The Scoreboard Still Reads Zero

2013 gave us Malala Yousafzai surviving an assassination attempt and continuing to speak anyway, Jennifer Lawrence refusing to perform gratitude on cue, Michelle Obama doing the work with a precision that most politicians can’t match. Three women who, in entirely different registers, showed what it looks like to be formidable without performing formidability. It was a good year to be paying attention to that.

The media, meanwhile, did what the media does. Women as bodies. Women as decoration. Women as cautionary tales or redemption arcs depending on which narrative fit the week. The same year that produced those three also produced an impressive volume of journalism that treated female ambition as spectacle, female appearance as the primary available fact, and female expertise as something requiring twice the credentialing to be taken seriously. The gap between what the culture claimed to believe and how it actually behaved was, once again, significant and mostly undiscussed.

What felt at least slightly different about 2013 was how many more people were keeping score out loud. The reaction infrastructure had grown—social media, feminist media, the sheer cumulative weight of documented examples—and ignoring it required more effort than it used to. Whether that translated into actual change or just into better-managed optics is a different question. I have a suspicion I already know which one it was.