To hear this episode, visit theallusionist.org/shinetheory
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, hold language under my chin like the torch in Blair Witch Project.
In today’s show, two people, two beloved podcasters, talk about coining a phrase - great to be immortalised in the dictionary, less great to have to lawyer up.
On with the show.
AMINATOU SOW: Hi. We are Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, and we are the authors of the book Big Friendship, as well as the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend.
HZ: And at some point between 2009, when they met and befriended each other, and 2013, when Ann used it in an article in New York Magazine, Aminatou and Ann coined the term Shine Theory.
ANN FRIEDMAN: I think this is just something that, you know, you probably said to me first, “I don't shine if you don't shine.” And then it became a thing we said frequently to each other and to other friends.
AMINATOU SOW: I will confess that it is the lyric from the Killers album that I just enjoyed a lot.
CLIP: The Killers ‘Read My Mind’:
I don't mind, you don't mind,
’Cause I don't shine if you don't shine
AMINATOU SOW: So if you're asking for the the real etymology of that, some of that is really some insider music joke from a long time ago. But the sentiment still stands.
ANN FRIEDMAN: We would say to each other frequently: "I don't shine if you don't shine," and really came to understand it as a shorthand for the investment we have put into each other as friends and how hard we're willing to work to help each other achieve the things we want to achieve, separately. And we also see it as a way of prioritising collaboration over competition, which may otherwise be the default for certain people.
HZ: Shine Theory is not necessarily a theory, it’s a practice.
AMINATOU SOW: The point of Shine Theory really is modelling for each other how it can be different. And so I think that we are less focussed on, you know, intent or is someone doing this thing, rather than just showing them like, oh, here's a different way that you could be at work and here is a different way that you could be in your life.
ANN FRIEDMAN: It has resonated in particular with people who have been told that there may only be one seat at the table for those who look like them and that they need to be competing with their peers and that identity to be the one in the seat. And that is something we talk about explicitly as we talk about Shine Theory; so in some ways, we are focussing the conversation around women, around people of colour, around people who are traditionally shut out of power. However, I don't know, I also sense - maybe I'm just talking about the men I know - a real desire to share power, not hoard it. And I think that thinking about these questions of practising how to be in support of community with people feel pretty key to everyone getting free, not just, for example, women.
AMINATOU SOW: The point of modelling the behaviour is really important for everyone because, you know, regardless of your gender, I don't know that anyone at work is really taught to be an actually true and good team player.
HZ: One of the principles of Shine Theory is sharing power, not hoarding power.
AMINATOU SOW: Hoarding power, it truly is the organising principle of so much evil, any kind of evil institution. And I think that even very good people do not realise the harm that they do when they hoard power and they refuse to just shine a light on making that more accessible to other people. And I think that when you come from a lack of resources, it is just very apparent to you what is going on there. But, yeah, we really believe that if you share your power, you can, in fact, get more power, and maybe have more fun, than if you were just hoarding it and being like a very selfish kind of arsehole.
ANN FRIEDMAN: One way is transparency, being very open with each other about how much money we're making, how we really have achieved something that we've achieved or the roadblocks that we are facing. I think that sometimes it is tempting to look at a friend's life and just say, like, "Oh, isn't that nice? All these things are just falling into place for you." And we're really committed to transparency as part of Shine Theory, because when you start to pick it apart and share with someone who you care about, "This is how I actually made it happen," it's easier to feel like you are in a sort of collaborative spirit with that person, rather than just feeling maybe resentful or judgy about what they've managed to land for themselves. So transparency is a big part of it, I think. And that is a practice. You can't just think yourself transparent. You actually have to share the details about what you have and how you got there.
AMINATOU SOW: Capitalism is not really invested in making people actually genuinely care for each other and like each other. I think that for some people, there is genuine bewilderment - there is a truly like not understanding that other people just do not have the same privilege that you do. Like, that is true. And then I think that for other people, there is also an understanding that if you share your resources, it will mean that in capitalism, ultimately you have less power. And so I think that everyone is motivated for different reasons. Some people it's truly out of sheer ignorance and some people truly out of sheer just wanting to be not a great person. But I don't believe that the way that we organise the workforce lends itself naturally to people just being kind to each other.
ANN FRIEDMAN: It's true, and also, I think speaking about this from a particularly American perspective, the sense that you are an individual and all of your skills and knowledges, those things are so particular to you and they form your unique advantage in the marketplace: that mythology goes really, really deep. And so, while that is not something that I have come to believe in that way, you're working against some cultural stuff when you talk about this in the United States as well.
