Empowered Women Empower Women
happy international women's day here's a short story <3
She had found the poster whilst scrolling LinkedIn in a post lunch funk. She felt lucky that scrolling social media was part of her job because she was very good at it. Or at least, was very good at the motion of it. For all the hours a day she spent scrolling down her track pad or flicking up with her thumb, past thousands and thousands of morsels of information, she retained almost none. But this poster- a recognisably Canva template was designed with bright neontastic colours, so obviously catered towards women that you could practically smell the oestrogen wafting off it. International Women’s Day Networking Event For Ladies Who PR.
I could network, she thought. I love to network.
The girls at her agency were nice, maybe a bit cliquey. They had their routine of hot pilates before work, something they’d sorted out on a package deal, and they could ask for her to join if she wanted to? But she knew that anywhere that came with a free green juice after class was most definitely out of her budget.
The agency was small and comprised of a gaggle of slim women who had a preference for elevated basics and whatever the latest fashionable sneaker was. They loved a nude lip and a bronzed cheek and a wine and a bitch about their boyfriends, who all seemed to work in a bank or a fund or a Big Four. There was one man in the office, gay, who was beloved and adored and fussed over. Who was taken photos of and with, underneath the neon sign of the agency’s logo. These were to be posted to the agency’s Instagram, ratifying what a delightfully fun and modern office they all worked in.
Everyone was lovely, perfectly kind, all of these women with their names hosting a variety of silent letters, extra H’s and A’s and Y’s ushered in like a parent sneaking vegetables into their child’s meal. But there was a kind of polite disinterest behind their eyes when they ran into her in the kitchen. They seemed to shake their meal replacement drinks faster, or take their My Muscle Chef meals out of the microwave before the ding.
So when she posted in the company Slack channel asking if anyone wanted to go to the networking event with her, she wasn’t surprised that the only responses were a chocolate box of emojis (a golden sparkle, the bulge of a bicep, and inexplicably a gorilla on all fours), and Ashleyeigh, the office sweetheart, saying Girl I wish! Unfortunately I have a dinner that night, but you’ve got this! *rocket emoji* *star emoji* *heart eye emoji*
The event wasn’t far from her office, a fifteen minute walk towards central in some capital s Space and she strode there in the type of boot that was well approved in her area of town but hadn’t quite seem to crack the 5am pilates circles, that she too was trying to crack.
Before she left, she’d spent some time preening in the work bathrooms. She was currently dealing with a dandruff flare up and wanted to do some damage control. Every time she looked in the mirror there were thick grey boats sailing the seas of her dark hair. She felt like it was to do with her gut health, that she was ill from the inside, that she needed to cure herself from her core, so she spent a lot of time drinking things that claimed they were alive, smelt like vinegar and looked like off milk.
En route, she felt her sheen of self assuredness slip. She conducted a quick inventory. Her bun; slicked (and relatively undandruffed). Trench coat; buttoned. A bank of Chat GPTed talking points; bustling around her head. She looked at the note app on her phone where she had written down a series of affirmations she had seen on a TikTok, to refer to in times of waning confidence.
I am interested and interesting.
I am kind and generous.
I can do whatever I set my mind to. No task is too big or too small.
My ass is almost as phat as my heart.
She smiled, changed the song she was listening to through her airpods and returned her phone to her pocket. She’d be fine.
At the entrance a woman with more gum than tooth smiled pink at her. Her best friend called them ‘fiancée teeth’, because “somehow these gummy bitches always have a man.” She looked down at her hands, noting the french manicure and rock.
“You’ve registered babe? I don’t see your name on the list?”
“Oh, I didn’t realise I needed to register. I just kinda thought…”
“No, it was definitely a register moment… Look babes, I think we can make it work but we deffo needed numbers. Just this time.” She winked which allowed her top lip to hook up revealing the endless wall of pink gum again.
In the Space was a photo wall adorned with logos of various sponsors, a bar and a long table sat full of women. She was intentionally an hour late, she had thought she’d let the room warm up a bit before she arrived. But now entering, she realised that it appeared that she was actually just late, and they were all halfway through a meal. The women hushed as she approached and Fiancée Teeth called out.
“Ladies Who PR! Please make our newbie welcome!”
There was a moment or two of “hey girl!”s and polite smiles, before the women resumed their conversations. Fiancée Teeth had found a fold up chair and dragged it over, the legs squealing on the floor. She pushed her way between two women deep in conversation and sat down the chair.
“Here you go babe. You’re a bit late so I’m not sure what we have in terms of food, but I’ll sort you out with a drink, yeah?”
She thanked her. Her lunch (500ml of bone broth and a long black) was long past satiating, and her stomach clawed at itself. She smiled. The two women either side of her smiled back.
“Hey queen.”
They picked up where they left off, something about a previous client, some disaster, something, she didn’t know, she wasn’t really listening. She shrunk down in her seat and the two women volleyed above her, like she was a thumb sucking child. Fiancée Teeth rushed back over, all apologies for the fact that there were no meals left, but she’d managed to accumulate a tiny plate of hors d’oeuvres, little finicky things that were delicate and veiny and impressively see through, and, imaginably, pretty unsubstantial. She had also brought her a glass, (“is red okay?”) and a bottle, which she forgot about and left when she was pulled into a parley about the best celebrity crisis PR management tactics.
