19/4/2016 Fromshoppingtonakedselfies:how'empowerment'lostitsmeaning|Worldnews|TheGuardian

From shopping to naked seles: how

'empowerment' lost its meaning
The catch-all term has come to denote a watered-down feminism, popular with celebrities and
advertisers alike. How did this authentic appeal from the marginalised become so abused?

Hadley Freeman
Tuesday 19 April 2016 07.00BST

H ere are a few things I have recently been told should make me feel empowered:
tweeting a naked sele; being Miley Cyrus; being Gwyneth Paltrow; looking at
advertisements; watching TED Talks; owning my feminism; disowning my
feminism; buying leggings; buying designer clothes; masturbating.

Its quite an exciting time to be a woman, I can tell you. Feminism might not have quite
nished its work yet there are still niggly little things such as unequal pay and female
genital mutilation, and, unbelievably, abortion remains an actual issue in the US
elections in 2016. But never has it been easier for a woman to feel empowered. Indeed, a
woman would now struggle to fail to feel empowered every minute of her day, going by
the current denition of the word; pretty much everything a woman does from eating
breakfast to being online has been described as a means to empower her. What girl
power was to the 90s, empowerment has become to the 2010s: a catch-all and therefore
empty word denoting a watered-down feminism, one beloved of bubbly celebrities and
canny advertisers alike.

To understand how such indignity has been visited upon this innocent word, we need to
look at what it was supposed to mean in the rst place. So, as Jennifer Aniston would say
she of the now-very-empowering Because youre worth it advertising slogan here
comes the science part. Empowerment referring to the idea of providing autonomy and
strength to marginalised people rst came into popular use in the English-speaking
west in the 70s and was used primarily in reference to black people. African-American
magazines such as Jet and Essence used it in encouraging self-help articles, and scholarly
books with titles such as Black Empowerment: Social Work in Oppressed Communities
were published. Feminism increasingly used the term in the 80s and 90s, often referring
to women and girls in third-world countries and other unquestionably terrible situations.
Rather sweetly, given that empowerment now denotes everything from deodorant to
chocolate, back then it was considered rather radical, with its suggestion of revolution.
Almost certainly the rst time I heard it was in the 90s when my school held a fundraiser
to buy computers for a school in India so as to empower Indian girls through computer
literacy.

By the late 90s and early 2000s, womens magazines and adverts aimed at women
started to pick up on the word. I remember one particular American fashion magazine
article in about 2001 urging women to empower themselves by getting ahead on next
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seasons looks, which sounded a lot easier than sending computers to India. No longer
did the term refer to the idea of a demographic gaining power for the good of the group,
but just one woman gaining power for the good of herself a shift from the collective to
the individual, if you prefer the lingo, and the TV programme most associated with this
change in attitude is, of course, Sex and the City.

Sex and the City is now frequently and unfairly dismissed as the TV programme that
suggested that buying designer shoes was a feminist act (in fact, as any SATC devotee
could tell you, far from celebrating shopaholism, Carrie nearly goes bankrupt from her
shoe-shopping habit and is only rescued from homelessness by one of her girlfriends).
However, until the show lost its mind and nerve in the last series, if Sex and the City was
about anything, it was that independence is great, but be prepared to take responsibility
for your actions. Whatever the shows intentions, there is no doubt that it became the
face of a somewhat tedious school of thought that suggested feminism could be found at
the bottom of a Harvey Nichols bag. The early 2000s was the era of commodied
feminism, when womens magazines would crow that maxing out your credit card was a
feminist act (such a Carrie thing to do!) because, damn, go, girlfriend! In 2003, satirical
website the Onion ran the headline Women Now Empowered by Everything a Woman
Does, and the accompanying article captured the absurdity of this thinking. Shopping
for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy.
Owning and wearing dozens of pairs of shoes is a compelling way for a woman to
announce that she is strong and independent, and can shoe herself without the help of a
man. Shes saying, Look out, male-dominated world, here comes me and my shoes.

While this approach to feminism blessed one with shoes, it didnt really have much
staying power. By the time the rst Sex and the City movie came out in 2008 in which
all Carrie wanted was a really big closet a new generation of young women was
already starting to trash the show and its money-obsessed mentality as an embarrassing
throwback, as dated and tasteless as a photo of Paris Hilton in a Juicy Couture tracksuit.

Yet, just as this idea of feminism as something you bought alongside your Manolo
Blahniks was being denigrated, a strong mentality was emerging from fourth-wave
feminism, one that at least partially denes the movement: to judge other women for
choosing to do something anything is inherently anti-feminist, because those women
made their choice and therefore it is a feminist act. The word empowered regained
traction and women who lived their lives according to their own choices and desires
were described as self-empowered. Choice feminism replaced consumer
feminism, but the two ultimately come down to the same thing: that is, if a woman does
something of her own free will whether its pole-dancing or buying shoes then its a
feminist act. And more than ever, its not only about feminism; its about empowering
the woman as an individual.

