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The death of the girlboss

The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated. Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a utopian promise. As a female business leader — be she a CEO, an aspiring CEO, or an independent MLM superseller — the girlboss was going to unapologetically will empires from the rubble of rejection and underestimation she faced all her life. As companies grew in her image, so did her mythos; her legacy would be grand and fair, because equality was coming to work. Everyone was supposed to win when girlbosses won.
Hard work would finally pay off.
What set girlbosses apart from regular bosses was pinning feminism to hustle. Women like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and former Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso — who coined the term — were finally wrangling power away from the men who had held it for so long, which was seen as a form of justice. As the concept was codified, the idea of the girlboss became about the melding of professional self and identity, capitalist aspiration, and a specific (and arguably limited) vision of empowerment.
“Literally every woman that I look up to is unrelatable,” <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22373865/rachel-hollis-controversy-harriet-tubman-girl-wash-your-face-stop-apologizing-unrelatable">Rachel Hollis, a very wealthy self-help guru, said</a> in a TikTok video in April, describing how she wills herself to wake up at 4 am to conquer her day. <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-hate-the-term-girl_b_13634228">Hollis wrote in 2016</a> how much she hated the term, but quotes like hers crystallize the girlboss mentality.
“If my life is relatable to most people, I’m doing it wrong,” she continued, and in the accompanying caption she compared herself to a slew of unrelatable women she looks up to, including Harriet Tubman.
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If Hollis’s fetish for relentless, unstoppable work and comparison of herself to the creator of the Underground Railroad is a prime example of a girlboss gone wild, so was the swift backlash.
Hollis’s most generous critics saw her words as a moment of unchecked privilege. Her sterner critics called her out in disgust, pointing to Hollis’s casual dehumanization of her housekeeper, whom she described as the woman who “cleans her toilets,” and her Tubman comparison as examples of typical, wrongheaded girlboss attitudes. People <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/rachel-hollis-tiktok-video.html">who worked for Hollis</a> corroborated her off-putting conduct. She was, in their view, just another white woman co-opting empowerment and feminism for profit, with no intention of lifting anyone else up.
Hollis is the latest in a recent spate of corporate women leaders — including <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion">Away CEO Steph Korey</a> and <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22195549/soulcycle-decline-reopening-bullying-bike-explained">certain founders of luxury spin classes</a> — who create companies plagued with stories of bullying, cruelty, and overworked and underappreciated staff. It now seems as though toxic work environments were a feature of their design and not coincidental bugs. Perhaps working for a girlboss was just like working any other job.
As more and more of these stories surfaced, “girlboss” shifted culturally from a noun to a verb, one that described the sinister process of capitalist success and hollow female empowerment. On TikTok and Twitter, girlboss the verb became yoked to “gaslight” and “gatekeep” to create a kind of “live, laugh, love” of toxic, usually white feminism.
“Gaslight every moment, Gatekeep every day, Girlboss beyond words,” one image macro reads.
But it’s not that people wanted the girlboss to fail; it’s the opposite. The concept of the girlboss failed us all.
The girlboss brought to life a way to talk about real concerns and barriers in the system honestly and frankly. It also posited a solution so blazingly simple — put women in charge — that it could never work.
We wanted it to be this easy to buck the whole system. When it turned out women CEOs were just CEOs, we never let them forget it.
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<figcaption>Look at this woman, completely unfazed by the fluttering money around her!</figcaption>
<cite>EyeEm via Getty Images</cite></figure>
Girlboss’s slow march toward irony was supercharged when the neologism officially got a name seven years ago.
“In 2014, Sophia Amoruso’s memoir, called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/GIRLBOSS-Sophia-Amoruso/dp/1591847931" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/GIRLBOSS-Sophia-Amoruso/dp/1591847931?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22230615[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22230615[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>#Girlboss, comes out</a>. This is where the word comes from,” feminist author and poet Leigh Stein explained to me. Stein is arguably the world’s foremost authority on the girlboss movement, having studied and written <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Self-Care-Novel-Leigh-Stein/dp/0143135198" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://www.amazon.com/Self-Care-Novel-Leigh-Stein/dp/0143135198?ascsubtag=[]vx[p]22230615[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":99,"subtag_delim_length":2,"subtag_key":"ascsubtag","subtag_data":{"ascsubtag":"[]vx[p]22230615[m]m-placeholder[s]s-placeholder[t]w[c]c-placeholder[r]r-placeholder[d]d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>an entire novel</a> about it. “That same year, Beyoncé performed at the VMAs in front of a sign that says ‘feminist’ illuminated in bright letters. As we all know, anything Beyoncé does is a huge cultural moment.”
Stein pointed out that at the time, the idea of bringing feminism, or some kind of feminism à la carte, into the corporate world was inescapable. Beyoncé and figures like Amoruso punctuated it, but it had begun brewing a year earlier, when Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg published her <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/6/18128838/michelle-obama-lean-in-sheryl-sandberg">lauded and controversial memoir Lean In</a> in 2013. The book sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, and established a language to talk about women’s issues in a corporate environment. Amoruso swooped in with the shorthand soon after.
“When you look at the actual word ‘girlboss,’ there may be some internalized sexism,” Alexandra Solomon, a professor who specializes in gender and gender roles at Northwestern University, told me. “Research shows that as women get older, and as women become more powerful, they are perceived as less likable. So by using that term girlboss, there’s a desire to be powerful but a fear of losing likability.”
In some aspects, Solomon explained, the girlboss label allowed women to assert power or lean in without threatening or alienating people around them. Calling oneself a “girl” could be seen as a compromise, but it was also a way to maneuver around traditional beliefs and systems that had historically diminished women’s voices.
Riding on feminism’s increased cultural cachet (as boosted by high-performance Beyoncé octane), Sandberg, Amoruso, and the girlbosses who came after them seemed to propose (along with the press that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/style/girlboss-rally-sophia-amoruso.html">breathlessly profiled them</a>) that women advocating for themselves and their worth was, intrinsically, a form of justice.
In this context, power and money became measures of equality, and rising to power in a capitalist system turned into an empowering feminist victory. It was a way of framing financial success and consumerism as goodness. The implicit promise was that if consumers made these girlbosses successful, it would mean better working conditions for women, and with that, maybe empowerment for all.
“If these women could succeed while upholding feminist values and treating their employees humanely, then maybe the patriarchy was just a choice that savvy consumers could shop their way around,” Amanda Mull wrote in <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/girlbosses-what-comes-next/613519/">the Atlantic in 2020</a>, explaining how the girlboss concept had entwined itself with justice. “Maybe people could vote for equality by buying a particular set of luggage or joining a particular co-working space.”
That cultural moment seemed to manifest itself in women-led startups such as <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/15/18184151/glossier-emily-weiss-marketing-strategy-recode">Glossier</a>, a direct-to-consumer cosmetics company launched in 2014; Away, a luggage retailer created in 2015; and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/2/7/18207116/the-wing-soho-dc-coworking-feminism-gelman">the Wing</a>, a coworking space for women founded in 2016.
The media narrative surrounding these very different companies’ origins was pretty similar: A woman, or a group of women, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/28/style/away-suitcases.html">has an idea for a company</a> that fulfills a need for young women especially; <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/07/style/glossier-new-store-new-york.html">funding is difficult to find</a> (because venture capitalists underestimate women) but is eventually secured; a unique company is created, one that is an extension of the founders’ backstories and forged by their struggles; the women succeed because they’ve leaned into their <a href="https://www.inc.com/magazine/201910/christine-lagorio-chafkin/wing-audrey-gelman-women-coworking-space-network-community.html">strengths as female founders</a>, and in doing so overcome a specific stripe of sexism.
Girlboss language wasn’t just used in the C-suite stratosphere. It trickled down to <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/3/26/21187035/mlms-coronavirus-recruit-young-living-doterra-essential-oils">lower-level workers and eventually multilevel marketing schemes</a>. Tethering feminism to hard work and entrepreneurship with justice fit seamlessly into MLMs, which have their own predatory <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mlm-horror-stories_l_5d952097e4b0da7f66211f35">horror stories</a> and are built on exploiting <a href="https://www.business.com/articles/mlms-target-women-and-immigrants/">tight-knit, predominantly female communities</a> with promises of financial success.
But mythologizing the girlboss didn’t last very long.
In 2015, Amoruso’s Nasty Gal became the subject of a discrimination lawsuit alleging it had illegally fired pregnant employees. After it was filed, <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rachelzarrell/nasty-gal-a-horrible-place-to-work-if-youre-pregnant">employees came forward</a> with stories about how Amoruso’s company was a toxic workplace. In 2016, Nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy.
In 2018, as criticism of Facebook’s handling of Russian election meddling, misinformation, and personal data abuse mounted, Sandberg’s bullying behavior and attempts to discredit the company’s critics came to light in a New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html">report</a>.
In 2019, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/5/20995453/away-luggage-ceo-steph-korey-toxic-work-environment-travel-inclusion">The Verge reported</a> on Away employees’ allegations that co-founder and co-CEO Steph Korey bullied employees, and that the company wasn’t as inclusive or diverse as it had claimed.
In 2020, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/magazine/the-wing.html">former employees</a> of feminist oasis the Wing said the coworking and social space created was only for show, and that working there was an exercise in being undermined. They also alleged that Black and brown employees were mistreated. The Wing founder Audrey Gelman <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/style/the-wing-ceo-audrey-gelman-resigns.html">stepped down that June</a>.
The same year, <a href="https://www.digitaltrends.com/news/glossier-labor-abuse-bipoc-instagram/">employees at Glossier alleged</a> they faced discrimination from both their company and the customers they served. They said upper management was predominantly white women.
Similar allegations of toxic work environments and discriminatory behavior surfaced at women-led media outlets such as <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21287045/refinery29-black-employees-man-repeller-cosmopolitan-who-what-wear-vogue">Refinery29, Man Repeller, Who What Wear, and Vogue</a>, as well as women’s clothing company <a href="https://www.today.com/style/reformation-s-yael-aflolo-apologizes-after-racism-accusations-t183582">Reformation</a> and the women-founded luxury exercise chain <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22195549/soulcycle-decline-reopening-bullying-bike-explained">SoulCycle</a>.
Like their origin stories, these companies’ reckonings had a similar trajectory: The businesses touted themselves as inclusive communities built by women, but behind closed doors, some employees said, was a toxic and sometimes abusive mix of, well, <a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/19/18140830/gaslighting-relationships-politics-explained">gaslighting</a> and gatekeeping. Those revelations hurt these brands with their consumers.
“A huge part of the problem is if you make feminism part of your brand, then your customers are going to say, ‘Wait a second. Are you a feminist company behind the scenes? Or is [it] just optics, like optical allyship?’” Stein told me.
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<aside><q>“No one’s in the comment section saying Jeff Bezos is bad at feminism”</q></aside>
