by Andi Zeisler
It might look a lot like the MAKERS Conference, a two-day, invitation-only event sponsored by AOL and American Express that took place in February of 2014 at a beachside hotel in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. MAKERS, the digital storytelling platform that showcases women’s stories and achievements, promoted the event as a landmark gathering that would “reset the agenda for women in the workplace in the 21st century.” When it was noted that this seemed like a slightly presumptuous goal given that the event’s guest list was heavy on celebrities and CEOs but empty of, say, labor-union leaders, the copy was hastily amended to herald the conference as one that would “gather and spotlight the prominent leaders and innovators from corporations, not-for-profits, and government organizations that are committed to women’s and working-family issues.”1
The conference was certainly about women’s issues, in the broadest, most uplifting sense: speakers included Martha Stewart, astronaut Mae Jemison, and congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Work issues were addressed in sessions titled “Brand Maker: Living IN Your Brand,” and “Fear Means Go: Learning to Embrace Change and Challenges.” Though the word “feminism” was absent from MAKERS’ press materials for the conference, a few of the event’s featured speakers didn’t shy away from using it—Sheryl Sandberg, in conversation with PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, urged the audience to “ban the word ‘bossy’ and bring back the word ‘feminism,’” and Geena Davis spoke passionately about the need to counter unconscious gender bias in film and television. But ultimately, this was a conference about very elite women patting other very elite women on the back for their individual achievements in highly rarefied fields, and, not incidentally, about helping position the conference’s corporate sponsors to better market products to a female audience.
“I was really grossed out by it,” confesses writer Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel and a columnist for the New York Review of Books, who was one of the invitees. Holmes and I are at an outpost of a New York bakery chain trading thoughts on the rapid ascent of feminism as a decontextualized style statement. “There was not any sustained discussion,” she continues. “It was all platitudes and generalities. It was, like, Jennifer Aniston interviewing Gloria Steinem. I mean, what?” (Another writer who was there, Megan Koester, noted in Vice that “when Steinem lamented the fact that female actresses still had to be much younger than their male costars, Aniston responded, ‘What do you mean?’ in a manner that suggested she had never seen a film which did not star herself.”) When I ask Holmes to elaborate, she pauses before stating, “There just wasn’t talk about things like women’s health and the ways that access to services are undermined and compromised by the political system. There was very little about the real, actual things that affect quote-unquote real-world women. I’m not saying that one-percent women shouldn’t talk about things that affect them. [But] it was a very unsophisticated portrayal of the state of the world, and gender politics within it.”
Holmes allows that the positive, up-with-ladies spirit of the conference was probably inspirational and empowering for some of the other women who were able to attend. But after talking with her, my mind was definitely on the millions of women who don’t even get to entertain the thought of “reset[ting] the agenda for women in the workplace in the 21st century.” Like Nike’s “If You Let Me Play” sneakers (made by sweatshop workers) and the trickle-down feminism of Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer (enabled by squads of nannies and maids), these conferences seem like ways to access and sell a certain kind of female power at a comfortable distance from the less individualistic and far less glamorous reality of the majority of women.
The MAKERS conference is part of an emerging marketplace-feminism trend—a high-dollar “ideas” circuit that prizes networking, knowledge sharing, and cheerleading, and that defines “women” as women in corporate, often high-profile industries in urban areas. A growing number of conferences and convenings have made news in the past few years as barometers of a new female ascendancy: The Women in the World Summit, hosted by former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown, is a three-day gathering at New York City’s Lincoln Center that brings together “CEOs, industry icons, and world leaders, as well as artists, grassroots activists, and firebrand dissidents . . . mak[ing] vivid the stories of the courageous and intelligent women who are taking on the status quo in their native countries, leading peace movements in the face of war and conflict, and shattering glass ceilings in every sector.”
