by Andi Zeisler
Let’s consider chocolate ads, since we all know that women’s love for chocolate is rivaled only by our passions for shoe shopping and scented candles. Ads that portrayed women as constantly fiending for it, rationalizing it, and sexualizing it were part of the monetization of women’s lib in the 1960s and ’70s—the new, independent woman, ads implied, could get almost everything she needed from chocolate. But both sexual double standards and the belief that women should remain restrained in all appetites have held fast, so in the 1990s and early 2000s, the empowerment potential of chocolate hinged on both transgression—portraying both chocolate and its female eaters as “sinful” and “decadent”—and absolution. In the former category, there were ads that featured women draped in yards and yards of rippling brown silk, as well as lots of references to “melting.” In the latter, there were chocolates who played the role of the cheerleading best friend in a romantic comedy, assuring you that everything was great. The individually wrapped Dove Promises, for instance, each contain an almost aggressively peppy affirmation: “Keep your chin up and a stiff upper lip. Maybe stick your ass out a little,” advises one. “Draw yourself a bath,” urges another. (Because if there’s anything a woman likes more than chocolate and shoe shopping, it’s a bath. Can I get an amen?) A third simply says, “You go girl! You deserve this”—since there’s always the chance that even on the brink of popping a wee chocolate square, women will be consumed with so much self-doubt and anxiety that an extra push from a candy wrapper is required.
Seems harmless enough—but these messages are one part of the larger picture of female consumers encouraged to think of consumption as striking a blow for women’s equality rather than just, you know, being hungry and eating some chocolate. Yogurt advertising and marketing has worked a somewhat similar angle in positioning what should be a gender-neutral snack as deeply, essentially feminine. The fervor with which women in yogurt commercials bond over their love of fruit-flavored dairy has made for excellent satire, including comedian Megan Amram’s viral “Birth Control on the Bottom” satire and a Saturday Night Live skit in which Kristin Wiig played real-life Activia spokesperson Jamie Lee Curtis as a yogurt fanatic who can’t stop pooping. It remains an irresistible target because even when actual yogurt ads address their own feminine myths—non-yogurt foods are guilty pleasures, yogurt is a “good” substitute for sweets—they do nothing to change them. One memorable Yoplait ad of the mid-1990s featured two disgruntled bridesmaids turning to yogurt for solace, soon exclaiming that the yogurt was “not-catching-the-bouquet-good” and “burning-this-dress-good.” It was an attempt to subvert gendered beliefs (wait, don’t women love weddings?) while deftly pressing others (yogurt is something that women just naturally crave completely apart from its associations with dieting).
Sell It, But Don’t Yell It
Advertising’s pitch to feminists has changed over time, from “liberated” versions of feminine standbys (the personal douche, the pushup bra, the low-cal frozen food) to the liberation inherent in consumer choice itself. But recently, the pitch has become a bit more nebulous. Two thousand fourteen introduced a new breed of empowertising with an ad for Verizon called “Inspire Her Mind.” In it, a girl in various stages of child- and teenhood is discouraged at every juncture by an offscreen voice—when she’s stomping through a creek (“Don’t get your dress dirty!”), when she’s examining marine life in tidepools (“You don’t want to mess with that”), when she’s building a rocket in the garage (“Why don’t you hand that [drill] to your brother?”). The final scene finds the girl stopping in front of a science-fair poster in a school hallway, pausing, and then dejectedly using the window’s reflection for that most stereotypically girly act: applying lip gloss. The voice-over: “Our words can have a big impact. Isn’t it time we told her she’s pretty brilliant, too?” appeared as statistics on how girls are often steered away from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields bloomed on the screen.
Another ad, for Always menstrual products, involved filmmaker and longtime girl-culture chronicler Lauren Greenfield asking adults to pantomime running, fighting, and throwing “like a girl.” They did so with exaggerated, simpering steps and rubber-wristed movements. Greenfield then asked actual girls to do the same activities, and they followed directions with a fierceness untainted by stereotype—throwing, running, and fighting with their entire bodies engaged and their faces full of intent. Afterward, Greenfield followed up with both the kids, who were genuinely confused by the idea that doing things “like a girl” was meant to be an insult, and the adults, who were well aware. The text in the ad then noted that girls’ self-confidence drops dramatically at puberty, and urged viewers to redefine what “like a girl” means.
