Suzy Weiss spoke with Amy Chozick about why famous women make us mad. Plus, she met the Manhattan socialite who calls her fellow millionaires 'cheater’ for avoiding New York taxes.
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Suzy Weiss, Bary Weiss, Nellie Bowles? Nothing but positive vibes. Making a good product, in an adverse society that wants them to fail? Nothing but positives. And gratitude from me.
Regarding your examples? Not such good vibes.
1) Elizabeth Holmes was legally a fraud. Folks wanted it to be a David (her) v. Goliath (Big Pharma), and were profoundly disappointed when ... it was all fraud.
2) Sanchez was a successful woman, but we read about her because of Jeff's success, not hers.
3) Hilary Clinton, without Bill? Would never have become a Senator. Yes, it's questionable if Bill would have been president with someone else...
Perhaps the Kardashians as an example? But the generated emotions (plus and minus) around them IS the product.
Oh Suzy. You're a nice girl, but this writing gig...it's not your strength. I do hope you find your thing.
This is a completely wrong take. We don’t hate successful women. We hate successful men and women who are doing destructive things. We also hate non successful men and women who do criminal things and want them in jail. We like non successful and successful men and women who are nice people and do good things.
Young Girls Need Heroines!
This article is garbage, and one of the reasons why I keep calling out the editorial, or complete lack of editorial standards, at The Free Press.
Suzy Weiss asks: "Why Do Famous Women Make Us Mad?" She then proceeds to give us a lineup of Elizabeth Holmes, Stormy Daniels, Lorena Bobbitt, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and Kim Kardashian. If this is what female leadership has come to, then little girls have nothing to aspire to except catching a billionaire, producing a sex tape, becoming a porn star, having your dad defend a man judged for murder, or being found guilty of tech fraud.
That's the list. That's what The Free Press considers worthy of analysis.
You might think of me as a misogynist, but I am not. I simply won't rob women of their accomplishments and their true heroines. Because girls need role models too.
So here is the article as it should have been.
Let's start with what every woman on the Weiss list has in common: not one of them stands on her own. Every single one derived her fame through a man's platform. Sánchez Bezos is famous because of Jeff Bezos. Stormy Daniels is famous because of Donald Trump. Lorena Bobbitt is famous because of what she did to her husband. Kim Kardashian launched from a sex tape with Ray J and a last name her father earned in the OJ trial. Even her much-celebrated shapewear company, SKIMS, is a product category Sara Blakely invented with Spanx over a decade earlier. Kardashian brought Instagram followers to someone else's idea.
And then there is Elizabeth Holmes, the one woman on the list who appeared to have built something independently. Giving Holmes credit for Theranos is like giving Al Capone credit for logistics innovation. Strip away the fraud, and there is nothing underneath. She is currently sitting in a federal prison camp in Texas, projected for release around 2031. That should tell you everything.
The culture that elevates these women is the same culture that erases the ones who actually built things. And that is the real crime.
Where are the heroines?
Émilie du Châtelet was born in 1706, in an era when women existed to bear children and manage households. She did something else entirely. She translated Newton's Principia Mathematica from Latin into French, and her translation remains the standard French edition to this day, nearly 270 years later. But she didn't just translate it. She corrected Newton's errors, added extensive mathematical commentary, and derived the concept of conservation of energy from mechanical principles. She demonstrated that kinetic energy is proportional to the square of velocity, settling a debate that had consumed European physics for decades. Voltaire, one of the great minds of the Enlightenment, called her "a great man whose only fault was being a woman." She died at 42 in childbirth. The work was published posthumously. History mostly remembers her as Voltaire's lover. It should remember her as the woman who made Newton accessible to an entire continent.
Madam C.J. Walker built a hair care empire from nothing in 1910 and became the first female self-made millionaire in America. She did this as a Black woman navigating Jim Crow. No billionaire husband. No scandal. No shortcut.
Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and then did something almost incomprehensible: she went back. Not once. Repeatedly. She led rescue missions through the Underground Railroad, guiding dozens of enslaved people to freedom while slavecatchers hunted her with a bounty on her head. When the Civil War broke out, she didn't retire to safety. She enlisted as a nurse, scout, and spy for the Union Army and helped plan a river raid in South Carolina that liberated hundreds of enslaved people. She was the first woman to lead an armed military assault in American history. The culture calls her a "freedom fighter." She was a combat operative.
Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She discovered radium. She did it in an era when women were barely allowed in laboratories, let alone expected to redefine physics and chemistry.
Sara Blakely cut up pantyhose in her apartment, patented Spanx, drove to department stores to pitch it herself, and built a billion-dollar company with zero outside investment. While Kim Kardashian was monetizing her Instagram following, Blakely had already invented the category.
Hedy Lamarr was one of the most famous movie stars of her era. She could have coasted on that forever. Instead, she co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during World War II, a concept that became the foundation for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Every time you connect your phone to a wireless network, you owe her.
Nancy Wake, known to the Gestapo as "The White Mouse" because they could never catch her, was the most decorated servicewoman of the Second World War. Born in New Zealand, raised in Australia, she joined the French Resistance and was recruited by Britain's Special Operations Executive. She parachuted into occupied France in 1944, led guerrilla attacks on German outposts, coordinated sabotage of supply routes, cycled over 300 miles through Nazi checkpoints to deliver intelligence, and killed an SS sentry with her bare hands. She received the George Medal from Britain, the Medal of Freedom from the United States, and the Légion d'honneur from France. She died in 2011 at 98. When she parachuted behind enemy lines, she carried a handgun, a satin cushion, and her favorite red lipstick.
Grace Hopper invented the compiler, the tool that made modern software possible. She retired as a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. No one handed her a thing.
Margaret Hamilton wrote the flight software for Apollo 11. When the computer overloaded during the lunar descent, her code saved the mission. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon because of the software a woman built.
Estée Lauder started mixing face creams in her kitchen and built one of the largest cosmetics empires in history. No celebrity endorsement, no viral moment, no man's coattail.
Margaret Thatcher clawed her way to 10 Downing Street from a grocer's family in Grantham. No family connections, no husband's career, no inherited platform. She became the longest-serving British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, won three consecutive general elections, and faced down the Soviet Union alongside Reagan. Whatever your politics, nobody gave her anything.
Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981. She served for 25 years. And yet, the culture chose to lionize Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead, with the "Notorious RBG" merchandise, the movies, the memes, while O'Connor was largely forgotten. The reason is simple: O'Connor was a conservative, and the cultural machine doesn't reward conservative women.
To Ginsburg's credit, and it is rare enough to be worth noting, she did publicly acknowledge O'Connor's pioneering role on multiple occasions. In the landmark 1996 VMI case, O'Connor had the right to assign the majority opinion to herself but gave it to Ginsburg, saying, "This should be Ruth's." And Ginsburg honored that. It was a moment of genuine grace between two women who earned their seats.
That it stands out as exceptional proves the point.
The culture celebrates women tearing each other down. It rewards women who build fame on a man's platform. It ignores women who built things from nothing. When the rare moment of women lifting each other up occurs, it is so unusual that we are still talking about it decades later.
Suzy Weiss had a choice. She could have written about any of these women. She could have shown young girls what they can become. Instead, she gave us Elizabeth Holmes, Stormy Daniels, Lorena Bobbitt, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, and Kim Kardashian.
She chose plastic.
This is the most inspiring thing I have read in a long time. Thank you!!!
Thank you for this exceptional comment. I learned a lot today and I am a woman.
Jennifer Doudna
Co-developed CRISPR, the revolutionary tool to edit DNA. She may be worth a some press as well.
The list goes on and on, and they are/were all amazing. And every time, they focus on whom? The idiots! Sorry, but it makes my blood boil.
Women run the media, not the Jews.
The scions of the plastic surgery industry?
I only asked my 34yo daughter-in-law last night why the Austtalian workplace and parliament have been besieged by myriad claims now that more women are in the workforce. Sound of crickets.
The woman in the middle of the picture looks like she’s been reupholstered.
I’ll probably spend more time pondering this question when society starts screaming “down with the Matriarchy!” with the same vigor that they currently scream “down with the Patriarchy!”.
