Girlboss ventures collapsed because they were media constructions, not sustainable businesses

Evidence

Despite their initial success, the girlboss icons flamed out quickly. Nasty Gal went bankrupt, the Wing shut its doors, and Weiss stepped down as Glossier’s CEO. (Even more injurious, the TV adaptation of Amoruso’s #Girlboss was dubbed “Netflix’s first truly terrible show.”) Perhaps, as Meltzer suggested, the girlboss was always a media mirage. While the most visible female entrepreneurs floundered, many successful women were running unglamorous but thriving businesses in America’s heartland, invisible without the support of publicists. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 326

Categorization

• QUESTION: This ‘media mirage’ raises the core question of the whole rebuttal: was the visibility-driven economy itself a mirage, and what was actually real underneath the uniformly publicized layer?
• XREF: The invisible-heartland contrast hints at a subculture still alive offline — precisely the reader’s search for a signature Marx misidentified.