by Andi Zeisler
In all movements for social justice, there’s been an off-key refrain from outside that goes like this: If only you could be just a little bit less combative, maybe your cause would be more attractive. If only your demands for equality were less strident, then people might really get on board—in fact, do you have to call them demands? There are few activists who haven’t heard some variation on this theme, and though history confirms that social justice just doesn’t work that way, feminism in particular has been prone to internalizing the criticism. Those semi-regular calls to “rebrand” feminism over the decades are based on the idea that feminism has alienated so many people that the only way to get it back on track is with a makeover so hypnotically alluring that people will forget what it is they thought was so distasteful about it in the first place.
Such was the outcome of Watson’s HeForShe moment. The central focus on working toward gender equality in the world was quickly eclipsed by an emphasis on convincing men that feminism’s image isn’t as scary as they think—as if they can only be expected to care about equality if it doesn’t pose any challenge to their own personal comfort. Mia McKenzie, author and creator of the Black Girl Dangerous blog, neatly summed this up, writing: “[Watson] seems to suggest that the reason men aren’t involved in the fight for gender equality is that women simply haven’t invited them and, in fact, have been unwelcoming. Women haven’t given men a formal invitation, so they haven’t joined in. It’s not because, you know, men benefit HUGELY (socially, economically, politically, etc. ad infinitum) from gender inequality, and therefore have much less incentive to support its dismantling. It’s not because of the prevalence of misogyny the entire world over. It’s just that no one’s asked.”3
The feminist movement’s dependence on celebrities to legitimize it is frustrating because it’s both so seemingly necessary and so self-defeating, and I say this as someone who cofounded a magazine based on the potential of pop culture—including celebrities—to demystify feminism. The reasons that feminists are often anxious to get celebrities on our side are the same ones that have undermined feminism’s public image to begin with: we want the inherent value, the rightness of the movement to be acknowledged by people who have the megaphone that most of us don’t. Celebrities are taken seriously in a way that regular feminists aren’t because, ironically enough, they are perceived to have less skin in the game, and therefore less bias. A lot of people would probably assume that Emma Watson, rich and educated and beautiful and famous since she was a child, doesn’t have to care about gender equality as much as, say, the single mother who keeps getting passed over for promotions in favor of less encumbered male colleagues; the fact that she does care must mean maybe it’s a legitimate cause. I’m not saying this is any kind of logical train of thought, but it is part of a group of long-extant fallacies that most feminist-identified people will recognize. (See also: “You’re too pretty/funny/nice to be a feminist.”)
The downside is the way these celebrity engagements with feminism are filtered through media channels: too often, what’s emphasized is not the right to be equal and autonomous, but simply the right to have the existence of feminism itself acknowledged as legitimate. Corporate media doesn’t want to focus on the numerous systemic issues that keep gender inequality alive and kicking—particularly since that could involve acknowledging its own complicity in some of those systems. Framing a new, cool feminist image solely in terms of how it departs from an older and much less cool feminist image is a safe way to pat celebrities on the back without putting them on the spot. (This is also why in many cases the discussion begins with a question like “How do you define feminism, Famous Person?” which informs everyone that a celebrity’s definition is just as good as the very clear definition of feminism that already exists.)
This has made for some pretty shallow analyses of celebrity feminist coming-out moments. Fortune magazine’s 2014 article titled “Will Young Celebrities Make Feminism ‘Cool’?” kicked off with the following all-too-familiar assessment: “Bra-burning. Man-hating. Angry and unattractive. Such stereotypes have shadowed the women’s movement over the past few decades—and a slew of young, fashionable celebs are working to clarify feminism’s true definition.” Similarly, the main takeaway from Beyoncé’s VMA performance, judging from the excited responses in tweets and op-eds, seemed to be that she’s now proven definitively that feminists don’t have to be: a) morally opposed to marriage and children; b) unfashionable; and c) (once more with feeling!) a man-hater. When you consider that, in previous decades, media made the same points about Gloria Steinem, Rebecca Walker, Naomi Wolf, and others, this doesn’t exactly count as a groundbreaking revelation. As well-meaning as individual feminist celebrities might be, this mediated response to them just serves to reinvent a wheel that didn’t get us very far to begin with.
The Enemy of the Good
The combination of fame and feminism has always been an uneasy one; intra-movement criticism of both ideals and icons was a theme long before second-wave feminism made “trash” a verb. A 1948 consideration of the women’s-suffrage movement published in The Nation by feminist organizer Ramona Barth prodded readers to “consider the hitherto unanalyzed weaknesses as well as the obvious strengths of the movement which was begun at Seneca Falls; it is healthy to unveil not only marble statues to their memory but the inner motives of the first feminists.”4 Barth’s minor shade was majorly echoed in 1970s women’s liberation when many members initially shunned the term “feminist”: as Alice Echols notes in her second-wave chronicle, Daring to Be Bad, they associated it with the “bourgeois and reformist”—as well as racially exclusionary—stripe of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others, seeing their own movement as having more in common with revolutionary women’s movements in Cuba and China. The third wave of the 1990s, in turn, loudly defined itself against the second wave’s ostensible sex-negativity, racism, classism, and separatism, the generational equivalent of an emo teenager slamming a bedroom door in her mother’s face. And the fourth wave is more of a tsunami, sweeping up fragments of feminisms past and deploying them in everything from focused grassroots organizing to cynical commercial product pitches.