HZ: This could be the big post-capitalism movement.
AMINATOU SOW: Friendship? Absolutely. Friendship is the big post-capitalist movement. This is what we are staking our lives on.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Interdependence, yes.
AMINATOU SOW: We’re like, interdependence forever. We believe it.
HZ: And diminishing hierarchies.
AMINATOU SOW: Always! Always.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Would be great, would be great.
HZ: Although sharing is in the spirit of Shine Theory, that didn’t mean they were happy for anyone to use it however they wanted to. Aminatou and Ann ended up having to trademark the term.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Ugh, speaking of America...
AMINATOU SOW: Oh my God. Everything turns you into an adversarial entity in this country. When we coined Shine Theory, there was there was no strategy behind it, truly; it was two friends using the vocabulary of within our friendship to really signal to each other something that we cared about. Ann, who was a columnist at New York Magazine, ended up writing about it. It resonated with a lot of people because, of course, why not just being nice to each other and not competing and shining a light really on a practise that other people were doing but not necessarily had a word for, was something that resonated deeply. And, of course, because it resonated deeply and widely, some people choose not to be nice about it. And so when I think it was maybe a couple of months after the article had come out, and we were noticing like a real groundswell of activity around it. And also people had started misusing it, essentially. And so we were trying to be attentive to what and what's the best way to just make sure that people are using it the right way, probably to just put it up on a website somewhere. And that way, anytime they google it, they can just be like, "Shine Theory. This is what it is." So we go to buy this website - it was a woman who was running some sort of boutique fitness - and it turns out that someone else has not only already bought the website, they have branded it in the most disgusting, just so anti the spirit of Shine Theory, and, you know, had the words 'Shine Theory' plastered on it. There were pictures of other women in some sort of beauty fitness competition.
ANN FRIEDMAN: There were so many abs and so much eye makeup.
AMINATOU SOW: So many abs, so much eye makeup. And the words just trademarked across it. And if I'm honest, I blacked out after that moment. So everything that has transpired since has been a fever dream.
ANN FRIEDMAN: And I also believe that this website mentioned the article in New York Magazine making it look like the two of us were somehow -
AMINATOU SOW: Affiliated.
ANN FRIEDMAN: - giving our blessing to this effort, like, you know, like we were mentioned in a way that was also extremely disingenuous, where a person is looking like they are like, yeah, I'm giving credit. But it more it seems like a bit of a dodge, like, oh, I'm going to show you that these people are fine with it. We were very much not fine with it.
HZ: How did you get them to knock it off? If you indeed managed to get them to do that.
AMINATOU SOW: Oh, lawyers. We did not get them to do this ourselves. And so, you know, I think it was it was the first time, Ann, I believe that we had to use a lawyer together.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Aww. The first time that we used a lawyer together! Awww.
AMINATOU SOW: It's so American. It's so American and beautiful. Our legal marriage, our legal union consummated over a fight over a trademark. Yeah. If I had to do that over again, I wish that we had not had to do that. So much of the legal battle around Shine Theory was not to establish like our own imprint on it; it was really to protect it against people who were trying to do this very kind of thing.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Right. And then there was a whole process as well of not just getting this other person to stop using it, but then trying to establish the trademark for ourselves, which I don't think we would have set out to do otherwise. But it requires you to say this is how we're making money off of something. Again, because America. And that was not a goal we had either. Really what we wanted to do is just say, “This is a thing we came up with and we want people to talk about it and we don't want people to market their fitness companies with it.” That was our our base desire.
AMINATOU SOW: We definitely got a couple of enquiries from tech companies where they wanted to use Shine Theory as the branding for their Women's History Month efforts, for example, or, you know, name a conference after it. Mind you, they were not inviting us to come present at the conference or explain to them what was going on. They just wanted to slap ‘Shine Theory’ over the effort. And my feeling is just pay the women in your company well, but that's just me. So there were things like that... What else?
ANN FRIEDMAN: There were definitely uses of it in advertising or advertorial campaigns or spon stuff.
AMINATOU SOW: Yeah, Victoria's Secret.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Victoria's Secret, a conference called Create Cultivate…
AMINATOU SOW: Yeah. Reese Witherspoon definitely trying to brand some sort of interview series around it. All very flattering and nice, but not exactly the spirit in which we want Shine Theory to be used.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Because Shine Theory sounds like so accessible and fun, it does not sound like an anticapitalist rage anthem or anything like that -
HZ: Socialism in disguise.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Exactly! Our much more radical views behind it were were easy to elide by just saying, "Shine Theory! Where women support women, yay!" And so that also happened, where brands and events that were not really engaging with issues of power and collaboration, like we've just described to you, were using this phrase as a shorthand for things that were just not meaningfully addressing what Shine Theory addresses. And that was extremely frustrating. So that went on for years, even after we went and got the trademark and the website.
