Andi Zeisler

A smart, funny look at the commodification of feminism.

(Full disclosure: I received a free electronic ARC for review through NetGalley.)

Within a very short span of time, feminism has come to occupy perhaps its most complex role ever in American, if not global, culture. It’s a place where most of the problems that have necessitated feminist movements to begin with are still very much in place, but at the same time there’s a mainstream, celebrity, consumer embrace of feminism that show more positions it as a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt. I’ve seen this called “pop feminism,” “feel-good feminism,” and “white feminism.” I call it marketplace feminism. It’s decontextualized. It’s depoliticized. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.

“The vote. The stay-at-home-dad. The push-up bra. The Lean Cuisine pizza.”

-- 4.5 stars --

When We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement first crossed my radar, I was intrigued but also worried; the book's description sounded like it could easily devolve into a chiding of Millennials by their older, second-wave sisters for not doing feminism right. (Think: Gloria Steinem's recent statement that young women's support of Bernie Sanders is merely a ploy to meet boys and get laid.) Then I saw that Andi Zeisler is the author, which mostly put my worries to bed: I'm a longtime subscriber of Bitch Magazine, which Zeisler co-founded, and it's pretty trenchant, on-point, and welcoming of diverse voices. As is We Were Feminists Once which, as it turns out, is a smart and funny look at the the commodification of feminism, both in recent times and historically.

Bolstered by capitalism and neoliberalist policies, "marketplace feminism" is the repackaging of feminism as something that's solely personal vs. political. This "feminism" is decontextualized and depoliticized, made soft and nonthreatening for mass consumption. It is a feminism "in service of capitalism." With an emphasis on personal choice as opposed to equality and liberation for all, this feminism asserts that all choices are equally valid; a choice is feminist as long as a self-proclaimed feminist (or any woman) is the one making it, as though the choice to wax one's body or take your husband's surname or even to marry at all is made in a vacuum. (Enter one of my favorite references: Charlotte York's desperate declaration, "I choose my choice!," upon quitting her beloved gallery job after marriage.) Values and ideology become so much products to pick and choose from, as if they were different brands of conditioner. Worst still, feminism itself is presented as a product in need of branding.

So we have feminism (and less threatening code words, such as liberation, empowerment, girl power, and choice) used to sell everything from cigarettes to yogurt, celebrities to thousand-dollar networking conferences. Companies like Estée Lauder and Revlon support cancer research through their charitable arms - while also pushing products that contain known carcinogens. Dove implores women to embrace their bodies through its Real Beauty campaign - and yet creates new problem areas to which they have conveniently devised a solution. (Soft armpits, really?) Perhaps the most egregious example comes from Walmart, which launched the Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative in 2012 - not long after the Supreme Court killed what would have been the largest-ever class-action sex discrimination lawsuit against the company. (If you want to "empower" women, Walmart, why not start with equal pay in your own damn company?)

Zeisler roughly structures the book around various forms of media: advertising, movies, television, celebrities, the news media, music, and the beauty industrial complex, with a fair degree of overlap. As a book nerd, I kind of wished she'd looked at feminism in fiction - especially given the proliferation of "strong female characters" in YA science fiction/fantasy - but I get why she didn't: these same concerns are mirrored in other forms of media.

While the scope of the topic is pretty large, she does a good job of distilling it down to its most essential parts, and providing timely and relevant examples. (If you're paying just a little attention, no doubt you're already familiar with many of the campaigns, products, and kerfuffles referenced in these here pages.) Despite the depressing nature of the subject, Zeisler's writing is witty, funny, and engaging. More than once I found myself snorting aloud.

It's also worth noting that, just as feminism is not only about the individual, Zeisler avoids laying the blame on individuals who make "unfeminist" choices (or celebs for their ill-informed riffs on feminism; "hating the player and ignoring the game," as it were). Getting a nose job, binge watching The Bachelor, or pursuing a modeling career doesn't make you a "bad feminist"; however, dismissing the context in which these choices are made and validated (or not) does mean you may be an uncritical thinker, at the very least.

As an ethical vegan, I can't help but compare the two: being vegan in a speciesist world, and being feminist when sexism and misogyny still run rampant. Given our limited choices, it's impossible to be 100% vegan, to avoid all animal-based products and exploitation altogether. Tires typically contain animal-based stearic acid; medications, including life-saving ones, are tested on animals; and those of us with companion animals must make the difficult choice between feeding them vegetarian, vegan, or omnivorous diets. So you do the best you can, trying to live in accordance with your values as closely as possible.

Likewise, Zeisler isn't asking us to give up potentially problematic entertainment, fashion choices, or hygienic practices. Do what makes you happy! Just do it through a critical feminist lens, and try to avoid trampling over other women in the process.

To this end, I do wish she'd offered some possible solutions. To be fair, the problem is so vast, it's hard to know where to start. Social media has proven a powerful platform for pushing back against sexism - as we see in some of Zeisler's examples - yet it often feels like a drop in the bucket.

