While listening to the most recent Nerdist Writers’ Panel podcast, I heard that Emily Halpern, the writer and showrunner of the television show Trophy Wife, was asked whether she ever fights with her writing partner during the collaborative process.
Her response:
We are two women, so we get passive aggressive. One of us may pout, and the other will ask what’s wrong, but we’ve never yelled at each other.
Either Halpern is right, and collaborative disagreements in female partnerships consist primarily of passive aggressiveness and pouting, or she has maligned all of womankind with her statement.
I tend to think it’s the latter.
I want to be surprised that someone like Halpern would lump women into this collective passive-aggressive basket, but on the same day I listened to the podcast, I read about North Carolina Representative Renee Ellmers’ remarks while speaking on a panel for the Republican Study Committee, the House’s conservative caucus;
Men do tend to talk about things on a much higher level. Many of my male colleagues, when they go to the House floor, you know, they’ve got some pie chart or graph behind them and they’re talking about trillions of dollars and how, you know, the debt is awful and, you know, we all agree with that … we need our male colleagues to understand that if you can bring it down to a woman’s level and what everything that she is balancing in her life — that’s the way to go.
It’s hard enough for women already without the likes of Emily Halpern and Renee Ellmers portraying the female sex as a collective of passive-aggressive pouters who are incapable of comprehending pie charts and graphs.