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Girlboss-branded companies failing to live up to their own standards prompted <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-infantilizing-ways-we-talk-about-womens-ambition">thoughtful pieces</a> about the way we think and frame women’s ambitions, and why these problems seemed to be ingrained into the companies’ design.
In June 2020, Stein herself wrote a viral think piece asserting the death of the girlboss. Her most convincing point was that girlboss failures weren’t some new folly or unique to women; this was, quite simply, capitalism.
“The rise and fall of the girlboss says more about how comfortable we’ve become mixing capitalism with social justice, as we look to corporations to implement social changes because we’ve lost faith in our public institutions to do so,” <a href="https://gen.medium.com/the-end-of-the-girlboss-is-nigh-4591dec34ed8">Stein wrote</a>.
The success these companies achieved in linking gender to their brand belies the idea that women are more virtuous, kind, and gentle; they weren’t supposed to succumb to greed or power, to commit the same terrible abuses male CEOs perpetuate.
“There’s a lens or mentality that a female boss will be more nurturing,” Northwestern’s Solomon told me. “It’s a setup. Her clear boundaries are then perceived as cruel boundaries or punitive. Or it goes the other way, and people perceive her gentleness as weakness.”
Girlboss downfalls, under this line of thinking, aren’t seen as just a failure of business but also as a betrayal of their gender.
The allegations of discrimination and toxic work culture at girlboss-led companies are undoubtedly serious, Stein said. But at the same time, “there’s kind of a trap” when it comes to how we talk about those business failures. She argues it’s possible to have conversations about what went wrong without losing sight of accountability or laying these failures at the feet of women writ large.
“There’s a whole <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/business/economy/amazon-warehouse-labor-robots.html">exposé</a> in the Times about the Amazon work culture and how it sounds like a nightmare to work at Amazon. But no one’s in the comment section, like, saying Jeff Bezos is bad at feminism,” Stein said. “Women are held to account for how ethical and virtuous they are as leaders in a way that men are not.”
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1623074413_7331_39051" data-cdata='{"asset_id":22598826,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Utj6S5zP580aFSAyVVvxrhI0w0o=/0x0:3895x2597/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/-FaE-TR6pbxNQIJi-Tz6v5_ghAc=/0x0:3895x2597/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7zGtNHr_dlO93rqu6qdp7kVojMk=/0x0:3895x2597/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/k80UOxmyUq6SOgUa2O4ptsXmZaU=/0x0:3895x2597/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/01hjrD0ISdeHH3tfRk9dD_NX0uw=/0x0:3895x2597/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/F5_vRxA_GaWrBC57YFlnc3BRkUI=/0x0:3895x2597/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/4wwK2FW4kPt2YwWk641aBcDf2zU=/0x0:3895x2597/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cxBfJ8HKTAzM5az4_Us6CoPkrWg=/0x0:3895x2597/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EjNJ75ifiebBpuuE1Wx62x6_rdw=/0x0:3895x2597/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="Girlboss Rally June 2019 Los Angeles" data-upload-width="3895" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/7_wTkqfqLk7hybLuMpNMBcMIWjY=/0x0:3895x2597/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/so2ofHIoc57YMFtvi4stxoTL5c8=/0x0:3895x2597/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/E3Ca3K0v7ebhJXyYWkujRE5V_-U=/0x0:3895x2597/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/_yUAi1fuL4z9NGImmu7uMeoWCaE=/0x0:3895x2597/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hvE5hcRqFpgcXzEvZajRA_7XD6U=/0x0:3895x2597/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/phi2FtU2dbC44Bvi3FHfbKU67SI=/0x0:3895x2597/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Zk9Kwb7XuKO0wfQ8ETfvJL9HT8M=/0x0:3895x2597/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/f7SVF0UOgjgAPBfExCtB1yz9OwU=/0x0:3895x2597/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hlwjMN5kbv1Li6GpA94d-rNw3YA=/0x0:3895x2597/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/JwgxGBf2kt20hijqHvwccdNB2vw=/0x0:3895x2597/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3895x2597):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22598826/1159300808.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>A notebook for girlbosses to, if they felt like it, document their girlbossing.</figcaption>
<cite>Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Girlboss</cite></figure>
In speaking to experts about the rise and fall of the girlboss, the one theme that keeps surfacing is that while the term ultimately flopped, the enthusiasm surrounding it was real. The barriers facing women in corporate structures, the desire to make workplaces better by making them more inclusive, the anger from being overlooked in current systems — it’s all authentic.
Lindsey Bier, a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business who specializes in gender communication, explained that one of the reasons she thinks the term became so popular and its downfall so magnified is the lack of empowerment women face in the workplace. For more than a decade, she explained, study after study was published about how women in leadership roles were penalized for how they talked to their employees.
“Men in leadership positions are expected to be assertive and direct. Women, however, face a paradoxical situation in which they’re judged if they’re not assertive enough, but then they’re also judged if they are too assertive and direct,” Bier told me. “The data shows that both men and women judge women in leadership in this way.”
The girlboss wave of feminist-adjacent corporate empowerment offered an unapologetic promise that women would not be judged or undermined the way they would in traditional corporate settings. The hard work they put into their jobs would finally be rewarded. But the promise became emptier when basic scrutiny revealed that employees at these companies, particularly women of color, still ended up feeling overlooked, overshadowed, or even bullied.
“You’ve changed the bodies of the people who are sitting at the table, but you haven’t changed the table,” Solomon said, explaining that girlboss offered to dismantle the system but opted for cosmetic changes.
<div class="c-float-left c-float-hang">
<aside><q>“You’ve changed the bodies of the people who are sitting at the table, but you haven’t changed the table”</q></aside>
</div>
The energy and desire for something better still exists. Both Bier and Solomon told me that younger people and members of Gen Z are more aware than previous generations when it comes to companies’ and brands’ values, and they factor in those values — e.g., equality, diversity, inclusion — when deciding where to spend their money. This is a shift from previous generations, which looked for their government to enact change.
While that sentiment can be reassuring, Stein is a little more cynical when it comes to getting corporations and capitalism to bend to a consumer’s will. Pinning hopes on CEOs to dismantle structural barriers is how we got into this mess in the first place. “I actually don’t want to see more of us, like, yelling at Rachel Hollis to end racism in America. I don’t think we’re targeting our rage into the right place,” Stein told me.
Expecting Hollis or Sandberg or Amoruso to fix systemic inequality in the United States is moot when they’re not often given a chance to fix their own companies, Stein says. “I don’t think we’re actually giving them the opportunity to do better,” she told me. “These girlbosses that are 29, 30, 31, 32 when they start the first company, they’re publicly shamed in the press for their failures. Do they get to try again? Are we really saying as a culture, ‘No, they don’t get to try again’? That’s what’s unfair to me.” Fixing their own businesses isn’t as ambitious as solving America’s deep problems, but it’s at least a small step in changing the system.
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<figcaption>Getty Images has a lot of stock photography of women in offices laughing maniacally.</figcaption>
<cite>Getty Images</cite></figure>
In January 2021, a sentence appeared on Tumblr: “today’s agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss.” Very much like how the girlboss became a cultural archetype who outgrew her original ambitions, gatekeep and gaslight are terms that, in recent years, <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=gatekeep,gaslight">exploded in popular usage</a>. “Gaslight” has become the trendy synonym for lying — particularly a strain of lying where someone denies an obvious truth — and “gatekeep” has become interchangeable with discrimination.
The three Gs were linked, and the internet ran with it: <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@glamdemon2004?referer_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdk79lclgtez2i.cloudfront.net%2F&referer_video_id=6953812834966834437&refer=embed">TikToks</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/loltay69/status/1351044731942350848?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1351044731942350848%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.intheknow.com%2Fpost%2Fgaslight-gatekeep-girlboss%2F">image macros</a>, and tweets were all dedicated to these pillars of a cringe-inducing cultural moment. That “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” neatly traces the business practices of some of the most notorious women CEOs of the past decade may be more serendipitous than pointed. Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss functions as more of an ironic “yeesh” at how embarrassingly enthusiastic we all were to jump on the buzzword bandwagon.
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss was a vibe.
Yet that hasn’t stopped the term from becoming sarcastic shorthand in interpreting pop culture, which hasn’t yet fallen out of love with girlbosses. In I Care a Lot, Rosamund Pike plays Martha Grayson, a sharp-bobbed antiheroine who scams old people out of their money via legal loopholes. Martha isn’t a bad person, <a href="https://twitter.com/itsgalow/status/1399088867337195521?s=20">she’s just going through her</a> gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss <a href="https://twitter.com/itsgalow/status/1399088867337195521">arc</a>.
The marketing for Disney’s new <a href="https://twitter.com/GRIFTSH0P/status/1398379357928894465?s=20">Cruella de Vil</a> origin story, wherein Cruella is an aspiring fashion designer at odds with an even-crueler Baroness, calls to mind ads for Glossier. The phrase has even been tossed at Bethenny Frankel, who in interviews says she hates the word <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2021/04/how-bethenny-frankel-gets-it-done.html">girlboss</a>. Yet, in her new Apprentice-like reality competition show, The Big Shot With Bethenny, she’s portrayed as a mean and awful boss who’s also supposed to be the protagonist.
Recently, the CIA, an organization that’s known to partake in torture, <a href="https://twitter.com/cia/status/1387431636732633089">created an entire ad</a> about how it’s an inclusive place for women to thrive. It’s not torture, the internet replied, it’s just <a href="https://twitter.com/N0ghl/status/1388103515524976642?s=20">girlboss, gaslighting, and gatekeeping</a> with some water.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/WednesdayWisdom?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#WednesdayWisdom</a>
"I am unapologetically me. I want you to be unapologetically you, whoever you are. Whether you work at <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CIA?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#CIA</a>, or anywhere else in the world.
Command your space. Mija, you are worth it."
— CIA (@CIA) <a href="https://twitter.com/CIA/status/1387431636732633089?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 28, 2021</a></blockquote>
</div>
Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss becoming a meme that’s now used to point out the hollowness of capitalism or organizations like the CIA co-opting social justice talk feels like the last gasps of the girlboss. As the pandemic brought job losses and shined a light on wealth inequality, many of us may be more cynical and weary about our corporate overlords — no matter what form they take — than we were in 2013.
Solomon, who specializes in gender psychology at Northwestern, pointed me to <a href="https://www.countbayesie.com/blog/2020/6/5/on-audre-lordes-the-masters-tools">Audre Lorde’s 1984</a> essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Lorde wrote about how systems like white supremacy and patriarchy perpetuate themselves and how difficult it is to break them apart:
<blockquote>
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
</blockquote>
In the context of girlbosses, putting these women in powerful positions was never going to buck the capitalist and patriarchal system because there was never an intent to change it — just wield it. Solomon explains that a lot of girlbosses learned to navigate and were supported by a capitalist system. The more they were exposed, the better the rest of us got at recognizing that it “sure as hell is just easier to use the master’s tools,” Solomon said.
Maybe mocking the girlboss to the point of redefinition takes back a little of that power. Redefined through comedy, she turns into a joke. The girlboss can’t hurt you if you can laugh at her.
Laughing makes it easier to admit that we got played, that we were once able to foolishly hope that a group of women were going to fix an entire system. It’s pretty funny, even if we wanted them to.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22466574/gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss-meaning">https://www.vox.com/22466574/gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss-meaning</a>