For instance, Zeisler cites the hashtag campaign #abbiemillsdeservesbetter as a reason why Fox (supposedly) rethought its sidelining of Abbie Mills after the first season of Sleepy Hollow. Since she turned in the final draft of this book, however, Mills was killed off in the season three finale - to further the white, male MC's storyline, no less. Granted, it was Nicole Beharie's choice to leave the show - but only after being sidelined, mistreated, and marginalized by the writers and production team. She chose her choice, sure, but why and at what cost?

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: The New Embrace
1. The Corridors of Empower
2. Heroine Addicts: Feminism and Hollywood
3. Do These Underpants Make Me Look Feminist?
4. The Golden Age of (Feminist) TV
5. Our Beyoncés, Ourselves: Celebrity Feminism

Part Two: The Same Old Normal
6. Killer Waves
7. Empowering Down
8. The Rise of Big Woman
9. Creeping Beauty

Epilogue: The End of Feel-Good Feminism

http://www.easyvegan.info/2016/06/15/we-were-feminists-once-by-andi-zeisler/ show less

I've been curious about this book since the very first time I saw the title. Of course, it didn't hurt that I was a longtime subscriber to Bitch Magazine, a feminist mag that Zeisler co-founded "to provide and encourage an engaged, thoughtful feminist response to mainstream media and popular culture." I was on board for that for a decade or so, until I eventually became too distanced from popular culture to care, and the presentation proved annoyingly challenging to aging eyes. At any rate, show more I thought this was sure to be interesting but back-burnered it. Then, when it became clear that mainstream media was still stuck in the 1950s by the Wall Street Journal having that gall to publish an opinion piece calling out Dr. Jill Biden for using the 'Doctor' as part of her title (non-WSJ link because obvious), I really felt the need to touch base with some feminist deconstruction. These issues are is like weather and erosion, you know--if you don't periodically check and maintain the foundation, it can get degraded over time.

Unfortunately, Zeisler is a more gifted columnist than book-length writer. Like many who write primarily in short formats, each chapter has a different focus. They are annotated, which means for those who enjoy references, it's possible to fact-check her claims. In Part One, Chapter One reviews advertising and feminism, Two examines Hollywood and 'empowered' women through the ages, Three covers the use of feminism in clothing campaigns, Four looks at television, and Five talks about celebrities and naming themselves 'feminist.'

In Part Two, Chapter Six, 'Killer Waves,' looks at the media backlash against the 'waves' of feminism. She begins in the 1980s and mentions such works as Fatal Attraction and Witches of Eastwick, and tries to work in Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court hearings and Anita Hill and Camila Paglia. I suppose she's trying to cover various negative media reactions through the decades, because it ends up at a Tumblr/Facebook discussion about 'Women Against Feminism.'

Chapter Seven discusses the way the word 'empower' has been diluted, which is perhaps the most insightful thing younger women need to understand: "empowerment has become a way to signify a particularly female way of being that's both gender-essentialist--when was the last time you heard, say, a strip-aerobics class for men described as 'empowering'?--and commercially motivated." "Empowerment is both a facet of choice feminism--anything can be a feminist choice if a feminist makes that choice--and a way to circumvent the word 'feminist' itself." This is one of the hardest-hitting chapters, with interesting arguments about how 'choice feminism' has perhaps backed feminism into corner. It looks into positions on the 'stay at home' debates and sex-work and how they were used against 'the movement.' It notes that the label of 'choice feminism' was inflicted upon the movement rather than chosen, and that in some ways, promotes infighting instead of actual action on systemic gender inequity.

Eight is a very short piece on the corporatization of the movement, and how the attempts to institutionalize or develop platforms have been tied to corporate sponsorship. Nine talks about 'erotic capital' (which seems to be a modernization of 'The Beauty Myth'), and Ten is a round-up summation of 'The End of Feel-Good Feminism.'

So I ran into three problems with the book: one philosophical, one thematic and one editorial.

First, philosophical. Zeisler is mixing analysis of marketplace capitalism and cultural story-telling, without really bringing together how they are connected, and using similar framework to discuss both. I'd argue marketplace capitalism is inherently (-ist) of all sorts, and if you are looking for anything else, you are only buying into the model that your value is that of consumer. So images are bound to be more or less problematic depending on how well that marketing group and company is at targeting their demographic at that particular moment in cultural history. Comparing representation in Oil of Olay ads and cinema through the ages doesn't square well.

Two, thematic. On the personal front, I'm not well-versed in media history. I've never been an avid visual media consumer, so I just wasn't as interested in these sections, particularly when it goes into the evolution of women in Hollywood at different periods of television. (On the up side, since Zeisler and I are both GenX, we share a lot of touchstones, although she clearly paid far more attention to pop culture than I ever did.)

