Don't 'ban bossy,' be bossy

Jennifer Garner, Condoleezza Rice and Beyoncé have all teamed up to support a campaign, so we should probably listen.

The unlikely team got together in order to show support for Sheryl Sandberg’s new project, which follows closely on the heels of her Lean In female empowerment campaign.  Sandberg is the current COO of Facebook, served as Chief of Staff at the United States Treasury Department, and was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google.

Ban Bossy’s website claims “When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’ Words like bossy send a message: don’t raise your hand or speak up.”

The new project is hoping to ban the word “bossy” — again, with a focus on empowering girls and young women.  

But that is easier said than done, and plenty of people, both male and female, are chiming in to let Sandberg know that she’s bossy for demanding an entire word be banned from our collective vocabulary.

Deep down, the campaign is good. I’ll stand behind anything that empowers girls, and I’ll certainly follow whatever Beyoncé and Rice have to say, but Sandberg’s new endeavor is inherently flawed.

The first flaw is that Ban Bossy doesn’t go far enough. It’s been years since I’ve heard someone called “bossy”, because we’re no longer that nice — and in the age of the Internet, kids aren’t getting any nicer.

Today, when a girl starts to assert herself, she gets called a “bitch” or even worse. We have words loaded with sexism that get thrown around on a daily basis, but they aren’t as tame as “bossy.”

And this is an aspect the naysayers are latching onto. Claiming that “bossy” isn’t that bad is a fairly valid argument. When young girls just as easily get called “bitch,” banning bossy seems to be the least of our worries.

We should call a spade a spade and rename the campaign Ban Bitch. Would the Girl Scouts be so readily able to get behind the campaign as they did with Ban Bossy?
Probably not, but the message would be more apropos of our time.

Secondly, Ban Bossy is flawed in the fact that it’s too specific. The campaign is too bogged down in semantics.

What made Lean In so compelling is the fact that it was “focused on encouraging women to pursue their ambitions and changing the conversation from what we can’t do to what we can do.”  It’s about so much more than one word.

And Ban Bossy is about more than one word too, but the general public isn’t seeing that because of the misattributed focus.

If we want to inspire young girls, it shouldn’t be by banning “bossy.” Perhaps we
should start a reclamation process.

After all, that’s what the campaign’s main video is doing. When Beyoncé claims that she’s not bossy, she’s the boss, we listen. But isn’t that the same thing? Women need to have a sense of bossiness, of rising above the competition.

We shouldn’t focus on banning words. We should focus on girls breaking through those labels and not stopping because of juvenile discourse.

sjostrow@indiana.edu
@ostrowski_s_j