vox The death of the girlboss

The girlboss is one of the cruelest tricks capitalism ever perpetrated. Born in the mid-2010s, she was simultaneously a power fantasy and a ...

Chrissy Teigen’s fall from grace

Chrissy Teigen, the former queen of Twitter, has gotten into a lot of trouble lately on the very platform she once ruled.
Teigen is famous because she’s a model, TV host, and bestselling cookbook author who is married to John Legend. (Disclosure: Legend sits on the board of Vox Media.) But her real claim to the widespread adoration she enjoyed until fairly recently came from the fact that she was good at Twitter. Her feed is full of funny, candid, uncensored jokes that underscore her “just like you, if you were incredibly hot and hilarious and married to an EGOT-winner” charm.
If Teigen’s jokes sometimes came at the expense of other people — well, who cared as long as those jokes were aimed at widely despised figures of contempt? Her sick Donald Trump burns were so widely admired by progressives that <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/john-legend-and-chrissy-teigen-cover-story">Trump once went on a Twitter rampage about her, and then blocked her</a>. A friend of Teigen’s framed the tweets that made him mad and Teigen put them on display in her house.
Earlier this year, however, TV personality Courtney Stodden pointed out a dark side to Teigen’s refreshingly unfiltered feed.
Stodden first became famous in 2011, when at the age of 16 they married 50-year-old acting coach Doug Hutchison. (Stodden is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.) Stodden and Hutchinson are now divorced, and from the vantage point of 2021, it’s clear that during their marriage, Stodden was a child who was being abused by an adult man. But in 2011, Stodden was widely considered to be someone ridiculous and mockable, someone whose feelings you didn’t have to care about. People called them “<a href="https://jezebel.com/courtney-stodden-is-worlds-weirdest-anti-bullying-advoc-5865051">the child bride</a>” and made vicious jokes at their expense. Teigen was not only one of many to make those jokes, but did so in a particularly brutal fashion, directing them right at Stodden.
“I experienced so much harassment and bullying from her when I was just 16 years old,” <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2021/03/28/courtney-stodden-chrissy-teigen-bullying-twitter-negative-2011-old-tweets/">Stodden said of Teigen in an Instagram video in March of 2021</a>. “At a time when I needed help. I was being abused.”
Stodden revealed multiple tweets Teigen sent to them at the beginning of the 2010s. “my Friday fantasy: you. dirt nap. mmm baby,” Teigen tweeted at Stodden in 2011. In another tweet, she simply wrote, “I hate you.”
“It really affected me,” Stodden said in their Instagram video. “It’s so damaging when you have somebody like Chrissy Teigen bullying children.”
In May, Stodden discussed Teigen’s bullying <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-crucifixion-of-courtney-stodden">in an interview with the Daily Beast</a>, adding that in addition to publicly tweeting at them, Teigen had also occasionally direct-messaged Stodden, telling them to kill themselves.
The story began to spread. Days later, Teigen’s cookware line, Cravings, <a href="https://pagesix.com/2021/05/22/the-rise-and-fall-of-undercover-bully-chrissy-teigen/">disappeared from the Macy’s website</a>. Macy’s has made no statement as to why the line has disappeared, but figures like right-wing pundit <a href="https://twitter.com/RealCandaceO/status/1394136989612625922?">Candace Owens celebrated the move</a> as a triumph over Teigen. <a href="https://pagesix.com/2021/05/22/the-rise-and-fall-of-undercover-bully-chrissy-teigen/">Page Six declared Teigen</a> an “undercover bully;” <a href="https://youtu.be/m1Mkm-vCBXc?t=41">Pete Davidson joked on Saturday Night Live</a> that “getting Chrissy Teigen out of our lives” was one of the only good things about the past year.
<a href="https://www.thecut.com/2021/05/courtney-stodden-chrissy-teigen-told-me-to-kill-myself.html">The Cut</a> had an overview of the story, and so did <a href="https://www.vulture.com/2021/05/chrissy-teigencourtney-stodden-tweets-apology.html">Vulture</a> and <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2021/05/chrissy-teigen-courtney-stodden-twitter-apology-explained.html">Slate</a>. <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/05/22/chrissy-teigen-cyber-bully-cancel-culture-courtney-stodden/5185634001/">USA Today</a> had an op-ed about it. What happened between Teigen and Stodden was all over the internet.
“I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be,” <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1392552701515370496">Teigen wrote in an apology thread on Twitter</a> on May 12. “I was an insecure, attention seeking troll. I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior but that is nothing compared to how I made Courtney feel.” She has not posted since.
Chrissy Teigen looks to be pretty canceled. And her cancellation is notable not only because she used to be so beloved, but because it points to a major cultural shift that seems to have occurred within the very period of time in which Teigen got famous.
Teigen became popular in the first place because she was really good at Twitter in the early 2010s. What it means to be good at Twitter now is very different from what it meant to be good at Twitter then — and if we unpack those changes, we can see just how drastically the culture has shifted in a single tumultuous decade.
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<figcaption>Chrissy Teigen laughing on the set of NBC News’ Today show in 2013.</figcaption>
<cite>Peter Kramer/NBC/NBC Newswire/NBCUniversal via Getty Images</cite></figure>
“Supermodel Chrissy Teigen is funny,” <a href="https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a29618/chrissy-teigen-interview-0914/">begins an Esquire profile of Teigen in 2014</a>. “Not funny-for-Twitter funny. Like, straight-up funny. Even in real life.” This is the frisson that animates almost all early profiles of Teigen: a slightly condescending awe at the fact that not only is she a professionally beautiful person but that she can also tell a joke. What are the chances!
Plus, did you know she likes food?
“I know it’s a cliché when supermodels say they love food and eat whatever they want and mysteriously never gain weight,” that 2014 Esquire profile continues. “But Chrissy actually adores food.”
Today, the celebrity-profile-reading public has internalized the lessons of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl deeply enough to be cynical about an article that so closely maps onto the archetype of Flynn’s “<a href="https://genius.com/Gillian-flynn-gone-girl-cool-girl-monologue-book-annotated">Cool Girl</a>” — “a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2.” In 2014, however, Jennifer Lawrence reigned as the queen of Hollywood, and a Cool Girl was the best thing any young star on the make could be.
Teigen appeared to fit the Cool Girl bill, and the profiles practically wrote themselves.
Teigen has real food cred. She launched a food blog in 2011, discussed her firm food opinions frequently on social media, and would go on to publish two bestselling cookbooks. But Teigen’s bona fides as a foodie were less important to her public image as she came up than the pleasing contrast between her evident love of food and the picture of her <a href="https://swimsuit.si.com/swimsuit/model/chrissy-teigen">on the cover of Sports Illustrated in a bikini</a>. The appeal of that contrast only increased as it became clear that Teigen was also funny, and that her sense of humor was not publicist-approved.
“Sure, her types of jobs may be more Maxim than Vogue, but it’s not just her curviness that makes her different than a typical runway girl,” <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/chrissy-teigen-and-the-rise-of-the-social-supermodel">enthused the Daily Beast in 2014</a>. “She shows a side that’s rarely seen in supermodels: personality. She loves to talk. And she loves to eat.”
“Chrissy Teigen is sort of the Jennifer Lawrence of the modeling world,” <a href="https://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a19380/chrissy-teigen-model-interview/">mused Elle the same year</a>. “No, she doesn’t trip a lot (to my knowledge?) but she does toe the line between self-deprecating charm and foot-in-mouth chaos in that J.Law-patented way.”
It was essential to Teigen’s appeal that she make her jokes in public, on Twitter, where everyone could see them. And Teigen really was very good at Twitter: She spent her teen years, she’s said, <a href="https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a25421062/chrissy-teigen-a-life-unfiltered/">toggling back and forth between MySpace and the Neopet forum she ran</a>. She’s fluent in the language of the unimpressed cooler-than-thou online. So you would maybe follow her even if she wasn’t famous for other stuff, because she was just that charming.
