by Andi Zeisler
Choice feminism has flourished in recent decades in particular because, though corporate media and popular culture (much like the Supreme Court with Roe) are not particularly interested in arguing for women’s equality, they are most definitely zealous about portraying women in opposition to one another. A big part of how choice feminism has finessed the project of never judging one choice as better than another involves retooling institutional norms and mores in individual terms and letting women themselves duke it out in the public sphere. There is gold in those choice-feminism hills, especially in a new-media sphere that prizes the pageviews and ad revenue yielded by a good, solid tug-of-war between, “My choice is feminist and empowering!/ No it’s not, and here’s why!”
“Empowerment as a function of consumer choice is not feminism,” states one feminist scholar I interviewed, “because feminism is at base about equality and capitalism is completely at odds with that.” But, she adds hurriedly, right before asking to be quoted anonymously, “When we have these conversations, it often becomes people saying, ‘Stop judging me for liking what I like!’ You can’t engage without interpretation of that as judgment.” Feminist consumers have a responsibility to acknowledge the limitations of the choice-plus-empowerment-equals-feminism frame—it’s part of being a critical thinker, which itself is crucial in a mediated culture. The problem is, to echo the anonymous scholar, such questioning itself risks being interpreted as insufficiently feminist.
With choice established as the lens through which to view anything and everything, no one wants to come right out and suggest that one choice might, just might, be even a fractional step in the direction toward or away from an objectively more equal world. The subsequent pile-on (as Hirshman can vouch from beneath a mountain of hate mail garnered by “Homeward Bound”) would be overwhelming. So most often we feint toward and then retreat from anything that might be mistaken as publicly judging another woman’s choices; a conspiracy-minded onlooker might say that choice feminism has been a magical antidote to activist feminism, moving public feminism’s focus from the redistribution of power and resources and winnowing it down to the narcissism of small differences.
Indeed, it’s important to note that choice feminism, at least at the start, wasn’t something nurtured within actual feminist movements, but rather a frame that, like “postfeminism,” was built by trend stories and amplified because—also like postfeminism—it pressed the ever-dependable conclusion that feminism had hurt rather than helped women. It had convinced them they needed jobs when they’d really rather be at home with kids, pressed them to compete with men as rivals instead of turning to them as protectors, repelled their natural baby-making instincts until it was too late.
Choice feminism and its offshoot, the so-called Mommy Wars, became a talking point in the mid-2000s—a time when, as it happens, grassroots feminism was easier to find and participate in than ever. It was sprouting up in group blogs online, simmering in political action committees, and rapidly expanding into less traditionally academic areas like prison and labor reform. But as a media story, women working together to craft new legislation, share tech skills, or lobby for incarcerated women to give birth unshackled is a giant snooze—and definitely a less economically rewarding option than the cost-effective write-around or op-ed whipped up from a mass of trends and polls and celebrity flotsam. By contrast, a point-counterpoint opinion piece, where one woman’s contention that high heels aren’t feminist is countered by a second woman’s equally vociferous defense of her choice to wear high heels, accomplishes a bunch of things at once: It fills content space cheaply, no reporting or research needed. It legitimizes the notion that women’s empowerment is provided by the marketplace and makes it enticing to advertisers. And it suggests to its audience that the real roadblock to feminist progress isn’t antiwoman lawmakers or greedy corporate policy or, you know, gender inequality itself, but women bickering amongst themselves about what does or doesn’t count as empowerment.
The further into the marketplace “choice” has moved, the more it has become a nebulous designation—which is maybe ironic, since the more it’s associated with women’s reproductive rights, the less focus is drawn to legislative failures that also affect women’s autonomy, from affordable child care to equal wages for equal work. The use of “choice” to rationalize individual choices—and, perhaps more important, to signify that criticizing those choices is unfeminist—isn’t unethical or amoral so much as it is underachieving.
We know logically that choices aren’t made in a vacuum: we assign financial, aesthetic, and moral value to any number of choices in the course of each day, and most of us get that these choices mean something in the larger world. People vote, recycle, volunteer, and donate to causes that they feel deeply about. They are gentle with children and old people, and they don’t kick kittens and puppies. Or they do kick kittens and puppies. And they embezzle, abuse family members, don’t tip at restaurants, and vandalize national parks. Sociopaths aside, most of us regularly express a sense of ethics and values in our choices, and know that many of them have the potential to make the world better or make it worse. As an ideology, feminism too holds that some things—say, social and political equality and physical autonomy—are better than other things, like inequality, domestic and sexual violence, and subservience based on gender. It makes no sense to argue that all choices are equally good so long as individual women choose them. And it’s equally illogical to put a neoliberal frame around that argument and suggest that a woman’s choices affect that woman and only that woman. It looks like we may have empowered ourselves into a corner.