The “Inspire Her Mind” ad centered on drawing more girls to STEM fields, an issue that’s gained a lot of cultural traction, outreach, and funding in the past decade. For the campaign, Verizon partnered with MAKERS, the digital initiative aimed at showcasing the stories of women globally; its voiceover was done by Reshma Saujani, founder of the organization Girls Who Code. A section of Verizon’s Web site called “Responsibility” elaborates on the company’s efforts to raise awareness about girls’ STEM education and showcases its partnerships with women’s-and-girls’ advocacy organizations. It’s hard not to be moved by the evocative photos and videos of young, multicultural GWC graduates on the Web site—one holds a hand-lettered sign that reads “Great ideas STEM from diversity”—and it helps that nothing in either the Web site or the ad itself is explicitly selling a product to its audience. The unspoken message is, “Hey, we’re the carrier who cares about your (or your daughter’s) potential, so choose us.”
Likewise, Always’s “Like a Girl” spot wasn’t pegged to any new product in the brand’s line, but seemed simply to have been created to position the brand itself as one that’s conscious of how stereotypes and beliefs about girls and women affect their lives. A section of the Always Web site titled “Fighting to empower girls everywhere” focuses on the brand’s partnership with organizations like the Girl Scouts of America (for its #BanBossy campaign, a partnership with the Lean In Foundation launched in 2014) and UNESCO, with which Always works to deliver products to rural areas in Nigeria and Senegal where lack of access to pads equates to missed school days and decreased opportunities for girls.
Here’s the thing we all know about advertising to women: the products aimed their way, from household cleaners to cosmetics to personal-care products, are pitched to solve a problem that in many cases the consumer might not ever know she had until she was alerted to and/or shamed for it. (Wait, I didn’t know my armpits were supposed to be sexier!) What this new slate of commercials announced was that, finally, it seemed possible for the ad industry to reach women without making them feel totally awful about themselves. In 2014, after decades of women’s movements, that was advertising’s big breakthrough: don’t make women feel like shit and they’re more likely to buy your product. An incredibly low bar had been cleared, and everyone rushed to pat themselves on the back for it. Suddenly, there was a name for the phenomenon: “femvertising”—or, excuse me, #Femvertising. It was a hot topic on ad-industry trade sites, and panels on how to do this astonishing new thing of not insulting women became a draw for conference slates and seminars. A 2015 AdWeek roundup was titled “These Empowering Ads Were Named the Best of #Femvertising”; and that year’s BlogHer—a yearly convening of lifestyle and brand-friendly women’s media—featured a #Femvertising awards ceremony.
It is worth wondering what made the likes of Verizon and Always suddenly turn to the empowerment and well-being of women and girls as a strategy. After all, Always had been content to coast on its products’ wings for years, with such bland, cheery taglines as “Have a happy period. Always!” and copy that focused on Dri-weave technology and “quick-wrap” packaging. Previous to 2014, Verizon’s claim to fame was the cute, bespectacled “Can you hear me now?” guy. It probably sounds overly cynical to quest
ion the motives of a brand when their end result seems as genuine as the “Inspire Her Mind” and “Like a Girl” campaigns. But given the emphasis on the brands themselves and not the products, it’s tempting to think that their pitches were, in a way, for feminism itself.
For a second, anyway. Empowertising can suck you in that way, and because there are so few commercials that celebrate, say, the athletic skill of preteen girls, of course they’re going to stand out. But looking closer, it’s the same old pitch—in Always’s case, one that does everything it can to decouple girls’ lack of confidence from the shame they’re still taught to feel about their menstruating and developing bodies. (“Have a happy period, Always!” at least mentioned the word “period.”) The ad seemed especially reticent in the context of a feminine-products market that has in recent years successfully harnessed humor and absurdism to send up the earnestness of the period-marketing past: Kotex, for example, marketed its U by Kotex line with commercials in which women mused, “When I have my period . . . I want to hold really soft things, like my cat . . . sometimes I like to run on the beach . . . I like to twirl . . . in slow motion.” By the end, the spot just comes right out with it: “Why are tampon ads so ridiculous?” The upstart menstrual-product subscription service HelloFlo, meanwhile, has managed to make menstrual products downright delightful: their long-form ads incorporate nods to how young girls actually feel about their periods—excitement, fear, embarrassment, pride—and, as a bonus, dare to use the word “vagina” in pitching their service.
