Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

Sloane’s most closely held tenet was that women could not be real friends unless they were willing to talk shit together. It was the closest thing she knew to a blood pact that didn’t involve knives.

We pretended that all of this was a myth. That we had neither fallopian tubes, nor menstrual cycles, nor breasts, nor moods, nor children. And then we took it as a compliment when one of the men in the office told us we had balls. So, tell us again how this wasn’t a man’s world.

Ardie, like many of us, had caught perfectionism, an illness that we heard was more common in women by a factor of roughly twenty to one. To the best of our understanding, it was transferred through social media and the pages of glossy magazines that were displayed face-out in the checkout line and, once contracted at the age of twelve or thirteen, could be cured by no number of Jezebel think pieces or edgy romcoms in which the leading lady boldly portrayed a train wreck or a bad mommy. For our children, we chased the gold standard of suburban contentment set by our own stay-at-home mothers, while simultaneously stepping into the shoes of our breadwinning fathers.

We will say this: none of us thought that motherhood and work could exist harmoniously. If anything, they were two forces, diametrically opposed. We were the prisoners, strapped to the medieval stretching device, having enjoyed the rare privilege of both loving and having chosen our torturers. There was only the small matter of our joints being pulled apart and our hearts spilling out from our rib cages.

So when we said that we would prefer not to have to be asked to smile on top of working, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to hear a comment about the length of our skirt, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please. When we said that we would like not to have someone try to touch us in our office, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs. Please.

We wanted to be treated like men at work for the same reason that people bought smartphones: it made life easier.

We lived with guilt the way other people lived with chronic medical conditions, only arguably, ours was the less treatable.

No one said anything. It turned into the longest silence that Grace had possibly ever experienced with her two friends, who also happened to be the smartest and most capable women she knew. But in the end, it wasn’t about intelligence or competence. It never had been. And because of that, they were going to lose.

Failure was a luxury we couldn’t afford, all chained together as we were, our fates locked up tight. One box office flop from a female director and no one wanted “girl” movies, one stock market plunge from a company with a woman CEO and women couldn’t lead, one false accusation and we were liars, all of us.

this instinctive and immediate fear for our safety had set in, the need to glance over our backs when crossing an empty parking lot, to check beneath our cars, to bristle when a strange man walked behind us too closely, to startle when he stopped us to ask the time. The realization that this fear was particular to us came later, that, unlike the boys with whom we played in cul-de-sacs when we were little, we would never outgrow the cautionary tales. There would forever be strangers offering us candy.

We had long seen the problem at the heart of it all: being a woman at work was a handicap that we’d been trying to make up for by erasing our femininity in just the right ways.

Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.

Our legacy would be our words. Shouted out loud. For all to hear. We were done petitioning to be believed. We were finished requesting the benefit of the doubt. We weren’t asking for permission. The floor was ours. Listen.