When a male boss spreads himself under the sheets with female colleagues (and these women are excelling for reasons everyone–including the office janitor–can explain), should the underlings in the group (1) tut-tut in annoyance, gnash their teeth and try to do their job anyway, (2) feign innocence, become political monks and reside above gossip, (3) get circumstantial evidence and snitch on them to the biggest boss or (4) just plain move on?

Ex-Letterman Writer Nell Scovell, according to her essay published yesterday in Vanity Fair, shrugged and took route 4. She decided she couldn’t do anything to upset the banana cart steered by the Big, gap-toothed Banana, probably figuring that one day she may have to come back to the Big Banana to give her a leg up (oh, grow up, people).  Instead, she focused on what she loved, which was her genre of writing and moved on to yet another writing job where, she says, “the atmosphere was respectful”. 

“I stayed for several seasons. Since then, I’ve racked up a long list of credits as a TV writer, series creator, producer, and director. In short, I moved on.”

Scovell’s essay, written with zero defensiveness, got me on her side very quickly.  At first. By the time I reached the end of her story, however, I felt something was wrong with the picture.  Why?  Scovell, I felt, had taken the easy way out.  I commend her on her pragmatism, her focus on what would get her mileage in the short and the long term and her sense of priority (as it related to her career, her family and her peace of mind). But I was disappointed that a woman wielding such an obviously fluid pen didn’t care to use it to dice, mince and squish out the Big Banana–along with his Nilla wafers–when she had the chance.

I look back on a time many years ago when I was at such a crossroads at my workplace. I was caught exactly in the situation that Scovell describes so eloquently. The boss was putting up an undeserving colleague for a promotion and there were many obvious sexual dalliances on company time and money. Everyone on the team was livid but no one dared go up the ranks to snitch on the boss. The work environment had become so hostile and erratic that someone had to stand up for fairness and dignity.  I spoke first. Within hours, others followed. 

Like me, Scovell was given a chance to speak up. But she didn’t take it. Publishing her essay now–many years later and for a very tidy sum, no doubt, and long after the fruit is mottled and limp–doesn’t get her any brownie points from me. For one, her non-confrontational stance didn’t further the fight against sexual harassment, manipulation and the intimidation of women in a male-dominated workplace. And what did she do to garner the respect of her gum-chewing, fart-joke writing male colleagues? When things didn’t work out, she simply shrugged and left. That’s all. She didn’t show the men in her writing group–men who must have sisters and mothers and grandmothers–that almost every member of the fairer sex ultimately wants fairness even if one or two among them may prefer to strut sexy. 

By sneaking out of the Letterman den without a squeak even when Letterman asked her why she was leaving, Scovell dragged women back several decades to a time before the sixties when Gloria Steinem and Betty Freidan began fighting for fair treatment of women, at home and in the workplace.   

I’ll sign off with Steinem's 1971 Address to the Women of America which addressed the issues of sexism and misogyny and racism and class. 

“This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen, or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.”