In its media focus, this book is in many ways the successor to the nerve-hitting 1991 blockbuster Backlash, by Susan Faludi (1991), which exposed often subtle media attacks on women’s progress. Humor is almost unavoidable in analyses of the contradictions in today’s pop culture-such as in Zeisler’s discussion of the promotion of Spanx “shapewear” as “empowering” to women. You can see it right away in magazine headlines like “When the Dove Tries: The Latest ‘Real Beauty’ Gimmick” (about a Dove soap ad campaign) and “Of Woman Borg” (about female robots). Zeisler’s book reflects a major engaging feature of the magazine: a healthy dose of informed irony. This year, for the first time, Bitch Media offered fellowships to four diverse writers from across the globe. It has even expanded: the magazine is now a part of Bitch Media, which includes online-only content, a blog, and the Bitch on Campus partnership. Bitch, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2016, has accomplished the impossible, surviving as an indie publication with minimal advertising. After reading this book, no reader will ever hear the words “empower” or “choice” the way she did before.Īs a co-founder of the widely respected Bitch magazine (its tagline, “feminist response to pop culture”), Zeisler has long been at the forefront of delivering brainy and entertaining cultural critique. Zeisler writes for both an academic audience and the rest of us all may appreciate her big-picture perspective, as she connects the dots across decades and political movements, while she provides critical tools to enable even the most dedicated Entertainment Weekly subscriber to navigate the perplexingly mixed media messages that surround us. And it’s probably feminism’s most popular iteration ever.” With wit and imagination, she traces the evolution of marketplace feminism during the past twenty years, and its assimilation into mainstream society, for better and for worse. Zeisler’s fantasy reveals the mixed blessings-and strange bedfellows-created by today’s “bizarro world” of “marketplace feminism”: the intersection of capitalism and feminism.
Paparazzi wellesley skin#
Zeisler goes on to imagine that the event would feature a “special conversation between Hayek and Jolie that adds $175 to the conference ticket price but does include a gift bag containing chia-seed energy bars, a luxury skin mask, and a coupon for Activia yogurt.” Paparazzi would be camped out to get snaps of celebrity attendees Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, and Amal Clooney. It would be held not at a convention center but at an extremely posh spa, all the better to pop out for a quick seaweed detox wrap if needed. Then she fast-forwards to describe what such an event would like today: “I’d like to think it can have the same galvanizing spirit,” Zeisler writes, but I’m also 99.9 percent sure it wouldn’t be funded by the government, but by a slate of multinational corporate sponsors: Verizon, Estee Lauder, Gucci. The keynote was by Texas Congressional Representative Barbara Jordan, and the conference’s resulting political action plan focused on such substantive issues as sex discrimination, wage inequality, childcare, abortion, and the rights of minority women. “The brainchild of Bella Abzug and Patsy Mink” and funded by the US government “to the tune of $5 million,” writes Zeisler, it drew between 15,000 and 20,000 attendees. In one chapter she looks back at the landmark 1977 international women’s conference in Houston. In her new book, We Were Feminists Once, Andi Zeisler is as adept as one can get in capturing-and contrasting-specific moments in pop culture. We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
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