House of Eratosthenes

There’s about nine months of dust on the campaign, and about three months’ worth on this critique of it. But there’s an important point to be made here:

Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In and Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, has a line in her book that states “I want every little girl who’s told she’s bossy to be told instead that she has leadership skills.” As you have probably heard by now, her Lean In organization and the Girl Scouts of America have teamed up with various celebrities and some other well-known female figures to urge us to ban the use of the word bossy.

As part of their “public service” campaign they have released a short ad featuring these women lecturing us about how they were called bossy and other names as children and therefore we should “ban bossy.” The “Ban Bossy – I’m Not Bossy. I’m the Boss” video has gone viral while stirring up some controversy along the way. It has now been viewed over 2,250,000 times on Youtube.
:
In the Ban Bossy video Beyonce tells us that “Girls are less interested in leadership than boys,” while Lynch adds, “and that’s because they worry about being called bossy.”

Really, that’s why? Are you really telling me that the fear of being called bossy has somehow stymied generations of women? How come I’m not buying that? And so what if a somewhat smaller percentage of “girls are less interested in leadership than boys.” Is that the end of the world? Are we really to believe that there must be some sort of contest and competition between the genders when it comes to the percentages of each in perceived leadership positions. Or is this really perhaps just another attempt to fuel the fires of conflict and tension between them by those who don’t really care much for the male gender to begin with? These are questions worth pondering.
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In the spirit of consensus, we should all agree that being bossy is not synonymous with true leadership and that it really shouldn’t be. And that being ambitious is not the same as being bossy, stubborn, or pushy either as is implied in the ad campaign. No one really and truly likes a bossy person, whether they be a woman or a man. [bold emphasis mine]

Synonyms offered for “bossy” include “highhanded,” “officious,” “overbearing” and “abrasive.” So yes, being overbearing and abrasive doesn’t make you a good leader, any more than it makes you a qualified engineer.

Oh yeah, engineering. We need to reform the culture there, too, to make life tolerable for these poor fragile women.

It is truly frightening that we have all these people running around, on the loose — not only that, but seeking greater influence, and then getting it! — who seem to have never made any sort of study into brilliant, accomplished, famous people who gravitated to some sort of vocation and then demonstrated that that’s where they belonged. Did anyone have to surround dead-white-guy George Washington with a protective bubble, within which he would never have to listen to anyone tell him he wasn’t a good leader? How about his successor, Barack Obama. If you buy into the idea that what Obama is doing with the presidency is what’s supposed to be done with it, it seems a stretch to say He had to be soothed and coddled into the position, or into the role. No one had to protect the young Obama from anyone who might have lectured Him about “You’re just not good at giving speeches.” Some of us don’t like what He does, but there can’t be any credible doubts that He’s awfully good at doing it.

And you can go right on down through the list. Inventors. Doctors. Sculptors. Painters. There haven’t been too many people finding success in these fields, by way of shouting down or excluding any critics who might have doubted they would be successful. Oh, a lot of successful people did have critics. Most of them did, I would guess. But the truly successful ones didn’t waste time arguing with the critics about whether success should rightfully be theirs; they simply went about proving it.

“Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.”
“But I don’t think of you.”

That may be the most famous quote out of the whole book, right there, and there’s a reason for that. People who have excelled at something, and gotten criticized in spite of their ability to excel — or perhaps because of it — know that that’s how it works. That’s the dynamic.

Controlling the narrative, on the other hand, becomes important when you’re selling a bad idea. If making a girl into a “boss” requires controlling a narrative, that’s a sign, perhaps the first of many, that this is not what she should be doing. It’s a terrible, terrible disservice this “ban bossy” campaign is doing to the next generation, especially to the next generation of women who may be casually flirting with the “boss” role, perhaps allowing their knowledge of the subject matter to languish, longing to — as I’ve said before about the perverse desires of men & women alike — “Skip to the really fun part, you know, where I tell people what to do and then they go do it.” If these boss-first-practitioner-second waifs happen to be on the receiving end of some criticism that the boss role is not the right one for them, there is a possibility that that’s exactly what they need. After all, if it isn’t true in their case, subsequent events should prove that naturally, without any guided narratives from social-media “campaigns.” But with the campaign, which fails to tease out the complexities of the stories behind each individual — it seeks, instead, to generalize, that’s what a “ban” is — how much time are the boss-first-practitioner-second girls going to waste on a role that isn’t right for them?

How much annoyance are these bossy girls going to cause their “underlings,” who may or may not have any matching desire to be the boss, but who have taken the time to understand & become effective at the work that has to be done?

The thing that really hurts the rest of us, though, is the composition of this newer and reconstituted layer of “bosses,” male and female. We can’t really afford to have too many people there who don’t belong there, who lack vision, just want to give orders. The first thing we should have been noticing that they tend to do, in fact that we should have expected them to do, is to pull emergency-stop cords. It’s far easier to stop things than it is to make things go, especially when your role as the “boss” requires an ability to form & act on a vision, and you happen to be missing this. Stopping something doesn’t usually require a vision. But if you can make it happen, it creates the appearance that you’re a strong and effective boss, in tune with what’s going on around you. It isn’t necessarily so.

And this last is not a female thing. We’ve had lots of occasion to see weak-to-mediocre, pretty-boy, speechifying, suit-wearing dudes elevated to positions of power way above their levels of competence. Coasting on old glories of looking like they know what they’re doing, eager to keep the mirage alive, when they wouldn’t even know how to work an ordinary kitchen blender. First thing they do, reliable as rain, is stop things.

We need more girls to join in on the charade? Fewer things going, more things stopped, more phony leadership from people who wouldn’t know how to sweep a sidewalk, with a side order of “strong” female caterwauling and finger-waggling and preening? And pantsuits too, I suppose…what a perfect recipe of what we don’t need, and haven’t needed for a very long time.

Well, if Facebook had any thoughts about interviewing me, guess I just blew that.

I love this stuff. Beyonce, of course, has a 100+ person entourage that does everything but wipe her ass for her (and for all I know, they do that, too). That’s real leadership.
- Severian | 12/05/2014 @ 07:34
“The Royal Vagina is clean, Your Highness.”
- Rich Fader | 12/05/2014 @ 14:38
As if we ought to HELP people (in this case, Womyn) who can’t take criticism- become leaders. I lead 11 people, and if I was so sensitive that a word like “bossy” could infringe on my abilities to do so, my team would eat me alive.
- Frank the Wanderer | 12/09/2014 @ 08:43

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Some Overdue Wisdom About the “Ban Bossy” CampaignFriday, December 5th, 2014

Some Overdue Wisdom About the “Ban Bossy” Campaign
Friday, December 5th, 2014