ZEITGEIST
How do we cut through “fauxpowerment” to find where true feminism lies?
Where’s the line between true feminism and marketing gimmick?
AQUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO— possibly your entire lifetime—I taught feminist theory at the University of Oxford in England. Back then, our poster thinker was Judith Butler, whose most famous works argued that gender, sexuality and man and woman as biological entities could only be determined in performance—as it played out, so to speak. Our heroine argued this in language so convoluted that it rendered us cross-eyed. How we fretted; how we thrilled.
Fast-forward to 2019, and I find myself in a café gazing at some newly released gingerbread cookies, Godfrey and Annie. Annie sports a dress and a red (lipsticked?) smile. However, their producer says that neither are gingerbread men, making it clear that they are gender-neutral biscuits. “Christ, we did this,” I think. “A couple of decades on, our elaborate academic wranglings are being packaged and sold with a ‘Have a nice day.’”
It’s not just gingerbread snacks being deployed in the battleground for gender equality: In recent years, more and more brands have been pushing supposedly empowering messages, often specifically aimed at women, to sell their products. As a journalist, I might receive 900 or so emails a day, legions of them banging the empowerment drum over the latest hair thickener or protein bar. Femvertising is nothing new (hell, there are even #Femvertising Awards)— lessons in female empowerment have been thrown at us from all corners of consumerism. Take the furor over Scottish brewer BrewDog’s pink “beer for girls,” launched for International Women’s Day—allegedly to highlight the gender pay gap—and lambasted for being the marketing gimmick it was.
However, in the fight for equality, aren’t there bigger, more pressing issues than the gender of your gingerbread cookie or the colour of your beer bottle? Aren’t these, in fact, just further examples of what one might refer to as
“fauxpowerment”—the overselling of false or banal socalled empowerment to women? For “empowerment” has become one of the most used—and abused—terms in the conversation around feminism, in a way that serves to dilute and undermine the cause itself. Bandying the word about for everything from childbirth to chocolate to fitness to floor cleaner is stripping the term of any meaning at a time when genuine power is still lamentably far from women’s grasp.
So from where did this omnipresent word spring? Its first appearance in the English-speaking West occurred in the ’70s, in relation to African-American communities. Feminists began using the term in the ’80s and ’90s, tending to deploy it in reference to changes within the developing world. As the century staggered to its end, women’s magazines increasingly appropriated the word to buoy their readers, bolstered in turn by the Spice Girls’ championing of so-called “girl power” (an ideology that occupied an uncertain territory encompassing pinching Prince Charles’ bottom and being nice to your pals). Then, in 1998, came HBO’s Sex and the City, and empowerment became enmeshed with conspicuous consumption. “Hey, Manolo lover,” the commercial clamour went, “prove your independence by enslaving yourself to a credit card.” This not only transferred empowerment from some sort of collective experience to an individual high but also put it firmly within the realm of the (designer) wallet, conflating consumerism with female autonomy. In 2003, the satirical website The Onion ran the headline “Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman Does,” with “does” meaning “buys.”
Big business was not slow in striving to exploit the idea of “women’s lib” as a commodity. Whether it was an It bag, an It restaurant or an It shoe, the “It” we were being sold was empowerment, because we were worth it. The global financial crisis of 2007–2008 looked to have thrown a wrench in the works of consumer feminism, but, in fact, it merely forced it underground. When it emerged, it was no longer confined to luxury goods but became a marketing freefor-all. Today, anything can be sold as empowering, from leggings to lingerie, weight-loss programs to wine, sanitary products to Kim Kardashian’s bottom.
As Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, notes: “The idea of selling individual women ‘empowerment’ can be an easy way for brands to jump on the bandwagon of a thriving feminist movement without actually engaging with the systemic, ingrained issues women are really battling. It is frustrating when we are sold the idea that women themselves could solve the problem of institutionalized discrimination and abuse simply by buying the right shampoo or T-shirt.” That’s not to say organizations and companies can’t adopt meaningful feminist messages, “but they need to put their money where their mouth is if they expect it to be convincing,” says Bates. “It’s no good slapping feminist quotes on your merchandise if your senior leadership is completely dominated by men or if you’re paying your female staff less than their male counterparts.”
This attitude—separating genuine feminist commitment from mere bandwagon leaping—lies at the heart of the issue. Kate Bosomworth, chief marketing officer at the U.K. branch of the creative agency M&C Saatchi, argues that today’s fauxpowerment explosion was inspired by a handful of genuine attempts by businesses to engage with women’s issues. “The 2004 Dove [Real Beauty] campaign was the first of its kind,” she tells me. “Then we had Pantene’s #ShineStrong. These campaigns were challenging and disruptive and truly tipped norms. However, those that have followed suit haven’t always been that authentic. Like us, they need to apply real insight into how to solve problems and help, how to bring a truth that no one’s talked about before. Not just putting women in their ads—consumers can see through that in a nanosecond, as they can find out very quickly whether organizations are true to their word.”
It is this lip service to empowerment that brings us so many platitudes—from one Dove campaign imitator too many informing us that our chubbiness is emancipatory to Hollywood’s tokenistic rehashing of male-focused hits. And so here we are, in a world in which we are presented with “empowering” control underwear, rosacea cures and rosé, with power something you can buy into as long as you’re not disempoweringly poor.
Call me a killjoy, but doesn’t this seem tawdry given that the issues women might more obviously seek empowerment over include voting access, equal pay, equal parenting, abortion rights, forced marriage, genital mutilation and rape as a weapon of war? Moreover, at a time when the crotchgrabber-in-chief occupies the White House, isn’t the notion that empowerment can be reduced to the perfect pink drink a tad Marie Antoinette-ish? We need to distinguish the faux from the real deal. Sure, I bought myself a mock pin saying “feminist.” It’s funny and playful, and feminism is not without these qualities. But right now we need less stuff and fewer power poses and more action, progress and rights.
Sam Smethers, chief executive of the gender-equality lobby group The Fawcett Society, tells me: “There is a value in having fun with the message. We sell great feminist T-shirts and [quirky] jewellery, and they get people talking. However, the concept of empowerment is something we slip into for want of something better, or clearer, to say. It suggests that women move from being powerless to powerful. It’s these barriers that need addressing: not changing the individual but the system they find themselves in.”
As the novelist Naomi Alderman, author of the prizewinning The Power, asserts: “Products, my friends, are very nice. But they are not the same thing as doing the inner work to increase your confidence, knowing you have a group of female friends to rely on or understanding truly in your heart that the fact that you feel shit about yourself a lot of the time is not your fault and that there are societal forces trying to make women, in particular, feel shit about themselves. Enjoy the products—why not? But do the work too.” You said it, sister. ®