You're Not Too Hot to Work

And the "girlboss narrative" wasn't a lie.

I’m going to admit something a bit embarrassing. A few years ago, I thought I had stumbled upon the ultimate based truth nuke: women were lied to. Women like me were told to spend our lives toiling away for bosses who didn’t care if we lived or died, instead of lovingly serving husbands and children who cared about us. What absolute rubes, I thought to myself. I told myself that while women’s rights were a good thing (I was glad to be able to vote, for example) it was absurd that we were “forced” into corporate life when the alternative was hanging around at home snuggling babies.

I eventually realized this was dumb—and in case you aren’t sure why, I’ll get to that—but these days, I’m seeing women of the next generation coming to the same “enlightened” conclusion. While I’m hardly the first one to notice the self-infantilization of Gen Z women—best described today as twenty-eight-year-olds identifying as coquettish, anemic baby deer—I rang the alarm about misguided “anti-work” sentiment that was actually just anti-woman about a year ago, when I wrote a piece which was ironically called Too Pretty to Work.

I actually think my previous article was a bit disorganized and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, but the crux of the issue is that, bluntly speaking, work sucks. Unless you do something you really love—something you’d do even if you won the lottery—most people would prefer to be independently wealthy than working. Most people would rather be sipping a tropical drink by a sunny private pool while getting a massage, as opposed to sitting through a forty-five minute meeting with ten participants, simply described as a “followup sync.” This is true of men, women, and all the other various genders that may exist out there.

But men’s work has never really been up for debate. So while plenty of men hate their jobs, or hate the fact that they have to work for a living, they generally don’t prance around talking about being just a sexy little boy who shouldn’t be forced to write Jira tickets (although some have fancied themselves oppressed working class heroes despite having, well, Jira ticket jobs, as I wrote about earlier.) Arguably, men had their own anti-work moment with Office Space and similar media, and plenty of men describe themselves as “anti work,” but not on the basis of being men.

But if you spend any time online, especially among Gen Z women, you see women who “don’t understand” why women of previous generations fought to make spreadsheets for eight hours a day. They were fed a “girlboss narrative” that was a lie, presumably by some shadowy forces. Even women on the left might decry this “lie” but blame it on capitalism instead of feminism. And it’s tempting to think this way—at one point, I did. One of my first big articles was about how often I got fired in my unfulfilling tech jobs, and how much I hated working. And I did hate it—but I (and many other young women) aren’t comparing “working for a living” to the realistic alternative.