Is "Girlboss Feminism" Dead? If It Is Dead, How Come the Rest of Us Are Still Forced by the Government to Subsidize These "Independent" Girlbosses?

You may remember Lindy West. Barely. She was one of those 2010's loudmouthed Fat n' Proud feminists that shrieked constantly at Jezebel or the Guardian.

Apparently she's written a memoir -- kind of like Lena Dunham -- and it's inspired a couple of viral articles about "Millennial Feminism" or "2010s girlboss bog feminism."

Helen Lewis writes about Lindy West being pressured to allow her "boyfriend" to date another woman. Which she accepts, because it's the "progressive," "sex positive," "feminist" thing to do.

Isn't it?

Actually she writes about various bits of Millennial Feminism nonsense but I'm going to focus on that one part.

The Death of Millennial Feminism Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era.

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That background is what makes the publication of her new memoir, Adult Braces, such a cultural moment. Adult Braces is many things: a paean to the varied landscapes of America, an advert for #vanlife, a reminder to be grateful that your partner hasn't talked you into a throuple with a much thinner woman. It is also the tombstone for Millennial Feminism--that swirling brew of Media Twitter, blog snark, the Great Awokening, whaling on Lena Dunham, fat positivity, and boring straight people identifying as queer through accounting tricks. To read Lindy West is to gaze backwards in time, to an era when it was acceptable to write "welp!" in copy.

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Her fatness wasn't only a joyful expression of her appetites; instead she has now realized that "I am at my biggest when I am at my saddest."

Even her relationship wasn't all that it seemed. In her 2019 essay collection, The Witches Are Coming, she had written that she and Oluo--her "best friend" and a "once in a generation" musical talent--had a "dawn ritual" where they lay in bed talking for hours. In Adult Braces, she adds that "what I omitted was that we'd only developed that 'ritual' to mitigate a toxic pattern we'd been stuck in for years: I'd wake up anxious, I'd vomit my anxiety on Aham, he'd snap at me for triggering his anxiety, I'd feel alone and unsupported, I'd stare at him with tears in my eyes until he had a panic attack, he'd zone out for the rest of the day and not listen to a word I said."

As it offers a revisionist history of West's 2010s, Adult Braces makes another grand claim: that West is now polyamorous and lovin' it. Yes, she might have been upset when a fan texted her with the news that Oluo was out in public kissing another woman. (Even then, she admits halfway through the book, that wasn't the whole truth: "I told you Aham was secretly seeing one woman in 2019. He was actually seeing two.") But really, she absolutely adores her and Oluo's now-mutual girlfriend, Roya, to the extent that through sheer force of will, she has become bisexual. It only took driving a van from Seattle to the Florida Keys and back, while also undergoing cosmetic dentistry, to realize this.

When I read Adult Braces, my instinctive reaction was: I don't believe you.

To me, it seemed obvious that Oluo, who is mixed race, had successfully used West's desire to be progressive against her: "He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn't feel it as keenly, as a white person." Oluo had also rebranded himself as a "non-binary he/they," perhaps to shrug off any suggestion that he was acting like every harem-patrolling patriarch in history.

Now, I know plenty of people who have come to a different understanding of their sexuality as adults--mostly Later-Life Lesbians, or LLLs--but it seems an unlikely coincidence that the first woman West has ever been attracted to was already her husband's girlfriend. Not least when the book includes this line: "Being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles."

Lindy West has sniffed that her life choices are none your business.

This might be true, although I would say again that if you don't want people picking over your personal life, avoid writing a memoir.

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This is why so many women who considered themselves left-wing--myself included--eventually parted ways with Millennial Feminism. At the beginning, the movement felt intoxicating and liberating, but it soon became clear that sticking with Millennial Feminism would have required submitting ourselves to a voluntary lobotomy. After all, Lindy West essentially did.

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Of course, it's one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It's quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

For a long time I've been saying that the Democrat Daddy Government is the Husband of Last Resort for bitter sexless husband-less AWFULs. What I meant -- I guess I didn't explain it -- was that AWFULs pretend to be "independent" from their daddies and from husbands but they're still mostly dependent on other people to support them. No, they don't have to answer to or please a husband to provide them with economic support. Rather, they just demand that the federal government provide the support that husbands traditionally did. They get the monetary benefit of marriage without actually having to find or please a mate.

