It Matters What Stories We Tell

Three years ago this past May, a 22 year-old man murdered 6 people on the campus of the University of Santa Barbara. Before he went on his killing spree, he made a video explaining his need for revenge. “You girls have never been attracted to me … I will punish you all for it. It’s an injustice, a crime… If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you.”

In the wake of this, women took to social media to share their experience with harassment and assault using #YesAllWomen. My feed was filled with stories, wall-to-wall. “I’m so lucky I’ve never had anything serious happen to me,” I thought as I flicked on a flashlight inside my brain, scanning. It landed on an old hand-painted sign, “NO BIG DEAL” in giant child-like bubble letters. I started picking through the heap underneath it, “I mean, sure, there was that one time… And of course that night. And, and, and… But none of this made me feel unsafe, it was just uncomfortable. Okay that one time I was scared.” That’s when I got to the bottom of the pile. Mexico. My stomach flipped as it all came back in a gasp, vivid and specific. It was a big deal. What the hell was it doing here?

It felt good to tell that story for the first time, then refile it in its proper spot, label clearly typed: “Frightening Things That Happened in Childhood from Which Unconscious Lessons Were Learned”. It felt good to scroll through Facebook and hear from all the men who found such things unacceptable. This was a wake up call, they said.

And here we are again. Still lucid dreaming…

I am thrilled that bulbous sack of gas and bile will no longer be able to dangle women’s careers off the end of his pathetic member. This is a very good thing and the swiftness of his fall suggests a slight shift in the paths of power. But I’d wager if that gelatinous hell-mouth was a once dashing and eventually avuncular arbiter of cool, sliding ludes to his buddies just to make sure everyone had a good time, he could have let power slip slowly from his phone sheet, enjoying an uneventful retirement before quietly dying on the toilet (which would, of course, go unmentioned when the Academy inevitably lionized him in his own in memoriam). But the cave dwelling slug wasn’t dashing or avuncular. I’m told he could be charming, but he certainly wasn’t cool. He was a rage-filled, violent, domineering, hemorrhoid riddled asshole. Who knows how many were poised to slip a shiv in when he was weak enough to go down clean?

But wait, let me back up…

I was on my third week of a European vacation when Hugh Hefner finally did us a favor. I was settling in to Amalfi after a rough travel day and felt a pall of homesickness drifting in (dog-sickness really) so I decided to check in on the rest of the world for the first time in a long time and found my social media feeds blanketed with praise and RIPs for a dead pimp.

Sorry, excuse me, pioneer.

You know what? No, we gotta go back further…

Aside from a few 48 hour whirlwinds, one for work, the other two for weddings, this year was the first I’d travelled internationally since high school. The topic came up plenty — I make good money, no kids, flexible schedule, why didn’t I travel? I would explain I was anxious about not being able to communicate. “People speak English everywhere,” was the standard refrain. So I would launch into a monologue about USAmerican entitlement and tell the story of waking up in a Paris hotel room to the southern drawl of my grandmother, “NYEWS. PAYPAH. DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT A NYEWSPAYPAH IS?” as a nonplussed frenchman wheeled in her oatmeal.

I’ve told that story a lot. Then three years ago, in the wake of a mass shooting in Santa Barbara, I remembered Mexico.

I was 15 and on spring break in Cancun with a friend and her family. It was one of those all inclusive resorts. We paid for things with beads from pop bracelets. There was a twenty-something gringo working there who I took a shine to early and flirted with often. On my last night we ended up under a palm tree on the beach, making out. It was all kinds of postcard perfect, aside from him being twenty-something and me being 15, then it all started moving too fast. I told him to stop. He did. Then he looked me dead in the eye and with a flash of anger that chilled me to my marrow said, “You’re lucky I’m not like other guys.”

Once the terror wore off, I felt lucky. I still feel lucky.