Banking on Empowerment
In 2011, Walmart launched a new initiative called the Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative. The program was announced a scant three months after the U.S. Supreme Court quashed what would have been the largest-ever class-action sex discrimination suit against a private company. Walmart, now the nation’s largest private employer, has a business model in which employees earn poverty wages while reaping billions in profit for the owners, but the suit focused on the fact that female employees were paid less than male ones for the same jobs—part of a systematic devaluing of female labor fixed in the company’s corporate culture. (“No position was too minor to be exempt from sex discrimination,” wrote Liza Featherstone in her 2005 book Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-mart.) Though the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the 1.5 million women who were plaintiffs in the case failed to meet the requirements for a class-action suit, Walmart still had to deal with a tarnished image.
Conceived as part of an ass-covering PR campaign, the Women’s Economic Empowerment Initiative combines a number of programs united under the banner of supporting women as producers and business owners. It includes the online-shopping destination Empowering Women Together, which offers products from women-owned businesses that, according to Walmart press releases, are “fueled by women with inspiring stories.” The company pledged to source $20 billion worth of products from such businesses over five years, in addition to doubling its inventory from women-owned businesses internationally. Elsewhere, the initiative supports a Women in Factories Training Program concentrated in India, Bangladesh, Honduras, El Salvador, and China; Walmart boasted that it “will train 60,000 women in 150 factories and processing facilities producing for top retail suppliers in industries with high percentages of women.”
Following years of public exposés of Walmart’s race, gender, and labor policies, the WEEI placed a complaint-proof façade over a company-wide devaluing of women’s labor. (Look at us! No, not in the actual stores—look at us over here, empowering these poor women in the Global South to make our products!) But even better, the initiative redefined women’s empowerment as something that corporations could provide, burnishing their reputations as they did. (At least one entrepreneurial family who bought into Walmart’s “empowering” sales pitch found that it wasn’t exactly walking the walk: Michael Wooley, whos
e teenage daughter Christen invented a comfortable backpack/vest hybrid for Empowering Women Together, had high hopes for the program, but as he told a Huffington Post business writer in 2015, the retail giant over-promised and more than under-delivered, withholding both sales reports and revenue.7)
According to Google Trends, the word “empowerment” hit a high in 2004 and 2005, as it became more deeply entrenched everywhere—feminist discourse, consumer marketing, corporate culture. “Empowering” joined “synergy,” “scalable,” and “drill-down” in boardroom conferences, vision statements, and business plans, and was eventually called “the most condescending transitive verb ever” by Forbes.8 It’s become the name of a range of businesses, a national fitness event, and an almost mind-boggling number of yoga studios. It’s become a company-jargon fave at Microsoft, with former and current CEOs Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella both using it to impressively vague effect in memos and public talks. (At Microsoft’s annual Convergence event in 2015, Nadella told attendees, “We are in the empowering business,” and added that the tech giant’s goal was “empowering you as individuals and organizations across every vertical and every size of business, and any part of the world, to drive your agenda and do the things you want to do for your business.”9)
Elsewhere in discourses and debates around sex as both an activity and a commodity, “empowerment” has become a sort of shorthand that might mean “I’m proud of doing this thing,” but also might mean “This thing is not the ideal thing, but it’s a lot better than some of the alternatives.” Feeling empowered by stripping, for instance, was a big theme among moonlighting academics or otherwise privileged young women in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and you can find countless memoirs about what they discovered about themselves in the world of the sexual marketplace; the same is true of prostitution, with blogs like Belle de Jour, College Call Girl, and books like Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl. There was a point in the mid-to-late 2000s when you couldn’t swing a cat through Barnes & Noble without knocking a slew of sex-work memoirs off the shelves: Lily Burana’s Strip City, Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl, Jillian Lauren’s Some Girls, Michelle Tea’s Rent Girl, Shawna Kenney’s I Was a Teenage Dominatrix, Melissa Febos’s Whip Smart, and Sarah Katherine Lewis’s Indecent among them.10 The crucial thing these often incredibly absorbing and well-written books had in common? All were written by young, white, and no-longer-hustling sex workers.
I want to be clear that standing with sex workers on the principle that sex work is work is an issue whose importance cannot be overstated, and also clear that my complete lack of expertise on the subject makes it well beyond the scope of this book. But I am interested in the idea that “empowerment” is so often used as a reflexive defense mechanism in discussions of this kind of sex-work experience, but less so in describing the less written-about experiences of people whose time in the industry is less finite and less bookworthy—transgender women, exploited teenagers and trafficked foreigners, men and women forced into sex work by poverty, abuse, or addiction. And I’m fascinated by the fact that we see thousands of pop culture products in which women are empowered by a sex industry that does not have their empowerment in mind, but far fewer in which they are empowered to make sexual choices on their own terms, outside of a status quo in which women’s bodies are commodities to be bought and sold. Indecent author Sarah Katherine Lewis has written that, during her time as a stripper, “I felt empowered—as a woman, as a feminist, as a human being—by the money I made, not by the work I did”; but hers is just one story. Belle de Jour and other sex workers have written about truly enjoying their work. If the market were just as welcoming of narratives in which young women were empowered by their careers as, say, electricians—if personal memoirs about a youthful, self-determining layover in the electrical trades were a thing publishers clamored for—then a handful of empowered sex workers would be no big thing. Until that’s the case, it’s worth questioning why the word is so often the first line of defense.
