by Andi Zeisler
For a time, the campaign was a smash: “Nonbridal” ring sales increased 15 percent in 2004, and in 2005 the campaign won the Gold EFFIE award from the New York American Marketing Association for “exceeding its objectives of bringing ring growth into line with total diamond jewelry growth.”7 The founder of consumer behavior–tracking organization America’s Research Group told NBC News in January 2004 that the key to the rings’ success was the sense of empowered entitlement among female consumers. “The days of getting permission are really over, and that’s what’s really expanded the buying power of women over the last 10 years.”8
It turned out to be a short run. The brisk trade in right-hand rings was slowed down in part by the rising awareness of the blood-diamond scourge in Angola, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children as young as five were forced into mining labor in order to fund civil wars in those countries. But stateside, things had changed as well: in the years after 9/11, there was a new emphasis on stability and domesticity, much of which envisioned a re-centering of traditional gender roles. Magazines theorized that the terrorist attacks had been a wake-up call for men emasculated by American culture, and declared the return of the cowboy as heart-throb; George W. Bush played at comic-book fortitude with his florid references to “evildoers” and chest-pounding entreaties to “Bring ’em on!” Publishing houses and women’s magazines were suddenly all about the “art of domesticity”; sleek scouring tools and aromatic floor cleaners became stars of a new prestige-housekeeping category of consumer goods. Marriage was on the country’s mind: the Bush administration, egged on by conservative-Christian advocacy groups, dedicated $1.5 million toward encouraging low-income couples to marry, but was quick to note that the push was for straight couples only. At the other end of the spectrum, splashy celebrity nuptials like those of Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, David and Victoria Beckham, and Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner were obsessively chronicled in a glut of new wedding-industry media, and even credited for bumping up the overall marriage rate. And despite Bush’s fierce “protection” of heterosexual marriage, the wedding-industrial complex welcomed gay marriage with open arms and a slew of rainbow-themed product. By 2014, the new trend in “nonmarital” rings, according to Vogue, was single women wearing wedding band–esque baubles on their left-hand ring finger for a psychological sense of belonging. So much for upending tradition.
I Am Strong. I Am Invincible.
I Am Good for the Bottom Line.
“If you let me play,” said the little girl, “I will like myself more.” “I will have more self-confidence.” “I will be 60 percent less likely to get breast cancer.” “I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to be.” “I will be more likely to leave a man who beats me.” “I will learn to be strong.”
It was 1995, and Nike was reaching out a well-muscled hand to female consumers with its heart-tugging “If You Let Me Play” campaign, which turned the studied benefits of young girls playing team sports into a girl-power salvo. Using research collected by the Women’s Sports Foundation, the brand packed decades of rebuttal to sports as a “boy thing” into thirty seconds of airtime. The spots featured a multicultural array of preteen girls one by one voicing these statements to the camera, as though addressing viewers’ complicity in marginalizing girls’ sports. It was one of Nike’s most successful campaigns ever, and served to align the brand with feminism, education, and progressivism without compromising its bottom line.
