Defining “feminist” as “a woman who lives the life she chooses” is great if you’re a woman who already has choices. But it does nothing for the vast majority on the outside of the conference hall, waiting in vain for that empowerment to trickle down.

The feminist uncanny valley is the result of a larger neoliberal framework that over the past five decades has come to unite politics, economics, and culture in a web of individualism, privatization, and decreasing focus on both community and compassion.

What girl power meant in a post–Riot Grrrl world was simply whatever elevated girls as consumers.

Advertising and marketing philosophies that thrive on emphasizing “natural” differences don’t stay in the realm of advertising and marketing—they spill into how we justify sexism and racism at every life stage.

As Roxane Gay noted, “Those who take safety for granted disparage safety because it is, like so many other rights, one that has always been inalienable to them. They wrongly assume we all enjoy such luxury and are blindly seeking something even more extravagant.”1

Neoliberalism is significant to contemporary feminism in quite a few ways, but one in particular is that both emphasize consumer choice and individual power in a way that can narrow to tunnel vision.

One thing almost everyone could agree on however, was this: there is a very fine line between celebrating feminism and co-opting it.

The problem is—the problem has always been—that feminism is not fun. 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.

Instead of teaching girls actual self-advocacy and confidence, a shift toward increasingly gendered capitalism turned Girl Power into little more than a cute, chauvinist retail fad.