A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO– possibly your entire lifetime
- I taught feminist theory at Oxford University. Back then, our
poster-thinker was Judith Butler, whose most famous works argued
that gender, sexuality and man and woman as biological entities
could only be determined in performance – as it played out, so to
speak. Our heroine argued this in language so convoluted it
rendered us cross-eyed. How we fretted, how we thrilled.
Fast-forward to 2018, and I found myself gazing at some newly
released gingerbread biscuits, Godfrey and Annie. Annie sports
a frock and a red (lipsticked?) smile. However, according to their
producer, neither are gingerbread men, making it clear they are
gender-neutral biscuits. “Christ,” I thought, “We did this. A couple
of decades on, our elaborate academic wranglings are being
packaged and sold with a ‘Have a nice day.’”
It’s not just gingerbread snacks being deployed in the
battleground for gender equality: in recent years, more and more
brands are pushing supposedly empowering messages, often
specifically aimed at women, to sell their products. As a journalist,
I might receive 900 or so emails a day, legions of them banging
the empowerment drum over the latest hair thickener or protein
bar. Femvertising is nothing new (hell, there are even
#Femvertising Awards) – lessons in female empowerment
have been thrown at us from all corners of consumerism. Take
the furore over Scottish brewer BrewDog’s pink “beer for girls”,
launched for International Women’s Day – allegedly to
highlight the gender pay gap – and lambasted for being the
marketing gimmick it was.
THE
REAL PRICE
OF
EMPOWERMENT
However, in the fight for equality, aren’t there bigger, more
pressing issues than the gender of your gingerbread biscuit or
the colour of your beer bottle?Aren’t these, in fact, just further
examples of what one might refer to as “fauxpowerment” — the
overselling of false or banal so-called empowerment to women?
For empowerment has become one of the most used – and
abused – terms in the conversation around feminism, in a way
that serves to dilute and undermine the cause itself. Bandying the
word about for everything from childbirth to chocolate, fitness to
floor cleaner is stripping the term of any meaning at a time when
genuine power is still lamentably far from women’s grasp.
So from where did this omnipresent word spring? Its first
appearance in the English-speaking West occurred in the ’70s, in
relation to African-American communities. Feminists began using
the term in the ’80s and ’90s, tending to deploy it in reference to
changes within the developing world. As the century staggered to
its end, women’s magazines increasingly appropriated the word
to buoy their readers, bolstered in turn by the Spice Girls’
championing of so-called “girl power” (an ideology that occupied
an uncertain territory encompassing pinching Prince Charles’
bottom and being nice to your pals). Then, in 1998, came HBO’s
Sex And The City, and empowerment became enmeshed with
conspicuous consumption. “Hey, Manolo lover,” the commercial
clamour went, “prove your independence by enslaving yourself to
a credit card.” Not only did this transfer empowerment from some
sort of collective experience to an individual high, it put it firmly
within the realm of the (designer) wallet, conflating consumerismIT’S BECOME ONE OF THE MOST
OVERUSED WORDS IN THE
CONVERSATION AROUNDFEMINISM,
SO HOW DO WE CUT THROUGH“FAUXPOWERMENT”
TO FIND WHERE THE TRUE POWER LIES?
WORDS BY
HANNAH BETTS