I have not read the article, don't care to, and, with apologies upfront, as this may be addressed within it, but being the lazy fool I am, I have a question:
Famous women make who mad? Who is "us"?
I don't know anyone who would be included in the "us."
Kim Kardashian got famous by having a family member record her having sex with some 3rd rate DJ and then released it on the internet, only after having seen Paris Hilton’s sex tape release enhance her fame. Lauren Sanchez Bezos is famous for being the wife of the billionaire founder of a game-changing company worth $4 TRILLION. Hillary rose to fame first by being the wife of a POTUS and then pissed off half the country when she denigrated housewives and acted like SHE had been elected POTUS. Perhaps these gals ought to actually have some significant and meaningful accomplishments of their own before demanding we bow down and kiss their ass. Where’s the female Elon Musk? The most admired woman on planet earth, Taylor Swift, earned her fame and fortune through hard work and applying her own creativity and being the voice of a generation of females.
I was about to type a comment along the same lines. My additional two cents is that I never understood why we were supposed to worship Hillary Clinton. The only reason she ever became national news was that she married William Jefferson Clinton. For heaven's sake, she failed her first bar exam. That doesn't strike me as a brilliant legal mind. Yet still she is trotted out as the femal messiah.
In 2016, Hillary's election campaign was givng off royal accession vibes, almost a divine right of kings/queens moment. Her loss to Trump was treated as if it were a usurpation instead of the result of a deomocratic election. The way she wore purple when she finally conceded gave off royalty vibes.
I've never knowingly listened to a Taylor Swift song, but she is inescapable. Granted she has a team, but she never would have been noticed if A. she didn't have an innate talent that she developed, and B. Worked like hell. All those worldwide tours have to be grueling in ways that I could never even comprehend. There is no doubt, however, that she has earned her billions.
Men are fighters; women are carers. It's in the jeans. When you see a man who's a carer or a woman who's a fighter something seems off. It's in the jeans.
Levi or Wranglers? Just want to make sure I don’t put on the wrong pants and start acting “off.”
Nah. Commenter thinks their unfounded binary deserves more than a nah to counter but nah.
How do I feel about famous socialite women? I don’t even consider them I don’t go out of my way to read about them, care about their lives or politics. I have my own life to live Why waste anytime on women or men who don’t affect my life in any meaningful way.?
the article says: "Last week, a married partner at a Manhattan law firm went viral after he was caught making out with a junior colleague on a Central Park bench. As my colleague River Page wrote this week, the real scandal is far bigger: What happens when our society turns into a nonstop surveillance state where anyone with an iPhone can turn your life into a reality show?"
Isn't the real issue - What happened to the much requested "privacy"? Making out in Central Park? What were they thinking? (Guess they were ... thinking with an organ different from brain). There are no hotels left in Manhattan where to rent rooms by the hour? With the pied-a-terre tax on even $1 mm condos, perhaps owners can start renting them - by the hour - and avoid paying the tax. Saves them $40 K per year in taxes, enough to frequent clean ups ... and even make some money ... while this tax stays.
Surprising owners did not see the writing on the wall: Paris had such taxes for quite a while, though at much lower rates. And the French word for "real estate: is "immobilier" - which really captures "real estate" feature: It is immobile, so will always be the first thig politicians will tax.
It's all about women demanding control of male sexuality.
"What comes to mind when you think about Elizabeth Holmes? What about Stormy Daniels? Lorena Bobbitt? Lauren Sánchez Bezos? Kim Kardashian? How do these women make you feel?" They make me feel like I'm glad I'm me and not them. With respect to Lauren and Kim, I get a lot of "you're fake" feelings. Caring SO much about your appearance is very ego-centric.
Holmes: Criminal
Daniels : Funny Hooker
Bobbitt : Scary
Sanchez : Plastic Surgery Nightmare
Kardashian : Vulgar Plague on Society
I think it's a "women" thing; I and the guys I know pay no attention to these folks.
Definitely. Straight guys don't give a sh*t. Now gay men, they might have an opinion.
Wouldn't know. Not up my alley, if you catch my drift...