The next day, my friend’s family had a flight before mine and rather than bringing me to the airport with them to wait at the gate, they made sure I had enough money to take a cab by myself later in the day. There were barely any other cars on the highway when the driver slowed and slid his hand into the backseat and up my skirt, stroking my thigh. Wordless, I slapped his hand away and slunk as tight into the corner of the backseat as I could. We pulled up to the curb of the airport. I threw the pesos I had in my hand into the front seat and leapt out of the car. As I ran inside I could hear him screaming after me — it wasn’t enough.

Then there was Madrid which had been misfiled under “Funny Things That Happened in High School”. I was 16 and on a school-organized spring break trip when my roommates and I were followed back to our hotel by a group of Italian guys. We managed to shut and lock the door to our room with them on the other side, but it took calling downstairs to security to get them to stop knocking on it, begging to be let in. They spent the next ten minutes or so in the street below hollering who knows what. The only word I recognized was “Vafuncullo”.

But I was afraid to travel internationally because I was anxious about communication.

We humans are miracles like that, we can bend reality with the same stories, repeated relentlessly. Not that I realized right away that I’d been lying to myself. Took three years.

Sorry, wait, we’ve got to back up again.

I was barely twenty when I had a friendship ending fight with a girl who’d broken my teenage heart multiple times. “Feminism is bullshit,” I spat at her. I didn’t exactly believe it but I didn’t really care. I knew it would make her as angry as I was and that was good enough for me. Far as I could tell, “Feminism” was an academic term that had no relevance to my life. Besides, my friend Steve had been attacked by a clutch of lesbians at Smith because he was a man who had the nerve to be first in line for the Ani Difranco concert on campus. Feminists were nuts. No thanks.

This is a hackneyed tale. If you don’t already know, I bet you can guess where it’s going… I graduated college, entered the professional world and realized Feminism was crucial to my survival. Who knew? Millions of women who I hadn’t bothered to listen to, apparently.

Let me illustrate my emotional journey in a language understood by many: the reality competition show, Survivor.

Jeff Probst welcomes you to the challenge, big twist today — All of you were brought in blindfolded. No one’s got a glimpse of the course you might have to run, or the puzzle you might have to solve. There are two teams. He tells each to pick a leader. The leader will take off their blindfold then, using only their voice, lead the rest of the team through an obstacle course where they’ll collect pieces to a puzzle which the leader will then solve.

Your team picks the smartest, most respected player. Everyone trusts this person. You feel good about it. Jeff calls both leaders over. You can’t hear anything but you get the sense there’s a whispered conversation. Finally you hear, “Survivors ready…!” and you brace to take off. “GO!”

Next thing you hear, your leader’s yelling your name, “You’re clear! The puzzle piece is right in front of you, 30 yards ahead! Run!” So you break into a run and promptly SLAM your crotch into a log obstacle.

You double over in pain, “What the hell!?”

The leader calls out, “Why did you stop? Keep going!”

“Cause there’s a LOG,” you yell back. You can’t tell where the leader is standing. Maybe they can’t see the whole course?

“There’s no log! You’re standing in an open field!”

But you can literally feel the log, crotch height, directly in front of you.

“GO!” the leader screams, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!?”

You trust this person. This person is your teammate. You know they want to win. What is going on? You must be misunderstanding something. You feel your way along the log till you get to the end of it. You sweep your arms back and forth in front of you. Feels like the coast might be clear.

“GoGoGoGoGO!” the leader yells.

So you take off. And SLAM, crotch into log again just before you’re inadvertently tackled by another teammate. Everything hurts.“Why are you lying down? GET UP! GET UP! GO!” OOF you’re accidentally kicked in the stomach. “Sorry” the kicker whimpers, injured too.

That’s it. You can’t take it any more. You jump up, rip off your blindfold, ready to rage, and that’s when you see the other team, navigating around logs and under cargo netting, NONE OF THEM WEARING BLINDFOLDS.

“Are you KIDDING me!?” You run up to Probst, “They’re not wearing blindfolds!”

