The TIME 100 and Some People TIME Forgot

Yesterday TIME published its famed “100 Most Influential People.” I love browsing this list, reading profiles of fascinating people written by other fascinating people, and every year look forward to it. I was thrilled to see some of my favorite feminist icons featured on this year’s list: Beyonce, Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai. However, this year as I was reading some entries from the “Icons” section I got a sinking feeling that the list would not achieve gender parity this year. After finishing my perusal of the list, I went back and counted and my gut was right. This year only 41 of the world’s most influential people were women.

I can’t say I was shocked, but I’ll admit I was disappointed. The “100 Most Influential People” list is inherently subjective which gives the editors some leeway in who ends up on the list. If the editors wanted to achieve gender parity on the list, they would be absolutely within their rights to do so. I have to wonder why it isn’t a priority especially in 2014.

However, rather than wallow in my own disappointment I set out to fill in the gaps. I decided to pick out nine women to complete the list. I thought, at first, that this might be difficult given that TIME couldn’t come up with nine more women to add to the list and I found very quickly that I was right. It was difficult, but not for a lack of influential women, rather for a preponderance of them.

So many women seemed to deserve a place on this list. A few names immediately jumped to mind: Wendy Davis, Dilma Rousseff, Sheryl Sandberg, Elizabeth Warren. But even then I couldn’t stop naming amazing, fascinating, diverse, influential women. In fact, the longer I went on naming women, the easier it got to list off accomplished ladies. I ended up with a list of 19 individual women, one two-woman team, and one three-woman team, and I could have gone on if I let myself.

I stopped myself at a list that included these 24 women: Mindy Kaling, Wendy Davis, Shonda Rhimes, Elizabeth Warren, Tina Fey, Dilma Rousseff, Drew Gilpin Faust, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, Sheryl Sandberg, Amy Purdy, Michelle Obama, Laverne Cox, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita N’yongo, Piper Kerman, Amy Poehler, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robin Roberts, Lorde, Katy Perry, and Geena Davis.

Each of these women is, in her own way, redefining something about the world we live in. They are leaving indelible marks on our culture and our world and it’s a little bit ludicrous that none of them was recognized on TIME’s list, if you ask me. I hope in future years that TIME’s editors will consider making gender parity a must for the “100 Most Influential People.” I believe almost any relatively informed person could list 50 incredibly influential women so it shouldn’t be that much of a challenge to TIME’s editors.

Here’s to this year’s “100 Most Influential People” and to the many women on the list, the many women who should be on that list, and the many women who will one day be on that list.  

It's Four Days Later and I'm Still Mad: Thoughts on the HIMYM Finale

Everyone has something to say about “How I Met Your Mother” and the finale to its nine-year run that occurred on Monday night and I’m no exception. So here goes nothing.

I’ll start by saying I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with HIMYM. It was hilariously funny and I can’t pretend it wasn’t, but many of the jokes were at the expense of women. Both the premise of the show (Ted telling his kids about his serial dating) and the characters (I’m lookin’ at you Barney) could be creepy.  However, the characters were interesting and compelling and this was a comedy that wasn’t afraid to tackle real, non-comic topics like the death of Marshall’s dad or Robin’s inability to have kids. Even though I often felt guilty about it, I kept tuning in for years and for that loyalty I felt I deserved some satisfaction and reward from the finale, but I was left viscerally disappointed.

For nine seasons, I invested in these characters and was able to watch significant character development unfold. But one hour threw almost all of that character development away. Barney went back to being a creepy womanizer, Ted hadn’t really let go of Robin, and Lily and Marshall were still almost exactly the same as they were nine years ago except for job and family size. I felt cheated and it seems to me the characters were cheated, too.

Additionally, the plot concerning Barney and Robin led to so much disappointment, at least for me. After watching a whole season take place over the weekend of their wedding, I was even more invested in their relationship than I had been at the start of season 9. Throughout the season every problem I was worried about in their relationship was carefully handled by the writers which is why I felt a little bit confused when they were divorced within three years. It was adding insult to injury when Barney fell for his baby daughter via a stranger because it seemed that the one thing that could truly change Barney’s nature was the one thing Robin couldn’t give him, a child.

Yet, the disappointment over Barney and Robin paled in comparison to the disappointment over Ted and Tracy, the eponymous Mother. Tracy, who became so beloved in so few episodes, was reduced to a mere plot device. She gave Ted the kids Robin never could and by dying she allowed “the nice guy” to finally get the girl, except it was the wrong girl. The final five minutes made the whole story not one of Ted meeting the mother but of never getting over Robin. If I had been one of Ted’s kids I would have been ticked off with my dad. Even without being Ted’s kid I’m still ticked off! Tracy was a compelling female character who shouldn’t have been short changed the way she was by this finale.

I understand that the desire to have Ted and Robin end up together stemmed from a long ago determined original plan, but I think that’s the problem. A famous saying goes “What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it’s supposed to be.” As it turns out, it’s what screwed up HIMYM the most, too. Having a plan is great, but at some point the characters might make that plan irrelevant. That’s what I believe Ted, Robin, Barney, Lily, and Marshall did. The original plan no longer fit these characters. The best show would remain true to the characters. Unfortunately, this show remained true to the plan instead.

While that might sound like a lot of problems for me to have with the HIMYM finale, there’s one I haven’t mentioned yet that deserves some attention. The pineapple. I was promised an answer to all of my lingering questions and I didn’t get this one. What was the story of the pineapple?