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

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.

Defining “feminist” as “a woman who lives the life she chooses” is great if you’re a woman who already has choices. But it does nothing for the vast majority on the outside of the conference hall, waiting in vain for that empowerment to trickle down.

When it comes to women’s and gender equality, backlash will probably always sell better than consensus, individual exceptionalism better than collective effort, and choice better than almost anything else.

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.

Empowertising not only builds on the idea that any choice is a feminist choice if a self-labeled feminist deems it so, but takes it a little bit further to suggest that being female is in itself something that deserves celebration.

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.

As with branding, celebrity isn’t about complexity, but about offering up an enticing package that the largest number of people can understand with the smallest amount of effort.

Empowertising and femvertising are both ways to talk about the business of selling to women without conflating examples of that business with actual feminism.

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