We Were Feminists Once

by Andi Zeisler

  Carly Fiorina’s adoption of an opportunistically feminist identity found much of the press greeting her with the same credulity. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO threw her hat in the presidential ring alongside Hillary Clinton in 2015 with a campaign that, she boasted, would “rende[r] the Democratic ‘war on women’ baloney sort of neutral.”10 While a presidential campaign based on a glaring fallacy (“I am a woman; therefore, there is no war on women”) might not sound promising, the media adored the catfight potential of this Hillary-meets-her-match angle. The Week noted in a fawning profile, “[Fiorina] has no use for laws mandating ‘equal pay’ or paid maternity leave or contraceptive coverage that movement feminists espouse and Clinton laps up—for the obvious reason that they’ll backfire by making women more expensive and hence less employable.” “Here’s How Carly Fiorina Wants to Redefine Feminism,” offered a blog post at Time in which Fiorina was quoted saying “a feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses. . . . A woman may choose to have five children and home-school them. She may choose to become a CEO, or run for President.” “What Kind of Feminist is Carly Fiorina?” asked Newsweek, and at least partially answered its own question by noting that the candidate had, months earlier, called feminism “a weapon [used] to win elections.”

  Fiorina had honed her image as a “pro-woman” candidate in a 2010 California Senate campaign against Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer that was infused with the same rhetoric as her presidential bid. At the time, Susan B. Anthony List president Marjorie Dannenfelser crowed that Fiorina-vs.-Boxer would be “a test of all the dogmas of feminism and women in political life, because we’ll have perfect contrast between these two women.” But ironically, both Dannenfelser and Fiorina did exactly what they expected those dogmatic feminists to do—assumed that voters would define “feminism” as narrowly as they did. Boxer didn’t take California for a third term because she conformed to the straw-feminist image that her opponent had conjured up; she won largely on issues that are crucial to all genders: the economy, clean energy, and health care for everyone. (It also may be worth noting that Fiorina’s comment, captured by a hot mic, about her opponent’s hair—“so yesterday”—painted more of a mean-girl picture than a pro-woman one.)

  And then there’s the Independent Women’s Forum, a Washington D.C. think tank funded by right-wing and conservative foundations whose focus is on what member and author Christina Hoff Sommers terms “equity feminism.” Positioning the group in direct opposition to established feminist lobbying organizations like NOW and the Feminist Majority, the IWF has denounced “radical” feminism as damaging to families and women themselves, and its members take a hard line on everything from the wage gap (it doesn’t exist; women simply make choices that merit a different pay scale than their male counterparts) to the so-called boy crisis in schools (Sommers has written extensively that “feminization” of public education is leaving male students in peril). And though the IWF’s mission statement doesn’t mention feminism (it names “greater respect for limited government, equality under the law, property rights, free markets, strong families, and a powerful and effective national defense and foreign policy” as key goals), its name piggybacks on independence as a feature of traditional feminism.

  There’s a lot to be said for an expansive approach to feminism, especially given the movement’s historical blind spots around race, class, and religion. Palin’s attempted hijacking of the term in 2008 exploited, if inadvertantly, an existing apprehension about dictating what constituted “real” feminism. The primary season had found longtime feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan chastised for their decidedly nonintersectional belief that women should vote for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama because, per Steinem, “Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life.” After Palin joined the Republican ticket, NOW’s Kim Gandy drew ire for opining that Palin wasn’t an “authentic” woman because of her antiabortion values. These gaffes justified some of the resistance to categorically calling bullshit on Palin, or even suggesting that her feminism might be little more than tactical spin. In her L.A. Times column, Meghan Daum wrote that “If [Palin] has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she’s entitled to be accepted as one,” which seems about as useful as saying that anyone who is willing to call themselves a personal injury lawyer (an equally despised term in many circles, after all) should go ahead and set up shop. Palin’s, and now Fiorina’s, wish to deny abortion rights and/or contraceptive access to her fellow women can’t seriously be considered in line with an ideology that for decades has put bodily autonomy at the top of its priorities. A big tent is great and all, but there has to be a line in the sand, and I’m pretty sure the desire to legislate other women’s bodies is it. Media outlets don’t see it that way, though, and why would they? Debating the feminism of Palin or Fiorina equals pageviews on a silver platter.

  Since the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, the issue of what feminism means in a political context has become particularly subjective. It’s notable that neither Palin nor Fiorina’s performative embrace of feminism has stopped Democratic female politicians like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Elizabeth Warren from being demonized by right-wing pundits and politicians as feminazis who hate families and eat babies and want to take their giant feminist sledgehammers to the moral bedrock on which America was founded. Yet when politicians on the other side of the aisle embrace their own interpretations of feminism, those same pundits are all of a sudden attentive to feminism. This is not just transparently contrived branding that serves a narrow set of interests; it’s ideological narcissism.

  Learning from Lilith

  In the late 1990s, there was a magical place, a place where being a woman was just about the most special thing you could be. A place where blissed-out white ladies with long, flowing hair strummed guitars and crooned wistfully into crowds of people, many of whom were wearing blackhead-removing strips on their noses (just go with it). It was a place called Lilith Fair, and it was both a very successful and very disappointing effort to harness the power of gender essentialism for the greater corporate good.

