This advertisement for Always feminine hygiene products has been getting lots of positive attention on social media the past few days:
A major company is investing its advertising dollars into empowering girls. Fantastic! (Even if, as one Facebook commenter noted, any mention of bleeding like a girl is carefully avoided.)
This also recalls another pro-feminist advertisement that went viral last April, Dove Real Beauty Sketches.
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I was taken aback at the number of women who reported breaking down in tears just watching this. Clearly the message hit home. Yet, one might also wonder about their selection of models. What about the people who actually do look like the sketches presented as ugly? And are they not still tapping into problematic standards of beauty in order to sell their own line of products?
Both of these ads present positive and important messages that reach a large audience not likely to have even heard of Iris Marion Young, let alone read her article from which the Always ad borrows its title. Am I wrong to still be suspicious about this appropriation of feminism by the health and beauty industry?
Someone appropriating feminist tropes to turn a buck?
Shock! Horror! It just couldn’t happen!
Thank god Helen Gurley Brown didn’t live to see it.
Next someone will try to militarise feminist propaganda. Bombing third world villages in the name of educating girls or something equally perverse.
Selling tampons with ‘feminism’ is one thing. It could be worse, you know.
Hi cabrogal, Your last comment was on point and well-taken, but this boarders on trolling. I do not express shock or horror, merely tentative reservations about the perhaps too uncritically enthusiastic reception of these advertisements.
Also, we both know that the human rights of girls to receive a proper education has not been a determinative factor in the U.S. policy in the Middle East, which can in no way be described as the “militarization of feminism” (or please correct me if I mistake your reference).
Sorry if I appear trollish, but to be honest I take it as no insult. I think all public statements should be looked at with troll-eyes and replied to in kind.
I guess you got my point though – that the commercialisation of feminism is a horse that had well and truly bolted when I was still in short pants in the 60s. There is nothing that marketers and advertisers won’t appropriate if they think they it might sell something and modern mainstream feminism has become even more of a whore than the sex workers it so often vilifies. Any adult who is enthusiastic about advertisements is probably a lost cause anyway.
Your only mistake is geographical. Afghanistan is not in the Middle East. But you are correct that US policy there is no more about the rights of girls than it is about suppressing terrorism. It was a failed attempt to establish the TAPI pipeline and a successful attempt to disrupt the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline. However the rights of girls are used to justify the NATO occupation to liberal feminists in the same way the suppression of terrorism is used to justify it to militarists. I think it fair to say that using feminist objectives (albeit culturally imperialist ones) as propaganda tokens in capitalist wars can be described as the militarisation of feminism in the same way that using them as propaganda in capitalist marketing can be described as the commercialisation of feminism. Or perhaps the ‘weaponisation of feminism’ would be a better term for it.
In case I’m coming across as anti-feminist here I should perhaps mention that I don’t believe any men can be feminists (I’m a man). However I am a fellow traveler as far as intersectional anarcha-feminism goes but have nothing but contempt for the trans-phobic, whore-phobic, Islamophobic equal opportunism that so often passes for feminism in mainstream discourse.
so, is the commercialization of feminism crucial? what is the bad side of it? and what’s good? thanks:)