Put differently, the rhetoric of Williams’ different body isn’t just sexist – it’s profoundly racist. - Anne Helen Petersen

But who needs romance when you have friendship with just as much texture and affection?

So-called Tiger Moms have often been demonized in the press, framed as crass, domineering, and un-American for their single-mindedness in preparing their children for college. Yet “good” Americans — which is to say, upper-middle-class white Americans — do the same thing. They simply cloak conversations about college in the rhetoric of “happiness” and “fit” and “fulfilling one’s potential.” It’s less crass. But it’s still bullshit.

The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon — and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.