I thought the idea behind mocking girlbossing is to mock the attempt to make bossing more palletable and "diverse" by putting a (white) woman in charge?
Like, nobody who's complaining about rainbow washing during pride is complaining about LGBT people, right?
Like, nobody who’s complaining about rainbow washing during pride is complaining about LGBT people, right?
Nobody on the Left.
But I never see more "Go Woke Go Broke" shit than during Pride Month. Chuds accusing Disney of being full of groomers hit a fevered pitch during Pride.
Classic issue with leftism is that under 40s just use it as a stepping stone to get into cushy media/aristocracy/celebrity/not-having-to-do-real-labor and throw it away for the neoliberal culture the moment they're accepted.
Probably half an issue with leftism (not adequately innoculating leftists against this) and half a crucial defense mechanism for neoliberalism (a big bump in standard of living for the PMC, especially PMC media members).
Experiencing soul destroying poverty and having your shelter, food, medical care and life in the hands of a society explicitly set up to punish and demean you for the crime of not crawling into the gutter to starve to death is usually pretty effective.
thats capitalisms defense mechanism, if someone criticizing it cant be jailed they can be bought.
How do I get bought out? For a million dollars I will never again criticize capitalism on hexbear.net
Right but unless you believe a communist revolution is immanent, power within the system is the only kind of power on offer
Unless you're doing Oscar Schindler levels of good from the inside, get right the fuck out with that justification.
Seriously. I find the last bit of that really stupid, anyway. Any power that's "on offer" isn't power at all; it's just you taking the deal with the devil so you'll be treated better by the puppet master. Real power has to be SIEZED.
Right but unless you believe a communist revolution is immanent
I do believe that communist revolutions are indeed manifestation of God within the material world.
I'm begging internet leftists to read about the Black Panthers and Young Lords. Or militant trade unions or any history not taught in High School civics.
It's important to understand that Natalie is not a leftist. This is not criticism from within for leftists to do better, where we know there's plenty of misogyny in wider society as well as leftist groups. This is left-punching from a liberal position of relative ignorance and likely the terminally online. The most likely function it serves is to rationalize why she is criticized from the left and why the people she associates with are criticized.
We can all see the truth in the need to make our spaces more coherently feminist and non-exhausting for marginalized groups, including women. In the West, we've inherited parties from actually class reductionist movements, frankly reactionaries, who called themselves socialist while doing jack shit outside of alienating a lot of people, and are far from truly recovering from that. But compared to wider society, including the radlib circles Natalie would feel most comfortable with, they are substantially better and are only outclassed by dedicated single-demographic interest groups, e.g. a women's group literally only populated by women.
It's important to see the function of these rationalizations for people like Natalie, that they are defensive, and that what they are defending is a liberalism that reproduces misogynistic repression but calls it pragmatic. That justifies, say, helping Hillary Clinton with her image despite her directing the mass impoverishment and violence towards millions of Libyan women, of ensuring that expectations around what is possible are lowered in every country. Regardless of whether this is about Clinton per se, it's the mindset Natalie has adopted, and it is, itself, reactionary.
I feel like the only way this tweet has any validity is if there was some large contingent of people attacking feminist capitalism completely unprovoked.
Maybe there is online but idk if I've ever seen it in the real world. Idk the tweet kinds just feels like it's using feminism to take a class collaborationist position.
Almost like everything Natalie has had to say for a while now; It's incredibly niche, and even more boring.
She is wrong though, she’s just trying to cynically use a feminism as a shield against rightful critiques of her class collaborationism and selling out to bourgeois interests (if she was ever left in the first place). This is no different than JK Rowling calling everyone who criticizes her sexist, misogynist, etc
Really looking forward to a 2.5-hour video essay with bisexual lighting and multiple Victorian era-inspired costume changes from :hillary-contempt: to :not-hillary: and back again
I hate it when people say this kind of stuff generally. I am sure there are certain people who do this, but leftists have been complaining about capitalism and capitalist behaviors LONG before women were even becoming 'bosses'. The reason that it is 'girlboss bossbabe cringe' is because most male 'bosses' I know don't post about their antisocial behavior, whereas there is a sizable contingent of women (including many I know personally) who revel in their anti-social behavior and post about it constantly. It gets commented on more because there is just more to comment on.
Not that commenting changes anything, I will once again ask you to stop posting, etc.
That might be a factor, but there is also some truth to the fact that a non-male person doing it makes it easier to criticize. I think the answer is not to criticize women less for doing it, but to criticize men more; don't let their position in the patriarchal hierarchy shield them from criticism both about it and about their role in other hierarchies like capitalism.
i think theres a few things going on
one is that I think people do shit on the boss guys the same way, I mean everyone who shits on girlbosses probably also shits on elon right? two is just that the girlbosses are more public because everyone has hated the guy bosses forever, girlsbosses is sort of a fredsher modern trend so it gets louder boos.