AMINATOU SOW: I feel like so much of our conversation is always focussed on how people are doing it wrong. But I really can not overstate how just joyous and amazing it is to see how much it has resonated with people. And I think that it resonates not because we invented anything new. I think it resonates because this is a practise that so many people were naturally already doing. And it also feels good to do. I love the mail that we get from Girl Scout troop leaders, from teachers, from, you know, people at work who have found ways to really deepen their relationships together. And the people who are ruining it for us are really such a small, small, small corner of that. But I get so much joy from from knowing that this is something that is alive and thriving, and not just some cutesy shorthand for for empowering women.
HZ: Do you have any favourite examples of shine theory in action in a positive way?
ANN FRIEDMAN: I have a favourite. There is a marathon runner, Shalane Flanagan, who really noticed that she was one of the few women with real staying power in the sport of distance running. She noticed this trend that I think other people had clocked, which is that women would start strong, maybe in a college track and field programme, and then once they got deeper into their adult lives, would fall off the competitive distance running circuit. And so rather than saying, “Oh, isn't it cool that I'm really the only woman here doing this thing?” she started a training programme like essentially like a running group where she mentored women who were at the beginning of their adult distance running lives. And a really large percentage of those women went on to run huge marathons, like be serious competitors in this sport. And almost all of them credit her specific mentorship and investment in them. And I just love that story so much, because she is literally training her competition or what should be her competition. And instead, what she was really doing is creating community. The Shine Theory way of looking at that is she took a collaborative approach to a problem that she saw, which was that she was the only one.
AMINATOU SOW: I love that example, too, because you're right, it's literal, actual competition.
ANN FRIEDMAN: So concrete.
AMINATOU SOW: Right. It's so concrete. And she creates a cohort for herself, but also has said that her running has gotten better because of it, you know. And I think that seeing that in such a quantifiable way was so inspiring to both of us. And, I'm like, if athletes can do this, who are you, office couch potato, for not sharing?
HZ: You know, other people who coined a phrase might want to slap their own names on it, get an eponym in the place - Sow-Friedman Theory.
AMINATOU SOW: That sounds so dreadful. I can't even. I am just shuddering thinking about that.
ANN FRIEDMAN: That sounds like a medical syndrome for people who can't explain their feelings, the Sow-Friedman Problem.
HZ: Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman are the hosts of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, and the authors of the new book Big Friendship, which is out now.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, we talk about another term Aminatou and Ann coined.
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: Considering the many kinds of friendships we might have, we don’t have a great deal of vocabulary to distinguish a friend, a true friend, from, say, your favourite work colleague but you don’t see outside of work; or a person you like but only see through a mutual friend, someone you’ve known since childhood but don’t necessarily have anything in common with; that person who always greets you with “Hey buddy!” and a big slap on the back but maybe you can’t stand them… To distinguish their intense, close, exceptional friendship, Aminatou and Ann decided on the term ‘Big Friendship’.
ANN FRIEDMAN: Which is just our way of really delineating there are some people who we call friend who are actually much more in the acquaintance department or who are people that we have fallen out of touch with and or maybe actually like friend, past tense. But a big friendship is someone who you are in an intimate, long-running friendship with, where you are both really committed to seeing the friendship through for the long haul. And we needed a term that wasn't ‘bestie’, which is definitely, you know, we have called each other bestie or like BFF; things like that just feel a little young, I guess, for the kind of adult friendship that we are talking about. And, you know, and also a little hierarchical. We are not each other's sole close friendship. And language matters, so if you're calling someone your best friend and that doesn't really ring true, you need another word. And so ‘big friendship’ is is ours.
HZ: Have you trademarked it? Preemptively?
ANN FRIEDMAN: Oh, my God. Noooo.
AMINATOU SOW: No. Hoping to never have to deal with the Trademark Office ever again, thank you.
The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best independent podcasts on the interwaves. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
malversation, noun, formal: 1. corrupt behaviour in a position of trust; 2. corrupt administration (of public money etc).
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. Thanks to Jackson Musker. Find me on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @allusionistshow. And to hear every episode of the show or read the transcripts, find out more about all the topics and people talking about them, see the full dictionary entries of the words, and a lexicon of every word covered in the show, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