“It wasn’t advertising. It was truth,” said Janet Champ, who served as Nike’s chief copywriter during the campaign.9 Either way, it was a new move for a buzzy brand whose cutting-edge ads featuring characters like Spike Lee’s Mars Blackmon (“It’s gotta be the shoes!”) were definitely cool, but not usually quite so earnest. And the plaintive, fourth-wall-breaking dialogue worked even better than Nike had hoped. Mary Schmitt, who covered the campaign for The Kansas City Star, reported:
The ad has been running on television for about a month, and the phones in the Nike headquarters have been ringing off the hook the whole time. . . . Many of the callers are mothers whose voices break when they say they want their daughters to have the opportunities they never had. Some are fathers whose girls are entering those arenas previously reserved for boys only. Some are coaches or teachers who have seen the differences sports can make in the lives of young girls. And some are women who never had the chance to find out.10
But despite Champ’s heartfelt description, this was advertising, and very successful advertising at that. Unless you’re a soulless pod person or an actual robot, you’ve probably been moved to tears by an ad or two. (I don’t care what your product is, if the TV commercial makes use of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” I will be a soggy heap by the end of it.) Still, no matter how many hankies the ad necessitates, it doesn’t change the goal: to make you buy things.11
Nike followed up a year later with a twist on “If You Let Me Play” called “There’s a Girl Being Born in America.” Over a similar montage of young, multicultural girls mugging for and staring down the camera, the copy’s straightforward narrative again invokes sports as a means for girls to thrive in the world: “There’s a girl being born in America/And someone will give her a doll/And someone will give her a ball/And then someone will give her a chance.” In a way, the ad’s power came from depoliticizing the very reason that girls were (still grudgingly, in many cases) given a chance to play sports: Title IX, the 1972 bill that, among other things, mandated that schools receiving federal funding provide equal support for men’s and women’s sports. In both Nike ads, the copy turned demands into requests, appealing to invisible men—the “you” and “someone” referenced in the copy—and effectively blurring the role that feminist agitation played in the rise of women’s sports. Women and girls may have fought for and won the right to play sports, but “There’s a Girl Being Born in America” was effective in pointing out that the social stigma still, often, involved asking for permission.
The sister campaigns signaled a move on Nike’s part to honor the female experience in sports by simply normalizing it—a smart move given that, at the time, the pop culture playing field was in a place of flux with regard not only to women’s images, but to those of girls. (By 1997, the company’s prioritizing of the female demographic was rewarded with 43 percent of the athletic-footwear market.) If the 1970s and ’80s leveraged women’s lib into a marketplace of self-actualized femininity, the following decade found it with younger consumers in mind. The 1990s brought media focus to a simmering “girl crisis” articulated in bestselling books like Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, Peggy Orenstein’s Schoolgirls, and Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan’s Meeting at the Crossroads, all of which warned of a precipitous drop in girls’ self-esteem at puberty and a host of damaging results. Study after study found that even smart, sporty, confident girls with plenty of familial support hit puberty and with it a wall of insecurity, self-doubt, and body shame. Suddenly, girls’ lib seemed just as crucial as women’s lib—and, incidentally, just as simple to market.
From Xena the Warrior Princess and her younger sidekick (and maybe-lover?), Gabrielle; to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the tiny, animated PowerPuff Girls; to bodacious video game explorer Lara Croft and a ballsy new breed of Bond girls, action heroines were on the ascent in the mid- to late 1990s. An uptick in smart, self-sufficient, and justice-minded heroines wasn’t meant to be a magical bridge for the real-life confidence gap written about by Pipher, Gilligan, and others, but it did fill a crucial void of visibility. Young women likely weren’t that interested in reading the dog-eared books of feminist theory and popular psychology that may have bolstered the awareness and self-esteem of their mothers and aunts. But they could, and did, have access to characters on TV, in comics, and in movies that modeled strength in the quotidian, no-big-whoop way that boys had always had.
They also had new iterations of old advertising messages. Take Barbie, that pink plastic vessel for cultural assumption
s and expectations about women. Since her debut in 1964, she’d been a lounge singer, a career woman, a bikini model, even a mother. In 1992, as Teen Talk Barbie, she became embroiled in controversy: each Teen Talk doll was preprogrammed with a limited number of phrases, several of which underestimated both the intelligence and the interests of teen girls. In a time of both the girl-crisis narrative and the flowering Riot Grrrl movement, no one had time for toymakers who programmed Barbie to say things like “Math class is tough!” and “Let’s plan our dream wedding!” The American Association of University Women promptly issued a statement to Mattel noting that “preteen girls most likely to play with Teen Talk Barbie are at the highest risk for losing confidence in their math ability,” and requesting that the phrase be struck from the dolls’ lexicon. An even better response came from a group of guerrilla culture jammers calling themselves the Barbie Liberation Organization, who subverted somewhere between three hundred and five hundred Teen Talk Barbies and G.I. Joe “Talking Duke” dolls by switching their voice boxes so that Barbie growled “Eat lead, Cobra!” while Duke exclaimed “Let’s go shopping!”
