Jess Bergman
Not Feminisms
Jess Bergman
Ding dong, the girlboss is dead! So claimed New York magazine’s The Cut in an apologetic eulogy published last August. But like Rasputin, the girlboss didn’t go quietly: attempts on her life date back as least as far as 2016, when Salon declared that, after Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss and the bankruptcy of Sophia Amoruso’s fast-fashion empire Nasty Gal, “it felt like the entire #GirlBoss era was uniformly rejected.” Other...
“Steered by the Reactionary” | What To Do About Feminism
Jess Bergman
For a long time now, we’ve had the sense that feminism is in trouble. In the years before the pandemic, its most prominent battles — the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Women’s March, #MeToo, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, “Nevertheless, she persisted” — were about figureheads. These days, symbols no longer seem adequate, or even all that meaningful. The professions (teaching, nursing, eldercare) that have been most overtaxed and underprotected during the...
“An Impossible Feedback Loop” | The Year in Mental Health
Jess Bergman
It’s no secret that the profound losses and disruptions to daily life of the past year have had a major emotional and psychological impact on nearly all of us. Many of the effects are obvious — loneliness, grief, disorientation, anxiety — and yet, aside from a profusion of dubious self-care tips and misused therapeutic language on social media, we have barely begun to reckon with their enormity and complexity, not...
