Too Pretty To Work (Part 2)

Why so many young women are no longer valuing a career, and why the girlboss is dead, Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of Too Pretty to Work. In Part 1, I examined some of the reasons that increasingly it seems like young women are less eager to be “career women” or—gasp—girlbosses. This is Part 2, where I’ll get into the rest of the reasons, including more explicitly political ones.

The title is meant to be an over-arching generalization of the sentiment I see on social media, much of which is tongue-in-cheek.

1.) Left-wing anti-work sentiment

When I first discovered the subreddit, r/antiwork, it spoke to me. It was the first time I had seen all types of workers, from blue collar warehouse workers to white collar software engineers, proudly admitting that they hated working. Prior to this discovery, I had asked for career advice on Reddit a few times and felt frustrated that the only people providing advice were hyper-ambitious themselves, and operated under the assumption that you were too. Alternatively, they would attempt to crush any hope you had of working a job that was even moderately pleasant. If you wanted advice on how to find a job with good work-life balance, for example, those people would inevitably tell you that the job market is “the worst it’s ever been,” you “have to be extremely competitive” and “beggars can’t be choosers.” (They’re still doing this- we have apparently been in an ever-worsening recession since 2008.) The only people giving advice about work were people who loved to work and thought that prioritizing work above everything else was the only way to live—or doomers complacently resigned to taking what little they could get.

r/antiwork was a breath of fresh air. Finally, other people who admitted they fucked around at work. After all—even the supposed “hustlers” are still on Reddit during the workday! Finally I could vent about some of my more unfortunate work experiences or pet peeves—mandatory field day activities, being forced to travel away from my husband, being lowballed at the offer stage—finally, a group of people who would empathize instead of telling me to suck it up.

The sentiment is clear: modern work has gotten completely out of hand. The C-level execs are bragging about record profits while telling workers they can’t afford to pay us more. The bosses have unlimited, unchecked power and we’re sick of serving their interests.

I think a lot of young women who feel increasingly disaffected about work are thinking about it in this context. They’ve had bad experiences with work, and they see work as an extension of capitalism (because in most cases it is.) Some go a step further imagine a world in which communism takes over, and they’re free to write graphic novels all day while occasionally helping out at the community garden. They probably know that revolution will never come (it would specifically require an anarcho-communist revolution, and most communist revolutions have been authoritarian, which means they’d likely be working long days in factories or on farms.) But even if they know it’s a pipe dream, it’s incredibly hard to enjoy your work, or even tolerate it, when you perceive it as something that’s fundamentally unjust.

There’s a well-known meme that parodies the modern-day upper middle class communist wishing he could be a poet after the Revolution, where the roles are switched and he is being forced at gunpoint to write poetry when all he wants to do is mine coal:

There’s also the fact that modern-day work feels endless and unmanageable, but it’s easy to imagine a past in which we just chilled out all day playing the lute. This line of thinking isn’t necessarily wrong, although it feels relevant to point out that the standard of living of a medieval serf would be considered a human rights violation in 2024:

To some extent the left-wing anti-work people have a point. Perhaps people would be happier if they were less alienated from their labor, with every person running their own mini-business where they can take pride in their craft instead of being a drone in an office, making a wage that doesn’t hold up to inflation while CEOs get richer and richer. Most of the left-wing women who say they don’t want to work still do want to work—but usually in a job that, in our current world, doesn’t generate a living wage. They want to open their own shop of crocheted sweaters, or run a local nonprofit theater troupe for children, or get their fantasy novel series published (having had a book professionally published, it’s actually absurd how little money that makes.) It’s easy to see why sex work—especially on sites like OnlyFans—is an appealing option. While many creators still don’t make the income they want to make, they at least get to work on their own terms and set their own hours. I mean, see figure 1: Substack.

Anti-work left-wing women are an easy target for the right wing—in the same way that “tradwives” are an easy target for the left (and I’ll get to that soon.) They make the mistake of posting videos where they’re visibly sobbing (as a woman, posting any video of you sobbing about anything except maybe the death of a loved one is a guarantee that you’ll get bullied by the likes of Tim Pool) and they unintentionally come off as whining about the fact that they have to do anything other than scrolling TikTok and gooning. They’re seen as lazy, entitled and delusional.

But they make a good point about how unfulfilling work can be. Many of us have felt that way for years, but didn’t have TikTok. And since many of these young women do consider themselves feminists, they feel alienated by the feminism they were sold—the first iteration of “girlboss” feminism, wherein they were promised a corner office with picture windows and what they got was a seat in a ten-person pod, a demand to “be scrappy” and “do more with less,” then a PIP, and two weeks of severance.

2.) Right-wing trad sentiment

I think when you mention young women being less eager to prioritize their careers, people are quick to assume it’s all a right-wing psyop. And as I’ve explained in Part 1 and the first bullet point of this article, I really don’t think it is. But…it sometimes is.