“I always have a note in my pocket that says ‘john did it’ just in case I’m murdered because I don’t want him to remarry #truelove #tips,” <a href="https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-christine-teigen-tweets/">went one tweet in 2014</a>.
“My newborn just looked up at me and said ‘mommy, why is Piers Morgan so unequivocally douchy?’ I didn’t know what to say,” <a href="https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/gallery/chrissy-teigens-best-tweets">went another in 2016</a>.
“Teigen’s assault of awesomeness starts in person with her ceaseless foodie chatter and continues on her nervy Twitter feed,” <a href="https://www.gq.com/gallery/chrissy-teigen-photos-gq-july-2013?mbid=gqpr">GQ had written early in Teigen’s rise, in 2013</a>: “highgrade funny, third-drink unhinged, often sourced from 30,000 feet. (‘AHHH seated in the danger zone I love it balls in my face balls balls in my face.’)”
Equally essential to Teigen’s allure was that her jokes didn’t always land, that they were frequently dirty, and that they were often right on the edge of what was considered acceptable discourse at the time. That 2013 GQ article asks of Teigen: “Any morning after regrets?” To which she responds, “All the time! But not really a regret that I thought it, just that I said it.”
Such admissions were part of what made Teigen seem real, and gave her a bit of an edge. Besides, <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/elliewoodward/eff-that-dude-talk-about-zero-talent">she playfully roasted her husband John Legend more than practically anyone</a> (“eff that dude talk about zero talent”), so to most onlookers, her zingers didn’t seem to be all that personal. Plus, Teigen would candidly admit that being unfiltered on social media sometimes did really hurt her.
“It wasn’t really an accepted thing within my modelling and TV career early on,” <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com.sg/exclusives/chrissy-teigen-august-2017-cover-interview/">Teigen told Harpers Bazaar in 2017</a>. “I would get in trouble, lots of phone calls from agents saying ‘Why did you tweet this? Now we’re in trouble with such-and-such a contract because you were too outspoken.’ I got so much feedback that I needed to watch my mouth if I wanted to work with certain people. And I remember sobbing so much because it was just the worst feeling, letting people down. I definitely lost work because people would shy away from being associated [with me], and I totally get it, too—they have to appeal to everybody.”
Teigen insisted that she always simply refused to listen to those who told her to tone it down. “I’m happy I didn’t because now they look at you for the way you are, and I love being an open book,” she went on. “I feel like everyone knows what they’re getting now and it’s a very comfortable place to be in life.”
Part of what people were getting with Teigen was a refreshing transparency. In 2017, she wrote an essay for Glamour about her experience with postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, Luna. “Phew! I’ve hated hiding this from you,” <a href="https://www.glamour.com/story/chrissy-teigen-postpartum-depression">Teigen wrote at the end</a>. Her popularity soared.
Another part of what people were getting with Teigen, as most profiles of her acknowledged, was someone who got into social media fights a fair amount.
“The star seems to be a lightning rod for strong opinions,” noted <a href="https://www.delish.com/food-news/a47319/this-chrissy-teigen-recipe-will-infuriate-you/">Delish in 2016</a>. “Maybe it’s because she’s not afraid to fire back, often replying directly to her dissenters.” Those fights were aggregation-friendly, though; the internet is littered with <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/1145081/chrissy-teigen-claps-back-at-body-shamer-after-sharing-swimsuit-selfie">dozens</a> <a href="https://www.eonline.com/news/1168192/chrissy-teigen-claps-back-at-claim-she-dropped-50-lbs-overnight-or-has-cancer">upon</a> <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a8658859/chrissy-teigen-best-twitter-clapbacks/">dozens</a> <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/pop-culture/chrissy-teigen-thirsty-instagram-post-miles">of</a> <a href="https://www.etonline.com/chrissy-teigen-claps-back-after-body-shaming-trolls-criticize-her-square-figure-145513">posts</a> <a href="https://www.etonline.com/chrissy-teigen-claps-back-at-criticism-over-her-traveling-for-joe-bidens-inauguration-159273">titled</a> <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanschocket2/chrissy-teigen-weight-cancer-clapback">some</a> <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/parenting/2019/07/19/chrissy-teigen-best-and-most-hilarious-clapbacks-twitter-instagram/1641795001/">variation</a> of “Chrissy Teigen Clapped Back at Her Haters and It Was Epic.”
Endearingly, Teigen was cool enough to know those aggregations were lame. “if I had my choice, not a single story would ever be written about any tweets of mine,” <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/988548493349240832">Teigen tweeted in 2018</a>. “they make people (me) seem like...the most annoying people. the ‘clapback’ wasn’t ‘epic’, it was just a fuccccccking tweet - just please stop with these stupid words.”
Teigen was good at trolling on Twitter in the same way she was good at telling jokes on Twitter. And the press was happy to frame that trolling as harmless fun, always directed at people who really deserved it, like anyone who was super mad that she <a href="https://www.bravotv.com/blogs/why-are-people-so-bent-out-of-shape-about-chrissy-teigens-guacamole">put cheese in her guacamole</a>.
The press — <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/chrissy-teigen-ivanka-trump-coronavirus-response-twitter">with the notable exception of the right-wing press</a> — seemed especially approving of Teigen when her trolling was directed at Trump.
“We must keep ‘evil’ out of our country!” Trump tweeted in 2017. “what time should we call your Uber?” <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tweets-chrissy-teigen-didnt-blocked-trump_n_59776ac2e4b0c95f375ef8fc">replied Teigen</a>.
“Chrissy Teigen’s Latest Tweet to President Trump Is Epic,” <a href="https://time.com/4661009/chrissy-teigen-donald-trump-tweet/">announced Time magazine</a>.
<a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tweets-chrissy-teigen-didnt-blocked-trump_n_59776ac2e4b0c95f375ef8fc">Trump eventually blocked Teigen in 2017</a>, after she tweeted, “lol no one likes you” at him, but he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about her. In 2019, Trump would go on a rampage after John Legend mentioned Trump’s latest criminal justice reform bill on a late-night show but didn’t give Trump as much credit as he preferred. “Guys like boring musician @johnlegend and his filthy-mouthed wife are talking now about how great [the bill] is – but I didn’t see them around when we needed help getting it passed,” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/09/trump-chrissy-teigen-john-legend-twitter-criminal-justice-reform">Trump tweeted</a>.
<a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1170914148919590914">Teigen’s response trended across the platform</a>; bemused and adoring press coverage ensued.
<div>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
lol what a pussy ass bitch. tagged everyone but me. an honor, mister president.
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1170914148919590914?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 9, 2019</a></blockquote>
</div>
“Donald Trump brought a knife to a social media gunfight and came off looking weak,” <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-chrissy-teigen-twitter-feud-lopsided-it-revealing-ncna1051706">opined NBC News</a> — “and at the hands of a woman of color to boot.”
Teigen wasn’t a johnny-come-lately in her trolling of Trump, though. She’d been keeping him apprised of her general disdain for him for years before he took office, and strikingly, she did so in the same way she kept letting Stodden know she hated them. She seems to have held both Trump and Stodden in the same category in her mind, and she tended to use the same tactics on them both.
“hey! been a while,” <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tweets-chrissy-teigen-didnt-blocked-trump_n_59776ac2e4b0c95f375ef8fc">Teigen tweeted at Trump out of the blue in 2012</a>. “I fucking hate you.”
There is of course a difference between tweeting mean things to the president of the United States and tweeting mean things to a 16-year-old. There is also a difference between tweeting mean things to Donald Trump in 2012, when he was just a racist billionaire in his 60s and held no public office, and tweeting them to a 16-year-old. But that difference seems to have been hard for Teigen to see in 2012.
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<figcaption>Chrissy Teigen and John Legend at the 2014 Met Gala.</figcaption>
<cite>Mike Coppola/Getty Images</cite></figure>
