We Were Feminists Once Read online

  ALSO BY ANDI ZEISLER

  Feminism and Pop Culture

  BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism

  from the Pages of BITCH Magazine (with Lisa Jervis)

  Copyright © 2016 by Andi Zeisler

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931950

  ISBN 978-1-61039-590-8 (EB)

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To my sweet Harvey—

  May your generation be the one that

  finally figures this shit out.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  PART ONE The New Embrace

  1 The Corridors of Empower

  2 Heroine Addicts: Feminism and Hollywood

  3 Do These Underpants Make Me Look Feminist?

  4 The Golden Age of (Feminist) TV

  5 Our Beyoncés, Ourselves: Celebrity Feminism

  PART TWO The Same Old Normal

  6 Killer Waves

  7 Empowering Down

  8 The Rise of Big Woman

  9 Creeping Beauty

  Epilogue: The End of Feel-Good Feminism

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  I didn’t set out to write a book about the commodification of feminism, though I guess you could argue that I’ve been waiting for it to happen for twenty years.

  As one of three founders of the magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, I always believed that the realm of media and popular culture was where feminism would truly change hearts and minds. At the time we started making our black-and-white, stapled-together zine, it was 1995—a time when feminism had only recently reentered the pop-cultural imagination after the massive 1980s backlash that saddled the very word with a wealth of ugly baggage. We were omnivorous pop-culture consumers, and the point of Bitch was to take pop culture seriously as a force that shapes the lives of everyone, and argue for its importance as an arena for feminist activism and analysis. At the dawn of the dot-com revolution, there were no blogs about feminist film criticism, no Twitter feeds that mashed up Judith Butler and the Incredible Hulk. We had only each other as sounding boards for strong opinions and burning questions. Questions like: Why do daytime talk shows treat adolescent female sexuality like an epidemic to be contained? What’s with men in sitcoms and commercials being portrayed as hopelessly bumbling ding-dongs who can’t read a grocery list? Why are black people always the first to be killed in disaster movies? And, of course, the eternal query: Why must every female musician who makes the cover of Rolling Stone do so in her underwear?

  We called the zine Bitch because we hoped to reclaim the word, and to make its verb form into something that could effect change just by speaking up and encouraging others to do the same. The word we were equally concerned with reclaiming, though, was in the subtitle: “A feminist response to pop culture.” Born in the 1970s, we came of ideological age during the backlash, seeing and hearing feminism dismissed as, at best, a vexing political incident that had come and gone; or, at worst, a social experiment that had succeeded at the expense of a healthy society and left men hungry for home-cooked meals, children marooned in front of blaring televisions, and women bitter and love-starved. Feminism didn’t have an image problem; it had an image catastrophe.

  So we launched a zine, and the zine grew into a magazine. At the same time, the word “bitch” moved deeper into common parlance, becoming a staple of television and radio, a pangender casual greeting, and a signifier of female badassness. But the complexity of making “feminist” palatable remained.

  The belief that there had to be other frustrated feminist pop-culture obsessives out there catalyzed Bitch as an activist project. Our content—essays about television and movies, critiques of ad campaigns, and interviews with feminists of all genders doing cool projects—were things we wanted to read, but had tried and failed to find elsewhere. As time went on, we found that we definitely weren’t alone: Over the next ten years, pop culture began to be taken seriously. Very seriously. New York Times and Wall Street Journal seriously. Entire-Web-sites-devoted-to-television-recaps seriously. A decade after Bitch launched, we were one of hundreds of Web sites, podcasts, and blogs whose work plumbed the intersections of feminism and popular culture.

  As part of a far-flung community of fellow pop-culture feminists that has bloomed over the years, I’ve seen pop culture and media transform feminism, for better and for worse—and feminism, in turn, change pop culture and media. But as I started to write this book, something weird happened: feminism got cool.

  A current of excitement that had previously been humming just under the surface of mainstream culture suddenly amped up. In August 2014, Beyoncé commanded the stage at the close of MTV’s Video Music Awards, the word “FEMINIST” glowing in neon lights behind her as her song “Flawless” sampled the words of Nigerian author Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie. (“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much.’”) The sample concludes with Adichie paraphrasing the dictionary definition of “feminist”: “The person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.” Though the song was already well known, and though Beyoncé’s particular brand of business-minded feminism was threaded through lyrics dating back to her Destiny’s Child days, the visual display served as her official flag in the ground. Bathed in spotlights, the biggest pop star in the world rocked the once-maligned label like a curve-hugging Met Gala dress, literally spelling it out for an audience of more than eight million.