He shrugs.

“No, we’re wearing them,” an opposing contestant calls out.

“Excuse me? I’m looking right at you. You are not wearing a blindfold.”

“Yes I am,” the contestant holds up his arm, which is in a sling.

“That’s a sling. You can see me.”

“No I can’t. It’s really hard to carry things.”

“Because you’re wearing a sling, which does in fact make it difficult for you to carry things, through A COURSE YOU CAN SEE.”

“Yeah. Well. You’re standing in an open field.”

“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT IF YOU CAN’T SEE?”

Your opponent turns back to their team with out an answer. Dumbfounded, you look to Probst. He shrugs.

“Put your blindfold back on,” one of your teammates calls out, pissed.

“Take yours off!” you yell.

“You’re the reason we’re losing,” they hiss.

“Takara wins!” Probst decrees as the opposing team finishes their puzzle.

You kick a log so hard you injure yourself.

Feminism is a map of the course slipped into your production designed rustic satchel the night before the challenge with a note on the back that reads, “You’re not crazy.”

Let’s set aside for a moment whether or not you find the analogy an over-simplified but pretty accurate illustration of the way women are forced to move through the world. Know that for millions of us, this is how our experience feels. And here’s the thing about feelings, they’re survival mechanisms, chemical reactions developed over thousands of years of evolution to bond us to one another, to tell us when we’re safe and when we’re not, to encourage us to procreate and expand our territory, or to protect ourselves. Feelings are biological, and when left unexpressed they sit in your body and fester.

I have been angry for a long time.

The shoulder rubs and lower back strokes, running fingers through my hair like I’m your wife or your hooker or your dog. Getting talked over, interrupted, shouted down, called ‘honey’ or ‘sweetie’ in tones dripping derisive and disrespectful, lobbing a pitch that splats unacknowledged only to have a dude say the same thing 15 minutes later to raucous approval like I’m a mute. Like my voice was never there. The hollers from passing cars, men standing too close, rubbing up against me on the subway, not hearing ‘no’ until it’s shouted, then spitting “bitch” out their bruised maw. I could go on and on and on but I don’t have to because for days and weeks and months and years women have been filling your eyes and ears with story after story of all the ways this never ends. We have been telling you and telling you. We shouldn’t have to tell you anymore.

I have been angry for a long time.

It starts on the inside — I must have done something wrong. It’s just me. I’m so stupid. I must be crazy. For some women it stays inward, forever. For others it begins to work its way out — It’s just her, she’s so stupid, she must be crazy. She should have known better. I would have handled it differently. What did she expect? Then there are those of us who get angry enough to rip the blindfold off and realize —

All around us is a civilization that for thousands of years has been built to funnel power to men. It isn’t personal, and it isn’t about any individual, this is the world, functioning as intended. Much of this has been inscribed in laws that we have only begun to dismantle. Marriage was long an economic instrument to consolidate wealth and power among men. Women in the US have had the vote for less than a hundred years. We weren’t allowed to open bank accounts or take out loans with out a man’s cosign until 1972. Marital rape wasn’t illegal in all 50 states until 1993. And of course we’re still legislating women’s access to health care. These are but an amuse bouche of the smorgasbord of institutionalized diminishments of women’s power that have been served to us over the centuries.

But if it were only institutional barriers that blocked our path to power, we would have flipped this script generations ago. Our greatest challenge is not changing law or policy, it’s changing the stories we tell and, by extension, our understanding of ourselves.

Stories are empathy machines. Films, novels, television shows, and plays are considered successful when they make us feel, when they take us on a journey with a character. They suggest a path we might walk in a similar circumstance, offer us a road map to move through challenge and adversity. Across thousands of years of western culture we have been relentlessly repeating stories that revolve around men. It all begins with him and it is to him all our empathy flows. From man, woman is made. She supports him or brings him low, but the adventures are his, he is the hero. She is the prize, the conquest, the safety waiting to welcome him home. He is driven by multitudes of wants and needs. She is driven by the need to couple with a man. These stories insist our institutional choices are the order of things, the way of the world, that all this air was already here. But it wasn’t. We dreamt it up, then forgot it wasn’t true. We bent reality around us.