  The all-female music festival was founded by Canadian musician Sarah McLachlan, in a stretch of the ’90s that overlapped with Riot Grrrl on one side and Girl Power on the other. It was a time when corporate airwaves saw an influx of female musicians with radio hits—Tori Amos, Joan Osborne, Missy Elliot, Fiona Apple, India. Arie—and wide appeal. But the industry’s prejudice against women as revenue killers was as strong as ever: McLachlan conceived Lilith as a retort to risk-averse radio DJs and concert promoters who acted as though any man who had to sit through more than one female act at a rock festival or two female artists back-to-back on the radio was in danger of drowning-by-estrogen. Lilith Fair was a big-ticket summer tour in the guise of a welcoming oasis, fusing music and community with civic awareness. (A portion of ticket sales went to organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Rape and Incest National Network, as well as local nonprofits in cities around the country.) In its first year, Lilith was an undeniable success, outselling such summer-festival staples as Lollapalooza and the H.O.R.D.E. festival and proving that women and girls were a market force that the music men were foolish to ignore. “In a sense, we’re talking more to the industry than the public,” noted McLachlan. “Because the industry thinks the public only responds to the lowest common denominator, and I think the public deserves more credit than that.”11

  Lilith Fair was just as successful in breaking ground in an emerging difference industry where being female was no longer a recipe for consumer marginalization. The corporations that Lilith partnered with over its run—among them the Jergens Company (makers of those Bioré blackhead strips), Luna women’s nutrition bars, and Volkswagen—were thrilled to be reaching a captive market. That such sponsors had chosen to put their brands behind a tour attended largely by politically progressive, female-identified people earmarked them as companies that women should subsequently think of when buying c
ars, nutrition bars, and blackhead strips.

  By the third year of Lilith Fair, though, there was something cloying about it. For one, the sheer sameness of a majority of its performers wore thin—though the festival did try to book acts beyond the white-lady singer-songwriter category, the lineups were still thick with them. The profusion of flowy skirts and gentle sounds made Lilith kind of the festival version of a tampon or yogurt commercial in which women are just so darn psyched to be female that they’re practically levitating. Author Sarah Vowell had this entertainingly blistering critique: “Just because I have ovaries doesn’t make me feel solidarity with horrid Tracy Chapman and her obvious, hippie-dippy songs like ‘The Rape of the World’; or claim sisterhood with wimpy, meek-voiced Lisa Loeb; or cheer ditzy Sheryl Crow, whose song about how ‘If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad’ was probably meant as a defense of eating ice cream or sleeping around or something, but I can’t hear it without imagining Joseph Stalin lip-synching it as a defense of all things evil.”12

  But the festival’s girly sounds had implications beyond annoying Vowell and others who shared her Lilith animosity. Rock festivals that had previously made at least halfhearted efforts to include female musicians on their rosters suddenly didn’t even have to do that. It was as though because Lilith Fair existed, every other mainstream music festival was off the hook for gender diversity: Lollapalooza, Warped, Ozzfest, and others had already been sausage parties, but in the wake of Lilith Fair’s success they became even more so. By the summer of 1999, it seemed as though an invisible wall had been erected between Lilith Fair and all other festivals, with each side sinking deeper into the worst of their respective stereotypes. Seeping out from the reviews of Woodstock 99—a reboot of the classic festival of peace, love, and bad acid—were reports of women being assaulted and raped in the cheering crowds for Limp Bizkit and Insane Clown Posse. Performer Sheryl Crow and emcee Rosie Perez were greeted with entreaties to show their tits. (Perez, at least, zinged back: “Go rent Do the Right Thing!”)

  In the wake of Woodstock, rock critic Ann Powers suggested that while Lilith Fair’s success was notable, it may have heightened gender tensions that have always permeated rock music and “confine[ed] mainstream female artists within the gilded cage of the pop songbird.”13 The festival, which had begun as an assimilated kind of separatism, now seemed like proof that separatism itself was assimilated past the point of no return. Certainly, the numbers of female musicians and bands on summer-festival rosters, twenty years later, haven’t changed much, and considering women these days are consistently at the top of charts across almost all genres, it’s a striking discrepancy. It’s even become a summer tradition for music–festival coverage to include at least one image of the posters from Coachella, Reading, Lollapalooza, and others with the all-male acts Photoshopped out—leaving a handful of all-female, mixed-gender, and genderqueer names suspended in suddenly-empty spaces.

  Empowering Who?

  There’s a feminist legacy of gender essentialism that, in some cases, has profoundly changed our culture. In the early days of radical feminism, for instance, there was a call to not simply theorize about a world remade by feminism, but to make one. The idea was that a “counter-reality,” as the women of one group known as The Feminists called it—a literal construction of alternatives to every institution in mainstream culture, owned and operated by women—was the only viable way to live without mainstream culture’s half-measures and stutter steps toward liberation. To start women’s schools, health centers, publishing companies, credit unions, and cultural centers from scratch would allow for prioritizing women rather than shoehorning them in alongside men, and also allow women marginalized by “straight” society—working-class women, women of color, women with disabilities, and lesbian women—to flourish financially and socially.

