by Andi Zeisler
This version of postfeminism still asserts itself regularly, popping up to remind us that the real problem isn’t a world bogged down in gender imperatives and systemic inequality, it’s the fact that some people just won’t stop pointing it out. In December 2014, Time magazine listed “feminist” on a list of words that should be struck from the nation’s lexicon in the coming year—one of the only definite words amid meme-born slang (“om nom nom”), appropriated teen talk (“obvi”), and African American Vernacular English (“bae”). A short while later, a Facebook page and Tumblr called “Women Against Feminism” appeared, featuring photos of young women holding up hand-lettered signs bearing declarations like “I don’t need feminism because I like men looking at me when I look good,” and “I don’t need feminism because I believe in love, not condemnation and hate.” This wasn’t an organized movement as much as it was an illustration of just how much exclusively individual-minded rhetoric has warped both history and logic. The Women Against Feminism were young (mostly college-aged), almost all white, and armed with rainbow markers and dubious statistics. (“I’m against feminism because feminists are guilty of virgin shaming.”) Their assertions propped up the same straw women utilized by postfeminists of yore, dressed up with dashes of Rush Limbaugh and Disney princesses.
Needless to say, the phenomenon was media catnip—not just for the delighted and overly credulous conservative and libertarian crowd, but also for media outlets who have come to depend on the word “feminist” to draw eyeballs. Some outlets offered thorough castigations of Women Against Feminism, reminding them that, among other things, they might not have all the individual freedoms they enjoy if not for feminist movements. Others, like the BBC, presented a neutral point-counterpoint format, in which women against feminism and women against Women Against Feminism faced off to, well, mostly talk past one another. Cathy Young, a writer affiliated with the libertarian Independent Women’s Forum, argued for the WAF in a Boston Globe op-ed, stating that “these arguments need to be engaged, not dismissed and ridiculed”—pretty hopeful talk, considering how many of the “arguments” seemed to understand feminism as a singular, Rapture-like event, in which every male person in the world vanishes. (“I don’t need feminism because who will open the jars if there are no men?”) Finally, the inevitable Tumblr called Cats Against Feminism was a fittingly absurdist rejoinder. (“I don’t need feminism because it’s not food. Is it food?”)
Treating feminism like it’s a personal accessory that just isn’t appropriate anymore obscures the places where feminism hasn’t made strides for people who still need it. The fearsome coven of straw feminists that’s conjured wherever such discussions pop up is now familiar enough to be its own online meme and source of satire (the comic artist Kate Beaton is especially gifted at tweaking straw-feminist fear), but it’s also a force people believe has disproportionate power against the status quo. Like the loophole women of the ’90s, these folks suggest that feminism is so pervasive, so successful, that traditional gendered stereotypes will become endangered if they’re not boldly resurrected by a brave few. “Women are rediscovering the joy of being loved for their bodies, not just their minds,” wrote the columnist Kate Taylor in a 2006 Guardian op-ed that suggested sexual objectification was not only vintage enough to be cool again, but an actual political statement. (“The ultimate feminists are the chicks in the crop tops.”) “Instead of desperately longing for the right to be seen as human beings,” she added, “today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects.” You can’t be both, is the message—you can be the boring, sexless blob of brains that straw feminists want you to be, or the super-fun sex objects that they hate. There’s no middle ground. It’s an idea that was even more recently essayed by the book Hot Feminist, written by another British columnist, Polly Vernon. Hot Feminist’s premise is that feminists, mean old humorless feminists (she doesn’t specify who), have deprived feminism of the age-old feminine joys of wearing pink and getting catcalled on the street. As Vernon tells it, a gal can’t even get her nostrils waxed without a Greek chorus of feminist disapproval! It’s downright oppressive.
