We were fans of the “Fearless Girl” statue that was erected in front of the Wall Street Bull as part of a campaign to get more women on corporate boards. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino made us view things from a different perspective; she says “there’s an infantilizing undertone that is often present in the discussions of women’s ambition happening right now.” Tolentino says this is part of a larger problem of infantilizing female ambition, which could be seen to include seemingly benign symbols such as Tory Burch t-shirts and bracelets emblazoned with slogans like “Bold” and “Ambitious.”

She quotes novelist Elisa Albert, to whom ambition “is a quality that arises organically from both vanity and a genuine wish to do good work; it’s also something she regards as alien and horrific. ‘So you got what you wanted and now you want something else,’ she writes. ‘You probably worked really hard; I salute you. . . . But if you have ever spent any time around seriously ambitious people, you know that they are very often some of the unhappiest crazies alive, forever rooting around for more, having a hard time breathing and eating and sleeping, forever trying to cover some hysterical imagined nakedness.’”

Ambition, Tolentino writes, “will always be complicated for women, and not just because of external impediments: it is an imperfect drive, enacted in imperfect circumstances, that inevitably leads to imperfect things.”Tolentino says Fearless Girl, which depicts an elementary-school student staring down the Bull, is “dismaying, and revealing, that this message is most easily conveyed through a figure of a girl—her skirt and ponytail blown back in the breeze, cheerfully unaware of the strained, exhausted, overdetermined future that awaits her.”