We Were Feminists Once

February 29, 2016
Zeisler, cofounder and creative director of Bitch Media, explores the history of feminism in the media over decades of resurgence and backlash, with a critical eye toward its commercialization and sanitization. She explores the ways advertisers have marketed products to women, from second-wave-era
Virginia Slims cigarettes and Secret antiperspirant to contemporary “empowertising” that pays lip service to body positivity and posits that “any choice is a feminist choice.” Zeisler deems the 1970s “the golden era” of feminist television and celebrates the Norman Lear–produced programs that paved the way for Roseanne and Murphy Brown in the 1990s. She then eviscerates The Bachelor’s “interchangeable beauties... pledging instantaneous love for an equally vague mass of square jaws and biceps.” Zeisler also artfully blasts “postfeminists,” such as theorist Camille Paglia, who treat feminism like “an outdated personal accessory”;
the current culture of elite women’s conferences poisoned by corporate sponsorship; and the 1990s devolution of Riot Grrrl’s punk spirit into the fangless Spice Girls ethos. Other topics include the dearth of opportunities for women in
the film industry, the Bechdel test, and Spanx. Zeisler also takes on hollow celebrity feminist culture, in a chapter amusingly titled “Our Beyoncés, Ourselves.” Zeisler’s analysis of what she calls “marketplace feminism” is acute and endlessly relevant, highlighting the insidiousness of the coopting powers that be, and calling on feminists to direct their resources toward legitimate political action and reclaim feminism as an identity, not something commodifiable.