It’s one of those words that you recognize instantly and without explanation. If you’re a woman, you don’t want to be around it and you certainly don’t want to be it.

I was reminded of that word while listening to this episode of This American Life, which breaks fresh ground on the well-trodden path that is sexual harassment coverage in 2018. It goes over the experiences of women who worked for Don Hazen, the former executive editor of AlterNet who left the publication after Buzzfeed reported that he had sexually harassed five female journalists.

What producer Chana Joffe-Walt does differently, though, is acknowledge that none of this harassment occurs in a vacuum. The women’s perceptions of what happened to them are shaped by a myriad of other experiences they’d had and messages they’d received about sexual harassment.

In a poignant moment at the beginning of the episode, Hazen’s wife, Vivian, recounts a memory of sitting with an older woman while watching female interns engage with their male supervisor.

“They’re surrounding him, and sort of hanging on his words, and leaning in,” she said. “And it’s just got that — no offense, his words weren’t that interesting, you know. It’s like, they were fine. But, oh my God, and he was eating it up. You could just see he loved this.

“And then I’m sitting in the back of the room, on the couch with this other woman, Lynn, and she looks up and she goes, hm, the cupcakes.”

The young women were Vivian’s age, but she seconded Lynn’s opinion. She said it was “like we’re grown up women, and they’re not. … That’s who I (wanted) to be.”

Vivian went on to regret feeling that way about the interns, but the entire concept feels like a new component of the dual nature of femininity, the most emblematic example being the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Women are pure or they are sluts. Frigid or too loose. Bitches who can’t keep their mouth shut or mice too afraid to speak. Women are dainty and polite and smile when told or they are strident, scowling, angry messes. We are cupcakes or we are women.

Part of what fascinates me about this dichotomy is that it seems to only apply to the workplace. It’s a quick stand-in for the take that a cupcake’s academic and/or professional endeavors are frivolous. That kind of woman is a girl, really, who is willing to feign fascination with older men to gain favor. In the 90s and the preceding decades, that woman would have been pegged as someone who was attending college or taking on a career so that she could find a husband. She should not be taken seriously, and neither should her work.

Meanwhile, the “women” are nothing but serious. Perhaps a little cold, maybe they can’t take a joke, but they are professional and view men as colleagues. Their contributions matter and deserve attention for their quality alone – not their gender or sexuality. I picture a walking blazer with shoulder pads.

The other thing that fascinates me about the cupcake/women dichotomy is that I sense it’s a label you can only earn from other women. The sexism and abuse that women aim at each other is an open secret and the main plot device of Tina Fey’s first movie.

Omitting high school drama and sticking to the professional world, female-directed sexism hearkens back to the days when women interested in a career were competing for few jobs (a scenario that some would argue has never ended). When they first entered the workforce, only a handful of women would be elevated to higher positions or considered for hire in the first place. Some female baby boomers I have spoken to said the setbacks that women faced led to a cutthroat atmosphere where they opted for open rivalries against each other, rather than holding each other up.

But when Vivian was just starting her career, she learned about cupcakes from a woman in her 40s. Maybe some women are naturals, but I believe we learn how to hurt each other. We pick up that behavior from each other – and in some cases, from our trusted mentors.

The AlterNet episode of This American Life keeps rolling around in my head. I’m sure I’ve been a cupcake. I know I’ve met them. However, the piece resonates with me due to its expert navigation of the dynamic between older and younger women at work, and paired with that, how multiple generations have vastly different views of sexual harassment.

Several of the women interviewed shared incidents where they’d told older women about the sexual harassment they experienced, only to be dismissed. The youngest woman fantasized about kidnapping and torturing her pig of a boss. She knew innately that what he was doing was wrong.

Meanwhile, a woman who was older than her still sounded uncertain if Hazen showing her a dick pic was inappropriate. Others viewed sexual harassment as an intrinsic workplace hazard. It’s just there. It’s always there. Added bonus: If you put up with it and another woman can’t “take it,” then you have one less woman to compete with.

For a story I wrote years ago at the Amarillo Globe-News, I spoke with a successful female attorney whose area of practice is incredibly male-dominated. I asked her what it was like to come up during the 70s and she described the old system, the one I mentioned earlier where women rarely supported or mentored each other because of the level of competition they underwent. After that, she made a vow to help younger female attorneys, to mentor them, to give them advice and to give them opportunities. Her attitude stuck with me, but I assumed that things are different now.

Listening to the AlterNet episode made me realize that for some of us, that system is still there. The proof is in the pudding. The epic amount of sexual harassment coverage has created two categories of women, categories that have been there all along: the cupcakes and the women who say no. Both of those labels carry a world of associations that lead us right to where we started – the virgin/whore dichotomy that women have been trying to escape since before the word “feminism” was coined.

As women, our experiences are connected. We’re either cupcakes or women who say no, and despite all the solidarity in the world, that way of thinking demands that the struggles we share are the struggles we go through alone.

Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

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