Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We are here with Laura Hankin and she is going to tell us about her new book, A Special Place for Women which came out on May 11, and it's about an elite women's only society that might have have a darker agenda going on. So why don't you just start by telling us a little bit about the book?
Laura: Thank you for having me. So yeah, in A Special Place for Women a journalist named Jillian, she's not in a good place, she has just lost her job at the new media journalism company that she was working for. Her mom recently died. She's about to turn 30 and she just feels like she's so Far behind and she needs a big story to make her name. And so she decides that she's going to infiltrate this secret women only social club for the New York Millennial Elite.
There are all these rumors about them, you know that membership dues cost $1,000 a month. That Rihanna stops by... maybe they even elevated and picked the first female mayor of New York. And then when she came for their fortunes brought her down. And so Jillian has never considered herself a club person, doesn't have a ton of female friends, but decides that she's going to get herself invited into this club and then take them down from the inside, only to realize once she's being drawn in that these women might be far more powerful than she ever expected.
Mindy: It's interesting to me to take obviously a feminist stance at the same time, highlight possible problems with power in general. It reminds me of a book called The Power. Have you read that?
Laura: I have. It is so good.
Mindy: The Power by Naomi Alderman, which is an amazing book. For my listeners. It's about women suddenly develop the ability to deliver electric shocks through their hands, which means that they can defend themselves, but also get aggressive if they want to. And what's so fascinating about it is not so much about the power of being able to do this, but it's about the fact that power itself is corrupting. So women end up behaving exactly like men with power. And so I think it's interesting to talk about that a little bit and how perhaps this club in the book, this feminism move isn't necessarily actually serving the people that it was supposed to be in place for.
Laura: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's great that you brought up The Power because I do think that has a very similar message to this book in some ways, although I think hopefully my book is a little bit more hopeful and slightly lighter. It gets dark. The Power was pretty tough to read in some parts, but so so good.
Yeah. I think that there is this sense that like, oh if women just ruled the world, all of our problems would be fixed and everything would be better. But I think that the most feminist thing is to acknowledge that women are people and some people are good and some people are bad. And it's really easy when you all of a sudden have a lot of power to let it make you do things that you didn't think that you would do before you had it.
And so I wanted to explore that in this book. And I was really interested by this rise of these women-only coworking spaces and networking spaces for a while there when they were first popping up. I think everybody was like, wow, what wonderful feminist utopias, How lovely that these things exist and provide a safe space for women. What happens when women take power and are basically just using it in the same way as men have always used it rather than trying to reconfigure what power is?
For example, it's sort of like how do you as a woman fight your way to the top? It's not really like how do you as a woman - while hopefully getting to the top - make sure that other women are being lifted up as well?
Mindy: This is something that I have certainly come across in the publishing world, never in a truly heinous way, but you do have a mindset whether it's true or not - I mean, unfortunately, it may be that there are only so many slots for women and once we start scrambling amongst each other for those slots of power, wherever they might be, whatever industry.
And I think this is honestly where society has done its most damage to women is teaching us to view each other as a competition. And that's true not only in any type of business world, but also of course in the big mating game of who wins a man. It's a really powerful tool that we've been taught to tear each other down and to always be on the lookout for your competitor. That's a wonderful way to keep women fighting amongst themselves. And the patriarchy doesn't have to do any work.
Laura: Classic move for the people in power to turn the people who are a little bit less in power against one another so that they just go ahead and fight each other and the people at the top can continue to glide along.
Mindy: How does that play into A Special Place for Women?
Laura: So Jillian, the reporter going into this group of women, she doesn't think very highly of them. I think she feels like they have basically just reinforced these structures and they, instead of discriminating against people because of gender, they're discriminating in other ways, like through class and through race. And Jillian is a middle class, lower middle class to middle class. She feels very much like she does not belong with these women that they might look down on her to get herself into the club. She has to kind of make up a bunch of impressive things about herself.
