One of my least favorite experiences in life is having an emotional reaction — laughter, sadness, literally any feeling whatsoever — to something and then realizing it’s an ad.
Personally, I enjoy living with the lie that I am too smart to be emotionally manipulated by corporations. But of course, none of us are. That’s because people who make advertisements are talented and good at their jobs, which are to make you feel stuff so that you will buy stuff.
And over the past decade or so, advertisements, particularly those targeted to women but increasingly for things like, say, highlighter markers, have harnessed feminism and empowerment as marketing tactics — tactics that work because feminism, in that same time span, has become popular.
The precise kind of feminism that corporate institutions are championing is the subject of a new book, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Author Sarah Banet-Weiser, a professor of media and communication at the London School of Economics, spent five years researching and writing the book, which draws a connection between what she calls “popular feminism” — the unthreatening, capitalist-friendly kind — and “popular misogyny,” the backlash to it, which she argues operates as a kind of distorted mirror image to popular feminism. It touches on everything from the misogynist shame tactics used against Monica Lewinsky to the toxic geek masculinity of Gamergate to Sheryl Sandberg’s controversial Lean In.
I spoke to Banet-Weiser over the phone about the book, and specifically about the politics of feminist advertising and the role of feminism in capitalism. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
Rebecca Jennings
You started working on this book in 2012. What was happening at the time that made you want to take on this project?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Between 2012 and 2014, I really saw an explosion of what I began to call popular feminist advertising — big companies like Dove creating these ads [that were] critical of the beauty industry and still wanting to sell products. Corporations were latching onto this idea that women and girls didn’t feel confident. You have these ad campaigns focusing on low self-esteem for girls; results from tech companies that say that women are really underrepresented; new funding for girls to be educated in STEM fields, and things like Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code.
I also started noticing this increase in membership in men’s rights organizations. Every time I investigated something that I would consider part of popular feminism, I would find some kind of hostile and often vicious response to it, whether that’s just comments on a YouTube video or, like, the Fappening.
Rebecca Jennings
One of the themes in the book is how what you define as popular feminism is essentially neoliberal feminism, or the idea that the problems women face can be solved within the individual. What are the dangers of that?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
The biggest problem with popular feminism is that we’re dealing with sexist and patriarchal structures — we still don’t make as much money as men, there still is this discrimination in jobs, rape culture is rampant. My problem with much of popular feminism is that instead of challenging that, it says basically, “Look, this is the situation. It’s up to you to just be confident. You can practice your power poses in front of a mirror and then go into a job interview.”
I have a daughter who I talk to about being confident. I like to be confident, but I think what we need to deal with is not just whether or not certain women who are in privileged positions can be confident. We have to deal with the structure that made us not be confident in the first place.
Rebecca Jennings
You argue that feminism and “feminist” products become popular when they don’t actually challenge deep structural inequalities. So do you think that part of the reason feminism has been cool in the past few years is precisely because of that?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
I think that many, many women and many men actually get a lot out of patriarchy. But many women also want to challenge certain parts of it, but not all of it. Popular feminism allows them to kind of do that, to feel like “I’m confident, I have power, but I’m not actually going to go and try to appeal to the state to change wage discrimination or racism.”
Rebecca Jennings
The book also argues that it’s only one type of girl who is being targeted with “empowerment” campaigns — the white, middle-class kind. Do you think it’s because they’re the ones thought of as having a lot more spending power in the future?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
The reason we invest in them for their future is because they’re going to hopefully be the future female CEOs. They’re hyper-visible because they have potential. A lot of the investment in STEM and [anti-]bullying has been about how the middle-class white girl became the girl who was under threat, [rather than the working-class girl of color].
Rebecca Jennings
In chapter one, you talk about how “empowering” ads like Always’s #LikeAGirl campaign are actually about creating empowered consumers out of women. How do we navigate how moving these ads sometimes can be while also recognizing the fact that they only exist to get you to buy stuff?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Advertising consumer culture is where we have hopes and desire and fears and anxieties. I think we need to take it seriously, but we also have to recognize that it is about a profit. I think it’s great to have a 20-year-old walking around the street wearing something that says, “Empower women.” [But] I think we need to not leave it at that. That’s what I worry about with the consumption: that it just stays about visibility. The T-shirt actually becomes the politics rather than taking a step further.
Rebecca Jennings
This tone of “sentimental earnestness” that you attribute to empowering ads is so tricky because for a lot of people, it works. But you also contrast it with the era of postfeminist “girl power” ads that we saw in the ’80s and ’90s. Can you discuss the relationship between the two?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Postfeminism recognizes that feminism was important but that there’s no longer a need for it. [One example of a postfeminist ad is] the Victoria’s Secret model where she’s like, “Hello, boys.” [The message] is like, “I’m so liberated that I can objectify myself.” A lot of them were also ironic, because irony was a big trope in advertising in general.
