Why Won't Anyone Listen to Women? | Gen X Meets Gen Z (XwhyZ)

My Gen Z kid handed me an article, and it turned into a whole conversation about who actually gets listened to.

I want to tell you how this episode started, because it is very on brand for us. We spent the first few minutes arguing about the countdown, me taking a sip of coffee right in the middle of the intro, and a genuinely unhinged bit about my Minnesota loon mug. If you have ever wondered whether Faith and I have our act together before we hit record, please let this put the question to rest. We do not. That is sort of the whole charm.

But then Faith brought me an article, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

It was an opinion piece in the Hollywood Reporter, and the headline alone was designed to make you mad. The gist was that the industry has gone soft, that the “quarter zips have taken over,” that the suits have lost their nerve, and that what Hollywood really needs is to bring its “monsters” back. Faith read it and got angry. Then she read it again and landed somewhere more interesting than anger, which is usually where the good conversations live.

Because underneath the provocation, we kept bumping into the same question. Who gets to show up as a mess and still be taken seriously? When a man rolls out of bed and shows up in a wrinkled shirt, he is a genius who cannot be bothered. When a woman does it, she is unprofessional. We are held to an impossibly high standard, and a lot of men are held to almost none, and somehow that gets framed as the natural order of things.

Here is the part that stuck with me most, and I said it out loud on the mic so I would have to sit with it. When a system stops working for men, they get to change the system and call it progress. When the same system does not work for women, women get punished for trying to change it at all. Once you see that pattern, you cannot unsee it. It shows up in offices, in who gets funded, in whose anger is treated as a real signal and whose is treated as an overreaction. It shows up in our own relationships, in the quiet math of money and power we do not always say out loud.

That is really what this episode is about. Not one silly article. The much older, much bigger habit of not listening to women, and what it looks like to notice that from two different generations at the same kitchen table.

Talking about it with my daughter is its own kind of gift. She sees things I was trained not to name. I have context she is still gathering. Somewhere in the overlap is the actual conversation, and I think that overlap is worth recording.

We wrap up with a couple of things worth your watchlist, including Elizabeth Meriwether’s Furious and Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, because we cannot help ourselves.

Come listen to the whole thing. Bring your own mug. And if this landed for you, subscribe so the next one finds you.

Keep looking for the wonder in the weeds.

Cristie Ritz-King, PsyD is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.