaker 4 (05:35):
I'm sorry, do you have some prior commitment, some hideous
skirt convention you have to go to.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
But one of the other fashion editors, played by Stanley Tucci,
takes Andy under his wing and she goes from being
this unfashionable rube to hot and stylish.

Speaker 3 (05:49):
Of course, could have predicted that.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
And in the process she becomes seduced by the environment
and this desire to please Miranda. So that is the
context of the movie, and that is where we are
when we get to this scene that we played at
the top of the episode.

Speaker 5 (06:04):
Yeah, okay, so the scene. What drew you to this
scene in particular? Well, I love the scene.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
I think I always have, but over time I've become
kind of more drawn to it because it really encapsulates
for me, the central tension in many women's careers, in
my career, in the careers I see of my friends,
I think, when you're young, you do want this life.
You want to be hugely successful, you want these big jobs,
but you don't really fully understand the sacrifices you're going

(06:31):
to make.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
You're told that there.

Speaker 1 (06:32):
Will be sacrifices, but as you go through you see
what that really means for your life, and that is
really complicated. So this dynamic, this tension between them is
a reflection of I think something that we all struggle
with internally, really.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
And the scene begins where this tension is playing out. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
So the scene comes at the end of the movie
after Andy has gone through her transformation.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah, her fashion transformation.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
Now she's wearing like amazing clothes and has like a
great haircut, and she does look I will say, imtegrable.
And she has seemingly bought into this world and kind
of in a Stockholm syndrome kind of way, you see
that all of her relationships are in tatters. She keeps
ditching her friends and family, and she and her boyfriend
have just broken up because she's so obsessed with her.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
Work, obsessed with their work.

Speaker 5 (07:23):
I feel like that's also another frequent plot line and
these types of things. It's like the boyfriend can't Hannah,
how devoted to your career?

Speaker 3 (07:30):
Yeah, I can't handle it.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
And they're in Paris for fashion Week, and even coming
on this trip to Paris is supposed to be an
indication that Andy has lost her way because it is Emily,
the first assistant who is supposed to go on this trip.
It is a huge deal to go to Paris fashion week,
and Emily has been talking about it for months, and

(07:52):
now Andy has gone instead because Miranda has taken a
liking to her and has said to Andy, you can
come to Harris instead, but you have to tell Emily.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Oh right. She's like pitting them against each other.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
And now in Paris, Andy has discovered that Miranda is
about to be fired and replaced by a much younger
European editor, and she's desperately trying to get to Miranda
to warn her. And then, unbeknown st Andy, Miranda has
already been aware of the plan and has outmaneuvered the
publisher by getting the younger editor another job.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
And it's a particularly.

Speaker 1 (08:28):
Brutal move and moment in the movie because Miranda has
saved herself by giving the job that had been promised
to the character played by Stanley Tucci to this other
editor to get her out of the way. And so
Stanley Tucci, who is this really loyal deputy who's worked
for her for years, who you see in an earlier

(08:48):
scene is so excited about this new role now is
stuck still at Runway Magazine with her. And now Andy
and Miranda are in a car together and Andy is reeling
from this because she has seen all of this go down,
and Miranda acknowledges that she saw how hard Andy tried

(09:10):
to warn her and was impressed by that.

Speaker 3 (09:14):
And then she says to her.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
I see a great deal of myself and you.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
And obviously Miranda means this as a compliment, but you
can see just by the reaction on Andy's face that
she does not hear it as a compliment, and she objects.
She says, but I would never do what you did, Miranda,
and Miranda reminds her that she already did to the
other assistant she replaced to go on this trip.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
That was different. I didn't have the choice. No, you choose,
you choose to get in you want this life. Those
choices aren't necessary. But what if this isn't what I want?

Speaker 4 (09:55):
I mean, what if I don't want to live the
way you live? And don't be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this,
everybody wants to be us.

Speaker 5 (10:06):
It's so funny because she truly can't conceive a world
in which people don't want what she has and what
she has to do to hold on to it.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
So yes, yeah, it is. It's a very poignant moment
in that way.

Speaker 5 (10:21):
Because Andy has realized that she's doing the same thing.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Right, And just to finish this moment, when they arrive
at the event they're going to, Andy turns and leaves
Miranda alone. And while she's walking away, Miranda calls her,
and you see Andy look at her phone and it
shows Miranda's name, and Andy throws her phone into a
nearby fountains. Right, so she's like relinquished this life. And

(10:45):
we don't know how she gets back to New York.
We don't know anything else, right, but she has like
walked away in the middle of like the most important
week of Miranda Priestley's year.

Speaker 3 (10:54):
And back in New York, we see.

Speaker 1 (10:57):
Andy go to a job interview at a newspaper, a
serious publication.

Speaker 3 (11:01):
She has said she's back in Dowdy Close, although.

Speaker 1 (11:06):
Still with a much more fashionable touch. I will say,
she still has the fabulous haircut. And so this editor
who is interviewing tells her that he's reached out to
Miranda for a reference, and you kind of see the
look across Andy's face and he says he received a
note back saying that Andy was the biggest disappointment, but
he'd be an idiot not to hire her, and ultimately

(11:27):
that's how we know this is a cautionary tale. Andy
has made a deal with the devil, the devil in Prada.
She's lost her way, she's disappointed her friends and family,
but by the end, she's seen the air of her ways.
She's saved herself, and luckily for her, because it's a fantasy,
she's reaped the benefits anyway, She's now gotten this other

(11:48):
job because Miranda has still given her her seal of approval,
which it is a fantasy, right, So it is the
fantasy we all have that that boss, he was terrible
to us, secretly thought we were amazing, right, Like that
is the redemption we all want.

Speaker 3 (12:07):
So obviously this movie is not high art, right.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
It's like, I don't want to make it seem like
we're going into the ins and outs of this movie,
because I think it's the best movie ever made. But
it is the real chic flick that isn't centered on
a man. It's about a girl and her ambitions and
figure out what she wants. The boyfriend's storyline is a
secondary plot point and they don't end up together, right,
And the role of Miranda Priestley is not something we

(12:33):
saw a lot in this way, right, a woman who
is highly successful, unapologetic, fully in charge, and is really
seen as a leader in this industry.

