The girlboss rose, and the girlboss fell. She died, she was autopsied in every major publication, her estate was settled, and her board members changed out of mourning wear and found love again.
So how is the girlboss standing before us today, like Jesus on Easter Sunday? How is her smile of bleached veneers blinding us from page 4 of the style section of the same newspaper that gleefully reported her demise?
The Wing girlboss is back, opening shops in Brooklyn and a boutique hotel and restaurant in the Hudson Valley. The Man Repeller girlboss is back, with a hot new fashion newsletter on Substack and the requisite affiliate links. The Bumble girlboss is back at Bumble, the Outdoor Voices girlboss is back at Outdoor Voices, and the girlboss who sold us underwear that could absorb menstrual blood is now selling us bidets to clean our butts.
These women, or most of them at least, were supposed to be done and dusted. Canceled. Publicly shamed and escorted out of polite society. But more than that, the archetype of the girlboss was supposed to have been deconstructed and rejected as fake feminism. It was no longer #goals to exploit your workers. We all spent the pandemic reading Marx, right? Right, guys?
It was inevitable that the girlbosses would return, since the system that cranked them out to begin with remained intact, with no visible reform or adaptation, after their fall. You can’t build a machine that makes Sneetches and expect it to spontaneously start producing Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzzes instead. In our case, that machine is post-2008-crash capitalism, and that machine has a whole girlboss setting. It needs us to worship the people who are addicting us to terrible apps, convincing us to wear ugly pants that cost $500, making us listen to a 35-year-old billionaire sing songs about people who are mean to her, so that we don’t get bored and do a revolution.
The girlboss was the millennial version of having it all, and all these She-E.O.’s were inspirational figures for a generation who had grown up on “Anything boys can do girls can do better” programming and Disney-princess merchandising. In an era of social atomization and oligarchic takeover, pop culture set about making us believe that overwhelming material success for a small handful of women was a satisfying substitution for equality.
You, too, the girlboss promised, could be wealthy, successful, fabulous, and, in many cases, alarmingly skinny. You, too, could be the subject of swoony biopics and portrayed by Hollywood’s finest. (See the Hulu movie Swiped, which valiantly tries to make a brainstorming session—where Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, played by Lily James, blurts out “Tinder!” as the name for the dating app they are developing—on par with Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity.)
The appeal of these women was not their products. The real product they were selling was themselves—as guru, success story, and Career Barbie doll. Who wants to sit around in underwear that soaks up your period blood all day long? Literally no one wants that, but we wanted a “socially conscious” business leader we could root for and imagine ourselves one day becoming.
Many of these women published books, and rather than offering The Art of the Deal–style tips and tricks of the trade, they shared personal stories of making it in a man’s world. Many of these businesses were cults of personality. (In the case of OneTaste, a “sexual wellness” company that taught “orgasmic meditation,” the female founder was accused of actually running a cult. Where Are They Now? Awaiting sentencing, facing 20 years in prison after being found guilty of forced labor.)
This frenzy was also assisted by the defeat of momboss Hillary Clinton at the hands of “final boss” of the patriarchy—as Jon Stewart called him—Donald Trump. There was the sense that women may have lost politically but they could force a vibe shift through domination of the culture. People were selling saint candles with Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on them. It was a weird time. But the idea was that, in order to change the culture that had created and elevated Trump, we could just flood the zone with brittle-boned wunderkinder in Reformation dresses and blowouts. That utopia was not only possible but inevitable.
Then came the pandemic, which didn’t just kill Americans and their literacy levels. One after another, over a span of two years, the girlbosses stepped down from their positions of power, if they were lucky. Miki Agrawal left Thinx, the menstrual-products company she founded, chased out by accusations of sexual harassment and mismanagement. (Agrawal denied the allegations.) Leandra Medine Cohen shut down the 2010s-defining fashion-and-lifestyle blog Man Repeller after accusations of racism and mistreating her workers of color. Audrey Gelman stepped down as C.E.O. of the Wing, the femme-only space she’d founded that charged more than $2,000 a year for what was essentially a high-end WeWork, in light of similar accusations of racism at her company.
When Gelman stepped down, as has often happened with cancel culture, people assumed the problem had been taken care of. Capitalism had been cleansed of one more bad actor and was one step further along in its process of purification.
Now Gelman is back, this time selling a retreat in upstate New York with hotel rooms that have no screens. But still, her product is less about the handpicked furnishings and textiles and knickknacks that decorate her rooms—every item is available for purchase—and more about her own self, as evidenced by the glamorous profile in The New York Times, which spent as much time detailing what Gelman is wearing, how she’s feeling, and what her famous friends say about her as it did describing her new business venture. Her product is the fantasy that one can develop and weaponize such a quirky and unique sense of taste that one can manifest an empire of abundance.
The cancellations of this time were fueled by disappointment and surprise that women operating in a business world that incentivizes and rewards behaviors such as the exploitation of labor and the hoarding of resources would act in the same way as men. There was and continues to be a pervasive, naïve belief that women are somehow better than, or just different from, men. That either they possess an inherent empathy and emotional intelligence which men lack, or that their experiences of oppression and discrimination would instill those qualities within them. Just what discrimination and oppression people thought these women, almost all of them born into wealth and an exclusive social milieu, had faced throughout their lifetimes was unclear.
But cancellation doesn’t work on the wealthy and the powerful, and shame is not an effective tool of social transformation—especially for those who are incapable of feeling it.
Jessa Crispin is the former editor of the literary blog Bookslut, the editor of the Substack the Culture We Deserve, and the author of the book What Is Wrong with Men
