Roth told Polygon he made it himself. “I have an animation background, and I drew it. I drew the loop cycles and the styles. Then I had some animators help kind of make it a little more fluid, and I worked with an artist to give it a bit of an old-timey jittery feel.” He said he was matching “the style of the 1920s haunted Mickey Mouse cartoons.”²

Then people read the credits. Dark Half, an AI visual effects company, was in them.³

Pressed on it, he came back with: “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film. It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.”⁴

He still won’t say which scenes.⁵ So let’s look at the ones he specifically claimed.

Look at these frames. The little girl jumping on the bed has no left leg, and only one white glove.

The ice cream characters in the middle image have no shading, but look at the bear underneath them. Soft tonal shading, volume in the fur, gradients in the trees behind it.

That doesn’t happen in cel animation. Everything in a 1929 frame is inked and painted with the same tools on the same stack, which is why those cartoons look unified. Two rendering languages in one frame is not a style. It’s two different things generated and stacked.

If you look at these Ice Cream Man stills, compared to a 1920s animated still. Roth’s aren’t even black and white. They’re cream and dusty rose, low contrast, whites drifting toward beige. 1920s cartoons were high contrast by physical necessity, that was the point of the look. This is the warm wash that generative image tools default to, the one people spent all of 2025 complaining about after March, when the yellow-amber cast got so consistent it earned a name, and spawned third party tools that existed for no reason except removing it.⁶ Part of the cause is that these systems silently rewrite your prompt toward “warm cinematic lighting” and “golden hour” before generating, and you can’t switch it off.⁶ Every one of these inserts is composited as a puffy white cutout floating on top of the live action, like a sticker. That edge treatment is convenient, because it means nobody has to solve where the generated image ends and the photography begins.

Dark Half’s own site describes the business as “merging generative AI with traditional VFX, from compositing AI into live-action footage,” and lists custom ComfyUI, agentic video systems, 3D Gaussian splatting and Unreal Engine 5.³ Compositing AI into live action is exactly what these floating cutouts are. Models converge hard on a small set of looks, one study running generated images through a thousand iterations found them collapsing onto twelve recurring motifs, which the researchers called “visual elevator music.”⁷

As the CEO and co-founder of Chambiar AI, I don’t have a problem with AI being integrated into creative workflows. I have a problem with tasteless AI in a creative workflow. Use it to open a door, to get to a visual you couldn’t have shot or drawn or afforded any other way. Use it to crank out a mediocre graphic a designer would have made better, and you didn’t innovate.

The parts he did make by hand aren’t good either

If the argument is “AI was a small shortcut on a couple of inserts, the real filmmaking is elsewhere,” then the real filmmaking has to hold. It doesn’t. The gore, the practical stuff, the thing horror fans buy a ticket for, mostly reads as latex under a hot light, and jump cuts.

Critics split on this one. Loud and Clear called the gore “incredibly well-made” and “juicy.”¹⁰ ScreenRant said the movie is “about as visceral as an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, and not nearly as cleverly staged,” with “most of the violence” having “a goofy weightlessness to it,” and called the kills “not nearly successful enough to hang a whole movie on.”¹¹ I’m with ScreenRant, I didn’t jump once.

And then there’s the The Walking Dead…

Late in the film there’s a little girl shuffling along as one of the infected, clutching a stuffed animal.

That’s the opening of The Walking Dead. Frank Darabont, “Days Gone Bye,” October 31, 2010. Rick Grimes at a gas station, a small girl in a nightgown with a teddy bear hanging from one hand, and she turns around.¹³ It is one of the most replayed cold opens in modern television. The character’s slippers are in the Smithsonian.¹³

You cannot put a little girl and a stuffed animal in a horror movie in 2026 and act like you got there on your own. If you’re quoting it, quote it and do something with it. This just takes the shape and leaves the meaning behind, which is what ScreenRant meant about the film’s references being “frustrating echoes of better horror films, stripped of the things that made them impactful.”¹¹

28% on Rotten Tomatoes. $2.1 million across 1,090 theaters on a $5.5 million budget, roughly $1,197 per screen by Sunday. That’s the lowest wide release per screen debut of Roth’s career, under The Green Inferno, under Borderlands.¹⁴

Then it gets much much worse.

There’s a kill where children see-saw and slam their backsides directly onto a grown man’s face. There’s a sequence where kids force ice cream cones into another kid’s mouth, staged and shot in a way that is not subtle and not accidental. And there’s a teenage girl whose arms are paralyzed so she can’t get up, and the film puts her on the ground with her rear in the air and holds the frame.

Roth’s own defense of his method, to Variety: “Part of horror is you’re being distasteful, you’re being transgressive.”⁸ Sure. Transgression is a real tradition, horror is built on it, I’m not a prude about the genre. But transgression is supposed to point at something. This points at nothing. It’s just a middle aged director’s camera finding kids’ butts three separate times and calling it edge.

One critic landed on it without naming the specific shots, writing that Roth “refused to craft an effective scare because he knows he can get the same reaction from an audience by lazily pushing the buttons of bad taste,” driven by “shock tactics over building tension.”⁹ That’s the mechanism. Shock is cheaper than suspense, and a body with fast cuts is the cheapest shock available, and these bodies belong to minors.

The animation was somebody’s job. There was a person who knows rubber hose, who could have made the jitter mean something, who would have been thrilled to work on a cursed 1929 cartoon. A study commissioned by the Animation Guild and three other arts groups projected generative AI would disrupt 204,000 US entertainment jobs, 118,500 of them in film, television and animation.¹⁵ A horror outlet writing about this exact film put it flatly: “The only ‘opportunity’ to be spoken of is the one lost by an animator or VFX artist.”¹⁶

He got asked directly, he said he drew it. Now a movie he spent years on has one fact welded to it, and he’s the one who welded it there. I don’t think he’s a villain, I think he got embarrassed and if using it was fine, in the way he did, he just say he used it.

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1. Ice Cream Man (2026), directed by Eli Roth, released August 7, 2026, The Horror Section and MCT Studios. Premise: a cursed Fleischer-style cartoon delivered to children’s phones turns them into killers. Wikipedia; Kotaku. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cream_Man_(2026_film) | https://kotaku.com/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-movie-horror-genai-ai-borderlands-2000721868

2. Roth to Polygon: “I have an animation background, and I drew it. I drew the loop cycles and the styles... I tried to match the style of the 1920s haunted Mickey Mouse cartoons.” Reported by Cartoon Brew and TheWrap. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artificial-intelligence/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-genai-265223.html | https://www.thewrap.com/culture-lifestyle/culture/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-movie-ai-use/

3. Dark Half, an AI visual effects company, credited on the film. Company describes itself as “professional AI-assisted VFX for broadcast and cinema,” “merging generative AI with traditional VFX, from compositing AI into live-action footage,” with a stack including custom ComfyUI, agentic video systems, 3D Gaussian Splatting and Unreal Engine 5. Variety; Deadline; darkhalf.ai. https://variety.com/2026/film/news/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-ai-generated-shots-1236828000/ | https://deadline.com/2026/08/eli-roth-admits-ice-cream-man-uses-generative-ai-1237018328/ | https://darkhalf.ai/

4. Roth’s correction: “I misspoke. AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film. It was an opportunity where technology and creativity came together to help bring my vision for the film to life.” Variety; AV Club. https://variety.com/2026/film/news/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-ai-generated-shots-1236828000/ | https://www.avclub.com/ice-cream-man-ai-usage-eli-roth

5. Roth has not specified which scenes used generative AI, how much material was generated, or how it was combined with human work. Cartoon Brew. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artificial-intelligence/eli-roth-ice-cream-man-genai-265223.html

6. The amber/cream cast in generative image output: documented from late March 2025 in r/ChatGPT and r/ChatGPTPro, viral on X (one theory post cleared 91,000 likes), spawning dedicated correction tools (yellowtint.art, April 2025; UnYellowGPT, May 2025). Contributing causes include automatic prompt rewriting toward “warm cinematic lighting” and “golden hour,” which per OpenAI’s own developer documentation cannot currently be disabled, plus preference tuning toward warmth. Know Your Meme; PopularAI. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/ai-art-becoming-yellow | https://www.popularai.org/p/chatgpts-piss-filter-why-ai-images

7. Study published in Patterns using a “visual telephone” method (Stable Diffusion XL + LLaVA, 1,000 iterations) found outputs converging on 12 dominant visual motifs; researchers described the result as “visual elevator music.” Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/ai-image-generators-default-to-the-same-12-photo-styles-study-finds-2000702012

8. Roth to Variety: “Part of horror is you’re being distasteful... you’re being transgressive.” Via AV Club. https://www.avclub.com/ice-cream-man-ai-usage-eli-roth

9. “Roth refused to craft an effective scare because he knows he can get the same reaction from an audience by lazily pushing the buttons of bad taste,” driven by “shock tactics over building tension.” Vague Visages. https://vaguevisages.com/2026/08/07/ice-cream-man-review-amazon-apple-movie-film/

10. “The gore effects are incredibly well-made; they’re all disgusting and gruesome and juicy.” Loud and Clear Reviews. https://loudandclearreviews.com/ice-cream-man-2026-review/

11. “About as visceral as an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, and not nearly as cleverly staged”; “most of the violence has a goofy weightlessness to it”; “the kill scenes, which aren’t nearly successful enough to hang a whole movie on”; references are “just frustrating echoes of better horror films, stripped of the things that made them impactful.” ScreenRant. https://screenrant.com/ice-cream-man-movie-2026-review/

12. “Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man AI Controversy Turns Every Practical Effect Into a Question Mark.” ComingSoon. https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/2173189-eli-roth-ice-cream-man-ai-controversy-practical-effects

13. The Walking Dead, “Days Gone Bye,” directed by Frank Darabont, aired October 31, 2010. Cold open: Rick Grimes encounters a small girl walker in a nightgown carrying a teddy bear at an abandoned gas station. The character, Summer, was played by Addy Miller; her slippers from the scene are in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History collection. Walking Dead Wiki; Smithsonian. https://walkingdead.fandom.com/wiki/Days_Gone_Bye_(TV_Series) | https://si.edu/object/slippers-worn-addy-miller-summer-television-series-walking-dead:nmah_1862588

14. Ice Cream Man opened to roughly $2.1 million across 1,090 domestic theaters on a $5.5 million budget, a per-screen average of about $1,197 by Sunday, the lowest wide-release per-screen debut of Roth’s directing career (below The Green Inferno’s $2,286 and Borderlands’ $2,752). Rotten Tomatoes score 28%. ScreenRant; Forbes. https://screenrant.com/ice-cream-man-2026-box-office-opening-weekend-domestic-result/ | https://www.forbes.com/sites/timlammers/2026/08/04/ice-cream-man-rotten-tomatoes-reviews-torch-eli-roth-horror-thriller/

15. CVL Economics study commissioned by the Animation Guild (IATSE Local 839), Concept Art Association, Human Artistry Campaign and National Cartoonists Society Foundation: 204,000 US entertainment jobs projected to be disrupted by generative AI over three years, 118,500 of them in film, TV and animation. Cartoon Brew. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/union-study-says-generative-ai-will-disrupt-204000-jobs-three-years-237495.html

16. “The only ‘opportunity’ to be spoken of is the one lost by an animator or VFX artist.” Phantasmag. https://www.phantasmag.com/articles-4/ice-cream-man-eli-roth-ai-horror-movies

17. [Reserved: my own screenshots from the August 6, 2026 Hudson Yards screening. The visual read in the “What’s actually on screen” section is mine as a viewer, not a forensic determination of which tool produced which frame.]

I own a 1978 Playboy, on the Playmate centerfold, next to her measurements and her turn-ons, there’s a baby photo, caption: Age 1, already Playmate material.

An infant’s photo, captioned like a preview, printed six inches from her nude adult body on the same page.

Every Playmate centerfold, standard since the late 1950s, ran a bio, a measurement chart, and then, without fail, three childhood photos, a baby photo, a toddler, and a teen. I have four issues spanning nearly two decades that all do this, it’s not just an aesthetic choice. It makes me question why those three photos, specifically, a baby, a toddler, a teenager, were the ones chosen to sit next to her nude adult body.

The nudity is the least interesting thing on the page, the interesting thing is that a mainstream publication looked at a woman’s infancy and decided it belonged in a sex spread, as evidence, as foreshadowing, as marketing copy.

Marilyn Grabowski ran Playboy’s photo desk for forty years, she’s the one credited as “the woman behind the centerfolds.”¹ A woman built this format and kept building it, issue after issue, for four decades, and I’m not saying that to let anyone off the hook, I’m saying it because “no woman would have allowed this” isn’t true. The real story is an entire industry, men and women both, agreeing without ever discussing it that a baby picture belonged next to a nude spread, because nobody stopped to ask why.

Playboy’s own numbers put its audience at 82.7% male, 17.3% female,² a ratio that barely moved for decades. This wasn’t built with women in the room, and it wasn’t sold to them either.

Playboy wasn’t an aberration, it was an origin point, one of the first mainstream American publications to make sexualized imagery of women a normal, coffee-table, newsstand product. That makes the centerfold less like one magazine’s oversight and more like an early systemic issue. The baby photo raises the question of who thought “let’s connect infancy to a sex spread” was fine.

Maybe the page stemmed from practice. Sondra Theodore started dating Hugh Hefner at 19, when he was 50, she’s since described that relationship as one where she was groomed.³ Miki Garcia, who ran Playmate promotions through the ‘70s and ‘80s, described the mansion as “cult-like,” and said the women were “groomed and led to believe they were part of this family.”⁴ The director who spent months interviewing former Playmates for a 2022 documentary said the word that surfaced again and again, independently, from different women, was grooming.⁵

For six seasons, millions of people watched a version of this dynamic play out on E! as entertainment. The Girls Next Door put Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends on television from 2005 to 2010, and the show packaged the arrangement as an enviable career move, young women “discovered” by Hefner, dressed, styled, and paraded through mansion life as a fairy tale.⁶ That packaging traveled beyond the show, too, in 2008, Hefner played himself in the comedy The House Bunny, appearing alongside Madison, Wilkinson, and Marquardt as the benevolent mogul in the background of a movie literally titled after the women who lived with him.⁷ Holly Madison has since written about wanting to end her life during her years there, being kept isolated, and being steered away from real therapy toward medication Hefner approved of.⁸

Hundreds of former Bunnies and Playmates have publicly disputed that account, defending Hefner.⁹

We don’t ask this question about the rest of the beauty and wellness industry, and we should. Every category that sells youth as the highest form of beauty runs on the same math the centerfold ran in plain text, tracing a woman’s value back as far as it’ll go, past her twenties.

Look at Hollywood right now. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has dubbed the current cultural moment the “ballet body” era, noting surging demand for slim, ballerina-like physiques.¹⁰ Ozempic chic has replaced body positivity as the red carpet standard, hollowed cheekbones and narrow frames read as status now.¹¹ Vogue Business’s own 2025 size inclusivity report admitted “progress has stalled” and called the return to extremely thin models a “worrying” regression.¹² That’s not just thinness for its own sake. A narrow frame, no hips, no chest, a body with the curves edited out, reads closer to a girl’s body than a woman’s.

Ariana Grande is the clearest recent example of what that pressure actually costs. In August 2026, days after the discourse around her “Petal” music video reached a fever pitch over how thin she’d become, her representative announced she was stepping back from public visibility once her summer tour ended.¹³ Reporters covering the fallout noted the scrutiny had reportedly driven a real spike in calls to eating disorder helplines in the UK.¹⁴ Playboy printed the instruction where you could see it, a baby photo captioned as a preview, the whole trajectory of a woman’s life laid out before she’d lived any of it. Nobody had to hide what they were doing, because nobody thought to ask why a magazine needed proof a woman had always been headed toward that page.

Media’s new motto: get smaller, get younger. I wonder what we’ll look back on from right now and think, what the hell. I can think of a few candidates already, that’s a different article for another day. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything you’d add to the list.

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1. Wikipedia, “Stephen Wayda” — on Marilyn Grabowski’s forty-year tenure as Playboy photo editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wayda

2. PBS Frontline, “American Porn” — Playboy media kit readership data (82.7% male / 17.3% female)

3. RT, “’Depraved’ Playboy founder accused of bestiality and grooming” (Jan. 24, 2022): https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/547202-hugh-hefner-documentary-playboy/

4. Fox News, “Hugh Hefner’s son defends Playboy founder ahead of shocking doc” — Miki Garcia interview

5. Variety, “Hugh Hefner’s Empire Is Examined In A&E’s ‘Secrets of Playboy’” (Feb. 7, 2022) — director Alexandra Dean interview: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/hugh-hefner-secrets-playboy-drugs-1235169107/

6. Wikipedia, “The Girls Next Door”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girls_Next_Door

7. Wikipedia, “The House Bunny” cast list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_Bunny

8. Vice, “The Dark Reality Behind ‘The Girls Next Door,’ According to Holly Madison”: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-dark-reality-behind-the-girls-next-door-according-to-holly-madison/

9. Fox News, “Playboy Bunny Danielle Lupo defends Hugh Hefner” — open letter from former Bunnies and Playmates

10. Eric Kim, “The ‘Skinny’ Body Ideal’s Resurgence in Fashion, Media, and Culture” — citing American Society of Plastic Surgeons 2023 report: https://erickimphotography.com/the-skinny-body-ideals-resurgence-in-fashion-media-and-culture/

11. SHOWstudio, “Why the Oscars Proved Ozempic Chic is The New Heroin Chic” (Mar. 6, 2025): https://www.showstudio.com/news/why-the-oscars-proved-ozempic-chic-is-the-new-heroin-chic

12. NBC News, “Is the era of body positivity over?” — citing Vogue Business Spring/Summer 2025 size inclusivity report: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/era-body-positivity-experts-worry-return-thinness-norm-rcna184050

13. CNN, “Does it matter what you think of Ariana Grande’s body?” (Aug. 2026): https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/03/entertainment/ariana-grande-weight-body-cec

14. Refinery29, “Why The Ariana Grande Body Discourse Isn’t Helping”: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2026/08/12001171/ariana-grande-weight-eating-disorders-petal

There’s a pink that really only belongs to Mexico. A saturated, almost defiant fuchsia sitting somewhere between magenta and the inside of a flower. It’s on the wall behind the abuela’s plants, on the sugar crust of a concha, in the twist of a De la Rosa mazapán wrapper. The papel picado strung over the street for a wedding. The bougainvillea eating the fence like it owns it. It has an actual name. Rosa mexicana. Mexican pink. It is, unofficially and completely, the color of the country.¹

A video from a creator named Kelsey Marie is what inspired this, and credit goes to her, because what she opened up goes back a lot further than a paint color. What I didn’t understand is how old that pink really is, and how much of it ties back to Mexico’s feminine ancestry.

