A note before we begin: this is a parody. There is no shell alias at the end. Nobody learns a keyboard shortcut. If you came for a hack, the hack is recognizing the genre — the breathless “the world as we know it is ENDING” panic-piece — and reading it back at half speed until the air goes out of it. That’s the whole bit. Proceed.
In a shocking turn of events, women have been promoted.
Not all of them. Some of them. Enough of them that the panic-piece genre, which runs on a permanent low-grade emergency, has a fresh emergency to run on. The pillars of modern society — capitalism and religion, two institutions that have survived plagues, schisms, and quarterly earnings calls — are reportedly reeling. The old boys’ club is said to be “left reeling.” It is always left reeling. Reeling is its resting state.
The boardroom
Capitalism, once the exclusive playground of men in suits, is now being infiltrated by women, who are doing capitalism. The same capitalism. They have read the same management books, attended the same offsite where everyone learns to “lean in,” and they too have a slide deck that opens with a quote misattributed to Steve Jobs.
“I never thought I’d see the day when a woman could out-negotiate me,” said one male CEO, who agreed to be quoted only as Anonymous, a person who is somehow the source for an alarming percentage of all reporting in this genre. “They’re like Terminators. But with a better understanding of market trends.”
The Terminator, for the record, also understood market trends. That was the plot.
The pulpit
Religion is reportedly faring no better. Women have begun to hold positions of authority within faith traditions, and are using that authority to ask whether some of the older rules were maybe more about the guy who wrote them down than about the divine.
“It’s like they’re trying to rewrite the Bible,” complained one clergyman. “Next thing you know, they’ll be saying Jesus had a sister.”
He has, in fact, a documented genealogy and a number of relatives. But we are not here to fact-check the panicked. We are here to admire the form.
The home
Meanwhile, in the most-cited tragedy of the genre, some men are no longer the sole breadwinner. They report feeling “adrift.” One man, interviewed on his couch, said his wife now out-earns him and that he is, quote, “just here.”
This is presented as a crisis. It is, on closer reading, a description of retirement, which men have historically marketed as the dream. The dream is fine when you choose it and a catastrophe when it arrives unscheduled — which is also, coincidentally, the entire emotional content of every productivity blog ever written. You will optimize your time so completely that you will have nothing left to do, and this will be heaven, unless it happens to you, in which case it is hell.
The actual news
Here is the seismic, foundation-shattering shift, stated flatly so we can all go home: a roughly equal number of competent people now get to ruin meetings that used to be ruined by a smaller subset of them.
That’s it. The boardroom is still a boardroom. The sync is still a sync that could have been an email. The strongly worded LinkedIn post is still strongly worded. The femme fatale of the headline turns out to be a mid-level director named Karen who declined your meeting because she had a conflict, and the conflict was a different meeting.
The future, we are told, is female. The present, on inspection, is mostly more of the same admin, distributed slightly more fairly, with the same coffee.
In conclusion — and the panic-piece genre is legally required to end with in conclusion — behind every great man is a great woman, and behind both of them is a calendar with no free slots until the third week of next month. Send the invite. Mark it tentative. Reel, if you must, but reel quietly. People are trying to work.