The paradoxes of a #GIRLBOSS

Sophia Amoruso's memoir-cum-advice text for ambitious young women draws on the unlikely story of its author to offer guidance for women who hope to follow in her footsteps. It stays true to her sassy, irreverent narrative voice, but seems confused on the principles it offers for young women to follow. Rather, it continually undermines its own message in favour of attachment to the brand of Amoruso. The meta-message, that one's strength of character and magnetism is everything, drowns out the stated message, of 'work hard and believe in yourself and you will find that anything is possible'.

GIRLBOSS is the story of Sophia Amoruso's trajectory from teenage ne'er do well to inspiring female entrepreneur. Her story begins with her as a troubled youth -- diagnosed with ADHD and constantly switching schools -- and travels through her rebellious phase of hitchhiking, shoplifting, and dumpster diving. It takes a turn toward the redemptive when she locates her passion in selling vintage clothing on Ebay and then follows a rather steep uphill path to glory when her clothing business reaches its stride and simply won't stop expanding. She takes us quickly through her growth, jumping from one employee to an office to a bigger office to going to Menlo Park to meet VCs. Based on her meteoric rise, she concludes that being a #GIRLBOSS involves hard work, luck, and a measure of self-respect that has some parallels with self-worship. In her words, 'be your own idol'.

There are three key confusions that are perhaps the most interesting elements of the book. First, there is the profound confusion about capitalism and whether it is good or bad. Second, there is the simultaneously conviction that magic is not in your control and that all magic emanates from the self. Third, there is the conviction that hard work is the most direct route to success paired with the obvious implication that there is something more than JUST hard work at play in a meteoric rise like Amoruso's.

Confusion 1: Is capitalism a problem? Is it my problem?

'As a teenager, I thought that life sucked and that my life—"oppressed" as I was by school and the suburbs—especially sucked. ... I believed that capitalism was the source of all greed, inequality, and destruction in the world. I thought that big corporations were running the world (which I now know they do) and by supporting them, I was condoning their evils ways (which is true, but a girl's gotta put gas in her car).'

Amoruso goes back and forth on whether she would like to embrace capitalism. On the one hand, she spent her youth experiencing it as oppressive. This seems to be less a political stance of hers and more of an emotional reaction to not fitting in to the suburban community where she was raised. She presents Nasty Gal as an aesthetic response to the oppressive nature of capitalism in her childhood. Since she never wanted to fit in, she was attracted to the unique look of vintage, its one-of-a-kind imprint and its inherent opposition to what was in the mall. But as she encounters success and begins to think like a CEO, the principles of capitalism and especially the inherent intelligence of the market in the form of the individual consumer, take over her resistance to being controlled by structures and her distaste for looking like other people. As it turns out, Amoruso's critique sputters out when her feeling of being an outsider dissipates.

Confusion 2: Who makes magic? Do I make magic?

"Chaos magic is the idea that a particular set of beliefs serves as an active force in the world. In other words, we choose what and how we believe, and our beliefs are tools that we then use to make things happen ... or not. Though this comes from a school of magical thought, it actually seems really practical and 'no duh' to me. It all goes back to the red string of my imaginary kite—if you believe something, other people will believe it, too."

In this passage, Amoruso refers to the time she, as a child, dragged around a red string saying that this was a kite. The other children on the playground with her immediately caught on to her idea, and began dragging imaginary kites behind them as well.

The magic, in her case, arises from a conviction that is entirely at odds with reality. It can become some version of reality through the distributed power of that conviction. For her, it is linked to self-confidence of an authentic kind, which persists even during periods of discouragement or opposition. Amoruso is at pains to distinguish her kind of chaos magic from more impotent manifestations of the same notion. 'You can't just type "abajilliondollars" whenever you log in to Facebook and all of a sudden become Warren Buffet,' she clarifies. But you can get everyone to pretend to have a kite simply by believing your own pretend kite is real. She gets bound up in this paradox, simultaneously offering techniques for incorporating these intentions into your own everyday life (she is herself a fan of making her intentions internet passwords, hence the Facebook reference) while spurning less authentic versions of this practice.

This is a similar confusion to the one about capitalism: her deeply held conviction is true for her but not necessarily transferable; it is possible to do JUST AS SHE DID but to somehow mess it up by being impractical, self-deluding, not hardworking enough.

Confusion number 3: When is hard work the path to true success?

Amoruso is a devoted believer in the power of hard work, and she makes this clear. Nasty Gal grew to what it is because of her hard work. Without her late nights, obsessive accounting, and perfectionist tendencies (she mentions her obsession with getting the labels straight on the packages she sent to clients with their new vintage purchases) the business would not have grown the way that it had.

Hard work, she shows us, is synonymous with her approach. She was a perfectionist when she made tuna sandwiches at Subway and when she sat at the information desk at Borders bookstore. She has worked hard at every job she had, even though the jobs she did all appear to be dead ends (in her narrative as well as in popular imagination). The capacity to work hard on its own enabled her to become a successful businesswoman.

This fanatical capacity to work is something she also values in her employees. She warns would-be #GIRLBOSSes that thinking themselves above a task, any task, will not win them affection from their employers nor endear them to their colleagues. But hard work is clearly a necessary but not sufficient condition for her rapid climb upward. While she tells the story of her many 'shitty' jobs as if it prepared her to run Nasty Gal, the only evidence for that is in the fact that she eventually did run Nasty Gal. There's no sense in which her tour of minimum wage employment opened doors for her or taught her essential skills (other than working hard, that is). You need the theory of magic to make sense of her path, which otherwise seems to lead only to other minimum wage jobs.

These three paradoxes make Amoruso's career advice a bit difficult to follow. Embrace capitalism, but with a critical eye toward its destructive properties. Believe in magic, but don't be a hippy-dippy person who overdoes it. And work hard, blindly, at whatever you are doing. It's tempting to dismiss these inconsistencies as a failure of the writer, or of the editor, who should have thought these things through better. But they seem commonplace enough that blaming her seems a bit simplistic. Are these maxims simply the received wisdom of 'making it' for young women in the 2010s? I am curious how widespread they really are.