We're hysterical, Freud says bring on the vibrators

I'm going to complain now, at great length (sorry) and supported through ample quotation, about an annoying tendency in this week's New Yorker.

It first manifests itself in an article by Virginia Heffernan about Tina Fey. The first woman to hold the position of head writer at Saturday night live is first profiled as a critical loner, her humor originating from the observatory powers of the outsider:

"Her [Fey's] sense of humor, however, didn’t make her cool. Instead, she was a straight-A student who packed her schedule with extracurricular activities, including the newspaper and choir. She has a soft but precise singing voice."

And here:
"“She’s pretty monastic at times,” Amy Poehler told me. “She’s not the first girl to belly-flop into the pool at the pool party. She watches everybody else’s flops and then writes a play about it.”"

Then we see Fey as a ball-busting hardliner, as in this quote:
"Nearly all Fey’s colleagues mentioned her ability to be mean and disarming at the same time. I heard her humor variously described as “hard-edged,” “vicious,” and “cruel.”"

And then (oh thank god we thought she was a cold-hearted bitch) we have this:
"While I was sitting with Fey one afternoon in a café on Broadway, she admitted that she chronically prepares for the worst, in part by keeping zingers close at hand. But it’s excessive, she realized: “No one’s really coming at you.” She had been reflecting on current events, and I expected to hear her customary tartness, but her voice faltered, and tears slipped down her cheeks..."

Later on in the same issue, in the story on the Wall Street Journal by Ken Auletta, we are presented with a similar female-in-position-of-power with Karen Elliot House, publisher of the WSJ.

Once again we have someone who was an outsider:
“I was fortunate—though I didn’t think so at the time—to have a father who taught us to go alone because he wouldn’t let us ‘go along.’”

And then, wow surprise, she's tough cookie also, as shown here:
"“She organized her territory and her personnel and got things done, in my mind more effectively and more forcefully than her predecessors,” Phillips said, adding that, under House, the Journal in Asia and Europe became profitable. At the same time, he acknowledged that she could be “brusque”..."

Or here:
"“People tend to describe me as ‘tough,’” House told me. “I don’t think I’m tough. I think I’m demanding.”"

But oh wait, no... is she crying?:
"Then there was the moment when Karen Elliott House cried. At dinner, House spoke, as she had at Boston University, about the importance of independence, of reporters avoiding the press pack. Then she talked about her pride in the newspaper, and her voice broke and tears filled her eyes. “We all looked at her and were befuddled, and silently pleaded, ‘Don’t cry, girl!’” one female editor recalled. Others remembered that she had cried during the newsroom announcement last spring that the Journal had won a Pulitzer. It’s a meaningless tic, Paul Steiger insists. “It’s like she scratched her ear,” he says. “She doesn’t lose focus.” (House cried on nine occasions during our two interviews. Once, she was describing Steiger, and when I asked why she was crying she struggled to regain her composure and said, “Partly it’s because Steiger is a nice guy.” Then she choked up again.)"

As someone who tends to shed tears in times of stress, this makes me a little annoyed, just because both articles follow the exact same narrative trajectory with regard to the female in question: Outsider, Intimidator, and then, as demonstrated by weeping, Human. The crying becomes both Fey's and House's redeeming quality. Now we've all seen someone like Bill Clinton get weepy on us, but for him everybody chuckles, "Oh Bill, he's such a ham." With Fey and House, the mention of their crying forms a turning point in the whole article, ("And then there was the moment when Karen Elliot House cried"). Heffernan and Auletta don't downplay the womens' myriad accomplishments or their intelligence, but in both of these there is an underlying insinuation of I-told-you-so that's rather maddening, like the goal of the article, twice in one issue, was to find some point of weakness and feast vampirically upon it. As if, in finding evidence of a breaking point, the authors reassure us that everything is in order after all. No need to worry.