  Beyoncé staking her claim to feminism was the start of a media domino effect. Shortly after, Emma Watson, beloved for years as Harry Potter’s Hermione, gave a speech on the importance of gender equality to the United Nations—noting, among other things, that “[i]t is time that we all perceive gender on a spectrum, instead of [as] two sets of opposing ideals.” The pop singer Taylor Swift, who several years earlier had disavowed feminism, quickly changed tack with a media announcement that, in fact, she’d been feminist all along. At Paris Fashion Week, Chanel’s runway-show finale took the form of a feminist rally, with models draped in the label’s signature tweeds raising signs that read “History is Her Story” and “Women’s Rights Are More Than Alright.” Brands like Verizon, Always, and Pantene began centering feminist themes in their ads for wireless plans, maxi pads, and shine-boosting shampoos. And my Google alert for “women and feminism,” which used to turn up lonely articles with headlines like “Feminism: Outmoded and Unpopular,” began teeming with woman-power boosterism: “Beyoncé’s Hip New Club: Feminism,” “Emma Watson Gives Feminism New Life,” “Why Male Feminists Are Hot.” Seemingly overnight, almost every female celebrity—and a fair number of male ones—who walked a red carpet was asked whether they were feminists. References to Lena Dunham and Leaning In were suddenly cropping up in everything from gossip columns to inflight magazine
s. The increasing presence of transgender women in mainstream pop culture—Laverne Cox, Janet Mock, the Amazon series Transparent—offered new opportunities to talk about gender as a limiting social construct. Cosmopolitan, the bible of man-pleasing sex tips, began embracing more explicitly political writers and subjects, though it will still teach you “40 Ways to Blow His Mind.” Feminism, so long dismissed as the realm of the angry, the cynical, the man-hating, and the off-puttingly hairy, was officially a thing. It was hot. And, perhaps most important, it was sellable.

  Theoretically, this was exactly the breakthrough my cofounders and I had always hoped to see in the media and pop culture we consumed. There’s no question that feminism has in just the past few years made inroads into all aspects of culture, not simply in the numbers of female senators and CEOs but also in the ways that we talk about politics, about entertainment, about parenting, about art. Accusations of domestic violence, once considered extrinsic to the business of sports and its players, are now the subject of lengthy debates and press conferences. Offensive jokes from comedians that would have gone unremarked upon a decade ago are now the basis for micro-campaigns on social media, capable of gaining enough steam to create a lasting impact for the joker. Weekly entertainment magazines review new movies with a lens on how—or, for that matter, whether—female characters are represented.

  Within a very short span of time, feminism has come to occupy perhaps its most complex role ever in American, if not global, culture. It’s a place where most of the problems that have necessitated feminist movements to begin with are still very much in place, but at the same time there’s a mainstream, celebrity, consumer embrace of feminism that positions it as a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt. I’ve seen this called “pop feminism,” “feel-good feminism,” and “white feminism.” I call it marketplace feminism. It’s decontextualized. It’s depoliticized. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.

  By 2015, you couldn’t swing a tampon without hitting someone or something that boasted its feminist import, in places you definitely wouldn’t expect: nail polish, underwear, energy drinks, Swiffers. Things started getting a little weird. The Ms. Foundation for Women, in partnership with Cosmopolitan, closed out 2014 with a list of the “Top 20 Celebrity Feminists.” Shortly after that, The Daily Beast enthused that “Maxim Just Became Your New Feminist Bible,” hyping the new direction of the former lad magazine which, under a new female editor, no longer ranked the fuckability of famous women. (Well, no longer only ranks famous women—now, it also ranks vacation spots and restaurants!) Similarly, Playboy’s decision to stop printing nude photo spreads after sixty-two bodacious years was heralded as a bold pro-woman stance and attended by rose-colored remembrances with titles like “Playboy Bunny: Sexist Relic or Early Feminist Figure?”

  In the summer of 2015, everyone’s favorite karate-chopping Muppet, Miss Piggy, was awarded the prestigious First Award by the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art, an honor previously bestowed on the likes of Toni Morrison and Chief Wilma Mankiller. Sure, Miss P had previously rejected the F-word, but with feminism in the news (and, perhaps more relevant, a new Muppets sitcom on the way) it was the ideal time for her to sit down with Gloria Steinem and announce that “Moi is a feminist pig.” By the fall of 2015, when an issue of InStyle featured pop star Katy Perry describing her signature fragrance, Killer Queen, as “royal, rebellious, and feminist,” it seemed like the word had become a catchall that media and pop culture were deploying like a kicky new seasoning for content.

  But while “feminism” has become a buzzword everywhere from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, the actual issues crucial to feminism’s forward movement are as threatened as ever. Here’s the Supreme Court, which placed a hold on a Texas law that aimed to close every women’s health clinic in the state by demanding that each one meets the medical standards of ambulatory surgery centers. Here’s a feminist video game critic who has been forced to cancel a campus speaking engagement because of a note that threatened “a Montreal Massacre–style attack”1 carried out against feminist supporters. Over here is Daniel Holtzclaw, the Oklahoma City cop who repeatedly profiled and targeted marginal black women in order to sexually assault them, and was put on paid administrative leave for almost a year before being fired. (Holtzclaw was sentenced to jail in late 2015.) And ooh, here’s Microsoft’s CEO telling a group of female professionals that women shouldn’t ask for raises, but instead “trust the system”—you know, the system that has for decades paid women less than men—and be rewarded with “good karma.”