A backlash against Teigen has been mounting for a while now. No one can be <a href="https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a25421062/chrissy-teigen-a-life-unfiltered/">declared</a> “the internet’s funniest (and frankest) person” without courting overexposure. Moreover, Teigen’s status as one of Trump’s most vocal celebrity critics has made her a favorite target of the right-wing spectrum of the internet. (<a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/chrissy-teigen-deletes-twitter-qanon-1143259/">She’s been extensively harassed by QAnon followers</a>.) So hisses of incipient anger have been brewing around her every post for years.
In 2017, the popular celebrity gossip blogger Nicki Swift put together a video called “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRvDkC-518Q">Shady Things About Chrissy Teigen Everyone Just Ignores</a>.” Many of the offenses listed in the video are fairly benign, like Teigen’s tendency to discuss her and her husband’s sex life in more detail than a lot of other celebs would offer. But some of them tellingly foreshadowed the tweets to Stodden that would resurface in 2021: Teigen calling then-22-year-old Teen Mom star Farrah Abraham “a whore” who “everyone hates” in 2013; Teigen writing of then-9-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in 2013, “i am forced to like quvenzhané wallis because she is a child right? okay fine.”
In October of 2020, the Chrissy Teigen backlash began to simmer. That month, Teigen suffered a stillbirth, one she announced publicly with black-and-white photos of herself in the throes of grief. <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kpgng/chrissy-teigen-stillborn-photos-are-a-way-for-parents-to-grieve-a-complicated-loss">Some onlookers jeered at the photos</a>, arguing that they reduced a personal tragedy into a tacky bid for attention. “Chrissy Teigen is so distraught over her miscarriage that she took the time to pose for a photo of herself crying, in black and white for dramatic effect, then shared that photo with the world along with her words. Stop it,” said one commenter.
A counter-backlash eventually emerged in that case, with <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kpgng/chrissy-teigen-stillborn-photos-are-a-way-for-parents-to-grieve-a-complicated-loss">multiple</a> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/i-have-huge-respect-for-chrissy-teigen-sharing-her-pregnancy-loss-when-she-knew-what-would-happen-next">outlets</a> arguing that taking photographs can be an essential part of the grieving process for the parents of stillborn children and that Teigen’s public vulnerability could lessen the stigma surrounding pregnancy loss. Teigen herself turned the whole incident into the fodder for <a href="https://chrissyteigen.medium.com/hi-2e45e6faf764">a raw and vulnerable Medium post later that month</a>.
“I cannot express how little I care that you hate the photos,” Teigen wrote. “How little I care that it’s something you wouldn’t have done. I lived it, I chose to do it, and more than anything, these photos aren’t for anyone but the people who have lived this or are curious enough to wonder what something like this is like. These photos are only for the people who need them. The thoughts of others do not matter to me.”
The backlash died down, but it hadn’t been fully averted. In February of 2021, Teigen <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1357036681770110976">started a Twitter prompt thread</a> on an apparently anodyne subject — “what’s the most expensive thing you’ve eaten that you thought sucked?” — and paired it with a jokey anecdote about having once accidentally ordered a $13,000 bottle of wine. <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/chrissy-teigen-wine-story-twitter-controversy">Her followers erupted into an eat-the-rich fury</a>.
“I don’t think I have ever had 13 thousand dollars at one time, but great story Chrissy!” wrote one.
“is someone forcing you to tell the world these things,” tweeted another.
“Chrissy Teigen” began trending worldwide on Twitter, signifying that Teigen had become that day’s <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/twitters-main-character">main character</a>. “worst nightmare,” <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1357075243903242241">Teigen tweeted in response</a>.
People were starting to get bored with Teigen, and it sure seemed like many of them were looking for any excuse to turn on her. Teigen was too savvy to the ways of the internet not to see it coming. In 2019, she told Vanity Fair she’d turned down an offer to host “a high-profile nighttime talk show” for fear of overexposure.
“It was just too much attention and focus on me,” <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/john-legend-and-chrissy-teigen-cover-story">she said</a>. “It’s almost like the more things you do, the closer you are to getting canceled. It’s so scary to me — to have the world turn on you and hate you.”
Teigen is well aware of how cancellation works on Twitter. In 2020, she was central to <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/5/11/21253740/alison-roman-chrissy-teigen-feud-fight-explained">the cancellation of food writer Alison Roman</a>, who lost her New York Times column and (Teigen-produced) cooking show after criticizing Teigen and Marie Kondo in an interview for “selling out” with their product lines. Teigen publicly announced her hurt feelings, and the Alison Roman backlash took off.
In that case, <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1260016124072083456">Teigen accepted Roman’s apology</a> and made a point of noting that she didn’t support the swarms of her followers who had attacked Roman. She added that she identified with Roman.
“I remember the exact time I realized I wasn’t allowed to say whatever popped in my head-that I couldn’t just say things in the way that so many of my friends were saying,” <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissyteigen/status/1260016721219338241">Teigen tweeted</a>. “Before, I never really knew where I stood in the industry, in the world. Eventually, I realized that once the relatable ‘snarky girl who didn’t care’ became a pretty successful cookbook author and had more power in the industry, I couldn’t just say whatever the fuck I wanted. The more we grow, the more we get those wakeup calls.”
So Teigen could see her cancellation coming. But it wasn’t until May 2021, when Stodden revealed how Teigen had bullied her, and it became clear that Teigen had done something genuinely horrible and not just a little cringey, that her cancellation truly arrived.
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<figcaption>Courtney Stodden at the Hollywood Museum on December 5, 2019, in Hollywood, California.</figcaption>
<cite>Michael Tullberg/Getty Images</cite></figure>
In the wake of Stodden’s video post, news outlets have unearthed other old Teigen tweets that, it is now clear, were in dismayingly bad taste. “Lindsay adds a few more slits to her wrists when she sees emma stone,” <a href="https://pagesix.com/2021/05/22/the-rise-and-fall-of-undercover-bully-chrissy-teigen/">Teigen tweeted in 2011 of Lindsay Lohan</a>, who has admitted to struggling with self-harm. Those Farrah Abraham tweets from 2013 that made the rounds in Nicki Swift’s 2017 video are now circulating again.
Teigen’s reputation-damaging tweets all share a certain essential DNA. They are all tweets mocking girls and femmes whom the pop culture of the late ’00s and early ’10s had made it clear were fair game for mockery: People who read as girls (Stodden did not come out as nonbinary until 2021), and who the culture at large considered to be too trashy, too slutty, too showy. Girly, but not in the right way. (<a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky">Not that there was a right way</a>.)
What Teigen said on Twitter about and to those people was genuinely horrible, and it is clear that she targeted them because pop culture had given her permission to do so. Even outlets like Jezebel, “a supposedly feminist website,” <a href="https://jezebel.com/no-headline-5957165">were mocking Stodden</a> in 2012. Doing so was part of the snarky ethos that defined Jezebel and its more famous cousin, Gawker.
So in the early ’10s, these tweets didn’t hurt Teigen. Instead, they were part of what made her seem real and funny. Then, as now, Twitter rewarded cruelty, as long as it was directed at those the in-group considered to be “the right people.” But then, unlike now, “the right people” could include teenagers trapped in abusive relationships with adults.
The attributes on display in the tweets that have led to Teigen’s downfall appear to be some of the same attributes that made Teigen so widely beloved for so long: her lack of filter, her love of roasting people widely agreed at the time to be terrible. What’s changed is that now, it’s clear that the way she wielded them was fundamentally misdirected.
Our great reckoning with how we talk about women and femmes over the course of the Me Too decade has changed the way Twitter works. And in the process, it’s bringing down the woman who used to rule it.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22451970/chrissy-teigen-courtney-stodden-controversy-explained">https://www.vox.com/culture/22451970/chrissy-teigen-courtney-stodden-controversy-explained</a>

