We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
Andi Zeisler
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 1610395891
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism’s splashy arrival at the center of today’s media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn’t offered solutions to the movement’s unfinished business. Planned Parenthood is under sustained attack, women are still paid 77 percent—or less—of the man’s dollar, and vicious attacks on women, both on- and offline, are utterly routine.
Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years’ experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change. Witty, fearless, and unflinching, We Were Feminists Once is the story of how we let this happen, and how we can amplify feminism’s real purpose and power.
154–155 choice feminism and, 180, 183, 185–187 feminism and, xv, 185 Hays Code and, 35 United Nations and, xi, 122–123, 135 wages, 131, 132, 144, 188–189, 208 See also feminism; gender inequality gender essentialism, 215 biologically-based sex differences and, 206–210 black women and, 201–202, 205–206 confidence and, 209–210 education and, 200–202, 209 feminist counter-reality legacy of, 218–219 gender inequality and, 199–200 media and, 205–208, 210 overview, 199 toys and, 202–204
onscreen would mean opening up more imaginative possibilities for women themselves: “The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens.” Naturally, this proclamation was greeted with outrage from other film-industry machers, who protested that the test prioritized a limited view of what makes a film meaningful, placing quantification above ineffable qualities of character development and plot; the CEO of the country’s Ingmar Bergman Foundation called the new rating “the
flights, I am that person who looks like she ran straight from a house fire to the airport, but is nevertheless face-first in Marie Claire reading about new coat silhouettes. What I’m saying is that I don’t have any illusions about what goes into a fashion magazine. I get that their makers are in the aspirational-fantasy business, not the social justice one, and I would not expect a magazine like PORTER (or even BUST, for that matter) to be, like, “If you want to dress like Gloria Steinem, try
wages for equal work. The use of “choice” to rationalize individual choices—and, perhaps more important, to signify that criticizing those choices is unfeminist—isn’t unethical or amoral so much as it is underachieving. We know logically that choices aren’t made in a vacuum: we assign financial, aesthetic, and moral value to any number of choices in the course of each day, and most of us get that these choices mean something in the larger world. People vote, recycle, volunteer, and donate to
Canadian musician Sarah McLachlan, in a stretch of the ’90s that overlapped with Riot Grrrl on one side and Girl Power on the other. It was a time when corporate airwaves saw an influx of female musicians with radio hits—Tori Amos, Joan Osborne, Missy Elliot, Fiona Apple, India. Arie—and wide appeal. But the industry’s prejudice against women as revenue killers was as strong as ever: McLachlan conceived Lilith as a retort to risk-averse radio DJs and concert promoters who acted as though any man