  It’s become a constant game of Good News/Bad News. As we celebrate the increasing number of female TV showrunners and writers, Senate Republicans have twice unanimously voted against an act designed to close the gendered wage gap. As our tabloid magazines documented every blessed step of Caitlyn Jenner’s transition, an anti-discrimination ballot measure in Houston, Texas was defeated thanks largely to TV ads that painted transgender women as child predators, warning, “Any man at any time could enter a women’s bathroom simply by claiming to be a woman.” As we excitedly binge-watch a Netflix series about life and love in a women’s prison, dozens of black women have died in police custody in recent years, with no satisfactory explanation as to why.

  These are problems that can’t and won’t be solved by marketplace feminism. They are impervious to our “feminist as fuck” necklaces and “I Blame the Patriarchy” unicorn t-shirts. (Nothing against those, they’re cute as hell.) They don’t care what a big deal it is that Inside Amy Schumer beat out all those late-night network sausage parties for an Emmy. They don’t care what new thing Taylor Swift said about feminism. And now I can’t help but worry that those of us who hoped that the marriage of pop culture and feminism would yield deliciously progressive fruit might have a lot to answer for.

  The aspects of feminism currently given voice in pop culture are the most media-friendly ones, the ones that center on heterosexual relationships and marriage, on economic success that doesn’t challenge existing capitalist structures, on the right to be desirable yet have bodily autonomy. Watson’s speech to the UN was centered on “inviting” men to get invested in feminism, in order to better legitimize it. Sheryl Sandberg’s much-heralded Lean In philosophy is about women conforming to workplaces that increasingly see them not as human beings but as automatons with inconvenient biology. The feminism they espouse is certainly reasonable, but it’s not particularly nuanced. It doesn’t get to the root of why men might not be invested in feminism or why corporate culture forces untenable choices. It doesn’t challenge beliefs or processes or hegemonies so much as it offers nips and tucks.

  Despite every signal boost for feminism, every spot-on viral video about beauty standards, every badass, take-charge female film or TV role, and every catchily named nail polish, the beliefs behind the word “feminism” remain among the most contested in political and social life. The question that has always been at its heart—Are women human beings, with the same rights, access, and liberties as men?—is increasingly posed in spheres where it should have been resolved decades ago. This increasingly looks not like a world that has finally emerged into fully realized feminism, but like a world in which we are letting a glossy, feel-good feminism pull focus away from deeply entrenched forms of inequality. It’s a feminism that trades on simple themes of sisterhood and support—you-go-girl tweets and Instagram photos, cheery magazine editorials about dressing to please yourself. The fight for gender equality has transmogrified from a collective goal to a consumer brand.

  It’s undeniable that media and pop-culture representations—even surface-skimming ones—of social movements can change attitudes. As someone who honestly believes that pop culture is a force that can, and has, changed the world, I want to at least entertain the thought that a culture half-changed by feminism can harness that power to finally go the whole nine. After all, if we can have feminist television shows, feminist publishing houses, and feminis
t pop stars, why not a feminist underwear line? Feminist toys? A feminist energy drink? A feminist strip club? If feminism sells in the form of a movie or an album, why couldn’t it sell as a nontextual product as well?

  This book is an exploration of how the new embrace of marketplace feminism—mediated, decoupled from politics, staunchly focused on individual experience and actualization—dovetails with instilled beliefs about power, about activism, about who feminists are and what they do. The first half looks at the ways that feminism’s past and present have informed the media and pop culture that represents and broadcasts feminism. The second half faces down the projects that remain unfinished. Both are a place to take the measure of marketplace feminism, to look at what a social, political, and still-radical movement becomes as it is filtered through the pop culture and media that serve as its contemporary translators.

  There are those who argue that the measure of cultural change is the degree to which that change is assimilated into existing society, those who would say that the media co-optation of a movement (say, with a slideshow of “The 8 Best and Worst Feminists in Entertainment”) is proof that it has truly made its mark. This is about the ways that modern feminism has changed and assimilated, and it’s about what happens next in this strange new marketplace world.

  PART ONE

  The New Embrace

  CHAPTER 1

  The Corridors of Empower

  “In a village chapel in upstate New York, 150 years ago, the initial bold steps in a revolution that would ensure women the right to vote were taken at the first women’s rights celebration at Seneca Falls. And now you can celebrate the anniversary of this milestone in women’s rights, and the strength and conviction of the courageous suffragettes involved whenever you use your First USA Anniversary Series Platinum Mastercard®. Celebrate women’s rights. Apply today.”