"The Girlbossification of AI/Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are telling women to use ChatGPT or get left behind."

That's a headline at The Cut.

I haven't read the article (yet). I just went to AI, asked it to read the article for me, and added the prompt: "I thought 'girlboss' was a dying framework." Grok agreed with me about "girlboss."

You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.

You're spot on— "girlboss" has been widely declared dead (or at least on life support) for years. By the mid-2020s, the term had become a punchline for toxic hustle culture, burnout aesthetics, exclusionary corporate feminism, and the "rise and grind" era that promised women could "have it all" if they just leaned in harder. Cultural commentary shifted toward "soft life," "snail girl" vibes, quiet quitting, slow living, and backlash against the idea that ambition equals endless optimization under capitalism. The May 11, 2026, The Cut article you linked ("The Girlbossification of AI") essentially argues that this supposedly dying framework isn't gone—it's just been updated for the AI era. Author frames it as a revival (or mutation) where high-profile women like Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, and Sheryl Sandberg are repackaging AI tools (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, etc.) as the new essential for women's career survival and empowerment. It's no longer purely aspirational "have it all" optimism; it's more defensive: don't get left behind, don't backslide, automate the drudgery so you can cling to what you've got.

But — I'm reading the article now —  The Cut isn't promoting "girlbossification." It's sick of these girlboss celebs:

"Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam..."

"... (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as 'Momma Portnoy,' after the shrill character in Philip Roth’s 'Portnoy’s Complaint.' [Harvey's brother] Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a 'beast,' as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam’s frustration at her life’s limitations. 'She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,' he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons’ headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: 'I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd.'"

From "‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein/Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life" by Alexandra Jacobs (NYT)(reviewing "HOLLYWOOD ENDING/Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" by Ken Auletta).

"[Sheryl] Sandberg has been telling people that she feels burned out and that she has become a punching bag for the [Facebook's] problems..."

"'She sees herself as someone who has been targeted, been tarred as a woman executive in a way that would not happen to a man. Gendered or not, she’s sick of it,' said one person who worked alongside Ms. Sandberg for many years.... [P]olitical consulting firm Cambridge Analytica... improperly accessed the data of [87] million Facebook users. That data was then used to target voters...to get them to support Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign.... After the fallout of Cambridge Analytica, Mr. Zuckerberg told Ms. Sandberg that he blamed her and her teams for the scandal.... Ms. Sandberg confided in friends that the exchange with Mr. Zuckerberg had rattled her and she wondered if she should be worried about her job... Ms. Sandberg also has been anxious about how coming film and television projects on Facebook will depict her tenure as one of the top women in tech. 'There’s no scenario in which a successful businesswoman is not portrayed as a raging bitch,' she told one adviser...."

From "Why Sheryl Sandberg Quit Facebook’s Meta/One of the world’s most powerful executives became increasingly burned out and disconnected from the mega-business she was instrumental in building. That dovetailed with a company investigation into her activities" (Wall Street Journal).

"For years, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to climb the corporate ladder by promoting themselves in the workplace..."

"... and asking for more help from their spouses at home. Now, her departure from Facebook as one of the highest-ranking female executives in corporate America marks the end of an era in the brand of self-empowerment feminism she championed as a critical tool to fight sexism in the workplace.... Her advice to women who wanted to ascend higher in their careers was simply to 'lean in,' or be more assertive at their jobs, which became a cultural phenomenon.... 'There isn’t another Sheryl.' Over the years, Sandberg has struggled to retain her voice as a champion of women as Facebook.... The movement to get more women into better roles in corporate America has stalled in recent years.... Sandberg’s image as a corporate feminist was first burnished after the 2010 TED Talk, in which she chronicled what she saw as the reasons women were still struggling to compete with men in moving up the corporate latter...."

From "Sheryl Sandberg departure marks the end of an era for women in tech/Silicon Valley is losing one of its highest-profile female leaders" (WaPo). 

Here's that TED Talk from 12 years ago. 

I blogged about the "Lean In" movement back in 2012 — "'Leaning in' evolves into coffee-sipping wishful supportiveness":

If you can bear to keep reading you'll see that there's a Lean In Foundation where you can register your "Lean In" circle and there are actually 7,000 registered circles. This is all very nice for the Chief Leaner In Sheryl Sandberg, she of the book "Lean In." It's her branding. You want to get her branding on you? That furthers her leaning in, but what does it do for you — you, over there in that circle in a coffee shop getting lost in the evolving cross-currents of mutual support?

"That whole 'so you can have it all.' Nope, not at the same time. That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time."

Said Michelle Obama, and good for her!

Quoted in New York Magazine.

