Vomiting on Boardroom Tables, Girlboss Feminism and Being a Trans Barometer.

The lips and assholes of political theory.

In 2003 William Gibson bestowed upon us the novel Pattern Recognition. If you like deep dives into the history of fashion design and strangely prescient descriptions of future technology (Like what the hell? How many times was W.G. ahead of the curve?) you should check it out. It’s the story of a marketing consultant hunting for the source of a mysterious AI generated film.

Modern tech discourse aside, the thing I love most about the work is that the main character, this marketing wunderkind, is allergic to corporate branding to the point where they unpick the CK labels from their clothes and file the logos off the buttons on their Levi’s. So strong and visceral is this character’s aversion to corporate messaging that they use this allergy to become the world’s foremost expert on “how good is your brand”. If they look at your product and only feel a little queasy? Your logo is derivative and boring. If they break out in hives? You have a solid, marketable look and feel. If they go into anaphylaxis and vomit all over your board room during your presentation? Well, then get ready for the most successful product launch in your corporate career of launching… whatever branded garbage you are peddling.

The concept fascinated me.

I loved the notion of taking your physical discomfort, your attuned sense of your body and how it reacts, to be a quantifiable barometer of an ephemeral concept. We all understand things “tasting bad” or “smelling bad”. It’s no mystery that some concepts and content would make someone feel ill. I love a splat-gore horror movie but know many who couldn’t think of anything worse. What if your sense of fashion, or film-analysis, or the aesthetics of the built-environment was turned all the way up to eleven? Turned all the way up to the point where your body reacted as if it was under a biological assault? It’s such a wild concept but so close to how our senses and sensibilities actually function yet so utterly alien. I never imagined that I’d feel anything like that pure fantasy.

But then I started living as a woman.

It’s like that moment when you’re a kid and learn that hotdogs are lips and assholes. This treasured treat, dripping in ketchup and mustard, is the grisly remains that would otherwise be left to rot. Or that the key ingredient in that rainbow spray of jellybeans, so sweet and chewy, is the boiled down ligaments and off cuts of animal hides. I feel sick to my stomach when I think about it. I feel physically ill when I consider the realities of something that I had taken for granted.

“I’m a white male aged 18 to 49, everyone listens to me.” The words of Homer Simpson, resonate in my mind over and over, like a dental plan. Transitioning has forced me to stare dead into the cold eyes of my lived privilege. I spent four decades presenting as a man. Four decades of receiving all the benefits of being the key demographic for... everything really. Every movie, every car, every sport, every TV show. They all were speaking to me, all clamouring for my attention. Every single one of them catering to what they thought would appeal to my gaze. The fashion, the music, the ten-out-of-ten wives paired with mid, sitcom schlubs. Everything. Even the things that weren’t being pitched directly to me but instead to the minority demographic (women) were still being sold with the promise of making men like me value them more.

But then one day you choose to live differently, and the sick feeling crystalizes.

You become hyper-aware of when you are being spoken to like you’re a man. You become attuned to implied value-set behind the pitch. You can feel the way you are being sold the aspiration of being “a successful alpha male” while really, it’s just some awful cologne or a yank-tank ute (that’s technically a commercial truck) or a pick-up-artist scam. You also become attuned to the ways you are being spoken to as a woman and which are the ways in which you are being corralled into be more attractive to men. It’s everywhere, even in the places you’d never expect. I thought it would just be in ads for hair products and skin care. I thought it’d only live in fashion that has forgone the shape ruining presence of pockets or shoes that you can’t run away in. Imagine my surprise when I found it buried in certain types of feminism.

This is a juggling act right now. Trying to address my privilege, trying to not dishonour the ways people like me have been persecuted, trying to articulate an opinion about feminism… it feels like walking a razors edge and it fills me with dread… even if that “razor” is being offered in an attractive pink colour with moisturizing strip to prevent unsightly ingrowns at my bikini line.

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert on feminism. I haven’t done the reading. Pretty simple self-assessment there… I don’t have much of a defence of it. But I know in my bones what is right and what it wrong. There are certain types of feminism that make my skin crawl. I struggle with the 21st century reinvention of what “the modern woman” looks like, especially in the workplace. This domain, whose winding corridors of secret culture and back rooms of unarticulated standards, has deliberately been used to exclude women. It has become the breeding ground for a type of feminism that makes me want to vomit on the boardroom table. The “Girlboss Feminist”.

I’ve never met one was comfortable with.

The “Girlboss” is a particular brand of white feminism that focuses your value as a person on how successful you are at capitalism. The perpetuation of the lie that wealth and power and status are the only metric to define if a person is “a success” in their life and not say… I dunno… improving the lives of those around you? Ensuring that those that you love are safe and nurtured? A life spent ensuring that those who have trickled down to the bottom of the economic/social pile-on are considered and cared for? Heaven forbid! That’s not something that you can quantify in a profit and loss sheet so it’s “worthless”. Girlboss Feminism focuses inwards. It stands in defiance of “the haters”. If there was any real examination these would seem to regularly be the people someone stepped on to get to the top. It is the denial of rather than the recognition of the community that shepherded you up in the world. The idea that in order to equalize the systemic patriarchy of the corporate world women just need to more assertive, more individualist, more ruthless and just “be more like men”? As if those are the things that have made men successful and not, oh I dunno, decades of deliberate marginalizing of women?

I feel the coiling slither of dysphoria inside me. Makes me wanna puke.

I realised I’m feeling a tiny shadow of what Gibson’s marketing wunderkind described, the feeling of your body rejecting something. “Girlboss Feminism” feels like a trap. It feels like an enticing lure to fool women into a way of thinking, a way of acting to ensure that the ruthless exploit-everyone-around-you world view is enshrined in a movement that is specifically about ending the exploitation of those around us. I have lived in the world of men. I have worked alongside, for and with charlatans and fraudsters, men who were shielded by the “it’s just business” culture. And now that I’m living among women who elevate, nurture and cherish the uniqueness of those around them. I feel blessed to be amoung them.

I haven’t done the feminist reading. I haven’t had the full breath of lived experience. But there are certain types of feminism that to me, don’t feel like “womanhood” when I do them… they just make me feel like a man. Your opinions may differ from mine, but I know what I feel in my bones and in the pit of my stomach.

–S