We’ve heard this all before, and we’ll hear it again before too long. The cycles of media backlash and “postfeminism” roll on, not because the arguments have changed all that much, but because they still encompass a broader social anxiety about women, men, sex, power, achievement, and more. When it comes to women’s and gender equality, backlash will probably always sell better than consensus, individual exceptionalism better than collective effort, and choice better than almost anything else.
CHAPTER 7
Empowering Down
“Feminism to me is following whatever makes you happy—whether it means banning ‘bossy’ or ‘bitch’ from your vocab, or binge-watching The Bachelorette or fighting superhero battles versus the evil Patriarchy, do what makes you happy.” —BUST article
I have a bad case of empowerment fatigue. The causes are legion: PR emails that begin with the phrase, “I represent a brand whose sole purpose is to empower women, particularly around that time of the month.” Women’s-magazine articles that promise “empowering beauty tips!” followed by celebrity interviews in which Jennifer Aniston exclaims that not wearing makeup for a role was “so empowering.”
As a catchall phrase that can be understood to mean anything from “self-esteem–building” to “sexy and feminine,” to “awesome,” empowerment has become a way to signify a particularly female way of being that’s both gender-essentialist—when was the last time you heard, say, a strip-aerobics class for men described as “empowering”?—and commercially motivated. Over the past two decades, a partial list of everything that has been deemed empowering by advertising campaigns, pop culture products, and feminist rhetoric includes the following: High heels. Flats. Cosmetic surgery. Embracing your wrinkles. Having children. Not having children. Natural childbirth. Having an epidural. Embracing fat positivity. Embracing anorexia. Housework. Living like a slob. Being butch. Being femme. Learning self-defense. Buying a gun. Driving a truck. Riding a motorcycle. Riding a bike. Walking. Running. Yoga. Pole dancing classes. Being a Pussycat Doll. Growing your own food. Butchering your own meat. Doing drugs. Getting sober. Having casual sex. Embracing celibacy. Finding religion. Rejecting born faith. Being a good friend. Being an asshole. By the time satirical newspaper The Onion announced “Women Now Empowered By Everything a Woman Does” in a 2003 article, it really did seem that “Today’s woman lives in a near-constant state of empowerment.”
More than ten years after that article, empowerment’s association with women, power, activism, and success seems to be its most robust legacy. And in media and popular culture, it’s still very much in earnest and unquestioning use by younger generations who have never known the term as anything other than a way to say, “This is a thing that I, as a woman, like to do.” Shortly after her performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, for instance, Miley Cyrus told British Cosmopolitan that she is “a feminist in the way that I’m really empowering to women. . . . I’m loud and funny, and not typically beautiful.” Duly informed, the celebrity tabloid OK! used the quote as the hook for a whole piece on “empowerment” as “the ability to do what you want to do.”
Many celebrities today are earning empowerment over their careers by embracing their unique styles. Miley Cyrus enjoys controversy and isn’t shy about it as she makes twerking an everyday dance move. Emma Stone gets her empowerment by landing roles as the stable go-to girlfriend of the world’s most loved superhero. Taylor Swift has become a music mega-mogul by building her reputation as a clean teen regardless of who she does or doesn’t date. They’ve all found what’s worked for them and built their brands off of it.
The article ends by asking, “Now, how can you be empowered like a Hollywood celebrity?”
Empowerment is both a facet of choice feminism—anything can be a feminist choice if a feminist makes that choice—and a way to circumvent t
he use of the word “feminist” itself. But what is empowerment, and who does it benefit? In most of these cases, the answers are, respectively, “whatever I decide it is,” and “pretty much just me.”
Empower to the (Girl) People
“Empowerment” wasn’t widely used in general, let alone to denote women’s self-esteem/achievements/purchasing power, until the late 1970s and early ’80s. The term was first used in the realm of social services, community development, and public health, particularly among minority communities: Barbara Bryant Solomon’s Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities, a 1976 book that outlined strategies for social workers, appears to be the first American book to use the word in its title. As the philosophy of helping underserved, socially sidelined populations access tools for both individual and collective success gained popularity in applied social research, the term began to be associated with those demographics and their movements. “Empowerment” denoted an intra-community effort to work toward both financial stability and power, an alternative to a top-down model that depended on the benevolence of those already possessed of such things, like foundations, missionaries, NGOs, and more.
