Whisper Network Quotes

“We had guilt of every flavor: We had working-mom guilt, childless guilt, guilt because we’d turned down a social obligation, guilt because we’d accepted an invitation we knew we didn’t have time for, guilt for turning away work and for not turning it down when we felt we were already being taken advantage of. We had guilt for asking for more and for not asking for enough, guilt for working from home, guilt for eating a bagel, Catholic guilt and Presbyterian guilt and Jewish guilt, none of which tasted quite the same. We felt guilty if we weren’t feeling guilty enough, so much so that we began to take pride in this ability to function under moral conflict.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand. We plucked our eyebrows, waxed our upper lips, got razor burn on our crotches, held blades to the cups of our armpits. Shoes tore holes in the skin of our heels and crippled the balls of our feet. We endured labor and childbirth and C-sections, during which doctors literally set our intestines on a table next to our bodies while we were awake. We got acid facials. We punctured our foreheads with Botox and filled our lips and our breasts. We pierced our ears and wore pants that were too tight. We got too much sun. We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex. Secretly, they toughened our hides, sharpened our edges. We were tougher than we looked. The only difference was that now we were finally letting on.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We knew we shouldn’t be ashamed. We weren’t ashamed. We were grown-ass women—which is obviously why we paraded to the restrooms with tampons secretly stuffed into our cardigan sleeves as though we were spies delivering encrypted information.
....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.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“How did we know when behavior was inappropriate? We just did. Any woman over the age of fourteen probably did. Believe it or not, we didn't want to be offended. We weren't sitting around twiddling our thumbs waiting for someone to show up and offend us so that we would have something to do that day. In fact, we made dozens of excuses not to be. We gave the benefit of the doubt. We took a man's comment about the way our heels made our calves look as well-intentioned. We understood the desire for us to draw a line in the sand - this was okay, this was not okay. No such line existed.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“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. Because when we failed it was because of our chromosomes, it wasn't because of a market dip or an ineffective advertising campaign or plain bad luck.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Every confidence, every request for advice was a leap of faith and we all had horror stories of times when we’d misplaced it.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We hated the gym. We loved it. We escaped to it. We avoided it. We had complicated relationships with our bodies, while at the same time insisting that we loved them unconditionally. We were sure we had better, more important things to do than worry about them, but the slender yoga bodies of moms in Lululemon at school pickup taunted us. Their figures hinted at wheatgrass shots, tennis clubs, and vagina steaming treatments. We found them aspirational.
So we sweated on the elliptical and lifted ten-pound weights, inching closer to the bodies we told ourselves we were too evolved to want.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“And so, when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“The thing we would articulate, far too late, as it turned out, was that when a building’s burning, no one just whispers, “Fire!” No one sits quietly at their desk, diligently completing their work and checking for typos while the smoke pours in overhead. No one cries for “help” softly, under their breath, so as not to disturb their neighbors. So why did we? Shhh, don’t tell anyone but … Keep this quiet, please, but … We haven’t told anyone else, but … This stays between us, but …”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“If time was currency, we were all going broke.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Still, a job was supposed to pay an employee, not cost her.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We were always looking for the perfect man. Even those of us who were not signed up for the traditional, heteronormative experience were nevertheless fascinated with the anthropological, unicorn-like search for one. Married or single, we were either searching for him or trying to mold him from one we already had. This perfect specimen would consist of the following essential attributes: He shared his food and always ordered dessert. When we recommended a book, he bought it without needing a friend to second our suggestion first. He knew how to pack a diaper bag without being told. He was a Southern gentleman with a mother from the East Coast who fostered his quietly progressive sensibilities. He said “I love you” after 2.5 months. He didn’t get drunk. He knew how to do taxes. He never questioned our feminist ideals when we refused to squish bugs or change oil. He didn’t sit down to put on his shoes. He had enough money for retirement. He wished vehemently for male-hormonal birth control. He had a slight unease with the concept of women’s shaved vaginas, but not enough to take a stance one way or another. He thought Mindy Kaling was funny. He liked throw pillows. He didn’t care if we made more money than him. He liked women his own age. We were reasonable and irrational, cynical and naïve, but always, always on the hunt. Of course, this story isn’t about perfect men, but Ardie Valdez unfortunately didn’t know that yet when, the day after Desmond’s untimely death, Ardie’s phone lit up: a notification from her dating app.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“There was a fascinating tidbit Ardie had once heard: Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“One of the best things about Ardie was that she could be just a little bit mean exactly when Sloane needed her to be. 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.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“It wasn’t only the warning that kept us safe but our ability to keep that warning quiet. Like secret agents operating behind enemy lines, we couldn’t afford to get caught. And yet we risked it anyway. With voices hushed, we reached out to each other to offer our knowledge. We tried. Because we’d always wanted the best for each of our friends. We wanted her to dump that loser. We wanted her to stop worrying about losing five pounds. We wanted to tell her she looked great in that dress and that she should definitely buy it. We wanted her to crush the interview. We wanted her to text us when she got home. We wanted her to see what we saw: someone smart and brave and funny and worthy of love and success and peace. We wanted to kill whoever got in her way.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We had been programmed to trade in secrets. Our leading deodorant brand promised not to tell... By whispering, whose secrets were we keeping anyway - ours or theirs? Whose interests did our silence ultimately protect?... As we grew tired of whispering because what were we hiding, after all? We had stories, all of us. Would speaking up cost us? Maybe. But maybe it would cost them, too.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“He turned, his eyebrows jacking up in surprise. The creases in his forehead had deepened over the years. (While we needed nips and tucks and filler injections to stay relevant, they needed only to age to become more dignified. Don’t think we didn’t notice.)”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“She thought it was good to put a label on it. It was like a diagnosis. Everyone had to support you once you got one of those or else risk being a ghastly, selfish person with a bias against mental health issues.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“we’d heard that those who lived in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. But no one had told us anything about how to conduct ourselves within the display cases of crystal conference rooms and buildings constructed out of thousands of soulless glass eyes.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“And in response Ardie just pinched her lips together and felt an uncharacteristic squeeze on her heart, because they would never see themselves the same as they saw each other and that was a gift.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Ardie wondered if something was wrong with her. Some actual diagnosis. A personality disorder. Something more concrete than just: natural introvert. But, well, to find out, she’d actually have to talk to someone she hardly knew for an extended time period, which was out of the question.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Listen”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“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 rom-coms 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. And we made sure that everyone knew we were handling it all swimmingly by the way we wrote notes on napkins dutifully folded into our children’s lunch boxes and threw Halloween parties with Swiss cheese cut into the shapes of ghosts. Because honestly, if that wasn’t success, what was?”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“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.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“There were a hundred things, small and large, that stood between us and our jobs every day, ranging from the incidental to the nefarious. So when we said that we'd 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 touch us in our office, we meant that: we would like to do our jobs, please.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Nobody told her this before she became a mother. That suddenly your diligently built-up immunity toward all these things, like name-calling and popularity contests, would up and leave the second someone took aim at your child.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We have been programed to work with secrets.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Women went around the world always fearing violence; men's greatest fear was ridiculouseness.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“We wanted to be treated just like men, at work, for the same reason that people buy smart phones: to make our lives easyer.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network

“Maybe the indiscretion was a biological adaptation. Survival of the best informed.”
― Chandler Baker, Whisper Network