Maybe part of the problem is more basic. The word “girlboss” is stupid. It’s simultaneously infantilizing and aggrandizing. So many millennial and Gen Z slang and neologism are dumb.
I also hate the term “nepo-baby.” Nepotism is an old concept and we had perfectly serviceable worlds/phrases, such as “rich kid.”
Was this supposed to be the "piece about some of my views that fall into an unclassifiable horseshoe dead zone where no major faction really supports them"? If so, it would have been bettef to have been about whales. The footnote reads:
> If you don’t know what I’m talking about, God bless. I will not even attempt to provide a summary. Maybe your favorite Large Language Model can help.
I have no idea what this is supposed to be about and I don't have a favorite LLM. This seems like a lot of navel-gazing from millenials who spend way too much time online.
Interesting to read this at the end of the working day. My take is that there simply is no easy balance between work and family.
This is not to say we can’t have nice things like daycare and year-round school! It’s simply my way of noting that a lot of the other tough choices won’t go away even if we have that stuff
Capitalism in its pure form is like evolution: relentless competition for limited resources. Evolution is excellent at coming up with innovative solutions, and we owe it our existence, as well as the existence of magnificent creatures like the leopard and the blue whale. At the same time, evolution is relentlessly cruel. The losers in the game of evolution, and they are many, get mercilessly eaten, they starve to death, they die of infections or hideous genetic defects. Evolution doesn't give a damn about anyone's feelings.
So it is with capitalism. In the heyday of laissez-faire 19th century capitalism, children worked 12-hour days in textile mills, there was basically no help for the unemployed other than some private charity, and if a man's foot was crushed by a runaway cart in a coal mine, too bad, so sad, not the mine owner's problem.
The reason we can now call capitalism "fine and good" is that long ago, many brave people organized in trade unions and went on strike (and some of them died) for better working conditions, and now we have government-regulated capitalism with some of the rougher edges sanded off.
The flaw in your reasoning is the assumption that the lot of a substance farmer was not equally precarious. If you were growing corn in Connecticut in 1820 and you got hurt you were fucked. The same as it was in 1620 England or 120 Rome or 3500 BC Egypt.
Well sure, but the common wisdom on capitalism in America is “best economic system ever!!!” not “at least it’s no more shitty than being a peasant farmer in a pre-industrial society.”
It’s sort of like what Colbert said after the 2016 election was called for Trump: “yes, the sun will rise tomorrow. But I’d like to think that here in America we have higher standards and expectations than ‘The earth’s rotation around its axis will continue along historic trends.’”
I look at a male lawyer working 12 hour days and think “there’s a workaholic wasting their life”. I look at a female lawyer working 12 hour days and think “there’s a workaholic wasting their life”.
I guess I’d have to say depends on what they’re working the 12 hours for. If it’s for a hefty slice of a zillion dollar deal or to save somebody from the electric chair sure go ahead and work 12 hours a day.
Well, just sayin', I'm not so sure about the wonderful feminism of the Eastern bloc. Maybe it was gone by the time I was there in the Peace Corps. There were some good perks for mothers that survived "liberation": your job would be held for you while you got the baby into toddler stage.
Otherwise the culture, including around feminism, struck me as 20-30 years behind ours (never left the "obscure" great generation years.) Young women weren't very imaginative about their career prospects: I may have pivoted a few towards IT careers and maybe even delaying marriage. I never saw my host doing household chores. Men seemed to have the good jobs in the city. Women got to be teachers and store clerks. Corruption pretty much kept everyone poor and dishonest.
The source for the "wonderful socialist feminism" is based on East German research. My country was further east and not a satellite, but a one of the "republics" of the U.S.S.R. But they've got a female president right now and are currently aligning towards the EU, so maybe the women are waking up.
The odd thing when people talk about his supposed SV turn to the right is actually, beyond the normal shifts among all groups between the end of Obama and Trump's 2nd win, there was no grand rightward shift among actual SV workers.
