The Real Price Of Empowerment

It’s become one of the most overused words in the conversation around feminism, so how do we cut through “FAUXPOWERMENT” to find where the true power lies?

- Hannah Betts

A QUARTER OF A CENTURY AGO – possibly your entire lifetime – I taught feminist theory at Oxford University. Back then, our poster-thinker was Judith Butler, whose most famous works argued that gender, sexuality and man and woman as biological entities could only be determined in performance – as it played out, so to speak. Our heroine argued this in language so convoluted it rendered us cross-eyed. How we fretted, how we thrilled.

Fast-forward to 2018, and I found myself gazing at some newly released gingerbread biscuits, Godfrey and Annie. Annie sports a frock and a red (lipsticked?) smile. However, according to their producer, neither are gingerbread men, making it clear they are gender-neutral biscuits. “Christ,” I thought, “We did this. A couple of decades on, our elaborate academic wranglings are being packaged and sold with a ‘Have a nice day.’”

It’s not just gingerbread snacks being deployed in the battleground for gender equality: in recent years, more and more brands are pushing supposedly empowering messages, often specifically aimed at women, to sell their products. As a journalist, I might receive 900 or so emails a day, legions of them banging the empowerment drum over the latest hair thickener or protein bar. Femvertising is nothing new (hell, there are even #Femvertising Awards) – lessons in female empowerment have been thrown at us from all corners of consumerism. Take the furore over Scottish brewer BrewDog’s pink “beer for girls”, launched for International Women’s Day – allegedly to highlight the gender pay gap – and lambasted for being the marketing gimmick it was.