How about a little break from Coronavirus content? To mark the weekend, please enjoy this video in which the Argentinian-Spanish rapper Nathy Peluso is an absolute boss. We mean that literally: on “Business Woman,” every trope of bossdom is explored through cartoonish visuals and brazen lyrics. In a mix of Spanish and English, she raps about how she will absolutely own you while she dances hard in a stream of Lady-Gaga-level costumes, throwing paper everywhere, wheeling in her desk chair, and dominatrixing dressed as a mechanic. Whether or not you follow along on YouTube (although, who’s stopping you), the chorus is insidiously catchy— head boppy, even— and ought to propel you to accomplish whatever you’re putting off.
For a year, I belonged to the women’s club, The Wing, whose founder is pictured above. Do you see that rainbow of books behind her? They’re all by women, and their color arrangement is a signature of the gram-tastic space. What else is true about these books is that they’re not catalogued; those women authors are there to be seen, not heard.
That’s pretty well representative of The Wing’s schtick, which Amanda Hess just outlined in 5,000 words in the New York Times: “The Wing is a Women’s Utopia. Unless You Work There.” It’s the article we were all too afraid to write, lest we be banished from the feminist club (figuratively, of course— when it comes to the literal club in question, many of us have quit). It outlines the gaping distance between the company’s capitalist visions of feminism, not so different from an “empowering” mascara ad, and their oppressive labor practices, which impose class divides between women in the space and often end up disadvantaging women of color the most. Maybe The Wing will spend some real time reflecting on this while they’re closed. Or maybe they’ll just keep posting photos of their merch.
Aside from the present reality that #DoingThings is not, in fact, better than #NotDoingThings, Outdoor Voices is in trouble. After years of seemingly unstoppable growth, the overpriced athletic apparel company started to flag this year: their clothes went on sale (gasp!); they announced they would close their New York office; and rumblings started to form around the golden child founder, Tyler Haney. Word on the street is, after growing quickly under an insane amount of venture capital, the company brought on experienced executives to make the brand actually work as a business. But their ideas were often at odds with Haney’s, so they replaced her with another CEO, keeping her on as a symbolic “Founder,” at which point she decided to leave.
If you wanted to, you could pick sides in this story, faulting a relatively inexperienced young businesswoman or the older, male executives who laid off 15 younger female employees the moment she left. But that’s not the point; in reality, all these direct-to-consumer businesses that have enjoyed near-unlimited investor cashflow for the last decade don’t really work (check out the numbers on Casper and co for proof). Let’s see how they all do in a recession.
Enough on the death of corporate dreams; let’s talk about a living company that deals in death. Lantern, co-founded by Liz Eddy and Alyssa Ruderman, is a public benefit corporation that provides guidance for navigating life before and after a death. As more people are starting to realize, pre-planning is a good idea, even if you’re young: If you have a company, a baby, or an online presence, it would be good to leave instructions for how to deal with them if you weren’t around. Lantern guides you through that stuff with a free online checklist, and if you’re suddenly faced with a death, they’re a one-stop shop for referring you to services like estate planners. Those resources are really challenging to cobble together independently, so it’s a huge load off to be able to access them in one place. Cheers to the all-female team doing the heavy lifting.