And one of them, she is like, okay, my childhood friend Rath has become a celebrity chef and you know, he's this impressive man and so I need him to pretend to be my boyfriend basically so that these women will pay attention to me. Because still I feel like the most impressive thing that I can do is be a powerful man's girlfriend. It does work like that in some ways is her in to the club, that people are like, oh, this powerful man has deemed you worthy. We should take a closer look at you.
Mindy: That’s particularly painful, but true. That's something that I don't think has faded in everyday life for most women. I mean I can say as someone that is well divorced at least once and having been through a couple of long term relationships that failed. You do kind of lose your value in terms of being single. There's that question of wait - you're successful, you're passably attractive. You don't have a horrific personality, like what, what is going on that you can't keep a man.
Laura: Uh huh. The good thing is that Jilian gets into the club. I think she feels like, oh, there are so many ways in which it's really nice to be in this group of women and not not have to worry about some jerk coming over and trying to make demands or playing up things to me and trying to hit on me. But at the same time, in some ways I almost feel more nervous and it feels harder to prove myself because like it's not just about how I look at it, it's this whole package thing of like, am I interesting enough and full enough? Am I warm enough?
Mindy: That's a really interesting point because we've definitely been taught what our tools are as women and they are usually tools that you use on men. I think that's a really interesting point. We are in a situation with other women relying on actual goodwill and connection. You know, we talk about locker room talk of course, and that's usually associated with men. But as a female athlete, we have our own... I wouldn't necessarily call it locker room talk but we have our own locker room environment. There's a lot of like female power there, but it's also just like it is an aggressive jockeying environment but it's specifically female oriented.
One of my books is Heroine, it's about an opioid addict, but she's also a female athlete and I wrote female locker room scenes. I can't tell you how many people - how many female athletes - have reached out to me and but like that was so refreshing because we do have that. We're not just braiding each other's hair and putting on mascara. It's like we have our own environment. We act differently when there aren't men around.
And I've always been amused... I work in a high school and the middle school, but specifically with high schoolers, I've always been interested to watch the behavior of boys, especially that age range and how it changes when there's a female present. And of course being a female and of course an adult, they aren’t in their natural space when I'm there. So you know, they changed just by being observed. I help out with the cross country team and I was on a canoe trip with them and I had already made it back to the turnaround point. So I was waiting on a ridge. I was just chilling out, reading a book or whatever and two of the canoes with the boys were coming back and they were just like flat out Lord of the Flies shit.
I was there and they didn't know I was watching them and it was so amazing to just watch them being boys because they were climbing out, you know, being boys, without knowing that there was a female observer and they were completely different... everything about them and of course, again, I'm an adult, so they're going to act differently around me anyway, but not knowing that I was there. Oh my God, it was so funny. I was just transported by being able to have the experience of watching boys be boys and not worried about anything. Women don't, I don't think we have quite as much freedom in that way.
Laura: Well, yeah, I think that women have to kind of, they might have the same instincts, but they have to kind of cover it up with this idea of like, oh yes, we're braiding each other's hair, we're putting on mascara, et cetera. Like we're being kind to each other, we can't Lord of the Flies each other in the same way. Still games are going on, they just might be going on more under the surface. And so they're like all these layers to it. And I don't want to say manipulation necessarily because I don't want to be like, girls are so sneaky and boys aren't. Because obviously that's a huge generalization. But yeah, I do think that perhaps it's more creative. It definitely can be.
Mindy: It's more subversive, I think.
Laura: Yeah, there are a lot of different dynamics going on right there, and how do I ride these waves and make everybody like me while still also getting ahead?
Mindy: I was reading a book, it was written by a man, but I could tell that he either had a lot of sisters or that he grew up with mostly female friends because there was a scene just between two females and they were teenagers. I think they might have been sisters, I don't remember. Or there was like a sleepover and this one girl's like, “I got this zit on my back, I can't reach. Will you pop it for me.?” And I was just like - that is boiled down essential female friendship right there - will you pop this thing I can't reach? I had the opportunity to meet that author. I was like, you had sisters, didn't you? And he started laughing and he's like, yep, he's like, I can't tell you how many times I walked in on them picking at each other's backs and I'm like, yeah, I mean that's the thing.