Speaker 5 (12:44):
Yeah, I mean it reminds me of like there's those
movies about female ambition in a way from the eighties,
Like I'm thinking about Baby Boom and wasn't there Working Girl?

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Yes, those are both movies I love, and they are
both about women trying to make their way in their
working life. But in both those movies, the romance is
still very central, and they do end up with a
hot guy at the end, right, and that is seen
as part of the happy ending. And here the happy
ending is that she gets the job she wants, Right,

(13:14):
That's a really big difference.

Speaker 5 (13:16):
Did you relate to Andy in watching it at the time,
Like I remember, Yes, I too wanted to be a
serious journalist, but I don't know that I ever thought
I would be capable of walking away in the same
way she did.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
I definitely didn't relate to that.

Speaker 1 (13:29):
I mean, I felt like I had to do whatever
it took to succeed, and I was willing to do that.
I was not the girl who was going to throw
her phone in the fountain. I had you know, bills
to pay and student loans and did what I had.

Speaker 5 (13:43):
To Immigrant mentality probably too, Yeah, definitely immigrant mentality.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
I did not feel like I was in a position
where I had a safety net, so there was no
place to go.

Speaker 5 (13:52):
I mean, I guess that's the fantasy aspect of this movie,
is that most people are not in the position to
throw their work phone fountain and just hope they're going
to get another job.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
And I actually I went back to my LinkedIn because
I couldn't remember where I was in my own career.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah. So in two thousand and six, I was working
at ABC News.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
At that time, George Stephanopolis was the host of This Week,
which I think he still hosts sometimes, and I did
have a very intense female boss who definitely had some
Miranda Priestley like demands.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
Okay, so now you have to tell us what kind
of demands those were.

Speaker 1 (14:30):
One thing that seems very Miranda like is that she
needed her daily papers to be unwrinkled, So before she
came in, her assistant would put her papers on her
desk and she had to make sure she got only
unwrinkled copies, which I'm not even sure how you guarantee
that I know she wasn't ironing them. So that's like
a very funny thing. She must have gone to the

(14:50):
newsstand and like selected.

Speaker 5 (14:52):
Oh unwringkled copies of the papers. I thought you just
met papers in general. Oh no, the newspapers, like the newspapers,
So she had to like make sure she wasn't getting
the top one at the BA she'd like dig.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, she doesn't make sure that whatever the New York
Times or New York Posts she was picking up, they
were pristine. And we had a very intense rule that
you would get in trouble for if you didn't. When
you sent an email on the two line, the names
had to be an order of seniority, Like if I
send an email to two people and one of them

(15:24):
was junior, they had to be second on the chain.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
Or I think that I do do that, like I
don't die.

Speaker 5 (15:31):
I don't do it too, but I think that I
do do that because it just kind of makes logical sense.
But I'm sure younger people who wear email was not
their primary with Queen Caanner who came up on slack
probably think that's insane.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah, And I also do that still too, just because
it's locked into my brain.

Speaker 3 (15:47):
I can't get it out of my brain.

Speaker 1 (15:48):
But the other one that I think is particularly funny
is if we had a cake in the office for
someone's birthday, the assistant had to make sure to hand
out the pieces of cake in the order of seniority's.

Speaker 5 (16:01):
So many ways, so like true hierarchy to everything, like
very higher.

Speaker 1 (16:06):
It was this kind of obsession with order right like
it things had to be a very specific way, which
just were not chill at all.

Speaker 5 (16:14):
I will say though, that with so many of these stories,
it's like there are plenty of male bosses that do
this kind of shit too, maybe not with the cake,
or maybe it's like they're the menus just playing out
in different ways, but we don't necessarily call them demanding
in the same way we just call them.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
Then, well, I will tell you a great story I know,
like this about a mail boss at ABC is. I
have a friend who was an assistant to an executive
producer and he used to make her follow him to
the bathroom and he would continue to shout notes at
her through the door and she'd have to like take
notes while he was peeing, which is disgusting.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
But yeah, I don't remember anyone ever calling that guy
a diva.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
And to be clear, this is a woman who I
enjoyed working for enough that I went to work for
her again. Right, She gets demanding and difficult, but I
saw that as just the way you had to be
to be in these jobs. I didn't have a lot
of examples of people in these jobs who were kind.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
And compassionate and wanted to like coddle me. This was
the deal.

Speaker 5 (17:15):
And also, for what it's worth, if you're running a
company or whatever the job may be, you probably don't
have time to coddle your assistant and on like, on
some level, maybe I'm sympathetic a little bit to some
of this. Cancel me, am, I remembering correctly that this

(17:42):
movie was based on a book.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yes, it was based on a best selling book of
the same name. It was written by Lauren Weisberger, and
the book came out in two thousand and three. Okay,
And the book was itself a cultural phenomenon.

Speaker 3 (17:55):
It was really popular.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
It came out at the peak of the chick lit era,
and most relevant is that Weisberger had actually been Anna
Wintor's assistant at Vogue, which is why it was so
widely understood that Winter Tour was the inspiration for Priestley.

Speaker 5 (18:10):
It's probably worth spending a little time for those who
might not know as much as we do talking about
who Anna Winter is.

Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, so she is not just the editor of a
fashion magazine. She has literally been called the single most
important figure in the three hundred billion dollar global fashion industry.
As you might expect from a famous fashion editor, she
has a very distinctive look. You know, this classic bob
that she's had for years, with fangs. She's often seen

(18:39):
wearing sunglasses. She's always flawless. And I was actually thinking,
I wonder if I've ever seen her in casual clothes. Yeah,
so I humbled Anna Wintour and jeans, And apparently she
does have genes because I found some pictures of it,
and she looks great in them. But she is sort
of in your mind if you've seen lots of images
of her, which I have, but I'm sure you have too,

(19:01):
this very polished person. And she became the Vogue editor
in chief in nineteen eighty eight.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Isn't that crazy? Thirty five years ago? Is she the
longest servant?

