The term coercive control wasn’t common parlance back in 1998, but it’s exactly what Angelus was trying to do to Buffy, and it’s exactly what my friend experienced for a decade and has had the courage to write a pseudonymous memoir about called Pinprick Eyes.
Did you ever re-think your entire career in the context of #MeToo?
Almost a decade ago, the term #MeToo became more widely popularized in the wake of revelations (to some) about the behavior of Harvey Weinstein and other famous mostly-men towards mostly-women. I remember many conversations with women colleagues where we recalled experiences in the workplace, on work trips, at work events, that suddenly much more clearly were not OK, even if they did represent “the way things were.”
The exec who told a close male colleague the equivalent of “I’d tap that” about me (and probably never expected that colleague would tell me about it because he thought I should know). The guy that all the women employees knew you shouldn’t keep hanging around once he’d had a couple of drinks. The way you had to devote a portion of your brain power to reading the room, deflecting the unwanted behaviors, and laughing when you really wanted to do anything but.
To me (and I’m guessing you too), these are MILD stories. The point is I never thought of those things as sexual harassment or creating a hostile work environment. I thought it was simply the price you paid to be an ambitious woman, especially if you worked in a male-dominated field, which I did for 14 years before co-founding BlogHer.
But who am I kidding? Most women are first trained to manage this kind of behavior outside the workplace, usually before we’re old enough to step into one.
It doesn’t start at work.
There was a sequence in my Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatching/recapping this week, where our heroine is trying to tell her Mom what’s been bothering her, without telling her that her vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend lost his soul because they had sex, and now he’s stalking her and up to his old evil soulless vampire ways. It really brought home that when you take the whole blood-sucking vampire aspect out of the equation, this is not an unfamiliar story:
Buffy: Do you remember that guy, Angel?
Joyce: Angel…? The college boy who was tutoring you in history?
Buffy: Right. Well, he's… and I'm…We're sort of dating. Were dating. We're going through kind of a serious "off again" phase right now.
Joyce: Don't tell me. "He's changed. He's not the same guy you fell for."
Buffy: In a nutshell. Anyway, ever since… he changed…he's been kind of following me around. Having a little trouble letting go.
Joyce: Buffy, has he… done anything…?
Buffy: No, no. He's just been hanging around… a lot. Leaving me notes… I just don't want to see him right now.
I mean, been there, done that…or is that just me?
Of course, Buffy is under-selling his behavior in this sequence, but women also learn to do that…to downplay, to shrug it off, to make excuses for and about whomever is making our world smaller or grittier or less secure.
Maybe for you it was an energy vampire. Or even a lifeforce vampire.
If you feel recognition, this book may validate what your gut has been telling you all along.
It felt like no coincidence that this was also the week I decided to dig in and finish Pinprick Eyes, a pseudonymous memoir by Danielle Hart (someone I have known for 20 years) about her decade caught in exactly this kind of web. If you’d have asked me, I would have absolutely agreed with Danielle’s assessment that from the outside her life looked perfect. And yet as I read her memoir, I was shocked but not surprised, if that makes sense.
She wrote the book to help others. The biggest takeaway is that sometimes your gut will know the truth your heart and head may not want, be ready to, or have enough data to acknowledge. And even when you listen to and respect your gut, it may not change what’s in your heart, yes even for an abusive person, and it may not counteract all the voices in your head. Voices that tell you it’s your fault, that you can fix it, that you’re overreacting, that this time things will change.
You don’t owe ANY kind of vampire your energy. Your lifeforce. Your blood.
Not at work. Not at home. Nowhere.
You shouldn’t have to owe them rent just because you live rent-free in their brain.
Buffy: It's so weird… Every time something like that happens my first instinct is to run to tell Angel. I can't believe it's the same person. He's the complete opposite of what he was.
Willow: Well… Sort of, except…
Buffy: Except what?
Willow: You're still the only thing he thinks about.
Resources:
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) | Text START to 88788 | www.thehotline.org
SAMHSA National Helpline: 1-800-662-4357 | samhsa.gov
988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988
Support for Families Affected by Addiction: Nar-Anon Family Groups:
nar-anon.org and Al-Anon / Alateen: al-anon.org
Buffy: "I think I'm finally ready…because I know now that there's nothing that's ever going to change him back to the Angel I fell in love with.”
Signposting and sharing
📺 Next week’s recapping will cover Buffy Season 2, episodes 19 and 20. These are the final two episodes before the two-part Season 2 finale. First we get some deeply emotional resonance, then we get our last breather of the season with a MOnster of the Week episode.
