Bitch magazine cofounder Andi Zeisler describes this phenomenon as “marketplace feminism.” “Marketplace feminism is in many ways about just branding feminism as an identity that everyone can and should consume,” she writes in her new book We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Tarnished by conservatives in the 1970s and 1980s who equated feminism with misandry and bra-burning, the movement has undergone an ideological shift to make it more palatable to the mainstream. This brand of feminism lite has been called a variety of things over the years, from “pop feminism” to “white feminism,” to my personal favorite (and coinage), “cupcake feminism.” Because the ideal feminist is the image of a woman double-fisting cupcakes. “Riots not diets!” [...]
Feminism in this capacity has come to mean everything, and, consequently, nothing. Getting rid of the word “feminist” itself is case in point. Last month, Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams was celebrated by the media for telling Entertainment Weekly that “we should stop calling feminists ‘feminists’ and just start calling people who aren’t feminist ‘sexist’—and then everyone else is just a human.” Everybody wins, right? “I sometimes really worry about speaking up about feminist subjects out of fear of being bashed by women on social media,” she continued. [...]
“The problem is—the problem has always been—that feminism is not fun,” Zeisler declares. “It’s not supposed to be fun. It’s complex and hard and it pisses people off. It’s serious because it is about people demanding that their humanity be recognized as valuable. The root issues that feminism confronts—wage inequality, gendered divisions of labor, institutional racism and sexism, structural violence and, of course, bodily autonomy—are deeply unsexy.”
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