"First, we get elites like Jean-Pierre who no longer have to even pretend to care about doing a good job. Second, we undermine the importance of individual agency in achieving personal goals. And third, we have to suffer through the absurdity of the soft-girl, tradwife epidemic we’re living through right now."
There's a real ugliness to the Biden admin hiring and keeping Karine Jean-Pierre. It seems that they wanted to diversify their staff as a performative measure, but didn't believe finding a competent Black woman was possible so they just hired an incompetent one to placate the left.
You can generalize this to so many things the Biden admin did without much effort.
But I would alter it slightly: they felt that finding a competent black woman wasn’t *important*; really, they didn’t believe that there was so much variation in competence once a certain bare minimum was achieved. And that’s what you see over and over in the Biden admin.
Its weird how the left is conceptualized wrt these choices. Is it inherently leftwing to want more minorities in positions of power? Maybe for social liberals, but if race was the only thing the left in America cared about they wouldn't have broadly supported Bernie Sanders in 2 primaries.
The dem community that got Biden over the top in the primary were southern black democrats, and its clear that the Biden admin felt an obligation to make picks that showed their "appreciation" for that. One thing that's also clear from picks like KJP is that they valued loyalty over competence.
Social vs economic progressivism. The concept of prioritizing demography over merit is not a moderate, or centrist, or liberal one, even if it isn’t universally well-liked at the extremes.
Historically countless moderate/centrist/whatever institutions and parties have rewarded demography over merit, it was the foundation of machine politics in countless cities.
Given the way people talk about fairly mild third wave stuff like Lean In, I think if you exposed the zoomers to serious second-wave feminism (like Ms Magazine from the 80s or even I Blame The Patriarchy for us old blogheads) they would spontaneously combust.
This article made me articulate the gripe I have towards the latest post girl boss messaging- and this is not even limited to the “women empowerment” but what backlash to tryhard created is while still chasing for an ambition (oftentimes financial goals) they told striving for it is bad.
And I’m personally a slacker and there’s def a big downside for those insecure strivers for life but this type of “you can try to have a cake and eat it” messaging def does not help.
Like ideally the conversation would have led to “maybe chasing the most ambitious financial goals at all cost is not for everyone and there’s basically a trilemma of good pay, social status and slack work - and it helps if you can prioritize any of them or learn to compromise, you are more likely to have a happy life”
I propose a quadrilemma (?) of good pay, social status, reasonable work-life balance, and positive social impact... not strictly the case that you can only have 3 of the 4, but in general they have to be balanced against each other
And also like a lot of times, if you step down for just one tier, the overall deal gets much better too (like maybe you give up slightly on social status and everything else gets amazing etc
Jerusalem you did it! I think you found the rare incompetent DEI hire in the wild, what with her proud trumpeting of I'm black and gay. Seriously though, this woman was just incompetent and is a walking warning to employers to hire competence people over flashy, loud people.
You however, are doing girl boss thing up right by starting your own company. Long may it prosper.
KJP’s PR tour has been an utter nightmare. Her appearance on the Bulwark was so awkward. If KJP was a girlboss wouldn’t she have been empowered not to cover up Biden losing his marbles while trying to run for president?
Power to the real GirlBosses like my wife and Jerusalem!
Is there truly a difference between genuine ambition, and the performance of genuine ambition in today's now? Is any publicly performed role not considered genuine, or else counterfeit, these days? We've lost the distinction, for sure. I can't even remembered when it happened, because the trend has been growing for so long. I want to say the 1980s, but even that isn't sure. Maybe our now has always been this way.
I'm no expert on Girlbosses, so I'm asking a real question here, more than making a statement: I want to know whether it's fair to characterize Girlbosses simply as women who ignore the intimidation of sexism and behave exactly as they like, even when that means organizing the efforts of others toward the pursuit of a personal goal — you know, just like any other (male) Boss would.
It makes sense that normalizing the phenomenon of women as executives eases the acceptance of subsequent women as executives, so it seems that Girlbossing assists the ambitions of women, generally — even if individual Girlbosses build nothing toward this direction, personally.
It seems that Jean-Pierre was bad at her job…
Returning to the distinction between genuine characteristics and performances for a moment, would it be fair to say that Jean-Pierre was simply a bad Girlboss because she was a poorly performing Girlboss — rather than *not* a Girlboss, because she was such a bad performer?
What happens when we mock strivers:
"First, we get elites like Jean-Pierre who no longer have to even pretend to care about doing a good job. Second, we undermine the importance of individual agency in achieving personal goals. And third, we have to suffer through the absurdity of the soft-girl, tradwife epidemic we’re living through right now."