The actual people doing most of the work in Silicon Valley still have basically the same political valence as they did in 2013, but because of the greatness of capitalism, much of the rewards of capitalism are going to a very small group of people who have radicalized because of Twitter, COVID, and small l labor power of SV workers in the late 2010s/early 2020s.
Plus, there's just this weird idea that the views of CEOs are paramount and need to be coddled.
That's never been the view of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Part of the reason Biden embraced Lina Khan and others beyond his general old school Democratic views is frankly, the post-Great Recession backlash plus the actual actions of Big Tech showed that Big Tech and other business leaders in part due to their own brain poisoniing during COVID and other actions many Democratic viewers don't like
(Yes, Amazon has a very high approval rating - in the same poll 80% of people would say they 'approve' of Amazon but a majority would also be OK w/ breaking it up.)
Now, I realize Matt and others seem to want at times, a Democratic Party without many of the actual Democratic voters within it , but there simply aren't enough centist-leaning voters out there to overwhelm the views of the Democratic base.
Plus, the idea of a massively powerful industry who didn't like regulation or labor power was going to be a long-term part of the Democratic coalition was kind of fantasy. Maybe in a world where broad swaths of SV leadership didn't self-radicalize because their workers actually had labor power (ie. the labor market of the late 2010s/2020s) but it's not like that was limited to Silicon Valley - it's just most of the industries where management freaked out because workers could say no were already right-wing.
Of course the most important thing is the Biden WH could've bent over and jumped how high when Musk and Bezos said to bend over and jump like Matt and other centrists want and Kamala still loses by the same amount because of inflation, plus Musk was already radicalizing on Twitter before Biden was so so mean to poor poor widdle Elon.
Again, it's kind of insulting that broad swaths of the population, whether they be transgender folks, immigrants, and so on can basically be told 'stick it' but we have to be very careful never to upset insanely powerful people.
Feminism that's helpful to the very small amount of female C-suiters = Good but the feminism that exposes Siliicon Valley CEOs for the sexist dickbags they've consistently been = bad is not actual feminism.
The failure mode for "girlboss feminism" is the temptation to scorn women who decide not to make an ambitious professional career the top priority in their lives, whether in favor of motherhood/domesticity or something else. The idea that the only way for a woman to be modern, liberal, progressive, liberated, whatever you want to call it, is to pursue advanced degrees and high-powered corporate jobs, and to do otherwise was regressive, Problematic, unfortunate, ignorant. I think the whole thing where people act like it's totally normal to put off even thinking about kids until your mid-30s, and that trying for them earlier is reckless, because firmly establishing that sort of career should come first, is downstream of that? Certainly not everybody was doing that, but it did happen, and I think that's the seed of the backlash.
That being said, I think it's worth reminding people of the distinction between "liberal feminism" and the leftist omnicause madness represented by people like Lindy West (who are wont to use terms like "liberal feminist" as epithets). I've read all the Lindy West discourse I can get my hands on, because I never liked that 2010s leftist style of feminism and I'm really enjoying seeing former adherents criticize it, and fortunately I don't think I can say any of the major contributors are confusing the two. The talk isn't so much about girlbossing as it is about performatively aggressive man-hating, "shout your abortion," preening obsession with doing, saying, and thinking whatever is the most "progressive," etc.
For anticapitalist vs capitalist debates, girlbosses might be useful bridge between opposing sides. But if educational polarization is an important factor and girlbosses tend to come from credentialed elites (which I think might be true, but I'm happy to be corrected) then girlbosses might be less helpful for Democrats trying to reach median voters. I wonder whether the anti-capitalist vs capitalist framing may be overemphasized in debates among people particularly influential in democratic party debates because it is more comfortable to them.
I’m thinking of the Twitter discourse we had a few weeks ago where the gender pay gap disappears if you control for occupation and experience, but you aren’t supposed to do that, because choice of profession and time out of the workforce to raise children are causes by womanhood.
This is actually a radical critique of the market economy! For the labor market not to structurally disadvantage women in this way, you would have to offer higher wages to women than to men at similar levels of seniority, and to offer more than the market clearing wage in roles that skew female. There is nothing capitalistic about overriding market wages based on popular opinion about who deserves what.
