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

but it seems worth questioning whether this is feminism, or just a new twist on the age-old concept of selling products and ideas with gender essentialism.

Neoliberalism is significant to contemporary feminism in quite a few ways, but one in particular is that both emphasize consumer choice and individual power in a way that can narrow to tunnel vision.

Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing “natural” differences don’t stay in the realm of advertising and marketing—they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.

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

But reinscribing feminism as something you dress in or consume, rather than something you do, accomplishes nothing—not for you as an individual, and not for how women as a whole are viewed, valued, and validated in this culture.

Instead of teaching girls actual self-advocacy and confidence, a shift toward increasingly gendered capitalism turned Girl Power into little more than a cute, chauvinist retail fad.

It shouldn’t be a radical notion that the experiences of women have the potential to be as universal and as broadly felt as those of men.

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.

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.