So the other day, specifically on a Saturday morning at 7am, a friend of mine sent me a Jonathan Perelman quote that seems to be quite popular according to the Internet: “Content is king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants.” To be honest, when I first read it, I wasn’t sure why she sent it to me. She usually shares bits of poetry she knows I would like, bits of poetry that would trigger in me a reflection. However, this time, there were no poetry, at least, very little. I could see the metaphor, but I couldn’t understand what it truly meant. I thus googled it and found out that it had to do with business and marketing and this is why my brain was too slow to understand the quote. In fact, my brain is composed of 75% of art and 15% are reserved for the rest: anything that doesn’t revolve around art and that could mostly probably irritate me :P. After a little research, I was still confused: why did she send me that quote? I didn’t know if she wanted a response or not, but usually, when you said a quote like this one, you do, or else why send it in the first place? I know my friend isn’t the type to have a discussion by text, but I still tried. I desperately didn’t want to look stupid, but I know I unfortunately did when I responded: “I know it’s a quote for business/marketing, but it’s quite clever, especially if you compare it to us humans. Of course, we wear the pants,” to which she replied “Hahaha.” 😐 I really wanted her to tell me what she thought of it. I put my phone on the side, forgetting this two-minute conversation and got out of bed.

Later, during the day, I thought a lot of that quote. I decided to google a little more and searched about this Jonathan Perelman. “Head of Digital ICM Partners, Formerly@BuzzFeed & @Google, Sr Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future, political junkie, foreign policy adviser, sports fan” is what we read on his Twitter bio. Enough for me to click on a 99U talk – video called – you guessed it – “Content is King, Distribution is Queen.” Although it is an interesting talk to listen to (yes, I recommend using about fifteen minutes of your time to watch that video), you don’t need to listen to it to understand the quote. I mean it kind of speaks for itself. Any content, whether coming from a company or simply from an ordinary person wasting their time on Facebook is important. What you want to sell, or just transmit to people might be your baby, your creation, your long-term project, your everything… your king. Nevertheless, your content cannot go anywhere, cannot be popular, cannot reach a fame of its own without distribution. Therefore, distribution wears the pants because it leads the content to a certain or to many directions. The fact that Perelman compared this to kings and queens, men and women, is important on a certain level. When I first read the quote, I was thinking of our roles as human beings, as genders. I thought, well, men need women and vice versa as much as content needs distribution and vice versa. As much as we like to be independent, we need each other for our society to “function” in general. I went deep with my thoughts, thinking that content could be a child (or many children) and that without the queen/woman, there wouldn’t be any life on earth because she’s the one to give birth (from generation to generation → distribution). I guess I went too far with that one. I mean, I had just woken up and my head couldn’t think straight because of I sleepy I was :P.  Now that I think about it, it doesn’t make sense at all. I mean, where’s the king in all of this. Like I said, I was sleepy as eff. 😛

That’s really all I had to say about this quote. I don’t know, I mean, we can analyze it for hours. We can take it far, until feminism even. Maybe my friend who sent me the quote is a feminist, maybe not. Maybe Perelman is a feminist, maybe not. All I know is that that quote triggered a reflection in me, like one of my friend’s poems would do, to the point I had to write a blog post about it. I want to share this quote with everyone for some reason. It’s relatable, it’s about us in the 21st century, the Millennial generation. It revolves around us daily. Content doesn’t stop to circulate every day and distribution feeds that circulation more than ever in our current epoch. What you really have to know is that SHE wears the pants. Any SHE wears the pants. But hey, don’t get me wrong: kings and queens are equal. But we, women, still wear the pants ;).