Start with the color itself, because it goes back further than any of us think. Long before there was a Mexico, there was cochineal. Grana cochinilla, a tiny insect that lives on the nopal cactus and, when crushed, bleeds one of the most intense reds in the natural world. Indigenous people in what’s now Oaxaca, Puebla, and Tlaxcala were cultivating it as early as the second century BC, breeding the insects for the deepest color, using the dye in codices and murals and cloth, treating red as the color of the sun, of blood, of the gods.² When the Spanish showed up and saw it, they lost their minds. Cochineal became one of the most valuable things to ever leave the Americas, shipped across oceans to dye the robes of European royalty and cardinals, an entire global industry colonized and built on the labor and knowledge of Indigenous Mexicans who were basically never credited for it.² The red that became the pink was Mexican before the word Mexico existed.

Before the conquest, the people at the hill of Tepeyac, just north of what’s now Mexico City, worshipped Tonantzin. The name means “our mother.” She was the mother of the gods, tangled up with Coatlicue, the earth goddess, the one who gives life and takes it back. Pilgrims walked more than sixty miles to honor her.³ Then in 1531, a decade after Tenochtitlan fell, an Indigenous man named Juan Diego said he saw the Virgin Mary on that exact hill, brown-skinned, speaking Nahuatl, and the Spanish built her a chapel right where Tonantzin’s temple had stood.³ You can read that as erasure, and partly it was. But what actually happened is the mother goddess never left. Guadalupe became the mother of Mexico, the patron saint, the face on the banners of the independence war, the image in every kitchen and taxi and tattoo. A country that would spend the next five centuries organizing its entire spiritual life around a mother.⁴

This is what makes Mexico feminine at the root. The homeland is grammatically a woman, la patria. The divine is a mother. The family runs on the abuela, the matriarch who holds the whole thing together with her hands.

The modern pink just gave all of that a name and a spotlight. In 1949, a designer from Veracruz named Ramón Valdiosera brought a collection to New York, to the Waldorf Astoria, built around this hot pink he’d pulled from Mexican textiles and the bougainvillea that was everywhere he grew up, in the crafts, the candy, the flowers spilling over the streets. When a journalist asked him about the color, he said it was simply the color of Mexico, and the reporter answered, so it’s a Mexican pink. That’s how it got the name, in a ballroom in New York, and the name came home and stayed.⁵ Valdiosera wasn’t just a fashion guy, he was a painter and illustrator and historian who spent his life documenting where the country’s aesthetic actually came from. Then Luis Barragán, the only Mexican to win architecture’s Pritzker Prize, made it structural, pouring that exact fuchsia across ten-foot walls and letting the light hit it until whole rooms looked like they were blushing.⁶ Foreigners call it “Barragán pink” like he owned it.

And then, in 2024, Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, its first woman president in more than two hundred years of the republic.⁷ Election night she stood up and said “no llegué sola, llegamos todas.” I didn’t arrive alone, we all arrived together.⁸ A country that had put a mother at the center of its faith, a woman at the center of its flag’s colors, finally put one at the center of its government. If you love this culture, that night felt like a very long story arriving somewhere.

But Mexico sits at an intersection of culture, tradition, belief, and morality, and it coexists with a number. About ten women and girls are killed in Mexico every day.⁹ In 2024 the state formally called 827 of those deaths femicide, killings specifically because the victim was a woman, and logged thousands more as ordinary homicides, which puts the real count of women murdered past 3,000 in a single year.¹⁰ Most of those cases go nowhere. The impunity rate for femicide runs around 95%.¹¹ Roughly seven in ten Mexican women over fifteen have already lived through some form of violence.¹² In May 2025, a 23-year-old beauty influencer named Valeria Márquez was shot at her salon in Jalisco, on camera, in the middle of a TikTok livestream, minutes after she said out loud that she was scared someone was coming for her.¹³ She was my age. This happens every single day, in many countries. Prosecutors are investigating it as femicide. Even Sheinbaum, in November 2025, was groped by a stranger on the street in broad daylight while walking through a crowd.¹⁴

Femicide isn’t a Mexico problem, it happens all over. But it’s worth sitting with how an appreciation for the feminine this deep coexists with a jealousy and hatred rooted in machismo culture. And in many cultures around the world. How does a country build five hundred years of devotion around the mother, make a woman its color, kneel to a feminine God, hand a woman the presidency, and also hold a culture that hates women so high? Reverence for the feminine and violence against women seem to always exist hand in hand.

Maybe worshipping the mother is exactly what lets a place look away from the daughters.

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1. Rosa mexicana (”Mexican pink”) is a vivid, saturated fuchsia widely treated as an unofficial national color of Mexico, embedded in textiles, folk art, and everyday architecture, and compared to the bougainvillea blossom. Wikipedia, “Mexican pink”; Mexico News Daily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_pink | https://mexiconewsdaily.com/culture/the-colors-that-paint-mexico-how-a-nation-found-its-soul-in-every-hue/

2. Cochineal (grana cochinilla), a red dye from an insect farmed on nopal cactus, is among the oldest pigments in the Americas, used as early as the 2nd century BC in what is now Oaxaca, Puebla, and Tlaxcala; the Maya and Aztec associated red with the gods, sun, and blood. After the conquest it became a hugely valuable global commodity built on Indigenous knowledge and labor that went uncredited. Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, “Cochineal: Mexico’s Red” and “The Color of Power.” https://hmsc.harvard.edu/online-exhibits/cochineal1/mexicos-red/ | https://hmsc.harvard.edu/online-exhibits/cochineal1/color-power/

3. The hill of Tepeyac, north of Mexico City, was a pre-conquest worship site for the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin (”our mother”), associated with Coatlicue and Cihuacóatl; pilgrims traveled great distances to honor her. In 1531, Juan Diego reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary on the same site, and the Spanish built a chapel there. Mexico News Daily. https://mexiconewsdaily.com/culture/is-our-lady-of-guadalupe-inspired-by-the-goddess-tonantzin/

4. The Virgin of Guadalupe became the patron saint and maternal symbol of Mexico (Church approval as patron of New Spain by 1754), appearing on independence-war banners and central to Mexican identity as the “mother of Mexico.” Mexico News Daily; academic overview of the “matricentric” tradition (Coatlicue, Guadalupe, Santa Muerte). https://mexiconewsdaily.com/culture/is-our-lady-of-guadalupe-inspired-by-the-goddess-tonantzin/ | https://www.academia.edu/7123929/The_Matricentric_Trinity_of_Mexican_Religion_Coatlicue_the_Virgin_of_Guadalupe_and_Santa_Muerte

5. Ramón Valdiosera (born in Ozuluama, Veracruz), a Mexican designer, painter, illustrator, and historian, introduced the pink at a 1949 showing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York; when international press asked what shade it was, he named it “rosa mexicano” for reflecting Mexican culture, and the term stuck. The shade drew on traditional Mexican textiles and bougainvillea, which Valdiosera described as the color present in Mexican crafts, candy, toys, and streets; when a journalist asked about it, the reporter’s response (”so it’s a Mexican pink”) is credited with coining the name. Latinx History; Azteca Veracruz; Your Fashion Dose; Wikipedia, “Mexican pink.” https://latinxhistory.com/history/rosa-mexicano-ramon-valiosera/ | https://www.aztecaveracruz.com/noticias/ramon-valdiosera-veracruzano-rosa-mexicano | https://yourfashiondose.wixsite.com/yfdblog/post/rosa-mexicano | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_pink

6. Luis Barragán, the only Mexican architect to win the Pritzker Prize (1980), is known for saturated pink walls (”Barragán pink”) in works such as Casa Gilardi and Cuadra San Cristóbal, using color and light as core architectural elements. ArchDaily; Food52. https://www.archdaily.com/898028/how-luis-barragan-used-light-to-make-us-see-color | https://food52.com/story/17638-the-mexican-architect-who-painted-modernism-pink

7. Claudia Sheinbaum was inaugurated on October 1, 2024, as Mexico’s first woman president. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/claudia-sheinbaum-inauguration-mexico-first-female-president-rcna173325

8. On winning, Sheinbaum said “No llegué sola, llegamos todas” (”I didn’t arrive alone, we all arrived together”). El Tiempo; NVI Noticias. https://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/claudia-sheinbaum-la-primera-presidenta-de-mexico-agradece-su-triunfo-historico-no-llegue-sola-llegamos-todas-3348924 | https://www.nvinoticias.com/nacional/la-presidencia-no-llegue-sola-llegamos-todas-claudia-sheinbaum/172261

9. Approximately 10 women and girls are killed every day in Mexico. Human Rights Research Center; CSIS. https://www.humanrightsresearch.org/post/10-lives-lost-a-day-understanding-femicide-in-mexico | https://www.csis.org/analysis/femicides-mexico-impunity-and-protests

10. In 2024, Mexico formally classified 827 killings as femicide and recorded roughly 2,310 additional female homicides, for more than 3,000 women murdered in a single year (SESNSP data). Human Rights Experts. https://thehuman-rights.com/femicide-mexico-3000-women-murdered-single-year/

11. The impunity rate for femicide in Mexico is roughly 95%, with convictions estimated at only 5–10% of cases (México Evalúa Impunity Index / SESNSP). Human Rights Experts. https://thehuman-rights.com/femicide-mexico-3000-women-murdered-single-year/

12. About 70.1% of Mexican women aged 15 and older have experienced some form of violence in their lifetime (2021). Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/6/president-claudia-sheinbaum-groped-how-unsafe-is-mexico-for-women

13. Valeria Márquez, a 23-year-old Mexican beauty influencer and model, was shot and killed on May 14, 2025, at a salon in Zapopan, Jalisco, during a TikTok livestream; on the stream she voiced fear that someone was coming for her shortly before she was shot. Authorities are investigating her death as a femicide. CBS News; Al Jazeera. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/influencer-killed-livestream-valeria-marquez-fear-mexico-prosecutors/ | https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/15/what-happened-to-valeria-marquez-mexican-influencer-shot-live-on-tiktok

14. On November 3, 2025, President Sheinbaum was groped in public in Mexico City by a man who put his arm around her, touched her chest, and tried to kiss her before a staffer intervened; she said she would press charges and called for a review of sexual-harassment laws. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/6/president-claudia-sheinbaum-groped-how-unsafe-is-mexico-for-women

Have you noticed the tampon machine in the public bathroom is never actually stocked? The little metal box bolted to the wall, the one that wants a quarter for a product it does not contain, empty every time. I’m not sure I’ve ever turned that dial and had anything come out, and it still says 25 cents on the front, which cannot possibly be the real price of anything in 2026. At least somebody hung a box on the wall, though. That coin-operated dispenser is close to a century old as a concept, bolted up not long after Kotex mass-marketed the disposable pad in 1921 and Tampax patented the tampon in 1933, and the design has barely changed since.¹

No one has a tampon anymore. It didn’t used to be like this, you’d ask your coworker and she’d rummage through her bottomless purse, but now you ask and she’s got exactly enough for herself, or nothing at all, because the product has gotten expensive. Tampons are up 36% since 2019, pads up 41%, both climbing faster than the price of food.²

Your office has a wellness portal, though. A meditation app, a mental health program, a steps challenge, and probably a webinar about resilience. What it does not have, in 63% of cases, is a tampon.³ A dispenser costs about forty dollars, and still, most employers have decided that the single most predictable biological event on the planet, one that hits roughly half their workforce on a schedule, is a personal supply problem you should have handled at home. Meanwhile 42% of them now cover fertility treatment, up from 30% in 2020, and egg-freezing coverage jumped from 2% to 16% in under a decade.⁴ So the company will freeze your eggs, but it will not stock a pad.

We don’t need period leave, or more time off. Japan has had menstrual leave on the books since 1947, Spain passed Europe’s first version in 2023, and in basically every country that has it, almost nobody uses it, because the stigma is the actual barrier and no one wants to be the woman who filed the period paperwork.⁵ You can legislate the time off but can’t legislate away the part where using it marks you.

The ask is smaller and more boring than a day off. Access, a stocked tampon box in the bathroom. It never gets met for the same reason it would work: a stocked box is cheap, and cheap doesn’t sell.

If you have a desk you have options, slipping to the bathroom, keeping a stash in a drawer, taking a call sitting down, and the wellness-portal life is annoying but survivable. At the bottom of the labor market, where the work is hourly and timed, Amazon warehouse workers have described being so squeezed by rate quotas that they skip bathroom trips, some reportedly peeing in bottles to keep their numbers up.⁶ California had to write an actual bill to guarantee warehouse workers bathroom breaks.⁷

In that same employer report, 0% of the leave policies reviewed mentioned menstrual health at all, a quarter mentioned fertility,³ and only 20% of women said they’d feel comfortable bringing it up with a manager.³ The system didn’t try to help and fall short, it decided the thing doesn’t officially exist, so we learned not to say it out loud, and it never has to be fixed. A Dutch study of nearly 33,000 women found more than 80% pushed through work while symptomatic, and only around 20% ever told their employer the real reason they were off.⁸ We were trained to call it a migraine.

The pink tax is the oldest scam in the aisle. Women pay about 7% more than men for comparable goods, 13% more on personal care, and nearly 48% more on some haircare.⁹ On top of that, period products are still taxed as non-essential in over half the country, only 23 states have scrapped the tampon tax while 33 exempt food from sales tax.¹⁰ So the government agrees a granola bar is a necessity and a tampon is a luxury, and you’re made to self-supply the exact thing your employer won’t stock, then taxed for the privilege of buying it.

The wellness industry is the fun one, the one that shows up in your feed at 11pm looking like self-care. Women’s wellness products are a $312 billion market in 2026, growing around 8% a year, with reproductive and hormonal health making up roughly a quarter of it.¹¹ The cycle-syncing apps, the seed-cycling kits,¹² the “hormone balance” gummies, the luteal-phase adaptogens, the entire TikTok and Meta ad economy built on the phrase “hormonal balance.”¹³ Lemme, Kourtney Kardashian’s gummy line, is on track to clear $200 million in sales this year, $13 million of that through TikTok Shop in a single month.¹⁴ Some of it is fine, some of it even helps, but strip the branding and a huge share of it is a privatized stand-in for infrastructure we’re denied in a doctor’s office. A heating pad, a real lunch, and ten minutes off your feet are free and they work. Instead, in 2026 we buy a jar of gummies for $48 and sync our bodies to an app. Your employer would very much prefer you reach for the gummy, because the gummy is your problem and the break is theirs.

In 2022 Scotland became the first country in the world to make period products free to everyone, by law, stocked in public buildings.¹⁵ New Zealand put them free in schools. That model works for the exact reason menstrual leave doesn’t: access is universal and invisible, so there’s nothing to be ashamed of and no one to ask, while leave is individual and visible, so it comes with a cost you pay in how you’re seen.

The workplace built itself around a body that doesn’t bleed. We got so good at timing our bathroom breaks and reaching for the more absorbent tampon just to get through the day that we stopped noticing the system was never built for us to be there.

