DECONSTRUCTING SPIN
Publicist Condemns Author To ‘Hell’ For Writing Devastating Takedown of Lean In
By Elizabeth C.
A FORMER FACEBOOK SPEECHWRITER HAS WRITTEN A DEVASTATING TAKEDOWN OF Sheryl Sandberg’s so-called new feminist manifesto, Lean In. In return, she received a message from Sandberg’s reputed publicist admonishing ”there’s a special place in hell” reserved for her.
Writer Katherine Losse deconstructs Sandberg’s much-ballyhooed book not so much a guide for working women, but as a propagandist tool to enhance Facebook’s power and quiet feminists’ critics all while wrangling more work out of female employees.
That sounds about right.
“Lean In’s goal is to push women forward into their work so as to overcome what Sandberg represents as women’s universal internal resistance to career velocity,” writes Losse, who worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2010. “…Life is a race, Sandberg is telling us, and the way to win is through the perpetual acceleration of one’s own labor: moving forward, faster. The real antagonist identified by Lean In then is not institutionalized discrimination against women, but women’s reluctance to accept accelerating career demands.”
Most pointedly, Losse asserts that Sandberg’s campaign is an assault on parenting itself.
“The fact that Lean In is really waging a battle for work and against unmonetized life is the reason pregnancy, or the state of reproducing life, looms as the corporate Battle of Normandy… Pregnancy, by virtue of the body’s physical focus on human reproduction, is humanity’s last, biological stand against the corporate demand for workers’ continuous labor. For Sandberg, pregnancy must be converted into a corporate opportunity: a moment to convince a woman to commit further to her job. Human life as a competitor to work is the threat here, and it must be captured for corporate use, much in the way that Facebook treats users’ personal activities as a series of opportunities to fill out the Facebook-owned social graph.”
The 3,800 word essay in Dissent is the most muscular criticism thus far lobbed at Sandberg’s overhyped release. And it triggered a reaction on Twitter from Brandee Barker, who’s Twitter tagline describes her as “Helping Lean In ignite change.”
Brandee Barker who used to run Facebook PR just sent me a message that says “there’s a special place in hell for you.”
— kate losse (@fake_train) March 27, 2013
Check out the well-thought out essay here.
Via Gawker.
