Kate Losse, writing for Dissent Magazine about Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” style of workplace feminism, wonders whether a feminism that is all about monetizing every aspect of life is beneficial for women in general:
Lean In begins with an introduction called “Internalizing the Revolution,” and like Zuckerberg’s 2007 F8 speech it aims to redefine what revolution means. Sandberg’s revolution is not asking corporations to renovate their operations to eliminate sexism. Rather, revolution in Lean In is a battle to restructure the self.
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Sandberg’s language in this chapter, while directed at women, recalls and even replicates the language deployed at Facebook to push its employees to work harder. At Facebook, the offices are festooned with posters that read things like “Be Bold,” “Move fast and break things,” “Done is better than perfect,” and “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Facebook’s corporate imperative to move quickly and gain influence over more people, figured in a Formula One vocabulary of speed and victory, is repeated in Sandberg’s writing. “When more people get in the race, more records will be broken,” and, “Don’t put on the brakes. Accelerate. Keep your foot on the gas pedal.”
Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands.
There’s something of the herd animal in every human, but in women it’s particularly pronounced. This is why there’s something evil about pushing women to sacrifice their self-interests on the basis of some trend, or so that a few people can reap profits from it (e.g. divorce). And by its nature, this corporate rat race can only reward the few; most women (along with most men) don’t have what it takes to be corporate captains of finance like Sheryl Sandberg, and will end up with the short end of the stick.
Men tend to understand this, and when men had political clout they crafted a compromise whereby the majority of men, who had no desire to devote their lives entirely to work, were compensated fairly for their time. Women’s liberation played a big part in destroying this compromise, but it’s gone even farther now. As more young men are dropping out of contention, discouraged by the enormous pressures of modern family life and the puny to nonexistent rewards most get for sacrificing themselves to a company, companies are pushing women to take their place. Rather than a triumphant movement toward equality, it smells of desperation to me: if you can’t find enough boys to be suckers for “the man” you turn to the women.
Sheryl Sandberg is a taskmaster who drives her underlings to great sacrifice through manipulation, ambiguous promises and poorly defined ideals. She’s the kind of boss who’d be perfectly happy if her female workers gave her their entire reproductive lives, only to end up desperate and childless in middle age. For all the anger some conservatives display toward players and PUAs, these guys are only taking advantage of a situation they didn’t create or ask for, but these same middle-class conservatives who hate players, by encouraging their daughters to get on the career track right out of high school, frequently push their daughters right into the arms of a corporate surrogate husband, all but guaranteeing they’ll have a fruitless sex life during their prime reproductive years.
In the end, the feminist demands about the workplace are just a reaction to their greatly diminished status as women. They’ve sold their femininity for a paycheck, and in most cases a pretty meager one. It’s going to be a bitter harvest in coming years for many, many women, and the new, “empowered” feminism of the corporate world is largely responsible for creating this problem.
