In 2014, I invited 13 women to my house to screen a film and meet each other (26 women showed up!). They were directors, producers, DPs. We talked about how we could support each other, what we needed. Everyone agreed we needed to do it again. So I scheduled the next one.

In a few months, we were hosting the likes of Joey Soloway, @akstanwyck @rmward to discuss difficult topics women were facing in entertainment. But even as the group grew, friends brought friends, it was...really pretty white. We decided it couldn't continue like that.

So after being deliberate, the group expanded into a deeply diverse and intersectional set, and I'll never forget when a brave member of the group said...I don't identify as a woman, can I still come here?

And I know it was a learning moment for me and everyone in the room, that a word we had been using as a unifying force "women" was exclusive. We had been calling ourselves WIMPS (women in moving pictures salon). We decided what it had to meen was WOMEN/INTERSECTIONALITY IMPS etc

We gathered to learn from each other and also to unlearn some of our most core assumptions about the way the world works. We gathered together because out in the entertainment world, we were often the only one of us in whatever room we were in.

We gathered to give each other courage, to tell each other, "no, it's not crazy, no it's not just you." We gathered to whisper the industry's secrets. Nobody in that room was surprised about Weinstein, and we won't be surprised at the many others yet to fall...

We also gathered to speak truth to power. A young actor in the room once dragged a network exec over the COALS for applauding the diversity of their background actors in their otherwise all white (and white directed) shows. She said, "It's about whose lens you're looking through"

Adjacent to the group, we started a resource list. It was list you could use to hire women into any kind of entertainment job. And that grew explosively - over the last 6 years THOUSANDS of women were hired into TENS OF THOUSANDS of entertainment jobs.

HOWEVER. It was always anchored in the experience of the in-person meetings, which I stopped being able to host in 2018. Then it was just a resource list, which worked ok for a while.

Over the last year it grew to almost 5000 women. And then the problems started. Members would post things and other members - typically BIPOC or LGBTQ members would respond and point out microaggressions or problematic language. Which was the paradigm of the original WIMPS.

And what I witnessed was the worst of white feminism/cis normativity. A total unwillingness to hear any correction, an the worst and most violent defensiveness (to the extent emails can be violence.)

The flare ups were terrible - long chains of reply-all threads. BIPOC and LGBTQ folks expressing real harm, and not being heard. And then I realized: these white women were in hiring positions. They were offering jobs.

And that means WIMPS had become a place that was pipelining BIPOC and LGBTQ creators onto toxic sets. So yesterday, after 7 years, I shut it down.

I don't think white/cis women have any idea how they have been weaponized to destroy movements for equality from the inside. They are pawns and often, they think they're the hero in the story.

So WIMPS is no more. We referred many of our members to @TheJTCList and @OurGlassElev8r among other platforms. The work to resource women is being done in many places. But great care has to be taken to not allow that work to become tools for patriarchy/white supremacy.