Lastly, I think her writing could have used editing for clarity. The ideas were conveyed, but when it came to actual structure, there was something a touch too elaborate about it, something that reminded me of early college writing when it was better to use a three-syllable word than one that was shorter, and to add adjectives and adverbs to bring tension to what is essentially an academic piece. An example:

"Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is feminist if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration. The ego, already so key to effective advertising, is indispensable to empowertising, with its emphasis on the “personal sell” that takes the focus off objective value and places it firmly within the buyer’s sense of individual mythology. What Douglas pinpointed as liberatory narcissism wears a different guise than it did in the 1980s--one that's less concerned with status or possessions than with the very state of womanhood."

I'm not saying that's bad--in fact, there's a very key idea in there, about connecting the ego in advertising to the label of 'feminist'--but it is quite wordy. True empowerment? Clear accessible writing. And while I appreciate a created word, it should be used thoughtfully if you want to be understood, not just thrown in your text as a way to seem hip.

At the end of the day, it was nice to check in with some feminism, and remind myself where my values stand, even if this wasn't quite the book I was hoping for.

links and such at the blog:
https://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/we-were-feminists-once-by-andi-zeisle... show less

Zeisler's analysis of "marketplace feminism" is very interesting but so contemporary that I wonder if I would understand it as well if I hadn't lived through the same pop culture moments as she has. I also will never look at the word "empower" in the same way again.

Strictly speaking, much of this book shouldn't be surprising if a reader was not willfully ignorant of current marketing and consumer trends. However, the pervasive misogyny in US culture (which reveals itself in everything from the reaction to the horrifying prospect of a womman president, to the pathological Gamergate dudes) and the numbers of people (especially young women) who inhabit the happy "post-feminist" fantasy world means that this book contains several much needed kicks up the show more bum. And they are delivered with relish by Zeisler; I anticipate this book by itself should supply me with a year's worth of smack-down quotes for the clueless and callous.

The chief virtue of this book is that Zeisler uses her extensive experience following and critiquing a variety of media trends to connect a lot of dots. She provide a useful and very accessibly overview of how Capitalism marketed products to women, and specifically the different stages in its use of the women's movement to sell stuff.

The focus of her analysis is what she refers to as "marketplace feminism." If you haven't come across the term before, you will recognize the phenomenon instantly when she begins to describe it. If you have ever heard anyone wittering on about "choice" and "empowerment" when trying to sell you a "product for women" (one of the elements of her analysis is the way in which, in contrast to the late 70s and 80s, our kids are actually growing up in a product world that is more highly gendered today) then you have encountered marketplace feminism. There are some undoubted benefits to greater exposure to the concept of feminism, especially after so many years of pretending (in the US at least) that it didn't exist, and Zeisler doesn't hesitate to point to these benefits.

However, the main reason she is pissed about marketplace feminism, and she is right to be pissed, is that what it does is take a movement that since its inception was predicated upon collective action for the collective good, and make it all about individual gratification. In the process, the possibility of making value judgments is all but eliminated. If you are a woman and you are exercising your "choice" then that is awesome and therefore feminist and therefore awesome all over again! The possibility that your choice might be a lousy one that damages others is irrelevant. Likewise, if your purchase makes you feel "empowered" then that is an automatic good; the fact that your powerful pink "This is what a feminist looks like" iPhone cover was probably made by women earning starvation wages in dangerous factory conditions (ditto your phone) is irrelevant. Zeisler argues strongly for moving away from the focus on feminism as something one is, in and for oneself, and putting the emphasis back on feminism as something you do for others.

My only criticism is that I wish Zeisler had spent more time connecting the trends she identifies with larger political and cultural forces. A perhaps inadvertent side-effect of the numerous (often discouraging) examples focused on feminist controversies and marketing, is that it can sometime make it seem as if these elements were created only to try and co-opt and contain feminism. Some of them of course have been applied in exactly that way. But what she is talking about here is a larger shift in modern capitalism. We are way beyond Marx's concept of alienated labor now. What we have instead is what we might call "alienation of affection" in which capitalism takes many of our own best impulses, strips them from us, and sells them back to us. Choice and empowerment should, after all, be unproblematically good things. In a capitalist world they become key mechanisms for moving units of product. And the fact that these are larger trends will be recognizable to anyone who has ever encountered the bright and shiny face of a twenty-something who has just discovered Ayn Rand and is reveling in the fact that at last (At Last!) someone is justifying their own self-absorption.

For these marketing trends to work PR firms need to elicit the power of the mass media, and Zeisler uses her familiarity with the media world to point out the many ways in which feminist concerns are either routinely mis-handled by the mainstream press, or (more disturbingly) artfully manipulated by new media outlets whose only goal is to stir up the kind of controversy that will generate page clicks. This also probably shouldn't be news to anyone, but given the number of my highly educated friends and colleagues who seem powerless to recognize or resist reposting clickbait or falling into the cycnical cycle of the outrage machine, I suspect that Zeisler's examples here will prove shaming. They probably won't change people's practice, however, and here as elsewhere I found myself wishing for embedding the specific feminist project here in a more thoroughgoing criticism of the practices of the larger media sphere and their links with capitalism consumerism.

And yet I still found myself hopeful after reading the book, because the book's subtext is that we were feminists once, but we could be so once again. show less