by Andi Zeisler
The ads were both a symptom and an effect of marketplace feminism. By addressing something feminism had long sought to remedy—the narrow prescriptiveness of mainstream beauty standards—Dove positioned itself as a progressive brand, even while performing its “firming” bait-and-switch. And those who identified it as a blatant shill were accused of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Dove was part of a multinational corporation, after all, went the rationalization. We can’t exactly expect them not to want to move units. At least they’re trying to do it in a way that nods to size positivity and women’s confidence. Right? Consumers, in any case, responded: in 2006, two-thirds of Dove’s sales were generated by people who bought more than one Dove product, double the number from 2003 before the start of the campaign. And ten years in, revenues had grown from 2.5 billion to 4 billion.13
In the years since the Campaign for Real Beauty launched, Dove has continued to tread the line between consciousness-raising and co-optation. The company’s 2007 video “Onslaught” is an example of the former: In it, the camera zooms in on the peachy face of a young white girl, allowing our gaze to linger for a moment before the screen is strafed with a montage of women’s bodies and body parts—breasts, lips, bikini lines, hips, clavicles. A woman on a scale grows and shrinks rapidly; surgeon’s scalpels and cannulae cut and suck at mortified flesh. It’s a riot of mediated images, and that’s exactly the point; at video’s end, a message appears: “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.” “Onslaught” borrowed heavily from the work of Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally, two media critics whose films make explicit and unsettling connections between women’s images in advertising and the treatment of women in culture more broadly.
“Onslaught,” along with an earlier video called “Evolution” that used time-lapse photography to track how makeup and Photoshop transform everyday models to ad-ready Amazons, were early viral sensations, unrecognizable as ads until one dug a bit further to find that they were projects of the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, one of the Campaign for Real Beauty’s initiatives. Both videos set the tone for the Upworthy era, using frank, discomfiting visual cues, urgent music, and spare copy to make viewers question what they thought they knew. Discovering that Dove was behind them added a layer of perceived legitimacy: this wasn’t the work of some crazed feminist activists, after all, but that of a company that had a lot to lose if women and girls were to reject the supremacy of beauty ideals. If they cared, then shit must really be bad.
But if the viral videos did help jumpstart the global dialogue that Dove desired, some of the company’s actual ads eventually derailed those same conversations. Take the “Sketches” video, which premiered in 2013 as both a TV spot and a longer video meant to be shared on social media. In “Sketches,” women in a spacious, sunny loft are asked to describe their features to a forensics artist, who later asks strangers to describe the same women to him. The women are then presented with two sketches each, which inspire shock, startled laughter, and sheepishness. The game, you see, is to point out how women are their own worst beauty critics—invariably, the sketch based on the woman’s own description of herself is much less attractive than the sketch based on the stranger’s description.
More than 135 million people watched the video, and if the number who shared it on Facebook is any indication, “Sketches” resonated as a real truth bomb. Advertising Age even named it the Viral Campaign of the Year. And yet, as a number of critics pointed out, the video arguably failed in its larger mission as part of the Campaign for Real Beauty—not only because it did little to expand the definition of what constitutes “beautiful,” but because it upheld the idea that “beautiful” is the most important word that can be used to describe a woman. As Ann Friedman pointed out at style-and-culture blog The Cut, “What if Dove had filmed a woman who looked exactly like one of the ‘negative’ self-descriptions—maybe someone with a heavy brow line and a prominent mole and deep, dark circles under her eyes? Someone who wore a size 14? And what if that woman had said to the sketch artist, ‘Well, first off, I’m really pretty?’”
The prevalence of young, thin, white women in the video also hinted that diversity of all kinds had become less of a priority for Dove (or at least for the agency that created the ad, longtime Dove partners Ogilvy & Mather) than the Campaign had suggested. In contrast to the brand’s past use of real people—gray-haired women, dreadlocked women, wrinkled women—the main subjects of “Sketches” are homogenous. Not one is a woman of color, all are conventionally thin, and all except one are under the age of forty. Given that both women of color and women over forty already see themselves reflected less in mainstream media than white women—and far less as avatars of beauty of any kind—this was significant.
The campaign’s next video was even more of a head-scratcher: titled “Patches,” it featured unsuspecting women being offered “beauty patches,” nicotine patch–like adhesives that they’ve been told will help them feel more beautiful. What happens next will not shock you in the least: The placebo effect of the patches lasts even after the women are told they’ve been duped and that—cue the swelling music—true beauty comes from within. “Knowing that I don’t need something to make me feel that way—that it’s just who I am and it was hidden and now it’s not anymore,” says one satisfied hoaxee, “that’s very empowering.” In just under ten years, Dove had gone from presenting women as straightforwardly confident in their own actual beauty to deeply gullible in service to the ideal of beauty itself. Not exactly progress—and yet, as with other ads, “Patches” received a largely favorable response: an Advertising Age survey of social-media reaction recorded a 91 percent favorable response in the first two days of the video’s release in sixty-five countries.14
Success aside, both “Sketches” and “Patches” revealed the limitations of a marriage between true body acceptance and market status quo. Dove’s stated goals might be sincere, but the company is still part of a system whose bottom line depends on perpetuating female insecurity—and subtly encouraging women to blame themselves for it. And yet, simply because few other companies have dared to engage with the subject of mediated beauty standards, Dove continues to be seen as the company that cares. The fact that it cares just enough not to put revenues in jeopardy (and not enough to cease inventing new insecurities and products to address them) isn’t important in a marketplace where simply flirting with body acceptance still seems radical. Unilever funded a follow-up survey in 2014 to measure the effect of the Campaign for Real Beauty; in it, survey consultant Etcoff found that 62 percent of woman interviewed agreed that they were “responsible for influencing their own definition of beauty”—triple the number who had agreed with that statement ten years earlier. The beauty-focused media those interviewees consumed hadn’t changed their messages; they had simply gotten savvier at delivering them with a feminist-inspired twist.
