Feminism for Sale

By Michelle Goldberg, AlterNet. Posted January 8, 2001.

You know her, the millennial urban liberated career chick. At least, you've seen her reflections -- in Bridget Jones well-meaning ditzy neurosis, in Sex in the City's mix of hard-edged libidinous glam and jazz-tinged wistfullness, in truckloads of randy female sex columnists and insouciant girl-power zines like Bust and Maxi. In the year 2000, after decades of wrangling with the myth of the ugly, hirsute, ball-busting women's libber, the culture has finally seemed to reconcile beauty and power, fun and feminism.

Like so many other cease-fires in our society, this one was negotiated largely in the marketplace. This new, shopping-and-fucking feminism is so ubiquitous right now in part because it jibes precisely with the message of consumer society, that freedom means more -- hotter sex, better food, ever-multiplying pairs of Manolo Blahniks shoes, drawers full of Betsey Johnson skirts, Kate Spade bags and MAC lipsticks.

It's easy-to-swallow feminism, feminism that encourages you to pamper yourself and get rid of guilt and waltz through life like Audrey Hepburn in "How to Steal a Million." Built on affirmations -- "You go, girl! Work it!" -- it doesn't make you feel bad about your vanity, as 70s feminism sometimes did, or hypocritical if you watch porn or wear glitter eyeshadow and miniskirts. It admits that consumer culture is often pleasurable and rewarding.

"I love clothes, I love the way they make me feel, I love makeup," says Janelle Brown, a senior technology writer at Salon who co-founded the online feminist zine Maxi. "I also don't let anyone step on me. I hold my own. There are things that I do that are stereotypically feminine, and there are things that I do that are completely unstereotypically feminine. I write about fashion and I write about geek stuff. I think that's what all women should be looking to do -- finding a balance between consumerism and feminism and recognizing that it's really hard to reject the basis of America. Fuck, we're based on capitalism. It's very hard to reject everything that that stands for and still live in America, so why not understand what it all means and figure out where your personal place in it is, without having to be one thing or the other?"

Thus Maxi combines articles about sexual harassment and updates on Norplant litigation with odes to hair products. In a piece about Vain, makers of Dirty Boy Dirty Girl hair goo and 2nd Day Shampoo "for marginally clean hair," Maxi editor Rosemary Pepper writes, "A little vanity goes a long way. Why not embrace your products, take a fashion risk, get out and have some fun with your looks? Don't get carried away, of course -- Narcissism is bad; it implies tunnel-vision and you may face evil mythical consequences. But on the other hand, a little vanity is good; it implies an appreciation of one's own image and lends a certain respect to viewers."

Many middle-class girls, no matter how serious or ambitious, can relate to this, which is what makes it so enticing. Go ahead, it seems to say, indulge yourself, treat yourself right. After all, we have a whole culture that tortures women with guilt; the last thing we need is a feminism that condemns our pleasures. "Unlike our feminist foremothers, who claimed that makeup was the opiate of the misses, we're positively prochoice when it comes to matters of feminine display," writes Debbie Stoller in "The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order," a compendium of Bust articles published last year (which, full disclosure, contains a piece by me.) "We're well aware, thank you very much, of the beauty myth that's working to keep women obscene and not heard, but we just don't think that transvestites should have all the fun. We love our lipstick, have a passion for polish, and, basically, adore this armor that we call 'fashion.' To us, it's fun, it's feminine, and, in the particular way we flaunt it, it's *definitely* feminist."

Who'd want to argue with this, to come out against beauty and adornment? Making feminism sexy has been a PR coup. Yet pieces like this one also second the culture at large, which is always urging us towards splurging, condemning thrift in the name of instant gratification. When consumerism is integrated into feminism, it dilutes one of our last bulwarks against full-bore materialism. The new, user-friendly feminism is delightful to partake of because it's always more enjoyable to go with the flow and revel in the world we have instead of yearning for the one we don't. Sadly, though, it makes it harder and harder to transcend the status quo, to resist the heady, pacifying pull of acquisition. Let yourself go, buy it, make yourself feel better -- the message is coming from all quarters now.

Feminism's latest incarnation is in many ways a direct reaction to its last one. The book that spurred the second wave of feminism, Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique," was a critique of a suffocating society that gave women little to do except shop. "One suddenly sees why manipulators cater to sexual hunger in their attempt to sell products which are not even remotely sexual," Friedan wrote. "As long as women's needs for achievement and identity can be channeled into this search for sexual status, she is easy prey for any product which presumably promises her that status -- a status that cannot be achieved by effort or achievement of her own. And since that endless search for status as a desirable sexual object is seldom satisfied in reality for most American housewives (who at best can only try to *look* like Elizabeth Taylor), it is very easily translated into a search for status through the possession of objects."

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