by men, or if you’re paying your female staff
less than their male counterparts.”
This attitude – separating genuine feminist
commitment from mere bandwagon leaping
- lies at the heart of the issue. Kate
Bosomworth, chief marketing officer at M&C
Saatchi’s UK branch, argues that today’s
fauxpowerment explosion was inspired by
a handful of genuine attempts by businesses to engage with
women’s issues. “The 2004 Dove [Real Beauty] campaign was
the first of its kind,” she tells me. “Then we had Pantene’s #Shine
Strong. These campaigns were challenging, disruptive and truly
tipped norms. However, those that have followed suit haven’t
always been that authentic. Like us, they need to apply real
insight into how to solve problems and help; how to bring a truth
that no-one’s talked about before. Not just putting women in their
adverts – consumers can see through that in a nanosecond,
as they can find out very quickly whether organisations are true
to their word.”
It is this lip service to empowerment that brings us so many
platitudes: from one Dove campaign imitator too many
informing us that our chubbiness is emancipatory, to
Hollywood’s tokenistic rehashing of male-focused hits. And so
here we are, in a world in which we are presented with
“empowering” control knickers, rosacea cures and rosé, with
power something you can buy into so long as you’re not
disempoweringly poor.
Call me a killjoy, but doesn’t this seem tawdry given that the
issues women might more obviously seek empowerment over
include voting access, equal pay, equal parenting, abortion
rights, forced marriage, genital mutilation and rape as
a weapon of war? Moreover, at a time
when the pussy-grabber-in-chief occupies
the White House, isn’t the notion that getting
your power can be reduced to the perfect
pink drink a tad Marie Antoinettish?
In this fauxpowerment-saturated world,
we need to distinguish the faux from the real
deal. Sure, I bought myself a mock prefect’s
badge saying “feminist”. It was funny and playful, and feminism is
not without these qualities. But right now we need less stuff and
fewer power poses: more action, progress, rights.
Sam Smethers, chief executive of gender equality lobby
group the Fawcett Society, tells me: “I’m not po-faced: there is
a value in having fun with the message. We sell great feminist
T-shirts and Tatty Devine jewellery and they get people talking.
However, the concept of empowerment is something we slip
into for want of something better, or clearer, to say. It suggests
that women move from being powerless to powerful, when it’s
more about recognising your own power, then recognising the
structures and barriers designed to make women feel less
powerful. It’s these barriers that need addressing: not changing
the individual, but the system they find themselves in.”
As the novelist Naomi Alderman, author of the prize-winning
The Power, asserts: “Products, my friends, are very nice. But they
are not the same thing as doing the inner work to increase your
confidence, or knowing you have a group of female friends to
rely on, or understanding truly in your heart that the fact that you
feel shit about yourself a lot of the time is not your fault and that
there are societal forces trying to make women, in particular, feel
shit about themselves. Enjoy the products – why not? But do the
work, too.” You said it, sister.E“We need
less stuff
and FEWER
POWER
POSES:
more action,
progress,
rights”Photography: Getty Images