vox Chrissy Teigen’s fall from grace

Chrissy Teigen, the former queen of Twitter, has gotten into a lot of trouble lately on the very platform she once ruled. Teigen is famous ...

Paid leave is incredibly popular — even with Republicans

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/kNw-PX6dAeXy8GNmTD_H-OppZZ0=/0x381:5314x3163/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22626192/1207357076.jpg" /></div>
Federal paid leave is <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21262711/paid-sick-leave-house-senate-races-november">overwhelmingly popular</a> — so popular, according to a <a href="https://paidleaveforall.org/category/press-releases/">new poll</a>, that people are willing to pay to keep it.
That poll, commissioned by Paid Leave for All Action, an advocacy group that promotes paid leave policies, surveyed 1,070 likely voters from seven battleground states (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). It found that 84 percent of likely voters, including 74 percent of Republicans, support paid leave programs; 69 percent of those polled, including 55 percent of surveyed Republicans, would support a federal leave standard even if they’d have to pay more in taxes to sustain it.
The survey, which was taken from May 14 to 20, had results that are markedly similar to other recent polls on the issue.
For example, a <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com/?id=66960X1516588&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftoday.yougov.com%2Ftopics%2Feconomy%2Farticles-reports%2F2021%2F04%2F15%2Fmothers-fathers-parental-leave-poll&referrer=vox.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.vox.com%2F2021%2F6%2F7%2F22380427%2Fpoll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank" has-subtag="true" data-cdata='{"rewritten_url":"https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1516588\u0026xs=1\u0026url=https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/articles-reports/2021/04/15/mothers-fathers-parental-leave-poll\u0026referrer=vox.com\u0026sref=https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22380427/poll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19\u0026xcust=___vx__p_22144468__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder","subtag_max_length":50,"subtag_delim_length":3,"subtag_key":"xcust","subtag_data":{"id":"66960X1516588","xs":"1","url":"https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/articles-reports/2021/04/15/mothers-fathers-parental-leave-poll","referrer":"vox.com","sref":"https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22380427/poll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19","xcust":"___vx__p_22144468__m_m-placeholder__s_s-placeholder__t_w__c_c-placeholder__r_r-placeholder__d_d-placeholder"},"encode_subtag":false}'>YouGov poll</a> from early April found 82 percent of Americans believe employees should be able to take paid maternity leave, and that 68 percent thought paid maternity and paternity leave ought to be offered.
The United States is the only wealthy nation in the world <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/28/22405362/joe-biden-paid-leave-american-families-plan">without a federal paid leave standard</a>, and access to the benefit is rare. Currently, about <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/23/22399439/biden-paid-leave-america-families-plan">21 percent of US workers</a> have access to paid family leave, and less than half (about 40 percent) have emergency medical leave.
The survey comes at a confluence of two critical moments for paid leave advocates and for working families: as the coronavirus pandemic has shed a light on the lack of paid family and medical leave, and as President Joe Biden’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/4/28/22404411/biden-american-families-plan-inequality">American Families Plan</a> proposes up to <a href="https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pages/how-bidens-paid-fmla-proposal-would-work.aspx">12 weeks of paid leave for qualifying workers</a>.
“The pandemic completely changed the game,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of the advocacy group Paid Leave for All. “What had been a hole in our infrastructure, what had been a crisis in the making for years and generations, suddenly now it is out on this really magnified scale. People realize how critical this is to our resilience, to our economic growth, to weathering crises, whether global pandemics or cancer diagnoses.”
Early studies have suggested tragic costs to current paid leave policies. An April <a href="https://humanimpact.org/hipprojects/walmarts-role-in-the-covid-19-pandemic-how-lack-of-paid-sick-time-prolongs-the-pandemic-and-increases-mortality/">report by Human Impact Partners</a> found that the presence of an “adequate paid sick time policy” at Walmart could have prevented at least 7,618 Covid-19 cases and 133 Covid-19 deaths during the pandemic. Guaranteeing paid leave at the federal level would ideally allow for better outcomes in the future, while allowing families to care for Covid-19 long-haulers and other sick loved ones without worrying about losing their jobs in the short term.
The seven battleground states tabbed in the survey could in all likelihood decide which party controls the Senate, and perhaps the House of Representatives, in the 2022 midterm elections.
As Vox’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/5/20/21262711/paid-sick-leave-house-senate-races-november">Li Zhou</a> explained, “Historically, the implementation of paid leave programs has faced Republican opposition due to concerns about the additional taxes needed to pay for them and the potential burden they could pose to businesses.” Republican opposition to paid leave remains among elected officials, but the survey’s results suggest likely voters feel differently.
And that could provide Democrats with an opportunity — particularly when it comes to swaying independent voters.
To win a majority of the seven battleground seats up for grabs in 2022, Democrats and Republicans alike will need to appeal to the 20 percent of undecided voters across the states. The poll found that undecided likely voters in the states surveyed lean slightly toward the Republican Party but become willing to support a generic Democrat candidate who supports paid leave by 46 percentage points.
The poll found that voters would currently like to reelect Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) by about 5 points each. But their leads rise by an average of 17 points when linking their work with paid leave efforts.
Voters’ support for Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (FL), Richard Burr (NC), Pat Toomey (PA), and Ron Johnson (WI), by contrast, goes down an average of 5 points when each senator’s opposition to federal paid leave is highlighted.
Obviously, paid leave won’t be the only issue on voters’ minds in 2022; economic considerations, cultural issues, public safety, and various other concerns will factor into their votes as well. But as Huckelbridge points out, paid leave is clearly a salient issue — and it’s one voters are primed to respond to coming out of the pandemic.
“For whatever party you are,” Huckelbridge said, “if you want to keep your seat, if you want to boost your popularity, paid leave is a no-brainer.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22380427/poll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19">https://www.vox.com/2021/6/7/22380427/poll-paid-leave-popular-democrats-republicans-covid-19</a>

vox Paid leave is incredibly popular — even with Republicans

Federal paid leave is overwhelmingly popular — so popular, according to a new poll , that people are willing to pay to keep it. That poll...

Is there a housing bubble?

