by Andi Zeisler
Treating feminism as a fixed metric flattens out the narrative possibilities that make people want to see movies in the first place. Seeing a movie that’s not feminist doesn’t keep anyone from watching it through a feminist lens. Fury Road would be good, loud, manic fun whether or not it passed the Bechdel Test mainly because, like other dystopian films before it, looking closely at the narrative yields a stark condemnation of how patriarchy hurts everybody. The rush to laud the movie for simply not being the usual woman-sidelining fare dished up by Hollywood during those all-important summer months is far less rewarding—because, ultimately, it presses the conclusion that it’s the most we should hope for.
CHAPTER 3
Do These Underpants Make Me Look Feminist?
“I am remembered as a hairdo. It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.” —Angela Davis, 1994
Granny panties are the new feminism. That’s not me talking, that’s the New York Times, which, in early June 2015, featured an article on the front of its Styles section about the white cotton staple of the supposedly old and sexless. Apparently, they were on the comeback trail thanks to a new set of young, female entrepreneurs designing indie underpants, one style of which features the word “feminist” on the butt. “Young Women Say No to Thongs” presented sales figures indicating a declining market for thongs and an expanding one for fuller styles as evidence that we’re in the midst of a feminist undie uprising. To quote one panty peddler, “Most lingerie is designed to appeal to a man. . . . For us, that’s not even a consideration. This is underwear you wear totally for you.” (Unless, as the piece pointed out, you display your undies to Instagram in “belfies,” a word I’m very sorry to have just foisted on you.) Remember when we thought the next horizon of feminism was going to be wage equality or universal health care? Turns out, it’s underpants.
The New York Times article was promptly picked up by multiple online outlets that parroted its claim: “Why Granny Panties are Cool Again” (Refinery 29), “Watch Out Victoria’s Secret: Women are Abandoning Sexy Underwear” (Business Insider), “The Rising Popularity of ‘Granny Panties’ Could Be Tied to a Healthier Perception of Beauty” (Huffington Post), and the oddly grave “Young Women Opting for Granny Panties Over Thongs, According to Report” at the NYT’s own Women in the World blog were among headlines touting the granny-pants revolution.
There are a few things to say about this story. The first is that it was not a “report,” but rather a trend piece. The second is that, as a trend piece, it was perfectly on-brand for the NYT’s Styles section: Draw attention to something that a very small group of privileged people are doing (deciding that something once uncool is now cool, building a business around that thing), and write about the thing as though it reflects a national shift in aesthetics. Downplay the rarefied nature of the product itself (the undies profiled sell for $25, $34, and $45 apiece). Overstate the facts. (Is a 7 percent downturn in thong sales really that significant?) Make sure the people making the products are young and cute enough to be photographed wearing their own product, in this case underpants with “Feminist” printed in pink across the butt. Encourage a tenuous connection with body or beauty politics that builds significant buzz for whatever’s being sold.
But let’s say that this granny-panties piece wasn’t an opportunistic leap onto the current wave of feminism-is-cool media that also had the chance to grab readers with pictures of half-naked young women. If that were the case, the following would still be true: Feminism has nothing to do with your underwear, and anyone telling you it does probably wants to sell you something ($45 underwear, most likely). But the fact that the granny-pants story whirled through the news cycle as though it was an actual feminist breakthrough has everything to do with marketplace feminism’s seductive infiltration of fashion.
There have certainly been periods in history that sewed a connection between liberation and undergarments. The Rational Dress reformers of the late nineteenth century sought to bring women out from under layers of wool petticoats, crinolines, and whalebone corsets that limited their movement and mobility; the women of London’s Rational Dress Society, for instance, quite reasonably proposed that women shouldn’t have to wear more than seven pounds of undergarments. These radical broads were among the many freedom-minded fans of the undergarment popularized in the 1850s by Amelia Bloomer, a Victorian-era feminist and avid bicycler who adapted “bloomers” as a version of the loose pantaloons worn by Turkish women.
