On the Femininomenon of Bullshit Jobs

How Girlboss feminism betrayed women and trapped them in humiliating, pointless office jobs

Image created by author using Canva without the help of AI.

Almost a century ago, Edward Bernays lit feminism aflame… with a marketing campaign.

He pioneered Torches of Freedom which equated smoking in public with women’s liberation. He hired women to walk in the 1929 Easter Sunday Parade while conspicuously smoking their little torches of freedom. By violating this arbitrary social taboo, women could challenge the chauvinist double standard. A righteous battle in the war for feminism, or so the thought ran. But cigarette flames fade notoriously quickly.

Torches of Freedom was a hit, normalizing women smoking anywhere they damn well please. But disappointingly, their material conditions largely remained unchanged. Still beholden to oppressive social structures, but now with a newfound smoking addiction. The only thing that really changed was booming profits for Big Tobacco. While they were selling the increasingly alluring ‘torches of freedom,’ they also suppressed lung cancer research for decades. And that’s a real shame because women are twice as likely as men to develop lung cancer.

Men lied and women died, but by the time anyone noticed, the shareholders and Bernays had made their blood money. Like a cigarette, women had been given a light, a spark, hope—only to have it snuffed out and tossed into a muddy puddle on the street like a burnt cigarette butt.

The campaign was successful precisely because it took women’s hopeful pining for personhood and misdirected it toward consumerism. An altogether early iteration of I shop, therefore I am. Worse than the recuperation of the feminine spirit was the framework that was architected for future fraud.

Almost a century later, women were sold a new, slightly more compelling story. Instead of revolutionary cancer sticks, we entered the era of the Girlboss: the woman who hustles, who maintains a thriving career, and moves ahead despite the system being ridiculously rigged against her.

Instead of challenging—or dismantling—oppressive systems like capitalism and patriarchy, women were encouraged to make peace with, and thrive within them. Just like the Torches of Freedom campaign, Girlboss feminism promised a new era of participation, empowerment, and social equity. It shifted the focus from consumption to production—it was going to be different this time! With nothing but a hearty helping of professional ambition, these Girl Bosses were going to fight for feminism by nakedly advocating for themselves at work. With their professional glow up, these Girl bosses would prove—not unlike Barbie—that you, too, can be the CEO… for better and for worse. We regrettably discovered that women CEOs are still in fact CEOs.

As Amanda Mull put it, “The confident, hardworking, camera-ready young woman of a publicist’s dreams apparently had an evil twin: a woman, pedigreed and usually white, who was not only as accomplished as her male counterparts, but just as cruel and demanding too.”

It was the same vapid, narcissistic cruelty you’d expect from a man but from a woman. Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes came to embody the Girlboss archetype exceptionally well. She not only defrauded investors, but led “a company culture characterized by fear, and multiple ethical breaches regarding patient safety.” She terrorized her workers—just like any man would. Apparently, toxic leadership was at the heart of the Girlboss movement from the very start.

Sophia Amoruso wrote the NYT’s best-selling book #Girlboss in 2015. The Washington (com)Post called it “Lean In for misfits.” But just like Holmes, Amoruso also had an evil twin—one who bankrupted her own company with “toxic work culture.”!

The Girlboss blunder is a cursed repetition of the Torches of Freedom. Amoruso is a modern-day Bernays. They both saw women yearning to be free. Jabbed that fragile sentimentality with a hook. Used it as bait. Reeled the ladies in, milked em for all they’re worth, and left em out to dry. As Leigh Stein put it, “Woke capitalism lets the elites maintain the status quo while paying lip service to the demands of activists.”

But it was never really about the elite Girlbosses. Not really. It was about the ordinary women who would emulate them. The Girlboss became a preferred archetype for the independent, empowered woman of the 21st century office setting. But behind the curtain, under the mask, is a tender human being faced with the banal humiliation ritual otherwise known as white collar work. It typically involved the kind of job where you closed your laptop on Friday evening and ugly cried.

My old manager had one of those. We worked in the “crypto industry” so the whole thing was already bullshit to begin with, but her actual job was to be the emotional punching bag to an extremely toxic CEO and then translate the punches into our quarterly KPIs.