By 1999, Barbie’s fortieth-anniversary year, the doll was talking a whole new game. The impossibly stacked fashion plate (she was originally based on a sexy German cartoon character) was rejiggered as a “lifestyle brand for girls,” and a new series of ads did the impossible, selling Barbie without an actual doll. The campaign featured black-and-white photos of human girls playing hockey and basketball, with taglines including “Girls Rule” and “Become Your Own Hero.” Only the unassuming pink Barbie logo in the corner of the ads revealed Mattel’s involvement.
The campaign wasn’t the only deliberate move away from Barbie’s math-challenged past. The year 1999 also brought the launch of Mattel’s official partnership with Girls Inc., a then-new nonprofit whose mission statement is “inspiring girls to be strong, smart, and bold.” In exchange for a donation of $1.5 million from Mattel, Girls Inc. shared insights and expertise gleaned from their work with real-life girls that would, in theory, make Barbie less likely to remain a ditzy PR nightmare. Isabel Carter Stewart, the executive director of Girls Inc., announced that the organization was “delighted to have Mattel—a corporation that has such a tremendous impact on the lives of girls—as our partner. Their products help girls dream about the future, and our programs help girls prepare and plan to meet their goals.”
On Mattel’s part, there was initial reluctance to enmesh the corporate vision of Barbie with the tacit feminism in Girls Inc.’s language. As a spokeswoman admitted to the Washington Post in March 1999, “There were a lot of people [at Mattel] who bristled at the [phrase] ‘strong, smart, and bold.’ They thought that was too strong for Barbie.”12 But as former Hues and Adios Barbie editor Ophira Edut pointed out at the time, Mattel had recently seen both dwindling sales figures and a rise—thanks in part to the Internet—of feminist writing that positioned Barbie as a bane of female self-esteem. A grab for relevancy, not to mention some of the sweet girl-power cash that was changing hands during that decade, must have seemed like a winning move; though, as Edut pointed out, “Ads telling girls they can ‘be anything’ or ‘become their own hero’ are only wrapping the Mattel message—buy our products now!—in a vaguely girl-positive package.”13 (One of the partnership’s first results was President Barbie, who was available in Latina and African-American versions in addition to the blonde-bobbed Caucasian one, and came with both a blue power suit and a red formal gown in order to emphasize her bipartisanship.) Things got rocky when the ever-alert fundamentalists of the American Family Association decided that American Girl dolls, also owned by Mattel, were tainted by association; the AMA petitioned American Girl to disassociate, calling Girls Inc. a “pro-abortion, pro-lesbian advocacy group.” The partnership ended, and though presidential-candidate Barbie was revived briefly in 2008 and 2012, becoming her own hero took a backseat to becoming a fashion model, a princess, and a “pet stylist.”
Your Body, Your (Consumer) Choice
The history of drawing on feminist language and theory to sell products has been driven by the idea that female consumers are empowered by their personal consumer choices—indeed, that choice, rather than being a means to an end, is the end itself. The idea that it matters less what you choose than that you have the right to choose is the crux of “choice feminism,” whose rise coincided with the rapid, near-overwhelming expansion of consumer choice that began in the 1980s. Consumption, always associated with status, became elevated as a measure of liberation and swelled with the self-obsession of the privileged but insecure. Tom Wolfe identified this dynamic in his coinage of the term “Me Decade,” and later satirized it in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Historian Christopher Lasch, author of the 1979 bestseller The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, laid the enshrinement of a cycle of consumption and neediness at the doorstep of the advertising and marketing industries, but also excoriated left-wing movements, feminism included, as enablers. (The temperamentally antifeminist Lasch would later target burgeoning marketplace feminism in his posthumously published collection Women and the Common Life, writing that “the feminist movement, far from civilizing corporate capitalism, has been corrupted by it. It has adopted mercantile habits of thought as its own.”)