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1. Disposable menstrual products were commercialized in the early 20th century: Kotex introduced the first successfully mass-marketed sanitary napkin in 1921, and the modern Tampax tampon was patented in 1933. Coin-operated dispensers became a common fixture in public and workplace restrooms over the following decades of the mid-20th century (widely documented as a longstanding bathroom fixture, though not tied to a single origin date or law). Alliance for Period Supplies, “The History of Period Products.” https://allianceforperiodsupplies.org/the-history-of-period-products/ On the enduring low-tech neglect and unchanged design of these dispensers, see also The Wall Street Journal, “Tampon Dispensers Lack That High-Tech ‘Wow’ Factor” (April 2019), cited here by headline and publication as the full article is paywalled. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tampon-dispensers-lack-that-high-tech-wow-factor-11556800479

2. Menstrual product prices rose sharply from 2019 to 2024: tampons up ~36% (to an average of $8.29) and pads up ~41% (to ~$6.50), with both rising roughly 10% in 2022-2023 alone, faster than that year’s ~8% inflation, and, per the Wall Street Journal, rising faster than the price of food. Project Pink Tax (advocacy aggregation; underlying percentage source not independently specified). https://www.projectpinktax.org/post/increase-in-the-price-of-menstrual-products-july-2024

3. Reproductive & Maternal Health Compass (RMH Compass) report, released May 6, 2026, drawn from more than two years of proprietary employer data across diverse US employers (sample size not published): 63% of employers do not stock free period products in workplace bathrooms; 0% of reviewed leave policies mention menstrual health support vs ~25% referencing fertility or prenatal care; only 20% of women feel comfortable discussing menstrual health with a manager; 42 million US women experience painful menstrual symptoms and 3.5 million struggle to function 1-2 days a month; after free products were introduced, 94.1% reported improved emotions and 70.6% stronger concentration. Via PRWeb. https://www.prweb.com/releases/employers-are-expanding-reproductive-health-benefits-yet-63-still-dont-stock-free-period-products-new-report-finds-302764319.html

4. International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans (IFEBP) data via SHRM: 42% of US employers offered fertility benefits in 2024, up from 40% in 2022 and 30% in 2020; egg harvesting/freezing coverage rose to 16% in 2024 from 2% in 2016. Mercer separately found ~45% of large employers covered IVF in 2023, up from 22% in 2019. SHRM, “More Employers Offering Fertility, Adoption Benefits.” https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/benefits-compensation/more-employers-offering-fertility--adoption-benefits

5. Menstrual leave exists in Japan (since the 1947 Labor Standards Act), South Korea, Indonesia, and Spain (first in Europe, 2023), and is significantly underused across these countries because of stigma and fear of being seen as less committed. The Conversation, “Menstrual leave: stigma and uncertainty mean these progressive measures are being underused around the world” (2026); Barcelona Metropolitan on Spain’s 2023 law. https://theconversation.com/menstrual-leave-stigma-and-uncertainty-mean-these-progressive-measures-are-being-underused-around-the-world-271449 | https://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/features/spain-menstrual-leave-law-first-in-europe/

6. Reporting on Amazon warehouse conditions describing workers under rate pressure avoiding bathroom breaks, with some accounts of workers urinating in bottles to avoid falling behind quotas. The Seattle Times, “Under pressure, afraid to take bathroom breaks: Inside Amazon’s fast-paced warehouse world.” https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/under-pressure-afraid-to-take-bathroom-breaks-inside-amazons-fast-paced-warehouse-world/

7. California legislation aimed at guaranteeing warehouse workers adequate bathroom and rest breaks amid quota-driven productivity pressure. NBC News, “A bathroom-break bill? California looks to make sure warehouse workers can take a break.” https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/bathroom-break-bill-california-looks-make-sure-warehouse-workers-can-n1232848

8. Nationwide cross-sectional survey of 32,748 women on productivity loss from menstruation-related symptoms: over 80% reported working through symptoms (presenteeism) and only about 20% told their employer the true reason for absence or reduced output. Published in BMJ Open (2019); summarized in Forbes, “The Cost of Menstrual Symptoms on Workplaces” (2026). https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelbraunscherl/2026/05/30/the-cost-of-menstrual-symptoms-on-workplaces/

9. Pink tax figures: women pay on average about 7% more than men for comparable products (New York City Department of Consumer Affairs study), rising to 13% for personal care products and nearly 48% for some haircare. Moneyzine, “Pink Tax Statistics” (2026). https://moneyzine.com/personal-finance/pink-tax-statistics/

10. As of 2022, only 23 US states had eliminated sales tax on period products, while 33 states exempt food from sales tax. Alliance for Period Supplies, “Tampon Tax”; Moneyzine. https://allianceforperiodsupplies.org/tampon-tax/

11. Women’s wellness products market valued at ~$312 billion in 2026 (up from $289.8 billion in 2025), projected to reach $549.3 billion by 2033 at an 8.4% CAGR, with reproductive and hormonal health representing ~24% of 2025 revenue. Note: this broad “wellness products” category includes functional food and beverage (~57% share); the narrower “women’s health supplements” segment is smaller. Grand View Research. https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/womens-wellness-products-market-report

12. Growth of seed cycling as a marketed “hormone support” regimen sold by supplement brands. WWD, “How Supplement Brands Are Simplifying Seed Cycling to Support Hormone Health.” https://wwd.com/beauty-industry-news/wellness/best-seed-cycling-brands-1237985316/

13. Marketing playbooks targeting women with “hormonal balance” and perimenopause supplement ads across Meta and TikTok. Landing Partners, “Women’s Health Supplements: Meta & TikTok Ad Guide 2026.” https://www.landing.partners/blog/womens-health-supplement-marketing-hormonal-balance-perimenopause

14. Lemme, the supplement and gummy brand founded by Kourtney Kardashian Barker in September 2022, generated over $30 million in revenue in its first 16 months and is projected to surpass $200 million in sales in 2026, including $13 million through TikTok Shop in a single month (November 2025). Forbes, “How Lemme Built a $200M Wellness Brand Beyond the Celebrity Playbook” (May 2026). https://www.forbes.com/sites/karineldor/2026/05/06/how-lemme-built-a-200m-wellness-brand-beyond-the-celebrity-playbook/

15. Scotland’s Period Products (Free Provision) (Scotland) Act, with the legal duty to make period products available free to all coming into force in August 2022, making Scotland the first country in the world to do so. Scottish Government; BBC News. https://www.gov.scot/policies/poverty-and-social-justice/access-to-free-period-products/ | https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-62534817

BuzzBallz switched Owned to Founded.

BuzzBallz was one of the most popular women-owned brands in the country. Then in May 2024 it sold to Sazerac, the privately held spirits empire run by the Goldring family, in an all-cash deal Forbes puts at more than $500 million.¹ ² The woman who founded it, Merrilee Kick, walked away with an estimated $400 million after taxes and a spot at No. 84 on Forbes’ list of the richest self-made women in America.¹ So let me say the obvious thing first, before anyone thinks I’m yucking Kicks yum. She won, and she won BIG.

Merrilee Kick was a high school business teacher in Plano, Texas. Back in 2009 she was grading papers by her pool, halfway through an MBA at Texas Woman’s University, and she thought, I really shouldn’t have a glass bottle out here by the water.³ She wanted a spill-proof, pool-safe, single-serve cocktail in a plastic ball. She funded it with a $28,000 inheritance, some maxed-out credit cards, a $178,500 SBA loan, and a $69,000 line of credit against her house.³ The motto was “Buy it by the ball.” By year two she was doing a million in revenue, and one trade show in Vegas in 2012 landed her distribution in 15 states in a single day. Walmart and 7-Eleven by 2014, past $100 million in revenue by 2019.³ She gave each of her two sons a 24.5% stake, made her husband CFO, and was selling nearly 7 million cases a year across 29 countries before she sold the whole thing.³

The disappointment going around isn’t really about her, but about the word that left the can.

“Women-owned” is a right to power. That seal is an actual certification from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council, and you only get it if a company is at least 51% owned and run by women.⁴ Ownership. Present tense. The second Kick sold the majority of BuzzBallz to Sazerac, the empire behind Fireball, Southern Comfort, and Buffalo Trace, the math stopped working.⁵ Sazerac is chaired by a man, and his family has run one of the biggest liquor conglomerates in the country for generations. You can’t be women-owned when the people who own you are the Goldrings. So the brand does the only thing it can. It slides one word to the left. Not women-owned. Women-founded.

I already wrote a whole piece on this exact thing, women exit, men sell, the one where women build it and men end up holding it. BuzzBallz is that same story with a cherry ‘rita flavor. The exit is the exact moment ownership turns into origin story, and “founded by a woman” is just what a company says about itself after a man bought it

.

And the loyalty was real, which is why this stings. There are women all over TikTok who turned buying these into a whole bit, holding up a fistful of cans, “support your queens.”⁶ ⁷ Whole feeds built on drink it because she made it. That devotion wasn’t fake, it just doesn’t come with equity. You can love a woman-owned brand all the way to a half-billion-dollar valuation, and the payout still goes to the family that buys it from her.

Women own more than 40% of the businesses in this country now.⁸ We start them faster than men do. And then watch what happens the second one of those companies is worth real money.

In 2025, 124 new US startups crossed a billion-dollar valuation. The number founded by all-women teams was zero.⁹ All-women teams pulled about 1.1% of US venture capital that whole year.⁹ The average woman-founded company that does raise a round gets about $5.2 million. The average male-founded one gets $11.7 million, more than double, for the same thing at the same stage.¹⁰

Do you see the pattern now? Women start the businesses, men fund the businesses, and when a woman does the near-impossible and builds one worth buying, a company owned by men buys it. There’s barely any money in women’s hands to be the buyer, so women are almost always the seller. The exit, that big beautiful payday we tell every founder to chase, is also the exact moment a woman’s ownership quietly turns into a nice little origin story.

That’s what the “aw, it’s not women-owned anymore” discourse is really circling without saying. It’s sad that the seal came off, sure, but it’s sadder that this is the best-case version. Merrilee Kick is the success story. She’s the one in a thousand who got the loan, got into Walmart, got to a valuation Sazerac couldn’t ignore. And even her win ends with a man’s family owning the thing and her name shoved back into the founding myth. That’s not the exception failing. That’s the system working as built.

Here’s the trap, and it works from both sides. Women don’t get to hold. When a woman builds something big, selling isn’t really a choice, it’s the exit the whole system was funneling her toward the entire time. When she takes it, the same internet calls her a sellout.

Ask Poppi, Allison Ellsworth mixed a prebiotic soda in her kitchen, grew it into a half-billion-dollar brand, sold it to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion, and her own fans met the news with “it’s so over.”¹¹ Ask Hailey Bieber, who sold Rhode to e.l.f. for a billion dollars three years in and caught the same side-eye.¹² We tell women to build the empire, and then when they sell it, we act like it’s a betrayal.

I wrote about this in my recent article Men sell, Women exit on Sana Sana 🔗

I don’t want us to stop selling. I want us to be the ones able to buy. I want for once the word “owned” to mean moving between us instead of away from us.

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1. Sazerac acquired BuzzBallz in an all-cash deal announced/closed in May 2024; Forbes conservatively estimates the deal at $500+ million, with founder Merrilee Kick netting roughly $400 million after taxes, placing her at No. 84 on Forbes’ Richest Self-Made Women list. Forbes, “How BuzzBallz Drinks Went From A Fun Side Hustle To $400 Million Fortune.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2024/06/01/how-buzzballz-drinks-went-from-a-fun-side-hustle-to-400-million-fortune/

2. Sazerac’s announcement of the deal to acquire BuzzBallz. PR Newswire (Sazerac). https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-spirits-company-sazerac-signs-deal-to-acquire-buzzballz-a-rapidly-growing-beverage-business-with-innovative-brands-302094943.html

3. Merrilee Kick background: Plano, Texas high school business teacher; conceived BuzzBallz in 2009 grading papers by her pool while pursuing an MBA at Texas Woman’s University; wanted a pool-safe plastic single-serve cocktail; launched 2010 at $2.99 (”Buy it by the ball”); funded via a $28,000 inheritance, maxed credit cards, a $178,500 SBA loan, and a $69,000 home-equity line; hit ~$1M revenue by year two; 2012 Las Vegas trade show landed 15 states of distribution in a day; Walmart and 7-Eleven by 2014; passed $100M revenue by 2019; gave sons Alex and Andrew 24.5% each, husband Tim served as CFO; ~1,000 employees, 29 countries, ~7M cases sold annually. Forbes (same article as above). https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2024/06/01/how-buzzballz-drinks-went-from-a-fun-side-hustle-to-400-million-fortune/

4. The “Women Owned” seal is the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) / WEConnect International certification, which requires a business to be at least 51% owned, operated, and controlled by one or more women. BuzzBallz displayed the WBENC “women-owned” certification on its packaging. WBENC / Women Owned; Artefact Magazine. https://buywomenowned.com/about-us/certification/ | https://www.artefactmagazine.com/2026/01/31/why-does-everyone-love-buzzballz/

5. Sazerac Company is a privately held spirits company controlled by the Goldring family (William Goldring, chairman); its brands include Fireball, Southern Comfort, and Buffalo Trace. Wikipedia, “Sazerac Company”; Forbes, “A Look Inside Sazerac’s Modern Drinks Empire”; Forbes profile, William Goldring & family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sazerac_Company | https://www.forbes.com/sites/david-tao/2026/05/07/a-look-inside-sazeracs-modern-drinks-empire-brands-net-sales-and-more/ | https://www.forbes.com/profile/william-goldring/

6. TikTok, @bryanthediamond, “Women Owned Buzz Balls - Support Your Queens!”

@bryanthediamondNo wonder it’s so good it was made by QUEENS😍 #fyp #buzzballs #womenownedbusiness #womenpower #sundayfunday #bryanthediamond

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1. TikTok, @victoorrlopez, “Supporting Women-Owned Businesses with BuzzBallz.”

@victoorrlopezim just supporting women! ❤️ #buzzball

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1. Women own more than 40% of US businesses as of 2025–2026. Forbes, “Women Now Own Over 40% Of U.S. Businesses.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinecastrillon/2026/03/17/women-now-own-over-40-of-us-businesses-why-entrepreneurship-is-rising/

2. Of the 124 new US startups that reached a $1 billion valuation in 2025, none were founded by all-female teams; all-female founding teams received about 1.1% of US venture capital dollars in 2025 (PitchBook data). Inc., “A Record Number of Startups Hit $1 Billion in 2025. Not One Was Founded by an All-Female Team.” https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/a-record-number-of-startups-hit-1-billion-in-2025-not-one-was-founded-by-an-all-female-team/91310600

3. The average deal for a female-founded company is about $5.2 million versus about $11.7 million for a male-founded company; female-only founding teams have hovered around 2% of global VC dollars for years (2.3% in 2024). Founders Forum Group, “Women in VC & Startup Funding: Statistics & Trends (2025 Report).” https://ff.co/women-funding-statistics-2025/

4. PepsiCo agreed to acquire prebiotic soda brand Poppi, founded by Allison Ellsworth (who first mixed the soda in her kitchen), for approximately $1.95 billion in March 2025; the deal drew backlash from fans who accused the brand of selling out to “Big Soda” (reactions including “it’s so over”). CNBC; AOL. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/pepsico-buys-prebiotic-soda-brand-poppi-for-more-than-1point6-billion.html | https://www.aol.com/news/pepsi-buys-prebiotic-soda-brand-162515724.html

5. e.l.f. Beauty agreed to acquire Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode in a deal valued at up to $1 billion in May 2025, roughly three years after the brand launched. CNN; CNBC. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/28/business/hailey-bieber-rhode-elf-beauty-acquisition | https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/elf-beauty-to-acquire-hailey-bieber-brand-rhode-in-1-billion-deal.html

Nothing you’re waiting for is worth it.

There is a TikTok account called @whatisthislinefor.nyc whose entire job is to walk up to the lines in this city and ask the people standing in them what they are actually waiting for. One creator, Renata D’Agrella Kenen, went viral just counting the lines within a ten-block radius of SoHo; another, Matt Peterson, built a following spotlighting the rare restaurants that don’t have one.² The lines are everywhere. L’Industrie on Christopher, where the wait for a burrata slice is more or less permanent, or Mama’s Too a few blocks up on Bleecker, or Rhythm Zero down the same block for a $6 latte. Maybe L’Appartement 4F on West 10th, where people line up at a takeout window for croissant cereal that sells out daily and runs about $50 a box.¹ Uptown it’s Crumbl on Columbus, downtown it’s Caffè Paradiso in Soho, and in between it’s whatever just went viral in Chinatown or the East Village this week. New York, the city that supposedly never sleeps, now spends an obscene share of its waking life standing still on a sidewalk with its phone out.

The line is the product. You are not waiting for the thing, you are the thing. In 2026 the crowd itself became the advertisement, signaling demand, which implies quality, which turns the line into a five-star review before you’ve tasted a crumb. A line plus a TikTok is the new storefront ad, cheaper than any billboard and far more convincing, and that matters more than ever, because the old ways of getting noticed keep getting more expensive. Meta’s ad prices jumped around 20% in a single year, and digital ad auctions inflate roughly 10% annually, while New York carries some of the highest retail rents on earth, Fifth Avenue is the priciest shopping corridor in the world and prime Manhattan storefronts run well over $500 a square foot.³ A packed sidewalk is free marketing that all but guarantees the rent gets paid. Which is the quiet engine under all of this, because what is actually new about Greek yogurt? Nothing. What’s new is that you’re waiting for it, because the product was never the innovation, the line is. A restaurant stopped being a place to eat and became a spot on the status totem pole, where what you’re actually buying is proof that you were willing to wait.⁴

There is real psychology underneath it, two old levers. Scarcity, the reflex to want whatever looks hard to get, and social proof, our deep unwillingness to bet on the empty room when there’s a packed one next door. A line is a certificate of quality more convincing than any ad a business could buy, which means the wait markets the place for free. You see forty people on the sidewalk and you decide it must be worth it.⁵

I know this because I see the deliveries on my morning walks. Via Carota’s celebrated green salad is Andy Boy lettuce, the same brand stacked at Whole Foods. Mama’s Too runs on ordinary supermarket ingredients, down to the jarred Saporito sauce sitting on the sidewalk in a case you could buy yourself. That isn’t a knock on either place, they’re good and they know exactly what they’re doing. It’s a question. If the lettuce is the same lettuce already wilting in your fridge, what are people giving up three hours of a Saturday for? The answer is the thing Supreme figured out a decade ago. This is drop culture, it just moved from clothes to carbs. Supreme built an empire on releasing a handful of box-logo hoodies on Thursdays and letting the line around the block do the advertising, and the food world watched, took notes, and swapped the hoodie for a croissant.

Think back to 2013, when this same city lost its mind over the Cronut. Dominique Ansel made a croissant-donut in a hundred-square-foot SoHo kitchen, and within days people were lining up at 6am for an 8am opening, it sold out in two hours, and scalpers flipped them for twenty times the price.⁶ At one point a crowd of Cronut hopefuls reportedly stood there unbothered beside a dead body on the sidewalk.⁶ That was thirteen years ago. The dot cake is the 2026 version, a cup of cake buried in rainbow sprinkles that has people wrapping around Butterfield Market on the Upper East Side and selling out in minutes, and it will crest and crash exactly the way the Cronut did.⁶

In 1899 the economist Thorstein Veblen coined “conspicuous consumption,” the idea that the rich buy useless expensive things mainly to be seen buying them. What we’re doing now has a newer name: conspicuous waiting.⁷ Time is the flex when you can’t afford the yacht, or even a day of shopping. Standing in a two-hour line and posting it says I have the leisure, the taste, and the insider knowledge to spend my afternoon exactly like this.

You can now pay a stranger to do it for you. A man named Robert Samuel started a line-sitting business during the 2013 Cronut craze and now runs it with 45 employees, charging around $38 an hour to stand in line for you, for sample sales, sneaker drops, Broadway tickets, restaurants, even the Diddy trial.⁸ If the wait can be subcontracted to somebody else for $38 an hour, then the wait was never about wanting the croissant. It was about being able to say you got it. The status transfers cleanly. Only the sore feet stay with the person who needed the money.

You cannot buy the West Village apartment,, I wrote about that last week, Read Here 🔗, but you can spend three hours and one story proving you were somewhere that mattered. Time is the single luxury good they haven’t figured out how to price out of reach, so of course we spend it conspicuously. It’s the only currency a lot of us have left to burn where people can see us do it.

I’ve stopped wondering whether it’s a fad and started wondering what we monetize next. We already sold our attention, that’s the entire influencer economy. Now we’re selling our time, the line, the paid line-sitter, the wait itself as a product you can buy or resell. Energy is next, we’re already optimizing our sleep and our focus like line items on a balance sheet. Attention, then time, then energy, each one turned into something to spend, flaunt, or run out of. And eventually the question stops being why are you standing in that line, and becomes whether you can still afford to.