Decades later, girdles were among the garments dumped in the Freedom Trash Can from whence the “bra-burning” myth came, at 1968’s protest of the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. Germaine Greer, in her zesty debut, The Female Eunuch, famously called the brassiere “a ludicrous invention.” And let’s not forget that thongs were once marketed as offering their own kind of liberation, if only from visible panty lines and unforgiving wedgies.
In contrast, no outlet that reported on the feminist granny panties that were purportedly sweeping the nation could agree on exactly what they stood for. Were they a nod to increasing body positivity? A response to the gaudiness and sweatshop-iness of Victoria’s Secret and its ilk? A corrective to mass-media images that suggest only the young and thin deserve nice knickers? The ‘undiepreneurs’ profiled in the New York Times could only agree on two things: that big chonies are comfy, and that they aren’t about what men think. (Which raises a whole other set of questions: Do these women think that only heterosexual and cisgender people wear underpants? Also, have they never heard of Jockey For Her 3-packs?)
As marketplace feminism has fully emerged, perhaps it’s not surprising that feminist underpants have become kind of a thing. (There are several small companies that advertise their wares as feminist, as Nylon magazine noted in an online slideshow that enthused “Underwear shopping just got a lot more empowering.”) Underpants are a safe consumer item to brand as feminist: everyone needs them, they’re mostly kept under wraps, and they supply reassuringly normative associations. The rise of feminist underpants is a weird twist on Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, wherein consumer products once divorced from inherent use value are imbued with all sorts of meaning. To brand something as feminist doesn’t involve ideology, or labor, or policy, or specific actions or processes. It’s just a matter of saying, “This is feminist because we say it is.”
This Is What a Feminist Looks Like
“Feminist fashion,” for a long time, has been an oxymoron, publicly perceived as a bridge too far for those on both sides. An acknowledgment of style as a feature of feminism extends to acknowledging the trademark clothes and accessories of well-known figures—Andrea Dworkin’s sacklike overalls, Bella Abzug’s gigantic hats, Gloria Steinem’s aviator glasses and concho belts. But very few people have ever presumed that feminists cared for or participated in fashion as an interest or avocation. The ideas key to different feminisms, after all, have historically been anticapitalist—questioning advertising messages, consumer imperatives, and commercialized, Caucasian standards of sex appeal. And besides, feminists were supposed to have weightier things on their minds: to admit that you cared about fashion, or even look like you cared, was to risk having your politics scrutinized. The miniskirts and tall boots that Steinem rocked in the 1970s were the source of a lot of side-eye from her comrades; years later, when feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter penned an article for Vogue in which she “came out” as a fashion fanatic and noted that her interest “can sometimes seem a shameful secret life,” many of her academic and feminist colleagues, as if to prove the point, promptly turned their noses up at her. The 1990s term “lipstick feminist” always seemed like it was deployed with a barb of disbelief—as though anyone who truly embraced typically feminine trappings was a sham. And it’s notable that the handful of fashion designers whose clothes inspire the descriptor “feminist”—including Miuccia Prada, Rei Kawakubo, and Maria Cornejo—are also described as “intellectual,” which fr
om what I can tell is a word people use for either very dark or very light-colored clothes that are quirkily draped or full of angles and deliberately show a minimum of skin.
In the past few decades, though, the relationship between feminism and fashion has become more pluralistic and more nuanced. There are body-positive independent designers and retailers whose dedication to selling well-made garments with precise tailoring in larger sizes has been a boon to women whose sizes or shapes most designers and retailers ignore. There are feminist fashion journals and blogs that consider a range of subjects from gender identity and sexual codes to fabric history and construction. There are blogs that offer “upcycling” how-tos designed to keep unwanted clothing out of landfills. And an increased awareness of the feminized labor force that makes fashion accessible—often unregulated, unethical, and dangerous—has kick-started public conversations that are as much about ethics as about appearance. The 2013 collapse of a Bangladesh factory that produced clothes for the likes of Walmart and Joe Fresh, for instance, was a moment of reckoning for a Western population that had come to depend on the “fast fashion” of H&M and Forever 21—cheap runway knockoffs meant to last only a season before being discarded for the next thing. Most of the almost 1,300 workers killed in the collapse were women for whom factory jobs are often the only available work. It was a sobering finger pointed at consumer liberation: it’s awfully presumptuous, after all, to extol the feminist self-expression found in fashion when the women who actually make the clothes have no such luxury.