Oooof.
🎯
There's a real ugliness to the Biden admin hiring and keeping Karine Jean-Pierre. It seems that they wanted to diversify their staff as a performative measure, but didn't believe finding a competent Black woman was possible so they just hired an incompetent one to placate the left.
You can generalize this to so many things the Biden admin did without much effort.
But I would alter it slightly: they felt that finding a competent black woman wasn’t *important*; really, they didn’t believe that there was so much variation in competence once a certain bare minimum was achieved. And that’s what you see over and over in the Biden admin.
Its weird how the left is conceptualized wrt these choices. Is it inherently leftwing to want more minorities in positions of power? Maybe for social liberals, but if race was the only thing the left in America cared about they wouldn't have broadly supported Bernie Sanders in 2 primaries.
The dem community that got Biden over the top in the primary were southern black democrats, and its clear that the Biden admin felt an obligation to make picks that showed their "appreciation" for that. One thing that's also clear from picks like KJP is that they valued loyalty over competence.
Social vs economic progressivism. The concept of prioritizing demography over merit is not a moderate, or centrist, or liberal one, even if it isn’t universally well-liked at the extremes.
Historically countless moderate/centrist/whatever institutions and parties have rewarded demography over merit, it was the foundation of machine politics in countless cities.
Given the way people talk about fairly mild third wave stuff like Lean In, I think if you exposed the zoomers to serious second-wave feminism (like Ms Magazine from the 80s or even I Blame The Patriarchy for us old blogheads) they would spontaneously combust.
why don’t we let kjp have “girlboss” and the rest of us can stick with “leader”
This article made me articulate the gripe I have towards the latest post girl boss messaging- and this is not even limited to the “women empowerment” but what backlash to tryhard created is while still chasing for an ambition (oftentimes financial goals) they told striving for it is bad.
And I’m personally a slacker and there’s def a big downside for those insecure strivers for life but this type of “you can try to have a cake and eat it” messaging def does not help.
Like ideally the conversation would have led to “maybe chasing the most ambitious financial goals at all cost is not for everyone and there’s basically a trilemma of good pay, social status and slack work - and it helps if you can prioritize any of them or learn to compromise, you are more likely to have a happy life”
I propose a quadrilemma (?) of good pay, social status, reasonable work-life balance, and positive social impact... not strictly the case that you can only have 3 of the 4, but in general they have to be balanced against each other
Yeah I def agree!!
And also like a lot of times, if you step down for just one tier, the overall deal gets much better too (like maybe you give up slightly on social status and everything else gets amazing etc
Jerusalem you did it! I think you found the rare incompetent DEI hire in the wild, what with her proud trumpeting of I'm black and gay. Seriously though, this woman was just incompetent and is a walking warning to employers to hire competence people over flashy, loud people.
You however, are doing girl boss thing up right by starting your own company. Long may it prosper.
KJP’s PR tour has been an utter nightmare. Her appearance on the Bulwark was so awkward. If KJP was a girlboss wouldn’t she have been empowered not to cover up Biden losing his marbles while trying to run for president?
Power to the real GirlBosses like my wife and Jerusalem!
Is there truly a difference between genuine ambition, and the performance of genuine ambition in today's now? Is any publicly performed role not considered genuine, or else counterfeit, these days? We've lost the distinction, for sure. I can't even remembered when it happened, because the trend has been growing for so long. I want to say the 1980s, but even that isn't sure. Maybe our now has always been this way.
I'm no expert on Girlbosses, so I'm asking a real question here, more than making a statement: I want to know whether it's fair to characterize Girlbosses simply as women who ignore the intimidation of sexism and behave exactly as they like, even when that means organizing the efforts of others toward the pursuit of a personal goal — you know, just like any other (male) Boss would.
It makes sense that normalizing the phenomenon of women as executives eases the acceptance of subsequent women as executives, so it seems that Girlbossing assists the ambitions of women, generally — even if individual Girlbosses build nothing toward this direction, personally.
It seems that Jean-Pierre was bad at her job…
Returning to the distinction between genuine characteristics and performances for a moment, would it be fair to say that Jean-Pierre was simply a bad Girlboss because she was a poorly performing Girlboss — rather than *not* a Girlboss, because she was such a bad performer?
•••
I really enjoyed this essay, by the way. 😀
I don't think there will be a "Mad Libs" on this one.
Bullshit