But though feminism is arguably less monolithic than it’s ever been, there is one thing that hasn’t changed and likely never will, and that’s the fierce internal conflict that ensues when individual figures, intentionally or not, come to symbolize the movement through media and pop culture representations. There have always been “famous feminists” who, via best-selling books, viral videos, or hit songs, become the face of feminism, if only temporarily. The skepticism that accompanies their rise is connected to an anxiety about how they will “sell”—and more to the point, perhaps, sell out—an ideology that has largely been defined by people hostile to it.
“Women rise to [feminist] fame not because they are lauded as leaders by other feminists . . . but because the mainstream media sees in them a marketable image—a newsworthy persona upon whom can be projected all sorts of anxieties, hopes, and responsibilities,” wrote Rachel Fudge in a 2003 essay on the struggle to reconcile activism and renown. This is important, both as it relates to feminism’s past and to its improbable embrace by mainstream American pop culture. On one hand, social movements need the diplomacy and charisma of people who can speak and agitate on behalf of them. On the other, the need to distill complex ideas and goals down to their most simple and quotable talking points has unquestionably done harm to those movements, feminism included. Mainstream attention has oversimplified complex issues—the wage gap, the beauty myth, the debate over decriminalizing sex work—and misrepresented goals. It has attributed collective successes to one person and minimized the plurality of feminist movements themselves. And it has turned countless would-be colleagues and compatriots into foes scrapping over crumbs of access and affirmation.
Jo Freeman’s Ms. article “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood” still regularly makes its way from inbox to inbox because the a
nguish with which it articulates the process of being sidelined, gaslighted, and shunned—all in the name of sisterhood—is still so relevant. Freeman defined trashing as something that often masquerades as critique but is wholly different: “a particularly vicious form of character assassination” that “is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences” but “to disparage and destroy.” After its publication in 1976, the piece garnered more letters than any previous piece in Ms.—“all but a few,” notes the essay’s current preface, “relating [the writers’] own experience of being trashed.” Formerly a member of the Chicago branch of radical feminists, Freeman left the movement completely after her deflating experiences. But two of her essays, “Trashing” and “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”—the latter an outline of the idealistic, leaderless context in which trashing often occurs—still put words to ongoing phenomena.
Individual feminists are used to being insulted and bullied by people who bear an inventory of beefs with feminists in general, especially these days, and inevitably online. Trashing—or its contemporary cousin, “calling out,” is different and usually a lot more painful because it comes from fellow feminists. Thanks in part to social media, trashings have become more public and more frequent—with participants, as feminist sociologist Katherine Cross put it, “hyper-vigilant against sin, great or small, past or present.”5 It’s possible for trashings to start out with a core of completely valid critique but spiral outward into chaos as more people pile on and context is diffused. Some are way pettier: I was once informed that I was being trashed on an online bulletin board because I hadn’t posed an apparently crucial question to a screenwriter I’d profiled. Trashings might be focused on an ideal of ideological purity: “careerist,” for instance, is a sneer aimed at feminists who have the temerity to want to be known (or at least paid) for their work. Other trashings might result from an opinion that’s unforgivably at odds with current feminist orthodoxy.
The competitiveness that leads to trashing obviously isn’t unique to feminist movements, but as many people have pointed out over the years, it’s likely to thrive within them because so many women, across ages and races and classes, are socialized to see themselves as connectors and uniters rather than experts and leaders; it’s even more likely to fester because of the unmended rifts of past feminist movements. The incendiary tone of trashing is also heightened because the line between one’s activism and identity is often as substantive as a vapor trail; trashing someone’s work becomes indistinguishable from trashing the person themselves.
A joke among academic professionals is that “the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.” Rerouted to describe feminist movements, it’s just as true. Take a movement that continually battles to justify its very existence, made up of millions of individuals with attendant millions of personalities, politics, and priorities. Throw in the multitude of causes and projects intrinsic to that movement, as well as the structural issues that too often make addressing them an exercise in wheel-spinning: lack of interest, lack of funding, and lack of time, to name just three. Add to those a history in which “feminism” has been broadly defined and disproportionately led by middle-class, educated, able-bodied white women. And finally, drizzle in the contemporary mainstream- and social-media climate that prizes conflict over nuance and shock over substance.
Navigating the half-finished project of feminism amid all this is a staggering task, so it’s not surprising that so much frustration isn’t channeled outward to the larger world of inequality but inward, at the microcosm of it that exists among fellow feminists. There are hundreds of ways that people are understood to be “doing feminism wrong”—I might be doing it right now!—particularly in online spaces where seasoned thinkers and activists find themselves engaging with people freshly enrolled in their first Women’s Studies class. There’s a Sisyphean slog through the same sets of arguments, over and over: feminists of color are taxed by having to explain and defend the concept of intersectionality; feminists engaged in sex work are frustrated by others who presume to know their lives better than they do. Within these virtual and actual spaces, such issues feel urgent, and personal, and crucial. But from outside, it can look very much like a movement that’s eating its own.
