Manufacturing Postfeminism

By Susan J. Douglas, In These Times. Posted May 13, 2002.

I’m sitting here, in one hand Vogue’s April edition called “The Shape Issue,” featuring Angelina Jolie (“Rebel with a Cause,” we’re told) on the cover, and in the other Time’s April 15 issue devoted to the question of “Babies vs. Career.” (Time promises to offer women “The harsh facts about fertility.”) Thirty years after the height of the women’s movement, here we are: Vogue tells us “How to Change Your Shape from Head to Toe” and Time warns us that if we get settled in a career first and then try to have kids, we are doomed to childlessness. And I’m sitting here thinking: This is it. This is postfeminism in action.

In October 1982, when the New York Times Magazine featured an article titled “Voices From the Post-Feminist Generation,” a term was coined, and ever since the women of America have heard, ceaselessly, that we are, and forevermore will be, in a postfeminist age.

What the hell is postfeminism, anyway? I would think it would refer to a time when complete gender equality has been achieved. That hasn’t happened, of course, but we (especially young women) are supposed to think it has. Postfeminism, as a term, suggests that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism, but that feminism is now irrelevant and even undesirable because it has made millions of women unhappy, unfeminine, childless, lonely, and bitter, prompting them to fill their closets with combat boots and really bad India print skirts.

But to perpetuate this “common sense” about feminism and postfeminism requires the weekly and monthly manufacturing of consent. Postfeminism is, in fact, an ongoing engineering process promoted most vigorously by the right, but aided and abetted all along the way by the corporate media. Postfeminism is crucial to the corporate media because they rely on advertising.

If millions of women stopped and said, “Hey, I don’t think I need lipstick, Lestoil, Oil of Olay, Victoria’s Secret boulder holders, Diet Coke, L’Oreal or Ultra Slim-Fast anymore,” that would lead to a serious advertising revenue shortfall. So the media must continue to manufacture postfeminism as the common sense way to understand women’s current place in American society. This April we got an excellent snapshot of how this process works.

Vogue’s first-ever “Shape Issue celebrates the female form in all its glorious variety.” These varieties include tall, short, curvy, pregnant and thin. Except that they are all size two (the “curvy” model, a socialite, is a size eight to 10). Even the pregnant model, who is nineteen, and would rather “flaunt my belly than hide it,” is a size two.

The letter from the editor acknowledges that “we receive countless letters attacking the models for the way they look. ‘Too skinny’ is the usual complaint.” But then she huffs about a “simple truth”: “To be slim and fit is healthier than to be seriously overweight and out of shape.” Well, that settles that. Our choices as women are anorexic versus blimp.

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