You’re Not a Girlboss – You’re Just Trapped in an MLM Scheme (2020)
So...
it&#x27;s hard out there.<p>My girlfriend is successful as an independent massage therapist, after working many years in day-spas where she had to accept lower wages and give up a lot of her income. Because she&#x27;s successful, she&#x27;s constantly being hit upon by female friends either inviting her into schemes or asking her for advice. (Some of these friends, she helps do their taxes - for free, because these 30-something women can&#x27;t figure it out - but she doesn&#x27;t give them financial advice).<p>Knowing a lot of these people and watching their schemes get derailed, I&#x27;ve come to a few conclusions.<p>1. Financial literacy basically doesn&#x27;t exist. It&#x27;s a miracle that my girlfriend taught herself. I&#x27;m not one to say that it&#x27;s being intentionally suppressed in our educational system; I think the people who teach and write curricula are equally unequipped, so it&#x27;s just a generational problem now in America.<p>2. The most paranoid &#x2F; suspicious &#x2F; likely to believe conspiracy theories are the ones who fall hardest for obvious ponzi schemes over and over. It&#x27;s not clear to me why people who wouldn&#x27;t accept a sandwich from a stranger are willing to put their life savings into an obvious scam (other than low IQ?)<p>3. It&#x27;s brutal being a girl who gets into her 30s with a few kids and has no money and no prospects. Big companies hiring these women thrive on their desperation, so they&#x27;re tolerant of smaller scams screwing them over and perpetuating the sense of there being no creative&#x2F;industrious outlet for them.<p>4. Women&#x27;s lib has been hijacked to the point that it&#x27;s just another excuse for oppressing American women. This doesn&#x27;t have to come in the form of workplace discrimination at Google. It&#x27;s that the very inclusiveness of Google gives an excuse to the rest of society to dump the worst tasks and the most burden on women, with the excuse that everyone&#x27;s now equal. That combined with a serious deficit in understanding the complicated schemes taking advantage of people results in this head-shakingly bizarre situation where tropes like &quot;taking control of my life&quot; are, over and over, just joining the latest iteration of Avon or tupperware parties.<p>So not to just sit here and complain, I&#x27;d offer a couple solutions:
1. Bring back real accounting and home eq classes
2. Have serious discussions in school about the life-altering consequences of early pregnancy
3. Tech companies need to take an active hand in labeling these things as MLMs or viral fads or simply <i>not good investments</i>
4. Women in their 30s-50s, who are a huge driving force of our economy, need to have paths to advancement that don&#x27;t require going through get-rich-quick schemes, and this isn&#x27;t something that can be accomplished by a few companies trotting out female VPs of marketing or something. Equal pay isn&#x27;t enough; equal opportunities are what&#x27;s needed.<p>A final thought; Jan 6th was supported by as many women as men. So was the Nazi occupation of Poland. Women can&#x27;t be discounted as a force of political disaster if you create an underclass of so many disenfranchised people. The growth of these schemes among women is a very bad sign for our future as a democratic &#x2F; market-based polity.