This makes celebrities adopting feminism as their brands an especially complicated prospect. Feminism may be something that individual celebs honestly care about, but often their knowledge of actual feminist issues is inversely proportional to the reach of their voices. When Patricia Arquette won the Best Actress Oscar in 2015, for instance, she turned her acceptance speech into a chance to talk about wage equality—on its face, an excellent use of a momentary worldwide platform. But Arquette got in the way of her own well-meaning comments later, in the backstage press room, when she said, “It’s time for all the women in America, and all the men that love women and all the gay people and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.” The oddly-worded statement seemed to suggest that struggles for LGBT individuals and people of color were a settled matter that white women had ingeniously fixed as we patiently waited for “our” turn; the reaction to it was as angry as it was swift.
Later in 2015, as Amnesty International prepared to vote on a policy to decriminalize the sex trade, a cluster of Hollywood feminists—including Lena Dunham, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, and Kate Winslet—signed on to a petition opposing the new policy. The issue of decriminalization is thorny and regularly misunderstood (especially with regard to where it differs from legalization); and debating its complexities is generally best left to those with the most experiential knowledge of the issues, e.g., sex workers themselves. The fact that famous actresses for whom the realities of the sex trade are almost wholly abstract were unwittingly putting sex workers’ livelihoods and safety in the balance offered a great illustration of how celebrity feminism can be as much a hindrance as a help. As one anonymous sex worker told The Daily Beast, “The fact that celebrities who have no stake in this and will not be impacted by it are getting the largest voice is frustrating and, frankly, dehumanizing.”
Meanwhile, as public figures in increasingly crowded fields, celebs’ work as actors or pop stars or viral sensations necessitates keeping themselves relevant. It all adds up to an unavoidable skepticism about what stake celebrities really have in feminism, and an understandable frustration when even their best intentions are badly executed. As happened in the wake of Arquette’s Oscar-night words, there’s a chance that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater, with people disregarding the root content of her wage-gap activism due to her careless phrasing. It’s valid to critique such statements when they’re made: the problem is, those critiques can easily be construed as just another form of trashing.
Reasonably or not, we tend to treat celebrities as authorities, which means they can validate the legitimacy of feminist ideas and politics in a way that feminist movements themselves may never be able to do. The one thing they can’t be is perfect: not even Beyoncé can be everything to every feminist, though please don’t tell her I wrote that. Celebrities should be able to be as fallible as the rest of us, but unfortunately we never quite let them, and it’s this that most likely dooms celebrity feminism’s potential for real change-making. They embody the danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good, but in adopting feminism as part of their individual brands, they also risk reducing it to a buzzword that will be out of style by the time next year’s awards season rolls around.
Brand-name Feminism
At its simplest, the difference between a celebrity-branded feminism and a feminist movement as a social and political force is that one is about individuals and the other about systems. Individual celebrities are great at putting an appealing face on social issues. But the celebrity machine is one that runs on neither complexity nor nuance, but on cold, hard cash. How much can celebrity feminists do if their prominent voices emanate from within systems—the film, TV, and music industries, for starters
—in which gender inequality is a generally unquestioned m.o.? Emphasizing the personal empowerment of individual actors, comedians, and pop stars, whether for itself or in relation to others, only serves to pull focus from the ways in which their industries make money from stereotyping and devaluing women. Is it celebrities’ responsibility to fix those industries single-handedly? Of course not. But it’s also not ridiculous to suggest that publicly taking on feminism as a pet cause should ideally be about more than just basking in the media attention you get for taking that stance. Again, paragon-hood is not the goal, but at the very least, boning up on current feminist issues and perspectives will prevent more unfortunate incidents like Arquette’s wage-gap fiasco.
In continuing the dialogues about equality and representation, small shots of honesty and transparency go a long way. Actor and comedian Amy Schumer is among the celebrity feminists who have been tagged as problematic (like many a stand-up comedian, her work has leaned heavily on casual racism), but she’s also been refreshingly unwilling to buy into the women-are-on-top-now! media spin that’s been amplified by her own speedy ascent to Emmy-winning fame. In the fall of 2015, as Madonna’s “Rebel Heart” tour took over Madison Square Garden, Schumer served as Madge’s opening act and promptly took aim at the idea that it’s a new, exciting day for women in Hollywood. “Why would it be exciting?” she retorted. “In an industry that judges you solely based on your appearance, when you know that every day you’re just decomposing, barreling toward death while smaller, younger starlets are popping out and you know you’re just six months away from having to wear a long white button-down and trying to fuck Michael Douglas at a Thanksgiving party? No. It’s not an exciting time for women in Hollywood. Are you serious?” The bit echoed her instantly-viral 2015 video sketch “Last Fuckable Day,” in which Schumer discovers Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey, and Patricia Arquette lunching in the woods to commemorate Louis-Dreyfus’s passage from, in casting terms, “believably fuckable” female roles to ones “where you go to the wardrobe department and all they have for you to wear are long sweaters.”