Rachel Hollis is the Ayn Rand of white feminism
I’ve loathed Rachel Hollis for quite some time, notably because I think she’s irritating and glossy. But I didn’t know why I loathed her specific brand of irritating and glossy.
Luckily, she decided to help me out by writing a new memoir/self-help book that slam dunks my opinion that she’s a self-interested, inauthentic, toxic “corporation” posing as a human being in order to make piles of money.
Didn’t See That Coming is a double-down on Hollis’s earlier philosophy of individual empowerment. She continues to tell women that we can bootstrap our way through anything by tapping into our personal superpowers — and she is the guru that is going to help us discover the superpowers within us.
“You, and only you, are ultimately responsible for who you become and how happy you are,” she writes in Girl, Wash Your Face, an earlier bestselling pile of garbage.
Really? Only me? This sounds a lot like, “What were you wearing when he decided to put his fingers up your skirt. After all, you are responsible.”
But in a less obviously grotesque interpretation, Hollis is simply Ayn Rand with better highlights: lean into your success and claim it as your own individual strength, intellectual prowess, and drive, while also being very careful to ignore or downplay any advantages or head starts you may have been handed along the way. And if you do fail, it’s your responsibility to try harder next time because the magic is inside of you.
“Unfortunately for Hollis, her message falls completely flat,” writes Stephanie McNeal for Buzzfeed. “Through a 2020 lens, her attempts at saying only personal responsibility can combat systemic issues feel laughably out of touch. Over the past several months, white people — especially white women — have been forced to acknowledge how white supremacy has shaped their lives and how much harder things are for people of other races, how privileged they themselves are, and how rigged the system is.”
Have white women really, though? No. We are rarely forced to do anything when it comes to actually reckoning with our white privilege beyond hand-wringing about it. And when we do face a reckoning, cue white lady tears or commence the annual season of the “antiracist book club with chardonnay.”
Proof: Hollis still boasts 1.7 million Instagram followers, largely white women who are still buying into her bullshit. And her bullshit is actively enabling and encouraging white women to keep poo-pooing any responsibility for buying into this toxic philosophy that is actively reinforcing systemic racism, sexism, and classism by virtue of not even acknowledging it exists.
That’s the hard part for us mortals who aren’t running around critiquing the shitty philosophy of the coaching, influencer, self-help industrial complex: it’s really fucking hard to figure out the flaw in the argument when it’s a flaw of omission.
“You are responsible for your own happiness. Work hard. The early bird gets the worm.”
These seem like solid things we should be teaching our kids. But they only work in a Rand-Hollis-designed vacuum of a universe a la The Truman Show.
These predominately white, middle-class, college-educated philosophers, teachers, and coaches don’t even have to list anything in the fine print, “My philosophy works best when you’re white, physically able, heterosexual, healthy, and educated. Some exceptions apply. See disclaimers, American history, and sweepstakes rules for more information.”
They don’t have to even mention privilege. No one is holding them accountable to doing so. So, it becomes a sin of omission.
It then becomes the responsibility of the reader, the buyer, and the consumer to pick up that something is just missing, but you can’t quite put your finger on it.
So you hunt it down like a rabid dog (like I did, you’re welcome), or like most busy, middle-aged, working mamas looking for someone who “gets it,” you just chalk it up to “nobody’s perfect, and the basic core of Hollis’s message seems good.”
No, her philosophy is completely unproven bullshit.
She can’t defend it, so she chooses — yes, she chooses — to OMIT, IGNORE, AND DISMISS the flaws in it and stay inside the media bubble of her own making where no one is demanding any intellectual rigor.
What’s missing is the second half of “You are responsible for your own happiness,” which is “Caveat: most of the time. Sometimes the world we live in is going to fuck with you so hard, and it won’t be your fault. And for some groups and individuals in our society, getting fucked over happens way more than for others. It’s just so much harder for different people, depending on where they land in our rigged system. We always need to be mindful of that. Especially when things are hard for us so we don’t lose empathy for others in our own darkest hours.”
But that caveat doesn’t sell a lot of books, and might actually result in a shift in our cultural values, which would disrupt current power and privilege structures. And we can’t have that, can we?
Hollis and dozens of other self-actualization and self-improvement lifestyle leaders never seriously address or acknowledge the giant systemic, sociopolitical, global, intersectional, society that we are a part of that makes it exponentially harder, if not impossible, for many people to bootstrap themselves any-fucking-where.
And when we elevate this toxic message into “empowering, refreshing self-help advice” by sending people like Rachel Hollis on Good Morning America or to the top of the NYT Bestseller List, it’s absolutely dehumanizing to the marginalized and less privileged among us as they listen to it.
Take a second to imagine the trauma, violence and pain you’d feel seeing dozens of perfect faces on your TV and in your feed telling you, over and over, that if you just tried harder (or wore a longer skirt) that things would be better
…The message they’re sending is actually, “It’s your own fucking fault.”
By implicitly blaming the victim, Hollis et al can ignore privilege’s role entirely.
If you don’t acknowledge privilege even exists, then you definitely don’t have to take the next step in understanding how your privilege makes you complicit in reinforcing our violent, racist, sexist status quo.
Book club and champagne, anyone?