The phenomenon of empowerment as a social-change framework for feminism, meanwhile, came to popularity through activism in the Global South—especially Southeast Asia and Latin America, where activists had become frustrated with paternalistic, charity-focused efforts like those undertaken by the United Nations. Leading global woman’s advocate Srilatha Batliwala’s 1994 book Women’s Empowerment in South Asia: Concepts and Practices distilled the new approach as a radical revisioning of power structures themselves, what she would later describe as a “political and transformatory idea for struggles that challenged not only patriarchy, but the mediating structures of class, race, ethnicity—and, in India, caste and religion—which determined the nature of women’s position and condition in developing societies.”1 Empowerment wasn’t defined as a static concept or standalone occurrence, but as an evolving way to rethink entire power structures and value systems, draw on shared skills and knowledge, and endow marginalized communities with tools for economic sustainability. By the time the fourth United Nations Conference on Women convened in Beijing in 1995, the word (“an agenda for the empowerment of women”) was an official talking point.
As “empowerment” ambled off the pages of research journals and international-development agendas, it found a home within burgeoning third-wave feminism, whose expansive goals it fit perfectly. (I first heard it in a women’s studies class in college and thought it was just a fancier way to say “power,” kind of like when people say “upon” because it sounds grander than “on.”) A young martial arts instructor named Rosalind Wiseman founded the nonprofit Empower program in 1992 after listening to her preteen female students discuss girl-on-girl bullying; within a short time, Empower was among an in-demand group of organizations devoted to helping young people, girls in particular, negotiate what Wiseman and her social science colleagues called “relational aggression.” (Tina Fey later adapted Wiseman’s 2002 book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence into the film Mean Girls.) Giving young people the means to understand and talk about the insecurities and pressures that lead to bullying and ostracizing offered them control beyond appealing to adults for help. Empowerment was also, notably, a softer way to talk about actual power—something that girls in particular are traditionally socialized away from. It might seem like semantics, but the difference between urging girls to empower themselves and urging them to be powerful mirrored the gendered social anxiety that often leads to bullying itself. “When women are uncomfortable with the word ‘power,’ muses third-wave activist and Manifesta coauthor Jennifer Baumgardner, “they say ‘empower.’”
Or, alternately, they say “Girl Power.” A hat tip to both power and empowerment that became a hallmark of ’90s-era marketing to women, girl power was a direct product of feminist media and pop culture that converged that decade on the strength of three key cultural phenomena—1992’s so-called Year of the Woman, the radically unpretty Riot Grrrl movement, and the prefab musical sensation the Spice Girls.
The Year of the Woman described a spike in female elected officials that was widely considered to be a direct result of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill debacle: the hearings snapped enough Americans out of complacency and into voting booths to propel Bill Clinton’s victory over Republican candidate Bob Dole and account for a challenge to the sausage-party House and Senate. The number of congresswomen almost doubled, going from twenty-eight members to forty-seven; the number of women in the Senate tripled from a pitiful two to a more respectable six. Used in political reporting as well as in movies and TV, “Year of the Woman” was media hyperbole that often came off as more patronizing than celebratory; one of the new class of senators, Maryland’s Barbara Mikulski, noted that “[c]alling 1992 the Year of the Woman makes it sound like the Year of the Caribou or the Year of the Asparagus.” But the handle also encompassed the National Organization for Women’s 1992 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., an event timed to coincide with the Supreme Court’s consideration of Pennsylvania’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling on abortion access. At the time, it was the largest explicitly feminist march in history, but the fact that it was held because women were still fighting for control of their own bodies made that a Pyrrhic victory.