Laura: Yeah, there are so many gross things that girls do for each other. It's incredible.
Mindy: One of your main jobs as friends in high school is - when I get up to walk to the bathroom and you follow me and let me know if I'm bleeding through. It's like yeah sure. Of course. Yeah, checking spots all the time. It's huge, it's huge.
Laura: Yeah. And thank God that you have friends who can do that sort of thing for you, whereas you know it's so funny, this whole idea of like, oh guys are such and such. They can do gross stuff. But then there's always this sense of - don't mention to a guy that you're bleeding once a month because that'll freak him out.
Mindy: That does set them back.
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Mindy: I wanted to talk about your other talent. You are one half of the comedy duo Feminarchy and I want to walk about being a female comic. It seems like that is a particularly male dominated area.
Laura: It definitely is, although the nice thing is that it has been changing in recent years. But when I was in college, not that long ago, although I guess longer ago than I tend to think… I'm just like, oh yeah, college yesterday! I remember I was in the musical comedy troupe and there was always a boy's number at the end of the show and a girl's number at the end of the show. And I was talking to one of the guys, he'd been assigned to write the girl's number and he was like, this just sucks. It's so hard. Like I wish I'd been assigned to write the boys number because it's just so hard to make women funny. Guys can do all sorts of stuff and be funny, but like the girls number always sucks, because how do you make women funny? And the weird thing was that at the time, as a 19 year old girl, I was sort of like, this feels wrong I think, but I can't articulate a bit and I cannot be like, screw you, what are you talking about?
That attitude was pervasive for so so long. And then there's been a real fighting back against it in recent years, which is great. And some of our funniest most famous comedians now are women, thank God. So now the people who make the argument of women aren't funny generally the mainstream view now is like, well you haven't been paying attention. Even still we get comments on our Youtube videos sometimes that are like, oh yeah, typical women, not funny.
Mindy: I don't know when you graduated from college, but I graduated from college in 2001 and I grew up in a rural area. So I was not necessarily around like the most liberated of environments for most of my life. I didn't necessarily subscribe to that idea that women aren't funny, but I was never really seeing any type of push back against it. And I think for me, one of the things that ties into that is just the idea of women, women being loud, women being aggressive. You have to enjoy the spotlight, you have to want the stage, you have to want people to look at you if you're going to be a comedian. And those are all things that women have been taught are unattractive or not a good quality for a woman to have.
And I remember when I was, I think I was a freshman, I went to a school that has a very, very strong theater program and I did like theater in high school, but when we talk like theater in high school, I mean like the worst possible examples of high school theater. So it was like, I didn't know shit and I went to a heavily like really competitive, people go to broadway all the time, college and I wasn't involved in theater at all because I knew I was way out of my league.
But the very first day I went to like a pit show and I forget what they were doing. I forget what the play was, but it was a one act. Everybody shows up at the same time to the same place for the same reason and they've all been duped or whatever. And one of the characters was a woman that thought she was responding to an ad for a dominatrix and it was girl, one of, you know, one of my fellow students who was just tall and loud and over the top and ridiculous and it's like she shows up cracking a whip and being loud and ridiculous and running and you know, wearing a bustier and I'm sitting there, from my little tiny farming community and I'm just like, oh my God, everything she's doing is scary and wrong!! She was by far the star of the show and she was amazing and everyone loved her and she got the loudest applause at the curtain call, but like my initial reaction to her - being raised in a fairly conservative area - it was No! Bad! Wrong! Stop!
Laura: When I was in high school, I was also a big theater nerd. I remember I always got cast just like sort of boring, sweet romantic lead in the musical, right? Who sings like all the soprano numbers, and I was always desperately looking for a line that I could make a laugh line. I was always trying so hard to make the audience laugh and it just wasn't there in the script, the way that these women were written, you weren't supposed to be able to make the audience laugh because that's not what your character was meant to do. Whereas it felt like the romantic lead men could still be very funny and charming.