Speaker 5 (19:13):
Like that's a huge amount of time for an editor
in chief To be clear.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
I mean, most people last two years in a job
in media, right, So the fact that she's been a
top the most famous fashion magazine in the world for
thirty five years is really an achievement and just wild.
I mean, she's been in that job longer than a
lot of people have been alive. And she was promoted
in twenty thirteen to Conde Nasts artistic director, so she

(19:38):
doesn't just lead Vogue anymore. She is the editorial leader
of all the titles of Conde Nast, which include The
New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Wired and a bunch
of other things.

Speaker 5 (19:49):
Yeah. I remember watching that documentary about her. What was
it this September Issue.

Speaker 1 (19:53):
Yes, there is a documentary about her called The September Issue.

Speaker 3 (19:56):
It was released in two thousand and nine.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
And the thing about Anna is she's very much seen
as a visionary, as someone who can see things coming
down the line and lead rather than follow. So she's
credited with seeing the power of celebrity culture really early
in the cycle and realizing before other people did that
it made sense to put celebrities on the cover. You
used to be models on the cover of fashion magazine.

(20:20):
It's Anna who's really credited with changing that.

Speaker 5 (20:24):
And she runs the met Gallet too, right, which is
like the biggest celebrity event of all.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Yes, she throws the net Galut, which is a benefit
for the Metropolitan Museum of Arts Costume Institute.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
It's the first Monday in.

Speaker 5 (20:35):
May, which means fashions, the biggest night is finally here.

Speaker 1 (20:39):
You know, just running that would make her a huge
cultural figure. Celebrities are desperate for invites to that. Yes,
so it's really hard to overstate her power and influence.
But also she is famously inaccessible. She is famously kind
of known to be someone with very high standards.

Speaker 5 (20:55):
Isn't the rumor that if you are an assistant or
a junior editor person at Vogue, you are not allowed
to make eye contact with her in the elevator?

Speaker 3 (21:03):
That's what I've always heard.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
Yes, I've heard that you're not allowed to say hello
to her or make eye contact. And frankly, that's been
true of other bosses I have had, So that does
not surprise me as a rumor.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
I feel like that could very much be real.

Speaker 5 (21:17):
Okay, so how close to reality do we think the
book and the movie an actual Anna Winter are.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
That's a great question. The Devilware's product is technically fiction.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
So I reached out to Samita Muka Patai, who worked
for Anna Wintour as the executive editor at teen Vogue,
and it happens to also be the author of an.

Speaker 3 (21:35):
Upcoming book on women and work and ambition.

Speaker 1 (21:38):
Of course, Samita was an editor, so she obviously had
a very different job than Andy did in the movie.
But here's how Samita describes being interviewed by Anna Wintour.

Speaker 3 (21:48):
I was very anxious to meet her.

Speaker 6 (21:51):
It just was never a position I ever thought I'd
be in which would be to interview with her. And
when I had that opportunity, unlike Andy, I researched like
crazy for how I would show up that day.

Speaker 3 (22:01):
You prepared, Yeah, I prepared.

Speaker 6 (22:03):
And there were multiple articles written about what to wear
and what not to wear the first time.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
You meet Anna. So what are you supposed to wear
and what are you not supposed to wear? Right?

Speaker 6 (22:11):
Well, interestingly, a lot of the articles say not to
wear black, that she doesn't like black, and this has
kind of been like a long rumor for her that
she's just like prefers color and brightness. Upon meeting her like,
I don't think it would have mattered at all what
I wore, and so it was kind of like it
was like deeply humbling to be like, oh, it's like
this big character that exists that's larger than life character,

(22:33):
but you're actually just like a person that's trying to
make the proper business and editorial decision for this brand
that you oversee. It was a big wake up moment
because I planned so much for what I was gonna wear,
and I bought myself a Gucci handbag and I.

Speaker 3 (22:46):
Practically wore it hanging around my neck.

Speaker 6 (22:49):
None of it was necessary, Like she really just wanted
to talk about my editorial experience and like my taste
in like culture. So it was definitely one of those
myth busting moments obviously, and she wasn't wearing sunglasses.

Speaker 3 (23:01):
Either, by the way.

Speaker 5 (23:05):
Okay, I love all the behind the scenes interview stuff,
but I have to say, the points to me to
made about Andy not preparing for her interview is like
the least relatable thing to us as journalists, Like why
would you not prepare for an interview where you're trying
to prove you want to be a serious journalist?

Speaker 3 (23:21):
Yeah, it's so weird to me, Right, you would at
least just do some research. And also it's hard.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
To believe that any woman in America who wanted to
work in media would just not know who the editor
of the biggest fashion magazine in the world was. Like,
that is still a big job in media any person
in America.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, it feels true.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
But the idea that Anna is actually a much more
complex character than the cultural characterization of her isn't surprising, right.

Speaker 3 (23:45):
Or the cultural caricature of her in a way. Yeah,
and that's something that I feel like you discuss a
lot in your work.

Speaker 5 (23:51):
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's something we keep
coming up against in this podcast, which is there's often
more complexity to the characters we're looking at, actually with women.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, And I think we've seen that a lot with
people like Robin Gibvens, whose identities are so flattened by
these characterizations of them, or Britney Spears who had her
complexity denied and was just dismissed as crazy. And in general,
I think that's what's really smart about this movie, going
back to Double Warsprata, which is that it takes something

(24:21):
that is also dismissed as frivolous and for women fashion
fashion magazines, and it explores the ways in which they're
actually serious and worthy of examination.

Speaker 5 (24:31):
Yeah, isn't there a famous scene where Miranda Priestley sort
of schools Andy in how she got her sweater or
something like that.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yes, the speech you're thinking of is the Cyrillian speech,
which is a color blue. They're in a meeting and
someone has presented Miranda with two belts, and Andy has snickered,
and so those two belts look exactly the same to me,
and she's sort of expecting everyone to be like, haha, yes,
but Miranda is really icy in her retort.

Speaker 7 (24:56):
You select, I don't know that lumpy blue sweater, for instance,
because you're trying to tell the world that you take
yourself too seriously to care about what you put on
your back.

