Girlboss, gaslight, gatekeep

This email is going to be about the commodification of feminism and the reckoning that’s come for the #girlboss. But before we get to that…

Happy Friday and happy Pride and happy summertime and happy everything! Here are some reasons I’m in a particularly celebratory mood:

1. I’m writing this email about what will become episode 5 of Thinking Is Cool. That’s half of my first season under my belt.

2. You’re reading this blog. I know there are a lot of ways you can spend your time, and I’m really grateful opening this message is one of them.

3. I’m so into this week’s blog topic that it’s almost hard to focus on anything else.

4. I had Carbone for dinner last night.

I hope you have some reasons to celebrate today, too. And if you don’t, email me and I’ll help you find one.

Before we dive in, a couple of important programming notes:

• I’m going live on Instagram tomorrow at 11:30am ET to talk about this week’s climate change episode. Follow me here to tune in, ask questions, vibe out, etc.

• Episode 4 of Thinking Is Cool drops Monday. If you’re feeling generous, share this email with a friend before the pod drops.

Now, it’s time to introduce our topic for Episode 5 of Thinking Is Cool. Let’s rock.

Girlboss, Gaslight, Gatekeep

Instagram tells me this about my audience: It’s made up mostly of people between the ages of 25 and 34. About 11% live in the New York area. Tuesdays are your most active days on the app. And 75% of you are men.

Because I’m a woman who’s had to work with men in a world made for them, I can imagine how some of that 75% might react to the title of this piece: “not for me.”

There’s where you’re wrong. When I set out to make Thinking Is Cool, I wanted to have difficult conversations. Conversations that might make us a little uncomfortable. Because that’s where growth happens. If my disclosure that I’m a raging feminist (I’m a raging feminist) makes you uneasy or makes me a little less palatable, I implore you to keep reading. This is just as much for you as it is for the carbon copies of me out there.

Because feminism—and the idea that gender does not predicate our capacity for success or our worthiness of respect—is for everyone. Today, that’s what we’re talking about.

I want you to think back to 2014. The world was a very different place—we were still two years out from the Trump presidency and six years out from George Floyd’s murder, and the idea of a pandemic was limited to the fictional realm. If you were a white woman of a certain age, it was the year of the #girlboss—advocating for women and their careers was the issue of a lifetime, at least at that point in our lifetimes.

What’s a girlboss? It’s hard to wholly encapsulate. How do you define something that’s reminiscent of both late-stage capitalism and unrecognized privilege but also almost universally appealing?

I’ll attempt with this: The #girlboss (interchangeable with she-e-o, boss babe, and badass) was a concept marketed to young women like me as the paragon for the girly-pop on a mission—she would stop at nothing to make a name and career for herself. She was Leaning In™ and she didn’t think twice about anyone who might stop her.

It’s a term first popularized by Sophia Amoruso, the founder and once executive chairman of Nasty Gal, in her 2014 memoir #GIRLBOSS (caps and hashtag hers, obviously not mine). Over the span of several years after the book’s publication, Amoruso and a cabal of well-dressed women would come to embody the idea of girlboss feminism.

Sophia Amoruso. Sheryl Sandberg. Audrey Gelman. Steph Korey. Ty Haney. The girlboss became synonymous with women who rejected expectations society foisted upon them and built empires. And they might even teach you how to do the same! If you buy this workbook, listen to this audiobook, follow this hashtag, attend this summit…

Inevitably, the millennial pink sheen of the girlboss wore off to reveal a darker reality: At its very core, the concept of girlboss was harmful. All the women I listed before? They faced allegations of abuse, rampant aggression, or worse. Turns out “doing whatever it takes” has some negative side effects.

It comes down to this: The girlboss was created not to dismantle the flawed, male-engineered power structures that have governed us since Hammurabi’s Code, but instead to beat men at their own game.

• Elle’s Anna Fielding put it well: “After years of looking fruitlessly, furiously, at the unsmashed glass ceiling, women in business decided to paint it pink instead.”

• This from Amanda Mull in The Atlantic struck me: “Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.”

Girlbosses were products of the structures they alleged to rethink. If we as women really cared to make the workplace more inclusive, we wouldn’t bother playing the men’s games—games of aggression, selfishness, and apathy. We would create new rules, new objectives—all of them better than the reality we’ve faced for as long as we’ve been permitted to play.

By leaning into existing structures instead of escaping and entirely rethinking them, the girlboss rhetoric presented what I can now recognize as two enormous red flags:

1. Being a girlboss was a possibility limited to the kinds of women who already had a fighting chance in the existing power structure—thin, beautiful, and, most importantly, white.

2. Girlboss culture led an entire generation to believe that the only way to succeed as a woman was to buy into hustle culture—louder, faster, less apologetic. To do it all, and do it all perfectly, and to never get tired.

It’s created a Girlboss Fallacy—the idea that women have to look a certain way and fit into a certain box to be taken seriously in the workplace.

I call bullshit. I refuse to accept that I’ll only reach parity (the bare minimum) by stomping over the weaker among us while wearing a DVF dress I can’t afford. Josh and I don’t have a ton of rules for Thinking Is Cool, but one is this: Be nice...it’s a good strategy.

I recognize my power in calling said bullshit. I know that I fit squarely into the target girlboss demographic. I read #GIRLBOSS right after publication. I thought that becoming Sophia Amoruso—who we now know to be a very bad example of a good boss and good feminist—was the only way to achieve my career goals.

It’s not. And soon on Thinking Is Cool, I’m exploring why—why women aren’t given equal opportunity, how the girlboss was a symptom of a much nastier illness, and what we can do to actually dismantle a system of oppression that holds us all back...men, women, everyone.

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I’m aware that a single podcast episode probably won’t erase centuries of sexism, and we have a great deal of work ahead of us. But I hope this episode (coming out June 14) will at least get you to think more about your relationship with feminism, corporate culture, and intersectionality.

I’m clearly very fired up about it, and I’ve relished hearing the stories (good and bad) of women from all sorts of backgrounds as I report this piece out. But I don’t want to stop at what I’ve got now...I want to hear from you.

• What do you think of girlboss culture? Do you think girlboss culture has helped or harmed people who identify as women?

• If your answer is harmed, what’s the better alternative?

• How do you view sexism and inequality of opportunity in the workplace?

• How do you think we can create the kind of world in which your gender doesn’t determine your potential?

• Why did I feel compelled to write that bit at the top—why is it so hard to convince men that this matters?

Tell me anything. Ask me whatever you want. Let’s have a conversation. Hit respond to this email or reply to this tweet. And always remember to look both ways before you cross the gender pay gap :)

’Til next time,

Kinsey

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