The girlboss hate has always felt bafflingly misogynistic to me.
Presumably they're not against women working in general - the people in that faction are too fringe to be in a position to bully anyone about girlbossing. So are they are just against women being successful?
If it's about anticapitalism, it feels weird to single out women specifically. Maybe these women are liberal instead of leftist, but they are singled out for their profession not their politics. Further, communism is definitely associated with female participation in the workforce, although not necessarily at the top.
It's not about women's fertility either, because surely girlbossing has to include Sheryl Sandberg, who famously had several children while being an actual billionaire executive.
It really feels like a leftist grifter taking a dip into right-wing misogyny for Internet clout. Am I wrong about that? I don't have any other way to understand it than that.
Anyone can dislike Sheryl Sandberg specifically if they like, she reportedly was not a very good boss or female-ally in the workplace. But come on Lean In was 2013.
Not a lot of former Jezebel readers in this comments section?
What almost instantly turned off so many gen x and millennial feminists about girlbossing is the fact that, once you have elite money and power, what you actually do with that money and power fast becomes more important than your gender while wielding it.
Meta is a company that has developed and scaled genuinely harmful products—harms that fall with a particular weight on teen girls—and Sheryl Sandberg’s carelessness in that whole enterprise is the most salient fact about her career, not whatever glass ceiling she broke.
Anti-feminists conservatives noticed this as well, so we got to enjoy all kinds of takes about how strong criticism of Sarah Huckabee Sanders was “a classic case of women failing to support other women.”
But when you start wielding power, the spiderman principle kicks in and you have to answer for what you are actually doing. That’s what it is to take each other seriously. That is part of equality also.
I have many thoughts and maybe I’ll post more of them later, but as the mother of two children, including an infant, I was really hoping to see more of your thoughts on how to support “girlbosses” who are mothers.
Writing “rah, rah, go women in the workplace! Yay feminist capitalism!” in sparkly pink font is cheap and easy. Actually implementing policies that help new mothers balance their careers and looking after their children is hella hard. Just the other day I read a post on the “Ask a Manager” blog where the letter writer was saying: “I’m a boss at a family-friendly company, and when an employee asked for time off to pump breast milk, I agreed, but it’s 90 minutes per day! I didn’t realize it was going to be so much! It’s really cutting into my employee’s billable hours, what should I do?” The Manager explained to the letter writer that yes, if you pump 3 times during a work day and each session is 30 minutes (a very standard pumping schedule if you want to maintain your milk supply), that will take up 90 minutes/day, and it’s just an accommodation you are legally required to provide.
A true “girl boss” culture is one where everyone involved knows and understands this. Actions matter; words are wind.
And the leave situation ugh. After having my second kid my leave balance has plummeted. I no longer can take vacation time or sick leave for myself because I have to use it when my kids are sick and/or schools are closed. My organization tends to promote childless people or people with grandparents in town (coincidence or no?) so the understanding of issues parents of young children have to deal with is low.
Anyway, I've never been very involved in the girl boss discourse. I thought a lot of the backlash to it had to do with the argument that women had to change themselves to adopt a more masculine style instead of working on society and on men to be more adapted to and encouraging of women's general needs and more feminine communication styles. Or maybe that was just my own personal disagreement with it.
I'm also disappointed in this essay. I'm not sure the point of it. I also had to scroll quite a bit to see any female representation in the comments.
Very well said! The struggle is real. Ultimately, there no way around the fact that you can't do your job and look after children at the same time. We can and should have policies that enable mothers to stay in the workforce - I'm in favor of subsidized childcare - but tradeoffs and constraints abound.
I agree that I was asking myself "what's the point?" as I read this piece.
And yes, the SB comments section tends to be male-heavy.
Also, you can't force them to pump in a stall in the ladies' room, as my (female!) former executive director did to one of my direct reports. At least not in Colorado. You have to provide them with a room with a door. I was glad to know the law on that.
I remember the Oxford Union had a debate titled "Feminism Cannot Be Capitalist" which argued that Capitalism, by its nature, exploits women. One of the speakers seemed to make the case that Feminism can only be revolutionary; dismantling the capitalist system and building a new one. The Debate went to the Opposition and the vote was that Feminism can be Capitalist.