Speaker 2 (25:05):
But what you don't know is that.

Speaker 3 (25:07):
That sweater is not just blue.

Speaker 7 (25:09):
It's not torquois, it's not lapist, it's actually ceruleum.

Speaker 1 (25:13):
And it was introduced on this runway and that runway
until you fished it out of some bargain basement. It's
like a very funny moment, and that speech has become
pretty famous because it does, in a really succinct way,
explain why fashion does have meaning in people's lives, why
our lives are all impacted by the way fashion works.

Speaker 5 (25:33):
Right, And so she's basically saying, you think you chose
that sweater, but actually, let me tell you that sweater
chose you.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Yeah, exactly, Susie.

Speaker 5 (25:47):
I want to go back for a moment to the
Miranda character in the book, because the book is actually
pretty vitriolic.

Speaker 1 (25:54):
I mean I reread the book last night, actually, and
it is so vitriolic, like kind of in a shocking
way to me now looking back it points book Andy
calls book Miranda a bitch. She talks about how much
she hates her. I mean, my takeaway from the book
is that the author hated working for Anna Wintour.

Speaker 3 (26:15):
Not a lot of complexity, It's like, that's what it is.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
Yeah, it's a pretty one dimensional character and she's just awful.
And interestingly, the limo scene is not in the book
at all. The ending plays out completely differently. So in
the book, the way their relationship ends is that Andy
says to Miranda, fuck you, Miranda, fuck you.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (26:40):
She's fired obviously for swearing at her boss. And the
whole thing in the movie about how Miranda writes her
a good reference and there's kind of this redemption moment
from Miranda that doesn't happen in the book at all.

Speaker 5 (26:53):
Okay, so this is like a revenge totally essentially, like
She's She's chin.

Speaker 3 (26:58):
It's like a revenge fantasy. Right. I don't think this
happened in real life.

Speaker 1 (27:02):
So I think this is like the book she's written
about what she wishes she had done when she left Vogue, right,
I mean, that's what it feels like.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Is a reader for sure?

Speaker 5 (27:11):
So do people like this book? Is the book bad?
What's the response?

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Like?

Speaker 1 (27:15):
I mean, the book is controversial, much more so than
the film because it is really a takedown. And I
guess at this time it was seen as sort of
bad manners to gossip about your former boss in this way,
which feels kind of quaint now like in the post
Cocker era.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
But it's like literally aronde.

Speaker 5 (27:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (27:33):
But The New York Times actually had two negative reviews
of this book, and the first one was written by
famed critic Janet Maslin where she refers to it as
a mean spirited gotcha of a book, and the other
one is called Anna Dearist, and it has this line
that is so interesting because I think in a lot
of ways it encapsulates kind of what we're talking about

(27:54):
in a larger sense. Here she had a ringside seat
at one of the great editorial franchises, but she seems
to have understood almost nothing about the isolation and pressure
of the job her boss was doing, or what it
might cost a person like Miranda Priestley to become a
character like Miranda Priestley.

Speaker 5 (28:10):
Hmmm, I bet that was written by a woman.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Yes, it was written by a woman, And I think
it is the truth that these jobs do come with
isolation and pressure.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
It is a reality that it's not quite so simple.

Speaker 1 (28:23):
And so the movie really makes an effort to humanize
Miranda in a lot of ways.

Speaker 3 (28:30):
Right moving Miranda is more complicated. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
The director has actually said that early versions of the
script even felt too vengeful, and I suspect what he
is leaving kind of unsaid in that is that's because
the book was vengeful, right, It was this like really
mean spirited book. So when it comes time to make
the movie, the movie is being made by people who
probably have had these senior positions right there, are two

(28:53):
scenes that give you a real window into Miranda's personal
life and what her career has cost her on that front.
In the movie, at one point, Miranda is having an
argument with her husband and Andy walks in, and the
argument is about how she's missed a lunch with him,
and he says, you know, I could tell everyone was
looking at me and thinking, there he is waiting for
her again, which feels, you know, like a thing a

(29:16):
lot of women go through when they're more successful than
their partner. And then later in Paris, there's this very
vulnerable scene where she tells Andy she's getting a divorce.
Miranda's without her usual armor, she has no makeup on,
and she's in a robe, and she talks about knowing
what they will write about her. Dragon Lady, career obsessed

(29:37):
no Clean, drives away another mister Priestley, and she tears
up as she laments what it will do to her daughters.

Speaker 5 (29:44):
Actually, I had forgotten until you were mentioning the Harry
Potter part of the movie that she even had daughters
like that too. Is an interesting thing because you expect
a woman of the stature, or a woman who behaves
like this to be this career as who doesn't have
a family, right.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
And what's kind of interesting in this moment in the
movie is that when Andy expresses sympathy for her and says,
you know, is there anything else I can do? Miranda
kind of snaps back into being her self, you know,
for lack of a better way of putting it, and
she just says, yes, your job, And that is kind
of the encapsulation, right, Like she's had this moment of vulnerability,

(30:21):
but then she has to keep going, Like what choice
does she have? You know, she is the editor of
Runway at Paris Fashion Week.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
She can't fall apart.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
And you know, EW did an oral history of the
film and the director said something that I thought was
really interesting. He said that in his vision, Miranda is
the heroine of the piece, not the villain, because it's
a coming of age story for Andy to learn about
what it takes to be great at something, Isn't.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
That So that's interesting?

Speaker 5 (30:50):
Yes, So it's really about how she Miranda was ultimately successful,
not just a terrible visit, right, Like, it's really.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
A movie about what it costs to be Miranda and
teaching Andy that she may not think it's okay, but
Eventually she's gonna have to make some of these hard
choices too, And that is really why the Limo moment
is so critical to the film and why I chose it.
It's fundamentally a film about what it costs to have
this kind of life, this kind of career, the isolation,

(31:20):
the pressure, and that's something I think Meryl Streep really
conveys in this portrayal, and why in a lot of ways,
Andy feels hopelessly naive to me. You know, even when
I saw this the first time, it seemed to me
like Andy had a lot of growing up to do.

