Girl, Stop Apologizing Needs to Apologize

It is one of the most disappointing things in life. That "follower" mentality. When the person being followed and "influencing" is just awful and/or a total idiot (but oooh, pretty Instagram!)



She won't. Social media has taught me how needy people are for shiny things and drama. Rachel provides both in equal measure.



My sister says they never leave the sorority.



Amen x 1000. They listen to these IG influencers who have no idea of what works for anyone other than themselves. But they go around "influencing": "do this", "buy this", "wear this" and you can be cool/rich/happy/pretty like ME!!!

Haven't heard of her and I'm fine with that.  I just don't see the appeal of all of these so called "influencers" popping up all over.  

I read her first book because a co-worker went on and on and on about how amazing it was and how she could relate to so many things in the book.

While I was reading it, I found myself rolling my eyes at so many places. I just didn't get why this book was on the best seller list. It was difficult to finish the book, but I will always finish a book once I start it.

I had no desire to read her second book. I don't follow her on social media so didn't see the video. I don't get her appeal.

I must say though....it IRKS me when someone says "I worked my butt off to get this and that". (I saw an actor say this once too) Well, lots of women work their butt off...lots of women get up at 4 am every day and bust their butts....my mom got up every day before any of us, she worked harder than anyone I know, all day long and practically 24 hours a day, but unfortunately, being a home maker doesn't provide the same kind of income as a social influencer or an actor. Just because you are fortunate enough to find a field that pays a lot, doesn't mean that other people don't work their butts off too. UGH!

Isn't that a great place to be in life? Definitely one of the things I enjoy.

I had house keepers growing up. One of them came a few times a week, partially because my mom was battling cancer and partially because she worked for several of my neighbors, so she was in the neighborhood almost every day. I would never reduce her to "the woman who cleans my toilets." Jean was an important part of my family's life - she even came from Alaska to Florida at New Year's for my youngest brother's wedding.

If they come frequently, they usually are there for just a couple hours at a time - they typically aren't doing marathon cleaning sessions.

Wealthy IG influencers are in a bind.

They started by "being relatable". "Tee hee, I'm just like you, but successful because I do/wear/buy....."

But then the money started gushing in for a subset of them. Now they live in 18,000 sq ft houses (Jordan Page), have multi-million dollar empires (Rach), take multiple resort vacations per year, have a staff of nannies, housekeepers, assistants, etc.

So, how do they keep their followers who followed for the "relatability" now that their lifestyles are completely "unrelatable."

The poor dears. Such problems.

This great analysis of RH was even before the recent sh#($* hit the recent fan.

"Self-Help has been taking over our media; from Instagram to books, messages of self-help and a “can-do” attitude are everywhere.


I recently sat down to finally read Girl Wash Your Face by motivational speaker, Rachel Hollis (I know, I’m probably the last person to read it).


I was looking forward to some real talk and honest messages about increasing your self-love. However, what I found was a book full of toxic self-help messages—messages that I sadly see all of the time.

The main idea of the book was that if you “choose positivity” then your life can be fuller and you can reach your full potential.

Sprinkled in this book were also problematic messages involving: body image (she states that you show people you can’t be trusted if you don’t stick to a diet); romantic relationships (romanticizing a love that isn’t reciprocated and is emotionally harmful); and substance abuse (it’s not healthy to escape to wine whenever you’re stressed and this practice shouldn’t be celebrated or taken lightly).



However, that’s a subject that needs its own space to discuss. Today, I want to focus just on the thought of “choosing happiness.”

I believe there is power in positivity, in fact, I try to be hopeful. I believe there is strength in kindness and helping others. However, I think that it is detrimental to think that by simply “choosing happiness” that our lives can be better.




By reading messages like this in books such as Girl Wash Your Face and on social media, it completely disregards two large populations of people:



1. People with depression or other mental illnesses.

2. People who are less privileged than a middle-class white woman. "

www.kaitlynluckow.com/blog/2019/3/11/girl-its-okay-to-be-dirty-a-look-at-toxic-self-help

She is one of my favorite YouTubers.

There's "relatable" and then there's "aspirational." It's a very, very fine line one has to walk to remain both.