To a certain extent, this is a good thing. After all, its nice for women to cheer each
another on, right? We 21st-century feminists have learned from the mistakes of our
elders and we wont judge one another about our sexuality (as Betty Friedan did) or
sleeping with married men (as certain feminists did in the 90s when writing about
Monica Lewinsky), as it was precisely this kind of internal sniping that bogged down
previous waves of feminism. We should encourage each other, not push each other
down. When one woman casts judgment on another woman, according to todays

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feminism, she is behaving worse than a misogynist man or (and this is almost worse in
todays feminism, so concerned as it is in overturning the past and forging its own
newpath) an old-school second-wave feminist.

The problem with this approach is that it leads to a great big pile of nothing. The
suggestion that women should unthinkingly celebrate one another purely out of sisterly
feeling is about as patronising as the idea that women shouldnt trouble their brains with
opinions. Moreover, the idea that fourth-wave feminists dont judge will provoke
mirthless laughter from any woman who has been on the web recently feminists dont
just judge, they judge each other, and they do so often. However, they now do it with the
added complication that theyre judging one another for judging. Feminists who query
whether things such as prostitution, pole-dancing or larking about naked while being
lmed by self-described pervert Terry Richardson (as Miley Cyrus did for her video
Wrecking Ball) are really empowering themselves are shouted down as angry anti-sex
harridans. In recent years, there have been feminist revisions of everyone from Margaret
Thatcher to Kim Kardashian, simply because they were their own self-empowered
women, even though both of them explicitly distanced themselves from the label in
their respective times. Yet when Kardashian tweeted a topless sele last month, she
claimed that she was empowered by her sexuality and, thus via the media of her
iPhone and her breasts she was striving to encourage the same empowerment for girls
and women all over the world. Anyone who queried this philosophy was shouted down
as an out-of-date loser who encouraged body-shaming. Empowerment has become the
cover for doing whatever the hell you like. It is a self-created safe space: as long as you
say you are empowered, anyone who complains is trying to oppress you.

We could sit around and argue about where the line lies between sexual empowerment
and sexual objectication until the self-empowered cows come home. Personally, Id
rather not see yet another wave of feminism die on the hill over whether or not pole-
dancing is a feminist act. So maybe the easiest way to deal with the kinds of arguments
raised by choice feminism is to end with this simple truth: while the ability to choose is
feminist, that doesnt mean the choice itself is. As Carrie Bradshaw, that icon of self-
empowerment, could tell you, do whatever you like, but dont kid yourself that youre
doing anything more than pleasing yourself. Buying shoes is not a strike against the
patriarchy. Telling other women to shut up online is not a feminist act. Tweeting photos
of your boobs is not empowering the world.

Nowhere is the words meaninglessness more obvious than in consumerism. Advertisers

have, unsurprisingly, latched on to a term that suggests worthiness but has really
become about promising an aspirational female identity. As Jia Tolentino recently wrote
in the New York Times, empowerment is now something women can purchase while
conditions determining who can access and accumulate power stay the same. Most
people would struggle to argue that telling women to lose weight or look thin is an
empowering act. But, as online magazine Jezebel pointed out last week, Weight Watchers
and Spanx are now selling their products in the US by promising that they provide
empowerment. Were not telling you to be thinner, these adverts say, were telling you
that youll love yourself if you are, and that will make you feel empowered.

Similarly, Jennifer Lopezs new single, Aint Your Mama, has been sold as being about
empowerment, instead of just boring ol feminism or independence, as the similarly

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themed 1999 Destinys Child song Independent Women was. Unfortunately for Lopez
and her PRs, the single was produced by Dr Luke, who was accused by Kesha of
somewhat less than empowering behaviour around her.

But the biggest irony about empowerment is not just how utterly meaningless
disempowered, I guess it has become as a term, but how those who claim to feel it and
those to whom it is sold are the ones who need it least. It is no surprise that I see so many
adverts promising empowerment, because I am precisely the kind of person to whom
empowerment is now marketed: white, thirtysomething, educated, middle class with
disposable income. I dont need to be empowered anymore than Kardashian does. Only
those already in possession of quite a lot of power would feel empowered by leggings, or
a TED talk, or naked seles. Empowerment has become not only a synonym for self-
indulgent narcissism, but a symbol of how identity politics can too often get distracted
by those with the loudest voices and forget those most in need of it. I think the most
clear, direct way to empowerment is to be really, really true to yourself. Its only recently
that Ive fully understood that, Paltrow recently opined while promoting some designer
perfume. I should have told that to those Indian schoolgirls back in the 90s: forget the
computer literacy, just know yourselves. Feel the empowerment.

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Feminism Women Kim Kardashian Gwyneth Paltrow Kesha More

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