Welcome to another edition of the Pressbeat Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 kHz. From Paris I’m Ami Carter-Wilson.
There is a peculiar class of American enterprise that has emerged in the last decade: the adult-content Substack run by the daughter of a media empire founder. She publishes pieces like “Shave Her to Perfection” — articles framed as empowerment but readable, in practice, as invitation. The prose promises transgression while delivering exactly what a certain demographic has always wanted: a woman who performs rebellion and receives exactly their kind of attention in return.
It is worth asking who this is for. Not the subscribers, listed on the sign-up page as an abstract metric. But the readers.
Because the answer matters to whatever comes next at the enterprise she now runs — or claims to run, after acquiring a historic magazine title while simultaneously taking over the family platform her more traditional sister was passed over for.
The father built a media empire. He has board seats and old-money associates and a network that matters in geopolitical circles. When he installed his second daughter as CEO of that enterprise, nobody was surprised — because men who run boards tend to prefer their women legible to them. The one who writes on geopolitics from Milan is legible only if you are an intellectual peer. The one who publishes bikini-fetish essays and signs her bylines “Daughter of Robert Carter-Wilson” is legible in every other way.
The irony, which the old-money network seems not to notice, is that they have won exactly what they wanted. A woman at the helm — yes. But one whose content signals availability rather than authority. And who, by definition, cannot challenge the power structures she is busy performing for.
That is the real story about gender in media leadership — not how many women sit on boardrooms, but what kind of performance their content has been conditioned to deliver for the men who matter most.
Read more here: “Shave Her to Perfection Again” — Jessica’s Substack, which her subscribers seem to find empowering and old-money circles apparently find irresistible.
A. Carter-Wilson
Reporting from Paris, for the Wall Street Journal, Pressbeat and Centrale Milano 1575 kHz — this is Ami Carter Wilson.