Suspended Terror
We're all canaries in this coal mine. Especially those closest to the coal face.
People can live in suspended terror for only so long.
| Tressie McMillan Cottom
…
I didn’t provide a citation for Cottom’s quote above because I will be exploring her related thoughts, especially regarding influencers' advice to women to embrace AI as part of a bruising scramble up the corporate jungle gym.
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Will The Gaslighting Never End?
In All career advice for women is a form of gaslighting, Ephrat Livni, back in 2018 in the beforetimes, tore into the double and triple binds that suffocate women in the workplace, and the lies that animate the struggle for work justice in our time:
If you’re a working woman, you’ve likely been inundated with advice about how to ensure that gender double standards don’t impede your brilliant career. Assert yourself boldly at meetings in an appropriately low tone of voice, yet purr pleasingly when negotiating salary. Be smart but never superior, a team player though not a pushover, ever-effective yet not intimidatingly intellectual. Calibrate ambition correctly, so that none are offended by your sense of self-worth, but all seek to reward your value. Dress the part.
Inevitably, even in the most allegedly enlightened workplaces, women contend with subtle biases. And so the fairer sex gets the message that we can’t just work. We must also contort and twist and try not to seem bitchy as we lean in.
But the obstacles that come with working in a sexist culture are beyond any individual’s control. And so advocating a do-it-yourself approach to on-the-job equality may actually be a kind of gaslighting—just one more way for institutions to deflect blame and make women question themselves and doubt their sanity. It’s the society we operate in that needs fixing, not how we ask for money, the tone of our voices, or our outfits.
Here, in 2026, nothing much has changed for the better. In a political climate where DEI is being erased by corporations willing to bow down to political pressure, and where capable senior military officers are pushed from promotion lists because of their sex or skin color, things have only gotten worse.
But that hasn’t slowed the selling of advice about getting ahead. Cottom1 writes about influencers who have now taken to promoting AI as the fast path to being a ‘girl boss’: a term now updated for our time, to go beyond just leaning in. Cottom writes about Emma Grede, who seems the Cruella De Vil of women whisperers [emphasis mine]:
Emma Grede is not a household name, but her literary debut (a self-help “leadership” book) tells a similar tale. The book itself has the hallmarks of the confessional tell-all advice genre that once sent women corporate leaders into the public domain. Grede calls herself a “three-hour mum” because she sees her four children three hours on Saturday and Sunday — 9 a.m. to noon — and she said she believed that working from home is “career suicide” for women who want it all. It’s “Lean In” on steroids. Unsurprisingly, her perspective courted its own outrage, from an audience that knows how hypervisibility, ambition and work obsession is fanfic for a corporate workplace that penalizes women whether they are visible or invisible, ambitious or checked out.
Gaslighting, again.
Cottom places this ‘Lean In’ on steroids firmly in 2026, and asks the right question:
The girl boss leadership strategy isn’t just outdated; the “how to get ahead” genre is the antithesis of today’s labor market. Getting ahead is for a time when companies are hiring. The A.I. economy we are building promises that companies will be able to make profits without making career paths. That’s the entire selling point.
So how are you going to claw your way to the top of a pyramid that has no middle?
She points out that the influencers like Grede are liars; they
promised us that in a scary world all we needed was a little bit more money to be less afraid. That message belies the truth that women can see with their own eyes. Once, women bought into their message. They earned educational credentials only to be told that they shut men out of schooling. They delayed child bearing to start competitive careers; now their political leaders are telling them that they’re failing at making enough babies. They started businesses and brands and built side hustles; now they’re being told that they did not do it enough or the right way or for the right people.
Women are facing an economic apocalypse.
The old Obama-era platitudes — that empowerment would bring more justice in the workplace — are just laughable now. Cottom points out that Democrats have no answer to her question, and Republicans want women out of the workforce, having children.
Jessica Grose points out that Republicans are calling for a return to higher teen pregnancies, even though older pregnancies have risen:
There’s been an increase in births by college-educated mothers, while births by women without high school diplomas have decreased and women with college educations are more likely to be working than those with less education.
But some conservatives blame women in the workforce as the culprit in this shift toward older pregnancies, rather than a sensible response to market forces. Two partners need two jobs to pay the rent, right?
And Grose notes men are likewise doing more to help in child rearing:
Ariel Binder looked at data from the American Time Use Survey and found that after the Covid-19 pandemic, husbands reduced their paid work time and increased their housework time.
[…]
The dynamic of more housework and less paid work was more pronounced among college-educated men and men with young children. Binder notes that this is a reversal of previous trends, where for decades, women increased working hours and reduced time spent on housework, but men’s behavior remained fairly static.
So, college-educated women continue to push for it all, which translates to later pregnancies — allowing them to dedicate time to work advancement, or at least survival — as well as men finally stepping up to take on more housework, a long-overdue adjustment.
I’ll leave the final word to Grose:
Maybe, instead of yelling at young men and women for making the wrong choices, we should be listening to them talk about how they want to live, and try to figure out the kind of society that would best support them.