It’s clear there’s at least some self-awareness in the larger scope of campaigns like these. And anticipating charges of talking out both sides of their mouths, such brands increasingly pair their advertising with opportunities for their consumers to help “join” or “shape” social media conversations sparked by their market activism. In 2013, for instance, Special K—a brand that has long boasted of its cereal’s singular power to slim women down enough to fit into a snug red frock—launched #fightfattalk, a hashtag campaign designed to bring awareness to the phenomenon of women using self-hating language when talking about their bodies. “From ‘joking’ about cankles to destructive self-deprecation, fat talk has become part of ordinary conversation, spoken without a second thought,” read the ad copy, which went on to state, “Words are powerful. Let’s make sure they’re positive.”
So far, so good. Special K was on point about the phenomenon of fat talk as a staple of women’s self-deprecatory arsenal, especially the fact that it’s by now ingrained as an ordinary topic of conversation, particularly among white women in commercial culture. From female stand-up comedians
for whom cutting self-observation has for decades been among the acceptable riffs (see Phyllis Diller’s observation that “My Playtex Living bra died. . . . of starvation,” or Janeane Garofalo’s reference to having “the physique of a melting candle”), to celebrity profiles in which starlets admit to being “caught” eating like humans by the paparazzi, apologizing for simply having visible bodies is part of many women’s average day. And for many women of color, the dynamic of self-deprecation might not only look like apologizing for having the audacity to inhabit a living body that requires food to function, but can also include an awareness that not conforming to ethnic stereotypes—the bountiful butts of Black and Latina women, or the birdlike delicacy and long limbs of East Asian ones—renders them either invisible or “wrong.”
And yet. Where Special K’s site proclaims, “99 percent of women fat talk, are your friends among them?” and invites readers to “find out now” by clicking a link, the resulting page is not a revelation about “your friends” at all, but a slideshow ad for several Special K products, including one that urges you to “Outsmart Those Temptations” by buying Protein Cinnamon Brown Sugar Crunch cereal. In other words, Special K is itself fat-talking to the consumer by positioning non–Special K food as a “temptation.” The press release for the campaign revealed the true impetus behind #fightfattalk: it wasn’t that the brand wanted women to stop trash-talking their bodies for its own sake, but rather because such talk is “a destructive and significant barrier to weight-management success.” It was a deceptive feminist hook for a decidedly unfeminist campaign: shut up about why you think you need to lose weight and just lose it, already. Model/TV personality and #fightfattalk ambassador Tyra Banks inadvertently summed up the campaign’s mixed message when she stated, “I’m excited to partner with Special K to help empower women to not only feel confident about their bodies, but also to remove those negative thoughts and show them how to employ tips and tricks to make their least-liked physical attributes look better.”
Similarly, as feminism’s popular profile began to rise in 2014, CoverGirl got in on the beauty-positivity action with its own hashtag campaign, #GirlsCan, announcing a five-year campaign to “empower [girls] to be the next generation to rock the world” and an estimated $5 million donation to individuals and organizations focused on developing girls’ potential. (One of the brand’s first donations was $500,000 given to Girls Who Code, a nonprofit whose mission is training and encouraging girls to enter technology fields.) The campaign enlisted celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres, Katy Perry, Pink, Janelle Monae, and Queen Latifah, all of whom spoke inspiringly in ads about the things they were told they couldn’t do and did anyway.
What CoverGirl didn’t do as part of the campaign, however, was change its point-of-sale appeals to girls and women. Thus we have Katy Perry in a #GirlsCan promotional video, discussing the meaning of empowerment (“confidence, inner confidence”) and enthusing that “Girls can own the word,” but there she is in a store display along with the question, “What kind of bombshell are you?” (The options, in case you’re wondering, are “sweet,” “flirty,” and “wild.”) It’s a textbook example of a brand trying to have its empowerment both ways, telling girls they can be anything they want, and then advising them to fit themselves into a limited range of boxes.