And here we are, still lucid dreaming, convinced we’ve woken up…

By the time I joined the “Halt and Catch Fire” writers room two years ago, my default position with men in professional settings was one of mistrust. These dudes around this new writers room table, genuine as they seemed and as much as I liked them, were bound to disappoint me. I was sure of it. I could write a tome on how wrong I was, but suffice it to say, I now trust those men more than most. How I came to is family business, but everything you need to know is on the screen, in 40 episodes of television, 20 of which I helped craft. It is a show about five people, Cameron and Donna and Gordon and Joe and Bos, navigating the personal computing revolution, beginning in the Silicon Prairie and ending in Silicon Valley. This, from Laura Hudson at Wired, is the best distillation of the shows themes I’ve seen:

Human beings are the signal, and everything else is just noise. This is Halt and Catch Fire’s most radical message, the one the tech industry would do well to heed as the online world grows more toxic and depersonalized with every passing day. Computers were and are nothing more than tools, boxes of beautiful ideas that are only as valuable as they are human — ones whose connections can destroy us as easily as they can draw us together, if we are not careful. But at their best, they can connect us with the thing that really matters: the people who will stand with us on the precipice of our lives, gazing down at the chasm of the next challenge, and hold our hands as we jump into the unknown.

Ain’t that the truth. What goes unmentioned there is the way in which the women of the show are full, rich and complicated humans who drive the story with wants and needs that have little to do with their relationships with men and a whole lot to do with their relationship with each other — a friendship which is as intimate and important as any romantic relationship. This shouldn’t be radical. This is a reflection of real life. Women want all sorts of things that have nothing to do with men, and our friendships are deeper, and more complicated and interesting than the vast majority of what’s portrayed on TV. Try something for me, list all the female friendships that have been the primary driver of story for three or more seasons of television and never involved romantic conflict over a man. Ilana and Abbi. Patsy and Edina. I didn’t really watch Buffy. Maybe her and Willow? And I can’t think of a single friendship between two women of color that’s consistently driven story. I’m stumped… Now let’s list the buddy comedies and cop shows that have been driven by a friendship between two men.

Cameron and Donna were radical.

The stories we told on Halt were possible because the two men who created the show continuously do the work to acknowledge and overcome all the oblivious, habitual, quotidian ways men diminish the power of women, and they built a writers room where those things didn’t happen. It wasn’t an accident. It was intentional. And it was the best room any of us had ever been in. Somewhere along the way of uncovering the final chapter of these characters’ story, I swept my gaze around the writers room table and my heart got full up with love and gratitude. I realized that after nearly 20 years in this business, I’d let my heart get hard. This experience had softened it. I didn’t know I’d been braced for brawling until I un-balled my fists. So much energy I’d been expending, protecting myself from threats real and perceived. How much better my work was, how much better my life was, when I could make my way unarmed. It felt so good not to be angry.

What more might women be able to accomplish if we weren’t in a never ending struggle to justify our existence and prove our worth? What dreams might we have? What new worlds might we create?

And so it was fitting that I was sitting at video village towards the end of the shoot for my last episode of the show, chatting about it coming to an end, what a gift it had been, how maybe I’d finally take a trip abroad and get over my weird anxiety about communication… When the needle dropped. And a new tune began to play. And I decided I was going to Mexico. And later Italy.