The sentiment is important and plainly true, but I think what's getting more attention is her use — in a public setting — of the word "shit." I think it's interesting that she said "that shit doesn’t work all the time" and not "that shit don’t work all the time." This wasn't a descent into the vernacular. She was keeping it lofty, but choosing to deploy the expressive, valuable word "shit."

The WaPo article on the subject is titled "Michelle Obama swore when criticizing Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘lean in’ mantra, and the Internet lost it." (I think it's illiterate to use the word "swore" to refer to excretion-related words. Swearing is a solemn declaration to God, and the bad kind of swearing takes the Lord's name in vain. "Shit" is not the Lord's name.)

[I]n what may be an unprecedented slip-up, Obama said the line that threw the audience and Internet into a frenzy. Upon hearing her utter a profanity...

I wouldn't call "shit" a "profanity" either. ("Profanity" is desecrating something holy, and shit isn't holy at all, though sometimes it made sacred, by saying "holy shit," but that proves my point: It starts low and can be elevated. What's profane is to say "God" as an expletive, which people do all the time without setting the internet atwitter.)

... the packed 19,000-seat arena lost it, erupting in cheers and laughter. Many on social media praised Obama for being “real” about the struggles working women face.... The uncharacteristic remark even appeared to catch Obama off-guard. Author and political commentator Touré Neblett tweeted that “everyone freaked out ... Michelle, too.” Neblett added that Obama quickly apologized before saying, “I forgot where I was for a moment. I thought we were at home, y’all... I was gettin’ real comfortable up in here.”

Oh, I don't think she "forgot." She was taking a little risk, but she was doing something Trump does all the time, saying something short and striking that will get everyone talking about her. It's perfectly fine. It's America.

And now that we're paying attention, we will need to talk about whether Sheryl Sandberg is full of shit with her "Lean In" book. Getting after Sandberg was already something that was happening, so Obama did a fine job of making herself part of that trend. Now, Sandberg has been in trouble lately because of a revelation that she "and other Facebook executives had tried to cover up Russians using the site to promote propaganda." (I'm quoting the WaPo article). That has nothing to do with Sandberg's 5-year-old best seller and her advice to women to "lean in." But Obama chose this moment to denounce Sandberg's much-touted advice as "shit." That shit sticks.

I googled "shit sticks" in an effort to get to the most common phrase about shit sticking, but I ended up at a Wikipedia article, "Shit stick":

Shit stick means "a thin stake or stick used instead of toilet paper" and was a historical item of material culture introduced through Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. A well-known example is gānshǐjué/kanshiketsu (lit. 乾屎橛 "dry shit stick") from the Chan/Zen gōng'àn/kōan in which a monk asked "What is Buddha?" and Master Yunmen/Unmon answered "A dry shit stick".

The illustration is mindbending:



"Gaki zōshi 餓鬼草紙 "Scroll of Hungry Ghosts", a gaki condemned to shit-eating watches a child wearing geta and holding a chūgi, c. 12th century."

"Facebook tanking."

"The social media giant's shares fell more than 5 percent after The Wall Street Journal reported that CEO Mark Zuckerberg blamed second-in-command Sheryl Sandberg for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and its subsequent fallout. The WSJ's report adds more fuel to criticism of Facebook's handling of the scandal and whether the two top executives have been too slow to change its platform. The New York Times detailed last week how the company ignored and then tried to hide that Russia used the platform to disrupt the U.S. election in 2016."

CNBC reports.

"The 43 people who might run against Trump in 2020."

A piece at The Hill. I haven't read it yet, but there's just one name I do not want to see. There's a certain someone who needs to step back and let other candidacies develop.

Okay, now I'm looking.

With no clear leader, the 2020 field should be a change from 2016, when Democrats had a small field of candidates, including front-runner Hillary Clinton.

I nearly lost my mind before focusing and reading that correctly. No, Hillary is not one of the 43, and she is certainly not the "front-runner."

My pet theory these days is that the people want excitement and will vote for the more entertaining character and what it takes to excite us properly keeps amping up. First, Obama, then, Trump, so what's next in this series? I'll extract the possibilities from the 43 on the list. I was going to exclude all the elected officials, but I let one on. In the order that they appear in the linked article:

"Women aren’t any meaner to women than men are to one another. Women are just expected to be nicer."

"We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind. When women violate those stereotypes, we judge them harshly. 'A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless,' Marlo Thomas once lamented. 'All a woman has to do is put you on hold.' In one experiment, researchers asked people to read about a workplace conflict between two women, two men, or a man and a woman. The conflict was identical, but when the case study was between two women, the participants saw it as more damaging to the relationship and expected them to be more likely to quit. When men argue, it’s a healthy debate. When women argue … meow! It’s a catfight."

