UNDER THE FEMALE INFLUENCE

that may or may not align with some facet of the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Although someone’s choice to wear stilettos or fake lashes may only encompass a fraction of their sense of self, our society has coded, or defined, such stylistic choices as “feminine.”

Stepping out into the world styled as such, even if temporarily, thus gives one particular insight into how gender, and in this case femininity, organizes our society.

In that vein, Jackson’s performance as Laganja highlights how gender operates within the rapidly developing cannabis industry in the United States. While discussions of social equity and gender parity are common enough throughout the industry, we have yet to realize that simply inviting more people of color or more women to the table is not enough. We cannot ask women of color or queer folk to leave their race or their sexuality outside of the boardroom, just because it may disrupt white heteronormative values. For example, when Jackson dresses as Laganja and attends cannabis events, her experience has been drastically different from attending events within the broader entertainment industry.

Why? As she explained “when a woman is hot, it makes people uncomfortable...maybe my character hasn’t done so well in the cannabis industry because maybe if I was more clown-like, or a caricature of a stoner girl with long, floppy hair…[but] no, I’m a hot, sexy, and powerful woman running a cannabis business.”

Given the historical trends of big tobacco and alcohol, the oversexualization of femininity in the cannabis industry is nothing new. But what Laganja identifies here is a pervasive double standard not only in cannabis, but in society generally: when someone inhabits their femininity as a point of sexual agency, it is threatening, even alienating. But when they do so as a point of sexual objectification? Well, that’s just good marketing. “Sometimes being in drag for me feels like being a superwoman…[but] in the cannabis industry, it’s the complete opposite,” she explained, “I’m being looked at negatively and people are like ‘Why is that there?’

And notice I say ‘that’ because...in the cannabis industry, it’s very rare that someone is going to ask me my pronouns.”

This double standard of sexual agency versus sexual objectification also contextualizes some of the homophobia that Laganja has experienced and denounced within the cannabis industry. So too are homophobia and sexism forever joined: separate in who may experience them, yet also bound together by a patriarchical society that only lets white heterosexual men express their sexwww.hshoneypot.com @hshoneypot 41