Six months later, I woke up in Venice to a bevy of missed calls, texts, and emails from back home, demanding immediate attention. A colleague of mine, someone I’d worked with for 15 years and who had mattered a great deal to my career, had been fired for sexual harassment. They never end, the reasons to be angry. I had never once suspected this guy had it in him. My first reaction, and the one I clung to for hours, was… No fucking way. There must be something political going on. Someone must be trying to take him down. I’m not proud of that. It took a dude, a fellow writer from Halt actually, to remind me — women don’t make this shit up. I was furious with myself. And there’s the cycle again. The one I thought I’d broken. Blaming other women. Blaming myself. The anger going every where but the place it belongs.

So when I got to Amalfi a couple days later, road-weary and dog-sick, and logged on to find what felt like the whole world praising a pimp — sorry — pioneer… The rage and bile in my gut began to overflow. It wasn’t just the obits and social posts from men, their oblivion was to be expected. But the women… Praising him. Making light of his impact. How could they not see? I snapped. Had I been in a writers room, it would have been vicious. I would have said a lot of shit I would have had to apologize for the next day, in a tone, pitch and volume damaging to my vocal chords. Alone in a hotel on Facebook, the damage was limited. I still had to apologize the next morning, but at least my throat wasn’t sore. What’s nagged at me ever since, though, is that I was so angry and desperate to make everyone else feel as angry as I was that I missed the opportunity to have the conversation that really mattered. I made it about rape accusations, ludes and coercion, aiding and abetting Cosby — all of which is true and worthy of condemnation — when what it was really about, what it has always been about, is these stories we repeat relentlessly, insisting that they’re true.

Hugh Hefner was acutely aware the world was set up to benefit him. He knew he wasn’t wearing a blindfold, he knew women were. He liked it that way. He knew the woman’s movement posed a threat to a power imbalance that tilted in his favor. He used his platform to co-opt the parts of the movement that got him laid and stymie the parts that didn’t. He was a master myth maker, and a skilled crafter of image. He was not an unconscious product of his time. He understood his power and was intentional in the way he wielded it. He gave us a new variation on the world as we’ve always known it — Man at the center taking action, women revolving around him in service — not because it was all he knew, but because he wanted it to stay that way.

We call that a sexual revolution, then we wonder how Harvey Weinstein got away with it for so long. And we wonder how on earth Donald Trump was elected leader of the free world.

It matters what stories we tell ourselves. It matters what stories we tell each other. Stories, repeated relentlessly, become immutable truths. It matters what stories we tell.

When we women tell stories of harassment and assault, we are wrapping tourniquets on seeping wounds. Take care of yourselves, sisters. Take care of each other if you can.

When men promise to hold themselves and their friends accountable, they are focusing on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. Thank you, brothers, but it is not enough.

If you are serious about making this right, please turn your attention to the root of it — this thousand year-old, man-made system of chutes and ladders, conduits and autobahns, that funnels power to men, and the stories that reinforce them. Do the work to understand all the ways these stories, repeated relentlessly, sift into your unconscious and shape your understanding of yourself and what’s possible for all of our lives. Because this…

“You girls have never been attracted to me … It’s an injustice, a crime… If I can’t have you, girls, I will destroy you.”

… is the inevitable result of a story civilization has been repeating for thousands of years — men’s conquest of women defines their worth. That sick kid didn’t pull that story out of thin air. His is not a unique expression of a rare evil. It’s banal and quotidian.

And that brings us back to the fetid mound of flesh that once had its own gravitational pull here in Hollywood, mecca of the movies, land where lucid dreams are made…

Because this is on the storytellers. The creators of culture. The weavers of collective imagination. The projectors of the shadows on the cave wall. This is on us, any and all who have access to speakers and screens, keyboards and paper, and a platform to reach a multitude. We are not the pioneers in this field. We didn’t dream up Eve with her yen for a bite of that apple, but we’ve repeated her story relentlessly. Maybe she’s the femme fatale, her power coming from her body, her sex and sin, her ability to destroy, deceive, and ruin. Or maybe she’s a source of life and inspiration, pure and virgin births, a caretaker of men. All About Eve begets Working Girl begets Showgirls. There can be only one. No, it didn’t start with Hollywood, but we are the ones who turned myth making into an economic engine, spreading its influence outside the bounds of our own culture, wrapping the world in our stories. Repeating the same ones over and over and over again. Relentless. To not acknowledge our power, to not take it seriously, to shirk the work of understanding it, to be unconscious in the way we wield it, is to run the risk of doing immense damage.

