The #Girlboss Era is Over
Welcome back to Flux, a twice-weekly newsletter from GEN about the powerful forces reshaping America.
On Tuesday, just as we hit “publish” on Leigh Stein’s dissection of the rise and fall of the girlboss, Sophia Amoruso, CEO of fashion site Nasty Gal and the original #girlboss, hit “publish” on an Instagram post that announced the end of the company she’d built over the last decade. Amoruso wrote that she, “along with the majority of our team, are no longer with Girlboss” and that the downturn from Covid-19 had “decimated” her business.
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The ambitious corporate feminism that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in capital was now falling, boss by boss. It was the end of an era for millennials who had come of age in a post-recession workplace in crisis, where they were told that if they need to fix something, they should start with themselves. In Refinery29, Connie Wang calls this group of millennials struggling against freefall the “grateful generation,” happy to be here and willing to tolerate, if not venerate, the toxic world these girlbosses made.
The younger generation … sees problems as networks — the ways in which our culture is tied to our economy which is tied to geopolitical forces, the environment, and random circumstance. When they see a problem, they are more likely to question the entire system. My generation had recognized the same problems, but our solutions relied on navigating these issues in isolation: Want a raise? Get another job offer. Want healthcare? Find work at a bigger company.
We are coming out of a long freefall of economy-above-all thinking, writes Eve Fairbanks in GEN, where the anxieties of the grateful generation meet the backward-looking boomers, who embody the “conviction that the precise economic conditions that reigned in the decades just after the Second World War are the only conditions that call forth the best in the American character.”
We’ve learned a lot about the coronavirus over the past three months — and yet we’ve also learned very little about it. Does it work in waves, does it work in hot spots? Does it flare up then down? Does it favor cities over rural areas? Indoor spaces or outdoor? This precarity has led to a “deep magical thinking,” she writes. “Many believe that we still have the right to choose how much to let Covid-19 affect us.”
— Michelle Legro, Deputy Editor, GEN
The progressive stars of this week’s primary
New York and Kentucky voted this week, and as the final votes are still being tallied, it was clear the breakout stars were progressive Black men: Jamaal Bowman, Mondaire Jones, and Ritchie Torres for New York and Charles Booker in a potential upset over Amy McGrath in the senate race against Mitch McConnell.
The final numbers for the Kentucky senate race likely won’t be tabulated until after June 30, when all of the absentee ballots have been counted, but “if these Black candidates emerge victorious,” writes Andrea González-Ramírez in GEN, “it will represent the convergence of their campaign stories and the national story during a year in which Black communities have been devastated by the coronavirus pandemic, disproportionate policing, and unequal access to health care.”
Introducing: Momentum
GEN was founded on the idea that this period of history would be one of seismic change and progress. To document this change and the important conversations happening around systemic racism and anti-Blackness, our parent company, Medium, launched a new blog: Momentum.
Momentum is committed to a long-term conversation about awareness and change so that anti-Blackness is confronted and, with time, wiped away. Read it here, and don’t miss this beautiful photo essay featuring Juneteenth celebrations around the U.S.
Flux populi: Our bodies, ourselves
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Caroline Randall Williams, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument” (New York Times)
One more thing…
Last year at this time, the Women’s World Cup was on, and the U.S. Women’s team was heading into the quarterfinals with France, leading to their eventual 2–0 victory against the Netherlands. Hold onto this feeling from a year ago and have a good weekend!
