We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

On the way down into the uncanny valley, we’ve decided that images of women in power, in the abstract, are as important as people of any gender who are actually working to make equality a reality for everyone.

The insidiousness of second-generation gender bias—informal exclusion, lack of mentors and role models, fear of conforming to stereotypes—colluded with the ideological spread of neoliberalism to recast institutional inequity as mere personal challenges.

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

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.

Feminism as a product, as a discrete measure of worthiness or unworthiness, as a selling point for products that have no animate capabilities, is a deeply imperfect way to assess whether feminism is “working” or not because it’s less about feminism than about capitalism.

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.

Neoliberalism was curdling into an I’ve-got-mine-so-fuck-you attitude toward social responsibility, and there was a whole new corner of American media intent on mourning a time when nobody was forced to acknowledge things like inequality, institutional bias, or offensive language. “Political

One is that the descriptor “feminist” now seems to be used to lavish praise on anything that isn’t overtly degrading, demeaning, or exploitative to women. Another is that arguments over whether a movie is “feminist” or “not feminist”—especially when that movie never intended to claim either1—suggest that feminism is not a set of values, ethics, and

I call it marketplace feminism. It’s decontextualized. It’s depoliticized. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.