We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

The business of marketing and selling to women literally depends on creating and then addressing female insecurity, and part of the revelatory potential of women’s lib involved rejecting the marketplace’s sweet-talking promises about life-changing face creams and shampoos—not to mention the entire premise of women as decorative objects.

I call it marketplace feminism. It’s decontextualized. It’s depoliticized. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.

One is that the descriptor “feminist” now seems to be used to lavish praise on anything that isn’t overtly degrading, demeaning, or exploitative to women. Another is that arguments over whether a movie is “feminist” or “not feminist”—especially when that movie never intended to claim either1—suggest that feminism is not a set of values, ethics, and

On the way down into the uncanny valley, we’ve decided that images of women in power, in the abstract, are as important as people of any gender who are actually working to make equality a reality for everyone.

So when we hear from those people—and, oh, do we hear from them—that feminism should modulate its voices, ask nicely for the rights it seeks, and keep anger and stridency out of the picture, let’s remember that large-scale social change doesn’t result from polite requests and sweet-talking appeasements. But make no mistake, that’s what marketplace

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

What girl power meant in a post–Riot Grrrl world was simply whatever elevated girls as consumers.

The insidiousness of second-generation gender bias—informal exclusion, lack of mentors and role models, fear of conforming to stereotypes—colluded with the ideological spread of neoliberalism to recast institutional inequity as mere personal challenges.

The ego, already so key to effective advertising, is indispensible to empowertising, with its emphasis on the “personal sell” that takes the focus off objective value and places it firmly within the buyer’s sense of individual mythology.