Speaker 5 (31:51):
So Susie, we you know, obviously both related to this movie.
I think when we first saw it in a different
way than we might now, Like back then we were
aspiring journalists or young journalists, and now we're more the
established journalists. So I was curious for you, I mean,
you have run really big newsrooms, You've been a boss

(32:12):
in a lot of these jobs. What do you think
the costs of that success have been for you? If any?

Speaker 1 (32:18):
I think for me the costs are really personal in
terms of just how I operate in the world, Like
it takes a lot out of you just physically to
do these jobs, you have to be willing to work
just an enormous amount of hours, and you have to
be emotionally available to a very large group of people

(32:41):
because you're managing a big team, and all of those
things take a toll on you, right. I think there
are people that can do these jobs that don't have
that experience, that learn to have a set of clear
walls where they're not sort of taking in a lot
of the energy around them. Or frankly, I think we

(33:02):
know because there have been studies that a lot of
leaders are actually sociopaths or psychopaths.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
I think is what the studies say that says leaders
are sociopaths.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, there's one study I remember reading the claim that
as many as one in five business leaders have some
psychopathic tendencies.

Speaker 3 (33:19):
So that's twenty percent. I'm so surprised by that.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
So I think if you are able to have that
kind of separation from you and the people whose lives
you you know, to some degree hold in your hands
when you're managing a large team, I think it can
be a lot easier. But for me personally, that has
been a real struggle, and I think it kind of

(33:43):
has re oriented me in terms of how I think
about ambition and whether or not I want to have
these big jobs, whether or not I think these big
jobs make sense anymore.

Speaker 5 (33:57):
Yeah, I mean, I think that the headline here is
that we hold women leaders to higher standards. Like I
guess Miranda Priestley, I don't know that she was in
a position like you were speaking of where she really
cared about the emotional well being of her entire staff.
It was more like she was in charge of she
had these assistants. But like, we expect women leaders to

(34:18):
be nice, and we don't expect male leaders to be nice.
So was Miranda Priestley kind of a bit sometimes? Like yeah,
but if she was a man, would we call her
a bitch or would we just call her demand decisive?

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Right?

Speaker 5 (34:28):
And so you know, she clearly put andy or her
assistance or whatever in precarious situations.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
But that's happened a million times before.

Speaker 5 (34:38):
And so I think that what me know is that
there's this likability trade off for women, like the more
power they gained, the less we like them, statistically proven
time and time again. And it applies to business or
it applies to politics, and so women are always having
to adjust their demeanor to try to make up for this.
And I think what Miranda Priestley, he represents as someone

(35:01):
who wasn't willing to adjust her demeanor, and thus she
was kind of like a frigid ice cool.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
Ice queen pitch. But is that fair? You know, It's
a little more complicated than that.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Yeah, And I do think this is something when you're
a woman in a leadership position, you're constantly trying to
thread the needle on right, because on the one hand,
you need to be somewhat decisive and you need to
be someone who moves things through. You can't just be
like spending all your time being emotionally accessible or whatever.

(35:31):
But on the other hand, I think my entire career
I have been given the note that I need to
soften myself. I need to be less blunt, I need
to work a little less quickly and assume that people
aren't always following Like. Those are notes I've gotten repeatedly
in my career, and I think I really struggle with

(35:54):
that still because I am not naturally like a very soft,
sweet person, you know. It's like I am pretty blunt
and straightforward, and I sort of think that's one of
my strengths.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
Well, that's kind of what you need to be a leader,
in fact.

Speaker 1 (36:13):
But as I've gotten older, I can see when it
has an impact on someone, and I try and dial
it down because I recognize that not everyone can deal
with that well.

Speaker 3 (36:23):
And that's part of the pressure.

Speaker 5 (36:24):
Right You're in charge of all these people and to
some degree they're well being, but you have to discipline.
There is hard stuff. Sometimes you have to do layoffs.
Thankfully I've never had to do that, but I can
imagine that's hard no matter who you are.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
Oh god, I can't believe you've never had to do
a layoff. That is really lucky in this media environment.
But just even aside from those pressures, it's just hard
to show up as your best self every single day. Right,
Sometimes you just don't, or you make mistakes and the
stakes feel higher because you're the boss and everyone's paying attention.

Speaker 5 (36:56):
Right, Like a bad day can have more extreme consequences.

Speaker 1 (36:59):
Yeah, I mean everyone I know in the leadership position
struggles with that at times. And actually we have a
friend who runs a newsroom who said to me recently,
it's not fun to be in charge anymore. And that
makes sense to me. Right, people are just so self
conscious all the time. They're so worried they're going to
do something that's going to get them canceled in some way.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
Which I guess is good on the one hand, like
that we're all more conscious of creating the kind of
workplaces we want to be in, but it's also complicated.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
I think part of the reason I have sometimes felt
like I'm groping around in the dark trying to figure
out how to be a good leader is that there
just weren't a lot of great.

Speaker 3 (37:39):
Examples of leadership.

Speaker 1 (37:41):
You know. Most of the leadership I saw was Miranda
Priestley type leadership.

Speaker 3 (37:45):
From men and women.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
So it's not like there were all these models for
me that I could be like, Okay, here's who I'm
trying to be. I was sort of trying to figure
it out on my own. I'm still trying to figure
it out to some degree.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Yeah, and there's still not great models, to be honest.

Speaker 5 (37:59):
I mean, I think that's why we've seen a lot
of women leaders who rise up really quickly and then
immediately get shot down. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
And that actually leads me to something I want to
talk about, which is the whole girl boss thing from
a few years ago. I've always joked that all these
toxic girl bosses were just women who saw the Devilwar's
praduct and instead of seeing it as a cautionary tale,
they saw it as a path to success.

Speaker 5 (38:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
They agreed with Miranda Priestley that everybody wanted this life,
that for better or for worse, she is a depiction
of unapologetic female power, and we don't see that a lot.

Speaker 3 (38:34):
So they emulated it. Wait, should we define the girl boss?