She felt herself zone out, zoom out of the room, observe the dinner like a drone from above. It was an animated painting; women gossiping, networking, confabulating, whatever you wanted to call it. Spittle collecting in blooms in the corners of mouths, teeth gnashing as they hurried to rip into the next canard. Lipstick slid to the side, or off completely. Phones lit up, pinged, buzzed. Texts were responded to, emails highlighted for ease of circling back. Selfies taken, retaken and retaken again. LinkedIns exchanged and connected.
After a while the scene became a little out of focus. She tried to adjust her vision but it was gone. She picked up the wine bottle to fill her glass again, but realised at some point it had emptied. It wasn’t full when Fiancée Teeth had put it down, right? Other people must have drunk it too. Surely. But all the nearby glasses seemed to be a collection of soda waters, with neat little lemon quarters wedged on the lips. Perhaps, if the women had been feeling a little cheeky, they could have actually been low cal tequila sodas.
No matter. She allowed another hors d’oeuvre to dissolve on her tongue, wondering how to log it on her MyFitnessPal app, picked up the empty wine glass and made her way to the bar. Someone topped her up and she tried to mingle for a moment, but everyone was so animated and all the conversations were about their black books and amazing campaigns and she felt like she was watching the whole thing with a delay, that she was a couple of seconds behind everyone else, that she couldn’t quite catch up.
The women were hushed and corralled around a small stage, the keynote speaker was about to begin. A woman strode up in a white pantsuit, holding the microphone in such a way that suggested she had spent some time in karaoke bars.
“Boss bitches how are we?!”
The crowd wooped. The speaker was a recognisable LinkedIn thought leader, renowned for her high post engagement and quick witted sass. She was also the owner of an alcohol free rosé brand called Mischief Managed and had made a 30 under 30 list a few years back, one of those ones where you have to self nominate, where the main sponsors are affiliate marketing brands.
Her speech tracked her career, the importance of trusting your gut, how she ignored her all male board when they advised her against something. She said that only 1 in 20 CEOs are women (“it’s giving sexism”) and thanked her boyfriend for his unwavering belief in her.
She spoke about giving back, about the importance of lifting all women up, supporting them, which is why in the spirit of International Women’s Day, she was sending 30 cases of Mischief Managed to a far away country that had recently been ravaged by war. “Because all women deserve to celebrate today with a glass of rosé in hand.” The women cheered. She raised a glass and thought about the fact that she’d quite like a supportive boyfriend, or like, just a boyfriend.
She went to the bathroom to collect herself. Staring into the parts of the mirror that weren’t covered by an adhesion, that read in a font designed to look like lipstick “equality looks good on you”, she saw the dandruff boats had started to migrate from the dock again. Except they weren’t boats, but more like cruise liners, or cargo ships or maybe even like small islands. Fuck. She must have been scratching her head again. She started trying to smooth the bits of dead skin away, but the more she picked, the more the skin disintegrated into even tinier bits, and spread further across her hair. She tried to shake her head, but the bun was slicked with enough oil to put a natural disaster to shame, so the dandruff just skidded across her hair, stars smattering across the sky. There was a big piece that hadn’t quite freed itself from her temple yet, so she proactively dug her thumbnail underneath it and prised it up. But she’d misjudged it, it mustn’t have been ready, because then her head started bleeding, like a lot, and she guessed the wine hadn’t helped, but it seemed to be coming quite thick and fast. She grabbed some toilet paper to stem the bleeding, but when she removed the toilet paper from the wound, she found it had crumbled and stuck to her hair as well. There was someone banging on the door quite loudly, someone yelling that she’d been in there a long time, that they needed to pee. She quickly did the best she could to make herself look normal. Like her skull wasn’t decomposing right then and there. Like the cage that was keeping her brain inside her wasn’t falling apart. She stopped the bleeding, wiped the flecks from her hair.
Out of the bathroom she got a top up. She found a group of women to stand with, their hair curled a little too hard, their highlights not quite blending in the way their hairdressers said they would, talking about their favourite gym. A little bit into the conversation, she realised it was actually the one the women from her work went to, the one with the free green juice and the face towels that were kept in a fridge. She tried to say that, to say look, how funny, we PR girls are all the same! But her tongue caught on itself, and the words didn’t quite make it out, tripping on her front teeth, which she’d always found to be a bit too big for her mouth.
“What? What was that honey?”
She tried again, but it didn’t work, and then they were pointing to her head, well, the blood on her head. Then it was all coming out of her, a spurt, a fountain from deep in her stomach. It was hot, the bile burnt her throat, and was somehow chunky, despite not eating anything proper in days. She was trying to heal her gut you know, and then her guts were all on this woman, the keynote speaker, the LinkedIn thought leader. All red from yesterday’s beetroot smoothie and today’s red wine. Pollocking across this woman’s white pantsuit.
On LinkedIn the next day, she typed out a post.
These days, phone calls, DMs and emails are all a typical days’ work.
But let’s not forget what PR is really about.
Connecting.
Peer to peer.
Face to face.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate International Women’s Day than with my Ladies Who PR gals. My cup is overflowing. Until next time… catch me in my inbox, or better yet, for a coffee. Let’s make magic *sparkle emoji* *coffee cup emoji*
xxxx
Love it