How are companies co-opting the #MeToo and other social justice movements to perpetuate a neoliberal social order that only profits white men?
On International Women's Day, my inbox was flooded with emails from fast fashion brands congratulating me on my womanhood ("You are courageous and unstoppable!" "You are a fearless female!"). Socially conditioned to deflect all compliments, I blushed a little, and clicked Delete. What irked me about these emails was not their half-hearted attempts to connect with Subscriber #74637487 but their unabashed efforts to exploit the human desire for collective effervescence, in other words, that giddy feeling of belonging to something larger and more important than yourself. The way you feel in concerts, at protests, even in blizzards - a sense of connection with the community around you that is normally obstructed by segmented living spaces, noise-cancelling headphones, and professional silos. When the revolution is all around you, who wouldn't want to signal belonging by slipping on a t-shirt?
Fashion mirroring the social mood is nothing new. So what exactly is wrong with the recent surge in "feminist" apparel? Well, at least three things: the re-framing of feminism as a fashion statement rather than a serious social issue deserving of sustained and careful attention; the complacency effect on wearers who lean on the signaling effect of their clothing to obviate the need to take real steps towards gender equality; and the covering effect of brands which sell "feminist" apparel yet perpetuate sexist corporate policies and practices.
While female purchasing power almost singlehandedly supports the fashion industry, women occupy only 8.6% of CEO positions in S&P 500 retail companies. In February 1908, the impetus for International Women's Day was triggered by year-long strikes and protests by female garment workers in New York City. Over a century later, 80% of garment workers are still women, but they reside in some of the poorest countries on Earth, and earn less than 1 USD per hour. Meanwhile, the fashion industry continues to play a critical role in the dissemination of thin-ideal imagery, with 60% of surveyed models reporting bulimic episodes in the previous three months.
Nowhere is the dissonance between "faux-woke" products and the policies of the companies selling them more stomach-churning than on the rose-pink pages of #WomenWhoWork, Ivanka Trump's new self-help book for other women who struggle to have it all. Ivanka Trump's firm personal belief in the merits of "really, really hard" work seem to disappear at international political events, where she engages in foreign diplomacy with South Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and other world leaders without any qualification or experience other than her filial connection to the President. Getting foreign trademarks approved for her products in the process doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, the women who voted for Trump because of the sanitizing effect of Ivanka are watching their equal pay protections be rolled back by an overt misogynist.
To be clear, the exploitation and appropriation of activist movements by large corporations is neither new nor surprising. Pepsi's off-color attempt to seem "woke" by filming a white supermodel dissolving protests by handing out free soda is only one of numerous examples of the dissonance between corporate advertising and social change.
The irony about corporate attempts to co-opt activist rhetoric is not merely that those corporations are unlikely to practice what they preach, but that the profits derived from such advertising are then used to entrench a neoliberal social order in which the dominant beneficiaries are not women or people of color but old white men. Who sit on the boards of these companies? Who receive million-dollar stock options, and golden parachutes when they leave those boards? The same men who have occupied those seats for centuries. And as long as we allow them to distill feminism into a fun-size slogan, we confirm the phenomenon that "the best way to constrain the power of a social movement is to commodify it".
To sell feminism for $9.99 (with FREE SHIPPING!) is to trivialize and obscure the very real, very dark, and very complex issues against which feminists have fought for centuries: wage inequality, gendered discrimination, structural violence, lack of physical control and autonomy, and institutional sexism. We don't need more distractions from the struggle. We need real conversations with male and female allies about the ways in which this generation, our generation, will advocate for real change at the moment when it matters. One day, when you're faced with a dizzying puzzle of paper résumés, how will you select the gender ratio of the team you build around you? How will you allocate your scarce resources between different wages, and how will you develop norms around parental leave and non-wage benefits? Whose stories will you publish, and whose stories will you silence? Those moments are the ones that matter, and those moments are the ones that require real bravery.