Strike Up the Ban!

“When a little boy asserts himself, he’s called a ‘leader.’ Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded ‘bossy.’”

That’s the premise of the new campaign to “Ban Bossy,” headed up by Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg is COO of Facebook, so she is a bona fide “leader”—but seemingly less the Eleanor Roosevelt and more the Michelle Obama type. Sandberg’s Lean In, a nonprofit that seeks “to empower all women to achieve their ambitions” by means of “an online community, free expert lectures and Lean In Circles, small peer groups who meet regularly to share and learn together,” is the face of 21^st-century feminism, which takes its cues from Beyoncé, rather than Betty Friedan. That makes the latest iteration, if anything, more mindless than its predecessors.

“Ban Bossy” is a perfect example: a gimmicky campaign based on faux-outrage and bolstered by pseudo-social science, spearheaded by one of the country’s leading businesswomen. It is another instance of the bizarre need among women of the Left to exhibit themselves as victims—a posture that Sandberg’s campaign will only serve to perpetuate among the youngest of ladies.

But the problem goes deeper, and it has nothing to do with Sandberg and everything to do with the mindset of the Left: not to engage, but to destroy. “Bossy” is not a stereotype; “bossy” is an adjective. But on the Left, words have no meaning except as tools of political power. If banning “bossy” serves the political aims of the new feminism, then it ought to be scrapped. Yet banning “bossy” does not just ban a word—it bans an idea, and proponents of word bans know this. The goal of the Left in eliminating certain words from discourse is to eliminate the ideas that those words represent. The narrower the parameters of thought, the easier people are to control.

The consequences to the strength and integrity of our public discourse are obvious—but so, too, should be the consequences to our persons, when we allow, under the guise of “empowerment,” a few bossy people to put restrictions on our freedom to think.