Writer, editor, and actor Tavi Gevinson started her fashion blog Style Rookie at the age of eleven, promptly becoming a media wunderkind who fielded Fashion Week invitations and interviews, and whose following comprised as least as many adults as peers. Style Rookie (which evolved into the online magazine Rookie) was precocious in its approach to discussing high fashion as art, but what was even more striking was Gevinson’s approach to feminism: At an age when most preteens have about as much interest in gender politics as they do in retirement funds, she was far more articulate than many adults about the way that fashion is scorned as a site of liberation. When I interviewed Gevinson in 2013, she was a senior in high school, editing Rookie’s print annuals, fresh off her film debut in Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said, and, as she put it, less interested in the fashion world than she’d once been. (“I want to be comfortable.”) But when our talk turned to the long-standing antagonism between fashion and feminism, she bristled with fresh annoyance when recalling how many people had brushed off her interest in both. “It was like, ‘Won’t she just give up this fashion crap and be smart already?’ I just remember feeling, ‘What, the only people who write about fashion should be stupid?’”
Though Gevinson acknowledged that the industry’s obsession with youth and thinness, as well as the racism that has historically permeated it, makes it “deeply flawed,” she dislikes the way an interest in fashion itself is dismissed as at odds with intellect and feminist potential. “There was a really stupid piece in the Guardian—I was in eighth grade when it came out—called ‘Why I Hate Fashion,’” she recalls. “And it was, like, ‘I hate ads for stores that tell me that shopping is good, I hate that models are skinny,’ and all this stuff. And I was, like, ‘Yes, but . . . that’s like saying [that you] hate food, because there’s McDonalds.’ It’s so broad.”
Recent years have brought a sense of possibility that the self-expression found in clothing can be decoupled from the elitist, tone-deaf fashion industry itself. (This might explain why Chanel’s “feminist” runway show in 2014 seemed like such a shameless attempt at trend-chasing.) So perhaps it’s not surprising that the most visible feminist statement made by clothes these days is a literal statement. Slogans like “Feminist killjoy,” “Crush the Patriarchy,” or even just a simple “FEMINIST” have become staples of online retailers and independent t-shirt lines. I’ve never been a slogan t-shirt person myself, but when I saw the news story about an Ohio teen who sent a scathing rebuke to her middle school after someone there saw fit to Photoshop the “Feminist” off her t-shirt in a class picture, I gave her a silent high-five. With the amount of things that people broadcast via clothing—brands, designers, alma maters, sports teams, religious affiliations—taking offense to the word “feminist” just seems boneheaded. (Especially if you’re old enough to remember the stretch of the 1990s when it seemed like half the young adults on the street were sporting shrunken baby tees with “Porn Star” and “Sexxxy” emblazoned across the chest.)
Slogan t-shirts have been part of the public face of almost every modern social movement, obviously. But the progenitor of this most recent spate of clothing-as-billboard was the humble white tee, sold by the Feminist Majority Web site starting in 2003, that proclaimed “This is What a Feminist Looks Like.” When Ashley Judd wore hers to a Glamour magazine shoot, eyes lit up around the offices at Ms., and soon Judd—along with Margaret Cho, Whoopi Goldberg, and Camryn Manheim—appeared on the magazine’s cover, proudly representing for Team Feminism. Between 2005 and 2006, the shirts became the Feminist Majority’s best-selling item: more than 650 different styles of shirts bearing the slogan were sold through the site, with bulk orders to be distributed or sold on college campuses accounting for many of the sales. The appeal of the slogan was easy to interpret: after all, too many people find the biggest roadblock to embracing feminism is in its unflattering optic legacy. Hags, dykes, ugly, unshaven, angry, finger-pointing, furious women—such adjectives and images have been encoded as the truth of what “feminism” represented for so long that it’s begun, sadly, to feel natural. The women and men who embraced the shirts were embracing the idea of jarring loose those ancient expectations of who might proudly identify as feminist.
