by Andi Zeisler
Powerful Women Wear Powerful Panties
And that, somewhat depressingly, brings us back to underwear. In the realm of fashion and product marketing, the slow shift in feminist branding from tacit to overt might best be illustrated by the prodigious success of Spanx, those bright, cartoony packages of gut-strangling spandex that became a pop-culture phenomenon seemingly overnight. Founder Sara Blakely began selling the stretchy “shapewear” (“foundation garments” are so 1950s) out of her Georgia apartment in 2000, but within a few years was presiding over a booming bum-slimming business. Spanx’s success was cemented when Oprah Winfrey, whose yo-yo dieting has been a relatable feature of her own brand, spread the gospel via her annual Favorite Things special; by 2012, Blakely was one of the world’s few female billionaires, raking in an estimated $250 million annually. The brand’s “tummy taming,” “thigh trimming,” and “butt boosting” products are a friendlier cousin of the constrictive girdles of decades past; I’ve sported them myself and can testify to experiences that range from minorly pinchy to sweating lower-torso hellscape. They’ve become the Band-Aids of contemporary culture: imitators like Yummie Tummie have crept in to grab a piece of the shapewear market, but Spanx is the catchall name for what is now considered a women’s wardrobe necessity.
Though Blakely noted in a 2012 profile in the Guardian that she was compelled to make Spanx in extra-large sizes once she realized that men, particularly in Hollywood, were wearing them, women remain the brand’s prime target. (Blakely hasn’t, to my knowledge, mentioned transgender women or drag queens as a tertiary market, but Spanx have definitely been name-checked as a staple item for both groups.) The company’s motto is “Changing the world, one butt at a time,” and part of its brand supremacy is the way that female celebrities are vocal about relying on them. On one episode of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon bemoaned the fact that, with three weddings to attend in one day, “I’ll be in Spanx for 12 hours.” However, Lemon’s creator, Tina Fey, told a red-carpet interviewer that the shapewear was “my dream come true,” and while it’s possible she was being sarcastic, the media ran with the quote. British superstar Adele copped to wearing four pairs of Spanx, one on top of the other, to the 2012 Grammy awards. She took home six awards for her album 21, but the next day’s headlines made as much reference to her multi-Spanx as to her musical triumph.
That Fey, Adele, Tyra Banks, and many other bold-name women with scrutinized bodies are open about their shapewear is a notable departure from more openly oppressive decades, when girdles were an unspoken necessity that became visible only when women of the second wave began shunning and disposing of them (and, more recently, when they’ve become prominent in fetish fashion). Part of what motivates today’s women toward undergarment transparency is Spanx’s feminist spin: rather than being constricting, they are empowering. With names like In-Power Panties and a tagline that reads “Powerful Women Wear Powerful Panties,” Spanx has recast the subtext of foundation garments past (women’s bodies and freedom of movement must be circumscribed by any means necessary) as a visible signpost of autonomy and progress (you can make your life better by feeling better about your otherwise unruly body). In 2015, Spanx made the sales pitch explicit in a New York Times piece on the company’s attempt to reach those holdout consumers who don’t want to be tortured by their underpants. Kicking off with the complaint of a New York City fashion stylist (“compression is just so 15 years ago”), the piece noted that the shapewear trend has been affected by the rise of “athleisure” looks—mostly yoga pants—that have slimming and lifting fabric construction, but also allow wearers to tie their shoes without risking nerve damage.
If you ask Spanx’s new CEO—which the Times did—to explain the company’s rebranding efforts, it’s all about a new, feminist world where every kind of body is accepted and there’s more public pushback on negative body conversations. Thus, the company’s new packaging promotes “feminist inspiration” in the form of lady-to-lady affirmations like, “Don’t take the rules too seriously.” That would be great if changing the rules was actually what Spanx is about. But Spanx is a business, and its embrace of feminism isn’t about women’s equality. It’s about a company boosting revenues that have fallen behind those of competitors offering less punishing undergarments and workout clothes. If emphasizing the comfort of “dig-free” and “soft touch” material is where the money is, that’s where Spanx is going. After all, a “feminist” slogan like “Re-shape the way you get dressed, so you can shape the world!” literally dresses up an age-old standard in slightly roomier stretch fabrics—as though the only thing that’s kept women from busting through pink-ghetto walls and glass ceilings isn’t social expectations or institutional inequality, but insufficiently thigh-smoothing panties.