Thrive, an event presented in New York City by Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington and Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski in 2014 to coincide with Huffington’s new book of the same name, emphasized that women have been so busy killing it in our careers and personal lives that we’re all going to burn out unless we incorporate the “third metric”—“a combination of well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.” The three-day event offered attendees a chance to implement this metric and create “sustainable, fuller, more impactful” lives by way of speakers like Katie Couric and fashion designer Tory Burch and sponsors like Kenneth Cole, JP Morgan Chase, and Westin Hotels and Resorts. (As Thrive’s Web site notes, “Throughout the day, sponsors are integrated into key customized segments to position their brand among attendees as an integral part of The Third Metric way of life.”) There’s Time Inc. and Real Simple magazine’s yearly “Women & Success” event in New York City, and Fortune’s Most Powerful Women conference, held most recently at the Ritz-Carlton in Orange County. The conference founded by Forbes magazine—Forbes Women’s Summit: Power Redefined—is held yearly in both the United States and Asia. And the S.H.E. Summit, a New York–based event now in its fourth year, is an “unforgettable, once-a-year experience designed to: Propel your next phase of personal and professional success; shift you into your MOST EMPOWERED state of self; re-align you with authentic goals and values; add significant relationships to your network; and provide a supportive community for your goals!”
Such conferences celebrate the experience of being an exceptional female individual among other exceptional female individuals by way of an exclusive experience that honors individuality and power as uniquely female experiences. Exclusive and expensive: tickets for Women in the World cost $500, Thrive $300, and S.H.E. $250 (if you nab the early-bird rate); Cosmopolitan’s Fun Fearless Life conference is a bargain at $199, even more so when compared to the $3,500 and $8,500 ponied up by attendees of the MAKERS and Fortune conference.
They’re not technically separatist gatherings, especially given that many of the corporate CEOs who speak at them are inevitably male—MAKERS calls them “manbassadors.” But a considerable part of their raison d’être is showcasing that educated, deep-pocketed women are an economic and branding force that has arrived. Make no mistake, these are not events to empower women, but to sell them to advertisers in a time when traditional magazine revenues have been hit hard by the changing economics of media. It’s a vision of empowerment that, in many ways, erases the presence of anyone who isn’t empowered in the most crucial sense of the word—financially so—by suggesting that their voices aren’t part of resetting agendas or creating fulfilling lives. The dissonance is more pronounced when you consider that the sponsors of some of these events are hotel chains (like Hyatt, the hotel for both the Forbes Women’s Summit and Time Inc./Real Simple’s Women and Success events) that have been at the center of labor-union disputes over the pay, hours, and working conditions of a largely female workforce. It would be one thing if such events acknowledged their narrowly defined demographic, but suggesting they empower women as a whole class is unavoidably tone-deaf.
In a 2014 New York Times article on the phenomenon of elite women’s conferences, one habitual attendee, a marketing consultant, asserted that “it’s the formation of a new girls’ club. . . . I mean, no offense, but men have been doing this kind of conference networking for years.”2 It’s true; they have. That’s one reason it’s easy to see the suddenly omnipresent women’s-conference sphere as less about the su
ccessful project of equality and more about the same gold mine of marketing to women that got cigarette and cornstarch companies so starry-eyed a century ago. Were I at a Third Metric or S.H.E. event, this kind of talk would probably get me bounced from the room, but it seems worth questioning whether this is feminism, or just a new twist on the age-old concept of selling products and ideas with gender essentialism.
Gender essentialism, simply defined, is the belief in binary, fixed differences between men and women that account for “natural” behavior and characteristics. Gender essentialism holds that men are aggressive, individualist, and rational rather than emotional; and that women are passive, community-minded, emotional rather than rational. Gender essentialism is the force that has justified centuries of unequal treatment and undergirded everything from fundamentalist religious beliefs (women as moral guardians of purity) to formulaic pop culture images of women (women as loyal wives and girlfriends) to workplace roles (women don’t rise as fast as men because they’re uncomfortable with power).