Of course Hollywood is culpable in Harvey Weinstein’s reign of terror. I’d be surprised if you could find an industry in the world that hasn’t protected a man like that, but there aren’t many industries with as much power as we have to remake reality. We squander this power. Relentless, we repeat the same stories, reinforcing the myriad imbalances that pump injustice into the lives of millions. It is not just women who suffer because of Hollywood’s oblivion of the role we play in people’s psyches and our collective unconscious, every single person who’s not a white dude pays the price.

I used to feel sheepish about discussing the work we do in this way. I was afraid people would find it self-aggrandizing or overblown. But Donald Trump is now president of the United States. And what is he if not the same story, repeated relentlessly, until people believed it to be so. How dare we deny our power now?

One of my favorite movies growing up, and one I’ve re-watched repeatedly through out adulthood, is The Neverending Story. A young boy named Sebastian, whose mother has just died, escapes a gang of bullies by taking refuge in an old used book shop. There he finds a tome called the Neverending Story. He hides in the attic and as a storm brews outside, begins to read about a magical land called Fantasia that is being destroyed by a darkness known as the Nothing. Fantasia is ruled over by the Childlike Empress, who is pure and white and locked in a Ivory Tower, slowly dying (every little girl’s dream!). Her only power is the ability to dispatch a hero, another young boy named Atreyu, to find a cure for her disease, defeat the Nothing, and save the world. After many adventures, and having lost almost everything he cares about, Atreyu learns the cure lies with an earthling child, but doesn’t know where to find him. With the Nothing closing in, Atreyu returns to the Childlike Empress to confess his failure. All that’s left of Fantasia is her Ivory Tower, floating weightless through space.

But he hasn’t failed, she tells him. He’s brought the earthling child with him. Atreyu doesn’t understand how she even knows about the child. Why would she send him on a quest where he’d have to endure such struggle and loss just to learn the thing she already knows?

Because that was the only way to reach him. “He has suffered with you. He went through everything you went through. And now, he has come here. With you. He is very close. Listening, to every word we say.”

Atreyu still doesn’t get it. If he’s so close, why doesn’t he arrive?

“He doesn’t realize he’s already a part of the Neverending Story… Just as he is sharing all of your adventures, others are sharing his. They were with him when he hid from the boys in the bookstore…”

The Neverending Story, she reveals, is a perpetual empathy machine. But Sebastian refuses to believe it, “She can’t be talking about me.”

The Ivory Tower shudders and cracks, the Nothing chipping away at what little is left. Atreyu panics, how can the earthling let this happen!

“He doesn’t understand that he has the power to stop it,” she explains. “He simply can’t imagine that one little boy could be that important.”

Reading this, Sebastian begins to take himself seriously. He calls out, “What do I have to do?”

The Childlike Empress smiles, “He has to give me a new name. He’s already chosen it. He just has to call it out.”

As the Nothing takes what’s left of the Ivory Tower, Sebastian runs to the window, throws it open, and hollers his mother’s name into the thunderstorm raging outside… A candle flickers and the frame goes black.

Sebastian sits across from the Empress in empty space. No stars. Almost total darkness. The only light emanates from a single grain of sand cupped in her palm, all that’s left of Fantasia. He laments it was all for not. Their world was destroyed anyway. No, she tells him. Fantasia can rise again. Then she hands him the grain of sand and asks, “What are you going to wish for…?”

The music swells and we find Sebastian riding a luck dragon high above Fantasia, remaking the world with his imagination. Once he’s dreamed Atreyu and his friends back into existence, Sebastian returns home where he and his luck dragon torment his bullies. A narrator assures us, his adventures continue… We hear nothing more of the Empress.