Probably. I guess it might be a matter of numbers, BUT IDK.
There's also a strong point to be made that co-opting real, liberatory feminism for liberal, "girlboss" feminism that only serves to fuck over working-class women even more (e.g. "MoRe WoMaN DRonE PiLoTs") must be reacted to even more urgently than other reactionary misogyny, because it's like an auto-immune disorder: keeps you from even mounting the struggle. Much like it's more urgent to criticize the Democratic Party because it pretends to be our ally, and co-opting our movement is worse than crushing it, because the former prevents you from ever fighting in the first place, whereas the latter just needs to be overcome with more/better organizing and strategy.
I get it, but I don't know how that can be 'the truth' based on anything but vibes. Around where I am, all we do is criticize the men in power for their shitty behavior, but again, they don't post on social media about it, so there is nothing to 'react' to, which is the primary driver of algorithmic interaction. Hell, most 'girl bosses' I know don't post, but the ones that do post constantly.
It feels like a very specific criticism about a very specific subsect of online leftists that is being generalized to a whole that has very little idea what she is talking about. Which is why I hate Twitter and posting in general. Like, I have no idea who she is talking about because I am not online enough.
Ah. Fair enough. I took the statement to be general, not just about Twitter or social media in general. I don't Twitter, so as that goes, beats me.
I’ve never heard a single “idea” from a girl boss that I would take seriously even if it was said by a guy, because that guy would likely be a bazinga brain
Natalie punches left from the position of a liberal it consistently confuses leftists that thought she might be "hiding her power level".
Yes, of course. I honestly don't like breadtube, I don't want to watch poorly-edited hour-long video essays that are only an hour long because they didn't want to edit them. I don't care how good your costume is if 90% of the video is you talking at the screen without any other visual aids and you're not even funny, lol.
You have a problem with the unedited ones, but TBH most of the edited ones are even worse. It's way too distracting and annoying when you can't get through a single sentence without at least one cut. I only like my collage edits when they make fun of reactionaries by pasting together single words to make them say things they'd never say and would probably shoot themselves for ever saying.
Yes that's also fair. There are folks that rely too much on editing and fail to have good content. I mean, armchair critic here, I don't put out my own content and I know it's a whole domain to go learn and get good at, but still I don't see the appeal of a lot of well-established lefties.
Gonna have a possibility unpopular take here, lol: I get similarly bored with Luna Oi or Non-Compete videos even though I think they're nearly 100% correct in their takes and very cool people. It's not attention span, I just get sick of listening to lefty talking heads with very little editing or narrative. Glad it reaches some other folks that aren't sick of it, though.
Philosophy tube has a podcast with alice from :wtyp: about spy movies. On that shes pretty openly some sort of communist. On her youtube channel she is very much hiding her power level
I wrote this out before, and I guess it didn't post, but you can assume all three are hardline communists, if you take their bits about upholding the Soviet Union and the GDR seriously, rather than jokes
in her older stuff she used to sit in front of a bookshelf with very prominently displayed Marx, like everything from kapital to books written about him. think she even had a little statue. pretty sure she's a marxist of some stripe, or at least was.
i'm not saying that. just thought she was placing them there for a reason.
It's because people thought she was a leftist when it seems like she was a liberal all along. It feels like a betrayal. There's no similar thing with people who were always openly liberal because it's a given that they were never correct, so leftists rarely argue about them.
I lost interest in her pretty quickly even as she was just becoming popular because although she put an anarchist persona in her videos ("Tabby" I think?), she only ever seemed to do so to present some HorSeSHoE ThEoRy and imply that persona wasn't worth listening to except superficially and just needed to tone down her ExTrEmiSm. There were other streamers—even if they weren't as "polished" and weren't starting to go viral—who were as good if not better on leftist feminism and trans issues, so it just wasn't worth putting up with Contra's horseshit takes.
I'm coming to this thread late, and I'm impressed, lots of good discussion and points here.
Something I'll add that I see frequently from libs is this type of argument (strawman maybe?) used to push back against anyone to their left. It's presenting a bad faith narrative that there is actually some significant population of people who identify as leftist and are actually secretly reactionary because of some perceived gotcha they concoct. It's kind of hard to explain, but I know it when I hear it.
Examples of things I've heard in my own life: "well of course I support Palestinian rights, but I know at least some of those people are only critical of Israel because they are antisemitic, how can I take their arguments seriously?"
"Bernie seems like a good guy, but have you seen those ads, no diversity. I'm sure there are a lot of people who like him who are actually racist"
I feel like this fits neatly into this category, even if I'm not doing a good job of explaining it.
I do beleve its unfair that the vsmpire lady got a sentence for running her blood scam but musk is still at large.
Or could it be that when "feminists" are terrible bosses it feels like a betrayal, but when chauvinists are terrible bosses it feels like Tuesday?