The father of essentialism was Aristotle, who got the party started back when he referred to the female as a “disabled male,” but while the couple thousand years since then have managed to disprove that particular characterization, remarkably little has been successful in dismantling gender essentialism as a whole. Its language, themes, and images have always been the bedrock of media and pop culture, endemic to jobs across all levels in all industries, encoded by sports culture, and enforced by religious tenets and texts. But even as gender has become something that more and more people understand as an unfixed, fluid category, recent decades have seen a cultural and political insistence on biology-as-destiny, one in which the marketplace plays a more-than-meaningful role.
The Difference Industry
Aristotle would have been proud of psychologist and “father of adolescence” G. Stanley Hall, who was among many medical professionals of the early twentieth century who believed that women were best left uneducated, lest “over-activity of the brain” disrupt their chief function of bearing and raising children. And Edward Clarke, whose 1873 text had the seemingly promising title “Sex in Education, or, a Fair Chance for the Girls,” held that young ladies who studied “in a boy’s way” were likely to suffer atrophy of the uterus and ovaries, insanity, and death. Though such studies were debunked by plenty of researchers—some of whom were women who’d been educated and lived to tell the tale—their theories were adopted by opponents of women’s equality with no small amount of relish. In 1879, Gustave Le Bon, one of the “craniometrists” whose work Stephen Jay Gould analyzed in the 1980 essay “Women’s Brains,” wrote perhaps the signature entry in the don’t-educate-the-ladies canon: “[A]mong the most intelligent races, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment. . . . A desire to give them the same education, and to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera.” (Le Bon, as you might imagine, also had some very specific beliefs about the brains of other races, ethnicities, and cultures, which can probably be summed up by noting that Adolf Hitler was a fan of his work.)
It’s easy to laugh at what seems like comically outdated thinking, until you realize that often violent opposition to the education of girls and women continues to be a hallmark of many cultures, despite a sustained rise in global awareness and advocacy. Even in the United States, there’s an inability to acknowledge the residue of our own culture’s resistance to girls’ and women’s education—as though because we’re not actually throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls or shooting them in the head, all traces of past inequality have been banished from the halls of learning. We can all have a knowing chuckle at, say, the fundamentalist Christian “stay-at-home daughter” movement wherein megachurch pastors warn their flocks against sending girls to colleges where they’ll be corrupted by rogue bits of knowledge and led astray from their core domestic purpose. But corporate media’s coverage of education often reveals a curiously similar set of worries.
There’s palpable anxiety, for instance, in the language used to report stories about patterns in school performance and college attendance. Across all races, there are more women than men enrolling in colleges and universities, but the percentage of men enrolling has remained steady. In other words, it’s not that men are declining to enroll; it’s simply that women are doing so in greater numbers. But the articles written about this phenomenon have presented it as a titanic crisis: A 2012 Forbes article about the college enrollment patterns of men and women used the phrase “female domination” to describe the gap. A year earlier, NBC Nightly News story blared the question, “Where are the male college students?” as though they’d all vanished in a puff of smoke. A 2014 post at Pew Research Center’s FactTank was headlined “Women’s College Enrollment Gains Leave Men Behind.” Girls are described as “leapfrogging” over boys in the “race” to college. And if you didn’t get the message that women are cheerfully flipping the bird at men as they barrel over them onto our nation’s college quadrangles, much-hyped books like The War on Boys, Are Men Obsolete?, The Second Sexism, and The End of Men are more than happy to offer fevered predictions of an America in which feminism has created masses of education-crazed interlopers.
