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What was the girlboss, and how did it evolve from a term of empowerment to something (let’s face it) extremely cringe? Emilie just got done reading Marissa Meltzer’s book on the story direct-to-consumer beauty juggernaut Glossier and its enigmatic founder Emily Weiss, and we couldn’t think of a better person to discuss it with than this week’s guest, TrueAnon co-host Liz Franczak. That’s because in addition to being one of our favorite thinkers on all things related to true conspiracies and the sinister things that rich people do, she also happens to have worked as an early employee of the vintage-to-fast fashion retailer Nasty Gal — you know, the company founded by Sophia Amoruso, the lady who wrote the original book on GirlBossing.
We discuss the specific economic, political, and technological moment that gave rise to the girlboss; its roots in pop feminist tomes like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and Amoruso’s #GirlBoss; and why a movement premised on a kind of feminist version of trickle-down capitalism — and that became synonymous with a very specific group of well-heeled, mediagenic, millennial white women — was doomed to disappoint from the start.
Along the way, we explore how Glossier and its line of “no makeup makeup” embodied the strange confluence of the Obama-era optimism and digital self-commodification that would become synonymous with mainstream millennial culture, and survey some of the other visions of femininity that have been circulating in wake of the girlboss’s demise, from Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, to lazy girl jobs and girl math, to trad wives, and more.
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Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Glossier’s Emily Weiss, by Marissa Melzter
“Where have all the girlbosses gone?”, by Marissa Melzter
“What do we mean when we call art necessary?” by Lauren Oyler
Towards a unified theory of the girlboss, with TrueAnon's Liz Franczak