sheryl played us, but we also played ourselves
No one unpacks a ~woman in the public eye~ narrative better than BuzzFeed’s celebrity expert Anne Helen Petersen, which is why you should make her Sheryl Sandberg dissertation the requisite one to read amidst all of the bad Lean Out jokes out there.
Petersen is so good at highlighting the complex expectations that famous women navigate and the even more complicated public personas they offer up in return, and that tension is almost as much a subject of this profile as Sandberg herself: when we quibble about the contradictory roles of frat house mom + corporate superwoman + feminist cheerleader + Olivia Pope-esque shadow influencer that Sandberg has embodied in our collective imagination, we’re also insinuating that mega-successful women have to do it all, but we’re also going to chalk them up as kiiiiinda duplicitous villains when they succeed.