One of the reliably essentialist refrains in much of the college-man crisis is, “Pray tell, who will all these overeducated girls marry?!?” The media hype around the phenomenon of educated black women who supposedly can’t find husbands, for one, is a subject that’s been ominously covered everywhere from Essence to CNN to the oeuvre of comedian–turned–relationship-expert Steve Harvey. The discussion almost never includes black women themselves, as political TV host Melissa Harris-Perry pointed out, but instead “frame[s] the issue as a black female problem rather than a community issue, offering advice that encourages women to mold themselves into a more sanitized definition of femininity that doesn’t compete with socially sanctioned definitions of masculinity.”3 Likewise, books like Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man don’t hang on sincere concern for the happiness or fulfillment of black women, but on the notion that too many of them being successful and uppity and single is a societal problem that requires immediate fixing. “That black women are single in large numbers, that they are advancing in education and careers, that they head so many households, that they are independent is deemed proof of their deficiency as women,” wrote Tamara Winfrey Harris in a 2012 Ms. article. “In a nutshell: women are transgressing the boundaries we understand as ‘natural,’ and that is terrifying.”
When it intersects with capitalism, meanwhile, there’s no limit to how far biological determination can reach. Assimilation into a vast marketplace of needlessly gendered products now begins at birth, with diapers printed with cars or princesses and crib sheets that feature either pirates or flowers, but never both at once. Humorous onesies for male neonates read “Future superhero” or, worse, “Hung like a two-year-old,” while those for girls denote “Princess in Training” or, still worse, ask, “Does this make my thighs look fat?” Shopping for a Halloween costume for my son several years back, I was baffled to see that superhero costumes, which once came in the form of screenprinted plastic sacks, now look like tiny, headless facsimiles of Jean-Claude Van Damme, bulked out with inches of foam-rubber musculature in case you didn’t get the message that they’re meant to be worn by boys. (Meanwhile, for girls on Halloween, the question is not whether she’s going to be a Disney princess, but which princess.)
It goes without saying that a trip to a big-box toy store involves voluntary immersion in a pink-and-blue sea of product essentialism, but even in what you might expect to be more neutral consumer spaces—say, the vitamin section at the supermarket—there’s no escaping it. (In case you’re wondering, the Disney-princess vitamins and the Avengers vitamins are identical blobs of gelatin and glucose syrup.) At the bookstore, The Big Book of Boys’ Stuff
and The Big Book of Girls’ Stuff both cover vital kid subjects like boogers and crushes, but have covers suggesting that boys want to know about science and girls want to know how much they should charge for babysitting; Scholastic’s How to Survive Anything books were peddled in “Boys Only” and “Girls Only” versions, with some pretty specific ideas of what each sex needs to withstand. (For boys: shark and polar-bear attacks, zombie invasions, and whitewater rapids; for girls: fashion disasters, “BFF fights,” breakouts, and embarrassment.)
This is a major shift from the more gender-neutral kid-specific marketing of the 1970s and ’80s. Sure, Barbie and G.I. Joe still lived in different aisles in the store back then, but there were also action figures based on Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man, and his ladyfriend Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman. Legos were primary-colored building blocks, not pre-made sets consisting of Star Wars scenarios and pastel beauty salons. When the Atari home videogame console made the scene, it wasn’t “for boys” or “for girls,” but for kids. (Or, if you were my dad, for hogging on the couch, with a drink and a smoke, after a long day at work.)
The paradox of the gendered product marketing that has intensified since the 1990s is that even as younger generations have a larger slate of powerful role models and a wider spectrum of gender identities than ever before, most of the retailers who court them have doubled down on dictating what “boys” and “girls” do and are. It’s no longer enough for Toys ‘R’ Us to advertise its unisex Big Wheel to any child ready to pedal its sturdy plastic chassis down the driveway; instead, it sells the Big Dog Truck and the bright-pink Lil’ Rider Princess Mini Quad. From Old Navy to Target to Pottery Barn Kids, inherently unisex kids’ products are divided into pink and blue silos. This complicates things for everyone: the boys who feel sheepish about loving “girl” movies like Brave or Frozen; the girls who are policed for their playthings even by female peers; the transgender children whose struggles are underscored by having to define themselves through everything from pencil cases to fruit snacks; and the parents and relatives whose concerns about such commercial rigidity get brushed off with statements like “He/she’s too young to care whether toys are pink or blue.”