If Spanx had existed in the 1980s, the marketing message might have been something like, “The control you want as you control your destiny,” paired with an image of a woman in a suit with enormous shoulder pads facing a conference room full of men. In the 1990s, the brand might have turned to a more Oprah-esque message of self-actualization, maybe “Shapewear that’s as powerful as your own dreams.” The current slogans about rule-breaking and reshaping the world nod to feminism in suggesting that women have big things to do for humanity and impatience with “the rules” that they have internalized. Spanx aims to have it both ways, paying lip service to the idea of rebellion against conformity while its very existence encourages its buyers to conform or risk inadequacy. (The underwear might be feminist, ladies, but that doesn’t mean your ass isn’t too big.)
This is a time-honored approach to marketing, one that’s not worth remarking on when it’s used to shill diet shakes or cars or tech gadgets by playing to the self-regard of potential consumers. Of course there’s potential to feel powerful in a pair of Spanx, just as there’s potential to feel powerful in a push-up bra or a killer dress or a soccer jersey or any other item of clothing that showcases what we like about our bodies. Does that make the product itself feminist? Or, more to the point, if it does, than what item of clothing isn’t feminist?
So buy that feminist underwear. It’s turning out to be a surprisingly robust market—not just granny panties, but also underpants with built-in menstrual pads, bras that lift and support without the aid of poky underwires, you name it. Because the truth is that while feminist apparel is having its trendy moment, there’s no one way a feminist looks. But reinscribing feminism as something you dress in or consume, rather than something you do, accomplishes nothing—not for you as an individual, and not for how women as a whole are viewed, valued, and validated in this culture. Whatever it says across your butt, that’s what matters.
CHAPTER 4
The Golden Age of (Feminist) TV
“Like, I am woman, hear me roar.”
—Shoshana (Zosia Mamet) on GIRLS.
The smart folks at the American Civil Liberties Union knew an opportunity when they saw one. On a Monday morning in the spring of 2015, they blurred past and present, fiction and reality with a tweet to Mad Men’s beloved Joan Holloway-Harris, who the night before had faced down her new firm’s top boss with stoic purpose. The former big fish in the small pond of Sterling Cooper and Partners was now swimming with chauvinist sharks in a vast, stinging ocean of corporate sexism, and when she took her complaints to the corner office, she had little choice but to invoke the holy trinity of 1970s women’s rights: the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the ACLU, and Betty Friedan. Bright and early the next day, the ACLU’s Twitter account addressed our head bitch in charge thus: “Joan, sexual harassment has no place at work! Contact us here.” Though plenty of Mad Men watchers, many of them young men, hopped on Twitter to express skepticism that things could really have been that bad for women in the circa-1970s workplace, the ACLU’s salient point was not only that they were just that bad—but, in many cases, they haven’t gotten that much better.
That particular episode of Mad Men aired less than two months after Ellen Pao, a Silicon
Valley venture capitalist, lost a landmark discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers. The case had been a flashpoint for an ongoing debate about just how bad sexism in supposedly meritocratic Silicon Valley was: like many female, transgender, and nonwhite tech workers, Pao believed that she was excluded from an overall office culture whose makeup was overwhelmingly white and male. Ski trips, private dinners, and other collegial events, she stated, were simply not open to office minorities; she was fired, she charged, because she accused a senior colleague of sexual harassment. Though plenty of stats on the larger landscape of markedly homogenous tech companies like Twitter, Google, and Apple and even less-diverse VC-firm slates would suggest that Pao’s case might have merit, a six-man/six-woman jury found no grounds for discrimination and no basis for the claim that Pao was fired due to her sexual harassment claim. (Pao’s next job, however, pretty much made her case about tech-world gender imbalance for her: as the interim CEO of notoriously douchey Internet man-cave Reddit, she shuttered some of the site’s foulest hate-speech forums and triggered an avalanche of racist and sexist threats and abuse before eventually resigning the position.)
