In the taxi home from the health center where the EKG tech had humiliated me, the first person I called was my mom, who reacted with enough concern to make me realize that I hadn’t been overreacting. She called me back moments later with my dad on the line. My dad is a doctor and was working for a corporate chain of urgent care clinics. Through his professional network, he was able to get the owner of that particular clinic on the line, and he made sure the employee in question was disciplined and that action would be taken by the managers. As an adult I’ve had a hard time letting my parents help me out, but it was such a relief to have them step in. Then I called my therapist, who saw me twice a week until I could talk about it without crying.
I’d started out my twenties desperate for independence. All I wanted when I moved out of my parents’ house was to be my own person, self-sufficient and brave. But as I got older, I realized that my survival hinged on having a strong support network. I could not have gotten through that decade, and all the extreme ups and downs, without my family, friends, and the kind, generous strangers that moved in and out of my life. It took things getting really hard for me to fully appreciate the value of emotional support, but it’s a mistake I’ll never make again.
I’m lucky, though: I’ve never been raped. Or rather I’ve never been raped but I have a thousand stories of close calls. And really, show me someone of any gender who hasn’t been raped and can tell you that without saying “but” right after. I’ll wait.
10 The Cult of Empowerment
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house… And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
—Audre Lorde
In November 2018, I was contacted by two female entrepreneurs about a members-only organization they were starting for women in positions of power. They’d received three million dollars in funding to launch a women’s-only executive network, and they wanted me to join the “founding class,” the first group of people initiated, despite a waiting list thousands long. The purpose, they said, was to provide support to women who had gotten to a point in their careers where there is none: they can’t complain or vent to the people above them, because it’s usually just a male CEO or a male-dominated board, and they can’t express how they truly feel to the people below them, because it’s on them to set the emotional tone.
Women in power are lonely, they reasoned. I didn’t need to be told that, but it was validating to hear. And, they continued, there’s only so much venting you want to dump on your partner about your job every night. This group, with a steep entry fee and secret, chic headquarters in Tribeca modeled after an old boys’ club, would empower women by creating a community of people in the same boat.
I said yes after about five minutes of chatting. I’d been complaining to my therapist for literally years about how alone and without proper mentorship I was. Forever lacking a filter, I told them, “It’s like my therapist put you up to this.”
Listening to the rules and mantras of Chief, as it’s called, it struck me that there was something cultish about it. I got lucky: it is definitely not a cult. But it could have been: the recent headlines were dominated by news of NXIVM, a loosely defined wellness organization that claimed to be oriented around women’s empowerment and instead was revealed to be a multilayered sex trafficking ring controlled by a straight white man that hinged on a female-driven master/slave system, which encouraged the women to brand each other and starve themselves. An extreme comparison, I know, but women who joined were lured in with promises of joining a supersecret, international women’s empowerment group, so it’s not that crazy to think about the similarities in marketing to commercial branding.
And it was branding that was everywhere. In the early aughts, as Ariel Levy famously documented, people began using the word “empowerment” to justify hypersexualized celebrity culture, using things like Girls Gone Wild and sex tapes to claim women’s sexual freedom. And later, in the 2010s, feminism at its most corporate was manipulated to reinforce the oppressive beauty standards we only recently started to name, creating a cultural zeitgeist loosely based on feminism that appeared in branding for all kinds of companies. And it became somewhat cultlike: a cult of empowerment. But who benefited from it? And who controlled it?
It was a difficult line for me to toe. As an editor, I wasn’t directly selling anything, but I did work for a business, and that business needed to make money to stay alive. Part of the way money was made was through audience growth, and my audience growth strategy was centered on wokeness—but the people who owned the companies I worked for weren’t ever part of the groups I was looking to empower. In a way I had to separate that knowledge from my thoughts about my work, in order to not start mind-fucking about who was ultimately profiting from my endlessly long days and sleepless nights. At least it was privately owned and not supporting a larger, evil corporation, I supposed.
Once I quit my job and had some time to myself, I started to notice that there were countless brands that had begun to use the most basic tenets of feminism in order to attract consumers and remain relevant. I saw them on subway ads, in editorial articles, on Instagram. While I’d been putting my women’s studies background into practice at media companies, empowerment had become an instantly recognizable, brand-able aesthetic. Cheerful yet minimal. Millennial pink. A certain set of alternating blocky and cursive fonts. Inoffensive, shareable, Instagram friendly. It had keywords: Feminist AF. Badass babe. Girl boss. Girl crush. Girl power. Kick-ass. Boundary breaking.
One problem with attaching such clear branding to an otherwise important and powerful movement is how easy it is to co-opt. Anyone can take these basic elements and apply them to any brand, and suddenly, at a glance, you can assume that their mission is vaguely related to women’s empowerment, and that by supporting them financially or socially, you are in some way participating in the revolution, or at least, a revolution, or something adjacent to one.