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1. NYC’s viral lines: L’Industrie Pizzeria (Christopher St) and Mama’s Too (Bleecker St) with near-constant queues; L’Appartement 4F (West Village, 119 W 10th St), whose viral “Petite Céréale” croissant cereal sells out daily and runs about $50 a box; Crumbl on the Upper West Side (Columbus Ave); Rhythm Zero (328 Bleecker St), which also draws weekend lines; and Caffè Paradiso (Soho), included per the author’s own observation. Yahoo Lifestyle; Tasting Table; Time Out; The Infatuation; Joe Coffee. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/enough-enough-city-never-sleeps-170723469.html | https://www.tastingtable.com/2138591/croissant-cereal-nyc-lappartement-4f/ | https://www.theinfatuation.com/new-york/guides/nyc-restaurant-lines — Note: the Andy Boy lettuce (a brand sold at Whole Foods) and jarred Saporito sauce details are the author’s own firsthand observation of deliveries; brand specifics are not otherwise independently documented, but the point holds, that the components are ordinary and store-bought.

2. Accounts and creators built entirely around NYC’s lines: @whatisthislinefor.nyc on TikTok, which interviews people about what they’re waiting for; a viral clip counting the lines within a ten-block SoHo radius (Renata D’Agrella Kenen); and creators who spotlight restaurants without lines (Matt Peterson). TikTok is credited with keeping the viral food line alive. MSN/Yahoo; TikTok; Bloomberg (July 14, 2026). https://www.tiktok.com/@whatisthislinefor.nyc | https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/enough-is-enough-the-city-that-never-sleeps-now-just-waits-in-hourslong-lines/ar-AA26hioz | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-14/from-new-york-to-shanghai-tiktok-is-keeping-the-viral-food-line-alive

3. In 2026 the crowd is the advertisement, the line functioning as a free five-star review; meanwhile paid advertising keeps getting more expensive (Meta CPMs rose ~20% year over year to about $14, ad auctions inflating roughly 10% a year) while New York has among the highest retail rents in the world (Fifth Avenue is the most expensive retail corridor globally; prime Manhattan corridors run well over $500 per square foot). Yahoo Lifestyle; Contraframe; Landingi; Statista; The Real Deal. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/enough-enough-city-never-sleeps-170723469.html |

CONTRA FRAME

IS THE LINE THE PRODUCT?

Read now what others will fake knowing tomorrow…

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a year ago · 6 likes · Mark McGrath | OODA Synthesist

1. | https://landingi.com/digital-advertising/ad-costs/ | https://www.statista.com/statistics/409128/leading-retail-rents-worldwide | https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2026/07/07/nycs-top-retail-leases-june-2026/

2. Restaurants as a “status totem pole,” where the value is proving you were willing to wait. Yahoo Lifestyle; We Are Ravenous. https://www.weareravenous.com/restaurants-big-dumb-line/

3. Scarcity and social-proof principles; a line as a “certificate of quality” more persuasive than advertising. Kansas State University / ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121113121729.htm

4. The 2013 Cronut craze: Dominique Ansel, SoHo, 6am lines for an 8am opening, sold out in two hours, scalpers reselling at 20x; “the Cronut turns 10” retrospective. And the 2026 “dot cake” (Dot Cakes, a mother-daughter Roslyn, NY bakery sold at Butterfield Market on the Upper East Side): rainbow-nonpareil cups of cake that went viral on TikTok, drawing lines around the block and selling out within minutes on restock days. Gothamist; Wikipedia; Fox News; Yahoo. https://gothamist.com/food/the-cronut-turns-10-a-look-at-the-sweet-little-pastry-that-started-a-revolution | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronut | https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/lines-wrap-block-customers-wait-hours-viral-dot-cakes-sell-out-within-minutes | https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/theyre-colorful-sweet-and-look-great-on-tiktok-but-dot-cakes-viral-boom-is-deeper-than-you-think-132437863.html

5. “The rise of ‘conspicuous waiting’: the 19th-century economic theory (Thorstein Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, 1899) that explains why Gen Z posts their place in line.” DNyuz (July 31, 2026). https://dnyuz.com/2026/07/31/the-rise-of-conspicuous-waiting-the-19th-century-economic-theory-that-explains-why-gen-z-posts-their-place-in-line/

6. Robert Samuel’s line-sitting business, begun during the 2013 Cronut craze, now ~45 employees charging around $38/hour to wait for sample sales, sneaker drops, Broadway tickets, restaurants, and court trials. Fortune; Fox News. https://fortune.com/2025/05/18/gen-x-entrepreneur-line-sitting-business-nyc-diddy-trial-sample-sale/ | https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/americans-paying-people-wait-line-tiktok-famous-food

There’s a video by Dr. Amanda Hanson I keep coming back to. She’s a psychologist who built a huge following on a single question, the one that made me want to write this down: what do older women wish younger women knew? It made me think about the woman I help photo assist 3 days a week… As I digitize her work for the love of photography, I internalize every single story she tells me.

In 1972, when Ralph Lauren was still just a guy selling neckties, he hired my boss to shoot his very first collection.¹ Her name is Mellon Tytell. She has photographed the Dalai Lama, Patti Smith, Norman Mailer. She and her husband spent decades documenting the Beat Generation, Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kesey, and she was part of the whole generation that built the West Village into the West Village, back when it was cheap and full of artists, the world I wrote about last week in ‘Every Day Is Great for a West Village Girl’. Her work lives in the International Center of Photography and the National Gallery.¹ She did all of it by marrying stability and chasing whatever was most interesting around the world. She always says, she became a photographer because she is searching for something, and her camera takes her on the search.

She’s 81. She says whatever she thinks the second she thinks it, some of it wise, some of it unhinged. She is not wise in spite of being a little crazy, she is both. She was born in 1945 and married at 21, in 1966, which was eight years before American women could get a credit card or a loan in their own name. Until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974, a bank could simply refuse a woman credit without a husband, father, or brother to co-sign, and a married woman’s card came in her husband’s name no matter who paid the bill.² My boss is older than a woman’s right to her own money. The independence my friends and I treat as natural as breathing, she watched get invented.

So all that to say… here are some of the crazy and interesting things i’ve heard about growing up, while working with Mellon. Take it ALL with a grain of salt, she’s a white woman born into complete privilege. But to spread wealth in audacity, we have to know about it.

Unless you move with the times, you can do the most extraordinary work of your life and still get forgotten. Keep moving. Keep adapting. Her apartment is a museum of her own life, the work she made and the objects she carried home from every trip, and it is genuinely fascinating to stand in. All of it is film. None of it was ever digitized. She forgets half of what she has done because she physically cannot see it anymore, a career most people would kill for sitting in boxes of negatives, invisible.

Who you marry is how you die, she told me once. She calls it a karmic love, a relationship built on transaction. She married, in her words, the only man she knew who would never ask her for a child, because a child was the one thing she was certain would sink her. He was a man who would let her become an artist. Let her…Which makes me realize my generation, maybe even my parents’, might be one of the first that gets the chance to marry purely for love, to actually choose. Gay marriage wasn’t legal in this country until she was nearly 70, and now her assistant is a 23 year old, gay Mexican woman. She could never have pictured it at 23. You really don’t know what you’ll live to see, so don’t take a day of it for granted.

Health is the only currency that holds. Money comes and goes. Time, mobility, a mind that still works, that’s the real wealth, and aging is a privilege most people don’t clock as a privilege until it’s the thing being taken.

Get property in your name. Not his, not hers, not jointly. Yours. She says it like a woman who watched exactly what happens to the ones who don’t.

Look as put together as you can when you go to the doctor. Everything is a business now, she says, and doctors are salesmen, they give their best attention to whoever looks like their best client.

It’s you, yourself, and you. Her husband is 86. He doesn’t buy her birthday presents, they never had kids, and she describes what they have as a karmic transmission more than a romance, a love that runs on a constant balance of acts of service. He is also the person who loves her most on earth.

Take everyone with a grain of salt. Everyone is judging you all the time, which she means as freedom, because if the judgment never stops then it weighs nothing, so do the thing that brings you joy while they do it. Surround yourself with people who accept you, or better, people who couldn’t care less what you do as long as you’re good to be around.

People can and will always change. Always. You either accept that and let them, or you move on.

The people who should have kids usually don’t.

Don’t blow your savings on technology you can’t afford. It comes and it goes and you’ll have paid a fortune for something that aged worse than you did.

Sometimes you have to listen to the stars. Half joking. Some things are unexplainable, sometimes it’s fun to blame a bad week on Mercury, and mostly it’s how she teaches grace, letting some other force take the wheel instead of gripping every outcome like it’s yours alone to steer.

A fun hair color makes you look younger as you get older, not the way the ads mean it, but because people expect old women to go gray, so a bright dye job short-circuits the whole assumption that the spirit is gone.

Rescue an animal, it’ll save your life.

Desire doesn’t dry up in old age, at least not for the women. In her experience it’s the men who stop wanting sex.

Talk to people on the street. You can learn something from literally anybody.

Sixty years after my boss picked her way out of financial dependence, young women are romanticizing their way back into it. The stay-at-home girlfriend, the tradwife, the soft aesthetic of a man paying for everything while you make sourdough on camera, all of it sold as rest, as an escape from the girlboss grind, when researchers keep pointing out it’s just financial dependence.³ The video essayist Isabella Lanter put the danger in a line I keep repeating to myself: if they can feed you, they can starve you.⁴ Nara Smith went on Call Her Daddy to insist she’s not a tradwife while being the single most famous face of the look.⁵ And the tell is that the aesthetic only works if you’re already rich. Poor women have always done this labor. Nobody filmed it in Moschino.

We have had our own bank accounts for barely fifty years, and right now 13 states have near-total abortion bans, fetal personhood bills in Congress threaten IVF and birth control, the Education Department has moved to narrow Title IX back down to biological sex, and Project 2025 is openly gunning for no-fault divorce, the exact law that lets a woman leave.⁶ Don’t romanticize the bars being built to cage you.

On July 29, Jeanne Gibson died. She was 100, one of the last living Rosie the Riveters, not the woman drawn on the poster, the actual one, who left Minnesota at 18 in 1944 to weld destroyers in Seattle while the men were at war.⁷ Which is finally what made me sit down and write this. They gave the surviving Rosies the Congressional Gold Medal in 2024. 2024. Eighty years after they picked up the torch, when nearly every last one of them was already dead. Too little, too late. Thanks, America.

And even the Rosie on the poster was only half the truth. She was white on purpose, because the campaign was never meant to include the more than half a million Black women who were also Rosies, riveting and welding and building the same war, then getting handed the most menial jobs, segregated lunchrooms, and night shifts designed to keep them apart from white women.⁷ I’m not the one to tell that story from the inside, but I won’t flatten it either. The freedom these women built was rationed by race from the very first day, and it still is.

So I keep going to work, and I keep writing down what she says, the wise parts and the unhinged parts both, because when she’s gone, and when the last of them are gone, we lose the only people left who actually remember the before. We are all going to have to be Rosies now.

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Inspired by Dr. Amanda Hanson, the “Midlife Muse,” a clinical psychologist whose videos ask what older women wish younger women knew. https://www.tiktok.com/@midlifemuse

1. Mellon Tytell (b. 1945), American photographer: her first photography job came in 1972 when Ralph Lauren, then a necktie designer, chose her to shoot his first collection; she has photographed the Dalai Lama, Patti Smith, Norman Mailer and others, documented the Beat Generation with her husband John Tytell (Paradise Outlaws, 1999), and shot for Ralph Lauren, Givenchy, and Dior; her work is held by the International Center of Photography, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the National Gallery of Art. Prabook; International Center of Photography; mellontytell.com. https://prabook.com/web/mellon.tytell/1721089 | https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/mellon-tytell | https://mellontytell.com/mellons-story — Her stepfather was an illustrator (she has described growing up watching him at his drawing board), corroborated by interview. The given name “Mary Ellen,” the upbringing in Manhasset and Great Neck, the stepfather Leon Gregoir, the biological father’s death at sea in WWII, and the posing detail are per a biographical profile and/or the subject’s own account, and were not all independently verified at time of writing. https://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/photographer-mellon-tytell-talks-about-the-beats-dalai-lama-music

2. Equal Credit Opportunity Act, signed October 28, 1974: before it, banks could deny women credit cards and loans without a male co-signer, and a married woman’s card was issued only in her husband’s name. Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum; NPR. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-american-womens-history-museum/2024/10/28/voices-on-independence-four-oral-histories-about-building-womens-economic-power/ | https://www.npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-5163432/smithsonians-new-series-is-tied-to-50th-anniversary-of-equal-credit-opportunity-act

3. Academic and business reporting on the romanticization of domestic labor via #stayathomegirlfriend and tradwife content, and the financial-dependence risk it obscures. Sage Journals (Isabel Sykes); CNBC. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494241285643

4. Quote attributed to content creator and video essayist Isabella Lanter, “if they can feed you they can starve you,” from the referenced YouTube video (exact wording not independently verified at time of writing).

1. Nara Smith on the Call Her Daddy podcast (July 29, 2026) rejecting the “tradwife” label while being described as its poster child. SiriusXM; Parade. https://www.siriusxm.com/blog/nara-smith-trad-wife-call-her-daddy | https://parade.com/news/nara-smith-addresses-the-trad-wife-title-in-new-interview

2. As of 2026: 13 states enforce near-total abortion bans post-Dobbs; federal “fetal personhood” bills threaten IVF and contraception; the Education Department moved to define Title IX “sex” as biological only; Project 2025 targets no-fault divorce (no state has repealed it as of March 2026). World Population Review; Ms. Magazine / NWLC; NEA. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/abortion-bans-by-state | https://msmagazine.com/2025/02/28/war-on-women-report-fetal-personhood-bill-introduced-in-congress-trump-antiabortion-and-pro-project-2025-cabinet/ | https://www.nea.org/about-nea/media-center/press-releases/education-department-rollback-undermines-title-ix-protections

3. Jeanne Gibson, a WWII “Rosie the Riveter,” died July 29, 2026 at 100, among the last living Rosies; she left Minnesota at 18 in 1944 to weld destroyers in Seattle; surviving Rosies received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2024. On the “Black Rosies”: more than half a million Black women worked the WWII home front but were excluded from the white poster imagery and, even after Executive Order 8802 (1941), relegated to menial jobs, segregated facilities, and night shifts. Hawaii News Now; KRON4; History.com; The National WWII Museum. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2026/07/30/beloved-rosie-riveter-dies-100/ | https://www.history.com/articles/black-rosie-the-riveters-wwii-homefront-great-migration | https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/rosie-riveter-women-war-workers-wwii-home-front

There’s a line outside Via Carota on Grove Street where people wait just to put their name on a list so they can then start waiting for a table.¹ There’s one down Christopher at L’Industrie most hours it’s open, for a $5.50 burrata slice.² There’s one running down Bleecker from Mama’s Too toward the subway.³ And there’s another directly across the street at Rhythm Zero, where a Saturday wait runs about thirty-five minutes for a $6 latte or an $8 matcha.⁴ People stand in them for hours.

The median asking rent in this neighborhood is $5,495 a month. The borough median is $4,445.⁵ A studio here goes for about $4,917. A three-bedroom runs $10,995. Roughly 80% of the West Village sits inside a protected historic district, so almost nothing new gets built, which keeps supply frozen and prices climbing.

And plenty of people living here couldn’t tell you a single one of those numbers, because they have never once had to know them. Earlier this month a street interviewer from Ohana NYC stopped a woman named Jade Shenker and asked what she pays in rent. Shenker is 30, a luxury broker on Netflix’s Owning Manhattan. She said she pays nothing, her boyfriend covers their apartment, somewhere around $8,000 a month. Then she was asked what a person needs to earn to live comfortably in this city. “I feel like the homeless people on the streets are pretty comfortable,” she said. “So you don’t have to make anything.” The clip passed 14 million views.⁶ There are an estimated 350,000 people without homes in New York right now.

I’m not interested in dragging a thirty-year-old over one sentence, but it shows how cleanly it shows the worldview this market produces. When housing stops being the place people live and becomes an asset class you sell on television, the people sleeping outside it stop registering as a crisis and start reading as NYC scenery.

Nobody made this neighborhood famous by standing in a line.

In the 1950s, Greenwich Village was a run-down neighborhood with low rents and a tight, welcoming community, and that is precisely why the Beats came. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, all of them drawn by cheap rooms and the chance to be around other people making things.⁷ They drank at the San Remo on MacDougal, at Chumley’s, at Minetta Tavern. The most influential American literary movement of the century happened here because a broke twenty-four-year-old could afford to live badly and write.

Then June 28, 1969, a few blocks away at the Stonewall Inn.⁸ Queer people, trans women, drag queens, homeless kids, were in this neighborhood for the same reason the Beats were. It was cheap, it was marginal, and nobody important was paying attention.

And these were never separate worlds. Ginsberg and Burroughs were gay men. The San Remo and the other bars served poets and queers and drifters at the same tables, on the same nights. Everybody was broke inside the same few blocks at the same time, so they drank together, crashed on each other’s floors, and made the work alongside one another. The scenes fed each other because there was nowhere else to go and no reason to separate. That is what makes culture. Not money. The absence of it, and everyone pressed up together.

And then there are the piers. After Stonewall, the rotting Christopher Street piers became the center of queer life in this city, and by the 1980s they weren’t a symbol, they were housing. Marginalized queer youth of color and trans kids who’d been thrown out of homes or pushed out of shelters lived down there, and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera handed out food and clothing to them.⁹ It’s where voguing and ball culture grew up. Paris Is Burning was shot around there, and Pose, the entire show, is set in that exact world. Before the rebuild, the piers sat derelict, and they were known as a place for sex work, for buying drugs, and for crime. They were also, for a lot of those kids, the safest place available, which says more about the other options than it does about the piers.