Bahaha!!! That parody. "Like Rosa Parks....I wrote Girl Wipe Your Butt...we're all #bossbabes"

I'm not one of them.  I read about three paragraphs of that article and was literally bored to tears.  I don't have the time or the inclination to give shallow people any more attention than 5 minutes, and even then, it was too much!  I can't believe her books have been so popular.

Girl, Wash Your Timeline

Rachel Hollis, the best-selling author and motivational speaker, built a blockbuster business sharing her “authentic” self. Then things got a little too real.

"May 14 was supposed to mark Rachel Hollis’s return to her happy place: a stage in front of an adoring audience.

That was the day that Rise, her self-improvement company’s conference for women, was scheduled to begin in Austin, Texas. At least 100 people would attend in person, and more than 2,000 had registered by mid-April to join online. It would be a fraction of her usual crowd — nearly 50,000 people logged on for a virtual event in May 2020 — but would put her on track to business as usual.

But in early April, Ms. Hollis, the 38-year-old author of the New York Times best-selling books “Girl, Wash Your Face” and “Girl, Stop Apologizing,” posted a video to TikTok that jarred many of her devoted fans....

Reducing a domestic worker to someone who “cleans the toilet,” said Louiza Doran, an antiracism and anti-oppression educator, in an Instagram Live dissection of Ms. Hollis’s TikTok post, was “the most disgusting capitalistic, privileged flex that was so quick, but it said so much about how she as a human being views the power dynamic and the social hierarchy.”

Ms. Hollis, who declined to comment for this article, issued an apology, blaming her “team” for her slowness in addressing the matter....

The gulf between Rachel Hollis, online persona, and Rachel Hollis, boss, grew increasingly wide, employees said. The bubbly woman who appeared weekday mornings on “Start Today” was not the one who arrived at the HoCo office just hours later. “She would go from being silly and talking about peeing in her pants to walking into the office in sunglasses, not saying hello to anyone,” said Ms. Crooks, who has written a novel, “My Life With the Mogul,” about a young woman whose idealism is crushed by the experience of working for a personal-development celebrity....

At the company leadership summit in early 2020, former employees say, she addressed her staff to say, “I am so rich, I could just retire to Hawaii and never work a day again, that’s how wealthy I am.” (Her point, they said, was that she loves her job.)

At the Rise Business conference in Charleston, two attendees said that Ms. Hollis gave a speech extolling her own influence over her followers. “I own you,” two people recalled her saying, in explaining that her endorsement meant so much to her followers, she could compel them to buy anything.

Ali Mudano, 29, the former executive assistant to both Mr. and Ms. Hollis, watched her boss’s evolution. “When Rachel wrote her books, she was a mom struggling through it like the rest of her base, it was authentic,” Ms. Mudano said. “But at some point in her rising stardom, it shifted from her wanting to be relatable to her wanting to exist in a different category.”...

Money and fame couldn’t protect HoCo from the havoc brought by the coronavirus. The company, which in April 2020 received a P.P.P. loan of $998,700, was reorganized to accommodate new goals of introducing a Rise fitness app...

If the Hollises seemed distracted at the onset of the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, their employees and social media community soon learned why. On June 8, Mr. Hollis revealed in a companywide Slack message that the couple was getting a divorce....

Some followers, many of whom are religious Christians, felt bamboozled. The divorce announcement came about a month after the Hollises’ make-out advice podcast. “Y’all are as fake as they get,” one person commented on a post....

Then Hollis Co. announced the conference would be put on hold so Ms. Hollis could rethink her content....

Vivian Kaye, the owner of KinkyCurlyYaki, a company that sells textured hair extensions for Black women, has watched the drama unfold since first being introduced to the Rachel Hollis brand when she was provided a free ticket by HoCo to attend the Rise conference in her hometown, Toronto. “I was there as seasoning,” Ms. Kaye, 43, said.

Even before Ms. Hollis invoked Harriet Tubman in her TikTok, Ms. Kaye thought her message was problematic, as is her tendency to co-opt Black vernacular terms like “girl” and “sis.”

“I should pull myself up by my bootstraps?” Ms. Kaye said. “Do you not know the system is rigged against me? That’s not feminism. That’s just putting lipstick on the patriarchy.”

www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/rachel-hollis-tiktok-video.html

Yet she was the one who made the Tic Toc videos. She knew it was out there.