Perhaps the grossest example of this is the way feminism has been repurposed by the wellness industry (if you can call it that—I’m not sure who gets to define what counts as “well”). There are the quasi-cults of SoulCycle and Equinox, which sell a hyperwoke lifestyle alongside high-intensity workouts, as though one is connected to the other; both are owned by someone who has helped raise money for the Trump campaign, despite the progressivism touted by the branding of both. And in connecting physical fitness to a political ideal, a new kind of drive is harnessed: the idea that yes, everybody is perfect and deserving of equality, but you are imperfect and the only way to fix it is by getting in really, really good shape.
And while wealthy workout junkies were pedaling faster and faster toward a manufactured feeling of empowerment at SoulCycle, other brands were selling feminism in a way that actively harmed consumers, like Flat Tummy Co, which sells dietary supplements that allegedly cause weight loss. It has millions of followers on social media and endorsements from various Kardashians, Cardi B, and even Amber Rose, founder of the feminist, sex-positive antirape SlutWalk rally. On social media, Flat Tummy Co’s profile picture has a light-pink background and in white, the symbol for “greater than.” The “real women” featured in before and after photos are mostly curvy women of color. The people in their ads, too, are women of color. In their text-driven posts, they call their followers “babe.” Alongside saturated pink photos of women working out they have cheeky posts about eating tacos and burritos and drinking wine, lest anyone think that they’re trying to shame you for eating. On their website, under “Our Mission,” they list their values as follows: “We’re real. We’re relatable. We’re inspiring. We’re inclusive. We’re supportive. We’re empowering.” Cover the URL and this could be the mission statement for a social justice nonprofit.
The brand, which was founded by a straight white couple, started to make national headlines when it put up a billboard in Times Square blatantly encouraging women, or, sorry, �
��girls,” to tell their food cravings to #SUCKIT by having a Flat Tummy lollipop instead of a meal. Aesthetically, it mimicked an ad for Thinx (the period underwear), and the verbiage was not unlike what you’d see in a newly feminist women’s magazine.
It was widely accepted that the teas, powders, and lollipops the brand sells were essentially laxatives, which can be harmful to consume regularly and especially harmful to consume in place of real food. It seemed like a no-brainer that feminism and diet culture are inherently at odds with each other. And yet Flat Tummy’s follower count—and revenue—continued to climb, a success that experts said was tied to an innovative manipulation of Instagram’s algorithm to target twenty- and thirtysomething women in the US and Canada. If the words “empowering” and “inclusive” can be applied to a garbage fire of this magnitude, we’re all fucked.
Few celebrities have been as publicly critical about Flat Tummy Co as Jameela Jamil, Nylon’s December 2018 cover star best known for her role as Tahani on The Good Place. That was one of the reasons I’d chosen her for the cover. I loved the way she repeatedly slammed Flat Tummy Co on social media with headline-generating captions like, “GOD I hope all these celebrities all shit themselves in public, the way the poor women who buy this nonsense upon their recommendation do.” She spoke out about her own history with disordered eating and how irresponsible it is for celebrities to promote products like Flat Tummy tea to their impressionable fans. It was incredibly brave to be as honest as she was, especially about the over-photoshopping of celebrity bodies, and the silence from her peers was perhaps even more noteworthy than her messaging: the fact that no one else was yelling about it was part of the problem.
For our cover shoot, Jameela’s management team made it clear that she did not want to be photoshopped. Jameela wanted us to know that she was proud of her cellulite and stretch marks and didn’t mind if they were featured, a perspective that we all found inspiring. Meanwhile, though, over the course of production for the story, the internet at large seemed to turn on her; writer Katie Heaney tweeted, “I think it’s okay if photoshop is your number one feminist issue if you’re nineteen and in your first women’s studies class. After that, it’s weird.” Dozens of media feminists piled on the criticism, critiquing the way Jamil was calling out women for being photoshopped rather than the people choosing to use the tool.
The irony, though, is that there was absolutely nothing that we would have retouched on her, anyway. Not that we generally did a lot of retouching (I too am adamantly opposed to it), but sometimes a celebrity would request a specific zit be removed or some such thing. In the photos, none of those alleged flaws—her cellulite and stretch marks—actually showed. Jameela is, objectively, one of the most beautiful women alive, with glowy skin that appeared poreless and thick wavy hair; she’s tall and fit, too. For all of her truly wonderful messaging about how everyone has flaws, Jameela herself appeared to have none. It brought me right back to trying to cast women for “My Beautiful Flaw” all those years ago. Her so-called physical imperfections didn’t make her any less objectively attractive. It’s a strange way to repurpose body positivity—yes, everyone is entitled to feel good about themselves, including normatively gorgeous celebrities. But that doesn’t really do anything to help with the goals of the movement, which is about plus-size women and the discrimination they face.
Kristin Iversen, who wrote the story, brought it up to Jameela in their interview:
I asked Jamil how she responded to people who protest that it’s unfair for a woman who must know that she is universally considered beautiful to be leading the charge for a Photoshop-free world. She responded by kicking off her canvas espadrilles, and waving her decidedly un-pedicured feet in the air, indicating their imperfections, pointing out a specific toe as particularly unattractive. And she said, “My ass looks like a map of the world. I don’t have a lack of gravity. I get spots. I have crooked lower teeth; I’ve never gotten my teeth whitened. I have cellulite.”
