Who Will Defeat Girlboss Culture?

It’s Not Who You Think

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Some of the most interesting conversations I have go on here on Substack, but also in the Imperium Patron chat on Telegram. Recently, one of our patrons shared an article called The Purpose of Homeschool by Michael Perrone. What a refreshing read.

The online right-wing discourse around homeschooling is rather idealist. It’s coming from a good place, but at times it can be unrealistic. The fact is, the homeschooling parent faces challenges that are not just big, but systemic. But there has arisen—just in the past year or so—a much more realistic conversation about homeschooling. Yes, it’s obviously the best thing for almost everyone. Yet it remains deeply undesirable for most people. Is the problem simply economic? Is it just a matter of weak will?

In Perrone’s article, he tackles the status question head-on. That is, why is homeschooling low-status? It’s not really an original observation to say that it’s not. We all know. But why is it not?

The simple answer to this question is that the French Revolution destroyed motherhood. The French Revolution was the inversion of the traditional functional hierarchy in society, by the triumph of the Third Estate over the First and Second Estates. Before the French Revolution, social functions were organized from high to low as priests, warriors, and producers. Historically, the chief values of European societies were the values of the warrior and priest: dominance, lineage, virtue, piety. When this traditional hierarchy was overturned, these values were replaced by those of the producer: knowledge, competence, independence. We know these as bourgeois values.

You’ll notice that at least some of the First and Second Estate values attach to motherhood, but none of the Third Estate values do. When you think of a good mother, you might think of a pious and virtuous woman; you never think of someone filled with competence and knowledge, and certainly not independence. When traditional society was ruptured and its values replaced, motherhood got left behind. Motherhood conferred no real status, and accordingly, status decoupled from fertility, for the first time in human history. This of course didn’t happen all at once—it took centuries for the full implications of this rupture to be felt. But just like your first drag of a cigarette doesn’t give you cancer straight away, it would be absurd to demand that these implications be immediate in order for them to be real. Feminism is downstream of liberalism.

Two centuries on, and we now have perhaps the most wretched creature ever to creep upon the earth: the girlboss. Her every passive-aggressive email is a howl of existential pain. She is in what Ed Dutton calls an “evolutionary mismatch”. Her natural instincts have been hacked and repurposed by a society bent on her destruction. Her most fundamental instinct is the same as her husband’s: status. Except unlike her husband, she can no longer win status in a way that serves her interests. So she is miserable.

Western birth rates will never recover until the status question is resolved. But in his article, Perrone offers an interesting observation of the girlboss that could help to resolve the status question. Whereas the girlboss wins high status by “taking the hard road” rather than the “idle and easy” job of motherhood, this is in fact the opposite of the truth. Feminist careerism is really the easy road. Today, homeschooling isn’t the default. It requires autonomy and self-governance. Careerism requires none of that—it gives women a safe, defined, mapped-out life structure, and one which is usually governed by a man anyway. The reasons for careerism are not just status-based, but deeply psychological:

Women may want to go to college and later the office and send their kids to public schools for all the feminist, financial, empowerment reasons but no less a reason, and no further from the heart of the matter, is a degree and a career is easier: joining a structured educational and employment system is a personal bail out. A safe haven where a mom doesn’t have to create a self-governing lifestyle on her own.¹

Freedom is a terrifying thing. We pay lip service to it. It’s what we’re told to want. But the plain fact is that, faced with risk and opportunity on the one hand, or certainty and structure on the other, most people will choose certainty. And nearly all women will choose certainty. Women are by nature risk-averse. So you have a societal structure wherein status is pushing women out of the home, and also their psychology is pushing them out too. Is it any wonder that being a stay-at-home-mother is deeply unpopular?

But there is a silver lining. Seeing that careerism imposes much-needed structure on women, brings into view the solution. We can see not only how girlboss culture can be defeated, but who will defeat it.