They weren’t priced out of it so much as policed out. Waterfront redevelopment planning in the early 1990s moved forward as though the queer community living on those piers simply wasn’t there, and Giuliani’s Quality of Life policing was piloted in the West Village’s sixth precinct in 1994 before being exported citywide, aimed squarely at low-income people, homeless people, and LGBTQ youth of color.¹⁰

The piers were rebuilt in 2003, when Hudson River Park’s Greenwich Village section opened. Today that same pier is a manicured lawn overtaken by shirtless men.¹¹ It is, at this point, the single most reliable place in New York to meet a shirtless man with a wiener dog. There’s a whole TikTok genre now about it being the best spot in the city to find yourself a bachelor, which means you can never let your man walk down there again. The kids who built the culture on that pier could not afford a coffee across the street from it, let alone sleep on a bench there safely overnight.

A broke, unsupported, queer twenty-four-year-old of color cannot live here now. Neither can the people who made the place worth moving to. They might, though, be the barista pulling your espresso, or the ad man riding three trains in to sell the neighborhood back to you.

What’s left to do here is visit. Sant Ambroeus is where celebrities and billionaires have lunch. Dinner for two at most of the places with a line lands around $50 to $80 a head before tip.¹² None of it is outrageous by Manhattan standards, and that’s almost the worst part. This isn’t a story about a few greedy restaurants, they’re good, and the people running them are mostly working class Americans. It’s that the entire neighborhood has been converted into something you visit, photograph, and leave.

90 Bedford at the corner of Grove, the Friends building, pulls crowds onto the sidewalk every day to photograph a doorway that was only ever an exterior shot.¹³ A few blocks over, 66 Perry Street is Carrie Bradshaw’s stoop, except an actual person lives there, so there’s a chain across the steps to keep tourists from climbing them, and the block had to organize back in 2008 to stop the tour buses from pulling up.¹⁴ People live in these buildings.

And the actual gay neighborhood has been quietly draining out the whole time. Nationally there are 45% fewer gay bars than there were in 2002, and 36.6% of gay bar listings disappeared between just 2007 and 2019.¹⁵ New York looks like an exception on paper, with at least 48 LGBTQ+ bars after the pandemic, up from 36 in 2019. But read why: local wealth and global tourism.¹⁶ The queer spaces that survive here survive as destinations. Not as neighborhood bars you walk to on a Tuesday because you live nearby, because you cannot live nearby. In 2026 surveys, three quarters of respondents said they’ve watched queer spaces visibly disappear where they live, and they name urban redevelopment as the reason.¹⁷

And then count them. Almost every gay bar in the West Village is a bar for gay men. Two are lesbian: Cubbyhole over on West 12th, and Henrietta Hudson on Hudson Street, which ran as a lesbian bar from 1991 to 2014 and came back after the pandemic rebranded as a “queer human bar,” powered by lesbians but intentionally open to all genders.¹⁸ I understand the reasoning behind that. I also know what it produced in practice, which is that on plenty of nights the lesbian bars are mostly full of men too.

Here’s what that looks like from where I sit, and I want to be upfront that I’m not a local. I’ve been in New York seven years and in the West Village going on three, and the actual New Yorker in this is my partner. I’m a lesbian, and this is supposed to be the neighborhood to live in. It is also, by a wide margin, the place the two of us have stuck out the most. In three years of living in what is allegedly the capital of gay America, we still have not met another lesbian couple on our block, not once.

Then there’s what happened to the history itself. In February 2025, the National Park Service stripped the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument’s website. The line describing the uprising as a milestone for LGBTQ+ civil rights was edited to say LGB.¹⁹ A year later the Pride flag came down off the monument entirely, and it took a federal court settlement to force it back up, while the language stayed gutted.²⁰

A neighborhood that markets itself on being the birthplace of gay liberation, where the rent is $5,495, where the actual bars are tourist stops, and where the federal government deleted the trans women from the plaque. The aesthetic is fully intact. The people are gone. The history is being erased in real time.

I don’t think this requires a villain. It’s just what the money does, and it does it the same way every time. Cheap rent and people nobody is watching produce something real. The something real becomes a word used to sell apartments, charming, historic, vibrant, artsy. The word raises the price. The price removes the people who made the word mean anything. Then the neighborhood sells their memory back at a markup, and it’s very nice, and there’s a line.

The economy doesn’t create cool, It hunts it. The frontier keeps pushing further out, Bushwick then Ridgewood then Bed-Stuy then across the river, and each cycle runs faster than the last because a neighborhood now gets discovered on TikTok in about six weeks instead of over a decade. There may not be a next affordable place in New York at all. Is there at all anymore? Which might mean the new bohemia isn’t a place, it’s online, and anyone who has tried to build something there knows that rent gets paid in attention, in posting, in being perceived constantly.

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1. Via Carota takes no reservations; the sidewalk crowd waits to add their name to the list before waiting for a table. Appetito; Michelin Guide. https://appetitomagazine.com/guides/where-to-eat-italian-in-the-west-village-when-you-cant-get-into-via-carota | https://guide.michelin.com/us/en/article/travel/the-ultimate-guide-to-nyc-s-west-village-where-to-eat-drink-stay-and-explore

2. L’Industrie Pizzeria, 104 Christopher St, and its near-constant line; burrata slice $5.50. Time Out; The Infatuation. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/restaurants/lindustrie-pizzeria | https://www.theinfatuation.com/new-york/reviews/lindustrie-pizzeria-west-village

3. Mama’s TOO!, 325 Bleecker St, with the line running down Bleecker toward the subway stop. Bob’s Pizza Tour; Tripadvisor.

The Sauce

The hottest intersection in pizza

Stand on the northeast corner of Christopher Street and Bleecker Street, and you’ll see people—not unlike you, dear reader—who love pizza. Starting on Bleecker and snaking its way towards the subway stop is the line to Mama’s Too. Take a look down Christopher towards the river, and you’ll see pizza fanatics queueing for L’Industrie Pizzeria’s burrata sl…

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2 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments

4. | https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g60763-d27755730-Reviews-Mama_s_Too_West_Village-New_York_City_New_York.html

5. Rhythm Zero, 328 Bleecker St: $4.50 espresso, $5.50 flat white, $5.99 latte, $6 pear brown sugar latte, $8 blackberry pie matcha; weekend lines with reported 35-minute waits. Joe Coffee; The Art of Living. https://joe.coffee/locations/ny/new-york/rhythm-zero-west-village-new-york/ | https://theartofliving.nyc/rhythm-zero/

6. West Village median asking rent ($5,495) vs Manhattan borough median ($4,445); studio ~$4,917, 1BR ~$5,650, 2BR ~$7,448, 3BR ~$10,995; ~80% of the area within a protected historic district. StreetEasy; RentCafe. https://streeteasy.com/neighborhoods/west-village/ | https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/ny/manhattan/west-village/

7. Street interview posted July 3, 2026 by Ohana NYC (the account tied to Girls Who Sublet NYC): Jade Shenker of Netflix’s Owning Manhattan says her boyfriend covers their roughly $8,000/month rent and that “the homeless people on the streets are pretty comfortable”; the clip passed 14 million views. An estimated 350,000+ people were without homes in NYC as of May 2026. Yahoo Entertainment; Starcasm. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/feel-homeless-pretty-comfortable-netflix-203619784.html | https://starcasm.net/owning-manhattan-star-jade-shenker-says-homeless-new-yorkers-seem-pretty-comfortable-after-revealing-boyfriend-pays-8k-rent/

8. The Christopher Street Pier as a post-Stonewall center of queer life and, by the 1980s, a home for marginalized queer youth of color and trans people; Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera distributing food and clothing there; voguing and ball culture, with the pier synonymous with the 1980s and 1990s scene depicted in Paris Is Burning and Pose; the piers’ structural danger and violent crime alongside their role as refuge. NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project; Queer Happened Here; The Christopher St. Pier Project. https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/greenwich-village-waterfront/ |

Queer Happened Here: NYC

When NYC's Piers Were Queer

A meeting place, a hangout, a refuge. An industrial wasteland, a locale for sex, a beach, a dance floor, an art gallery, a home. A place of thrills, of danger, of comfort, of joy. Each of these varying descriptors and functions—alongside many others depending on who you ask—could at one poi…

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3 years ago · 60 likes · Marc Zinaman

9. | https://christopherstpierproject.org/history

10. Early-1990s waterfront redevelopment planning that disregarded the queer community using the space; Giuliani-era Quality of Life policing piloted in the West Village’s sixth precinct in 1994 and exported citywide in 1995, disproportionately targeting low-income people, homeless people, and LGBTQ youth of color; FIERCE founded in 2000 in response. The Scholar & Feminist Online (Barnard). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/the-fierce-fight-for-power-and-the-preservation-of-public-space-in-the-west-village/

11. Renovation and the opening of Hudson River Park’s Greenwich Village segment in 2003; the pier’s lawn today as a popular summer destination “overtaken by shirtless men.” Hudson River Park; Christopher Street Pier (Wikipedia); MSN travel feature. https://hudsonriverpark.org/the-park/piers-and-places/ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Street_Pier

12. Via Carota plate pricing (~$14–$38) and per-person cost (~$50–$80 before wine), representative of the neighborhood’s line restaurants. MenuXP; SheKnows. https://www.menuxp.com/via-carota-menu

13. The Friends building at 90 Bedford Street, at the corner of Grove, drawing large daily crowds of fans photographing the exterior. SnapHappy Travel; Hot Corn. https://snaphappytravel.com/how-to-find-the-friends-apartment-in-new-york/ | https://hotcorn.com/en/movies/news/walking-in-new-york-from-friends-to-sex-and-the-city/

14. 66 Perry Street, Carrie Bradshaw’s stoop in Sex and the City, is a private residence with a chain across the steps to deter trespassing, with a gate later planned; residents campaigned successfully in 2008 to stop tour buses from stopping there. Time Out; Away With Maja. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/officials-will-soon-install-a-gate-by-the-sex-and-the-city-stoop-to-stop-tourists-from-trespassing-011525 | https://www.awaywithmaja.com/visiting-carrie-bradshaws-apartment-new-york-city/

15. 45% fewer gay bars than in 2002; 36.6% of gay bar listings lost between 2007 and 2019. The Nation; LGBTQ Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/long-live-queer-nightlife-ghaziani/ | https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2022/06/gay-bars-decline-nationwide-according-new-study/

16. NYC as an outlier, at least 48 LGBTQ+ bars post-pandemic vs 36 in 2019, attributed to local wealth and global tourism. WNYC. https://wnyc.org/story/lgbtq-bars-are-closing-across-country-nyc-they-are-thriving/

17. 2026 reporting: three quarters of respondents report a visible decline in local queer spaces, with urban regeneration cited as a driver. Time Out. https://www.timeout.com/about/queer-nightlife-in-2026-the-right-to-dance

18. Cubbyhole (281 W 12th St) as one of New York’s few remaining lesbian bars; Henrietta Hudson (438 Hudson St) operated as a lesbian bar from 1991 to 2014 and reopened post-pandemic rebranded as a “queer human bar” powered by lesbians and intentionally inclusive of all genders. NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project; Henrietta Hudson (Wikipedia); Cubbyhole (Wikipedia). https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/cubby-hole-henrietta-hudson/ | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Hudson | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubbyhole_(lesbian_bar)

19. February 2025: National Park Service removed “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Monument website, changing LGBTQ+ to LGB. GLAAD; AOL. https://www.aol.com/government-stonewall-website-removes-transgender-175655423.html

20. Pride flag removed from the monument in February 2026 under a flag directive; a federal court settlement later required it permanently restored, while the removed language remains an open issue. The Hill; AOL. https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/5839739-pride-flag-legal-victory/ | https://www.aol.com/articles/trump-admin-removes-pride-flag-013616929.htm

A marketing legend who never wanted the fame. Technically, he’s just a musician who needed students.

Dan Smith does not want to hear from you. There’s no number on the flyer. No email, no tear-off tab, no QR code, no link in any bio. He papered the entire city with his own face and left no way to reach him. That isn’t an oversight. That’s the design.

He’s a working musician out of Newton, Massachusetts, a guitarist and singer-songwriter who came to New York, needed students, and put his own face on a flyer to get them. Then never stopped. Thirty-plus years, thousands of copies, one photo and four words: Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar.¹ He charges $150 an hour and he’s genuinely great at it.² He wanted the work, not the fame. And to get the work, he did the thing every one of us does now. He sold himself with his face.

Which makes him an early sign of something the rest of us only caught up to later. Long before “personal brand” was a phrase, or content was a job you could put on a tax return, Dan Smith already understood the assignment: if you want to get hired, you put your face out there, and you keep it there. Every freelancer, every founder, every person now running a one-person marketing department is doing exactly what he did. He was just decades early, and he did it on paper.

And he caught the last wave of it. Dan Smith rode physical media right up to the edge before digital swallowed everything: the flyer, the wheat paste, the bodega window, the cork board by the register. That used to be how a city talked to itself. Now it’s niche, close to vintage. A stack of Xeroxes and a staple gun feels almost analog now, which is exactly why the flyer still lands in a feed that forgot how to make anyone feel anything.

The flyers got so iconic they turned into a bit. BoJack Horseman parodied them. The New York Times profiled him in 2005 and again in 2022, and even then he wouldn’t do it the easy way, he refused to talk to the first reporter by phone and declined an interview after her lesson.³ Gothamist ran a whole piece just trying to work out who he actually is. A man made himself one of the most recognizable brands in the city and stayed, somehow, a stranger.

And he beats all that money. We see somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day, actually notice fewer than 100, and remember almost none of them. 41% of people can only recall 1 to 10% of the ads they saw in the last 24 hours.⁴ Companies spend over a trillion dollars a year to get forgotten that fast.⁵ Dan Smith spends the price of paper and a roll of tape, and nobody forgets him.

The missing number isn’t a quirk, it’s the whole strategy. Every instinct in marketing says cut the friction, add the link, the CTA, the retargeting pixel, the fifteen ways to convert. He does the opposite. He withholds the ask, so if you want him you have to remember the name and go looking, and the looking is what burns him in. The absence is the ad. He makes you come to him, and almost nobody with a budget has the nerve to try that.

The lesson is to do less, not more. One message. Something people can’t scroll past. Years of it, not a campaign. And the nerve to give people just a name and trust the right ones to come looking.

Plenty of people run versions of this now, they just pay a lot more for it. A24 has built a whole identity on it, most recently sending Timothée Chalamet out in a fake leaked video pitching absurd promo ideas for Marty Supreme. Brands repaint public basketball courts overnight and hide a QR code in the design. Skincare companies drop fifty people onto New York sidewalks to hand things to strangers.⁶ And wheat pasting, the exact thing Dan Smith does with a roll of tape, is now a service you can buy, roughly $4,500 for 100 posters across 15 to 25 locations in one city.⁷

Which is the funny part. Companies pay thousands to rent the look of a guy putting up flyers because he needed the work.

Everyone markets themselves with their face now, whether they signed up for it or not. Dan Smith was doing it before it had a name, out of nothing but the need to work, and he built something most trillion-dollar budgets never touch. He just never handed anyone his number.

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1. “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar,” Wikipedia (flyers posted thousands of times across NYC bodegas, coffee shops, delis, and laundromats; never any tear-off contact tabs). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Smith_Will_Teach_You_Guitar

2. “Dan Smith Will Teach You Guitar: Who is the Man Behind the Flyer?” ABC7 New York, and Gothamist interview (musician from Newton, MA; lives in Manhattan with wife Melissa, a photographer; $150 for a one-hour private session; teaching in NYC 30+ years). https://abc7ny.com/dan-smith-new-york-city-yorkers/5799047/ | https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/an-exclusive-interview-with-mystery-man-dan-smith-who-will-teach-you-guitar

3. Laura Longhine, The New York Times (2005), which praised Smith’s marketing and called him “an excellent teacher” but noted he refused to talk by phone and declined an interview after her first lesson; a follow-up ran in 2022 (”Dan Smith Might Teach You Guitar”). Summarized in Wikipedia (above).

4. “How Many Ads Do We See a Day,” Digital Silk; The Drum (4,000–10,000 ads of daily exposure, under 100 consciously registered, 41% recall only 1–10% of the prior day’s ads). https://www.digitalsilk.com/digital-trends/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/ | https://www.thedrum.com/news/2023/05/03/how-many-ads-do-we-really-see-day-spoiler-it-s-not-10000

5. Global advertising spend surpassing $1 trillion, per 2026 advertising-statistics roundups (Colorlib; Permission.ai). https://colorlib.com/wp/advertising-statistics/

6. “Guerrilla Marketing Examples That Went Viral in 2026,” Air Fresh Marketing (A24 and Timothée Chalamet’s “leaked” Marty Supreme video; overnight basketball-court repaint with QR code; 50-person DTC skincare street team in NYC). https://www.airfreshmarketing.com/blog/guerrilla-marketing-examples-viral-2026

7. “Fly Posting in NYC: The Street Poster Advertising Guide,” American Guerrilla Marketing (wheatpaste campaigns from about $4,500 for 100 24″×36″ posters across 15–25 locations in a single market). https://americanguerrillamarketing.com/articles/fly-posting-nyc/

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Somewhere right now, someone is paying $3,000 to not have their phone.

They’re at a retreat. There’s a cave for meditation and a private chef and a basket by the front desk where you surrender your device like a weapon at a saloon. Digital detox retreats run anywhere from $500 to $3,000 and up per person, and the high-end ones put you in a converted monastery in Italy or a chalet on an Alaskan glacier, so you can experience the radical luxury of a Tuesday with nothing in it.¹ I’m not mocking the impulse. I’m pointing at the price tag.

Being offline costs money now. Real money. And anything that costs money to access is, by definition, a class marker.

Look at the phones. Gen Z is buying dumbphones, flip phones, the little bricks that only call and text, and framing it as a wellness decision. #BringBackFlipPhones has 59.8 million views on TikTok.² The write-ups say it plainly: owning a dumbphone has become a status symbol, a way to signal that you’re intentional, that you’ve opted out, that your attention is too precious for the feed.³ Which is a wild thing to buy a second phone to prove. The flex isn’t the device. The flex is that you can afford to be unreachable.

Most people can’t, and that’s the part the wellness industry skips. While the rich are paying to get offscreen, everyone else is being pushed further onto it. Households making under $30,000 a year spend about 15% more time on streaming than households making over $100,000.⁴ Higher-income teenagers spend less time on screens than their lower-income peers, not more.⁵ The old story was that poor kids didn’t have computers. The new one is that they can’t get away from them. The richer you are, the more you can pay to be offscreen.⁶

And the baseline is already staggering. The average American now spends around 7 hours a day looking at a screen. For Gen Z it’s closer to 15.⁷ That’s not a personal failing you can meditate your way out of. That’s the water.