This article reminded me of that debate from 2020. To me Capitalism is meant to be meritocratic and about who can make the most money allocating scarce resources efficiently. The exclusion of people from competing based on race, religion, gender, etc. is a consequence of bad actors trying to preserve their position to the detriment of the capitalist system. Creative Destruction should not judge people by whether or not you are a woman. Feminists arguing against Capitalism and Girlbosses seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to appreciate how capitalist girlbosses like Katharine McCormick helped finance the development of the pill.
In many ways it reminds me of the fundamental contradictions of the United States. A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal rather than founded on a single nationality like Italy or Germany. The US oftentimes failed to live up to the high ideals of its birth; but does that mean that it should be overthrown in a Revolution or that its past failings should be learnt in order to better achieve the ideals. Don't throw the baby out with the Bathwater. Is my Liberalism showing in opposition to the Revolutionary spirit?
Despite constantly seeing her name in my various feeds, I am proud to say that I have managed to avoid learning any of the specific plot points of the Lindy West story.
If I said "I'm thrilled that I have no idea who Josh Allen is", would that make me smart and sophisticated? Is not knowing The Discourse when it's girl topics good?
I think this is an unfair comparison: the critique isn't that Lindy West discourse is a "girl topic", it's that she's known for some rather salacious (and gross imo) stuff. Josh Allen, on the other hand, is known for his professional accomplishments and his marriage to Hailee Steinfeld (and their new baby). A better comparison would be not knowing much about, say, Deshaun Watson.
I definitely haven't heard of Josh Allen! Are people talking about him? I googled and found he's a quarterback, but didn't see any Discourse about him (but maybe I didn't look hard enough).
Maybe part of the problem is more basic. The word “girlboss” is stupid. It’s simultaneously infantilizing and aggrandizing. So many millennial and Gen Z slang and neologism are dumb.
I also hate the term “nepo-baby.” Nepotism is an old concept and we had perfectly serviceable worlds/phrases, such as “rich kid.”
Now please get off my lawn!
Was this supposed to be the "piece about some of my views that fall into an unclassifiable horseshoe dead zone where no major faction really supports them"? If so, it would have been bettef to have been about whales. The footnote reads:
> If you don’t know what I’m talking about, God bless. I will not even attempt to provide a summary. Maybe your favorite Large Language Model can help.
I have no idea what this is supposed to be about and I don't have a favorite LLM. This seems like a lot of navel-gazing from millenials who spend way too much time online.
Interesting to read this at the end of the working day. My take is that there simply is no easy balance between work and family.
This is not to say we can’t have nice things like daycare and year-round school! It’s simply my way of noting that a lot of the other tough choices won’t go away even if we have that stuff
>capitalism is basically fine and good
Eh...
Capitalism in its pure form is like evolution: relentless competition for limited resources. Evolution is excellent at coming up with innovative solutions, and we owe it our existence, as well as the existence of magnificent creatures like the leopard and the blue whale. At the same time, evolution is relentlessly cruel. The losers in the game of evolution, and they are many, get mercilessly eaten, they starve to death, they die of infections or hideous genetic defects. Evolution doesn't give a damn about anyone's feelings.
So it is with capitalism. In the heyday of laissez-faire 19th century capitalism, children worked 12-hour days in textile mills, there was basically no help for the unemployed other than some private charity, and if a man's foot was crushed by a runaway cart in a coal mine, too bad, so sad, not the mine owner's problem.
The reason we can now call capitalism "fine and good" is that long ago, many brave people organized in trade unions and went on strike (and some of them died) for better working conditions, and now we have government-regulated capitalism with some of the rougher edges sanded off.
The flaw in your reasoning is the assumption that the lot of a substance farmer was not equally precarious. If you were growing corn in Connecticut in 1820 and you got hurt you were fucked. The same as it was in 1620 England or 120 Rome or 3500 BC Egypt.