Men, you have the power to stop this. It’s not just a story. You made it real. Unmaking it costs you nothing more than the courage to say our name. And when the world crumbles out from under us and we begin to rebuild, it requires you hand us the grain of sand this time and ask us what we wish for.

Our only way out of this is empathy.

Most don’t get into film and television to try to change the world, and yet by being here we have more power to do so than most. If those of us who give this industry its reputation for pinko-commie-leftist-liberal values are serious about living up to them, then I don’t know how “Leave the World Better than I Found It” doesn’t factor into the choices you make about the stories you tell. The choices aren’t always stark. And they’re often not that challenging. Yes, you have to put energy into cultivating awareness, but after that, you’re just doing your job with another lens in your tool kit of human understanding.

Let’s go back one last time…

Fatherhood was likely near the front of their minds when creators Chris Rogers and Chris Cantwell put together the big idea document for the final season. Cantwell’s wife was pregnant with their second kid, and Rogers’s wife was pregnant with their first, so it wasn’t surprising that they wanted to consider the possibility that two of our characters might have a baby together. As they’ve told it, my response was, “No fucking way.” As I remember it, I offered more of a, “I hate it so much and here are all the thoughtful and clearly stated reasons why it would break my heart”. Every woman in the room was in agreement. We debated it off and on for days —

They were drawn to it because it was an interesting story for him. And on that we all agreed. It was something we believed he wanted. And we felt that discovery was surprising and interesting considering all he’d been through. But we also agreed she was definitely not someone who’s ever wanted kids. And we agreed that she probably shouldn’t have them, not at this moment in her life anyway. And that she’s probably not the kind of person to be careless with her birth control but okay, there are ways around that, so let’s say there’s an accident and it becomes a question of whether or not to have an abortion… She could be in a place in her relationship where she’d feel compelled to keep the kid. And if she did, she’d figure it out, like a lot of women do, and of course she’d love it. But would their relationship last? Probably not. And would she be a good mom? Probably not.

Were we really going to end the story of this brilliant, immature but growing, huge-hearted, alien iconoclast with her choosing to have a kid and marry the guy, something she’s never wanted, because it was an interesting story for him? No. Of course not. Cantwell and Rogers didn’t make the choice because it was the best choice for the sisterhood, they made the choice because it was the best choice for the character. Doing right by the sisterhood was the result of a balance of power in the room. It is not enough to have equal representation, the women in the room have to have an equal voice.

I am a middle class white woman from Texas. Donna and Cameron were middle class white women from Texas. Our stories are not nearly enough. We need more stories from all sorts of women — black, white, brown, first generation immigrants from eastern Europe, Navaho from a reservation, Muslims, Jamaicans, Ashkenazi jews, rich and poor, young and old — all thriving in places and roles where they’re not usually seen on screens, but where they do exist out in the real world. We need more stories of women who are driven by rounded and complicated relationships to all sorts of other people, some of whom might occasionally be men. More stories of women in which they build and wield power in unexpected ways. We need more of these stories. Hundreds of thousands of them. Millions. And we need to repeat them relentlessly.

There’s a story my father’s kept telling me since early in my childhood: the only power an artist has in business is the power to say, “No”. The longer I’m in it, the more right he’s been proven. Executives and producers, your power is in the “Yes”.

Every day we make choices about how to use our power. Just because we’re not conscious of the moral lines we draw and cross, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Working in an industry with this much power at our fingertips, there will always be tension between the practical concerns of of our lives — families to provide for, mortgages to pay down, bottom lines to protect — and our professed values — equality, justice, love, empathy. Compromise and mistakes are inevitable. But if we mean it when we say this sort of behavior towards women is unacceptable, then we have to do more with the power we’ve got.

It will take generations to craft a new mythology in which none of this is preordained.

Storytellers, let’s make the world as we want it to be.