Then what happens in the late ’90s is that you start to have a lot of statistics about girls not doing well in STEM fields, rape culture increasing, the number of female CEOs not growing. Some people talked about this as being a crisis in girlhood. You’ve got Queen Bees and Wannabes, Raising Ophelia, all those books.
So then advertising thought, “Oh, actually, we do need feminism,” but of course, advertising wants a certain kind of feminism, not a feminism that actually challenges capitalism or patriarchy. You have these very earnest ads. I’ve seen [the Always campaign] so many times and I still tear up. They’re really smart.
There’s this CoverGirl ad with Queen Latifah, Janelle Monáe, and Katy Perry, who say things like, “They say girls can’t rock. I rock.” “They say girls can’t run a business. I run a business.” Then at the end, Ellen DeGeneres is like, “They say girls can’t do it. Just be yourself and you can. Easy, breezy, beautiful, CoverGirl,” or something.
I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna show this to my daughter, who’s 13. This is gonna be the most powerful parenting moment of my life.” I was going to talk to her about the hypocrisy of CoverGirl about saying, “Girls can’t unless they’re beautiful.” So I played it for her, and before I could say anything, she goes, “Oh, my god, mom. I’m gonna watch that every day before school.” It meant something to her. It really resonated with her.
Rebecca Jennings
That’s so interesting. You were talking about how when phrases like “be yourself” are used in advertising, it basically relates to overcoming your own self-esteem so that you can succeed within these traditional parameters of success, like fame and money. The women in the commercial are all very successful, famous women who have succeeded in business, and I think your argument was the problem with that is that, again, it’s still just holding up these same capitalist structures.
Sarah Banet-Weiser
One of the things I was trying to ask is, there’s all this discourse on empowerment, but what are we empowering women and girls to do? We’re not empowering them to become better feminists. Instead, we’re saying, “What you should really do to be empowered is make sure that you’re making a lot of money.” “Empower” can become just a thing that you can put on a necklace.
Rebecca Jennings
This relationship is also reflected in the body positivity movement — it literally keeps the focus on the female body rather than suggesting, “Hey, maybe the way your body looks isn’t all that important.” Can you explain how that fits in with what you call the “economy of visibility”?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
Body positivity in a widening field of beauty is actually really important, but even within that, the kinds of bodies that we still see are typically white and thin and very conventionally beautiful. What you have then is misogyny that comes up as a response to body positivity, which is about shaming — fat-shaming, slut-shaming.
The economy of visibility is this practice that says, “You should put yourself out there and just love your body no matter what.” [But when] you put yourself out there, some asshole comments, “You’re so fat, I’d never sleep with you,” or something. It becomes this market of shame. Body positivity is important, but when it’s circulated as popular feminism in these media platforms, we also have to contend with that other part.
Rebecca Jennings
In the preface, you talk about how the election of Trump was a huge moment in writing this book. Then at the end, you discuss Hillary Clinton and the feminist T-shirts that were so much a part of the campaign. Again, the problem is when the politics stops with a T-shirt. Did you see the Clinton campaign as an example of that?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
It’ll be interesting to see what happens this week in terms of the US elections. There are a lot of people who have argued that Hillary Clinton isn’t a feminist in many ways, but she was the target of misogyny. By the fact that she was the target of misogyny, she kind of became the symbol for popular feminism.
The T-shirts, “I’m with her” or “Pantsuit Nation,” all that, when it’s just about the circulation of that message, then you can see how that becomes a feminist project in and of itself rather than something that is a route to making change. The visibility becomes the politics itself, and it just ends there. It kind of absorbs itself.
Rebecca Jennings
The last line of the book is, “What we need is a different sort of transformation, one that transfigures the rage of popularity into a powerful rage, an intersectional, collective rage, directed at a racist and sexist structure. We need a lasting feminist rage.” What do you think that might look like?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
I don’t have the answer, unfortunately, but I have given it a lot of thought. I think one of the reasons feminism became so popular is that it’s very happy. It’s cheery. It’s not an angry feminism. It’s Christian Dior, and necklaces, and Etsy, and cute mugs that say “male tears.” I think that’s great, but I do think that in order for it to be popular in the way it has been, it can’t be alienating. Feminism should be alienating, because it’s challenging those who hold power.
Female rage is something that I feel like is hopefully becoming something we can express more readily. We should be focused on an angry feminism, or one that just respects the anger that comes with living in a patriarchal world with a president like Trump, that that makes us angry and it’s okay to be angry. We need to figure out how to channel the anger into something. Channeling cheerfulness is easy because we get to put on a T-shirt. But channeling rage is harder.
Rebecca Jennings
So if popular feminism spurred the rise of popular misogyny, what do you think feminist rage would spur?
Sarah Banet-Weiser
That’s the risk, right? It’s the happy feminism that got a response from incels. What is the rage going to do? It’s the risk we have to take. But complacency is worse. We shouldn’t let the risk of misogyny hold back our rage, because then change isn’t going to happen.