Well sure, but the common wisdom on capitalism in America is “best economic system ever!!!” not “at least it’s no more shitty than being a peasant farmer in a pre-industrial society.”
It’s sort of like what Colbert said after the 2016 election was called for Trump: “yes, the sun will rise tomorrow. But I’d like to think that here in America we have higher standards and expectations than ‘The earth’s rotation around its axis will continue along historic trends.’”
I look at a male lawyer working 12 hour days and think “there’s a workaholic wasting their life”. I look at a female lawyer working 12 hour days and think “there’s a workaholic wasting their life”.
I guess I’d have to say depends on what they’re working the 12 hours for. If it’s for a hefty slice of a zillion dollar deal or to save somebody from the electric chair sure go ahead and work 12 hours a day.
OK sure but that’s not the typical reason in the world as it actually is
Well, just sayin', I'm not so sure about the wonderful feminism of the Eastern bloc. Maybe it was gone by the time I was there in the Peace Corps. There were some good perks for mothers that survived "liberation": your job would be held for you while you got the baby into toddler stage.
Otherwise the culture, including around feminism, struck me as 20-30 years behind ours (never left the "obscure" great generation years.) Young women weren't very imaginative about their career prospects: I may have pivoted a few towards IT careers and maybe even delaying marriage. I never saw my host doing household chores. Men seemed to have the good jobs in the city. Women got to be teachers and store clerks. Corruption pretty much kept everyone poor and dishonest.
The source for the "wonderful socialist feminism" is based on East German research. My country was further east and not a satellite, but a one of the "republics" of the U.S.S.R. But they've got a female president right now and are currently aligning towards the EU, so maybe the women are waking up.
The odd thing when people talk about his supposed SV turn to the right is actually, beyond the normal shifts among all groups between the end of Obama and Trump's 2nd win, there was no grand rightward shift among actual SV workers.
The actual people doing most of the work in Silicon Valley still have basically the same political valence as they did in 2013, but because of the greatness of capitalism, much of the rewards of capitalism are going to a very small group of people who have radicalized because of Twitter, COVID, and small l labor power of SV workers in the late 2010s/early 2020s.
Plus, there's just this weird idea that the views of CEOs are paramount and need to be coddled.
That's never been the view of the Democratic Party as a whole.
Part of the reason Biden embraced Lina Khan and others beyond his general old school Democratic views is frankly, the post-Great Recession backlash plus the actual actions of Big Tech showed that Big Tech and other business leaders in part due to their own brain poisoniing during COVID and other actions many Democratic viewers don't like
(Yes, Amazon has a very high approval rating - in the same poll 80% of people would say they 'approve' of Amazon but a majority would also be OK w/ breaking it up.)
Now, I realize Matt and others seem to want at times, a Democratic Party without many of the actual Democratic voters within it , but there simply aren't enough centist-leaning voters out there to overwhelm the views of the Democratic base.
Plus, the idea of a massively powerful industry who didn't like regulation or labor power was going to be a long-term part of the Democratic coalition was kind of fantasy. Maybe in a world where broad swaths of SV leadership didn't self-radicalize because their workers actually had labor power (ie. the labor market of the late 2010s/2020s) but it's not like that was limited to Silicon Valley - it's just most of the industries where management freaked out because workers could say no were already right-wing.
Of course the most important thing is the Biden WH could've bent over and jumped how high when Musk and Bezos said to bend over and jump like Matt and other centrists want and Kamala still loses by the same amount because of inflation, plus Musk was already radicalizing on Twitter before Biden was so so mean to poor poor widdle Elon.
Again, it's kind of insulting that broad swaths of the population, whether they be transgender folks, immigrants, and so on can basically be told 'stick it' but we have to be very careful never to upset insanely powerful people.
Feminism that's helpful to the very small amount of female C-suiters = Good but the feminism that exposes Siliicon Valley CEOs for the sexist dickbags they've consistently been = bad is not actual feminism.