Feminists who weren’t fans of the shirt argued that it was overly conciliatory, that the slogan actually seemed meant to reassure others that women could be feminist and still care about being normatively good-looking and attractive to others. The fact that the shirts came in a tight-fitting, shrunken baby-tee style and were expressly marketed to an audience of younger women, they argued, suggested that the point of the shirts was less about proclaiming that feminist stereotypes were pointless than it was about capitulating to the very same beauty standards that feminism wanted to banish. One such naysayer, journalist (and current New York Times Book Review editor) Pamela Paul, told Women’s ENews that she thought the baby tees, in particular, “feed into anti-feminist rhetoric that says that women who stand up for their rights are somehow unattractive, not sexy, humorless and not getting any. . . . I think it’s kind of a sad way to represent power.” But younger women, in particular, couldn’t care less: from just the number who called the Bitch office to see if we, too, sold the shirts, it was clear plenty of them were ready to make a simple, declarative statement into a small act of resistance.1
The power of “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” owed a lot to the political context from which it emerged. The George W. Bush administration had from its inception mounted an all-out attack on almost everything related to reproductive choice and access. Among the Handmaid’s Tale–esque undertakings that Bush shepherded or signed off on between 2001 and 2004: Cutting funds for family-planning services while bulking up those for abstinence-only sex-education programs; proposing regulations that would offer health care coverage to fetuses but not to the fully-formed people growing them; establishing National Sanctity of Human Life Day (which, in case you couldn’t guess, was not about people already living); curtailing federal funding for stem-cell research; and—my personal fave—appointing to the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee one Dr. David Hager, a zealously paternalistic evangelical gynecologist who refused to prescribe contraceptives to his female patients, much less help get FDA approval for Plan B.
And even though the scorched-earth situation going on with respect to women and their bodies was obvious to many people, it was also something of a taboo to discuss it, particularly while the terrorist atta
cks of September 11 were still so fresh and all-consuming. When I ask Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the author of 2004’s The War on Choice, to recall this time, she still seems a bit stunned by how mandatory patriotism threw a kind of invisibility cloak over the widespread dismantling of reproductive rights. “I wrote The War on Choice because there was no way in the normal political realm that you could actually lay bare what was going on with women’s rights, in public,” she explains, her bright voice laced with ire. “Because you would get creamed. You would be considered not credible. Traitorous. I wanted to just dispassionately document every single one of the things that the [Bush] administration and their buddies were doing. And when you put them all together, you saw that it was not random attacks. This [was] a pattern.”2
The “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt became popular again in 2014. By this time, it was just one of thousands of offerings in a consumer landscape where a young, Riot Grrrl–inspired feminist aesthetic was available to those who knew where to look: on Etsy, for instance, where you might buy anything from a cross-stitched sampler reading “Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda” to a plush uterus with a stitched-on happy face to wooden earrings bearing the image of Audre Lorde. Or in magazines like BUST and Worn, which showcased DIY clothing hacks and size-friendly indie lines, as well as throwback girl-culture icons like Jem and the Holograms. Ms. had already featured on its cover a picture of Barack Obama, pulling open the top of his button-up shirt, Clark Kent–style, to reveal a Photoshopped “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt underneath. Bush-era champions were still giving their all to a rollback of women’s bodily freedoms, of course. But in contrast to what Feldt described in the early 2000s, there were more people, connected and galvanized by social media, who seemed willing to come right out and call bullshit on fearful, regressive attitudes about what happens when women are autonomous, sexually confident people.