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/zYQ2FSRTA0-WQwhBNJovyCd1AR4=/0x75:3000x1646/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22638225/GettyImages_566010801_copy.jpg" /></div>
More than half of homes in the US are <a href="https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-update-home-prices-surge-24-pct/">selling above list price</a>. People are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/business/economy/new-home-building-suburbs.html">playing a lottery</a> to see if they’ll win the honor of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a home. The Case-Shiller US National Home Price Index looks like a <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA">rocket ship launching into space</a>. You’d be forgiven for flashing back to the aughts but listen closer, that’s not Fearless playing, it’s Fearless (Taylor’s version).
There’s a growing sense of unease. Renters at the lower end of the market have seen their <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/03/22/rents-rich-are-plummeting-rents-poor-are-rising-why/">rents rise in some places</a> even as they’re more likely to be suffering the economic harms of the last year. <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/housing-real-estate-market-home-buying-difficulty/">Would-be homeowners are furious</a> as they lose <a href="https://www.redfin.com/news/real-estate-bidding-wars-march-2021/">bidding war after bidding war</a>, looking for someone to blame as they watch their peers land a home and lock in a low mortgage rate. And homeowners are riding high for now, exhaling sighs of relief that they made it into the exclusive club and eagerly watching their wealth skyrocket, worried about what might happen to change that.
The last crisis, when a housing bubble and <a href="https://irle.berkeley.edu/what-really-caused-the-great-recession/">risky behavior by Wall Street</a> took the blame for the Great Recession, looms large in our collective memories. And with America’s unemployment numbers still not where we want them and <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22264320/jobs-report-unemployment-rate-inequality">the unequal economic recovery from the pandemic</a>, the fear of another crash looms. It’s unsurprising, then, that the questions “are we in a housing bubble?” and “will the housing market crash?” saw a “tremendous increase” over the last 12 months, according to Google Search.
Prices rise and fall for assets all the time for a variety of reasons, so what makes something a bubble? Yes, housing is a scary place to see volatility (it’s the largest asset most of us will ever have), so part of this fascination with housing bubbles is people paying more attention than they might with other assets. For example, used car prices have <a href="https://publish.manheim.com/en/services/consulting/used-vehicle-value-index.html">skyrocketed nearly 50 percent over the last year</a>, but very few people are asking if there’s a used car bubble.
The reason for this likely is that the most recent time the housing market attracted such universal attention, lots of people decided it was a bubble. But there’s no agreed-upon economic definition for an asset bubble. And in everyday conversation, it appears to mean “prices have gone up a lot and I think they’re going to come crashing down again.”
In a way, it doesn’t really matter what we call it. There are fundamental problems in the housing market that have to be fixed and the solutions for them are relatively straightforward. Whether prices will come down, stop appreciating, or this is a new normal in the price of homes depends on public policy choices that are in our control.
Ask two Nobel Prize-winning economists, and the answer is blunt:“It’s impossible to know for sure whether something’s a bubble,” <a href="https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/video/are-markets-efficient">said</a> Richard Thaler in a conversation with his colleague Eugene Fama.
“What’s the bubble?” he added. “The up? The down? The subsequent up?”
And yet, there are instances that feel like “bubbles” — Thaler cites the 2000s housing market — prompting quite a bit of effort between the two economists to define it.
Harvard economist Robin Greenwood and his fellow researchers <a href="https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Bubbles%20for%20Fama_e680848b-4f23-478a-b6cd-e5564e6a431b.pdf">looked at 40 times when stock prices have increased over 100 percent</a> and found that a “sharp price increase ... does not, on average, predict unusually low returns going forward.” That is, a quick price boom does not mean an inevitable crash (though they do find evidence for the “increased probability of a crash”). This means just because prices rise really fast doesn’t mean it’s a bubble in danger of popping. The definition needs to be narrower than that.
But bubbles are more than just a sharp increase in prices — there’s also an accompanying frenzied ethos that’s integral to the definition. The Harvard researchers called it investors rushing “toward a new Eldorado.”
“I would say it’s defined in terms of ‘people parameters,’” Robert Shiller, another Nobel Prize-winning economist, explained in an interview. “A bubble is a time when price increases in some markets attract a lot of attention ... I have been thinking about epidemiology, and blooms in speculative bubbles are a sort of epidemic of an idea, of a feeling of what one should do with one’s life or leisure or what’s cool.”
In general, what people are looking for to determine if there might be a bubble in housing is that the fast price appreciation is detached in at least some ways from the fundamental reasons why prices increase or decrease normally (like supply or demand).
Kevin Erdmann, a somewhat heterodox researcher in this space based at the Mercatus Center, is very skeptical of bubbles: “An argument could be made that housing has never really left the fundamentals,” he explained. Instead of a so-called “bubble,” he <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3569920">argues</a> that we had a “housing supply bust” that caused prices to appreciate quickly in places like New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco. This in turn created a migratory phenomenon where households flooded to places like inland California, Arizona, and Florida.
An interesting thing to note in favor of Erdmann’s theory is that in 2017, home prices actually exceeded their pre-Great Recession peak without much fanfare from housing bubble prophets. If the prices in 2005 and 2006 were divorced from the fundamentals, it’s hard to see why prices would have so quickly rebounded and exceeded those levels.
The story of the Great Recession is still being debated over a decade later, and the smartest minds in economics have yet to figure out how to decide if something is a bubble, especially while it’s happening. That means you should be very wary of people telling you they know that something is a bubble or that it isn’t. That said, here is the case for, and against, calling today’s housing market a bubble.
First, prices have gone up a lot. CoreLogic’s <a href="https://www.corelogic.com/news/multi-generational-demand-us-home-prices-post-third-month-of-double-digit-growth-in-april-corelogic-reports.aspx">index</a>, a leading measure of US home prices, “recorded a 13 percent annual gain, the highest since February 2006.” Looking closer at different submarkets, it looks even more out of control: a 27.2 percent increase in Idaho, 20.4 percent in Arizona, 19.3 percent in South Dakota.
The “contagion” factor seems to be there as well, with some would-be homebuyers behaving somewhat irrationally in their desperation to get a house. People are <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/26/22453293/housing-supply-shortage-discrimination-real-estate-cover-letters">offering to name their firstborn child</a> after the sellers if their bid is picked; others are lining up around the block, forcing realtors to act like bouncers as “people try to cut in line,” one agent <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2021/03/29/inside-dcs-pandemic-fueled-real-estate-boom/">told Washingtonian magazine</a>. And roughly two-thirds of people who bought a home in 2020 made an offer on a house that they had <a href="https://www.redfin.com/news/remote-homebuying-surges-to-new-high/">never seen in person</a>.
Ali Wolf, chief economist at Zonda, explained that while there are a lot of fundamental reasons prices have increased, those didn’t all suddenly materialize in 2020. After all, she said, you’ve had “low interest rates and good demographics [millennials aging into their prime homebuying years]” for several years now, and America’s housing shortage has been a long-running issue, so why the fast price growth last year?
At least some of this could be “that frenzy, that ‘I’ve gotta go now because I’m never going to be able to buy a home if I don’t buy right now,” she said.
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang">
<aside><q>“A bubble is a time when price increases in some markets attract a lot of attention”</q></aside>
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Another factor is the Federal Reserve’s own intervention in the market. In order to ameliorate the impact of Covid-19 on the housing market, the Fed bought over $1 trillion in mortgage bonds last year. Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-01/fed-s-mortgage-buying-spree-at-1-trillion-with-no-end-in-sight">reported</a> in September that the Fed owned “almost a third of bonds backed by home loans in the US,” which has pushed mortgage rates down significantly. This provided security for the housing market and was widely seen as a stabilizing force, but it also fueled a lot of the demand and urgency people feel to buy a home quickly before rates rise again.
Unlike last time, credit-tightening standards mean qualifying for a mortgage is pretty difficult, so if we are witnessing another housing bubble and it does pop, there are likely fewer people who are at risk of default.
“That was key in 2005 and 2006,” said Bill McBride, the economics blogger who <a href="https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/02/housing-bottom-is-here.html">famously predicted</a> the country had reached the bottom of the housing market in February 2012. “They would make loans to anybody!”
Since the Great Recession, it’s become harder for lower-income people to purchase a home. The median FICO score for purchasing a home is now 45 points higher than it was before the housing crash. The 10th percentile, deemed the “<a href="https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103273/housing-finance-at-a-glance-a-monthly-chartbook-november-2020_0.pdf">lower bound of creditworthiness to qualify for a mortgage</a>,” is now 657; before the recession, it was below 600. While many have criticized these standards as too strict since they lock out less well-off Americans from homeownership, these standards have also reduced the risk that people will default on their mortgages.
Additionally, many (primarily higher-income) people have saved a lot of money after the last year. Time <a href="https://time.com/nextadvisor/banking/savings/us-saving-rate-soaring/">reported</a> that the personal savings rate “skyrocketed to a record 32.2% in April, up from 12.7% in March, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.” In addition to good credit scores, homeowners have plenty of savings and have accumulated nearly <a href="https://www.corelogic.com/insights-download/homeowner-equity-report.aspx#:~:text=CoreLogic%20analysis%20shows%20U.S.%20homeowners,16.2%25%2C%20year%20over%20year.">$1.5 trillion in equity since the end of 2019</a>.
This isn’t a situation where a ton of people have mortgages that they won’t be able to pay off — the marginal homebuyer is wealthier and more secure than in the lead-up to the Great Recession.
The case against calling this a bubble is pretty straightforward. Prices are rising primarily due to low supply. That’s paired with the demographics of the nation, which predict a huge surge in demand as millennials age into the prime homebuying years.
“I wouldn’t call this a bubble,” says McBride, the economics blogger. As the National Association of Realtors <a href="https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-reports/home-buyer-and-seller-generational-trends">reported</a>, millennial buyers make up the largest share of homebuyers at 37 percent. Having overtaken baby boomers as America’s largest generation <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/">in 2020</a>, it’s no surprise that, as they reached the age when people generally begin buying homes, there would be a sharp increase in demand.
The most important factor is low supply.
Michael Neal, senior research associate at the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center, told Vox in a <a href="https://www.vox.com/22264268/covid-19-housing-insecurity-housing-prices-mortgage-rates-pandemic-zoning-supply-demand">December interview</a> that low supply is “probably the biggest contributor” to the rapid rise in prices.
Having a bunch of first-time homebuyers enter the market wouldn’t be that big of a deal if the market could accommodate them. Instead, what we’ve seen is a serious failure to ensure enough houses. A Freddie Mac <a href="http://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210507_housing_supply.page#:~:text=Future%20outlook%3A%20shortage%20to%20continue,to%203.8%20million%20in%202020.">report</a> found in 2018 that the housing shortage was at 2.5 million homes; in 2020, that number skyrocketed even further to 3.8 million.
It’s an especially difficult problem for first-time homebuyers like many of those entering the market over the last year, since entry-level homes make up an increasingly small share of new construction. Starter homes dropped from 40 percent of newly built houses in the early 1980s to just 7 percent in 2019, according to the same report.
The nation’s historical failure to build enough homes is not due to resource constraints (though, over the last year, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22410713/lumber-prices-shortage">the price of lumber has exacerbated the issue</a>) but due to onerous regulations at the local level that have restricted the supply of housing in job-rich centers.
Another reason so many nontraditional markets have seen home price appreciation is because of remote work. It allowed a small portion of the population to relocate to cheaper markets where they can easily outbid locals. The stickiness around remote work will play a big role in whether this is a permanent change or a temporary brouhaha due to the strangeness of the last year.
But it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. It’s possible that there are bubbles in certain submarkets. For instance, in places where people have bought second homes for extra space during the pandemic, prices have risen as well. Post-pandemic, if demand dries up as remote work winds down, we could see prices depreciate quickly in those areas. McBride told <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/us-housing-market-records/619029/">the Atlantic</a> these are the places he could potentially see a bubble popping.
“We might see some price declines in the second-home areas, like small towns in New England and other beach towns on the East Coast,” he <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/us-housing-market-records/619029/">said</a>. “But even there, we just might see a shift where more people decide that they like owning second homes.”
Whether we call it a housing bubble or not, the current situation is untenable.
Prices are rising, homeownership is increasingly out of the reach of many Americans, and the alternative (renting) is also increasingly expensive, especially in the most job-rich parts of the country. This is an <a href="https://www.vox.com/22429430/renters-rent-relief-eviction-moratorium-housing-market">unhealthy</a>, <a href="https://www.vox.com/22420753/homelessness-los-angeles-skid-row-judge-carter-housing-crisis-zoning">unstable</a>, and <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/5/26/22453293/housing-supply-shortage-discrimination-real-estate-cover-letters">unacceptable</a> state of affairs. And it was <a href="https://www.vox.com/22252625/america-racist-housing-rules-how-to-fix">entirely preventable</a>.
There aren’t enough homes to meet the demand for would-be homeowners, and there aren’t enough homes to meet the demand for renters. The US needs to build enough housing to support the number of people who need a place to live. And to do that, it needs to change local zoning laws that seek to prop up current homeowners’ investments by preventing more dense housing from being built. If it doesn’t, prices will continue to rise.
For homebuilders, knowing if demand is going to crater is important, because they don’t want to make major capital investments in submarkets where demand might change in the next year when projects may finish up. But this is also a function of America’s terrible local housing policies. There are not nearly enough places to live near the nation’s most productive job centers; the reason builders are forced to build less in certain communities is because <a href="https://www.vox.com/22335749/housing-prices-connecticut-segregation-zoning-reform-democrats-adu-parking-minimum">local regulations make it impossible to build where people want to live</a>.
This is why, for the average person, figuring out the terminology around bubbles shouldn’t be the biggest concern. The biggest concern is that when you want to move to a new job, there might not be a house to buy or a place to rent for you and your family. That when your kids grow up, there will be zero homes available nearby for them to live in. That when your parents want to downsize, or are unable to afford their mortgage on a fixed income during retirement, they’ll be forced to move out of their community because there are no available places to live.
This is a crisis of our own making. The housing frenzy that accompanies the current moment is a byproduct of turning an asset that could be widely available into a scarce one. It’s up to local, state, and federal authorities to reverse that trend quickly or face the consequences.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/22464801/housing-bubble-market-crash-supply-shortage-great-recession">https://www.vox.com/22464801/housing-bubble-market-crash-supply-shortage-great-recession</a>