Speaker 5 (38:40):
So this was a term that was popularized in twenty
fourteen when Sophia Amarusso, who had founded a wildly successful
company called Nasty Gut, wrote a book called girl Boss,
and girl Boss was framed as the reaction to lean In,
which was Sheryl Sandberg's blockbuster.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
Debating Sparti shrl Samdberg, her brand new book is generating
a kind of feminist firestorm.

Speaker 4 (39:06):
She calls it leaning in, gunning for the corner office,
not the cubicle.

Speaker 5 (39:11):
And so if Leanan was saying, like, you know, go strive,
rise up the corporate ladder, girl Boss was saying like, no, actually,
you can be scrappy. You don't have to come from money.
You can do it your way, and over time there
was this generation of leaders who rose really quickly and
were very you know, media savvy. They were all very attractive.

(39:34):
They like started populating the cover of every magazine and
they were sort of heralded as this new generation of
women leaders. But a lot of their businesses failed, a
lot of them were criticized for various things, and so
ultimately that term now is more of a pejorative, Like
it's used on TikTok to like criticize people who are
seen as too ambitious. There's that phrase, don't girl boss

(39:55):
too close to the sun. They had too much unbridled
ambition and came to bite them in the ass.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Right, Because there's also that meme gaslight girl boss gatekeep right,
Like it's basically talking about how the girl bosses were
actually also positions of privilege and they sort of gate
kept other people out of the arena. But I feel
like part of what the issue is is there isn't
really a clear definition of what a girl boss is.

Speaker 5 (40:22):
I mean, it's a fake word, Like it's a made
up word that was created as a joke and then
became a real thing, And like why are we calling
women girl bosses anyway, they should just be bosses. So
I sort of am like, you can't define that, Like
it came to represent a striver.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
Right, like a very earnest striver who embraced a certain
kind of corporate feminism. Yes, and equality in this world
was just like getting to be the boss. You were
an unapologetically ambitious woman like Miranda, but with a feminine twist.
So like, if you're a girl boss, you're less threatening
in a way. Right, You're certainly not the crazed, desperate
career women of the eighties we talked about in the

(40:59):
news Week marriage episode. Right, You're not Glennon Close in
Fatal Attraction. You're like a fashionable and millennial pink feminist.

Speaker 5 (41:07):
Well, and in some ways the media and society has
enforced that by adding girl in front of your title.

Speaker 1 (41:19):
But ultimately the girl boss, as you said, was pretty limited.
And Amanda Mull wrote a great piece in the Atlantic
where she talked about why that was. So there was
some idea that there was equality just based on advancement, right,
it kind of ties capitalism up with female equality, which
I think feels inherently flawed. And then she said something
that I thought was really smart, she said. The girl

(41:42):
Boss argued that the professional success of ambitious young women
was a two birds, one stone type of activism. Their
pursuit of power could be rebranded as a righteous quest
free quality, and the success of female executives and entrepreneurs
would lift up the women below them. But that's not
really what we In fact, even the person who popularized

(42:05):
the term girl boss, this woman, Sophia Marusso. She eventually resigned.
The company went into bankruptcy a couple of years after
that book came out, and there were a number of
complaints about discrimination and toxic management, accompanied by lawsuits from
her employees.

Speaker 5 (42:23):
Yeah, I mean, I think it's slightly more complex, Like
a lot of these stories and quote unquote downfalls were
flattened a bit in the media narrative. I'm actually profiling
Sophia now for a piece for l and so it's
been interesting to actually dig into what really happened versus
how the media that I hate saying, yea, we are

(42:45):
the media portrayed it. But certainly it represented something right,
and I think she wasn't the only one. In fairness
to her, there were a slew of other examples of
female leaders who were lauded as girl bosses or who
leaned into that branding eventually came under scrutiny and were
forced to step away from the companies they founded. Just like,
off the top of my head, there's the CEO of Glossier,

(43:08):
the luggage brand away to that woman who ran things Underwear.
I think you know, there was a shift at a
certain point in what was perceived as acceptable boss behavior,
particularly for these companies and these founders who had brandoned
themselves as socially conscious, if not overtly feminists.

Speaker 1 (43:25):
And I think also what you're saying is is that
these power structures were built by men. So if these
women were replicating these power structures, it wasn't like they
were doing something unique. It's just the case that if
you're a woman, you're more likely to face an immediate backlash.
Look at Elon Musk, I mean, he has had a
million of these kinds of complaints around him.

Speaker 5 (43:47):
Right, Or Adam Newman of WeWork or Travis Kalanek of Uber.

Speaker 3 (43:52):
And all three of those men are fine.

Speaker 1 (43:54):
And actually Semita muka pot I, who we spoke to earlier,
and as I mentioned, is right a book about women
work and Ambition also talks about the hypocrisy she sees
in the Girl Boss downfall.

Speaker 6 (44:09):
I'm always cautious when we too eagerly tear women down.
I'm not going to all women's matter this or something obviously,
like women are capable of the same heinous atrocities and
labor oversights as men. But I do think that when
we go after women for a specific behavior that is
considered completely normal in men, you know, my eyebrows raise

(44:30):
a little bit. I'm like, yes, no leader should be toxic.
We should absolutely be creating environments that are equitable. We
should not expect people to work and sacrifice everything. None
of those things are sustainable. They are not things that
we should support in workplaces. But also they are a
result of under resourced environments. Right often women led companies

(44:52):
don't get as much money as male led companies. Definitely
true for startups in a ridiculous way. And then you
add to that these kinds toxic dynamics or leaders that
don't have enough experience to successfully lead in those kinds
of environments, or a lot of times people that would
fit into this Girl Boss mold the very characteristics that
make them good for those roles. Are literally what makes

(45:14):
them bad as leaders. Yeah, you know, so like being
like judiciously committed to your vision, being really good on stage,
being really good in the press. It's like those people
are monsters behind the scenes, right. But putting that to
the side, the majority of women that are starting businesses
aren't these kind of quote unquote girl bosses, right. They're
young women that are trying to find their voice and

(45:35):
their name or a lot of times women become entrepreneurs
because they hit the glass ceiling at work and they
were not getting the recognition that they deserved, and so
they decided to go out on their own. And so,
you know, it is worrisome when you focus a lot
on a small number of people when there's this kind
of like broader ecosystem of women trying to create things

(45:57):
on their own terms.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
Samita has written about how while the girl boss concept
is flawed, it did provide a model for women who
don't always see a path to leadership, like women of
color and people like Samita and I are often excluded
from those kinds of spaces. So there are some things
about this that weren't all bad. But you know, any
model of female leadership generally does eventually face a backlash, right,

(46:34):
I mean, we've just seen that in this country, any
kind of female advancement eventually faces a backlash.