The Mad Men episode aired slightly more than a year after the New York Times published a guide to salary negotiations for women that underscored the perils of negotiating while female. The title “Moving Past Gender Roles to Negotiate a Raise” was misleading, given that the piece was all about what women in the workplace should do differently than men when advocating for better pay. Women were urged, for instance, to take negotiation-playbook tips written for men and “soften” them, given that employers often find it “unseemly, if on an unconscious level” when women talk up their merits. Elsewhere, female-identified workers were advised to approach salary talks as “dialogues,” rather than negotiations, since asking for what they deserve—as men are expected to—would be sure to freak everybody out. “We are asking women to juggle while they are on the tightrope . . . it’s totally unfair because we don’t require the same of men,” stated the founder of Carnegie Mellon University’s gender-equity program. Almost every expert quoted in the piece, in fact, acknowledged that discrimination is very much a part of both workplace culture and individual workplaces. Yet the guide proceeded as though there were no possibilities other than those that asked women to submit to indelibly gendered expectations and reify them for future women in future workplaces.
The episode aired less than a year after the release of “The Glass Floor,” a report on sexual harassment in the restaurant industry—a field identified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as the largest source of sexual harassment claims. The report’s findings were deeply upsetting, if not all that surprising: though restaurant employees of all genders experience unwanted sexual questioning, touching, bullying, and pressuring, women and transgender workers are the most affected, experiencing harassment from management, coworkers, and customers; tipped workers in states that pay a sub-minimum wage are most likely to be subject to regular unwanted sexual attention.1 The assertion that echoed throughout the data was that sexual harassment is “endemic” to the industry, so much so that a majority of workers see it as simply part of the job.
And the episode aired just under two years after the Supreme Court’s Vance vs. Ball State decision, which narrowed the definition of supervisory roles in sexual harassment complaints. By limiting the definition of “supervisor” to someone who has direct power to hire, fire, or promote employees, Vance set a precedent that markedly affected the chances for plaintiffs to see justice in workplace harassment cases. Cases in which retail, restaurant, and hospital employees, among others, were subject to ongoing harassment by a senior employee to whom they reported—in other words, a supervisory figure—were subsequently thrown out not on grounds that they didn’t occur, but because the tailored definition of “supervisor” (defined only as someone with direct hiring/firing power over an employee) enabled employers to duck responsibility. And, as the EEOC’s general counsel told Think-Progress, Vance also lessened the likelihood of lawyers even taking on cases that were likely to be contested on the technicality—by extension suggesting that victims of harassment really shouldn’t bother seeking justice if the conditions to argue for it weren’t airtight.2
So yes, skeptics on Twitter, things really were that bad, and, in too many cases, still are. But they’ve also gotten much better, in one especially crucial way: there is now a parallel sphere in which for every depressing real-life inequity there’s a depiction of a different ending, and many of us have ready access to that sphere. On television, we see and hear women constantly. We watch and listen to them; we are influenced by them and encouraged to emulate them. The maxim that “You can’t be what you can’t see” no longer applies to an encouraging number of women in public life, because for almost anything we might want to be there’s a woman somewhere on your television or computer who is already a shining example of it. There she is: She’s a hard-charging political fixer, or a hotshot surgeon with a temper. She’s the DA, the assistant DA, and the presiding judge. She’s the president of the goddamn United States. She’s a special agent, a lovelorn dowager, the Supreme of a coven of sassy witches. She’s a clone, a cyborg, an alien. She’s an awkward black girl, a clueless white girl, a pregnant virgin, a sex addict. She’s a trans woman, a butch woman, a woman who’s still trying to figure it out. She’s finding love in unlikely places, ditching dead-end relationships to finally find herself. She’s framing her enemies, overdosing on drugs, running a crime syndicate. She’s using martial arts training to fend off a shitload of zombies. She’s too stoned to peel herself off the couch.
