▸ Column · Contemporary boardroom Metropolis — the LexCorp Foundation charity gala circuit, Silver Age Comic register.
LEX LUTHOR replies.
Replied to by Lex Luthor, with a rebuttal from Selina Kyle.
The letter
I'm writing because I need a definitive answer, and I suspect you're the only person in Metropolis who will give me one without hedging. A colleague of mine attended the LexCorp Foundation's annual benefit last month — the evening at the Metropolis Museum where the shrimp cocktail costs more than it should and the men occasionally behave accordingly. One of the guests made an advance she had not invited. She slapped him. In front of half the city's board members. My colleague maintains this was the correct and sufficient response — that a slap is the only language such a man comprehends, and that a woman in her position was entirely right to use it. I find myself arguing with her, but I cannot quite say why.
Lex Luthor replies
My dear, your colleague is asking the wrong question, and so, it turns out, are you. "Was she right." How charming. How entirely, magnificently beside the point.
Here is what she actually accomplished: she made herself the event. The man who insulted her left as the fellow who got slapped at a charity dinner. She left as the woman who caused a scene in front of half the LexCorp Foundation's donor list. Frankly, she handed him the better exit. He gets a story. She gets whispers.
Do I condemn her? No. The impulse was sound. The execution was sentimental. Sentiment, I find, is what people reach for when they have not located the sharper instrument.
Here is what she could have done instead: lean in. Smile. Say — quietly, so only he hears — one sentence he will not be able to un-hear at the next gala, and the one after that. Something true about him that he believed was private. She almost certainly knows one. Every woman at that table knew one.
Which of you leaves the room worse off? That is the only question worth asking.
She left worse off. That particular mistake, darling, I do not make.
— Lex Luthor
Selina Kyle weighs in
Lex is wrong about the arithmetic. He assumes she had a secret worth deploying — that one whispered sentence would have outperformed the slap. Maybe she did. Maybe she'd rather keep that ammunition for something more private than a museum gala.
A slap costs nothing she can't replenish. A secret, once spent in public, is just spent.
Pay attention to who profits when you stay composed. Sometimes the city is watching, and sometimes the city deserves to watch.
She left even. That is not nothing.
— Selina Kyle