On the faux intellectualism: Virgie has...some unique self esteem issues. For one, she constantly bills herself as a "body image expert." Really makes herself sound like a 12 year old bragging to his friends in the schoolyard that he totally got laid.
And she has an unintentionally hilarious habit of declaring her degree on her books and other bullshit. She has a masters, but no terminal degree like Ed.Phd, Phd, or MFA. Like butternut Greer, she loves to mention her shitty degree apropos of nothing. It's just another sign of how pathetic she truly is.
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EDIT: I tried to find some old images of her books and talks where her MS was listed. She also billed herself as a "sex therapist" but I couldn't find images showing that either. Wondering if she got called out on that bullshit enough and scrubbed the evidence.
Yeah, it's possible she got a "consolation prize" Master's after filling the requirements for one, but not having what it took to go on for the PhD.
Whatever I may think of Virgie's FA bullshit, however, I have to admit she's got enough intelligence and street smarts to have bailed out on her own, for good reasons. She may have realized just how the academic sausage gets made and been smart enough to leave with a terminal Master's, rather than waste her time on the PhD.
While being Hispanic would give her a serious boost, the academic job market is still shit, and not getting any better. Her MA (according to her bio on Ravishly) is in "Human Sexuality, with a focus on the intersections of body size, race, and gender," FWIW. There weren't exactly going to be a lot of tenure-track positions open for her. And maybe she didn't want to get locked into the teaching-and-publishing grind required to get tenure, or have to pick up and move cross-country to whatever college would offer her tenure-track employment. Maybe her teaching experiences as a grad student, and dealings with academic bureaucracy and the stupid, petty politics were enough to convince her that academia was not where she wanted to be. Grad school is fucking miserable, and if the prize at the end turns out not to be what you really want, taking your MA and getting the fuck out really is the sane option.
She's rare among the FA crowd in that she has the ambition, organizational ability, and persistence needed to make a plan and carry it out, so I do think she could have earned the PhD if she really wanted to. I just don't think she wanted to. She has a lot more freedom to write the kind of stuff she likes, and make videos, and do speaking engagements than she would if she were still in academia, and she's probably making about the same amount of money, without having to sit in stupid meetings, or deal with students and their bullshit, or deal with campus bureaucracy. And she gets to stay in the Bay Area, which she almost certainly would not, had she earned the PhD and gone looking for a professor gig.
tl;dr: Virgie is fat and repulsive and has shitty ideas, and I would not have sex with her, but there are some very good reasons why she might have chosen to stop at an MA instead of going on for a PhD.