Over the weekend, I finished reading Hey, Hun: Sales, Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing by Emily Lynn Paulson.
I’m not really an active member of the anti-MLM community online, but I AM very anti-MLM, so I was really excited for this one.
The memoir/story aspects were WILD. So entertaining to read.
Where it fell flat for me was in the analysis of things like privilege and white supremacy. It kind of felt like Paulson was still too early on her journey of “deconstructing” from MLMs, and not educated enough about actual theories of social justice, to be able to provide very insightful analysis, so she ends up repeating a lot of claims without explaining them well.
For example, as a lot of Goodreads reviews mention, for all she mentions MLMs being white supremacist, she never really lays out what she means or breaks down how. I feel like it’s because she’s just repeating a claim she’s been told but doesn’t actually understand why/how it’s true.
The parts about religion and Christianity also had the same problem, I wish it had delved deeper into the Christian hegemony side of white supremacy. Like, given how MLMs often target undocumented immigrants (something else that could’ve been highlighted more) and the demographics of where in the US MLMs thrive, a lot of MLMs probably have more non-white Christian sales reps than they do white religious-but-not-Christian ones.
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like Paulson has grappled with her own privilege enough (some parts were infuriating to read because of this) or learned deeply enough about social justice to be able to provide an accurate analysis of that aspect of MLMs, and this probably would’ve been a lot better if it focused on the memoir elements instead of alternating between that and analysis.
