After Dissent magazine published a rather lengthy and critical review of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In by Kate Losse earlier this week, Losse received a private message on Facebook from Brandee Barker, one of the publicists for the book/movement, telling her, “There’s a special place in hell for you.” Losse took a screen capture of the message and tweeted it out, adding, “Maybe sending Hellfire and Damnation messages is part of the Lean In PR strategy. LEAN IN OR ELSE YOU’RE GOING TO HELL.” Losse sees it as an inappropriate response to her criticism of the book. Perhaps. But there seems to be way more to the story, especially considering that Losse worked closely with both Barker and Sandberg during her five-year run as an employee of Facebook—before she left to write a damning tell-all about the social media company.
Losse’s review wasn’t just a critique of Lean In but of capitalism and startup culture and Facebook itself, which she claims is the true voice behind the book, and the movement is really just a conspiracy to co-opt feminism:
It is well-known that Facebook clones small apps and rolls them out to Facebook’s broad user base when an outside app becomes threatening to Facebook’s business model. Given that strategy, it’s not hard to see how Facebook may want to incubate its own feminist movement in order to prevent a more activist and transformative feminism from affecting Facebook’s business. Just as with any of Facebook’s competitive moves, the need to create an in-house version of a product arises due to an external threat. And put very simply, feminism is a threat to Facebook, just as Instagram or Snapchat were threats to Facebook’s photo-sharing business.
It’s an interesting take, and one that would be particularly attractive to those in the tech world who 1) are tired of Facebook’s dominance; and 2) haven’t read Sandberg’s book. But it also robs Sandberg of any agency in its implication that she’s just some tool of the patriarchy’s grander, Mr. Burns-esque scheme to cash in on the women’s movement. Like Mark Zuckerberg is sitting in a high-backed leather chair, rhythmically tapping his fingers together, thinking of all the money he’s going to make from feminism, of all things. The theory that a feminist manifesto about empowering women was masterminded by male executives is not so much a criticism of Lean In as it is an insult to women’s ambitions, as well as to Sandberg and what she’s achieved.
That said, the review is hardly out of line. It’s written with a reasonable tone, even if I don’t agree with it.
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