What ever happened to the good old-fashioned art of “owning
it”?
Our culture is awash in people who get called out for their
behavior and then retreat behind some victim-y excuse. If you’re going to go
for it, go for it.
اضافة اعلان
The ne plus ultra of this charade is Elizabeth Holmes, who
is on trial for being a big fraud after she pretended to have invented a
simpler, cheaper way to do blood tests with a finger prick.
Holmes plans to blame her behavior on “a decade long campaign
of psychological abuse” perpetuated by her former boyfriend and business
partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani — a charge he denies.
In a Times guest essay, Ellen Pao, a former tech executive,
suggested that, while Holmes should be held accountable, “it can be sexist to
hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of
men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment.”
Sexism this ain’t, sisters. Holmes went for it. She became
the youngest female self-made billionaire by spinning gold out of blood. She
really put the con in Silicon Valley. And the Steve Jobs-wannabe in the black
turtleneck was buoyed by many powerful men on her board — including George
Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and David Boies — who were rooting for a
young woman to break into the club of boy geniuses conjuring unicorns.
Balwani will also be tried on fraud charges in January. But
Holmes was no delicate flower.
“If you release a buggy software program before it’s ready,
no one’s going to die,” John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter who
broke the story and wrote the bestseller “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a
Silicon Valley Startup,” told me. (He has a podcast by the same name.) “Holmes
was operating a medical device startup. She commercialized a product that
patients and doctors relied on to make important health decisions. She was
gambling with people’s lives.”
Of the allegations that Balwani abused her and “held her in
his psychological grip,” Carreyrou said that based on his reporting and
research, “I don’t buy it. Everyone I talked to who worked at Theranos and
observed them closely said it was a partnership of equals and if anyone had the
last say, it was Elizabeth. She controlled 99.7 percent of the voting rights.”
Sexism exists. But we shouldn’t reorient our society so that
people can simply wrap themselves in an identity cloak when identity is not the
issue. Virtue should not be defined by who you are, putting you beyond reproach
and preventing judgments about what you did. That would leave whole sectors of
society exempt from moral evaluation.
That brings us to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She said her
“Tax the Rich” turn at the Met gala “punctured the 4th wall of excess and
spectacle.” Sure, whatever.
Maybe it wasn’t what Karl Marx had in mind. Bernie Sanders
wouldn’t have done it. But if Ocasio-Cortez wanted to get glammed up and pal
around with the ruling class at an event that’s the antithesis of all she
believes in, a gala that makes every thoughtful American feel like Robespierre,
she should have just gone for it.
Don a beautiful dress, let helpers carry the train, have fun
and ignore the inevitable charges of hypocrisy. She should have adopted the
philosophy of another frequent guest of that gala, Kate Moss: never complain,
never explain.
Instead, Ocasio-Cortez tried to have it both ways. The
socialist Jackie O. Vogued in a virtue-signaling garment with an anodyne
slogan, expressing a view that a majority of Americans already hold.
Rather than Owning It, she put out a bloviating statement on
Instagram, chalking up all criticism to sexism and racism.
“Honestly our culture is deeply disdainful and unsupportive
of women, especially women of color and working class women (and
LGBTQ/immigrant/etc.),” she wrote. Really, the working-class card, at the Met
gala? She added: “The more intersections one has, the deeper the disdain. I am
so used to doing the same exact thing that men do — including popular male
progressive elected officials — and getting a completely different response.”
I found this statement to be at the intersection of
disingenuous and hilarious, coming from the woman who is a phenomenon and a
trailblazer in wielding image and social media to her advantage.
Her response was cynical. And it wasn’t the first time that
she had failed to consider that people can disagree with her without
disagreeing with her identity.
Two years ago, after she and three other progressive
congresswomen voted against the House’s version of a border bill, Nancy Pelosi
said that they were simply four people with four votes.
Ocasio-Cortez riposted with the absurd charge that Pelosi
was targeting “newly elected women of color,” smearing the speaker, who has
spent her life battling for the downtrodden and who helped lift Barack Obama
into the Oval Office and pass his health care bill.
Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t the only House member in the past week
who failed to “own it”. Pramila Jayapal was the subject of a BuzzFeed News
investigation in which former staffers described “a serious disconnect between
how she talks about workers’ rights and how she treats her own staff.”
Her current chief of staff, Lilah Pomerance, deflected:
“Women of color are often unjustly targeted, regularly held to higher standards
than their male colleagues, and always put under a sexist microscope.”
If you want to behave like Miranda Priestly (or Amy
Klobuchar) with your staff, own it.
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