Vice Has Always Had a Woman Problem

By now, you’ve heard the news: America’s newfound reckoning with sexual abuse and assault (both are wrong! AND EVERYWHERE!) has hit every industry, it seems, including journalism. Case in point: recent departures at Vice following news of widespread mistreatment of women employees. The New York Times‘ Emily Steel’s reporting on the subject is nothing short of essential. Here’s the opening of an article you should read in full:

One woman said she was riding a Ferris wheel at Coney Island after a company event when a co-worker suddenly took her hand and put it on his crotch. Another said she felt pressured into a sexual relationship with an executive and was fired after she rejected him.

A third said that a co-worker grabbed her face and tried to kiss her, and she used her umbrella to fend him off.

These women did not work among older men at a hidebound company. They worked at Vice, an insurgent force in news and entertainment known for edgy content that aims for millennial audiences on HBO and its own TV network.

But as Vice Media has built itself from a fringe Canadian magazine into a nearly $6 billion global media company, its boundary-pushing culture created a workplace that was degrading and uncomfortable for women, current and former employees say.

An investigation by The New York Times has found four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees, including its current president.

Since all this horrible news has come out, I’ve been asked to weigh in on it, and I haven’t really wanted to, to be honest. None of this is really news to me. Because here’s the thing about Vice: WE COULD TELL. From the outside. Before the stories came out.

I’ve always liked Vice, and I’ve always known Vice wasn’t for me.

Welcome to the heartbreaking contradiction of being a woman in media.

Vice isn’t for me in the same way that the NFL isn’t for me. But female football fans exist and voracious female readers exist. I read Cat Marnell’s shitshow of a column for Vice. I’ve read plenty of excellent coverage from Broadly. But whenever I read anything in Vice, there’s a layer between it and me that I have to navigate, a moment of translation that I suspect members of Vice’s target audience do not have to perform.

So when Broadly launched two years ago—and when Vice pushed a disingenuous accompanying narrative that there weren’t great media outlets for women, as if they’d be an authority on such a thing—this is what I wrote about it:

The problem, I think, with a site like Vice launching a vertical for women is the message it sends: that women don’t read Vice, or that “women’s issues” need to be shunted into their own separate pink-hued category away from the site’s front page—and this, on a site that actually did run a fashion spread glamorizing female suicide. The problem isn’t that Vice doesn’t offer a dedicated space for female readers: it’s that Vice doesn’t offer women much of anything. Cat Marnell’s column was wonderful guilty pleasure reading, and Vice has occasionally published interesting female voices, but these seem to be exceptions. There are a lot of things Vice could—nay, SHOULD!—be doing to be less of a boys’ club. I’m just not convinced Broadly is going to be one of them.

A media organization that doesn’t treat women as part of its audience is unlikely to treat them well in other contexts.

And it looks like that’s exactly what happened here. I read the stories in the Times article aghast that they’d happened in a professional setting, and yet not at all surprised. Not because I’ve had those specific workplace experiences—I haven’t, and I count myself as lucky that I’m able to say that—but because I can imagine what it would be like. Anyone who lives inside a woman-body in the world every day likely can. And journalism is already a challenging trade to break into. It’s hard not to wonder how many women aren’t journalists because they were unwilling to play by boys’ club rules. It’s harder still to think of how many women may have stuck it out under terrible circumstances just to do the job they love.

Here’s the thing about cultivating a “boys will be boys” office culture: It has consequences. It means that women employees are less safe, and it means that the media outlets who adopt this ethos will have glaring blind spots. We’re seeing what that looks like with the many allegations at Vice. Women aren’t stupid, and women in journalism ask questions and tease out angles for a living. We’re professional observers. We know when we’re unwelcome. Maybe now the rest of the country will too.