GATEKEEP GASLIGHT GIRLBOSS PLUS
GATEKEEP GASLIGHT GIRLBOSS PROFESSIONAL

This is where the word comes from,” feminist author and poet Leigh Stein explained to me. “In 2014, Sophia Amoruso’s memoir, called # Girlboss, comes out. Girlboss’s slow march toward irony was supercharged when the neologism officially got a name seven years ago. The girlboss succeeded because of benevolent sexism Look at this woman, completely unfazed by the fluttering money around her! EyeEm via Getty Images When it turned out women CEOs were just CEOs, we never let them forget it. We wanted it to be this easy to buck the whole system. It also posited a solution so blazingly simple - put women in charge - that it could never work. The girlboss brought to life a way to talk about real concerns and barriers in the system honestly and frankly. The concept of the girlboss failed us all. “Gaslight every moment, Gatekeep every day, Girlboss beyond words,” one image macro reads.īut it’s not that people wanted the girlboss to fail it’s the opposite. On TikTok and Twitter, girlboss the verb became yoked to “gaslight” and “gatekeep” to create a kind of “live, laugh, love” of toxic, usually white feminism. Perhaps working for a girlboss was just like working any other job.Īs more and more of these stories surfaced, “girlboss” shifted culturally from a noun to a verb, one that described the sinister process of capitalist success and hollow female empowerment. It now seems as though toxic work environments were a feature of their design and not coincidental bugs. Hollis is the latest in a recent spate of corporate women leaders - including Away CEO Steph Korey and certain founders of luxury spin classes - who create companies plagued with stories of bullying, cruelty, and overworked and underappreciated staff. She was, in their view, just another white woman co-opting empowerment and feminism for profit, with no intention of lifting anyone else up. People who worked for Hollis corroborated her off-putting conduct. Her sterner critics called her out in disgust, pointing to Hollis’s casual dehumanization of her housekeeper, whom she described as the woman who “cleans her toilets,” and her Tubman comparison as examples of typical, wrongheaded girlboss attitudes. Hollis’s most generous critics saw her words as a moment of unchecked privilege. If Hollis’s fetish for relentless, unstoppable work and comparison of herself to the creator of the Underground Railroad is a prime example of a girlboss gone wild, so was the swift backlash.

GATEKEEP GASLIGHT GIRLBOSS PLUS

“If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong,” she continued, and in the accompanying caption she compared herself to a slew of unrelatable women she looks up to, including Harriet Tubman.Įach week we’ll send you the very best from The Goods, plus a special internet culture edition by Rebecca Jennings on Wednesdays. Hollis wrote in 2016 how much she hated the term, but quotes like hers crystallize the girlboss mentality. “Literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable,” Rachel Hollis, a very wealthy self-help guru, said in a TikTok video in April, describing how she wills herself to wake up at 4 am to conquer her day.

GATEKEEP GASLIGHT GIRLBOSS PROFESSIONAL

As the concept was codified, the idea of the girlboss became about the melding of professional self and identity, capitalist aspiration, and a specific (and arguably limited) vision of empowerment.

Women like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and former Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso - who coined the term - were finally wrangling power away from the men who had held it for so long, which was seen as a form of justice. What set girlbosses apart from regular bosses was pinning feminism to hustle. Everyone was supposed to win when girlbosses won. As companies grew in her image, so did her mythos her legacy would be grand and fair, because equality was coming to work. As a female business leader - be she a CEO, an aspiring CEO, or an independent MLM superseller - the girlboss was going to unapologetically will empires from the rubble of rejection and underestimation she faced all her life. Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a utopian promise.

The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated.

Gatekeep gaslight girlboss