Adam Pilarski

I confess that, while I had a fairly critical view of Lean Ins Power and Influence video
from the onset, the cogent rhetoric of Susan Faludis article only solidified my skepticism. While
I recognize that some of Sandbergs points are lifted directly from studies done in our textbook, I
find her points regarding body language to be overblown. While her suggestion that women are
socialized to have more docile, low body language does have merit, it hardly carries enough
weight to adequately address any serious sociocultural impediment to gender equality. This
renders her arguments vapid and largely insipid. She seems to argue that, rather than directly
addressing the systemic oppression that stymie womens social mobility, women simply need to
maintain a posture that adheres to the powers-that-be. While I recognize that she argues this on a
case-by-case basis, this argument seems to perfectly encapsulate the sanitized brand of her
feminism. Even before reading the Faludi piece, I jotted down that Sandberg seemed more of
an entrepreneur than a scholar or revolutionary. She even goes so far as to cater to neoliberal
sensibilities, stressing individualism and complacency with corporate culture. This effectively
neglects a collective call to mobilization or any true call for social change. What is disheartening,
however, is to see how her movement seems to have gained traction. I suppose this only makes
sense, given the fact that her convictions are largely anodyne. In proselytizing complacency with
the status quo, it is a clean, benevolent breed of feminism for your average white, middle-class
female consumer.
As stated before, I found the article from The Baffler to be nothing short of compelling.
In highlighting the banality of Sandbergs convictions, it effectively painted a portrait of a social
movement ironically subservient to capitalism. Opening with a rather humorous look at Lean Ins
corporate culture, Faludi slowly and thoroughly deconstructs its fundamental shortcomings. It

juxtaposes its professed accomplishments with both evidence to the contrary and historical
instances of true mobilization in the workforce. In suggesting that Sandbergs agenda perpetuates
a corrupt system, she eloquently asserts that womens equality has hardly come to fruition.
When Faludi adduces instances of women occupying gender-typed roles in the workforce
(such as customer service, human resources, etc.), I began to contemplate who, or what, was
promulgating the more optimistic narrative of gender egalitarianism. A sensible explanation for
this misconception is, naturally, corporate culture. As corporations command a burgeoning
influence in the working world (up to and including the media), it seems only natural that they
will dictate public perception of the status quo. Just as Faludi so astutely argues, the exploitation
of identity and commodity fetishism (yes, I went there) enables opportunists to commodify
countercultural movements. In this consumerist reification, the rasa of the movement is
compromised in the process. The hegemonic inculcation of the average woman surely helped to
quell the more radical attempts at reform in the 1960s, and, Faludi argues, nothing has changed
since then.
I recognize that this response seems a bit ostentatious, and I offer my sincere apologies to
my reader for that fact.