Elizabeth May and Lisa Raitt’s Thelma-and-Louise bond
Footage of Green party leader and Conservative minister is an onstage tableau of women supporting each other
Forget Thelma and Louise, who were once the go-to pop cultural symbol of female friendship. We’ve now got Liz and Lisa.
Thelma and Louise were of course characters from that memorable 1990s’ feminist female buddy pic of the same name, in which two friends — one a ferocious waitress, the other a more timid housewife — go on a rogue road trip, and basically shoot, kill and drive over a cliff to make the point that women are strong and they support each other.
Now, courtesy of another more immediate film medium, YouTube, there’s fascinating footage of Liz (Green party Leader Elizabeth May) and Lisa (Conservative Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt) and their onstage tableau of female friendship.
As was widely reported last week, at the designed-to-be raucous parliamentary press gallery dinner, Raitt rushed to the podium in her stocking feet to haul her friend May off the stage as May delivered a seemingly interminable kamikaze speech in which words were mangled and the F bomb was dropped.
The humanity in those few seconds as May leaned into Raitt, who gently guided her off saying, “We gotta take off now” earned Raitt a ton of praise, much of it from male commentators who seemed bowled over by the honourable minister’s instinct to rescue her pal from further embarrassment.
(Perhaps they couldn’t imagine a man saving another man so publicly.)
Intrigued by what that moment said about female friendships — Raitt, who just turned 47 and May who will be 61 in June are not only opponents but almost from different generations — I reached out to both women to see if they would talk about their friendship.
May, on the road and busy, sent an email saying only that Raitt “first wrote me for help with a school project when she was a student in Cape Breton? (I am a lot older.) We only met once she was in Cabinet.”
That would be in 2008, and the two women not only share Nova Scotia in their background, but are the kind of politicians, says Star columnist and author Susan Delacourt, for whom “friendship and personal relationships would come before partisanship.”
I didn’t hear back from Raitt’s camp. No doubt both women were eager to let the story die. Yet it’s a good one, at least from the friendship angle.
My own life and career have been defined by my friendships with women who have supported me, confided in me as I have in them, and rescued me when I needed it.
The days of the all powerful boys’ club — in any profession — are dwindling — but for a long time a woman absolutely had to count on other women to support her. In many ways, she still does. (Lena Dunham, mega successful creator of Girls, the HBO series, is known for generously helping other female writers up the ladder.)
Pop culture is catching up in a more realistic way with how women support each other at work. It’s no longer all about having to stand up to men. Nor, as more women achieve power, is it about them competing for limited spoils.
I’ve written before about Scott & Bailey, the terrific British female detective series — available on Netflix — in which two smart but very different detectives, one for a while a binge drinker, and the other a more grounded wife and mother — help pull each other up through the ranks, solving cases and liking each other’s company so much, that, as one reviewer observed, they keep on talking, rehashing the day’s work — or what they’re going to make for dinner — on their car phones as they individually drive home.
“Who knew that letting your female leads behave as Actual Women when confronted with hideous crimes and disastrous relationships could prove so watchable?” wrote one critic in the Guardian.
That’s just the point — it shouldn’t be unusual or a surprise to anyone that women have each other’s backs in their professional lives. The stereotype of a Devil Wears Prada witch boss or colleague from hell may well exist but so in greater numbers do the women who go the extra mile for each other.
Gender bonding is such a natural instinct. Men for years found relaxation (not to mention career advancement) in golfing with their office buddies. It only became awkward when women made professional inroads and noticed they were being left out. As men and women get used to the power shifting more equitably among them, there’s an across the board tendency now to be less gender focused, men are less threatened, women less intimidated. Professional camaraderie is becoming gender neutral.
But women are kidding themselves if they think they don’t need each other out there. There are bleak landscapes — the Armed Forces comes to mind — in which women need to bond overtly.
In any field, a woman who sees when another woman is in trouble (even if it’s trouble of her own making) and helps her without sacrificing her friend’s dignity or her own, is a woman you want to be friends with in your workplace.
As for Liz and Lisa — I get the feeling either of them would be great company on a Thelma and Louise style road trip, without the carnage of course.
The laughs would be many, the insights profound — and the F bomb would no doubt be exuberantly dropped before we hit the first on ramp. Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.