The failure mode for "girlboss feminism" is the temptation to scorn women who decide not to make an ambitious professional career the top priority in their lives, whether in favor of motherhood/domesticity or something else. The idea that the only way for a woman to be modern, liberal, progressive, liberated, whatever you want to call it, is to pursue advanced degrees and high-powered corporate jobs, and to do otherwise was regressive, Problematic, unfortunate, ignorant. I think the whole thing where people act like it's totally normal to put off even thinking about kids until your mid-30s, and that trying for them earlier is reckless, because firmly establishing that sort of career should come first, is downstream of that? Certainly not everybody was doing that, but it did happen, and I think that's the seed of the backlash.
That being said, I think it's worth reminding people of the distinction between "liberal feminism" and the leftist omnicause madness represented by people like Lindy West (who are wont to use terms like "liberal feminist" as epithets). I've read all the Lindy West discourse I can get my hands on, because I never liked that 2010s leftist style of feminism and I'm really enjoying seeing former adherents criticize it, and fortunately I don't think I can say any of the major contributors are confusing the two. The talk isn't so much about girlbossing as it is about performatively aggressive man-hating, "shout your abortion," preening obsession with doing, saying, and thinking whatever is the most "progressive," etc.
Capitalism is good! YAAY CAPITALISM!! 😃
For anticapitalist vs capitalist debates, girlbosses might be useful bridge between opposing sides. But if educational polarization is an important factor and girlbosses tend to come from credentialed elites (which I think might be true, but I'm happy to be corrected) then girlbosses might be less helpful for Democrats trying to reach median voters. I wonder whether the anti-capitalist vs capitalist framing may be overemphasized in debates among people particularly influential in democratic party debates because it is more comfortable to them.
I’m thinking of the Twitter discourse we had a few weeks ago where the gender pay gap disappears if you control for occupation and experience, but you aren’t supposed to do that, because choice of profession and time out of the workforce to raise children are causes by womanhood.
This is actually a radical critique of the market economy! For the labor market not to structurally disadvantage women in this way, you would have to offer higher wages to women than to men at similar levels of seniority, and to offer more than the market clearing wage in roles that skew female. There is nothing capitalistic about overriding market wages based on popular opinion about who deserves what.
The girlboss hate has always felt bafflingly misogynistic to me.
Presumably they're not against women working in general - the people in that faction are too fringe to be in a position to bully anyone about girlbossing. So are they are just against women being successful?
If it's about anticapitalism, it feels weird to single out women specifically. Maybe these women are liberal instead of leftist, but they are singled out for their profession not their politics. Further, communism is definitely associated with female participation in the workforce, although not necessarily at the top.
It's not about women's fertility either, because surely girlbossing has to include Sheryl Sandberg, who famously had several children while being an actual billionaire executive.
It really feels like a leftist grifter taking a dip into right-wing misogyny for Internet clout. Am I wrong about that? I don't have any other way to understand it than that.
Anyone can dislike Sheryl Sandberg specifically if they like, she reportedly was not a very good boss or female-ally in the workplace. But come on Lean In was 2013.
Not a lot of former Jezebel readers in this comments section?
What almost instantly turned off so many gen x and millennial feminists about girlbossing is the fact that, once you have elite money and power, what you actually do with that money and power fast becomes more important than your gender while wielding it.
Meta is a company that has developed and scaled genuinely harmful products—harms that fall with a particular weight on teen girls—and Sheryl Sandberg’s carelessness in that whole enterprise is the most salient fact about her career, not whatever glass ceiling she broke.
Anti-feminists conservatives noticed this as well, so we got to enjoy all kinds of takes about how strong criticism of Sarah Huckabee Sanders was “a classic case of women failing to support other women.”
But when you start wielding power, the spiderman principle kicks in and you have to answer for what you are actually doing. That’s what it is to take each other seriously. That is part of equality also.
1000%
Hi Matt Y,
I have many thoughts and maybe I’ll post more of them later, but as the mother of two children, including an infant, I was really hoping to see more of your thoughts on how to support “girlbosses” who are mothers.