vox Is there a housing bubble?

More than half of homes in the US are selling above list price . People are playing a lottery to see if they’ll win the honor of spending ...

Google Agrees To Alter Ad Practices After France Imposes Fine

<div class="ins_instory_dv">
<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Google Agrees To Alter Ad Practices After France Imposes Fine" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2021-06/f7ib8gc_google-generic-650_625x300_07_June_21.jpg" title="Google Agrees To Alter Ad Practices After France Imposes Fine" /></div>
Watchdog said decision opens way for publishers who felt disadvantaged to seek damages from Google.
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Paris, France:
Alphabet's Google agreed to make changes to some of its widely-used online advertising services under an unprecedented settlement with France's antitrust watchdog released on Monday.
The authority also fined the Mountain View, California-based company 220 million euros ($267.48 million) after a probe found it abused its market power in the intricate ad business online, where some of its tools have become almost essential for large publishers.
The French watchdog's decision is an attempt to rebalance the power struggle over online ads in favour of publishers, which held sway in the business in the pre-Internet era, but lost considerable ground with the rise of Google and Facebook.
The watchdog said the decision opens the way for publishers who felt disadvantaged to seek damages from Google. Many publishers globally have expressed unhappiness over ad practices employed by the tech giants.
"The decision to sanction Google is of particular significance because it's the first decision in the world focusing on the complex algorithmic auction processes on which the online ad business relies," said France's antitrust chief Isabelle de Silva.
De Silva said the fine was reduced because of the settlement, but she did not give specifics.
A Google spokesperson didn't immediately reply to a request seeking comment. The watchdog said Google will not seek to appeal the authority's decision in court.
The French competition authority's investigation focused on the tools Google offers publishers online to sell and manage online ads. The settlement with Google shows the firm is ready bend to antitrust pressure and make operational changes to some of its most popular ad business tools, whose success relies on the trove of data it has amassed over the years.The watchdog found that Google Ad Manager, the firm's ad management platform for large publishers favoured AdX, its own online ad marketplace, where publishers sell space to advertisers in real-time. It did so notably by providing AdX strategic data such as the winning bidding prices. The watchdog also said Google AdX offered Google Ad Manager superior interoperability features than for rival so-called sell-side platforms (SSP), the crucial technology that allows publishers to manage advertising spaces available for purchase, fill them with ads and receive revenue.
Under the terms of the settlement, Google offered commitments to improve the interoperability of Google Ad Manager services with third-party ad server and ad space sales platform, the watchdog said.
The watchdog said it had accepted these commitments and that they were binding in its decision. The case follows a complaint by News Corp., French news publishing group Le Figaro and Belgian press group Rossel
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-agrees-to-alter-ad-practices-after-france-imposes-fine-2458232">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-agrees-to-alter-ad-practices-after-france-imposes-fine-2458232</a>

news world Google Agrees To Alter Ad Practices After France Imposes Fine

Watchdog said decision opens way for publishers who felt disadvantaged to seek damages from Google. Paris, France: Alphabet's Googl...