Almost all the brands that push female empowerment with their products have charitable arms, whether it’s breast-cancer research (Avon, Revlon, and Estée Lauder, among others), girls’ education (Dove, CoverGirl, Gillette), or domestic-violence awareness (The Body Shop, Mary Kay). It’s hard to argue with that, and these brands know it. But when you look at the business practices, ingredients, and parent companies associated with these empowering brands, the cracks are difficult to ignore. If Estée Lauder and Revlon care so much about preventing breast cancer, for instance, you’d think they might do a better job of making sure their products are free of known carcinogens. If Dove truly wants to broaden how we think about beauty globally, parent company Unilever might want to reconsider the skin-lightening creams like Fair & Lovely that it hawks across the Middle East and South Asia. It would be hard to make the case that corporate brands’ co-option of tacitly feminist attitudes has changed their appeals to female consumers. In deepening the connection between external good looks and happiness/fulfillment, Dove and CoverGirl and Special K have just further allied their brands with a cultural vision that equates youth, thinness, and whiteness with self-esteem and success.
The fact that these feminist issues are the ones that again and again float to the surface of a deep well of gender inequality makes sense, in the saddest way. As Susan J. Douglas points out, we live in a time where “fantasies of power . . . assure girls and women, repeatedly, that women’s liberation is a fait accompli and that we are stronger, more successful, more sexually in control, more fearless, and more held in awe than we actually are.”15 In this context, attending to what one can feasibly control—body, clothing, grooming, consuming—can seem like less of an uphill climb. It’s certainly much easier than calling out the people and the systems that are actively opposing our freedom and humanity. Erotic capital is real, and in many places, in many individual lives, it pays off. But what’s found at the end of a needle, a razor, and a lipstick tube is a quick fix, not a sustained strategy.
EPILOGUE
The End of Feel-Good Feminism
By the time this book comes out, it will have been two years since feminism broke into the American mainstream. And as I’ve written, edited, and rewritten this epilogue over the span of a few months, I’m not quite sure how to bring it to a natural conclusion. Do I point to the many successes that have resulted from a more politicized popular culture, and a corporate media that is increasingly informed by the more enlightened—or “politically correct,” if you’re not a fan of enlightenment—outlets that report on it? I could definitely do that, since these two years have indeed seen a striking change in public attitude toward intrinsically feminist issues.
Bill Cosby’s penchant for drugging and raping women under the guise of offering “mentorship,” for instance, was an open secret for years among the showbiz people and media figures who knew about it (and, of course, among the more than four dozen women who eventually came forward with their stories). The video of comedian Hannibal Burress condemning Cosby might not have sparked a new interest—and, perhaps, some justice for Papa Pudding Pop’s victims—if not for a media landscape that’s become, since Cosby’s TV heyday, more conscious of how popular culture reflects and creates real-life biases and beliefs.
I could also list the ways that an awareness of media and pop culture’s influence has inspired a wealth of grassroots activism, organizing, and creativity. For this, credit goes mostly to the Internet, which as a transformative tool has been unparalled in amplifying discourses, disseminating facts, and mobilizing activism that has actually made a difference. Think of organizations like Know Your IX, an advocacy initiative that informs college rape and abuse survivors of their rights under Title IX. Or Hollaback! which grew quickly from a smartphone app to a global initiative to confront racist and sexist street harassment. There are well-funded organizations dedicated to preparing girls for careers in STEM fields, like Girls Who Code, Black Girls CODE, and the Girlstart. There’s The National Domestic Workers Alliance, which helps organize on-and offline, caregivers, nannies, and other domestic workers across the country. The girl-run organization and summit SPARK! (Sexualization Protest, Action, Resistence, Knowledge) campaigns against media sexualization of girls, while the Women’s Media Center monitors the gendered language often deployed in political journalism. And there’s a slew of media and pop culture-specific projects and initiatives, from hackathons to Twitter hashtags, that have raised the profile of media literacy and resurrected “If you can see it, you can be it” as a mantra for reform.
I could certainly talk about the way that current feminist movements have effected changes in how mainstream media and pop culture ta
lk about all manner of bias and bigotry, nudging terms like “rape culture,” “cisgender,” and “colorism” into public spaces and dialogues. This shift has brought with it flashbacks to the early 1990s, with headlines bemoaning “thought police” and “political correctness gone mad”—but it’s also brought forward the voices of people for whom safety, justice, and humanity are not rhetorical thought experiments. Two thousand and fifteen’s college-campus protests against police violence pushed the feminist-born term “safe space” into contact with jeering mainstream pundits, but it also started a conversation about why such a lampoonable term needs to exist. As Roxane Gay noted, “Those who take safety for granted disparage safety because it is, like so many other rights, one that has always been inalienable to them. They wrongly assume we all enjoy such luxury and are blindly seeking something even more extravagant.”1
The confrontation of campus rape as a systemic issue has become a national talking point; the necessity of an intersectional lens on feminist issues a global one. The long-held contention that representation matters—in leadership, on TV, in Hollywood, in literature, in politics—is finally getting through, and pop culture is at the forefront of more complex, more nuanced conversations about it. The importance of workplaces that not only recruit but retain diverse staff has become a talking point among economists and human-resources professionals; and studies asserting that companies with more gender and race diversity see concrete financial gains are highlighted in the likes of Forbes and Scientific American. In short, more and more people are realizing what feminists have been saying for years: Equality makes things better for everyone, if we can get past fears and stereotypes and embrace it.