Then I remember I got cast in a one act play my junior year, it was Woody Allen one Act, so I don't know if it would be done in high school now. But I was cast as like this sort of dumb sex object who was the comedic lead in some ways because it was so funny that she was like talking about sex stuff on stage. Now I can crack everybody up, but similar to the dominatrix thing, like it still was very related to to sex.
Mindy: I do think things have changed. Obviously there are a lot of women in the spotlight that are you know, funny women and leading ladies and it has changed. I just know that that was one of my very first moments where - because I was always a feminist, I just didn't know what brand of feminism. It was more like, it was kind of a selfish type of feminism. It was more like - I'm awesome. I just also happened to be girl, right?
And so in some ways it was a competitive thing because I saw this girl being loud and being abrasive and being obnoxious and being like, just actually tall and big and taking up space and getting all the attention and part of it was no, no, no, no, no, you're not allowed to act like that. But the other part was Goddammit, why aren't I the one up there doing that, right? And so kind of a mixed reaction of like, jealousy while also being like, oh my God, my mom would kill me if I did that.
Laura: Well, that's funny. That's something that I'm sort of trying to explore in the book is this way. Sometimes admiring another woman, it can feel so confusing because there's so much wrapped up in it, right? It's like jealousy plus admiration. You know, you want to feed them, you want to be their best friend, maybe you kind of want to kiss them, I don't know. And all that really just gets so, so wrapped up altogether.
And that's the thing that, that Jillian, the protagonist of A Special Place for Women, ends up feeling with a lot of the women that she's encountering in this club, even though she goes from being like, no, I'm going to hate them all. She really gets drawn into them. I think there is a weird - and I don't think it's natural - I do think it's something that we've been taught that there's this pack mentality. There can only be one alpha.
Mindy: So you're always competing. And if there's someone that's better looking than you or richer than you or funnier than you, or taller, has bigger boobs or whatever it is, you have to find an angle at which you're still better. Whether it's that you know that her boobs are fake or she definitely got an eyebrow lift. You're going to find a handle where you have the upper hand.
Laura: Mm hmm. Is there ever a world we can create where we can all just love that everybody that we hang out with is so cool in their different ways and not feel that jealousy?
Mindy: I really, really hope so. But it's hard. It would be nice. It would be a kinder world. That's for sure. I mean, I'm sure that it happens across genders as well. But I mean, I just know that any time I have felt any jealousy or envy, it's always it's always turned toward another female. Which doesn't make me feel good, but it's just there.
Laura: I know. Yeah. And I think the modern movement towards - let's all get these shirts that are like women supporting women and, let's get the perfect feminist tote bags. The slogans are so wonderful and like, yes, we want to build towards a world where that's the case, but just because you have a tote bag that says, it doesn't mean that you actually feel it or are acting that way.
Mindy: And it's very possible that a man designed that tote bag and the company you bought it from the CEO is a man.
Laura: Uh, Yeah, so one of the women-only coworking spaces, that was kind of a model for the club in the book, has since gone under. It's sort of unclear what's happening with Covid, but it was founded by women, but now it's been bought out and the majority stakeholder in it is a man. I just think that's like the saddest thing. I think finding that equilibrium of a group of women where there's no judgment, there's no comparison, there's no jockeying. That is difficult.
Mindy: I do have that with my friends from college. We actually had a girls weekend this week, past weekend and that's really nice. Like it exists, there's like four or five of us, we stay in touch and we get together and there isn't competition among us, like it truly is just support, all the things that come with a group dynamic. I mean, it can definitely happen, you just have to know when to check yourself, I think.
Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book and where they can find you online?
Laura: Yeah, so it should be available at any bookstore. You can support your local bookstore and then if you want to find me, I am at Laura Hankin on instagram and Twitter, probably slightly more active on Instagram. My website is www dot laura Hankin dot com. And I have another book that just came out in paperback, Happy and You Know It. So if you need a little something to whet your appetite before getting into A Special Place for Women, you can pick that one up too.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.