The Peoples’ Club

Jolie O’Dell wrote a fantastic smack down of some misogynistic marketing recently. The company at fault had a bunch of sexified disembodied lady body parts drapped around some sound system to try to get people to attend their booth at CES.

Cool, guys. Creative.

But what really made me pause was the last note in her article:

” *Note: Dirk Marketing is run by Angie Dirk, a woman. Patriarchy wouldn’t be patriarchy without women’s participation, and we wish Ms. Dirk would have had the wherewithal to do better work and demand higher standards of her clients.”

Here’s where I don’t have any answers. In 2013 when we talk about being ‘one of the boys’, I think what we really mean is being able to develop the kinds of relationships with people where you can be both casual and off-the-cuff when the situation calls for it and then be highly professional and buttoned-up when the situation calls for that.

More frequently today, thank goodness, that’s not a gender-specific ‘Boys’ Club’ but a gender-neutral ‘Peoples’ Club’ – meaning people with personality, not just some body at a desk staring at a computer screen. It’s a real skill to be able to develop those relationships and switch back and forth at will. It’s also the place where you end up being super-productive, creative and happy. (I’m lucky in that this is how the large majority of my professional experiences are and have been.)

I think, though, that it can be challenging for women to figure out the line between this kind of healthy banter and the kind of negative actions that are detrimental to the advancement of women in the workplace. With so many men still dominating a lot of businesses, I think for some women it still feels like this kind of relationship is still exclusively male, so you need to bend to misogynic attitudes if you want to play the game.

I don’t have an answer and I don’t know how to teach anyone how to find that line. But I do think it’s possible to not to freak out about things that just don’t matter while being able to put your foot down and tell it like it is when something does matter, with everyone in your life.

Maybe Ms. Dirk at this ad agency thought the ad was just ‘boys being boys’. But they weren’t acting like people and it’s an idiotic, cheap campaign. She should have called them out on that, no matter how much she wanted the contract or to maintain the relationship.