Speaker 5 (46:40):
Yeah, And in fact, I think we're seeing that more now,
Like after these girl Bosses, these so called girl bosses toppled,
a lot of the investment to female founded companies actually
went down.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
By the way, investment to female companies was always really low.
And that's also partially what was kind of interesting about
this being a media sort of created story. Women receive
I think less than two percent of VC funding, so
there were never a huge number of girl Bosses to
start with. So the disproportionate attention they got in the

(47:13):
beginning and then in the backlash is also indicative of
something which is we love a story about a woman
rising and then folly. That's just the thing we love
in this country. Also, it's probably worth noting that, in
terms of the backlash, the Miranda Priestleys or in the

(47:34):
real world, the Animinturs of the world didn't emerge completely unscathed,
but interestingly not really about their years of boundaryless or
potentially inappropriate leadership styles. You know, I think when Black
Lives Matter happened, there was a lot more focus on
the ways in which fashion and fashion magazines really reinforced

(47:58):
a certain kind of wayness. And you know, Anna did
have to apologize for that. In June of twenty twenty,
after facing a lot of criticism, she issued an apology
for not doing enough to address diversity issues at Vogue,
and she said, I want to say plainly that I
know Vogue has not found ways to elevate and give
space to black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators.

(48:21):
We have made mistakes to publishing images or stories that
have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for
those mistakes.

Speaker 5 (48:29):
I mean, pretty big a deal that she like she's
not the type to stand down or apologize.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
I don't think Yeah, I don't think so either, But
I think this was obviously a more serious allegation in.

Speaker 5 (48:42):
Some way well, and then also interesting that she was
able to keep her right.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
She get her job after that apology, right.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
Unlike the girl bosses who've kind of toppled and then
maybe found their way back in some smaller way, she
has stayed on top of the Conde Nast editorial operation.
And obviously I don't want to conflate white supremacy bias
with slightly toxic or even very toxic behavior. This is
obviously a deeper issue, but it shows that she had

(49:08):
sort of gone from being immune to this kind of criticism.
At the point in which the doublewares Prada is made,
it didn't lead to some kind of backlash towards her, like, oh,
I can't believe you treat people this way. It was
considered kind of charming or funny or whatever. And now
she's sort of gotten to the point where she's not
given a pass completely in that way. And actually that
same year, in twenty twenty two, a few months later,

(49:31):
The New York Times published a really lengthy piece asking
if her diversity push had come too late, and former
employees said that Anna had fostered a workplace that sidelined
women of color, and you know, she had helped set
a standard that favored white, eurocentric notions of beauty, which
you know isn't a surprise. That's something you also see
in the movie, right, there's a real central focus in

(49:54):
the movie about a very sort of classic beauty standard.
There's a lot of focus on on thinness in the movie.
There's like this famous line where Emily, the first assistant, says,
I'm just one stomach flew away from my goal weight,
which is like a thing me and my friends always
jokingly say to each other people, Yeah, everyone says that, right,
or or said maybe gen Z say that.

Speaker 3 (50:16):
Yeah, maybe they have more sense than we did.

Speaker 1 (50:18):
And you know, it wasn't just Anna who set these standards,
but as arguably the most powerful person in fashion, she
did play a large role.

Speaker 3 (50:27):
In this kind of centering.

Speaker 5 (50:29):
The other thing, too, is that, in particular for women
of color, but really for any marginalized group, is that
you are often forced to represent your entire demographic.

Speaker 1 (50:39):
Right, So if you're a gay leader, there's also this expectation.
If you're a translator, it's like you're doing more than
just your job. You're representing an entire category of people,
and your success or failure carries out weight. And I
do think to some degree that gets back to this
idea or this thing I was saying at the top,
which is it does feel like you're carrying a lot

(51:00):
of weight in these jobs. You know, you're not immune
to the understanding that you're not just representing yourself. Like
when I was given the opportunity to run newsrooms. I
was almost always the only woman of color or the
first woman of color to have that opportunity in that role.
So I was clear that I wasn't just you know,

(51:21):
doing a job, but I was also representing a kind
of progress. And if I did it badly or if
I embarrassed myself, I.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Was letting down, letting much more than just my own
mental health, you know. I mean, yeah, more than just
yourself or your employees.

Speaker 5 (51:38):
You're letting down like everyone who strived to be in
a role like that and who maybe had not gone
the opportunity well.

Speaker 1 (51:44):
And also the other thing I think is that you
recognize that you are the representation for a lot of people,
like I recognize that.

Speaker 3 (51:52):
In those roles.

Speaker 1 (51:54):
There were women in the newsroom who saw me in
that role and were like, oh, I can do that too.
So if I did it poorly or I was not
a good example, that I was not setting a good
example for them. I was not giving them a path
because they were like, well, I don't want to be
that bitch, you know.

Speaker 3 (52:10):
So, which is terror I mean terrifying. Yeah, it on you,
like I do think it does take a real toll.

Speaker 1 (52:17):
I mean, I'm someone who struggles with a lot of anxiety.
I have in my life had very serious depression, and
it is the case that when I am in these jobs,
it triggers a lot of those issues for me. And
the reason I often leave these jobs is because I've
gotten to a point where I no longer feel like
I can balance and I need to sort of step
away to recenter myself. And I think that is a

(52:42):
good segue into kind of where we are now in
terms of how we're thinking about work as women and
where women's ambition is.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
You know, where does all of this leave us?

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Like if we're not going to be the Miranda Priestley's,
we're not going to be the Sheryl Sandbergs, We're not
going to be the girl bosses, Like what's left now?

