employment: during her crust-punk period, Amoruso worked at a plant store, an orthopedic shoe store, a Borders bookstore, an outlet mall, a Subway. Briefly, she worked as a landscaper. But she approached the jobs as if they were a “big, fun experiment,” she writes; deep down, she knew that something great was around the corner. The story does have an odd Cinderella aspect to it, with money replacing magic. “I entered adulthood believing that capitalism was a scam, but I’ve instead found that it’s a kind of alchemy,” Amoruso writes. (Scams, of course, are also a kind of alchemy, spinning horseshit into gold.) For a while, she stole to support herself, because her political ethos “didn’t really jibe with working for the Man.” Her first eBay sale was a shoplifted item. What magic! That sale turned into a dozen more, then hundreds, then thousands, and then, soon enough, Amoruso stopped seeing money as a “materialistic pursuit for materialistic people….What I have realized over time is that in many ways, money spells freedom.”
Upon release, #GIRLBOSS received reflexive hosannas. Amoruso was profiled in New York. Billboards and taxis advertised the book with a cute slogan: “If this is a man’s world, who cares?” A few months later, Amoruso’s company laid off twenty employees. The next January, she stepped down as CEO. In 2015, a handful of ex-employees sued her and Nasty Gal; several claimed that they had been fired because they were pregnant, and one woman claimed she had been fired because she was laid up with kidney disease. In June 2016, Amoruso was named to Forbes’s second-annual list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women. In November 2016, Nasty Gal filed for bankruptcy. In 2017, the TV adaptation of #GIRLBOSS premiered on Netflix. Amoruso had thought the series would be free marketing for her brand and her company, she told Vanity Fair. She clarified: “It still benefits me, of course.” #GIRLBOSS was canceled during its first season. By then, Amoruso had already left Nasty Gal, cruising away like a shuttle detaching itself from a burning space station. She’d started a new company, called Girlboss, whose slogan was “redefining success for ourselves.”
Girlboss is “a community of strong, curious, and ambitious women,” the site announces—a company that’s “unapologetic in our beliefs and values of supporting girls and women who are chasing dreams both big and small in a shame-free, lame-free zone.” Its website features blog posts like “4 Things I Learned as a Millennial Workaholic” and “How Rupi Kaur Built a Career on the Relentless Pursuit of Creativity,” but the company is geared toward events: Girlboss holds conferences, or “Girlboss Rallies,” which sell VIP tickets for $700 and digital access for $65. “Part conference part experiential inspiration wonderland,” the website proclaims, “the Girlboss Rally has taken the tired conference world by storm, creating a space for the next generation of entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and thought leaders to meet, hatch plans, and thrive together.”
The basic idea here is that, for women, photogenic personal confidence is the key to unlocking the riches of the world. In her memoir, Amoruso writes, “In the same way that for the past seven years people have projected themselves into the looks I’ve sold through Nasty Gal, I want you to be able to use #GIRLBOSS to project yourself into an awesome life where you can do whatever you want.” The Girlboss Rallies are supposed to work the same way: you pay to network, to photograph yourself against millennial-pink and neon backdrops, to take the first step toward becoming the sort of person who would be invited to speak onstage. This is meant to scan as a deeply feminist endeavor, and it generally does, at least to its participants, who have been bombarded for many years with the spurious, embarrassing, and limitlessly seductive sales pitch that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours. (Later on, The Wing, the wildly successful and meticulously branded women-only coworking space founded by Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, would simultaneously harvest this acquisitive, performative energy and attempt to make it ineligible for criticism through its self-aware membership, savvy branding, and stated commitments to inclusion, community, and safe space. In December 2018, The Wing, by then operating in five locations, raised $75 million, bringing its funding to a total of $117.5 million. Many investors were female—venture capitalists, actresses, athletes. “This round is proof positive that women can be on both sides of the table,” Gelman said.)
The ever-expanding story of Girlboss feminism really