Being Mary Jane – Photo: kontrolmag.com

I first named this post “Being Mary Jane: The Perfect Corporate Sister“, then “Being Mary Jane: The Quintessential Corporate Sister”, not really sure at first which post title would be best adapted to what I wanted to say about how I feel about BET’s new Being Mary Jane show…And in the midst of all the back and forth between this post title and that one, it occurred to me that as much as I love the new BET show “Being Mary Jane”, and despite the sheer happiness (and relief) at watching Gabrielle Union portray the under-represented demographic of corporate sisters , Mary Jane Paul’s character is far from being…perfect…or quintessential, or any other big, inflated word that would look great on my post title, but would just not be…real! And honestly,perfection is so overrated, and sooo boring…

Like many of us, Mary Jane works in a hard, unrelenting business. As a sister on the way up in corporate America, the corporate path can be a hard, unrelenting one. Remember when Olivia Pope’s dad in ABC‘s  “Scandal” told her that as Black people, and minorities in general, “we have to work twice as hard to have half what “they” have”! Long hours, not getting the credit we deserve, standing out in the professional crowd (and not always in a good way), we can relate to these all too welll…And when you’re a corporate sister on the way up, you know the feeling all too well…

As I was watching the first episode of this season’s  “Being Mary Jane” a couple of days ago, I could not take my eyes off the screen, off….myself really! Main character Mary Jane Paul’s family is my family, what with the socio-economic issues and problems that many a Black family can relate to….From her jobless brother, to her pregnant (with no boyfriend) niece demanding to use Mary Jane’s luxurious house to host her baby shower, which interestingly enough would coincide with her “not-real” boyfriend’s real girlfriend’s baby shower day as well…Got it? Well, I do…Because as surreal as some of these stories may be, they are also familiar because they happen in my family, around the neighborhood I grew up in…These are real stories, and as educated, professionally successful and ambitious as I may be, they are also my stories…

And talking about real stories, Mary Jane’s love life alone, is just about the most “real” depiction of many a thriving corporate sister’s love life out there…We may not admit to it, but dating as a Black or minority corporate sister holding one (or two or three) degrees and making the kind of money Mary Jane makes, is bound to put any one of us into hot water (or hot, uncommitted sex for that matter)…Being a successful woman is still not much accepted in today’s society! Being a Black, successful, beautiful and sexual Black woman: barely conceivable, not very acceptable, and definitely challenging, especially when it comes to relationships! So it’s not surprising that like many of my girlfriends, and much like my younger, unmarried self not too long ago, Mary Jane is romantically stuck in that place between loving a “taken”, unavailable man, and sticking to her morals…It’s an all-too familiar scenario for Black professional women, and successful women in general, whose professional achievements somehow, somewhat, seem to almost always stand in the way of their romantic happiness…Hmmm….

So yes, I love Mary Jane Paul, because if I ever wanted a reminder of what it means to be a hard-working, thriving Black corporate sister, she does give it to me…But most importantly, she reminds me that not only is it ok to not be perfect, but that all this imperfection business, from compromising our morals in the name of love to struggling to carry the weight of the world on our tired shoulders, all of that is better than perfect, it’s REAL! And for once, we needed to have that reality, that crazy, overachieving, out of this world reality in our face…And the hot sex scenes do not hurt either!

Do you think Mary Jane Paul is the real corporate sister?

The Corporate Sister.