Being online also stopped being optional a while ago. There are more than 207 million content creators in the world, a number expected to pass 220 million by the end of this year.⁸ Over half of them make less than $15,000 a year doing it.⁹ Sixty-two percent report burnout.¹⁰ These are not hobbyists. This is a labor force, mostly working for scraps, and the job is to never log off. To post through the illness. To turn the dinner, the walk, the grief, the apartment, the face, into content, because visibility is the only thing that reliably converts into money or work.

It lands hardest on women. We spend more time here than men do already, teen girls average 3.7 hours a day on social media alone, roughly 45 minutes more than boys, and women 16 to 24 clock over 7.5 hours a day on their devices.¹¹ Not because we like it more. Because we got handed the “personal brand” as a second job nobody agreed to. You’re not just supposed to be good at the work, you’re supposed to be legible, findable, posting, building an audience a future employer or client can scroll through before they decide you’re real. The résumé is a feed now. So logging off isn’t self-care, it’s a pay cut. Every hour I’m not visible is an hour I’m not marketing the one product I’m allowed to give away for free, which is me.

So of course “touch grass” became aspirational. Of course being unreachable reads as power. It’s the same move as a four-hour lunch or a house with no address on the internet. The people who can vanish are the people who don’t need you to find them. The rest of us are on call, unpaid, indefinitely, performing a leisure we don’t actually have for an algorithm that pays in exposure.

And the same machine that made all of this mandatory now sells you the way out at a markup. The retreat, the dumbphone, the $40 focus app, the subscription to being left alone. You get exhausted for free, then pay retail to feel like a person again. I’m not above this. I’ve downloaded the app that locks my other apps. I’ve fantasized about deleting everything and moving somewhere with no service, and then checked my phone forty seconds later to see who’d watched the story about how tired I was.

I don’t want to win the unplugging contest. I don’t need a better flip phone than you, or a more remote cabin. I just want us to stop pretending disappearing is a wellness journey when it’s really a receipt, a thing you get to do once you’ve been seen enough to afford it. For most people it was never on the menu. I’m still here. So are you, reading this on the exact thing that’s wearing you down. Maybe the answer isn’t logging off. Maybe it’s refusing to feel guilty about a tiredness someone else is billing by the hour.

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1. “7 Best Digital Detox Retreats for a True Reset in 2026,” DigitalDetoxApp; “6 Best Digital Detox Retreats Around the World for 2026,” SquadTrip (pricing $500–$3,000+; Eremito monastery, Italy; Sheldon Chalet, Alaska). https://digitaldetoxapp.com/best-digital-detox-retreats/ | https://www.squadtrip.com/guides/best-digital-detox-retreats-around-the-world/

2. #BringBackFlipPhones TikTok view count, per TrendHunter / Accio dumbphone coverage. https://www.trendhunter.com/protrends/flip-phone-resurgence

3. “Why Is Gen Z Buying Dumb Phones,” Vertu (dumbphone as intentionality status symbol). https://vertu.com/lifestyle/why-is-gen-z-buying-dumb-phones-the-rise-of-digital-minimalism-in-2026

4. Streaming-time gap by income bracket, “There’s a Problematic Tech Divide Between Rich and Poor Kids,” Verily. https://verilymag.com/culture/theres-a-problematic-tech-divide-between-rich-and-poor-kids-but-its-not-what-you-think/

5. Common Sense Media surveys on income and teen media time, cited in Verily (above) and EdWeek. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/debunking-the-myth-that-rich-parents-dont-want-tech-for-their-kids/2019/02

6. “Why Do Rich People Now Want Less Screen Time?” TFP (the wealthier the household, the more spent to be offscreen). https://www.tfp.org/why-do-rich-people-now-want-less-screen-time/

7. “Average Screen Time Statistics 2026,” DemandSage; ScreenBuddy (US adults ~7 hrs/day; Gen Z ~15h19m/day). https://www.demandsage.com/screen-time-statistics/ | https://www.screenbuddyapp.com/blog/screen-time-statistics-2026

8. “State of the Creator Economy 2026,” Behind the Scenes (207M+ creators, projected 220M+ by end of 2026). https://behindthescenes.com/blogs/state-of-the-creator-economy-2026-trends-stats-what-s-next

9. “Creator Economy Statistics for 2026,” Circle (majority of creators earn under $15,000/yr). https://circle.so/blog/creator-economy-statistics

10. Creators 4 Mental Health study of 542 North American creators (62% experience burnout), cited in inBeat / Circle roundups. https://inbeat.agency/blog/creator-economy-statistics

11. “Social Media Screen Time Statistics 2026,” SQ Magazine; “Average Time Spent on Social Media,” DemandSage (teen girls 13–17 ~3.7 hrs/day, ~45 min more than boys; women 16–24 ~7h35m/day on devices). https://sqmagazine.co.uk/social-media-screen-time-statistics/ | https://www.demandsage.com/average-time-spent-on-social-media/

For the first time in the show’s history the final four women were all Black: Melanie Moreno, Trinity Tatum, Aniya Harvey, and Kayda Bosse.¹ Trinity Tatum took the whole thing, winning the $100,000 with her partner.² Just a country with its phones out, reposting the one franchise that has spent years as a case study in how Black women get overlooked, voted off early, and dragged online harder than anyone else, this year the public chose them.³

Trinity said it out loud in the finale, to the other women:

“I just can’t wrap my head around the fact that we have four beautiful Black women in the final four. I feel like that’s what a lot of people need to see, that ‘hey I can do that,’ ‘Hey, I can be on that show.’”⁴

I’m not a Black woman, and this isn’t my moment to narrate. But I do want to sit with what it means, because I think this dumb, beautiful summer show just told on the entire country.

Here’s why Love Island is useful, of all things. It strips out the bureaucracy. There’s no hiring committee, no Forbes list, and no nepotism (minus Charlie & Zach) It is the closest thing we have to a blank ballot: a country with its phones out, deciding in real time who it actually wants to see on top. Take away the gatekeepers and the platforms, and head-starts … the thing America reaches for is not whiteness. America picked four Black women. And for the first time, the show scrapped the final test of whether the guy would pocket the whole $100,000. The win was just hers to share.

The problem is now not who America wants at the forefront. The problem is who America has built its ladders to reward.

It matters that this happened here. Love Island UK has spent years getting dragged over the same thing: Black women picked last when couples form, first out of the villa, their partners’ attraction questioned to their faces. It took until the show’s eleventh season, in 2024, for a dark-skinned Black woman, Mimii Ngulube, to win, as one half of the first Black couple ever to take it.⁵ Same format, same producers’ playbook, other side of the ocean. So when the American version puts four Black women in the final and hands one the win, that isn’t the show doing it. What changed is who was watching, and what they wanted.

And maybe it’s bigger than just removing the filters. This wasn’t people quietly failing to be racist. This was people wanting it. They showed up season after season, invested, rooting, screenshotting the injustice the years it went the other way. There’s a real version of this where America has decided it wants Black women to win, where the audience is running years ahead of every institution still claiming it just can’t find them. The culture moved. The org chart didn’t get the memo.

The tide is turning even where the institutions refuse to feel it. Somewhere between the elections Black women keep saving and a villa full of people voting, the country keeps arriving at the same quiet verdict: in Black women we trust.

And the gap between those two things is the whole story. The same public capable of this ran an economy, this same year, that pushed Black women out in staggering numbers, an estimated 300,000 out of work as companies raced to gut their diversity commitments. Media made it literal: NBC dissolved the desks covering Black, Latino, Asian American, and LGBTQ readers, and Teen Vogue cut the only two Black women on its writing staff. America knows exactly who it wants at the top.

Even inside a season that ended with four Black women in the final, the show had its own colorism to answer for, with darker-skinned contestants like Aniya and Titi catching a different, uglier tier of treatment along the way.⁸ “Black women won” and “Black women got protected” are not the same sentence, and the distance between them lives on that show too.

I keep thinking about Trinity saying people needed to see it. She’s right, and I hope every one who watched believes her.

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1. “Love Island fans praise ‘sisterhood’ as girls celebrate having ‘4 beautiful Black women in final,’” The Mirror US (first all-Black-women final four: Melanie Moreno, Trinity Tatum, Aniya Harvey, Kayda Bosse). https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/love-island-season-8-finale-1931368

2. “Bryce and Trinity Win ‘Love Island USA’ Season 8,” Variety ($100,000 winners). https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/bryce-trinity-win-love-island-usa-season-8-1236807453/

3. “’Love Island’ revives conversation about racial bias and misogynoir in dating,” NBC News (the show’s documented history of bias against Black women). https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/love-island-racial-bias-dating-black-women-rcna218684

4. Trinity Tatum’s finale remarks, quoted in The Mirror US (above) and TheGrio. https://thegrio.com/2026/07/13/trinity-tatum-wins-love-island-usa-season-8-joining-the-shows-growing-legacy-of-black-winners/

5. Love Island UK’s documented pattern of bias against Black women (picked last, first dumped), per NBC News / US News misogynoir coverage; Mimii Ngulube won Season 11 (2024) with Josh Oyinsan as the show’s first Black couple to win, per Heart. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/love-island-racial-bias-dating-black-women-rcna218684 | https://www.heart.co.uk/showbiz/tv-movies/love-island/mimii-ngulube-age-job-instagram/

6. “The 2026 Workforce Reset: Here’s What That Means For Black Women,” Essence (media layoffs and DEI rollbacks disproportionately hitting Black women). https://www.essence.com/news/money-career/2026-workforce-reset-black-women/

7. Women in the Workplace data on promotion gaps (women, and Black women especially, promoted at lower rates), McKinsey / LeanIn.org, as reported in 2025–2026 coverage. https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/women-in-the-workplace

8. “Why KC Chandler’s Words To Aniya Harvey On ‘Love Island USA’ Resonated With Dark-Skinned Black Women,” Baller Alert (colorism within the season). https://balleralert.com/kc-chandler-aniya-harvey-love-island-usa-dark-skinned-black-women/

Last month, a woman who sells bookmarks tried to bill the entire internet for a personality trait.

The phrase was “Hot Girls Read.” You’ve seen it. It’s been on tote bags and tattoos and TikTok captions for years, a low-stakes little flex about being cute and literate at the same time. Allie Mitrovich, who runs a shop called Allie Rose Co., registered it as a federal trademark, then asked small businesses to pull their own “Hot Girls Read” products off their own shelves, including shops that had been selling it long before she ever filed.¹ Her own catalog ran from a $3 bookmark to a $59 sweatshirt.² A Hot Girl Reading Club had already existed on Instagram since February 2020, no relation, no permission asked.³

BookTok did what BookTok does. Hundreds of videos, a full pile-on, and within days she surrendered the trademark and posted an apology about righting her wrongs.⁴ Good. But I don’t really want to talk about her, because she isn’t the story. The story is that this keeps happening, and it keeps happening to us.

Megan Thee Stallion said “hot girl summer” in an Instagram caption in 2019, then spent more than two years fighting the trademark office to actually own it, finally registering it in January 2022.⁵ Then in April 2025 that same office refused to let her extend it to beauty products, because by then there were so many other “Hot Girl” marks on file that hers might cause “consumer confusion.”⁶ Sit with that one. The woman who coined the phrase got told there were already too many people renting out her sentence.

Mia Lind took “Hot Girl Walk,” which is the radical invention of putting on sneakers and walking, and trademarked it in 2023. She has filed 22 applications for versions of it and put roughly $100,000 into the process.⁷ Then the legal letters started. Walking groups in Florida, Utah, and Pennsylvania had to rebrand, a group in Miami got sued in federal court and is now, I promise I’m not making this up, “On the Walk Miami,” and she filed a federal lawsuit against an Indianapolis organizer in July 2024.⁸ A courtroom, over women walking outside together.

Even “girl dinner,” the sacred act of eating three crackers and a piece of cheese standing up at your counter, got a trademark application in December 2023.⁹ That one the office actually refused on the merits, ruling the phrase “fails to function” as a brand because it’s just a common expression women use for feeding themselves.¹⁰ Which is the entire thing, legally and spiritually. You cannot own a sentence everyone was already saying.

Here’s what gets me. None of these are products. They’re moods. They’re the specific, unpaid, collective genius of women being funny about their own lives on the internet. “Hot girl summer” is a feeling. “Girl dinner” is a coping mechanism with good lighting. We make these things together, in the replies, for free, because naming your life alongside other women is one of the last pleasures nobody has figured out how to meter. And then, reliably, someone shows up with a filing fee and a Shopify and turns the group chat into a licensing agreement.

I’m not even mad at the individual women who file. The incentive is obvious, and when a culture rewards whoever sprints to the courthouse first, someone is going to sprint. What I’m mad at is how legible we’ve made ourselves to that incentive. Every phrase we invent now has a resale value attached. “Clean girl,” “that girl,” “rat girl summer,” “tomato girl,” these aren’t just aesthetics anymore, they’re pre-cleared inventory sitting on a shelf, waiting for someone to staple a registration to them and start invoicing.

And it lands on girl language specifically for a reason. Women’s culture gets treated as both worthless and free right up until the second it turns profitable, at which point it magically becomes someone’s intellectual property. Nobody is out here trademarking “sigma grindset.” The stuff men make together online gets to stay a joke. The stuff we make together becomes a $59 sweatshirt with a cease-and-desist folded inside it.

I say all this as someone who files trademarks for a living. I run a company, I understand protecting a name you actually built, a logo you paid a designer for, a thing that is genuinely yours. That is not what this is. This is enclosure. It’s fencing off a field a thousand women planted together and then charging them admission to walk back in. The tell is always identical: the phrase is older than the filing, the “founder” can’t tell you the day she coined it, and the first move after registration isn’t building anything, it’s billing someone.

The trademark office actually has a name for why most of these collapse. It’s called failure to function. The phrase is so common, so obviously shared, that no single person could ever be its source in a buyer’s mind. I think that’s kind of beautiful. The law looked at “girl dinner” and said, in essence: this belongs to too many people to belong to anyone. Every girl who ever stood at her fridge making dinner her whole personality has a claim, which is exactly why none of you get to bill the rest.

You can’t trademark a girl’s personality. Not because it isn’t valuable. Because it was never yours alone to sell.

Check out what i’m founding at CHAMBIAR.AI 🚀

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Sources

1. Mary Roeloffs, “Business Owner Who Trademarked ‘Hot Girls Read’ Backs Down,” Forbes, June 8, 2026. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/06/08/hot-girls-read-trademark-sparks-intense-booktok-controversy/

2. Same Forbes report (catalog priced from a $3 bookmark to a $59 sweatshirt).

3. “The Book Community Is Hot as Creator Faces Backlash...,” Parade. https://parade.com/books/the-book-community-is-hot-as-creator-faces-backlash-for-her-decision-to-trademark-a-popular-bookish-phrase

4. “’Hot Girls Read’ Trademark Owner Surrenders Registration Following Backlash,” Gerben IP. https://www.gerbenlaw.com/blog/hot-girls-read-trademark-owner-surrenders-registration-following-backlash/

5. “Megan Thee Stallion Secures The ‘Hot Girl Summer’ Trademark After A Two-Year Legal Fight,” Black Enterprise (registration issued Jan. 4, 2022). https://www.blackenterprise.com/megan-thee-stallion-secures-the-hot-girl-summer-trademark-after-a-two-year-legal-fight/

6. “Hot Girl Summer Trademark Refused,” Trademarkia (April 2025 refusal of the beauty/wellness extension citing consumer confusion). https://www.trademarkia.com/news/intellectual-property-news/hot-girl-trademark-denied

7. “She started Hot Girl Walk Indy to meet people. Then came the lawsuit,” Mirror Indy (2023 trademark, 22 applications, ~$100K). https://mirrorindy.org/hot-girl-walk-indy-lawsuit-mia-lind-casey-springer/

8. Same Mirror Indy report and “Walking the Legal Line,” INIP Law (FL/UT/PA rebrands, “On the Walk Miami,” July 2024 federal suit, S.D. Ind.). https://www.iniplaw.org/walking-the-legal-line-hot-girl-walk-vs-hot-walk-indy-in-trademark-dispute/

9. “Branding a Viral Moment: The Complexities of Trademarks for Famous Phrases,” PR News (Dec. 2023 “Girl Dinner” application). https://www.prnewsonline.com/branding-a-viral-moment-the-complexities-of-trademarks-for-famous-phrases/

10. Same PR News report (USPTO refusal, “fails to function,” commonly used expression).

The Postal Service’s answer was Ralph Lauren. Not a stamp designed by Ralph Lauren, the entire issuance, curated by him, the first time in history USPS has handed one person a complete official run.⁸ The day the stamps dropped, a licensed capsule collection landed in Ralph Lauren stores worldwide: the flag sweater, a polo, a ball cap.⁹ On the Fourth of July, the History Channel aired an hour called Ralph Lauren’s American Icons.¹⁰ A first-class stamp costs 78 cents, and so does this one, the same as the plain flag stamp, the same as the one with a dog on it.¹¹ The most famous name in American luxury got added for free. The sweater version costs $398.¹²

Here’s the part I can’t put down.

The man they chose was named Lifshitz

The person the United States government chose to define what America looks like was born Ralph Lifshitz.¹³ The Bronx, 1939, youngest kid of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Pinsk, in what’s now Belarus, father a house painter.¹³ At 16, he and his brothers changed the family name from Lifshitz to Lauren, because other kids wouldn’t stop making fun of it.¹⁴ Then he built a $15 billion fortune¹⁵ selling the look of English aristocracy and old East Coast money,¹⁶ the exact world that would have taken one look at a broke Jewish kid named Lifshitz and pointed him toward the service entrance.

I want to be clear, because it would be cheap to sneer here. That’s a genuinely great American story. Kid from nothing turns himself into the most recognizable name in American style. I understand why people love it, and I understand why the government wanted it for the party.