Inez Stepman wrote a real corker of a piece on this subject. I don't mean she cribbed from me, I just mean she questions how "independent" the "independent girlboss" really is, given that she's so incredibly dependent on subsidies provided by taxpayers, quite against their will.

Is the independent girlboss dead? Maybe she never existed to begin with.

The release of Lindy West's latest cringeworthy memoir, Adult Braces--about how her husband out-woked her into becoming the side chick in her own marriage--has prompted an intra-leftist firing squad about who bears responsibility for the girlboss's dimming appeal to younger women.

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The image of the working woman, the girlboss, remains the sine qua non of independence. After all, she pays her own bills using money she earned herself, or so it seems. But dig into the details and one learns she is propped up from every angle by laws, taxpayer dollars, and the ability to externalize the costs of her lifestyle onto others. In other words, the girlboss is often as much a dependent as Betty Draper, but her dependence is less honest, laundered through public policy.

President Barack Obama ran an infamous 2012 campaign ad, mocked by conservatives, about the "Life of Julia," a woman dependent on government at every turn. That model could be renamed for Millennial girlbosses as the "Life of Jessica": a cycle of dependence on institutions and structures that allegedly liberate women from the patriarchal boot but instead merely redistribute and conceal their dependence.

She points out that Democrat open borders policies provide these "girlbosses" with incredibly cheap and exploitable foreign labor which increases their own economic power. Read the whole essay for that.

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Then there are the girlboss jobs themselves. While millions of women create real value in the economy and deserve their paychecks, it's impossible not to notice the wild proliferation of "email jobs" and administrative compliance positions that don't add to the company bottom line (David Graeber famously called them "bullshit jobs" in his bestselling book of the same title), jobs disproportionately filled by the fairer sex.

In 1991, reforms to the Civil Rights Act ensured that lawsuits over (often spurious) sexual harassment claims in the workplace became a major cash cow for litigants. Companies responded by bending the knee to the most easily offended, kicking off the era of "political correctness" and spawning an enormous industry that trains employees not to harass one another. These reforms also raised the stakes for employers to prove they were not discriminating on the basis of sex or race in their hiring and promotion practices, pushing them well beyond meritocracy into de facto affirmative action for women and minorities.

Even more pernicious is the proliferation of Soviet commissar-style jobs, both in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, that exist primarily to enforce political agendas rather than to produce value. In the U.S., the number of human resources jobs, three-quarters of which are filled by women, has exploded, roughly doubling from 2014 to 2024. It's unlikely that managing a payroll has become commensurately burdensome in the past ten years; those additional roles exist to enforce diversity laws. The entire DEI complex is a giant subsidy for make-work positions staffed by women and racial minorities.

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Earlier in the life of the girlboss resides an even more obvious source of her dependency: universities. Higher education is disproportionately attended and staffed by women. It is also funded in large part by the taxpayer, with an output that adds to cultural revolution more than to the wealth of nations.

Female students earn just under 60 percent of bachelor's degrees, and similar proportions of master's and PhDs. Given that women more often choose lower-paid majors such as gender studies and communications, as opposed to structural engineering and computer science, it's little surprise that the student debt crisis is itself a disproportionately female phenomenon. Women hold two-thirds of outstanding student debt, nearly all of which has been financed by the federal government. Unless serious policy changes are made to defuse this debt bomb, the high default rates will ultimately fall on the taxpayer, through whom the government already owns 93 percent of student loans.

As I said, read the whole thing. The "independent" girlboss is an illusion; they've merely forced all the rest of us to become their daddies and husbands.

I got this from Based Camp, who have called the phenomenon of women who are almost entirely subsidized by the taxpayers -- and usually paid by taxpayers to act as agitators and disruptors against the lives and lifestyles of the taxpayers themselves -- "Nuns of the State." Rather than being supported by the Church to teach Church doctrine, they're paid by the Deep State -- using money the Deep State stole from taxpayers -- to disrupt society and make taxpayers' lives a living hell.

That's another good term for it.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:15 PM

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