The Internet, social media, and the rise of rapid-response media criticism have undoubtedly played a substantial role in getting corporations to understand that even if a brand’s bottom line is solid, it has to at least appear to care what its customers think. It used to be that a print ad or commercial that insulted women—think of those that wound up in Ms. magazine’s “No Comment” section—might garner a stack of strongly-worded letters to a brand’s corporate HQ, but there was little to keep the ad from continuing to run. More recently, it’s a wildly different story: the same ad would very likely be the basis for well-placed blog posts at Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and Copyranter, callouts on Feministing and Clutch and Autostraddle and Bitch, an untold number of pointed tweets, and very possibly an online petition at Ultra Violet or Change.org. It’s depressing that responses like this are consistenly necessary, but public shaming has turned out to be an incredibly effective way—and, in the case of ads offensive to women, perhaps the only way—to get brands thinking about the impact of their messages and imagery.
And at a time when audiences are choking on consumer choice, marketing with a purpose is no longer just a value-add for companies, but a crucial part of brand identity. In September 2014, a few months after both the Always “Like a Girl” and the Verizon “Inspire Her Mind” ads premiered, Ad Age reported on their effects as measured by the Advertising Benchmark Index. It found “that not only do a majority of consumers feel the ads promote a positive message for women, [but] they have a strong, positive impact on the brands’ reputation. ‘Given the subject matter, the call-to-action scores were higher than might be expected,’ said ABX president Gary Getto.”16
Advertising has one job to do, and it’s not to reflect the nuances of social movements. But the staggering growth and spread of the medium in just the past two decades—from its slow creep into new physical spaces (shopping-cart handles, sports leaderboards, public-transit tickets) to its primacy in the digital realm (sponsored Tweets and Instagram posts, responsive Facebook ads) to its sneaky guerrilla and viral manifestations—has meant an attendant growth in power. If, as media scholars like Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally have spent decades arguing, advertising’s power is both cumulative and unconscious, it will absolutely continue to play a crucial role in the ongoing project of gender equality.
Still, there’s a vast difference between using the language of empowerment to suggest that being able to choose between three different kinds of diet frozen pizza is a radical accomplishment and helping to create a world where diet frozen pizza isn’t something that needs to exist in the first place. (Or, at least, isn’t something marketed solely to women.) And the difference between feminism and marketplace feminism is just as vast, which is why the designation of femvertising is useful, if not necessarily in the way it was supposed to be. Empowertising and femvertising are both ways to talk about the business of selling to women without conflating examples of that business with actual feminism. They’re a gateway toward learning more about specific issues that impact women and girls; maybe they’re a way to discover alternatives to mainstream products. But celebrating the ads themselves simply celebrates advertisers’ skill at co-opting women’s movements and selling them back us—and then rewards us for buying in.
CHAPTER 2
Heroine Addicts: Feminism and Hollywood
“I talked to so many men. I walked into room after room after room of men who got to sit around and discuss whether they thought this movie was something that would appeal to women.” —Jill Soloway, in Entertainment Weekly, 2014.
Just a smidge less inevitable than death and taxes is the summer Hollywood-blockbuster season. It’s the time when the big studios roll out their “tentpole” franchises, so named because their behemoth profits finance the rest of the year’s lesser-grossing output. It’s the time when Spiderman, Batman, Iron Man, and other Mans take their rightful place in full surround sound and movie execs slide behind the wheels of their Teslas with dollar signs in their eyes. It’s not, generally, a time when you hear a multiplex contender described as “an incredible feminist movie,” and “the feminist action flick you’ve been waiting for.” Except, in May of 2015, it was. The movie was Mad Max: Fury Road—the fourth installment, neither prequel nor sequel, to the Australian series about a former cop navigating the lawless realms of an unforgiving future wasteland. And the praise was near-universal: Fury Road garnered a coveted “99 percent fresh” score on the Tomatometer at film review site Rotten Tomatoes, and prompted the New York Post—a paper never known for taking any interest in feminism—to declare it “the feminist picture of the year.”
