Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, feminist” has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyoncé. It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what’s long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces.
But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism’s splashy arrival at the center of today’s media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn’t offered solutions to the movement’s unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percentor lessof the man’s dollar, and vicious attacks on women, both on- and offline, are utterly routine.
Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years’ experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change. Witty, fearless, and unflinching, We Were Feminists Once is the story of how we let this happen, and how we can amplify feminism’s real purpose and power.
Must-Read For Anyone Who Cares About Feminism Beyond It Being Used As A Marketing Ploy For anyone who cares about feminism and what it really means beyond buying a slogan-emblazoned T-shirt at Urban Outfitters, Zeisler makes you think about what feminism meant to our mothers and what it could mean for ourselves and our daughters. Smart, thought-provoking, and very, very funny, this analysis of popular feminism will make you think about your own personal viewpoints and what feminism actually means.
Marketing Tool Is pop culture a better lens than political action to view the state of feminism? Andi Zeisler’s We Were Feminists Once posits that feminism has been taken over by Madison Avenue and capitalism, so that’s where we must look. She calls it marketplace feminism, the main takeaway of this book. In a blistering summary of songs, commercials, bands, tv shows, films, novelists, fashion and especially actresses, the book is clear evidence of way too much television intake…
Brava, Zeisler! Finally! – someone is willing to let the proverbial cat out of the bag by intelligently scrutinizing the consequences and general ickiness of marketplace feminism. In some ways I feel almost creeped out by how accurately Zeisler is able to summarize my own misgivings about the general direction of an “empowerment” feminism that cares more about capitalism, consumerism and neoliberal policies than it does about actually improving the lives of women – but until now, there hasn’t been an…