Who knew that all those years of talk about having it all actually referred to TV?
Women in Boxes
As a medium that exists mostly at the whim of advertisers, television wasn’t exactly the first industry to jump aboard the women’s liberation train. TV executives knew what to do with women as a broad and undifferentiated category of humans who took care of babies, bought laundry powder, and heated up frozen dinners. But when faced with the prospect of actual female people who didn’t see themselves represented on their living room screens, TV executives—a white, male bunch, mostly—were at a loss. Once it was clear that feminism was something that female audiences were interested in, these execs were faced with the task of telegraphing some of its core messages while not alienating their sponsors. By 1971, television had seen a small handful of single, independent career women in the form of Julia’s Julia Baker and The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern, but such women were initially presented as one-dimensional. MTM’s female writers (it was the first network offering to have more than one) understood that even the carefully crafted, wholesome Mary had to reveal the facets of her womanhood by slow degrees: they simply couldn’t be as frank about essaying a single woman’s freedom as they could with a man’s. The chronically dating Mary didn’t have her first overnight with a man until the show’s third season (and that was offscreen); its major milestone came later that season with a reference to the Pill.3
The women who agreed with Redbook, in a 1972 poll, that “the media degrades women as mindless dolls,” and wanted something a little juicier were the perfect audience for Maude, the All in the Family spin-off featuring Edith Bunker’s sharp-tongued cousin Maude Findlay. A thrice-divorced feminist with a sensible, graying hairstyle, a Valium prescription, and a penchant for maxi vests, Maude was both a product of the women’s movement and a send-up of it. It was okay to cringe at her often clueless, if well-meaning, efforts to be the best liberal in the room, but she could also be deeply sympathetic—especially important given that she was the first prime-time character to have a legal abortion.
Television in the 1970s that wrestled with feminist issues was effective in part because the landscape was evolving quickly and in real time: divorce, single parenthood, unemployment, coming out institutional sexism and racism, poverty, male
chauvinism, and more were all part of the films, sitcoms, dramas, and talk shows of the decade. Furthermore, television had at least one producer—Norman Lear, of Maude, All in the Family, Good Times, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, and Mary Hartman Mary Hartman—who made a career of giving a voice to the social issues of the time in ways that didn’t pander to audiences or attempt to end each half hour with a tidy, pat resolution. Lear, a self-described “emotional” liberal, was matter-of-fact about the groundbreaking material he brought to television, though its content often tied the networks in knots. Maude’s discussion about abortion, for instance, “was conversation I’d heard a hundred times in family life—in my country and my culture,” Lear told Terry Gross in a 2014 Fresh Air interview. “So I didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t open it up for a television family.” (Lear, along with congresswoman Barbara Jordan, later founded People For the American Way, a civic advocacy organization meant to combat the growing cultural influence of the Religious Right.)
But by 1980, the perception was that women’s liberation was a done deal, and nobody wanted to hear any more about it—particularly the TV networks. Contrast Maude’s abortion dilemma with that of Christine Cagney of female buddy-cop drama Cagney and Lacey. The show’s creators had battled with CBS executives over nearly every aspect of the women’s roles since the start: they were too tough, too old, not “feminine” enough, and not sufficiently vulnerable, charged the brass. Making the denouement to Cagney’s surprise pregnancy a miscarriage, it turned out, wasn’t good enough. Instead, the script was rewritten so that the pregnancy was just a scare, which prompted a lecture from Lacey that conspicuously avoided the subject of abortion.4