Write Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in "Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman."

And I'll just add: Women co-authors aren't any more credit-demanding than men co-authors. It just looks better to have their name as part of the title.

"Hi, sir. Bye, sir. Your kind are not welcome here. Read the sign. Out!"

Says Hermie (Colin Quinn's character) on the "I Love You Baby" episode of "Girls" that aired on HBO this week. The sign — in Ray's Coffeehouse — says no "man buns." And Hermie is blatantly, vocally enforcing the shop's new "hipster hate" theme. Shoshanna (the Zosia Mamet character) has very enthusiastically devised this theme and put up the signage and gotten the NYT interested doing a style-section piece on the place: "They love the hipster-hate angle." Hermie's interpretation of the theme is overt refusal of service. Shoshanna reacts:

"Hermie, Hermie, we cannot actually turn people away. That's discrimination. We just have to, like, you know, glare at them and make them super-uncomfortable and bully them until they leave of their own volition."

Hermie reacts:

"From now on, anybody walks through that door with a bun on top of their head or tattoos that were not acquired on a naval adventure on the South Pacific, we treat 'em like a hippie at Disneyland in '68. This is a haven for normal people — working men and ladies... We're taking back the night. You're either with me or against me."

Shoshanna seems to have come up with the hipster-hate theme as a marketing gimmick to counter the competition from the extremely hip coffeeshop across the street (Helvetica). She's following the "lean in" advice Hermie found in that book by Sheryl Sandberg. Later, Hermie tells her he needs her to "lean out" a bit, because she's too intense. But he likes the money that's been coming in under the hipster-hate branding, which the NYT and some of the customers might think of as ironic, but Hermie is an older guy — the actor who plays him (who I remember from the old MTV quiz show "Remote Control") is 58. Hermie seems to be getting excited by the theme unironically.

The interplay between these 2 characters is wonderful. Is Hermie some kind of stand-in for Zosia Mamet's father David? In the final scene, closing the coffeehouse for the night, Hermie and Shoshanna dance to the evocative old voice of Frankie Valli singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." I had to puzzle over whether that counted as sexual harassment in the workplace, but I backed off — influence by retro-ishness and my idea that Hermie and Shosh were like David and Zosia — into the view that they were like a father and daughter at a wedding. Isn't "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" an iconic wedding song?

As for those hippies in Disneyland in '68... like many of the things we remember from the 60s, it happened in the early 70s:

August 06, 1970. A bizarre occurence takes place at Disneyland when 750 "Hippies" and "Radical Yippies" infiltrate the park, and take over the Wilderness Fort. They raise the Vietcong flag and pass reefers out to passersbys. Later, they march in a Main Street parade, and sing their own lyrics to "Zipadee Doo Dah" ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Mihn is going to win..."). More conservative park guests try to drown them out by singing "America the Beautiful." Before the confrontation can heat up, a platoon of Anaheim Police officers in full riot gear pour into the park from backstage areas! A riot is adverted and Disneyland vice president of Operations Dick Nunis orders the park closed at 7:10 PM. For many years afterward Disneyland will selectively enforced a "dress code" at the park, occasionally refusing admission to "long-haired hippies."

Look at the ads in the NYT next to the story about the great hippie invasion:



What a fabulous moment in movies: You've got the iconic hippie movie, "Easy Rider," the iconic racial comedy "Watermelon Man," the iconic military movie "Patton," and — tucked in there cozily in the corner — "Rosemary's Baby" (7 years before Roman Polanski committed rape) and "Tales for Males" (2 decades before Hollywood began making its movies about gay men).

"If this sounds spiteful and ugly it is. But I think it is also appropriate, and who else would say it besides me?"

Wrote Penelope Trunk, guessing that Sheryl Sandberg's husband, David Goldberg, had killed himself and that he may have done so because she "leaned" into her job too much. (We later learned that Goldberg died in an accident on an exercise treadmill.)

In New York Magazine, Marin Cogan gets quite hostile to Trunk.

But instead of apologizing for her mistake, Trunk doubled down on the idea that he killed himself... If you’ve never read her, the posts come across as inexplicably cruel...

I’m not sure what exactly made me turn away from Trunk’s blog. I don’t think it was any one specific post, but the gradual realization, upon closer reading, that my friends and I were mistaken in assuming that Trunk’s brazen careerism was a feminist project in any meaningful sense. Some of her posts read more like trolling than genuine advice.... Not that long after I stopped reading it, the tone of the blog got dark...

Now, we know.

