From Self-Optimized to Self-Actualized: The New Era of Empowered Women
The self-optimized woman, meticulously crafting her public persona, has crumbled beneath the weight of her own identity performance. Enter the self-actualized woman.
Helen Gurley Brown's groundbreaking book, Having It All, championed the idea that women could achieve professional success and personal fulfillment. It celebrated the empowerment of women through ambition and self-sufficiency. Today, the pursuit of "having it all" involves navigating a digital world obsessed with personal branding, where genuine support and community have become rare commodities. This piece explores how the collective quest for empowerment has been both advanced and undermined by the pressures of self-optimization and the relentless pursuit of fame. To read the full essay, please subscribe to
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Whether or not she realized it, she had spoken aloud the underlying subtext of the culture writing milieu over the last decade. Everyone is awaiting my fame. My family, who have grown accustomed to me transacting in the steadily depreciating currency of exposure; my agent, who is fielding correspondences from editors at big five publishers wondering when I’m finally going to submit a book proposal; my professional colleagues and acquaintances, who will reap the social benefits of knowing me after witnessing the pursuit of cultural relevance elude me year after year; my enemies, whose ill wishes were infinitesimal, energetic deposits of visibility into a ledger in the ether; and most of all, myself.
“Really?” I replied. “Everyone’s waiting for me?”
She’s an investor in my writer identity, one identity I possess in a universe of limitless potentialities and performances. If I rise, her connection to me gains value. But I don't see the spotlight shining on her the way she sees it for me. It feels taboo to say that. It’s not very “girl’s girl” to not mirror her admiration back at her, but hey, it's not as taboo as a preoccupation with fame.
The calculus of clout is a game we all play, consciously or unconsciously, as we navigate our careers and relationships. Pursuing fame isn't just an unspoken, personal endeavor that drives us; it is a collective one, mimetically intertwined with the expectations and aspirations of those around us. Fame, in this sense, becomes a social contract. It's not just about personal achievement but about fulfilling a role in the narratives of friends, family, professional acquaintances, and strangers. These relationships, particularly among women, can enhance social mobility as we navigate the media industry.
Years ago, the same acquaintance confided in me that she disliked that our colleague, a young woman we both met in Binders Full of Women Writers, a Facebook group devoted to women writers professionally supporting each other, was constantly fishing for professional guidance. She explained that helping her would require a sense of pity she couldn't summon, preferring instead to offer support from a place of self-interest. This acquaintance often complained about the misalignment of energies between her and other young women writers. Their desperation, and frankly, their lower status, wasn't her concern.
If it isn't obvious: this writer comes from wealth. She is related to corporate executives and career politicians. Generations of wealth paid for her college tuition. She wasn’t just another desperate girl like me, our colleague, and all the female writers who had to network laterally—and self-optimize—to establish referent power as a collective. The interlocking systems of oppression like capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy didn't impact her as harshly as they did us, which made her less invested in girl-bossing, the interdependence it provided us, especially. Her inability to recognize our positional differences—that we weren’t all fortunate enough to attract success without chasing it—was shortsighted. But it tracks. Rich people are often reluctant to ask for things directly because doing so implies need, which signals lower status and undermines legitimacy. This attitude starkly contrasts with the populist and feminist ideals of Binders Full of Women Writers. Binders Full of Women Writers was more than just a networking tool; it was a lifeline and a testament to our shared struggle for recognition in an industry that often overlooks women.
She was right about our colleague, though: the poor girl was always fishing, and it stunk. Writers, like houseguests and fish, stink after three days. Our stench is need. The need for approval, belonging, love, respect, and validation is a fundamental human trait. However, this very need often clashes with the sensibilities of the upper middle class and the wealthy—groups that many writers, myself included, consciously or not, aspire to join. When I reflect on my trajectory, I see the invisible hands of these upper-class expectations shaping my choices, nudging me toward more certain paths, away from others. Don’t be mistaken, though, the wealthy writer’s dismissiveness masked her kind of desperation: the need to maintain a facade of self-sufficiency, to project an image of a writer who doesn't need anything. This carefully constructed facade is a persona; it’s the social mask she wears to maintain a semblance of control and independence, reinforcing the superior position she was born into.
Unfortunately, it’s become de rigueur in our present writing ecosystem for all of us to don a similar mask. Unlike the so-called girl boss era that gave rise to Binders Full of Women Writers, there is no culture of writing support anymore. In the 2010s, there were established avenues for collaborative efforts among young women, whether through informal online groups or within the industry itself. However the media landscape has shifted dramatically since then. Today, we're left to navigate the turbulent market forces, exacerbated by oppressive systems, on our own. Much of the activity I observe among the media class, particularly on the Substack Notes app, reflects this trend.
While I’m relieved to be at a different station in life, I feel bad for young writers who won't experience the abundance I did. Today, the pathways to social mobility seem exclusively oriented around gaining visibility and curating a visual identity via tech platforms. I especially pity young writers who, as I mentioned in my "I Hate Interesting Girls" piece for Delia Cai’s Deez Links, foolishly believe they can network in this ecosystem. Staff positions and freelancing opportunities are scarce. The best one can hope for is that the Substack algorithm will favor them, as there is no incentive for established writers—whether they have bylines or outsized visibility from TikTok or elsewhere—to offer support. No amount of fawning over these people, including fawning over me, will change that. You will get flexed on and be implicated in your own getting flexed on. The girls with the influencer-writer-activist-podcaster-everything-and-nothing careers do not care about you. Their pursuit of "interestingness" positions them above the masses of status-disadvantaged girls. When they eventually renege on the social contract of mutual support, understand that it was always premeditated.
The girl bosses never cared more than their self-interest would allow them to, either; thus, support often stagnated when these women achieved success. They were motivated to feign concern because, at the time, we collectively held less power. Now, as visibility becomes the primary goal in our post-truth media landscape–in the absence of cultural centrality, “taste,” “consensus reality” and real jobs–those who have "made it" often withdraw their support, leaving their supporters behind. This lack of reciprocity among writers of "competing marginalities" within these hierarchical systems diminishes the potential for collective progress and solidarity. But collective progress and support was never the goal for anyone who openly seeks rank and status. These people strive for more stratification, not flatness, demonstrating an inconsistency between the ideals they espouse and their behaviors.
Still, they want us all to see them as guileless—smolbean, UwU, neurodivergent, girl-interrupted, pronouns-or-pussy-in-the-bio—characters. All the race to innocence mascots want us to see them that way. Moral outrage serves as the externalization of disempowerment, while moral injury represents its internalization. The most vocal and aggrieved individuals express their sentiments outwardly through actions like the "call-outs" prevalent in the 2010s. In contrast, others quietly assert their post-truth identity performance through a more palatable, even glamorous, victimhood. I'd argue that the current trend of "girlhood" essays represents a race to innocence among young white women that is as insidious as $30k GoFundMe scams or accusations of abuse against housemates simply for requesting help with chores. It's all part of the same hustle. The underlying dynamics—jockeying for social capital and visibility—remain unchanged.