But sit with what the story actually required. He had to change his own name first. The price of getting to author the American fantasy was filing paperwork on the part of himself that read as foreign, then selling everyone a version of “American” buffed to a shine that never had room for the boy he used to be. He didn’t just make himself legible to power. He became the guy power hires to draw the picture the rest of us are told to move toward.

That’s not a Ralph problem. That’s the machine doing exactly what it was built to do. This country keeps the door to belonging narrow on purpose, charges your difference at the threshold, and then points to whoever paid in full as proof the door was open the whole time. Ralph didn’t beat that system. He paid it in full, and it thanked him with a stamp.

The fabric of our nation, allegedly

Look at what made the cut. A flag in the wind. Jackie Robinson’s baseball glove. A weathered pickup on a dirt road. A dog. The Empire State Building. A barn. A teddy bear. A lighthouse. A sailboat. Horses loose out west. A hamburger. A Diné, or Navajo, blanket. And dead center, framed by the other twelve, a knit flag Ralph designed himself, reading 1776 to 2026.¹⁷ The whole pane sits on blue denim, which the Postal Service says represents “the unique fabric of our nation.”¹⁸ The fabric of the nation is, per the federal government, denim off a Ralph Lauren mood board.

The images are meant to stand for freedom, independence, equality, and opportunity.¹⁹ And they’re lovely, that’s the trick, he is extraordinary at this. But it’s one specific dream of America. Rural, hetero, mid-century, nostalgic, the version where the barn and the pickup and the good dog are all waiting for you if you just work hard and keep quiet. It’s a country a lot of us were never really invited to relax inside. And where the pane does reach for someone outside that frame, it reaches carefully. The one nod to Native America is a Diné blanket, woven by Naiomi Glasses, the weaver Ralph Lauren installed as his first artist in residence in 2023.²⁰ Even the inclusion arrives brand-approved. The picture sells belonging. It just quietly decides who’s already in it, and on whose terms.

Why this is my problem and not just a fashion story

I write about code-switching a lot, because I do a lot of it. Queer, Latina, 23, running a company in a room that was not built picturing someone like me at the head of the table. You learn early which parts of yourself to bring in and which to leave in the car. You learn the voice that gets you believed. You sand the edges. You make yourself legible to power, because legible is the toll to get through the door.

Ralph Lauren is what winning that game looks like at the very top. Not just let in. Handed the flag. Asked to decide what the country’s own face is. And the quiet lesson of the whole spectacle, to every kid carrying some version of the name Lifshitz, is that yes, the reward is real, and yes, the entry fee is you. Change the name. Lose the accent. Sell them back a cleaner draft of the dream, and maybe, decades later, they’ll knit your sweater onto a stamp.

A band-aid you can peel and stick

There’s a reason this reads as a punchline and not a celebration. An institution that reaches 170 million addresses six days a week is quietly going under,⁶ and the government’s big move for the 250th wasn’t to fund it. It was to brand it. And the branding didn’t even come with a check. Those designer stamps still sell for 78 cents, same as any other, no premium, no rescue, nothing added to the balance sheet.¹¹ It was never a revenue plan. It was a costume. You can’t keep the lights on at the post office, but you can always, always sell the flag.

And the detail that finishes me off: these are Forever stamps. Always valid, no matter how high the rates climb. Forever.²¹ Forever stamps, from an institution that just told Congress it might not see next winter. Stick that one on the fabric of the nation.

But the deal only works if you take it. Keep the name they mispronounce. Leave your edges on. Decide the America with your accent still in it is the real one, and make the picture widen to fit you instead of shrinking yourself to fit the picture.

If you want more of this, on women, work, tech, and the things I can’t leave alone, subscribe for free to Sana Sana.

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Sources

1. USPS net loss of $9 billion in fiscal 2025 — CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/us/us-postal-service-financial-crisis-hnk

2. Roughly $25 billion in losses over three years — TheStreet. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/usps-lost-9-billion-last-year-and-now-your-postage-is-at-risk

3. Operating at a shortfall almost every year since 2007 — NPR (citing Brookings). https://www.npr.org/2026/03/17/nx-s1-5750419/usps-running-out-of-money-postal-service-david-steiner

4. Postmaster general warned USPS could run out of cash within a year, as soon as fall 2026, or February 2027 if it defaults — NPR / CNN. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/17/nx-s1-5750419/usps-running-out-of-money-postal-service-david-steiner

5. $15 billion statutory borrowing limit, effectively maxed — NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/17/nx-s1-5750419/usps-running-out-of-money-postal-service-david-steiner

6. No tax dollars for operating expenses; delivers to more than 170 million addresses six days a week — CNN / USPS. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/18/us/us-postal-service-financial-crisis-hnk

7. Options discussed include ending Saturday delivery, closing rural offices, and raising a first-class stamp from 78 cents toward $1 — Marketplace / NPR. https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/03/20/usps-lost-9-billion-last-fiscal-year-what-now

8. American Icons, 13 commemorative stamps curated by Ralph Lauren, first time USPS invited an individual to curate a complete official issuance — USPS Newsroom. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0609-usps-american-icons-commemorative-stamp-collection-curated-by-ralph-lauren-marks-americas-250th-anniversary.htm

9. Licensed capsule collection (flag sweater, polo, ball cap) debuted the same day at Ralph Lauren stores and RalphLauren.com — USPS Newsroom. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0609-usps-american-icons-commemorative-stamp-collection-curated-by-ralph-lauren-marks-americas-250th-anniversary.htm

10. “Ralph Lauren’s American Icons” premiered on the History Channel July 4 as part of HISTORY Honors 250 — USPS Newsroom. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0609-usps-american-icons-commemorative-stamp-collection-curated-by-ralph-lauren-marks-americas-250th-anniversary.htm

11. American Icons stamps are Forever stamps priced at 78 cents each, the current First-Class Mail rate, the same as any other Forever stamp — Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/usps-unveils-america-250-stamps-how-you-can-get-them-12052682

12. Ralph Lauren’s iconic American Flag Sweater retails around $398 — Yahoo/SheKnows; Shopbop listing. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/found-perfect-dupe-ralph-lauren-214500722.html

13. Born Ralph Lifshitz, October 14, 1939, in the Bronx, to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Pinsk, Belarus; father a house painter — Wikipedia; Britannica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lauren

14. Changed surname from Lifshitz to Lauren at 16 after being teased over the name — Wikipedia; Hey Alma; Britannica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lauren

15. Net worth estimated at roughly $15.2 billion as of June 2026 — Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Lauren

16. Brand built around the look of English aristocracy and the East Coast American elite — Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ralph-Lauren

17. The 13 stamp images (flag, Jackie Robinson’s baseball glove, pickup truck, dog, Empire State Building, barn, teddy bear, lighthouse, sailboat, horses, hamburger, Diné blanket, plus the central knit flag reading 1776 to 2026) — WWD; USPS Newsroom. https://wwd.com/business-news/business-features/ralph-lauren-us-postal-service-stamps-250th-anniversary-1238950529/

18. Blue denim layered behind the pane, described as “the unique fabric of our nation” — USPS Postal Store. https://store.usps.com/store/product/american-icons-stamps-S_582404

19. Images selected to reflect freedom, independence, equality, opportunity, and the pursuit of happiness — USPS Newsroom. https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2026/0512-usps-to-honor-nations-250th-anniversary-with-american-icons-stamps-curated-by-ralph-lauren.htm

20. The Diné (Navajo) blanket was woven by Naiomi Glasses, a seventh-generation Diné weaver who became Ralph Lauren’s first artist in residence in 2023 — USPS Newsroom; Stamps Forever. https://www.stampsforever.com/stamps/american-icons

21. Forever stamps remain valid for the 1 oz First-Class rate regardless of future rate increases — USPS Postal Store. https://store.usps.com/store/product/american-icons-stamps-S_582404

There’s a piece on Entreprenista right now about what no one tells you about selling your company.¹ Two founders. Two exits. One planned for ten years, one a dissolution after three decades. Both women. Both hit by the same thing on the other side: the identity loss, the disorientation, the quiet grief of no longer being the person they’d built themselves into being inside a company.

It raised a question I haven’t been able to shake since I read it.

I think about this a lot, partly because I’m building a company in this same world, and partly because “reclaim” is a word I sit with constantly. Reclaim your time. Reclaim your energy. The whole culture is built around the idea that women are owed something back. But you can’t reclaim what you were never allowed to hold in the first place.

So the question isn’t really about the psychology of the exit, though that part is real. It’s about who gets to exit quietly, and who has to perform their feelings about it on the way out.

Because right now, in the same news cycle, we have two case studies sitting right next to each other. And they answer that question pretty clearly.

Allison Ellsworth started Poppi in her kitchen. Maxed out her credit cards. Sold her car. Appeared on Shark Tank nine months pregnant and walked out with $400,000 for 25% of her company.² She built the brand to $500 million in annual revenue, raised only $40 million in total external capital across every funding round, and in May 2025 sold to PepsiCo for $1.95 billion.³

By every financial metric that exists, that is a perfect exit. A 49x return on total capital raised. One of the largest acquisitions of a founder-led consumer brand in the decade.⁴

Her headline quote from Fortune: *”You’re happy but you have anxiety.”*⁵

She compared handing over her company to watching a child go off to college. She settled an $8.9 million class action lawsuit over gut health claims that she said “big brands go through.” She went on TikTok, personally, to apologize for a Super Bowl marketing stunt involving vending machines sent to influencers. Her words: *”It was the first time I ever responded to something, and it was me, because I put myself out there as the face, so I had to be the one to get that message out.”*⁶

She built a brand worth nearly two billion dollars. She spent the year before the sale issuing public apologies for it.

Michael Preysman founded Everlane in 2011. Built it around “radical transparency,” publishing factory names, labor costs, and material costs, right next to the price tag.⁷ By 2016, the brand was valued at $250 million.⁸ In 2020, he sold a majority stake to private equity firm L Catterton, stepped down as CEO in 2022, and eventually left the board entirely earlier this year, citing disagreements over the brand’s direction.⁹

In May 2026, L Catterton sold Everlane to Shein for approximately $100 million to cover $90 million in debt.¹⁰

Preysman found out about the sale from the news. Twenty minutes before it was finalized.¹¹

The internet’s response to him: *”This is the founder response we didn’t see coming.”*¹² Comment sections full of can’t-wait energy. Industry support, immediate and warm. Within days he’d launched a new brand, Still Radical, with a waitlist of nearly 4,000 people and a statement that read like a mic drop: *”Same principles, but a new take. And this time: no venture capital, no private equity.”*¹³

He didn’t sell his company. His investors did, over his objection, without telling him. And he got a redemption arc.

Allison Ellsworth executed the exit she’d planned from day one, stayed on as a creative advisor, and described it with anxiety.

The Everlane customers who called the Shein deal a “betrayal” they were upset about values. About sustainability. About the fact that a brand built on ethical sourcing ended up in the hands of the largest fast-fashion polluter on the planet.¹⁴ That anger makes sense. But it’s worth noticing who it landed on.

Not Preysman, who built it and lost it. Not L Catterton, who controlled the cap table and made the call. The betrayal narrative attached itself to the brand itself, which in people’s minds meant the woman-coded community it had built, the millennial shoppers who’d bought in emotionally, the idea that conscious consumption was possible. The deal felt personal because the relationship had always been personal. That’s how brands built on values work. And that intimacy, that parasocial loyalty, is something women-led and women-targeted brands build more deliberately than almost anyone.

Which is also, not coincidentally, the thing that makes the exit feel like a defection.

This isn’t new. The research on it is not subtle. Women founders face what’s been called the “double bind,” penalized for behaviors that are expected and celebrated in men.¹⁵ When a male founder is aggressive, he’s visionary. When he exits, he’s strategic. When a female founder is the face of her brand, she’s authentic. When she exits, she owes that community an explanation.

The Entreprenista piece asks: “If the business ended tomorrow, who would you be?” It frames that as the psychological challenge of the exit, the identity question founders need to sit with.

But there’s a version of that question that only gets asked of women: who do you owe an apology to on the way out?

Preysman doesn’t owe anyone an apology. He’s a visionary who got screwed by PE. Allison Ellsworth has $150 million after taxes and still went on TikTok to say she hears the criticism.¹⁶

The Entreprenista founders talked about the grief of no longer being needed, the disorientation of walking away from an identity. That’s real. That deserves space.

But underneath that grief is something structural, not just personal. Women build companies where they are the company. Not just the founder, the face, the moral compass, the community manager, the person who goes on TikTok when something goes wrong. That’s not a personality trait. It’s a survival strategy, because it’s often the only way to build trust fast enough to get a brand off the ground when you’re not getting the funding, the credibility, or the benefit of the doubt that your male counterpart gets by default.¹⁷

And when you build that way, the exit doesn’t just close a chapter. It looks like abandonment.

Men exit. Women sell out. The difference isn’t the deal. It’s what the market decides the founder owes.

The Entreprenista piece is worth reading. But the fuller version of that story isn’t just about what founders feel on the other side of an exit. It’s about why women are the only ones expected to feel bad about it.

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Footnotes

¹ Meghan Block, “What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company,” Entreprenista, 2026. https://www.entreprenista.com/articles/what-no-one-tells-you-about-selling-your-company

² “Poppi: Kitchen Experiment to a $1.95B Acquisition,” Femfounded, March 13, 2026. https://femfounded.org/case-studies/poppi/

³ Ibid.; PepsiCo Press Release, “PepsiCo Completes Acquisition of Poppi,” May 19, 2025. https://www.pepsico.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/pepsico-completes-acquisition-of-poppi-accelerating-strategic-portfolio-transformation

⁴ “Poppi: Kitchen Experiment to a $1.95B Acquisition,” Femfounded, March 13, 2026.

⁵ Alicia Kelso, “Poppi Founder Allison Ellsworth Went From Making Soda in Her Kitchen to Selling Her Company to PepsiCo for $1.95 Billion,” Fortune, June 16, 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/06/16/poppi-founder-allison-ellsworth-went-from-making-soda-in-her-kitchen-to-selling-her-company-to-pepsico-for-1-95-billion/

⁶ Sara Fischer, “How TikTok Helped Allison Ellsworth Build a $2B Beverage Brand,” Axios, October 30, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/10/30/poppi-founder-allison-ellsworth-tiktok-brand

⁷ Lauren Sherman, “Everlane Is Selling Out… to Shein,” Puck News, May 2026. https://puck.news/everlane-is-selling-out-to-shein/

⁸ “The Everlane Founder Is Starting Over, and This Time He Won’t Take Venture Capital,” Ethos, May 2026. https://the-ethos.co/the-everlane-founder-is-starting-over-and-this-time-he-wont-take-venture-capital/

⁹ “Everlane Founder Michael Preysman Teases New Brand Following Shein Sale,” TheIndustry.fashion, May 2026. https://www.theindustry.fashion/everlane-founder-michael-preysman-teases-new-brand-following-shein-sale/

¹⁰ Lauren Sherman, Puck News; Shawn Grain Carter quoted in “Everlane Shoppers Come Unraveled Over Sale to Shein,” CNN, May 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/20/style/everlane-shein-sustainable-fashion-cec

¹¹ “Everlane Founder Michael Preysman Teases New Brand Following Shein Sale,” TheIndustry.fashion, May 2026.

¹² “Everlane Founder Michael Preysman Teases New Brand,” WWD, May 2026. https://wwd.com/sourcing-journal/industry-news/everlane-founder-michael-preysman-teases-still-radical-1238983770/

¹³ “Everlane Founder Launches His Next Venture,” Metaintro, May 2026. https://www.metaintro.com/blog/everlane-founder-launches-next-venture-after-shein-deal-2026

¹⁴ “Shoppers Slam Everlane’s Shein Acquisition as the Ultimate Sellout,” The Cooldown, May 2026. https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/everlane-shein-sale-controversy-impact/

¹⁵ Elaine Pofeldt, “Female Founders Under Fire: Are Women in the Startup World Being Unfairly Targeted?” Fortune, December 9, 2020. https://fortune.com/longform/female-founders-startups-the-wing-away-outdoor-voices-ceos/

¹⁶ “Poppi: Kitchen Experiment to a $1.95B Acquisition,” Femfounded, March 13, 2026.

¹⁷ Fern Lulham and Scott Shane, “Evidence That Investors Penalize Female Founders for Lack of Industry Fit,” Science Advances, 2020. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abd7664

#WomenInTech #Founders #Startups #WomenFounders #Entrepreneurship #VentureCapital #BusinessStrategy #Feminism #WorkCulture #Poppi

Women stopped needing men long before men noticed.

Not emotionally, not always, but legally, economically, structurally? That door closed a long time ago, and we’ve been watching men process the grief ever since.

So the question is:

Here’s what’s actually happening: this is the first generation of men to exist in a world where their gender alone does not guarantee them a woman’s economic dependence, social compliance, or romantic obligation. For most of recorded history in the West, male necessity wasn’t earned; it was legislated. Before 1974, it was perfectly legal for lenders to deny women credit based solely on their gender, and banks routinely required a male cosigner, typically a husband or father, on applications for credit cards, loans, and mortgages.¹ Women couldn’t own property in most states without a husband’s name attached. The system didn’t make men necessary because they were; it made men necessary because men made it to be so.

Then we started dismantling it. Slowly, imperfectly, and incompletely, but now that it’s happening, we’re supposed to call the fallout a crisis.

Real things are happening to men. Labor markets gutted by deindustrialization hit male-dominated industries first. College enrollment has shifted, with women now outpacing men in degree attainment. Deaths of despair, suicide, overdose, and alcohol account for three out of four male fatalities in that category.² These aren’t fabricated. They’re real, they’re worth addressing, and they existed long before anyone started talking about “male crisis” as a political category.

But who the f**k built the system in which men are now failing? Men.

The same structure that told men their value was inherent and guaranteed also told them that emotional labor was beneath them, that asking for help was weakness, that their identity lived entirely in their economic output and their ability to provide. Men didn’t build that trap in isolation, but they sure did benefit from the parts that kept women underneath it. The crisis isn’t that women gained power. The crisis is that the system that propped up male necessity without requiring male growth finally stopped working, and nobody prepared men for a world where they’d have to earn their place the same way everyone else does.

Competence. Emotional availability. Actual partnership.