I love big pointless explosions as much as anyone (I paid to see Armageddon in theaters. Twice.), but, like most feminists with a film habit, I’ve come to expect certain things from the female characters in big-budget action franchises that aren’t called Alien. They’re often presented initially as strong, smart, and steady—that is, until they’re called into service as catalysts for the male hero’s journey, at which point they’re likely to be kidnapped, terrified, chained to a bomb, or whatever. Sorry I just spoiled a bunch of superhero movies for you!
Having grown up in a time when Mel Gibson wasn’t yet a garbage person, and the Mad Max trilogy was the pinnacle of postapocalyptic cool, the idea that its dystopia could be a place where women seized power didn’t seem too off-script, especially given Tina Turner’s iconic portrayal of Beyond Thunderdome’s corrupt Aunty Entity. Still, encomiums like the ones being flung Fury Road’s way rarely come around in the realm of big-money Hollywood action franchises. Even more intriguingly, the movie’s trailer and poster, which prominently featured star Charlize Theron, prompted a small but loudly aggrieved cluster of male bloggers to boycott the film on the grounds that it was some sort of pyrotechnic Trojan Horse freighted with feminazi propaganda. (“I’m angry about the extents Hollywood and the director of Fury Road went to trick me and other men into seeing this movie,” complained one.) Fury Road hadn’t been anywhere near my summer-movie to-see list; my husband, who has seen each previous Max movie approximately 250 times, didn’t even realize there was another one. But hearing that the film’s very existence was chapping antifeminists sent me off to the theater immediately, so thanks, guys.
Fury Road is indeed a movie that is explicitly about the damage caused, to women and men alike, by patriarchy, and about the desperate measures some will take to escape that system. Max (played now by Tom Hardy) has been so broken
down by his past attempts to do right by his fellow humans that he’s gone feral, mute and tortured by flashbacks to the deaths he’s failed to prevent. So while he’s the familiar character of the story, it’s Theron’s Imperator Furiosa who is its catalyst. Furiosa is the War Rig driver for Immortan Joe, a masked warlord who presides over The Citadel, where he wields his power over the starving masses, keeps women as breeding and milking stock, and uses Max and others as “blood bags.” Furiosa is a buff survivor of untold atrocities with an Erector set of an arm and a plan for redemption that involves spiriting away the patriarch’s prized harem and braving hundreds of miles of harsh terrain to get to the “green place” of her birth. Between Max’s PTSD and Furiosa’s grim single-mindedness, there’s minimal plot exposition, so subtext does the talking. Male lust for power and control of resources has leached the land of its vitality; the warlord has spawned thousands of sickly boy-men who have been told, like the Vikings before them, that dying in battle is their one chance at glory. And the green place, it turns out, is gone, its only legacy a satchel full of seeds guarded by a motorcycle gang of elderly, gunslinging First Mothers.
I loved the movie, though that doesn’t matter. Others didn’t, which also doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the most-feminist-picture-of-the-year accolades set the tone for a debate that wasn’t so much about the movie itself but about feminism as an objective metric of quality. The many articles and blog posts touting Fury Road’s feminist bona fides were countered by an attendant raft of “well, actually . . . ” rejoinders (one of which was actually called “Actually, Mad Max Fury Road Isn’t All That Feminist, and It Isn’t All That Good, Either”). For every person who enthused about Theron’s stoic embodiment of Furiosa, there was someone who thought that she was too pert-nosed and perfect-looking to be realistic. Those who thought that a gross patriarch squirreling away the hottest women for his own pleasure seemed pretty on point as a postapocalyptic scenario butted heads with those who felt that a real feminist movie wouldn’t feature a harem that resembled a Calvin Klein perfume ad.