Elsewhere in pop culture, “empowerment” has become even more of a throwaway. You can find a list of “108 Women’s Empowerment Films” on the yoga Web site Awakening Women; it includes Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (because, I guess, being kidnapped for marriage by a bunch of backwoods man-boys is empowering), Sylvia (falling in love with a philandering jerk-genius and cutting short your career as a poet by committing suicide: also empowering), What Women Want (having your creative ideas stolen by your boss who’s been endowed with sudden mind-reading powers and who uses them to market stuff to women: empowering!). Beauty blogger and entrepreneur Michelle Phan introduced her cosmetics line in 2013 with a video titled “Empowered by You,” in which Phan is shown in different guises—Game of Thrones’s pearl-haired Khaleesi, a platform-booted Harajuku girl—intercut with close-ups of her products. “You empower me,” enthuses Pham. “What empowers you?” Advertisements for any and every product or experience aimed at women—a new style of razor, say, or a life-coaching retreat in Hawaii where you can set your intentions for the future—use the term as an all-purpose adjective, Mad Libs–style; pop it anywhere in that sentence, it’ll make sense.
The pop cultural framing of empowerment is basically the one defined by the fluffmongering OK magazine article—“the ability to do what you want to do”—a meaning that isn’t about change or action or demands or even community. The term is apolitical, vague, and so non-confrontational that it’s pretty much impossible to argue against it. Embracing your makeup-face free one day, being empowered by cosmetics the next? Sure! A detour into sex work? Why not? Convening in Hawaii for life-coaching and intention-setting? Don’t mind if I do! In only a few decades, “empowerment” has gone from a radical socialchange strategy to a buzzword of globalization to just another ingredient in a consumer word salad.
“Empowerment,” like “feminism,” was once a word with a definition. Both have become diluted, in part because of the fears about what their definitions stood to change, and in part by the market that’s embraced (some) of their goals. Both have been, and continue to be, successful and unsuccessful, and both continue to be eminently worthwhile projects. But it’s hard to think about “empowerment” in a way that’s not indelibly gendered (even on HBO’s Hung, a series about a male teacher who turns to prostitution, all the paeans to empowerment come from the dotty woman who pimps him out), and entirely overused. We can like what we like, and feel good about things that maybe society thinks we shouldn’t. But continuing to hitch empowerment exclusively to women and to feminist movements has started to blur the way forward: after all, if everything is empowering, nothing is.
CHAPTER 8
The Rise of Big Woman
“Onward, Upward, and Inward” —tote-bag slogan at the 2014 Thrive Third Metric conference
It seems almost impossible to imagine now, but thirty-nine years ago, the U.S. government funded a national conference on woman’s issues, convened with the goal of making recommendations on issues, platforms, and needs to prioritize in the coming years. The brainchild of congresswomen Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink, the conference was proposed in 1975 as part of President Gerald Ford’s National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Decade (back then, women didn’t just get a year every now and then) and funded to the tune of $5 million. The conference was held in Houston over four days in November 1977, drawing between fifteen and twenty thousand attendees, two thousand of whom were official delegates representing all fifty states and six territories. With Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan delivering a keynote address and Abzug presiding over the official business, the delegates got down to cases, eventually drawing up an action plan for twenty-six “planks” to be submitted to Congress and President Jimmy Carter. Among them were sex discrimination, wage inequality, education, the rights of minority women, disability rights, abortion, child care, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. In the 2005 documentary about the conference, Sisters of ’77, many of the wom
en there mused about the impact of the historic, never-to-be-repeated event. There were arguments (over abortion, most prominently), there was hostility (from Phyllis Schlafly and her STOP ERA cohort, predictably), but there was also a sense that there could be no turning back to an earlier time, a time when women were simply absent from the nation’s agenda. “It caused a spark in so many women,” remembered Texas governor Ann Richards in the documentary, “to know that the fight was worth it and that they were not alone in their efforts, and that there were thousands of women out there who agreed with them, and who were going to be there to help.”
Let’s imagine a similar conference were to happen today. I’d like to think it could have that same galvanizing spirit, but I’m also 99.9 percent sure it wouldn’t be funded by the government, but by a slate of multinational corporate sponsors: Verizon, Estée Lauder, Gucci. It would be held not at a convention center but at an extremely posh spa, all the better to pop out for a quick seaweed detox wrap if needed. Paparazzi would be camped out to get snaps of celebrity attendees Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, and Amal Clooney; there might, in fact, be a red carpet. There would be sessions on Embracing Leadership and Mindful Branding. The action planning wouldn’t be the focus of the conference, but rather an optional breakout session between a panel discussion on financial empowerment and a special conversation between Hayek and Jolie that adds $175 to the conference ticket price but does include a gift bag containing chia-seed energy bars, a luxury skin mask, and a coupon for Activia yogurt.