Yesterday, I listed 2 "Things it seems we should know by now." The first was "The name of the princess baby." Of course, as already blogged today, we now know the name is Charlotte Elizabeth Diana. The second was "The cause of the death of Sheryl Sandberg's husband. David Goldberg 'died suddenly,' last Friday, at the age of 47." As we discussed in the comments, the lack of information makes people guess that it was a suicide, and it would be significant if the husband of the author of "Lean In" killed himself.

But the husband, David Goldberg, did not kill himself. We learn today that he "died of head trauma... after he collapsed at the gym at a private resort in Mexico":

Mr. Goldberg, 47, was on vacation with family and friends at the Four Seasons Resort near Punta Mita, close to Puerto Vallarta in southwest Mexico, according to a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Nayarit State. Mr. Goldberg left his room around 4 p.m. on Friday, collapsed while exercising and died of head trauma and blood loss, said the spokesman. His brother, Robert Goldberg, found him on the floor of the gym at the resort at around 7 p.m., with blood around him. The spokesman said it appears “he fell off the treadmill and cracked his head open.”

This might be interesting to those who are questioning Harry Reid's account of his recent injuries.

Things it seems we should know by now.

1. The name of the princess baby.

2. The cause of the death of Sheryl Sandberg's husband. David Goldberg "died suddenly," last Friday, at the age of 47.

"We've gotta dispense with calling guys who are effeminate or who throw like girls 'sissies.' You know why?"

"Because that diminishes women... We've got to stop this making fun of guys. I think part of it's to protect Obama, because he's the one that's well known for that," Rush Limbaugh said (sarcastically) yesterday, in the midst of a monologue that centered around something an ESPNW columnist, Kate Fagan, said about the problem of violence in football. She said:

Holding NFL's feet to the fire should mean getting men to throw the kitchen sink at domestic violence...

What's up with the anti-violence lady using 2 violent metaphors?

... to invest millions of dollars in grassroots organizations, in going into middle schools and high schools and colleges and talking to young men about dealing with anger, about how they treat women. I think that's where you're gonna see change. Going into the school systems and the younger spaces and really reprogramming how we raise men.

Rush made much of the word "reprogramming." His transcript headline paraphrases Fagan's statement as "We Must Reprogram Men." His monologue goes on to paraphrase her repeatedly like this:

We have been in the process of reprogramming men and the way they are raised for a long time... we need to reprogram the way we're raising men... it's the guys that have to be reprogrammed... I've never run across anybody who suggested that women need to be reprogrammed. I don't think I've even come across anybody who wanted to teach a girl how to throw right. They just accept it is what it is. But honestly, folks, it's always reprogramming men... this effort to reprogram men has been going on a long time.

But Fagan didn't say "reprogramming men." She said "reprogramming how we raise men." Who's getting reprogrammed? Which human beings are analogized to computers and capable of programming? It's got to be those who are raising men, which is mostly women — mothers (more than fathers) and early childhood educators (mostly women). So in fact, in Fagan's statement itself, Rush was encountering what he says he never runs across: a suggestion that women need to be reprogrammed. He doesn't notice it when he sees it, perhaps because reprogramming women is so deeply embedded in the culture that it just looks natural. Feminists continually pressure for the reprogramming of women. That's what the "lean in" campaign is all about.

Maybe during the commercial break somebody pointed out the discrepancy in the paraphrase, because when Rush came back, he was more accurate, referring to "this business of reprogramming the way we raise men" (before detouring into the topic of Ohio State's description of what consent to sex means, which is funny/disturbing because it seems to demand that couples agree about "why" they are doing what they're doing), and "We have got to reprogram the way we raise men" (which relates to expecting men to "think with their brains" rather than their other "head," as Rush frat-boyishly put it). 

You know, I hate all the human-as-computer metaphors, including speaking of how people are "wired." It's dehumanizing, to men and to women. Fagan was trying to talk about what parents and teachers can do to raise good children. Conservatives should agree that boys and girls should be raised into adults who have good character, who understand right and wrong, and who embrace virtue and avoid vice. That's not controversial at a high level of abstraction. As to the details, is Rush saying that the best way to raise boys to be good men is to mock them by calling them "sissies" when they do something in a way that seems stereotypically female?

Does Rush embody and project ideal masculinity? Is he a good role model for boys? Is he carrying on some fine, old, valued tradition of raising boys to manhood? He has no children of his own, and he seems to have a lot of opinions about how parents and teachers — mostly women — are attempting to do well as they shape the new generation of Americans. They're doing many things wrong, it may be presumed, because anyone who tries to do something that difficult will get many things wrong. But how do you do it right?

