Lived Through This

Here’s What It Was Really Like to Work at a Women’s Website

I felt nothing. So I headed to my desk for another busy day of browsing online sales and waiting to die.

Photo: Emma Matthews Digital Content Production via Unsplash

I was running two hours late to work on the day I figured out I was really, truly, finally about to get fired. The whole “two hours late” thing wasn’t, like, an eerie portent of doom or anything. I had been pushing my start time back later and later for months until I was here: waking up at 9:30 for a job that started at 9, then finally swanning into the office at 11, with big black sunglasses and a giant takeout coffee, like I was a glamorous drug addict rock star instead of a writer employed to churn out articles like “If You’re Such a Big Feminist, Why Don’t You Fart in Public?” By that point in my career as a blogger, my morning posturing was the only part of the job that I really enjoyed.

Usually, the building’s lobby was jam-packed every hour of every day with various bright, hopeful young persons clutching various bright, hopeful $14 deli salads. Every floor of our office building was filled with vaguely hip, youth-oriented businesses, so not everyone was headed to labor with me in the “women’s issues” gulag on 12. Sometimes the young salad-toters would get off at eight (cryptocurrency?) or 9 (sports bras that were feminist for some reason).

But that day, it was just me, dourly sipping my vanilla sweet cream coffee and grimacing like I was about to get a Pap smear.

I anticipated a quick and direct ride to my day of faux feminist outrage on the 12th floor. I wondered if today would be one of the days when we were supposed to write about how The Bachelor was sexist, or if it was going to be one of the days when we decreed that it wasn’t sexist, and in fact, it was actually sexist to not like The Bachelor. It mostly depended on which articles were doing well on Facebook at the moment.

But as the doors were closing, someone yelled for me to hold them.

Two harried women, both with identical camel-colored overcoats and blonde Brazilian blowouts, rushed toward me. I could tell they were publicists from the way their high heels clacked across the lobby; everyone who…