Further underground brewed a music subculture-turned-ideological revolution that too was galvanized by how much hadn’t changed for women. Riot Grrrl filtered punk culture of the 1980s and early 1990s through a declaratively female, politicized gaze. Part of the focus of Riot Grrrl’s loose coalition of nationwide chapters was on creating an entire culture of girl-produced, DIY media—hand-scrawled paste-up zines and posters, radio shows, guerrilla theater, and, of course, chaotic guitar-driven outbursts with titles like “Suck My Left One” and “Don’t Need You.” What made Riot Grrrl resonate with many women was that it said out loud something that no mainstream media or pop culture seemed to be saying: postfeminism was a lie. As Sara Marcus writes in her Riot Grrrl history, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, “The world was insane. Women were under attack but weren’t supposed to acknowledge it, weren’t supposed to resist it.”
The first issue of Riot Grrrl zine made note of the “general lack of girl power in society as a whole, and in the punk underground specifically”; part of the active participation of Riot Grrls was drawing attention to the way punk’s ostensibly progressive façade of antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist politics often concealed gender stereotypes, sexism, and even violence. Alice Bag, whose early-’80s band, The Bags, was part of the influential first wave of L.A. punk, has noted that though the scene began with an eruption of mixed-gender and mixed-race bands in close-knit chaos, the attendant rise of hardcore, with its hypermasculine performers and violent mosh pits (“a bunch of white guys slamming into each other,” as Bag put it) came to define the genre.2 For the girls and women who loved the punk ethos but were tired of being treated like appendages to hardcore guys, the revolution of Riot Grrrl was the act of simply taking up space—on stages, in mosh pits, on paper, in public. The cry of “Girls to the front!” was about more than demanding an expansion of the mosh pit; it was about foregrounding female experience. That didn’t always happen with sophistication, and it quite often ignored race and class analysis, a fact that has been a chief focus of contemporary Riot Grrrl revisionism. But for a generation that had been brought up believing that feminism had come and gone, the permission to question the culture’s default-male settings was seismic.
The subjects Riot Grrrls addressed in zines and songs (rote gender stereotyping, devaluing of intelligence and musicianship, sexual objectification and abuse, mental health) and the institutional issues with which the movement itself grappled, for better and worse (classism, racism, sex work, power dynamics) mirrored the efforts of second-wave c
onsciousness-raising groups in the microcosm of punk music. In carving out space where girls were both the creators and the primary audience, bands like Bikini Kill, Heavens to Betsy, and Bratmobile directly mirrored the intentionally political Women’s Liberation Rock Bands of the 1970s, whose statement-making ruckus was all about upending the equation of “rock” and “cock.” The fact that rock and punk purists, most of them male, sneered at the largely unschooled sounds that resulted was beside the point—“We seek to create revolution in our own lives every day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things,” read an early version of the Riot Grrrl manifesto, and that included not giving much credence to what “real” musicians or critics thought.
Riot Grrrl’s separatist inclinations meshed with both straightedge punk and “homocore” scenes, whose stalwarts, including bands like Fugazi and Pansy Division, labels like Dischord and Lookout!, and zines like Outpunk, gazed somewhat warily on the major-label ascension of musical peers like Nirvana and Sonic Youth. But for male bands, it was arguably different: their idealism might be mocked as rigid or overly self-righteous, but few outsiders disputed their right to actually exist, or interrupted their sets yelling, “Take it off, you cunt!” Early mainstream coverage of Riot Grrrl was sniffy—Spin, for one, was irked that Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna declined an interview and painted an unflattering portrait of a band trading on their bodies and boyfriends.3 So as music magazines, TV networks, and other media began poking and prodding to see what made these Grrrls tick, an unofficial but deliberate media blackout took shape, with access rationed out to feminist journalists and independent-minded publications. (Sassy magazine, with its early and devoted Riot Grrrl boosterism, turned out to be a great recruiting tool.)