When British Vogue ran a piece in late 2025 asking whether having a boyfriend is even cool anymore, the internet lost its mind. Writer Chanté Joseph’s argument was simple: for the first time in Western culture, a single woman read as the main character. Being claimed is no longer the status symbol it was in 2012. Women are cropping men out of photos, soft-launching like they’re embarrassed, or not posting at all. And the reaction from men wasn’t curiosity. It was panic.³

That panic is the tell.

Because the question was never really “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing?” The question underneath it was: Are we still necessary? And the honest answer, the one nobody wants to say plainly, is that necessity was always the wrong frame. We owe men what we owe any person: the chance to show up and be worth it, but really, at this point, we owe men nothing.

The proposed solutions to the “male crisis” make the actual agenda obvious. Every policy conversation ends up in the same place: roll back Title IX, gut DEI, restrict reproductive autonomy, and return to “traditional” structures. The solution is always, somehow, to put women back in a position of dependence. That’s not a fix. That’s just the same system with better branding.

Women still earn 81 cents for every dollar a man makes in the U.S. Hispanic women earn 64.5 cents, a gap exceeding $23,000 a year for a full-time worker.⁴ The gender wage gap widened in 2025.⁵ Men hold between 62% and 77% of senior leadership at the five largest U.S. investment banks.⁶ The power didn’t transfer. It diluted slightly at the edges, and that dilution is being called a catastrophe.

It’s not a crisis. It’s progressive damage from systematic mis-structuring, and the people who built the structure are the last ones who should be surprised it’s falling.

¹ Bankrate, “Celebrating the Anniversary of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act,” October 28, 2024, https://www.bankrate.com/credit-cards/news/equal-credit-opportunity-act-anniversary/; National Archives, “On the Basis of Sex: Equal Credit Opportunities,” March 22, 2023, https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2023/03/22/on-the-basis-of-sex-equal-credit-opportunities/.

² Michael Winerip, “Men Need a New Narrative,” Ms. Magazine, April 25, 2024, https://msmagazine.com/2024/04/25/men-feminists-masculinity-trump/.

³ Chanté Joseph, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” British Vogue, October 29, 2025, https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/is-having-a-boyfriend-embarrassing-now.

⁴ Economic Policy Institute, “The Gender Pay Gap Widened Slightly in 2025,” 2025, https://www.epi.org/blog/the-gender-pay-gap-widened-slightly-in-2025-how-trumps-first-year-in-office-hurt-women-and-what-states-can-do-to-fix-it/.

⁵ Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Equal Pay in 2025: Gender Gaps Increased,” December 18, 2025, https://iwpr.org/equal-pay-in-2025-gender-gaps-increased-forecast-for-achieving-pay-equity-bleaker/.

⁶ Inequality.org, “Gender Economic Inequality,” updated June 2025, https://inequality.org/facts/gender-inequality/.

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#WomenAndWork #GenderPolitics #FeministEssay #WesternCulture #Equity #WorkplaceEquality #LatinasInTech #QueerVoices #Founders

Every year, Forbes publishes its 30 Under 30 list. Six hundred names. Twenty categories. The magazine, the press cycle, the LinkedIn congratulations from people who barely know you. The summit with the speakers and the name badges and the feeling that you have, finally, undeniably, made it. Made it past the doubt. Made it past the “you’re too young.” Made it to the top of the only scoreboard that the industry seems to agree on.

And then, a few years later, some of those same names make the news agaim, a different kind of coverage.

The pipeline from 30 Under 30 to prison has not gone unnoticed online. Once you look at the numbers, it’s hard to unsee.

Sam Bankman-Fried was on the 2021 list. Sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years. Charlie Javice, 2017 list, seven years in September 2025, plus $287 million in restitution, after fabricating millions of fake customers to sell her startup to JPMorgan for $175 million. Joanna Smith-Griffin was arrested in November 2024, charged with defrauding investors of $10 million after her 2021 crowning. Gökçe Güven, 2025 list, charged in early 2026 with allegedly keeping two sets of books and fabricating brand partnerships to raise $7 million. She faces up to 52 years.

One investor noted that the sum total of frauds and scams that 30 Under 30 honorees have been arrested for may exceed the total dollar value of funds legitimately raised by all honorees combined.¹

Not a curse. A structural problem with a deliberate design.

The list doesn’t reward achievement. It rewards narcissism, manipulation, and gatekeeping dressed up as meritocracy.

Here’s what Forbes says it evaluates: innovation, measurable impact, leadership, and trajectory. Here’s what it actually rewards: the performance of those things, to the right audience, with the right cosigner.

The candidates who make the list aren’t necessarily running the most impressive businesses. They’re the ones who’ve spent 12 to 18 months building a verifiable credibility trail through media coverage and a consistent public narrative before they ever submit a nomination.² The list rewards people who are good at being seen. Not people who are good at building.

That takes resources most founders don’t have. Press relationships, a PR firm, a warm intro to the right journalist. Selection favors already-promising candidates backed by networks or early traction, with documented bias toward venture capital-endorsed profiles over bootstrapped efforts.³ We know whose founders VC’s fund. Multiple studies have documented that less than 2% of venture capital goes to Black founders and less than 1% to Latina founders. The list reflects the funding landscape, not the talent landscape.

The Root observed that 29 of the 30 journalists honored in the inaugural 2011 Media category were white, and none were of African descent or Latino.⁴ Forbes has added more diverse names since. The criteria haven’t changed.

And then there’s what chasing the scoreboard does to people.

You’re under 30. You’ve watched every person who made the list get a profile, a speaking slot, a VC intro they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. So when your numbers aren’t quite there, you make them look like what success is supposed to look like, not success as it is, but success as Forbes needs it to appear for the feature to run.

One founder put it plainly: “They fake traction. Inflate valuations. Pretend they’re further along than they are. It’s not a celebration of achievement, it’s a deadline with fireworks strapped to it. And deadlines like that don’t just burn people out. They push some into fraud.”⁶

The list selects for people willing to perform invincibility under extreme pressure. That’s a specific psychological profile. It isn’t always a healthy one.

Girlboss. Prodigy. Same fraud, different noun.

Look at the women in this story: Smith-Griffin, Javice. Ellison, Güven. Not the only 30 Under 30 alums who’ve been charged, but consistently the ones the headlines lead with: “AI girl boss,” the articles called Smith-Griffin when she was arrested. Javice got the “girlboss fraud” treatment before the verdict came in.

Meanwhile, Trevor Milton of Nikola Corp was convicted of using exaggerated production numbers to steal from investors, and nobody wrote a think-piece about male ambition run amok. Sam Bankman-Fried, 25 years. Martin Shkreli, seven. Both on the list, both men, neither became a cautionary story about gender.

When a woman defrauds, it’s a character story; when a man does it, it’s a market correction.

The recognition industry needs scrutiny

Forbes is not a certification body. It’s a media company. The 30 Under 30 program is monetized through sponsorships exceeding nine figures annually, with critics arguing it diverts entrepreneurial energy toward nominations, events, and branding rather than value creation, inflating valuations of unproven ideas and contributing to ecosystem bubbles.⁸

You cannot pay to be on the list.⁹ But you can pay a PR firm to build your media trail. You can pay to attend the summit. You can leverage a VC relationship to get a warm editorial intro. The money doesn’t go to Forbes. It just flows through everything upstream.

The fraud cases aren’t proof that young founders are uniquely corrupt. They’re proof that a system demanding you perform success before you’ve achieved it, in exchange for the visibility you need to achieve it, will select for people willing to blur the line. Not a character flaw. A rational response to a broken incentive structure.

So, what do you do with the list?

I’m 23, I run a B2B SaaS company building the coordination layer for how work gets tracked and credited. I’ve been asked more than once if I’m chasing the Forbes 30 under 30 dream.

The list means something to people who don’t know you yet. It’s a credibility shortcut in an industry that doesn’t extend credibility freely to people who look like me. I get the appeal.

But I’d rather build something that doesn’t require me to perform where I am before I’m actually there. The 30 Under 30 framework rewards optics. I’m more interested in being the founder still standing at 40.

Footnotes

¹ This observation has been attributed to multiple investors and commentators tracking the pattern since approximately 2023. The aggregate fraud figures across charged honorees run into the billions when SBF’s FTX losses are included.

² Source: OBA PR, “Forbes 30 Under 30: The Complete Application Strategy Guide 2026,” obapr.com, April 2026.

³ Source: Grokipedia, “Forbes 30 Under 30,” grokipedia.com, March 2026.

⁴ Source: The Root, cited in Wikipedia’s “Forbes 30 Under 30” entry, regarding the 2011 inaugural Media category list.

⁶ Source: Celestine Riza Tsuki, “The Dark Truth Behind Forbes 30 Under 30,” Medium, August 2025.

⁸ Source: Grokipedia, “Forbes 30 Under 30,” March 2026.

⁹ Source: OBA PR, “Forbes 30 Under 30: The Complete Application Strategy Guide 2026,” April 2026.

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There is a sponge in your kitchen with a face, it is yellow, it is smiling, and it is named Daddy. It did $340 million in revenue in 2024² and has 4.2 million TikTok followers ³, which makes it, by every reasonable measure, the most culturally significant cleaning product in America, and it is shaped like a man who is not doing the dishes.

This sponge came out in 2012, invented by a guy named Aaron Krause who pitched it on Shark Tank and got a $200,000 check from Lori Greiner.⁵ A woman funded it, women made it famous, and women are on TikTok right now demonstrating it, recommending it, building entire cleaning content careers around it. The thing they are holding up to the camera, the thing with over a billion dollars in lifetime sales,⁴ is named after the person least likely to be at the sink.

This is not a coincidence; it is a portrait.

Here is what we know about who actually cleans. Women spend 12.6 hours a week on cooking, cleaning, and housework, while men spend 5.7,⁶ and in households where both partners work remotely, women take on 72% of domestic labor to men’s 28%.⁷ The gap has been closing since the 1990s, slowly, and as of 2023, women still do housework at a rate 1.6 times higher than men.⁸

Scrub Daddy named it Daddy.

The product line has a full family now. There is Scrub Daddy, firm and yellow, and the original, with no pronouns in the copy, and then there is Scrub Mommy, softer and pink and dual-sided, whose product description uses feminine pronouns throughout.⁹ Daddy is the default, Mommy got a gender, the dad scrubs hard, and the mom stays gentle,¹⁰ and this is all just sitting there on the shelf at Target, adjacent to the paper towels, completely unremarked upon.

What I keep coming back to is the aspiration of it. “Daddy” as a name isn’t threatening or masculine in a way that would alienate the women buying it; it’s warm, it’s family-coded, it’s the kind of name that implies a household where dad shows up, rolls up his sleeves, handles it. It’s the fantasy version of the division of labor, not the actual one. They didn’t name it after the person cleaning, they named it after the person the person cleaning wishes would help.

And it worked, a billion dollars’ worth of work.

There is something almost elegant about it, if you can hold the absurdity long enough to appreciate it. The women who are statistically doing most of the cleaning, who built this brand’s entire cultural presence through word of mouth and TikTok demonstrations and gifting it to each other, they made Daddy famous, they put him in their carts, they held him up to the camera, and they smiled at his little face.

He has a mouth, and he cannot use it to say he’ll do the dishes.

The sponge is a great product. I own one, and that’s almost the whole point; the thing works, so nobody stops to ask why it has a name that functions as a gentle, smiley-faced monument to the labor it represents but does not share. Scrub Daddy isn’t trying to make a statement; it’s just a sponge, but the culture it landed in already knew who was going to be holding it, and it sold anyway, and it went viral anyway, and a woman investor made it happen, and women on the internet made it famous, and here we are.

The dishes are still yours.

• “Scrub Daddy Net Worth in 2025: How Much Is the Smiley Sponge Worth?,” GrowthScribe, accessed June 20, 2026, https://growthscribe.com/scrub-daddy-net-worth/.

• “Scrub Daddy Shark Tank Update: From Novelty Sponge to Household Empire,” Legit.ng, January 20, 2026, https://www.legit.ng/entertainment/tv-shows/1693062-scrub-daddy-shark-tank-update-novelty-sponge-household-empire/.

• “Scrub Daddy’s Performance Marketing Success on TikTok,” Taktical, April 3, 2025, https://taktical.co/blog/scrub-daddy-performance-marketing-tiktok-playbook/.

• “Scrub Daddy Top Sellers 2025: Best-Selling Cleaning Tools Revealed,” Accio, April 19, 2026, https://www.accio.com/business/scrub-daddy-top-sellers.

• “Scrub Daddy Net Worth: The Smiling Sponge That Built a Million-Dollar Empire,” R. Couri Hay, March 16, 2026, https://rcourihay.com/blog/scrub-daddy-net-worth/.

• “The Free-Time Gender Gap: How Unpaid Care and Household Labor Reinforces Women’s Inequality,” Gender Equity Policy Institute, October 2024, https://thegepi.org/free-time-gender-gap/.

• “The 2024 Gender Inequality in Unpaid Domestic Work Report,” Clockify, accessed June 20, 2026, https://cake.com/blog/gender-inequality-in-unpaid-work/.

• Melissa A. Milkie, Liana C. Sayer, Kei Nomaguchi, and Hope Xu Yan, “Who’s Doing the Housework and Childcare in America Now? Differential Convergence in Twenty-First-Century Gender Gaps in Home Tasks,” Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 11 (2025), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231251314667.

• “Scrub Mommy (1ct),” Scrub Daddy, accessed June 20, 2026, https://scrubdaddy.com/product/scrub-mommy-1-count/.

• Jennifer M. McNeill, “Scrub Daddy Vs Scrub Mommy: Is There Even a Difference?,” Chowhound, accessed June 20, 2026, https://www.aol.com/articles/scrub-daddy-vs-scrub-mommy-160500690.html.

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If you’re a woman in business, wear the dress. She argues that we over-corrected away from femininity, swung hard into the blazer to prove we were serious, and left a tool on the table. Femininity reads as currency, she says, and in the economy of 2026, we should spend it. I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Not because I’m sure she’s right, but because I’m not sure she’s wrong, and that’s a gap in my thinking.

There are two things women are being told about the dress right now, both sold as freedom, and I want you to sit in the contradiction with me.

We may have overpaid for the blazer

The swing is real. For fifty years, the move was away from 1955, away from the dress, the softness, the smile, all of it coded as small. We put on the suit because that was what seriousness looked like, and seriousness was male, so we borrowed the costume of the people who already believed.

@dejhuana’s point is that the trade costs more than we noticed. That, in suiting up, we started treating our own femininity as a liability to hide instead of a thing we could actually use. And she’s got a point you can feel in a room: a certain presentation does get a warmer reception. People lean in. If that’s true, and most women know it’s true, then refusing to use it isn’t a principle. It’s leaving money on the table and calling it virtue.

She goes on to say that it’s not just men who are attracted to feminine energy. We’re all drawn to it, she says, and it’s all natural. Hold onto that word; we come back to it.

Showing skin

Here’s where it gets complicated, and where I can’t follow her all the way.

In 2015, researchers ran a study they nicknamed “Unbuttoned.” Same women, same faces: they adjusted the outfit by almost nothing. A skirt an inch shorter, one or two buttons open at the collar. The senior women, the managers, got rated as less competent for it. The receptionists in the same study got no penalty at all. Maybe because no one expected them to be the competent ones to begin with, so there was nothing to dock. That is a whole other article, and I owe you one.

It’s not one study. Glick and colleagues found the same shape in 2005: visibly sexy presentation drags down perceived competence, specifically for women in high-status jobs. Heilman had already named the bigger pattern, “penalties for success,” where women who win at male-coded things get punished for the winning. Eagly and Karau named the mechanism underneath it: the boss-shaped slot in our heads is male-shaped, so a woman who reads too many female characters trips an alarm.

Translation: the femininity that warms the room when you’re junior can cost you the room once you’re in charge. The currency @dejhuana says to spend has a cliff, and nobody posts where it is.

Nature versus nurture

Which brings us back to that word, “natural.” She says we’re naturally drawn to femininity. The data leans the other way. Nature wouldn’t dock the manager and wave the receptionist through; nature wouldn’t get stricter the higher you climb. And natural definitely wouldn’t make women the harshest judges of other women, but in that 2015 study, the older, employed, higher-earning women were the toughest raters in the room. That looks less like instinct and more like a curriculum we all sat through.

But here’s the part I actually sit with: even if it’s trained, it’s trained so deep it runs like instinct. So does the distinction help the woman standing at the mirror at 8:40 in the morning? Maybe “trained, not natural” is both true and useless. Maybe naming it is the only thing that ever moves it. I go back and forth.

So, what should the working girl wear?

Standing between two stories that both promise her power. One says: stop apologizing for femininity, spend it, dominate. The other says: the spending has an exchange rate that turns against you the second you’re senior enough to matter. Both are partly true, and both were handed to her by people who meant well.

You can watch the contradiction play out in what 2026 is actually telling women to wear to work. For two years, the dominant office look online was the “office siren,” also tagged corp-core or “girlboss 2.0”: fitted blouses, pencil skirts, body-hugging blazer dresses, the Y2K secretary reborn and described by one outlet as “business casual for hot girls.” Femininity is the entire point. Then the same fashion press that built the trend spent early 2026 declaring it over, pivoting to “soft power dressing” and structured tailoring, with editors cautioning that a plunging neckline still has no place in a meeting and stylists calling power suits and pumps relics where nothing skin-tight need apply. One twelve-month cycle, two opposite instructions: be the office siren, but nothing skin-tight; lean into femininity, but read powerful, not available. So, it looks like the runway can’t make up its mind either.

I’m 23, I run a tech company, and I have done the mirror math (too sexy, too boring, too dull, too tight) more times than I’ll admit. While I’d bet the ‘people’ across the table spent zero seconds on their button-ups, ties, and collars. Some days I think the move is to wear exactly what I want and let the cost land and call the cost data. Other days, that sounds exhausting, and I just want to get dressed and go to work. I don’t have it solved, and I’m 23. From what I can tell, nobody twice my age has it solved either. The woman spending the currency and the woman refusing to are both right.

So, where’s the modern woman at? Wear the dress or refuse to, then tell me which one you did, and why.

Subscribe to keep up with my thoughts as a 23-year-old Latina, queer, Tech founder.

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