"It's craziness. Originally, it was a joke that he was going to be nominated for homecoming princess, but he got a lot of nominations."

"And now there are a lot of upset girls because a spot was taken from them. I’m very sympathetic that he’s transgender, but he should be on the boys’ side, not the girls'," said the grandmother of a student at Sand Creek High School, where Scarlett Lenh, 16, won the vote for homecoming princess.

And a student said: "I think it’s wrong because he’s actually a guy, he’s not a girl, and he hasn’t been doing this his entire life — he’s only been recently doing it." Doing it? What is it? Dressing and acting and ??? like some stereotype of a female? This implies there's an "it" that biological females are compelled by nature to do, but what, exactly, is "it" supposed to be?

It seems to me that the biological compulsions — menstruation and the capacity to become impregnated — are precisely the ones that the biological male cannot do. The things that can be adopted by a male can also be rejected by a female, and, anyway, what is the relationship between those things and being a homecoming princess? If that's some sort of achievement in princessiness, shouldn't the male who chooses to participate in the competition get the most credit?

And when did homecoming queen become homecoming princess? Is this part of the Disney-related obsession with princesses? Has "queen" become pejorative? If so, why? Is it because the queens in the movies these days are evil? Is it because we don't really want the little girls to lean in and lead? Or is it because of the old association with gay men and the lack of fit with the present-day conception of "transgender," about which even the resistant grandmother has learned to be "very sympathetic"?

"Leaning in" evolves into coffee-sipping wishful supportiveness.

Here's an article in the Wisconsin State Journal about how some women in Madison are "forming 'Lean In' circles to offer career support":

Madison yoga therapist Natalie Buster invited female colleagues to gather one morning in July to form a "circle" of support.

She chose Lazy Jane’s on Williamson Street for the meet-up because the breakfast spot is owned by a woman — Jane Capito. "It evolved into something more than I thought possible," Buster said. "We really got lost in each others’ stories and lost in each others’ connections."

It's nice to have friends and to go out for coffee and get lost in each others' stories and connections, but how is this "leaning in"?!

Oh, well... it "evolved."

Did it evolve into the realization that you don't really want to lean in?

If you can bear to keep reading you'll see that there's a Lean In Foundation where you can register your "Lean In" circle and there are actually 7,000 registered circles. This is all very nice for the Chief Leaner In Sheryl Sandberg, she of the book "Lean In." It's her branding. You want to get her branding on you? That furthers her leaning in, but what does it do for you — you, over there in that circle in a coffee shop getting lost in the evolving cross-currents of mutual support?

For Buster, who spent a dozen years as an actress in New York City before coming back to Wisconsin, the meeting at Lazy Jane’s exceeded expectations. Women who might be in competition with each other professionally should be able to improve each other as well, Buster said.

“I really want mentorship to happen,” Buster said. “I want cross-advocation and support of each other.”

That sounds like the opposite of leaning in. You're openly expressing aversion to competitiveness. It's more like hanging back. 

"Why Thatcher Wouldn’t Succeed in Our ‘Lean In’ Culture."

By Amity Shlaes.

As [Sheryl] Sandberg laboriously notes [in her bestseller "Lean In"], Harvard Business School, which already famously focused on teamwork and consensus, has lately emphasized teamwork even more. It’s hard to imagine Thatcher (“Defeat? I do not recognize the word”) thriving at HBS.

The result of the collaborative culture is that corporations or government institutions focus intensely on internal culture and pour their energy into achieving minuscule policy changes relating to workplace efficiency, gender or race. The great victory with which future Thatcher biographers are likely to open their accounts is her winning back the Falkland Islands from the Argentine junta. The great victory with which Sandberg opens her book was getting Google Inc. (GOOG) to establish reserved parking for pregnant women.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee asks: "What is with this annoying attempt to get people to use the phrase 'lean in'?" I've been irked by this too. Obviously, Sandberg was trying to sell her book and came up with something she wanted to make into a meme, but how did she get so many media people to adopt it?

Why does the meme seem useful? Is it some subliminal effect? I see the connotations of slimming down and also being lazy (like when you're leanin' on the shovel/mop instead of working).

I suspect that media people are mostly just lamely grasping at ways to make the same old material seem new. I'm guilty of spreading the meme too, since I put this post up, but I have actually been avoiding "Lean In" stuff. I fell for it this time because of the Margaret Thatcher + Amity Shlaes prod.

ALSO IN THE COMMENTS: "I enjoy watching a woman 'lean in.'" And: "Lean In while wearing a low cut blouse, and you're sure to get a promotion." Is that the subliminal sustenance people are receiving?!