Personally, I find the fact that she literally had to take a shoe off to prove that she has flaws to be equal parts funny and upsetting. And also, while Jameela cited her lower teeth and specific toe as evidence that she’s not perfect, she requested that they not photograph her feet, and she smiled with her mouth closed in photos, and she wore a substantial amount of face makeup. As requested, we didn’t retouch the photos, but ultimately, the parts of her body that she doesn’t like weren’t pictured anyway, so it didn’t feel like any sort of big win for the cause.
In response to further criticism from other media that a conventionally attractive woman maybe doesn’t have a right to criticize other people for being airbrushed, Jamil addressed the fact that retouching isn’t just about looking artificially thinner and younger, tweeting, “But when you’re a brown woman whose skin gets lightened and whose ethnic nose gets made smaller and who gets thinned out all without your permission making you feel bad when you have to look in the mirror or meet people in real life and you feel like a liar you maybe get my point?” The racism behind a lot of retouching decisions is very real, and I wish she’d discussed it more in our cover interview, or even at all. Women, at this point, seem to fully understand what is being done to celebrities to make them look superhuman; what’s less discussed is the way Photoshop is used to obscure someone’s race. For many women of color, that has historically meant skin lightening, and as Jamil mentioned, changing actual facial structure. For others, most infamously Kylie Jenner but recently a ton of white Instagram influencers, it has meant Photoshop and Facetune as an HD form of blackface, another tool for cultural appropriation.
Look: In the interest of the idea that we are all indeed just human, it’s not really fair to expect an airtight argument from anyone for anything, especially someone who is a celebrity and therefore constantly under a microscope. I’ll (thankfully) never experience the pressure she’s under, and can’t know what that must feel like, and further what it must do to your ability to be absolutely brilliant and succinct in your messaging at any given moment. It does seem like she is earnestly trying to do good; as I was writing this chapter, I noticed that a teenage fan had tweeted at her asking for advice on how to cope with suicidal thoughts, and Jamil had actually directly answered her, recommending eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. And ultimately, as Kristin wrote in the cover story, “This picking apart of Jamil’s physicality, whether due to a search for imperfections or as proof that she has virtually none, feels uncomfortably like part of the problem, and besides the point.”
And that point, as I see it, is this: nearly all women, even the most universally beautiful women in the world, think that they have flaws. I’ve never met a woman who thinks otherwise. On another cover shoot featuring an objectively gorgeous young woman, we asked if there were any angles she’d like us to avoid photographing, and she said, “I hate myself from all angles, so do whatever you want.”
In previous decades, this attitude made us easy targets for advertising language that promised to make us less flawed (and advertisements that confirmed we were flawed in the first place). In the 2010s and beyond, it makes us easy targets for faux-feminist branding, the kind that promises to empower us, to make us feel better about ourselves. It’s the same message, just packaged differently. Corporations have learned the language of contemporary digital feminism, and they’re using it to stay relevant to consumers who are sick of being made to feel worse about themselves. They’re selling our own ideas back to us, as a millennial-pink means to an end that hasn’t changed one bit.
In 1984 Audre Lorde warned against using the master’s tools to dismantle his house. With the commercialization of female empowerment, though, the master is using the tools of the resistance—tools that activists spent decades fashioning—to build a new house, erecting walls and a roof around the movement so insidiously that we hardly realize we’re being trapped.
And the master can take lots of different forms. Though of course straight, white, ci
sgender men sit at the top of our culture’s power structure, other identities can do their bidding; white women, for example, continue to be agents of the patriarchy by refusing to prioritize racial diversity in their work, by calling the cops on black teenagers, by not believing survivors of sexual assault, or by voting for Trump. And women every day are starting their own brands using the language and aesthetics of empowerment in order to appeal to young, feminist-identified women, without ever making clear what exactly is so empowering about their product. It’s the echoes of the parts of second-wave feminism that were found to be so problematic by lesbians, people of color, trans people, working-class people, and sex workers; it’s Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate rich white lady Lean In feminism, a flattening of feminist thought that neglects to factor race and class into a conversation about power and instead reduces people to just two categories, man or woman. And I don’t think that being woman-owned and operated makes your company inherently feminist; the female founder and CEO of Thinx was eventually accused of sexually harassing the women who worked for her, after all (though ultimately the case was privately settled). Power is power, and if wielded for personal financial gain and little else, empowerment is nothing more than a marketing strategy.
I’ve often wondered, Isn’t it good that Sandberg applied feminist ideals to the corporate structure? Isn’t that at least a step in the right direction? Well, sure, sort of. But also, no. Sandberg’s work at Facebook is certainly not a beacon of intersectionality, from what we continue to learn about its participation in the Russian hacking of the 2016 election and her knowledge of it, to testimony from black employees about the company’s systematic racism.
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