Hello, you.
I’ve waited to tell this story for a while.
Penny is a short film developed by a group of artists in my hometown. I joined the project in March 2025 to help develop its screenplay and provide a strong female perspective, and over the next five months my role expanded across story development and pre-production. During stretches when the director was navigating a divorce, moving homes, and traveling, I continued working independently on the film, revising its script, developing its characters and philosophical architecture, and building much of the infrastructure that would eventually carry it toward production.
Penny is a story of a woman unfrozen, allegedly.
But her melting point is not where our story begins.
Long before I had language for what happened during this film, I accumulated a strange education in the relationship between intimacy, creativity, labor, and authorship. For years, some of my closest creative relationships were also romantic ones with men. I designed beside them, helped create records and sets; advised teams and built worlds. Solved a shit ton of emotional problems. Sound familiar?
More often than not, a "woman's touch" supplies invisible, emotionally connective tissue that allows a project, a home, or an idea to become coherent. Women in these roles grow familiar with being praised as essential. But what occurs when essentiality asks to become reciprocal?
A woman can be welcomed as inspiration, support, or magic. She can also advocate for proper recognition, authorship, authority, or an accurate account of events.
When labor is performed in love, its beneficence can be mistaken for an absence of authorship, as though affection somehow converts work into something freely occurring and therefore permanently available. But love does not extinguish labor, and care does not create an entitlement to its indefinite continuation. Generosity is not a loophole through which potential harm becomes permissible.
There is a name for this version of disappearance. Historian Margaret Rossiter coined the term “Matilda Effect” to describe the recurring under-recognition of women’s scientific contributions and the tendency for their work to be overlooked or attributed to male colleagues.
Rossiter was writing about science, but the concept belongs to a much longer inquiry into how intellectual labor can become detached from the women who performed it.
Erasure is contingent upon the contribution or possession of something desired by the auteur, or land-grabber, so to speak. The issue arises precisely because someone holds something worthy of absorption. A woman can conceive, carry, and birth a concept, yet somehow remain entirely absent from the mythology of how the thing was made.
Collaboration necessarily involves exchange, influence, and shared discovery. Except the zeitgeist is not fenced by perimeter, nor are archetypes inheritable. The storyteller must be ready to admit their multifacetedness. In myths, no one is solely the hero. We do not own the surrogates of our craft. Some guys get into filmmaking just to say they did, I guess. In which case, Penny should have been a racecar movie.
I won't spend a life litigating every instance in which something I touched also passed through somebody else’s hands. Though, I do know when a man is going to protect his IP to the grave, and those are not forests I'd willingly get lost in. Nor are those woods the point of this tale.
What I will stand for, permanently, is the safety of women and marginalized people. That requires being braver about what I share. Not every wound needs an audience, but secrecy can preserve the very conditions that make repetition possible. The more honestly I can account for what I have participated in, survived, misunderstood, and learned, the more capable I become of recognizing those conditions elsewhere. I will show up for other people when they encounter them, if I can.
Do not allow your most intimate bonds to go without boundaries, whether with a partner, parent, boss, or collaborator. Draw lines before you need them, and tend them with the same ordinary attention you would give a porch step or a garden.
Boundaries do not have to announce distrust. Often they are infrastructure for remaining yourself while loving, making, helping, and building alongside somebody else.
Trouble will find us, always, and some epochs will be darker than others. It is paramount to have some reliability that keeps us regulated and protected: a warm meal, a long hug, a friend who knows what is happening, a written agreement, an NDA in your purse.
Believing the best in people can coexist with expressing how you prefer to be treated. Good intentions can live alongside aggression, entitlement, fear, and feelings of scarcity. The danger begins when those forces cross into disregard for another person’s humanity, or when somebody becomes unwilling to examine the effects of their own actions.
In creative communities, that unwillingness can become structurally dangerous. It can propagate through environments organized around “recognizing talent,” rapidly drawing people in for their gifts and moving just as quickly to the next source of energy, labor, access, inspiration, or possibility. A community can perceive itself as generous while still developing habits of extraction. That is precisely why goodwill cannot be the only infrastructure we observe. If you have your safety, challenge those who challenge you.
Joy Harjo’s “A Map to the Next World” imagines orientation after a world already marked by damage, forgetting, and failed maps. I return to that proposition often: whatever world comes next will still be made by people carrying what happened in this one. What we learn here about power, harm, and repair can be brought with us if we listen.
Reverence for maternal magic and fraternal mercurialism must translate into tangible respect beyond the symbolic relationship.
It is possible to adore what a woman represents while materially undervaluing what she does. Labor can be treated as instinctual, natural, or simply expected when women perform it, even when entire households, workplaces, communities, and economies depend upon it. The labor does not disappear simply because the prevailing system of accounting has learned not to count it.
We do not enter public displays of rage with equal historical permission or consequence. Some bodies are routinely expected to perform the connective labor that keeps homes, relationships, workplaces, and communities coherent, while the anger produced when that labor is ignored, exploited, or taken for granted can itself become evidence against them.
These problems are fused: expectation of care and punishment of refusal; dependence upon women’s labor and suspicion of women’s authority; romanticization of feminine intuition and the discomfort produced when intuition produces a really good fucking case for herself.
Perhaps that is part of mapping the next world: not imagining ourselves beyond human error, but becoming more precise about which arrangements we refuse to reproduce.
The concept of a muse is particularly unstable, supposedly transforming the artist while the inspirer retains almost no authority over the transformation. Her contribution can be described as magic precisely because “magic” is harder to invoice, copyright, credit, or trace than labor.
What happens when she stops being atmosphere and starts keeping records?
My larger emerging inquiry is not simply about men behaving badly, nor is it an argument that every creative disagreement between a woman and a man is theft. I am invested in understanding the mechanisms through which women’s creative labor can remain welcome while it is inspirational, supportive, intimate, administrative, emotional, connective, or muse-like, and then become contested when the woman asks to be understood as an author, or simply as an individual with an autonomy.
Authorship is one place where that mechanism becomes visible, but it is not where my interest ends. I care deeply about women retaining rights to their work and moving safely through creative and professional spaces. That is the experience from which I write. I care even more about the communal conditions that determine whether someone can speak when something goes wrong.
That shifts the question from credit alone to ecosystem. What happens in a community when one person controls access, opportunity, reputation, or the prevailing account of events? What conditions make it increasingly costly for someone who has already been misunderstood or marginalized to contradict that account? What kinds of informal loyalties, professional dependencies, social incentives, or simple discomfort allow one version of events to harden before the person most affected has been able to speak?
That is the larger problem I am trying to understand: not only who gets credit for making the work, but who retains enough safety and autonomy to tell what they know about how the work was made.
When I see a woman walking a child home from school, I see labor. I see necessary infrastructure being supplied by a person while the economic system around them may record no productive activity at all. What else have our systems trained us not to count? What happens when we become deliberately more difficult to erase from those systems of accounting?
Marilyn Waring’s work in feminist economics gave me language for a phenomenon much larger than art. Her work interrogates systems of national accounting that can depend upon enormous quantities of unpaid labor while failing to recognize much of that labor as measured economic production.
Creative work has its own systems of accounting.