It may have been the worst job on Earth.

She performed invisible, emotional labor. This was the kind of work that men either didn’t care to do or were not emotionally intelligent enough to even know to do it. Leaving it, as always, to women.

The work itself was exhausting and took a tremendous toll on her. She was in denial about a serious drinking problem, and had virtually no life outside of work. Just like women a century ago, she was sold the dream of liberation, but received only the same old nightmare of exploitation.

“Not the Black Death this time; the grey life.” —Aldous Huxley

Millions of white collar workers have been waking up to smell the burnt coffee. It started with David Graeber’s theory on bullshit jobs. The latest data finds ~34,000,000 American workers have jobs they secretly think are pointless.

Contrary to popular belief, these bullshit jobs are overwhelmingly in the private sector which largely represents the callous whims of a cruel, insecure class of nepo babies hungry for an entourage of yes men—and increasingly—yes women.

Make no mistake: these bullshit jobs are exhausting. Maybe not physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Graeber literally called it “spiritual damage.” It’s not hard to understand why.

One’s work life is reduced to that of a groveling gimp clamoring for the approval of some rich asshole. To not just “know one’s place” but to convincingly perform the daily facade of intricate ring-kissing rituals. To disfigure one’s own labor for another’s ego. It’s an altogether asymmetrical, toxic dynamic—one that women are painfully familiar with.

In Chappell Roan’s hit song, Femininomenon, she explores the endlessly disappointing experience of modern heterosexuality:

So let’s say it’s working out

You pretend to love his mother

Lying to your friends about

How he’s such a goddamn good lover

False praise for an arbitrary authority figure, social performativity to maintain the appearance of success, and blatant lies to protect a man’s wittle feelings. Roan created this song as a re-centering of women, of her own lesbianism, of “celebrating women instead of prioritizing mediocre men who do the bare minimum.” In romance, too, women are pushed into unfulfilling relationships where another person’s needs are prioritized above their own. Just like in bullshit jobs.

I’m not the only one to see this connection either. In a 2018 interview about bullshit jobs, interviewer Ether van Rijswijk asked Graeber if it’s possible to have a “bullshit boyfriend.” She surely asked in jest, but the similarities mount faster than you’d expect.

Stuck in the suburbs, you’re folding his laundry

Got what you wanted, so stop feeling sorry

Bullshit jobs veer toward extreme boredom. Like a Saw movie, but the pain is a kind of monotony. Work one long enough, and you’ll inevitably find yourself asking, “this is it? This is what life is?!” But due to their relatively competitive salaries & benefits, you can’t leave. Not really. Golden, coffee-stained handcuffs. You get one of those pencil-pushing office jobs and you stay there. You sacrificed a lot to get here. Decades in education, not to mention the money you can’t get back. What’re you gunna do.. quit?

If you’ve ever had a bullshit job, you may have felt the human oh so human need to complain. Ahh, complaining. But the response one is likely to receive is normally a flavor of withdrawn callousness. ”You could be breaking your back for minimum wage. Or homeless like my cousin. After all, this is the job you wanted, isn’t it?”

Bullshit jobs create bullshit lives. They materialize the subjective feeling of depression into a lived experience. They enforce a dynamic where another’s needs—be it a boss or a boyfriend—permanently overshadow one’s own.

This is the reason my old manager drank. It’s the reason Severance is popular. We are bored and sad and fucking miserable. Roan is a hero of feminism for gloriously exposing the truth about this depressing facade that passes for “a life” in 21st century late stage capitalism.

Ladies, you know what I mean

And you know what you need and so does he

But does it happen? (No)

But does it happen? (No)

No. It doesn’t happen. And it isn’t possible to happen under modern barbarism. Smoking won’t change that. Working a bullshit job won’t change that. Becoming a Girlboss gazillionaire won’t change it either.

So long as we are born and raised and domesticated in a cage, the taste of freedom will forever remain a mystery to us. Femininomenon provides no clear answers. No ten point plan to establish matriarchy. Femininomenon is a pop song, a reframe. A reminder to stop lying to your friends, to his mother, to your boss and to yourself. The end of that lie is a profound silence. A silence where something new might finally be sung into existence.