🛠️ Tool of the week/When a tool is a quick “no”: There is one piece of advice I give everyone when using any AI LLM-style tool for the first time. Test it out by asking it what it can tell you about you. The output may be close, but not perfect. Or the output may be wildly inaccurate. Either way it will remind you that you can’t give up on fact-checking, doing your own research, or confirming what your LLM tells you. I tried a new tool this week that is meant to be an LLM you use on your own local machine, so totally private, and no training up into the cloud. But that means it’s also not going into the cloud to fetch the latest and greatest info. It’s telling you whatever its model knows right now. When I asked it what it could tell me about Elisa Camahort Page, it was part boring reporting of what my LInkedIn profile says 🙄, part random and very untrue facts 😬. A similar early example was when I first asked ChatGPT about me, and it gave me a college degree I didn’t have and named me as author of a book I didn’t write 🤯. I’m fairly certain those random facts come from info that was adjacent to info about me on the same site. The quickest way to gauge accuracy is to ask any tool about something you know really well, and nothing better than to ask it about your own self. (PS: The tool I tried this week is called Jan.ai. I know at least one person who highly recommeds this tool, but for me I asked it this one question and uninstalled immediately afterwards.)
📽️ This week’s recommendation is a movie: I saw Disclosure Day last weekend. I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism online, but I was very spellbound. In fact, I was in a full movie auditorium in which you could hear a pin drop for nearly the entire 2.5 hours. If you go to movies out in the wild these days, you know how rare that is. Did I walk out understanding every technical detail? Nope, gotta suspend your disbelief, for sure. But did I walk out thinking that a) Spielberg is still a master storyteller and artist and b) Emily Blunt is an incredible dramatic actress (which I didn’t really know)? Absolutely. I think it’s worth seeing for yourself.
🙋🏻♀️ Question of the Week: Did #MeToo make you revisit moments in your career? Either about things that happened to you, or things you saw happen to others and didn’t realize were uncool at the time?
My daily tarot card:
Today I drew the Two of Chalices. (Chalices=Cups in a typical tarot deck.) Cups/Chalices are the suit of emotion and heart and feeling. And twos are almost always about partnership…of various kinds, not necessarily romantic. The Two of Chalices speaks to a balanced relationship. And the agency we each have in meeting people halfway and offering mutual respect and well-deserved trust. Drawing this caard today seems to validate two things about my week that just went by: First, that I made progress on a couple of professional fronts…having open and respectful dialog that increased clarity and moved things forward. Second, that I made conscious effort to connect with people IRL, not just online. I loves me some online community, but sometimes it’s even better to have 1-on-1 face time (not Facetime) with people in meatspace. I should probably keep moving the ball forward on both of those goals this week!
A card pull or full reading can help make a specific decision. Or can set the tone for your week. Either way, options are here, my Buffy deck and I are at your service! https://calendly.com/elisacp
Out in the world this week:
I made a public plea to the powers-that-be at Threads this week, but honestly it applies to every single social media platform (including LinkedIn). Do you agree on this?
“There is one thing that can stop the (hopefully not inevitable) enshittification of this magical place: Don't throttle reach when people share links. Every social platform does it. People hate it. We are all capable of NOT clicking if we're not interested. Let US decide if someone shares too many links. Let US decide to go see a link & come back. What's the phrase? If you love someone let them click. If they don't come back they didn't like your platform that much to begin with.”
So, what Buffy episodes did I watch these past two weeks week?
I watched Season 2, episodes 17 (Passion recap) and 18 (Killed by Death recap)…which aired on February 24 and March 3 1998, respectively.
The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 17 is if there’s too fine a line between love and hate…get the hell out! This is one of the most obvious, maybe even ham-fisted, metaphors in the show…you sleep with someone, and they change. But it is so masterfully done and chillingly portrayed that you will not care about the ham fists. Passion is not brutal. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be.
The core #BuffyLifeLesson in Season 2 Episode 18 is about belief. Episode 17 is about when passion turns dangerous, when people turn cruel. It’s squarely in the context of a romantic relationship. If Buffy had a “believe women” episode, it would be this one. Episode 18 is more about how kids can sometimes cut to a truth because they haven’t yet acquired our adult baggage about what is real or not, what is an acceptable story or not. Beliving them isn’t always about believing the literal, rather it’s about seeing the truth that may live beyond the literal.
I’m here every week, using pop culture (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer right now) as a jumping off point for everything I’m thinking about professional leadership, personal development, political philosophy, and pop culture. I would love you to join me by subscribing. And I would love you to share the link with other nerds like us!
FINAL WORDS
Giles: "Sometimes small children do see something we adults don't. Us. Our true selves. Our hidden faces."
-From Killed by Death, Season 2, Episode 18