Speaker 3 (53:03):
Quiet quitting, great resignation.

Speaker 1 (53:05):
It's like, I feel like it's kind of the end
of ambition in my mind, right, I think, well, do
we want to have it all? I don't want to
have it all anymore. I just want to have enough.

Speaker 5 (53:15):
So, as you know, I am very skeptical of all
of these little phrases enter into No, it's not the
end of ambition.

Speaker 3 (53:25):
And also when we talk about ambition.

Speaker 5 (53:27):
Are we really just talking about women's ambition, like nobody asks,
is it the end of ambition for men? That's true,
And yet these trends, these memes, this kind of linguistic
popularity of terms like yeah, lazy girl jobs or quiet
quitting or I don't dream of labor. Like everything that
you see on TikTok these days, which is essentially anti

(53:49):
work rhetoric, is largely being pushed by people of all genders.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
So I don't know.

Speaker 5 (53:57):
I do think that like gender bias even into the
way that sometimes I talk about this issue. But I
also think that, you know, there's a little bit of
like delightful in a way idealism when it comes to
young people, but also naivity about the fact that like,
all right, kids, you gotta work. Yeah, yeah, I want

(54:21):
to be a lazy girl too. I'd love to bedrod
all day, Like that would be awesome.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
I don't want to have a job. I know, i'd
be great. God, let's just sell there all day. Yeah,
Like what other terms can we insert here?

Speaker 5 (54:32):
You know, but like you still need money to live
and I know that like sure, we'd want to reject
capitalism and blah blah blah, but like, we're still living in
a capitalist society, and so I take some of this
anti work rhetoric with a grain of salt, though I
do believe that hopefully by questioning things like this girbast

(54:54):
culture or hustle culture, or the way that we have
devoted our entire beings and entities to work over the
past ten twenty year, yours is a good thing.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
I want to throw to Semeta one more time because
she had something interesting to say about this too. Workplace
hierarchy isn't really going anywhere anytime soon, right, Like, we
have to figure out how management structures that are equitable,
that work, that play to people's strengths, that support them
in being as innovative and creative and impactful as possible.
That's why I think we're frozen in time right now,

(55:23):
because we know that we don't want this kind of
unfettered ambition at any cost. Toxic workplay is all bad,
all bad words. We know we don't want that, but
we don't know how to apply that in our lives yet.
I think that's led to this trend in like quiet
quitting or lazy girl jobs, or people really calling it
in at work, which ultimately isn't going to actually make
people happy, right, What actually makes you happy in your

(55:46):
life is living a life of integrity and authenticity and joy.
When you're checked out of something, you're not finding joy
in your life, and that's fine.

Speaker 3 (55:53):
I think we all go through phases. We have to
do that.

Speaker 6 (55:55):
But that's not a model for women's advancement in the workplace.

Speaker 1 (55:58):
Right.

Speaker 6 (55:59):
It's a problem and it's a wake up call for
working conditions, but it's not ultimately a strategy that's going
to be successful or make us happy if that's ultimately
the goal.

Speaker 5 (56:11):
I think Samina is right, and this isn't the end
of ambition generally, but it's hopefully a workplace shift that
is happening, Susie. Where does that then leave you?

Speaker 1 (56:22):
I mean, I guess what I'm doing is projecting to
some degree, because maybe it's just the end of my ambition.
Like maybe the reason those memes speak to me is
that I have come to kind of want a quieter
career when where I have less responsibilities, one where I
get to chat with you.

Speaker 3 (56:41):
But I will just say, that's not unambitious.

Speaker 5 (56:44):
That's a different kind of ambition, And so I think
part of the problem is that we have come to
define ambition in these really rigid ways that involved yeah,
climbing for the corporate ladder, being a boss, like having
a big team, being in management, and there are so
many different ways to be ambitious, and so I guess
that's what kind of gives me hope to what you're saying.

Speaker 3 (57:05):
Oh, yeah, that's actually a really good point. I've never
thought about it that way.

Speaker 1 (57:08):
It's true that I'm not lacking in any ambition, it's
just my ambitions have really changed. I'm not trying to
get the bigger job. I'm not always trying to get
the bigger paycheck. I'm just trying to do work I love,
and work that feels creative, and work that I hope
is kind of meaningful or it's certainly at least meaningful
to me, even if it's not that for everyone else.

(57:29):
So that's actually a nice way to think about where
that leaves us, and maybe we leave it there.

Speaker 5 (57:39):
Susie, I want to use our next episode. We're going
to be talking about what it means for a woman
to be quote.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
Past her prime, which I don't think happens for the record,
but we are going to talk about aging and what
that means for us, but also just how women are
treated as they age in the culture. So I think
it's going to be a really interesting one.

Speaker 3 (58:03):
This is in Retrospect. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (58:06):
Is there a pop culture moment you can't stop thinking
about and want us to explore in a future episode.
Email us at inretropod at gmail dot com or find
us on Instagram at in retropod.

Speaker 5 (58:17):
If you love this podcast, please rate and review us
on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
If you hate it, you can post nasty comments on
our Instagram, which we may or may not delete.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
You can also find us on Instagram at Jessica Bennett
and at Susi b NYC. Also check out Jessica's books
Feminist Fight Club and.

Speaker 3 (58:34):
This Is eighteen.

Speaker 5 (58:36):
In Retrospect is a production of iHeart Podcasts and The Media.
Lauren Anson is our supervising producer. Derek Clements is our
engineer and sound designer. Emily Meronoff is our producer. Sharon
Atia is our researcher and associate producer.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Our executive producer from the media is Cindy Levy. Our
executive producers from iHeart are Ana Stemp and Katrina Norbel.
Our artwork is from Pentagrams. Our mixing engineer is Amanda
Rose Smith. Additional editing help from Mary Do. We are
your hosts Susie Bannacarum and Jessica Bennett.

Speaker 3 (59:09):
We are also executive producers.

Speaker 5 (59:11):
For even more, check out in retropod dot com.

Speaker 3 (59:14):
See you next week