  The utopia was never realized in a complete sense, but some of its projects definitely were. The women’s health movement, for one, was an upending of medicine’s paternalistic approach to women’s health brought about by activist groups like the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the Black Women’s Health Project, and Chicago’s underground network of abortion providers, Jane. They shared one big idea: that women had the right to know about their bodies, control their reproductive destinies, and make decisions about their health care in a time when the medical establishment was characterized by a disdain for “female problems” that left women misdiagnosed, pathologized, mistreated, and forcibly sterilized. On a much smaller scale, the rise of a “women’s music” genre created and supported by lesbian artists led to cultural successes like that of Olivia Records, a lesbian record label–turned–fancy cruise line. And intentional communities where women live simply and collectively are, though well off the mainstream radar, still surviving in parts of the country.

  In some places, of course, these visions of a female utopia hardened into a distrust of anything (and anyone) that wasn’t explicitly female. The now-defunct Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, for one, was the longest-running institution in women’s music, but its gender rigidity—it refused to grant entry to anyone who wasn’t a “woman-born-woman”—came to symbolize the ideological conflict between second-wave radical separatists (now called simply “radfems”) and more intersectionally aware activists.

  Women’s music and lesbian collectives and all-female intentional communities are often portrayed as a hippie holdover that, if viewed at all by the mainstream, seem like a gendered variation on the Pet Rock, hardly the fearsome threat to American wholesomeness they once were. But the same narrow picture of what a woman is has, in this new marketplace-feminist reality, been shined up and refashioned into “empowerment” events and political campaigns that hijack these terms to refer to an identity of power, rather than a process of social and political change. Defining “feminist” as “a woman who lives the life she chooses” is great if you’re a woman who already has choices. But it does nothing for the vast majority on the outside of the conference hall, waiting in vain for that empowerment to trickle down.

  CHAPTER 9

  Creeping Beauty

  “Looks are the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics.” —Alex Kuczynski, Beauty Junkies

  The power of erotic capital has been explicit in culture since culture has existed. How many narratives in literature, theater, film, and contemporary popular culture have featured women undergoing physical, sartorial, and temperamental changes to leverage their looks into a better station in life, even temporarily? (I’ll start: Scheherazade, Cinderella, Pygmalion and its countless updates, The Taming of the Shrew, Little Women’s indelible “Vanity Fair” chapter, Pretty Woman, Miss Congeniality, ZZ Top’s “Legs” video . . .) And how much tragedy has resulted from cultural messages that some bodies, colors, and sizes are simply worth more than others? The works of Toni Morrison, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, and many more testify.

  Erotic capital was once a matter of coy artifice (“Only her hairdresser knows for sure . . . ”), but these days there are more and more ways to find out just how, and why, to deploy it. A 2011 New York Times article titled, “Up the Career Ladder, Lipstick in Hand,” offered evidence that women who wear makeup increase their likability and trustworthiness in the workplace. This finding might seem a likely conclusion to a study funded by Procter & Gamble, manufacturers of both the drugstore staple CoverGirl and the high-end beauty line by Dolce & Gabbana. But the article hurried to assure readers that the authors of the study were unaffiliated with P&G, and thus legit; one of them was Nancy Etcoff, Harvard professor, author of the 1999 book Survival of the Prettiest, and consultant to the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. (We’ll get to that shortly.) Etcoff, responding to a query about whether individuals should be judged on competence rather than appearance, made the case that a “cultural shift” in women’s attitudes about their own appearance must be taken into account. She argued, “Twenty or thirty years ago, if you got dressed up, it was simply to please men, or it was something y
ou were doing because society demand[ed] it. . . . Women and feminists today see this is their own choice, and it may be an effective tool.”

  Author and London School of Economics professor Catherine Hakim popularized the name of this effective tool via her 2010 book Erotic Capital. Hakim’s thesis is that where gender inequality persists, women should make better use of their one clear advantage—erotic capital—to level the playing field. Some of Hakim’s pronouncements were deliberately provocative (for instance, the suggestion that erotic capital is, for women, possibly more useful than a college degree), but most of her theory was a case of same rabbit, different hat. The “beauty premium” and its effect on workplace hiring has been a regular subject of study for academics over the years. Results have generally varied: one report found that good-looking male study subjects in Europe and Israel who included a photo when applying for jobs had a significantly higher response rate than both unspectacular men and those whose CV didn’t include a photo at all. The same experiment with female subjects found that women without a photo were, somewhat surprisingly, more likely to be called back than those with one, whatever the level of attractiveness. An earlier study, meanwhile, found that people considered attractive earned at least 5 percent more than their plainer colleagues—and, conversely, that those labeled ugly found their earnings penalized to the tune of 5 percent less (women) and 10 percent less (men) than their more comely coworkers. In other words, there is a beauty premium, but since nobody can say for sure when or how it will come into play, it’s safer to proceed through life with the switch set firmly to “on.”