Writing “rah, rah, go women in the workplace! Yay feminist capitalism!” in sparkly pink font is cheap and easy. Actually implementing policies that help new mothers balance their careers and looking after their children is hella hard. Just the other day I read a post on the “Ask a Manager” blog where the letter writer was saying: “I’m a boss at a family-friendly company, and when an employee asked for time off to pump breast milk, I agreed, but it’s 90 minutes per day! I didn’t realize it was going to be so much! It’s really cutting into my employee’s billable hours, what should I do?” The Manager explained to the letter writer that yes, if you pump 3 times during a work day and each session is 30 minutes (a very standard pumping schedule if you want to maintain your milk supply), that will take up 90 minutes/day, and it’s just an accommodation you are legally required to provide.
A true “girl boss” culture is one where everyone involved knows and understands this. Actions matter; words are wind.
And the leave situation ugh. After having my second kid my leave balance has plummeted. I no longer can take vacation time or sick leave for myself because I have to use it when my kids are sick and/or schools are closed. My organization tends to promote childless people or people with grandparents in town (coincidence or no?) so the understanding of issues parents of young children have to deal with is low.
Anyway, I've never been very involved in the girl boss discourse. I thought a lot of the backlash to it had to do with the argument that women had to change themselves to adopt a more masculine style instead of working on society and on men to be more adapted to and encouraging of women's general needs and more feminine communication styles. Or maybe that was just my own personal disagreement with it.
I'm also disappointed in this essay. I'm not sure the point of it. I also had to scroll quite a bit to see any female representation in the comments.
I think by this point most women don't bother. I spent 20 years arguing with dudes on the internet and I'm basically done. It's not worth it.
Very well said! The struggle is real. Ultimately, there no way around the fact that you can't do your job and look after children at the same time. We can and should have policies that enable mothers to stay in the workforce - I'm in favor of subsidized childcare - but tradeoffs and constraints abound.
I agree that I was asking myself "what's the point?" as I read this piece.
And yes, the SB comments section tends to be male-heavy.
Also, you can't force them to pump in a stall in the ladies' room, as my (female!) former executive director did to one of my direct reports. At least not in Colorado. You have to provide them with a room with a door. I was glad to know the law on that.
I believe that's the case everywhere in the US.
I remember the Oxford Union had a debate titled "Feminism Cannot Be Capitalist" which argued that Capitalism, by its nature, exploits women. One of the speakers seemed to make the case that Feminism can only be revolutionary; dismantling the capitalist system and building a new one. The Debate went to the Opposition and the vote was that Feminism can be Capitalist.
This article reminded me of that debate from 2020. To me Capitalism is meant to be meritocratic and about who can make the most money allocating scarce resources efficiently. The exclusion of people from competing based on race, religion, gender, etc. is a consequence of bad actors trying to preserve their position to the detriment of the capitalist system. Creative Destruction should not judge people by whether or not you are a woman. Feminists arguing against Capitalism and Girlbosses seem to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to appreciate how capitalist girlbosses like Katharine McCormick helped finance the development of the pill.
In many ways it reminds me of the fundamental contradictions of the United States. A nation founded on the idea that all men are created equal rather than founded on a single nationality like Italy or Germany. The US oftentimes failed to live up to the high ideals of its birth; but does that mean that it should be overthrown in a Revolution or that its past failings should be learnt in order to better achieve the ideals. Don't throw the baby out with the Bathwater. Is my Liberalism showing in opposition to the Revolutionary spirit?
Despite constantly seeing her name in my various feeds, I am proud to say that I have managed to avoid learning any of the specific plot points of the Lindy West story.
If I said "I'm thrilled that I have no idea who Josh Allen is", would that make me smart and sophisticated? Is not knowing The Discourse when it's girl topics good?
I think this is an unfair comparison: the critique isn't that Lindy West discourse is a "girl topic", it's that she's known for some rather salacious (and gross imo) stuff. Josh Allen, on the other hand, is known for his professional accomplishments and his marriage to Hailee Steinfeld (and their new baby). A better comparison would be not knowing much about, say, Deshaun Watson.
I definitely haven't heard of Josh Allen! Are people talking about him? I googled and found he's a quarterback, but didn't see any Discourse about him (but maybe I didn't look hard enough).
I don't know. I just looked up a random sports figure!