The feminist cultural historian and media critic Susan J. Douglas has noted, for instance, that the success of advertising to women in the 1980s hinged on its effective pairing of status and power with liberation. As neoliberal, greed-is-good, if-I-have-an-umbrella-it-must-not-be-raining rhetoric became the common tongue of the overclass, luxury beauty products, designer labels, and exercise regimens (Buns of Steel, anyone?) became liberatory achievements, rather than mere consumer goods. “For women in the age of Reagan,” wrote Douglas, “elitism and narcissism merged in a perfect appeal to forget the political already, and get back to the personal, which you might be able to do something about.”14 The representations of choice in a time of tacit postfeminism translated neatly into what could be called “empowertising”—an advertising tactic of lightly invoking feminism in acts of exclusively independent consuming.
Take the infamous 1994 billboards for Wonderbra that featured model Eva Herzigova looking down in delight at her suddenly pneumatic breasts swelling out of a scalloped black bra, alongside the words “Hello Boys.” The Wonderbra had been sold in the UK since the mid-1960s, but sales rocketed up thanks to the billboards. The ads worked so well in part because they were tongue-in-check (others in the series read “Look me in the eyes and tell me you love me” and “. . . Or are you just happy to see me?”), but also because they assumed a level of what feminist theorist Angela McRobbie calls “feminism taken into account”—a belief that the movement’s success has rendered it irrelevant as something to be considered in shaping culture. You can almost hear the rationale proffered in the Wonderbra billboard concept review: “This would seem sexist if we didn’t know better, but we do know better, and because women know we know better, this is, in fact, empowering.” If Herzigova, Kate Moss, and the millions of other women who sent Wonderbras flying out of department stores were making the choice to wear this underpinning, and they’re exhibiting sexual agency in doing so, such logic went, what’s more feminist than that?
There are no concrete numbers on how many consumers indulged that postmodern reading of the ads, but based on Herzigova’s own reflections twenty years later, probably not a ton. Recalling the billboards (which, in 2011, were voted the most iconic ever by Britain’s Outdoor Media Centre), she initially told the UK’s Mail Online, “My Wonderbra campaign empowered women. . . . It didn’t degrade them like some said.”15 But in the same article, Herzigova complained that when she tried to shift from modeling to acting, Hollywood executives wanted to check out her underthings first: “I met people who said, ‘Yes, we can talk about the movie over dinner.’ I was, like, ‘What dinner? I can just read the script here.’” The fact that the suppos
edly empowering ad did nothing to chip away at the routine sexualization of women—that it might have further galvanized it, even—didn’t seem to register.
By the mid-2000s, the theme of consuming as liberatory seemed to have gone full-on absurdist, typified by diet-frozen-entrée purveyor Lean Cuisine’s 2004 pitch for its new frozen pizza: “The vote. The stay-at-home-dad. The push-up bra. The Lean Cuisine pizza.” Implying that the push-up bra is a women’s-rights development on par with political enfranchisement—and that a diet frozen pizza is equivalent to a revisioning of domestic gender roles—makes it seem like there’d be nowhere left to go in the shameless-sales-pitch department. And yet, there was always more to co-opt for fun and profit: that same year, an ad for Barely There lingerie posited that if Betsy Ross had been invited to sign the Declaration of Independence, she would definitely have wanted to do so in well-fitting undergarments. In the TV ad, model Shalom Harlow, as Ross, announces, “I want panties that don’t ride up so I can sign the Declaration of Independence and then go to the fireworks. I wasn’t invited to those events. I was home upholstering a chair. But if I were there, I’d be Barely There,” an assertion that was apparently on-brand enough that no one involved in its creation realized that it was also batshit nonsensical.
And, in 2006, as a wave of state restrictions on both abortion and contraception rolled across the United States (including a controversial statewide ban in South Dakota), Gardenburger decided to debut its new tagline, “My Body, My Gardenburger.” It was part of a winky campaign that borrowed famous progressive slogans (“Make Gardenburgers, Not War,” “Peace, Love, and Hominy”), but there had to have been someone working for the company aware that it was a particularly terrible time to be conflating consumer choice with bodily autonomy.
Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration. The ego, already so key to effective advertising, is indispensible 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.