Good news: the arduous process of feminist liberation has granted some women access to the most powerful seats at the table. Nor can we forget that it has allowed a select few to become eye-wateringly and independently wealthy. But as much fun as it is to track the meteoric rise of the girl go-getters, we have always been more interested in watching their catastrophic unravelings.
Inventing Anna is the TV dramatisation of Anna Delvey’s louche New York social life. Based on a true story, we watch Delvey – real name Anna Sorokin – pose as a German heiress replete with a $60 million trust fund. She takes Manhattan’s elite for a ride as she fleeces hotels and banks out of more than $275,000. This is all before she is ultimately arrested, put on trial and sentenced to prison. Her cons are fun but the demise is delicious.
When New York Magazine first published its investigation into Delvey and her unique approach to personal finance, it took the internet by storm. The media rushed to parse and dissect her undoing from every available angle: who was she? What gave this Russian 25-year-old girl the nerve? How could someone who wasn’t even that pretty get away with it? (So ran one line of questioning). Stories of scammers are sexy and layered with intrigue. But what’s more intriguing than a competent fraudster? A hapless woman who got found out.
Since the first revelation of Holmes's deceit... the media has been awash with stories of the 'spectacular rise and fall' of Theranos and its red-lipped, blonde founder
This is not the only much-chewed-over feminine downfall of late. Elizabeth Holmes became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire with her apparently revolutionary blood testing start-up Theranos. Holmes was the paradigm of the female entrepreneur. That is, of course, until the technology underlying her company was revealed to be flimsy. By 2016 the company (once valued at $9 billion) was mobbed by investigations and lawsuits. By June 2018, Holmes was criminally charged with defrauding investors. And this year she was found guilty on four of 11 charges.
Since the first revelation of Holmes’s deceit, right up to her recent conviction, the media has been awash with stories of the “spectacular rise and fall” of Theranos and its red-lipped, blonde founder. And the story will be dramatised in The Dropout this year, fuelling our insatiable appetite as we delight over another woman’s hubris and subsequent karmic reckoning. When Holmes is sentenced in September she will, in all likelihood, face not-insubstantial jail time.
Of course, she is a criminal. And Delvey too. But the contempt they inspire is potent beyond all proportion, and the stories of their wrongdoings magnified. Why do we relish these tales so much?
Perhaps it is simply because it is hard for women to make it to the top. When they fall the impact and its shockwaves are greater. Or maybe when women succeed it is often because of, not in spite of, their less conventional characteristics. Delvey and Holmes eschewed the demands that women be cheery, impenetrably perfect, responsible and show precisely the right level of ambitious. A woman who flouts expectations presents a far more acute threat to the status quo than one who adheres to them.
And as far as we may have come, the idea of a woman at the very top still provokes discomfort. So no wonder the world feels a cathartic relief when they are exposed as fakers, fraudsters and comic book baddies. Smart and capable is more frightening than sly and tricky.
When provided with anything other than well-meaning softness from women there must be a redressal; an equal and opposite reaction; a downfall
It is as though our suspicions were right all along: women overreach and we need to overcorrect. Bonus points if they are green and unorthodox: perhaps the one thing more threatening than a successful woman is a successful young one.
Of course it has always been thus. The goddess Medea could never quell her rage; Lady Macbeth eventually faced the consequences of her plots; Emperor Nero’s mother was stabbed by her son in recompense for her overweening ambition too. These women weren’t saints, far from it. But we are inured to the violence and iconoclasm in stories about men. When provided with anything other than well-meaning softness from women there must be a redressal; an equal and opposite reaction; a downfall.
But stories do not have to be morality tales, nor do they have to be fair. In fact, this phenomenon only really matters in the non-fictional realm. The pictures of former Downing Street press secretary Allegra Stratton crying outside her home as she resigned for joking about No 10’s lockdown breaches became totemic of the late stages of the pandemic. And woman falling on her sword dominated the front pages.
Journalist Laura Craik quipped that “if Anna Delvey didn’t exist, then [screenwriter and director] Aaron Sorkin would have to invent her”. And when the writer Emma Brockes asked in a piece for the Guardian what it was about Holmes that elicited such contempt, she concluded there was “a thrill of satisfaction when the verdict came through, that was only vaguely related to justice”.
It seems we have created a world in which women are permitted to succeed, but where we would always rather watch them fail.